Inside the 19 January edition

This week you will notice some significant new design changes in your Guardian Weekly.

The new look reflects changes in the UK daily Guardian newspaper, which has relaunched in a redesigned tabloid format. The Observer newspaper will also follow suit this weekend, and our digital versions on mobile, apps and desktop have had a similar refresh.

The masthead has a renewed strength and confidence to represent the Guardian Weekly’s place and mission in these challenging times. Guardian journalism itself remains what it has always been: thoughtful, progressive, fiercely independent and challenging; and also witty, stylish and fun.

The Weekly is undergoing a phased update, and in the coming months we’ll be bringing a fuller, bolder redesign to the rest of the paper too. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Our cover story this week visits Finland to check on the progress of the country’s universal basic income trial, a radical experiment to see whether giving free cash to the unemployed can actually help people back into work. Once seen as a utopian leftwing pipe dream, it’s an idea that is now gaining traction on the other side of the political divide, as European affairs correspondent Jon Henley reports.

This was a piece commissioned through the Guardian’s Inequality Project, which explores ideas addressing imbalances of wealth and poverty – check out more of the site’s interesting work here.

In the US and Latin America, fallout continued from president Trump’s latest aberration, a reported reference to “shithole countries”. In the Middle East, as Tunisians protested on the seventh anniversary of the revolution that began the Arab spring, Martin Chulov weighs up the increasingly fragile-looking political victories across the region.

In Britain, the sudden collapse of the construction and services contractor Carillion has left thousands of jobs at risk and put the government under intense pressure. Catch up with the story on our UK news pages.

Our Weekly Review long read examines the fortunes of paper, a medium that once looked endangered by the advent of portable screen technology but that has proved surprisingly hard to write off.

In a far-flung tourism special, we also take a look at mysteriously complex efforts to complete a luxury hotel in the Cook Islands, and prejudice suffered by Nepali holidaymakers around the Himalayan trekking scene.

Culture takes its glow-sticks to India to check out the country’s burgeoning rave music scene, while there’s a consideration of death as it is portrayed for younger viewers in Disney movies.

Sport has an in-depth interview with Jayden Brown of the Boston Celtics, a basketball player with such eloquent views that he is apparently considered “too smart” for his own good by one NBA executive. Even if you don’t like basketball, it’s well worth a read.

On the back page, Simon Jenkins signs off by asking, in these times when we have to question much of what is presented as news, whether the film and TV industries shouldn’t be more careful over their creative licence with historical detail. Having caught up with Netflix’s The Queen recently and some of its eyebrow-raising storylines that are built around factual events, I thought Jenkins had an interesting point. What do you think? Drop a line to our Reply page.

Thank you for your continued support of Guardian journalism via your subscription to the Weekly. We hope you enjoy the edition; please let us know what you think of it.