Many hoarders are scared to seek help but one UK housing association is taking a more empathetic approach

At one end of the table sits Tony*, who showers at his local leisure centre in Birkenhead every day. His landlord won’t fix his bathroom because of his hoarding. Then there’s Sarah*, who ended up homeless with her three teenagers after their landlord evicted them because of hoarding. In her new home the problem has started again, but she says she’s petrified to ask for help in case she loses her property.

Sian Cowley, 35, who has struggled with hoarding for decades, says: “I’ve lived without central heating for two years. A lot of us live without the basics like hot water, heating and cooking because we are too scared to get people in to do repairs because of the threat of eviction.”

Damien says plants last longer, but Tolu doesn’t think things have to survive for years to be worthwhile. Who should turn over a new leaf?

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Flowers are a fleeting gesture. Why not buy plants that last years instead?

As the Colombian pop supremo prepares to perform at Sunday’s final, we rate her greatest work, including gossipy takedowns and lycanthropic lyrics

Of Shakira’s World Cup anthems, it’s the joyfully ludicrous Waka Waka from the 2010 tournament in South Africa that bangs hardest. Featuring Afro-fusion band Freshlyground, the Colombian superstar redraws preened football superstars such as Ronaldo et al as soldiers on a frontline.

(Island)
On the Bradford-born producer’s self-assured second album, drum’n’bass rhythms power up angsty odes with shades of Arctic Monkeys, Kate Nash and myriad genres

Like another of the year’s biggest pop records, Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the second full-length from the self-proclaimed “emotional junglist” Nia Archives is an album of two halves. The first documents its protagonist falling in love at breakneck speed; the second, the whiplash of sudden heartbreak. Unlike Rodrigo, Archives didn’t grow up starring on Disney Channel, a predestined route to success, but in Bradford, cutting her teeth on early 00s pirate radio, dancehall and landfill indie.

More than most major artists, Archives has carved out her own path. After leaving home at just 16 to move into a youth hostel in Manchester, she started teaching herself to make beats; eventually, she uprooted to Hackney and studied music production, and used her student loan to fund the promotion of her self-released debut single. Since then, she’s made history as the first electronic/dance act to win a Mobo in decades (after publicly campaigning for the inclusion of dance music at the awards in 2022). With her 2024 debut album Silence Is Loud, she became the first junglist to be nominated for three Brit awards, and the first to be nominated for the Mercury prize since 1997 – before she was born.

JD Salinger’s wry, subversive classic inspired novelist Joseph O’Connor to be a writer. He reflects on why this story of a disaffected teenager remains as fresh and transgressive as ever

In 1981, when I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a paperback of her dad’s favourite novel. I’d never heard of it despite living in a home full of books. My parents loved the work of Edna O’Brien, Muriel Spark, John le Carré, Dickens. So did I. But encountering the first sentence of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye made the world burst into colour.

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

At the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre broke new ground in selling readers an angry rightwing perspective. Today, most of Fleet Street is run by his disciples

In 1986, 131 years after the Daily Telegraph was founded, its editor, Max Hastings, wrote a memo to senior colleagues about the newspaper’s nature and purpose. “The Daily Telegraph is … ‘nice’,” he said, “in the business of reassurance, of providing confirmation each morning for our readers that their world is looking pretty safe and stable.” He went on: “We are not a strident campaigning newspaper – our business each day is to seek to give our readers the fullest possible information about what is happening in the world, and to suggest what it might mean.”

In practice, under Hastings and many other Telegraph editors, this ethos produced a journalism of pervasive but usually understated conservatism: often focused on the English countryside, the value of hierarchy and tradition, the pleasures of seasonal pursuits such as foxhunting and gardening, the interests of farmers and retired military men – and cautionary tales about more reckless lives gone wrong, often presented through enjoyably detailed reports from the divorce courts. The Torygraph, as many non-readers called it, could be inward-looking and “numbingly dull”, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the historian of British conservatism, but it was “thoroughly respectable”. Many of its most renowned figures, such as Hastings’s predecessor as editor, Bill Deedes, were “mildness itself”.

Revised plan aims to ‘keep something going’ amid fears Netanyahu may gamble on new all-out offensive before Israeli elections

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

The Gaza recovery plan being pursued by Donald Trump’s Board of Peace (BoP) has shrunk dramatically from an ambitious blueprint for the reconstruction of the whole territory to a small pilot project in the south of the strip.

Even the envisaged pilot scheme – involving a temporary camp for a tiny fraction of Gaza’s 2 million displaced people, with a Palestinian administration, police and a small international security force – is not expected to take shape before the end of the year.

• Spokesperson says islands belong to the UK

• ‘PM wishes both teams well for the final, especially Spain’

Keir Starmer supports the idea of Fifa investigating Argentina players who displayed a banner touting their country’s claim to the Falklands Islands after their World Cup semi-final win against England, Downing Street has said.

Starmer, who watched the match while travelling to Ukraine by train for the final overseas trip of his premiership, endorsed a call by Peter Kyle, the business secretary, for Fifa to investigate what rules may have been broken.

Downing Street sources suggested Khan’s elevation comes as part of a regular honours list, rather than being linked specifically to Starmer’s departure

Couples could legally marry in forests, on beaches, at sea or in their gardens under new proposals, the Press Association reports. PA says a government consultation announced today, covering rules in England and Wales, could help cut the costs of weddings and mean two ceremonies are no longer required to cover different faiths. PA says:

The average wedding in England is estimated to cost more than £20,000, with venue hire alone typically accounting for around £6,000 without catering.

The system as it stands means some couples have two ceremonies – one where they feel their beliefs are best reflected and another making their marriage legal.

Exclusive: Green party launches pushback against idea that next PM will have more left-leaning agenda than Starmer

• UK politics live – latest updates

Andy Burnham is “too in hock to vested interests” to offer real change, Zack Polanski has said as the Greens launched a pushback against the incoming prime minister, portraying him as cautious and weak on such areas as wealth taxes, Gaza and rent controls.

Under Polanski’s leadership the Green party in England and Wales has more than tripled its membership, and is closely tracking Labour in opinion polls, with much of the new support coming from former Labour voters disenchanted with Keir Starmer’s approach.

Sixth day of fighting threatens to turn into all-out war and casts serious doubt on peace deal struck last month

• Chaos and confusion bring US no closer to resolution on strait of Hormuz

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

The US has intensified its attacks on Iran, hitting targets near Tehran and striking a ship it accused of trying to break its blockade, while Iran retaliated by firing missiles and drones at US allies in the region.

Six consecutive days of back-and-forth attacks threaten to pull the region back into a total war and cast serious doubt about an interim deal reached last month meant to achieve a permanent peace.

Case is one of first brought by an AI company against a user ⁠for allegedly using a tool to generate child abuse material

Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup xAI has sued a South Carolina man arrested ⁠earlier this year on charges of sexually exploiting minors, alleging he misused the company’s AI system Grok to ⁠create child sexual abuse ⁠material.

xAI ​alleged in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas on Tuesday, that Terry Harwood violated the company’s ⁠terms of service. The case is one of the first brought by an AI company against one of its users ⁠for allegedly using an AI system to generate child sexual abuse material.

Review of case criticises handling of agent X, who exploited role with agency to violently threaten his girlfriend

MI5 has been reprimanded by a watchdog for lying about its relationship with a neo-Nazi informant, who had exploited his role with the spy agency to violently threaten his girlfriend.

The Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (Ipco) criticised MI5’s handling of a man known only as agent X, and said some of its officers had initially misled the courts and the regulator about his true status.

Keith Thomas can move arms and hands, and feel sensation of touch after ‘double neural bypass’ and months of training

A man who was paralysed from the chest down in a swimming accident six years ago has been able to feed himself and drink from a cup thanks to a brain implant that bypasses his spinal cord injury.

Keith Thomas of Massapequa, New York, could not lift his arms off his wheelchair when he agreed to trial the technology in 2021, but after surgery to implant electrodes in his brain and many months of training, he was able to move the limbs again.

Analysis reveals stark socioeconomic divide, with schools with highest free school meal eligibility having fewer trees

Private school grounds in England offer 41% more tree cover than at state schools for cooling and shade in extreme temperatures, research has found.

As teachers and students prepare to take their summer holidays after weeks of high temperatures where some classrooms reached highs of 40C, an analysis of tree cover in schools in England reveals a stark socioeconomic divide.

Heatwaves, high energy prices, calls for reindustrialisation and North Sea drilling are all high on the to-do list

• UK politics live – latest updates

Wildfires cast a pall of smoke this week over Greater Manchester, whose former mayor Andy Burnham stands on the threshold of No 10. Amid three UK heatwaves so far this year, which have killed thousands of people in England and Wales, damaged harvests and left children crying in classrooms, the new prime minister’s plans for the climate crisis remain as shrouded as his city.

“Burnham has been very quiet about the climate [crisis] so far,” says Chris Venables, an environmental campaigner and fellow at the Green Alliance thinktank. “I don’t think [it] is at the forefront of his mind, but that does not mean he will water down this agenda.”

Exclusive: Jane and Alan Kelvey reflect on close encounter with Russian warship a few hours into two-month sailing trip

They found themselves at the centre of an international incident, the close encounter between their small sailing boat and a Russian warship making headlines around the world.

A month later, Jane and Alan Kelvey are to be found berthed in a rainy harbour in north-west France, still taken aback by their brush with Vladimir Putin’s forces – but trying to get on with their fun sailing trip.

With the state shattered, armed gangs offer food, shelter and perilous safety to young people – but at a terrible cost

When Davensky was eight years old, he was kidnapped from school. An armed gang pulled a black bag over his head, dragged him from class and threw him into a truck. He was taken to an unknown location, stripped and locked inside a refrigerated room. Some time later, his captors handed him a gun.

“They pointed to another child and said I had to kill him. It was a test. They said if I didn’t pull the trigger, they would cut off my fingers,” he says, speaking in quick bursts. “I did it.”

R-Urban Poplar in London is a ‘living lab’ where locals can experiment with ways of taking charge of their food supply

On a stiflingly hot and dusty morning at the height of the summer’s third heatwave, traffic thunders down the A12 arterial route through east London. A high, red-brick wall rises by the road. What few passersby will realise is that this ivy-topped wall shelters an urban oasis, within which sits an unprecedented sustainable project.

The world’s first “community powered” sauna – heated by food waste from residents of the neighbouring housing estate – is set to open here.

Lewd propositions, drunken tirades, groping, grumbling and grubby behaviour – cabin crew have to experience it all, at altitude. They open up about the horrors they’ve seen from passengers and colleagues

Last week, right at the start of this year’s holiday season, a 30-year-old drunk British holidaymaker tried to kiss a male flight attendant on a plane, spent a week in Mallorca presumably thinking his actions were consequence-free, and was then arrested on his way back through Palma airport. In February, Jet2 banned two passengers from the airline for life after a mid-air brawl on a flight from Turkey to Manchester, and last week BA had to cancel a flight back from Barbados, because (some) members of the crew were still too drunk from the hotel bar to operate it. There’s a connection between these incidents, and it’s not just as flight attendant Thomas, 27, puts it: “Well, drunk Brits – you know how that goes”.

The term “air rage” was coined in the 90s, but the behaviour it describes went through the roof post-Covid. In 2021, the number of reported incidents in the US was greater than in the previous three decades combined. A new category of misdemeanour had appeared – mask non-compliance.

The more unusual you are, the more unusual it is to find people like you, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But as she grows older, her social world will shift

• Read more Leading questions

Our teen daughter is a deeply sensitive, perceptive kid who longs for close friendship but often feels sidelined; she reads slights quickly, ruminates and compares herself harshly. Her 16th birthday was heartbreaking: the in-person warmth and social-media love she expected didn’t materialise, and she’s crushed. We try to parent with both empathy and backbone, validating her feelings while nudging her towards agency: widening her circles, getting busier and repairing frayed ties without begging for approval.

But how do we wisely accompany a teenager whose self-worth is repeatedly tested by imperfect peers (in her mind at least) and the distortions of online recognition? What practices, language and boundaries help a highly sensitive adolescent convert disappointment into dignity and build friendships rooted in mutual regard rather than constant self-surveillance?

From cheetah cubs to uplifting sport to come, put England’s World Cup exit behind you with these suggestions

It can be a bleak feeling when the whole nation has been gearing up to celebrate England reaching a World Cup final, only to see the dream dashed at the last minute. But there are still plenty of things to be cheerful about. Here are five suggestions of things you can do, see or enjoy to take your mind off Lautaro Martínez’s 92nd minute winner for Argentina.

And football? Well, it is coming home(-ish) again soon. The next men’s European Championship is being held across England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland in the summer of 2028, when 23 of the best teams in Europe will compete for the right to knock England out at the semi-final stage. Is that joke too soon?

From blackout masks that block 5am sunshine to silk Bluetooth masks that feel cool on your skin, these eye masks could genuinely improve your sleep

• The most-hyped sleep remedies, tried and tested

The best product I’ve ever reviewed for the Filter cost less than £10 and sent me to sleep. When I tested sleep aids last year in an effort to tackle insomnia, an eye mask helped me nod off faster and stay asleep for longer than numerous purported zzz-enhancers, including magnesium and lavender spray. Between you and me, it also worked better than the melatonin tablets I’d brought back from a trip to the US.

Even so, when I was asked to test a range of eye masks for this article, I didn’t expect the cheap MyHalos blackout mask to retain its pole position. Masks from leading sleep brands Tempur and Manta Sleep, and therapeutic tech specialists such as Therabody, use innovative designs to calm your mind and even sync with your heartbeat. The Lumenate Nova, which deploys soothing LED light therapy, reportedly has Jennifer Aniston among its many fans.

Best budget eye mask and best overall:
MyHalos blackout 3D sleep mask

Best Bluetooth eye mask:
SnoozeBand Pro

Sam had such ease about him and I just loved the way he seemed to cruise through life. But he confronted his mortality with real courage

• Sam Neill’s final interview and his life in pictures

• ‘A true gentleman’: actors, directors and leaders pay tribute to Sam Neill

• Jane Campion remembers Sam Neill

When I first met Sam, I thought he was handsome, cool and weirdly shy. He was always a rare combination of suave and down-to-earth: this great, democratic guy with no bullshit. I just loved the way he seemed to cruise through life. He had such ease about him.

Acting was just one chunk of his life: there was always a lot of other stuff going on. He couldn’t wait to get back to his farm and his wine and his animals. I remember when we were making Merlin in 1998, he kindly took me out for lunch. We had a really delicious bottle of pinot noir, and he said that was what he was aiming for with his winery Two Paddocks.

Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the ancient Greek epic has sparked a new appetite for an old classic. Here are the translations, podcasts and audiobooks that make the Homeric world more approachable

The Odyssey was once all Greek to me. I struggled to keep up with the characters, the mass of heroes and villains, the swarms of sons and daughters. I found the Homeric formula – repeated stock phrases passed down from the oral tradition – confusing and tiring. The prose in my 1946 EV Rieu translation, revised by his son DCH Rieu, felt laboured and laborious. I have put the Odyssey down, several times, in the course of my life. But, like Sirens, difficult books tend to have a hold on us. The recent film adaptation pushed me to once again try reading the Odyssey, so I decided on a new approach. I spoke to classicists and conducted research, aiming to render the inaccessible accessible.

To read the Odyssey, start by avoiding the Odyssey. “Begin with contextualisation” – get to grips with themes and content – Antony Makrinos, associate professor in classics at UCL and director of the Summer School in Homer 2026, told me. He sent me an exhaustive list of recommendations, and I found myself in the British Museum, mid-heatwave, learning about Mycenaean civilisation and ancient Greece. I cooled down that evening with a Simon Armitage documentary, Gods and Monsters: an intriguing assessment of our flawed hero.

At one point Britain was able to produce more than 80% of the food it consumed. Today it is 57%, meaning the country cannot produce enough to feed its population, a situation described by the government as a national security risk. So, what happened? Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks back at how we got here, and explores the reasons why the UK is at a high risk of food shortages and how it compares with other countries 

Guardian analysis finds 19% of games reached heat levels warranting delays, as Fifa defends its player safeguards

The climate crisis has come for football.

During this year’s World Cup, nearly one in five of the tournament’s 100-plus matches took place in levels of heat and humidity that a football players’ union has previously said should trigger delays or postponements, a Guardian analysis has found. An additional 23 matches were played in cities as they reached those heat levels, but in stadiums where conditions were mitigated by air conditioning.

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They say never go that far back. In the last half an hour of their end-of-days Geopolitics World Cup semi-final with Argentina, England committed to the bit in the Deep South. No wonder there were gaps. Thomas Tuchel stood and watched national trauma unfold in front of his eyes as towering aerial threats such as Alexis Mac Allister and Lautaro Martínez beat his four centre-backs to cross after cross. Forget the ghosts of ‘66, the spectre of Southgate loomed over his successor as realism reared its ugly head at the business end of an England men’s major-tournament run once again.

Watching England lose is one thing. Watching them lose surrounded by millions celebrating Argentina’s march to another World Cup final, is completely different

Look, most people were awfully good about it. Our waiter at a restaurant near Plaza de Mayo shook our hands warmly and said nice things about Jude Bellingham. On the metro ride back from the fan zone there was no massive gloating either, just bright-eyed kids in Lionel Messi shirts swept along by the nationwide euphoria. “Vamos, vamos, Argentina,” they sang, barely able to believe that their team were once again heading to a World Cup final.

To be a stray English bystander in a city totally awash in sky blue and white was a rare privilege. Some of us covering England’s rugby union tour have been lucky enough to visit a few memorable sporting cauldrons, but to be in Buenos Aires after Argentina defeated England at a football World Cup is right up there.

England head coach made changes that would have led to Southgate and Eriksson being hammered

Lionel Messi has seen buses reverse into position before. England did not confront the greatest player of all time with anything new when they dropped back with a place in the World Cup final within reach. The negativity was lamentable and it was no surprise when punishment arrived in the form of a clinical Argentina fightback.

This was a tale as old as time. There was a chance for England to push on after Anthony Gordon fired them ahead early in the second half, but they reverted to type. The mentality was passive and they looked scared to win. No one put a foot on the ball and offered control. Harry Kane? Invisible in another game. The midfield? Outplayed, outrun and outclassed by Alexis Mac Allister and Enzo Fernández. Thomas Tuchel? Outwitted by Lionel Scaloni, whose substitutions made a difference, and too quick to retreat when there was so long left for England to defend their lead.

While England shrank away in Atlanta, Argentina’s No 10 was not finished making his mark on the biggest stage

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Well, not to this lot anyway. On a day of ceaseless rolling noise under Atlanta’s vast refrigerated dome, England reached the end of the road, the end of their own capacities at this World Cup, the end of the gears within this team. Mainly they ran into Lionel Messi, who was not ready to be done just yet. Not like this anyway.

With 55 minutes gone England were actually winning this game, 1-0 up thanks to Anthony Gordon’s goal, the only real moment of clarity they produced all match. At which point they simply disappeared as an animate entity from the stage.

The enmity between London and Buenos Aires has gone on for far too long – sooner or later, wise heads will prevail

This week Britain and Spain agreed to demolish the border dividing Gibraltar from the Spanish mainland. It was good news. Decades of negotiation came to a happy compromise. Unfortunately the deal will not be celebrated on Sunday in a World Cup final between Spain and England. But is it too much to hope that a similar negotiation might arise from last night’s semi-final, a crushing defeat for England at the hands of Argentina, after which the Falklands-Malvinas issue raised its tired head in the form of a banner on the pitch? Can nothing good follow the generous embrace of Lionel Messi and Harry Kane?

None of Britain’s imperial-era territories have an eternal right to stay as they are, let alone one that costs British taxpayers upwards of £60m a year in defence costs. In the case of the Falklands, its status as an overseas territory has been staunchly defended by successive governments largely as the price of victory in the 1982 Falklands war. In truth, I suspect this has much to do with the fact that the islanders, unlike the abandoned Hongkongers or Diego Garcians, were white British. The war also rescued Margaret Thatcher’s government from unpopularity and covered the then prime minister in glory, unlike later military adventures.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Any boost for the military will be paid for by cuts elsewhere. Britain’s new PM should be careful he is not being sold a pup

For many British voters, politicians and journalists, public spending has had a bad name since the late 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher’s government began its long campaign to tame the supposedly bloated state. From this perspective, the public sector wastes money, commissions unnecessary or out-of-date projects and generates endless jargon and reasons for its own existence, while delivering strikingly fewer social or economic benefits.

Constant public and private lobbying for more funds from every minister, this argument continues, has helped make the job of prime minister impossible, and raised taxes and government debt to intolerable levels. Therefore the state requires a fundamental rethink – which means its sense of entitlement needs to shrink.

The defense secretary has announced a screening program for troops. Get ready for a high-T Department of War

One day perhaps Pete Hegseth will make the news for doing something worthwhile, something that makes his mother proud. One day perhaps we’ll see a headline about the defense secretary that doesn’t involve allegations of sexual misconduct or bigotry, claims about past drinking on the job, possible war crimes, Christian nationalism, or his weird fixation on male facial hair.

Alas, today is not that day. Rather, we are gathered here today because Hegseth is very het up about testosterone. On Wednesday, the defense secretary proudly announced a new screening program for “war fighters” 30 and older that would ensure they had the “right testosterone levels”. In a video posted on X, captioned “the High-T Department of War”, Hegseth explains: “By addressing these health markers early, we’re keeping you on the leading edge of lethality.”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

With Dane Cook set to star his new film, Curry Barker’s dad joins Lana Del Rey’s dad and Tom Holland’s dad in a new wave of nepo daddies

A generational shift is happening in Hollywood. The two big breakout films of the spring – Backrooms and Obsession – were made by a pair of plucky young YouTubers who found themselves granted the keys to the kingdom. Both of these films took more money than the most recent Star Wars, the most recent superhero movie (Supergirl) and the most recent Spielberg. It is arguably the biggest shake-up of the film industry since the rise of New Hollywood in the 1970s.

But perhaps the biggest change is tangential to all of this. This week it was announced that Jeff Barker – the father of Obsession direction Curry Barker – is making a film of his own. Medium Rare is a horror short that will shoot this summer and star Dane Cook and the Oscar-nominated actor Leslie Ann Warren. This will come hot on the heels of Good Tape, another horror short of Barker’s that is currently in post-production.

The idea that former colonies should pay reparations makes perfect sense through the lens of the new right. But have they got the telescope the right way round?

Dearest World,

Britain, that small yet once highly influential nation that once proudly ruled over much of you, that “gifted” you the English language as well as William Shakespeare and Mark Morrison, that kindly bestowed upon you industrialisation as well as industrialised slavery, the proud nation that won two world wars and created football … I’m afraid to reveal, is not what it used to be.

I was full of positivity when I began reading the National Survey for Wales, but the questions quickly grew deeper and deeper

Have I done any hang-gliding in the last four weeks? Hang on (no pun intended), let me think. No, not as far as I can recall. No hang-gliding. Will leave that box unticked.

Filling in the National Survey for Wales is a dizzying experience. One minute you’re exasperated with how long this trivial pursuit is taking, the next you’re into some serious soul-searching. Guilt-inducing, thought-provoking, sometimes moving. There’s a lot going on.

Devolution, tax, the EU and immigration: these are all opportunities for growth if Burnham abandons the excessive caution of the past few years

The economic inheritance Andy Burnham will receive from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves is not, in any meaningful way, a crisis. That is worth saying, because the comparison is not with some imagined social-democratic Eden. It is with the Britain Labour inherited after austerity, Brexit, the inflation shock and the Truss episode – a country in which economic policy had too often alternated between drift, denial and irresponsibility. Restoring seriousness to fiscal and macroeconomic management is an achievement, and not one economists should dismiss.

But it is also a limited achievement. Labour was not elected simply to demonstrate that it could avoid blowing up the gilt market, or so that ministers could once again speak in complete sentences about public finances. The question is whether Starmer and Reeves changed the trajectory of an economy that has, for more than a decade and a half, been characterised by weak productivity growth, falling relative living standards, deteriorating public services, excessive centralisation and a damaging loss of openness. On that test, the answer is less comfortable.

Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant

The decision to shoot in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, where the Indigenous people can’t tell their stories without fear of imprisonment, helps erase our own brutal journey

• Peter Bradshaw’s five star review
• A classicist’s verdict

The simple act of holding a camera in my homeland of Western Sahara can be a crime. When Sahrawi film-makers and journalists attempt to document everyday life under Moroccan occupation, they can often end up in prison cells. For the Moroccan regime, a camera in the hands of a Sahrawi threatens its official narrative that Western Sahara is part of Morocco.

In contrast, when celebrated international names in the film industry wish to capture an ideal picture for an epic journey, and decide that our land is exotic enough to shoot the desired scenes, they are welcomed, escorted and granted access by the same authorities that usually deny us that right.

The outgoing prime minister was on good form during his sometimes emotional last PMQs. But Labour MPs were right that change was needed

Mercifully for a prime minister whose defenestration was swift and brutal after Labour’s catastrophic local election results in May, Sir Keir Starmer’s valedictory week has offered several opportunities to point to what he got right. Sir Keir’s steadfast record in corralling international support for Ukraine – and ensuring Britain stayed out of Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran – will be looked on favourably by history. A minute’s applause in Paris on Monday, from leaders of the “coalition of the willing” countries, was well deserved.

On Tuesday in the House of Commons, Andy Burnham paid tribute to the outgoing prime minister for his role in drafting the bill that finally became the Hillsborough law this week. On Wednesday, serendipitously, the England team’s World Cup exploits allowed Sir Keir to indulge his passion for football during his final prime minister’s questions.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Obesity reflects prices, advertising and access, not simply weak willpower. Ministers must now act

Britain has spent the last three decades asking individuals to make healthier choices inside a market that makes those choices more expensive and less visible. It is no surprise then that the proportion of adults in England living with obesity nearly doubled in that time, to 30%. MPs on the health select committee have decided enough is enough. Preventing obesity in future generations, they say, must take precedence over the interests of the food and drink industry.

In a report to parliament, the cross-party committee argues that preventing obesity demands radical action to regulate food markets. To those who say “just wait for cheap Ozempic”, MPs offer a clear answer: off-patent GLP-1 drugs may transform treatment, but treatment is what becomes necessary when prevention has failed.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Dr Alessandro Massazza says extreme heat is linked to poor mental health, but solutions do exist. Plus letters from Sean Smith and Woody Caan

The data published by Imperial College London on deaths caused by the May and June heatwaves is a stark reminder of how climate change is not only measured in degrees of temperatures but also in terms of lost lives (May and June heatwaves killed about 2,700 people in England and Wales, data suggests, 13 July).

While each death due to extreme heat is a preventable tragedy, mortality only represents the tip of the iceberg of how heat is impacting our health. Extreme heat also affects our mental health. Throughout the past weeks in the northern hemisphere, we have all experienced how it is making it harder for us to sleep, making us more irritable and reducing our ability to concentrate.

There is no majority support for use of gene editing on non-life-threatening conditions, writes Tom Lichy of the British Deaf Association

Your editorial (The Guardian view on gene-edited humans: darker uses must be acknowledged alongside medical ones, 5 July) offers welcome support to those expressing concern about the lack of public dialogue on gene-edited humans. These concerns are exacerbated when some scientists view the use of germline editing to eradicate hereditary conditions as inevitable.

The new polling for the Progress Educational Trust reported in your editorial indicates that the UK public agrees with the use of gene editing to correct life‑threatening genetic conditions. No such majority supports use for conditions such as deafness which are not remotely life-threatening.

Martin Bailey responds to a letter that said the word ‘welfare’ is American and has negative connotations

Ruth Lister is very much mistaken in her accusation that the word “welfare” is pejorative and American in origin (Letters, 13 July). William Beveridge refers to welfare 25 times in his report of 1942.

Moreover, the use of the word welfare in Britain has a long and positive history – it was the stated aim to improve the welfare of the British people by liberals, the labour and trade union movement, many Christians, friendly societies and other progressives throughout 19th-century Britain, much of this reaching political fruition in the reforms of the Lloyd George government and the acts of the 1945 Labour administration.

Carla Keen on the cultural signals we attach to how people speak, in response to a review on a documentary hosted by the inequality campaigner

Lucy Mangan’s description of Gary Stevenson as having an “adolescent bullishness” raises a wider question about how class shapes perceptions of authority (How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson review – how did this end up such an embarrassment?, 8 July). I am an artist from a working-class background working in theatre, and I am very aware how often authority is often judged through presentation. Our media landscape still has a narrow idea of what expertise looks and sounds like. Research by the Sutton Trust has shown that around half of newspaper columnists and over a third of BBC executives were privately educated, despite private schools educating only a small minority of the population.

Stevenson is now wealthy, highly educated and professionally successful, but class is not only about income or occupation. It is also about the cultural signals that we attach to voice, manner and presentation.

️Updates from the first-round action at Royal Birkdale
️Official leaderboard | R&A gets tough | And mail us

Bob Mac aside, it’s still a wee while until some of the more fancied stars take to the course. Time for a little scene setting, then. Ladies and gentlemen, on the tee, Ewan Murray …

A fast start for Bob MacIntyre! He sends his opening tee shot into the rough down the left, and only just finds the front of the green with his second. But he rolls in a 45-footer and birdie is not a bad way to start the week! Oban’s finest already has three top-ten finishes at the Open on his resumé, including a tie for seventh at Portrush last year. Keep an eye out.

Updates from the 179.1km stage to Chalon-sur-Saône
Wærenskjold wins fastest ever Tour stage | Email Tom

170km to go Tudor’s Michael Storer has had an early technichal and is racing back solo to get back into the bunch. No break as of yet.

174km to go The bunch is still together as the teams feel eachother out. Currently the peloton is strung out after a sharp left into a roundabout and then a big sweeping right turn.

Updates from the second ODI at Sophia Gardens
Read The Spin | Follow us on TikTok | Mail Tim

3rd over: India 17-0 (Rohit 9, Gill 6) Archer continues, pitching full, finding swing, troubling both these master batters. Then he goes short, rushing Rohit into a top edge, and the catch is dropped by Gus Atkinson at long leg. Archer has been so unlucky, in all formats, since he returned from the IPL.

2nd over: India 11-0 (Rohit 4, Gill 6) Another lesson from Tuesday might be: don’t stray onto Shubman’s pads. Saqib Mahmood gives him a straight half-volley and pays the price as Gill’s wrists do the rest. But Saqib too finds the edge of Gill’s bat as another controlled nick squirts away for a single. Rohit comes to the party with a languid push for three, well retrieved by Harry Brook, two inches from the Toblerone. Dinesh Karthik reckons it should have been given as a four, so bear it in mind if England win off the last ball.

• Midfielder was team’s best performer last season

• Leeds close to signing centre-back Muharemovic

Dominik Szoboszlai is poised to give Liverpool and their head coach, Andoni Iraola, a significant boost by signing a new long-term contract. The midfielder, who was the team’s best performer during a difficult final season under Arne Slot, has two years on his deal and mentioned several times last season that there had been no real progress over an extension.

After months of negotiations between Liverpool’s sporting director, Richard Hughes, and Szoboszlai’s representatives, the terms of a new contract have been agreed in principle and the 25-year-old is close to signing the deal.

Michael Carrick’s first signing is a surprise, but the Brazil midfielder will help the team deal with Casemiro’s exit

By Opta Analyst

Andrey Santos moving from Chelsea to Manchester United was not on our summer transfer window bingo card, but the Brazilian has become Michael Carrick’s first signing. United desperately needed reinforcements in midfield, especially after Casemiro’s departure and Manuel Ugarte’s long-term injury, so deals for Santos and Youri Tielemans will be welcomed by fans.

Tielemans looks like particularly good business – he captains Belgium, has made 244 appearances in the Premier League and was available for £35m – but Santos is a more curious choice. He was often a backup player for Chelsea last season as they finished seven places and 19 points behind United; he is not the finished article, and played for one of United’s rivals. Since Alex Ferguson retired 13 years ago, United had only signed four players from their “big six” rivals: Juan Mata, Nemanja Matic, Mason Mount (all Chelsea) and Alexis Sánchez (Arsenal).

• Hat-trick against Fiji insufficient to promote No 8

• Borthwick expects ‘fantastic atmosphere’ for game

England have opted not to start the in-form Henry Pollock against Argentina on Saturday and have instead retained an unchanged starting lineup. The only alterations from last week’s 73-8 win over Fiji are among the replacements where Ben Spencer and the uncapped Northampton loosehead Emmanuel Iyogun come into the matchday 23.

Even an eye-catching hat-trick of tries in Liverpool has proved insufficient to earn Pollock a promotion from the bench for this month’s third and final round of Nations Championship fixtures. The head coach, Steve Borthwick, has chosen to stick with Ben Earl at No 8 and Guy Pepper at openside flanker, with Bristol’s Benhard van Rensburg and Saracens’ Noah Caluori once again handed roles as impact subs.

• Nearly 40% of 2026 races at showpiece meeting affected

• Track layout and listening devices for stewards on menu

The British Horseracing Authority said on Thursday that it aims to introduce a series of measures before next year’s Cheltenham festival to tackle a significant rise in the number of false starts at National Hunt’s showpiece meeting. The percentage of false starts has climbed steadily over the past five years, from 18% in 2022 to nearly 40% at the 2026 meeting. The rate of false starts in jump racing is around 4% over the same period.

A review of this year’s meeting identified particular problems at the starts for races over two and two-and-a-half miles, which begin near a bend.

Whistleblower suggests internal security services deployed spyware from 2017 against key domestic and foreign targets

A former member of Morocco’s domestic intelligence service has helped to provide an unprecedented insight into how the north African state used hacking software – including Pegasus spyware – to target journalists, human rights defenders, French politicians and Spanish cabinet ministers and police officers.

Pegasus, which is manufactured by the Israel-based NSO Group, allows its operator to access everything on a target’s mobile phone, including emails, text messages and photographs. It can also activate the phone’s recorder and camera, turning it into a listening device.

Critics say Foreign Office figures send ‘global message about the role the country wants to play on international stage’

Labour’s foreign aid cuts mean reductions of as much as 90% in the bilateral support the UK will give to some African countries, Foreign Office figures show.

The department’s annual report includes a long-awaited breakdown of how the reduction in the aid budget will affect individual countries for the next three years.

President says he had to choose ‘one side or the other’ after breakdown of relations between ministry and military leaders

• Europe live – latest updates

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has defended his decision to dismiss the country’s popular defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, and confirmed reports that relations had broken down between the ministry and the country’s top army leadership.

Speaking at a press conference in Kyiv with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, Zelenskyy said there had been a “challenging dialogue” between Fedorov – widely seen as a reformist and moderniser – and the military’s commander in chief, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi.

JCVI says children should have one or two doses of menB vaccine at age 15, depending on if they had vaccine as a baby

All teenagers across the UK should be offered a meningitis vaccine on the NHS following a series of fatal outbreaks, a government committed has said.

The recommendation, made by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), would mean that young people would be eligible for the menB vaccine at the age of 15, alongside catch-up programmes for those who otherwise would have missed out.

Move raises questions over position of the head of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency

• UK politics live – latest updates

Ministers have U-turned on plans to strip volunteer coastguard officers of their hourly pay after intense criticism of the plan.

The announcement, made by the maritime minister in parliament on Thursday, was described as a huge win for coastguards, many of whom had said they would reduce their hours or leave the service altogether if the government had pushed ahead. It has raised questions over the position of Virginia McVea, the head of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA).

Exclusive: High-level documents show how Copa Cogeca worked to weaken legislation to protect climate and wildlife

• Europe live – latest updates

Newly revealed documents from inside the most powerful farming lobby in Europe show how it delayed, gutted and overturned some of the most sweeping farming reforms in EU history, including a plan to cut pesticide use in half.

Copa Cogeca describes itself as the voice of 22 million farmers across the continent, and enjoys unrivalled access to EU lawmakers. It has even been described as a “partner in policymaking”.

From fierce flooding and escaped pigs to birds that can’t fly due to the weight of plastic in their stomachs, mankind’s biggest challenges are on stark display at Summit Photo 2026

Minister urges public to report cases of three or more sick or dead birds in a group after brown skua seabird tests positive for H5N1 on Wellington beach

The deadly H5N1 bird flu has been confirmed in New Zealand for the first time, sparking alarm that some of the country’s most beloved and vulnerable native birds could be wiped out if it spreads.

A single ocean-going seabird, a brown skua, returned a confirmed positive test on Wednesday, after it was found on Petone beach in Wellington on 10 July, said Andrew Hoggard, the biosecurity minister.

Birds are unable to sweat but they keep cool by seeking shade and bathing

As we humans sweltered in the record-breaking late June heatwave, we might not have spared much thought on how birds were coping.

Unlike us, birds are unable to sweat, so instead they have evolved other ways to avoid overheating. These include seeking shade beneath trees, bushes and hedgerows, spreading their wings to allow cooler air to circulate around their body, and opening their bills to cool down, the same as dogs do when they pant. Birds are also able to pump blood into their bare parts – bills, legs and feet – which allows their body heat to disperse.

Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 19, sentenced to five and a half years each for cyber-attack that cost Transport for London £39m

The data of millions of commuters was stolen, Londoners were left out of pocket and 27,000 Transport for London staff were forced to reset their passwords.

Over four days in 2024 a pair of teenage hackers had London’s transport network at their mercy. Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers had burrowed into the heart of Transport for London’s IT systems and held the “keys to the kingdom”.

Ofcom concerned TikTok’s age verification is ineffective, leaving some exposed to posts on suicide, self-harm and pornography

TikTok is under formal investigation over concerns it has failed to protect children from harmful content, the UK’s online regulator, Ofcom, has announced.

The social media platform’s approach to checking the ages of users has sparked “particular concerns” at the watchdog, almost a year after measures to protect children from the worst of online content came into effect under the Online Safety Act.

Campaign hopes to buy site for community, fearing it could go same route of corporate gentrification as Camden and Old Spitalfields

Traders at Brixton market say they are in a battle of “people over profit” after submitting a last-minute plan to stop the site being bought by a private equity firm which they fear could price out longstanding independent businesses.

Those behind the Buy Back Brixton campaign said they are through to the second stage of a bidding process, competing against multinational companies to buy Brixton Village and Market Row for community ownership.

The dual national, who missed six weeks of school, is latest of several children affected by recent Home Office policy

A British girl was prevented from returning to her school in the UK for six weeks after a trip to see her grandmother in Italy because of the Home Office’s new rule requiring dual British nationals to have a British passport to get back into the country.

The 15-year-old, who was stranded in Rome in April, is just the latest of a number of children and young adults hit by a new Labour government rule that came into force in February.

Wives and children offered new identities to try to stop gangsters recruiting down the generations

Children and young adults raised in mafia families will be given a chance to break away from organised crime under new legislation in Italy that aims to stop the intergenerational recruitment of gangsters.

In an unprecedented effort to sever the family chain, the Italian state will offer children aged under 25 and other close relatives of mafia bosses a chance to start over: a new home in another city, a new school and, if necessary, a new identity.

Stigma and superstition surround those with disabilities such as Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy. But there is a growing move to raise awareness and increase inclusivity

When Fatima Muhammad was told to drown her infant son or abandon him in the forest to die, she brushed off the ludicrous suggestions fuelled by superstition. But when people began to run away, some screaming profanities at the sight of him, she knew they meant it. His crime was being born with Down’s syndrome.

Alameen was born in 2015, the fourth of Muhammad’s six children. He is happy and playful at home, his mother says; a child who loves to draw and dance. He communicates using the basic sign language he is slowly learning and the habit he has developed of taking Muhammad’s hand and leading her to whatever he needs.

Vessels believed to have departed from Myanmar in late June, with mostly Muslim Rohingya minority onboard

The United Nations has said more than 500 people are feared dead after reports of two large shipwrecks off Myanmar since late June.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) and its refugee agency UNHCR voiced alarm in a joint statement at reports “that two boats carrying more than 500 people may have capsized off the coast of Myanmar in recent days”.

Country begins 42-day countdown to outbreak being declared officially over, as numbers continue to rise in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo

Uganda has started lobbying countries to lift Ebola-related travel restrictions after discharging its last confirmed Ebola patient from hospital.

The discharge of a Congolese national from the Mulago national referral hospital’s isolation centre in Kampala on Thursday triggered the start of a 42-day countdown required by the World Health Organization before Uganda can officially be declared Ebola-free, provided no new infections are detected.

Scunthorpe factory expropriated from China’s Jingye and ministers will ask a valuer to assess compensation

British Steel has formally been taken into public ownership 15 months after the government stepped in to prevent the closure of its steelworks in Scunthorpe and the loss of 4,000 jobs.

Keir Starmer on Thursday said it was in the national interest for the government to take over the factory from its Chinese owner, Jingye, in one of the last significant actions overseen by him as prime minister after the Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Act received royal assent on Wednesday.

Passenger Ljubisa Karović was nearly sucked out of his seat when Boeing 737-800’s window blew out on flight from Greece

For nervous flyers, it sounds like the stuff of nightmares; for most, only contemplated in an action movie. But last week, a passenger really was nearly sucked out through a broken aircraft window mid-flight.

Ljubisa Karović was on a Ryanair-Air Malta flight leaving Thessaloniki in Greece when the adjacent window blew out of the Boeing 737-800, pulling his head and shoulders out of the plane. His wife and fellow passengers helped to keep him inside.

Agreement combines Uber Eats with food delivery brands in 99 countries and expands taxi service reach

• Business live – latest updates

Uber has reached an agreement to take over the German takeaway company Delivery Hero in a $14.8bn (£11bn, or €12.9bn) deal that would create a global food delivery giant.

The US tech firm said it had offered to pay €41.50 a share to Delivery Hero’s shareholders, valuing the business at $14.8bn. Uber will pay $13.7bn after accounting for its previous purchases of a quarter of Delivery Hero’s shares, most recently in May.

Tim Steiner speaks as shares in the online grocer slide nearly 15% on plunge in pre-tax profits to £17m

• Business live – latest updates

The co-founder and boss of Ocado has said he has “no intention of being a puppet master” exerting control over its staff amid an apparent boardroom row over succession at the grocery technology company.

Tim Steiner, who is to stand down as chief executive in 2028, suggested that any successor would be happy to work with him.

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
The Empire State building is caught in bed with the Chrysler Building and a milk bottle turns into a dragon in the raunchy and cheekily provocative work of the Dutch artist and architect

In a high-rise New York apartment with a wide window that surveys the Manhattan grid below, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings are in bed together. The Chrysler melts in a silvery swoon, shagged out, while the beacon atop the Empire State Building still glows fiery red and on the bedside table the Statue of Liberty’s arm holds up a torch suggesting more passion to come. But oh no! The lovers have been caught at it. At the door is the forbidding RCA Building, which has left its usual station at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to see this!

Madelon Vriesendorp’s 1975 skyscraper sex romp drawing Flagrant Délit – “caught in the act” – can be seen twice in her exhibition Mind Games: as a standalone print and as the cover of Delirious New York, the 1978 book by her ex-husband Rem Koolhaas that is both a surreal history of the city and a subversive manifesto for a new kind of modern architecture. Vriesendorp is what exactly? An architectural cartoonist? A cartoonist architect? She is certainly more than just a graphic prankster, and won the 2025 Soane Medal given to visionaries who have “furthered and enriched the public understanding of architecture”. Hence this show. And it all started with skyscrapers copulating.

The confessional classic opened the floodgates for a generation of brilliant female showrunners. But as risk-averse streamers tighten their purse strings, is the industry forcing women’s stories back into a box?

Ten years ago, Phoebe Waller-Bridge locked eyes with the camera and asked her audience: “Do I have a massive arsehole?” An unexpected punchline to a monologue about a booty call that went surprisingly – and literally – south, it announced Waller-Bridge as a new star of British telly. The half-hour comedy series Fleabag broke the fourth wall, and the internet. Its second season was even bigger, spawning countless thinkpieces discussing Andrew Scott as the “hot priest” and the sold-out Topshop jumpsuit worn by Waller-Bridge, which had a keyhole cutout revealing an aspirational slice of boob.

Both Fleabag and Waller-Bridge were praised for blazing a path that female showrunners and their feminist creations could later stomp down. It secured Waller-Bridge an exclusive deal with Amazon worth a reported $20m (£16m) a year. The show’s success certainly changed Waller-Bridge’s life. But, a decade on, as the British television industry has been reshaped by the rise of streamers, budget cuts and dwindling opportunities for new talent, how did it change TV?

Doing full justice to the Homeric legend, Christopher Nolan amasses an epic cast to convey the true cost of war with film-making of thrilling ambition

• A classicist’s verdict: soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard

• Nolan’s film shot on occupied land. That feels like a betrayal

Christopher Nolan reinvents the Homeric legend as a colossal origin-myth story of postwar disillusion, an epic ordeal of anguish witnessed by the dead and presided over by capricious deities who participate on almost equal terms with the humans. It speaks to the generational pain of PTSD; plenty of soldiers come home in person after any war promptly enough, but arriving back to their prewar state emotionally or spiritually can take years or decades and may never happen at all. The invisible odyssey of anguish is punctuated by flashback episodes, hallucinations, confrontations with the arbitrary gods of dysfunction. And all the time the spouses and children cannot move on with their lives.

This is a film with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. There are some broad-brush moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with a muscular flourish. It has gasp-inducing, Imax-sized landscapes of loneliness shot by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema – who, incidentally, avoids the sea’s traditional cliched colour – and full-tilt battle sequences and fight scenes accompanied by the throbbing and thrumming of drums.

Ferrell’s brash ladies man and loser golfer could have been hilarious. But comedy has sped up over the last two decades, and all the genital gags and dodgy references fall flat

In the 2000s, American comedy had a rude awakening. While the preceding decade had been all attractive sophisticates bantering in big cities, the new millennium arrived in a miasma of crude, cartoonish buffoonery: Austin Powers, American Pie, Dude, Where’s My Car? These were, sadly, the sacred texts of a millennial adolescence.

In comparison, the work of the Frat Pack – a group of comic actors that included Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Seth Rogen and Luke and Owen Wilson, plus writer-director Judd Apatow – seemed almost highbrow. By the middle of the decade, this cohort had funnelled ribald irreverence into much better films, including Zoolander, Dodgeball and Anchorman. Eventually, though, the worm turned; as chin-stroking dramedy and nerdy Marvel wisecracking took hold of the zeitgeist, this PC-needling silliness fell out of fashion.

Five wealthy women set off for a weekend where everyone has something to hide. Plus: Dan Snow follows in Odysseus’s wake. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Atlantic
This glossy drama about wealthy women who head off on a girls’ weekend is the perfect chaser for anyone who raced through Two Weeks in August. After her husband dies, celebrity cook Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) organises a bougie trip with four friends: the school mom, the college bestie, the sort-of sister and the fan who reached out on social media. But everyone has a secret – and one is an absolute shocker. Gemma Chan, Chloë Sevigny, Regina Hall and D’Arcy Carden star. Hollie Richardson

Monaco/Raftis/Colombo/Frigato/Orchestra Ghislieri/Prandi
(Arcana)
Recorded from a live performance in an 18th-century theatre in Jesi – Pergolesi’s hometown – this is a brain-addling tale of love triangles and long-lost twins set in the ancient Olympics

Pietro Metastasio’s tale of dirty doings at the ancient Olympic Games proved so popular that more than 60 composers set it to music, including Caldara (for whom it was written), Vivaldi and Cherubini. Pergolesi’s version, premiered in 1735, resurrected in 1937, is among the finest, presaging what should have been a glorious operatic career if only the composer hadn’t died at the age of 26.

The story begins as the formidable Megacle is persuaded to compete in disguise as his hot-headed and not entirely honourable friend Licida. What Megacle doesn’t know is that the prize is the hand of Aristea, the woman he has fallen in love with himself. Throw in Licida’s cast-off mistress Argene masquerading as a shepherdess and the discovery that Licida is actually Aristea’s long-lost twin and you have all the ingredients for a plot of brain-addling complexity.

Actor Russell Tovey’s narration crackles with compassion and menace in this magical story of a widower and his young sons in mourning

Less than a week after the sudden death of his wife, a grieving man opens his front door to a giant crow who scoops him up into his wing and tells him: “I won’t leave until you don’t need me anymore.” Still in shock, the man is facing the prospect of raising his two young sons alone. The bird, which has previously been roaming around the family’s flat at night, has observed a household of “heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly covered in a film of grief”. In that first visit, the man “woke up and didn’t see me against the blackness of his trauma”.

First published in 2015 and since adapted as a play and film, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is an inventive and sharply observed novella by Max Porter which uses verse, dialogue and the supernatural to examine a family grappling with the loss of a wife and mother who had been “busy living, and then she was gone”. In a story that shifts between the perspectives of “Dad”, “Boys” and “Crow”, we learn the man is a writer who is working on a book about the poet Ted Hughes called Crow on the Couch.

The annual rundown of Guardian writers picking their most played tracks of the season goes from club-ready pop to sunny tech house

• Check out a Spotify playlist of the choices

Kim Petras’ greatest song to date is also the best outsider country song in recent memory: if Ethel Cain and Lana Del Rey could ever put the beef behind them and duet, the dusty gutter romance of Jeep is exactly how you’d want it to sound. The song creates a flyover state love story in a strangely effective union of hyperpop and Americana, creating a windswept fantasy of “doing some middle America shit” with your man: Four Loko-fueled hookups, gas station canoodling and screaming along to rage music beneath the stars. The truly audacious thing is the bridge, a whispered and impressionistic slur that feels like Petras is eight drinks deep, doing donuts in her car until everything blurs. It’s total make-believe, but Petras is so good at making you feel her longing that it gets me choked up. When she recently came out at a Charli xcx show to perform Jeep unannounced, it already felt like an anthem. Owen Myers

From 18th-century pleasure gardens to Studio 54, the story of nightlife in all its hedonistic – and political – glory

In this fabulous alternative history of the modern world, the academic and “party historian” Imogen Willetts looks at the last 500 years of civilisation through the sometimes blurry lenses of its after-dark scenes, with fascinating results. She begins by trying to capture what it feels like to go on a big night out, focusing on a phenomenon that, in 1912, the sociologist Émile Durkheim labelled “collective effervescence”. In one passage, she explains this by referencing dancing as part of ancient tribal hunting rituals, listening to Charli xcx’s 365, or singing along to Sweet Caroline with tens of thousands of other people in a stadium.

This is no dry academic study, then, and its mix of historical research, critical theory and conversational references to pop culture makes for a bright and compelling read. What Willetts calls the “seemingly superficial act of getting gussied up to drink, dance, have fun and meet people” is, of course, much more than that, and she scratches away at the layers with skill. Nightlife can contain, or enable, rebellion, community, innovation, art, love, sex and political revolution. From Japan to France, from Shanghai to Germany, via many detours to the United States, she examines historical movements as they might be seen from dusk till dawn.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some fantastic new paperbacks, from the gripping story of an international murder case to a state-of-the-nation yarn

***

In a new book, Isaac Butler goes back to the 1980s to trace how battles started against the arts, from Piss Christ to Mapplethorpe, and looks at what we can learn for today

Isaac Butler is limbering up for an event at Politics and Prose, an independent bookshop and venerable Washington institution, but still has time to explain his arm tattoos.

They variously depict: a logo from his grandparents’ company in the 1960s; a satellite that his father worked on at Nasa; a “jaunty crab” for his wife, who finds crabs “hilarious”; an iris by Japan’s Utagawa Hiroshige for Butler’s daughter, Iris; a drawing of a scene from a production of The Seagull by the Russian theatre maker Konstantin Stanislavski; and an artwork by the American painter and photographer David Wojnarowicz that shows a house on fire.

PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2; Undercoders
Colourful, counter-cultural and captivating – this rail riding game set in a dystopian Japan is as weird as it is exhilarating

Every now and again a game appears with a premise so outrageous you stop in your tracks to take it all in. Denshattack!, a game about kickflipping trains across a dystopian future Japan, is the epitome of this feeling. Set in a post climate disaster world, people have retreated to corporate-owned domed cities to live out their days in air-conditioned, ignorant comfort. Save for a handful of outcasts, the rest of the country is a mess of broken infrastructure, where rival gangs battle it out on the ruins of Japan’s famously extensive rail network. Naive upstart Emi has one goal: become the best Denshattacker there is, one sick nosegrind at a time.

Taking the idea of an on-rails platforming game to its extreme conclusion, developers Undercoders have combined the best bits of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series – grinding, flipping and spinning through an entire dictionary of tricks – with the anti-establishment message behind Jet Set Radio. The rivals Emi encounters showcase the history of Japanese misfits, pitting you against ageing rockabillies and violent girl gangs without a shred of judgment.

Brennan Lee Mulligan’s Dungeons and Dragons push is part of a wider trend using tabletop games for political action

Just before their election day, six Los Angeles city council candidates stood on stage at Hollywood’s Fonda Theatre. But they weren’t there for a debate or a black-tie gala. They were there to play Dungeons and Dragons.

Comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan guided the politicians through a short D&D campaign to defeat corporate villains and an evil dragon. Hundreds of enthusiastic fans in the crowd pledged additional donations up to $150 each to give the candidates what is called an “auto crit” for maximum damage to the dragon.

As global anxieties multiply, ​v​ideo games from Resident Evil to Mouthwashing are providing rich source material to help decode society’s problems

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Horror is so hot right now. There’s Obsession, Evil Dead Burn and Hokum in the cinema, Widow’s Bay, From and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen on TV, and, of course, a rotting smorgasbord of horror games including Resident Evil Requiem (pictured top) and Reanimal, soon to be joined by Silent Hill: Townfall, Silver Pines and Dreadmoor. We’re also seeing weird cross-pollinations, with horror movie studio Blumhouse making games, while games themselves become horror films and the whole backrooms genre infects every medium it touches.

So it was fascinating to attend last week’s horror and gaming conference at Falmouth University, in Cornwall: a gathering of students, researchers and lecturers, all engaged in the academic study of horror games. There were brilliant talks on zombies and posthumanism, the gothic in games, and the role of monstrous little girls in survival horror (there are a lot of them!). Subjects as diverse as masculine fragility, disability and ageing came up; Will Doyle, creative director at Supermassive Games, gave a great keynote on the art of creating horror in games using tools such as revulsion, spatial alienation and the human instinct of apophenia. I learned a lot about theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Mark Fisher, and about the technical similarities between indie horror games and film noir (for example, the use of darkness and creative camera techniques to “hide” budget restrictions). It was incredible fun.

PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2; Marimittu Games
A soft puzzle game makes a sharp point about the over-optimised future ahead

In the far future, on a planet that is not Earth, AI is in charge. This entity is no Skynet-esque killer robot but a machine that cares for humanity. Manifesting most visibly as cute droids, the technology is pervasive – embedded in everything from the design of the sleek architecture to the gorgeous, mostly sunny artificial weather. The so-called Optimization System has but one responsibility: ensuring the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

In less skilled hands this game might have felt like an undergraduate seminar on the limits of utilitarianism. But Japanese studio Marumittu Games elegantly marries its philosophical concerns with smart design choices. You play as a young, unnamed Facilitator tasked with tending to both the city’s bots and its human residents. Each morning you wake up, sleepily loping off to the bathroom before sitting down for an exquisitely rendered breakfast, and then embark on your day’s work. Like everything else in this near-future scenario, labour is designed to cause as little frustration as possible, amounting to simple maths brain teasers on a grid – nothing too taxing, but enough to keep you engaged.

Chichester Festival theatre
The well-worn rags to riches story blossoms beyond its generic setup when Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins’ relationship develops an emotional truth

For the first hour, this production of Lerner and Loewe’s musical glides along smoothly enough; the cockney flower girl sings of rain in Spain, the elocution professor rails at her for murdering the English language with her guttersnipe vowels, and the whirligig of Eliza Doolittle’s transformation from “squashed cabbage leaf” into lady carries you along.

Set against Dickensian lanterns and Henry Higgins’ hardwood bachelor study, its lovable songs (Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?, With a Little Bit o’ Luck, I Could Have Danced All Night and so on …) seem to emanate from a generic Musical Theatre Land – an anodyne setting entirely dissociated from the world of today. The intention, it seems, is safe, nostalgic entertainment.

The Egg, Bath
The beloved children’s perennial is the basis for a celebration of craft, creativity and the beauty of the natural world in this charming puppetry production

The Egg theatre celebrates its 20th anniversary with Tom Wentworth’s thoughtful but fitful adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved book. As Mary and her friends nurture their secret garden, animal puppets play amid the audience and flowers pop up across a green-washed stage. It’s all very charming – particularly when Cat Rock’s beautiful puppets skip, soar and dart around the theatre. There’s a plucky robin, a majestic owl and a ridiculously lovable fluffy lamb. All the puppets are frayed around the edges with the original fabric exposed; a celebration of craft and creation just as much as the beauty of the natural world.

The puppets are complemented by a striking design from Kat Heath and evocative music from composer Ben Osborn. The Yorkshire Moors around Misselthwaite Manor, where Mary is sent after being orphaned, are brought to life using curtains of fabric and giant gloves with long spindly fingers, worn by actors and swaying wildly in the wind. It’s quite unusual work, which sometimes makes the young audience giggle but gradually takes a hold of the imagination.

Whitechapel Gallery, London
I feel bad for the artists whose work has been crowbarred into a wonky show about migration, protest, climate and identity

It’s rare that an exhibition is so bad you feel compelled to text a friend saying “you wouldn’t believe the garbage I just saw” as soon as you get out. And if you can walk around this badly explained, undercontextualised, barely linked, poorly thought through mess of a show without getting a migraine, you have a stronger constitution than me.

This is an exhibition about east London. Or maybe it’s about Britishness. Or migration. Or the climate crisis. Or music. Or global trade. Whitechapel Gallery doesn’t seem to really know, so what chance do the rest of us have of figuring it out? The gallery would argue it’s about all of these things; I’d say it manages to be about none of them.

Birmingham Rep
With tremendous singing from Ramin Karimloo and Meow Meow, Joe Murphy’s superb staging of the story is full of dark gothic humour

Stephen Sondheim was drawn to fairytales – and not just in the storybook theme of Into the Woods. The origins of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, lie in Victorian melodrama, but in the hands of the composer, working with book writer Hugh Wheeler in response to a play by Christopher Bond, it is steeped in the tropes of folklore.

The story of a serial killer who provides the grisly contents for his landlady’s pies is ripe with the kind of dark gothic humour that appealed to the Brothers Grimm. There are shades of Hansel and Gretel in the cavernous oven and of Little Red Riding Hood in the prospect of being turned into someone’s dinner. The composer’s lyrics even quote the nursery rhyme Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake, Baker’s Man.

At Birmingham Rep until 15 August

The actor, who also appeared in The Waltons and Private Benjamin, died at his home in California

Hal Williams, the actor best known for TV roles in Sanford & Son and 227, has died at the age of 91.

His representative confirmed that Williams died on 15 July at his home in California.

As Hairspray and his ‘angriest movie’ Desperate Living are rereleased, the ‘Pope of Trash’ reflects on dead dogs, dirty rats, ‘that lunatic RFK’ and why there are no novelty dances any more

John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 comedy Hairspray was awarded a PG certificate. “It was horrible,” he says.

Until then, Waters, christened the “Pope of Trash” by the novelist William S Burroughs, was notorious for filming the unfilmable. In Eat Your Makeup, he recreated JFK’s assassination only five years after the event, casting the boisterous Divine in drag as Jackie Kennedy. He invented a blasphemous sex act called the “rosary job” in Multiple Maniacs, which also featured a rape-by-giant-lobster. Most repulsively, in Pink Flamingos, he persuaded Divine to scoff a fresh dog turd on camera.

Coming from the same developer as the Shard, London’s latest trophy building may be 54 storeys shorter than envisaged but should rise to building of the year

If Irvine Sellar, the larger-than-life developer who gave London the 95-storey hypodermic pinnacle of the Shard, had had his way, the UK’s tallest building would have been joined by a sibling: a 72-storey residential tower soaring above Paddington Station, the pair of leviathans winking conspiratorially at each other across the capital. In the end the Paddington Pole, as it became known, attracted the feather-spitting ire of heritage bodies and community groups, and after 1,800 objections, was refused planning permission by Westminster Council.

Undaunted, Sellar and his architect Renzo Piano – the Italian imperator of hi-tech and co-designer, with Richard Rogers, of Paris’s Pompidou Centre – went back to the drawing board and simply lopped off 54 storeys. And so, in a reverse ferret that was a gift to headline writers (“Pole-axed” trumpeted Building magazine), the Pole became the Cube: an 18-storey office block, homogenous, crystalline and curiously self-effacing, despite its cubic chonk, its glacial glass walls reflecting the grey London sky.

Matt Damon’s sensitive and repentant Odysseus might come as a surprise to Homer, likewise some significant omissions concerning the poem’s female characters

• Peter Bradshaw’s five star review

• Nolan’s film shot on occupied land. That feels like a betrayal

It would be easy to think that the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem composed over 2,500 years ago, is all about Odysseus. It’s called the Odyssey, after all. It opens with the invocation to the Muse, “Tell me about a complicated man” – pulling no punches about the poem’s theme. This is, on the surface of things, an epic about a man coming home, a return voyage that spans fluorescent fantasy worlds and yawns across 10 years in the wake of the fall of Troy; a one-hero clash with monsters and princesses, giants and whirlpools, the fight to reclaim his place as king of Ithaca, and as the hero of an epic of his own.

But the point about an epic is that it also contains multitudes. There is much that is epic about Christopher Nolan’s latest film. For those familiar with Nolan’s work, that hardly comes as a surprise. It’s a long watch, coming in at just under three hours. It reckons with the breadth of the Odyssean legend, from the sack of Troy all the way to Odysseus’s return, and seamlessly juggles the epic’s multiple timelines and flashbacks. And while the jaw-dropping cinematic effects of a feature film shot with Imax cameras might seem entirely modern, the way Nolan captures the smashing of a ship’s prow into the waves or the crunch of bones in the Cyclops’ jaws have their roots in the dynamic visuality of Homer’s poetry – what ancient commentators called enargeia, the epic’s ability to bring the world to life before your eyes.

Psychologist Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. She fears the current debate around smartphones obscures some of the biggest issues facing teenagers – from the impact of Covid to the health of their adult caregivers

The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens would be to kick all adult men off the internet, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and most likely to spread misinformation, she says.

Odgers is not recommending this as a policy for governments to adopt: “That would be crazy, right? It would be unfair.” But she is on a drive to puncture the prevailing narrative that the best way to address online harms is a social media ban for teenagers.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The chef and restaurateur talks vintage plates, proper photo albums and cycling with the Filter

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Angela Hartnett is a chef and restaurateur known for her sophisticated yet simple Italian cooking. Her passion for food was instilled in her by her Italian mother and grandmother. After starting out in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchens at Aubergine and Pétrus, Angela became head chef at Pétrus, helping the restaurant achieve a Michelin star. In 2008, she co-opened the now Michelin-starred Murano in London’s Mayfair with Gordon Ramsay before taking full ownership two years later. Several Café Muranos have followed, as have Hartnett Holder & Co at Lime Wood in Hampshire and Cicoria at the Royal Opera House.

She co-hosts the podcast, Dish from Waitrose, with Nick Grimshaw. She has an MBE and an OBE for services to the hospitality industry and to the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Filter’s authority on camping and the outdoors, Sian Lewis answered your questions on the best tents for all conditions, how to keep out wildlife, and meals to make your kids happy

ejtp19 asks: My six man Hi-Gear tent complete with zipped off sleeping area is on its last legs and I need to replace it. I’ve got the romantic urge to go for a teepee/bell tent ... but I’m worried I’m going for style over substance. How annoying is not having a zipped-off sleeping area? Is there a teepee/bell type tent with a separate bedroom and is it worth it?

Sian replies:

I have a bell tent and I absolutely love it for festivals, weddings and family camps, but they do have limited uses - they’re heavy, only have one room as you said, and take a while to erect and dismantle. I also paid to have mine cleaned after a few years of use as polycotton isn’t fully waterproof and can get mildewed if you don’t put it away fully dry.

You could look at something in between a bell tent and a tech-y tent - I rate Robens for quality and its Fairbanks Grande and Fairbanks Venturer are gorgeous, teepee styles that are easier to transport and erect (but with no sleeping areas). The only teepee-style tent with sleeping compartments I can find is Decathlon’s Teepee 5.2.

Firstly, camping alone as a woman is brilliant - once you get used to it. It can take a few camps to feel confident, and I’d recommend starting in a comfy campsite by yourself or even going for a solo glamping trip and seeing if you enjoy having some time alone under canvas. I’ve wild camped alone hundreds of times and always really enjoyed it. I’d suggest trying one night alone not far from your car - if you don’t like it you can always drive home and try another time.

If you fancy trying wild camping, firstly make sure you’re aware of where you can camp legally, and let someone know your plans and location. I like to take some creature comforts such as a good book or a podcast (not a true crime one, mind).. Remember that no-one knows who you are once you’re inside a tent. Pitch late and leave early and you’ll probably have your spot all to yourself.

Want to recreate the lustre of days spent in the sun with none of the damage? Try these expert-approved formulas

• The best IPL and laser hair removal devices tested

The wise among us would never forgo our safe-sun protocol, but there’s no denying that many of us feel happier and healthier with a tan. The irresistible lure of sunkissed skin has long been a summer staple – and from tanning waters to wipes, instant tans to gradual tanning moisturisers, there are now more ways than ever to get a faux glow.

There’s also been a growing demand for multitasking beauty products, so the newest fake tan formulas often add skincare benefits alongside the bronze. Self-tans infused with hyaluronic acid, niacinamide and vitamin C hydrate, nourish and protect, much like your usual body cream or facial serum.

Best fake tan overall:
Bare by Vogue Williams clear tan water

Best budget fake tan:
Dove Summer Revived Sunkissed Glow + Pro-Ceramides gradual tan lotion

They’re cheaper and greener than air conditioning, but which evaporative cooler impressed us most?

• The best fans to keep you cool, tested
• Dyson HushJet Mini Cool fan review

Air coolers should not be confused with air conditioning. An air cooler can lower your room temperature by a couple of degrees, while aircon can lower it by tens of degrees. So it’s important to manage your expectations. But air coolers are much more energy efficient: they use a fraction of the electricity of aircon.

Evaporative air coolers work by pulling warm air through water-soaked pads. The water evaporates, which uses energy, so the process cools the air. So while it’s not fridge-cold like aircon, the air is cooling – like a sea breeze taking the edge off summer heat.

Best air cooler overall:
Swan Nordic air cooler – currently out of stock

Best portable air cooler:
Morphy Richards Flexi Freeze

From taco in a bowl to cantaloupe and courgette, assemblies of raw ingredients are a terrific choice for lo-fi, hot-weather meals that require minimal cooking

Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

When Shakespeare coined the phrase “salad days”, he was referring to a state of youthful inexperience. But at 41, and midway through the hottest summer on record, I can safely say my own salad days – these weeks of endless salad-eating – are the result of experience. As my organs segue into their fifth decade, I need more than rosé and a bag of Tyrrells for dinner. (Although if you’re interested, I’m a salt-and-vinegar Furrows person and my favourite rosé – Catalan producer Can Sumoi’s La Rosa – is on offer.)

I’m not only eating salad, of course, but assemblies of raw ingredients are an obvious choice if you’re looking for lo-fi meals that involve more interaction with the fridge than the oven. I like Tom Hunt’s rubric for a fridge-raid dinner salad, which – rather than sending you out for ingredients and sweat patches – uses whatever you have on hand. And Meera Sodha’s no-cook salad of tomatoes, chickpeas and rose harissa delivers fibre and flavour without so much as a struck match. And then there is Feast’s archive of recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi, which boasts doozies such as his tomatoes with mango-miso dressing and this courgette and cantaloupe salad. Ottolenghi’s lime and poppyseed slaw with curry leaf oil, meanwhile, has accompanied almost every barbecue or “family-style” spread – the citrus juice softens and “cooks” shredded cabbage, carrot and onions into submission, and don’t even get me started on its maple-turmeric cashews. The whole lot cries out for a beer – preferably Table Beer by the Bermondsey brewery the Kernel, a pale ale that is big on hops and low on booze (variable, but about 3%).

Aluminium is practical, recyclable and, for wines drunk young, the ideal container. Better still – high-quality options are increasingly available

Cans are the answer to many of the problems posed by wine. On picnics, at festivals and generally on the trot, what are more practical than bottles? Cans! For the carbon-conscious, what have a significantly lower environmental impact than glass? Aluminium cans! And what if, for whatever reason, you don’t want to commit to a full 750ml bottle of wine? Try a can! This small, light and sustainable format is a secret weapon to keep, quite literally, in your back pocket; with cans – wherever you are and whatever you’re doing – drinking wine is always possible. Not to get too Barack Obama about it, but “yes, we can”.

Gen Z are largely behind the recent boom in canned wines, which stands to reason: fewer of them are drinkers and those who are do so only moderately, so a smaller format suits. According to a 2025 survey by Ocado, 53% of them “have been directly influenced by social media to try boxed or canned wine”. This shows in the way those formats are marketed: the peachy-pink can of Nice’s Pale Rosé, for instance, reads, “Won’t shatter on the dancefloor”, while Vinca’s catarratto “pairs well with great company”. A and almost all of them make a point of their recyclable packaging, appealing to the most environmentally-conscious generation to date. (Glass bottles are, after all, consistently found to be one of the largest contributors to wine’s carbon footprint.)

Use the whole pod – husks, beans and all – for a rustic, nutritious version of a seasonal favourite

Tom Norrington Davies is a friend, fellow chef and one of the best yoga teachers I know, so you can probably imagine my pleasure on recently coming across his recipe for broad bean and mint risotto, which he wrote for The Eagle Cookbook in 2009. Like many restaurants, this legendary gastropub pods their broad beans to reveal the beautiful green bean inside; this is my zero-waste interpretation.

Not a ‘cake person’? Loaded with fruit and whipped cream, these luxurious pastries are sure to hit your sweet spot

Strawberry, or any berry, shortcakes are the perfect dessert to make for those in your life who are not cake people. I’m married to a “not cake” person, so I would know. For me, the contrast between the salty, slightly warm shortcake (which is more like a biscuit), whipped cream and macerated fresh fruit is perfection, and hits enough of the sweet spots still to feel like a dessert without actually being cakey. But, first, the cardenal, a truly elegant, light-as-a-feather cake that’s made with alternating rings of genoise sponge and meringue all sandwiched with whipped cream. Though the building blocks are simple – meringue, sponge and cream – when combined, they turn into something really special.

The Guardian’s Saturday magazine is interested in hearing from couples, partners and former lovers to talk about their sex lives

How often do you have sex? The Guardian is looking for couples to talk honestly – and completely anonymously – about what they get up to in the bedroom for the Saturday magazine’s much-loved This is How We Do It column.

The idea behind the column is to provide a counterpoint to the airbrushed, exaggerated stories about sex we see on TV and in the media. We want to publish un-sensationalised interviews with real couples, so we are particularly keen to hear from you if you have hit a roadblock in your sexual life. How do you navigate intimacy when your partner wants sex more than you do? Or after an affair? Or when you are not feeling spectacular about your body?

We’re looking for couples of all ages and sexualities. We would not publish your names or where you live.

If you’re having trouble using the form click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here.

Rick and Rachel are non-monogamous – but they both know this arrangement may not work forever

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

I’ve tried knowing and not knowing, and I find both difficult. In an ideal world, we’d go looking for sex together

You and your husband need to have a frank discussion and decide whether you want to negotiate the next stage of life together or apart

I’m 55 and, after being a dutiful wife for 30 years, my sex drive declined after a traumatic hysterectomy eight years ago. My husband was patient and kind throughout. I love him dearly, but sex was never really the same afterwards, which I attribute to the surgery.

I’ve now been through menopause and suddenly find my libido returning. However, my husband no longer desires me due to weight gain. He can’t maintain an erection for long, and is very critical of my sexual performance. He’s seen a doctor, but nothing came of it, and he refuses couples counselling.

From Hollywood movies to confessional memoirs, three-person relationships are everywhere. But is it really possible to keep everyone satisfied? Happy trios, bruised couples and rejected lovers tell all

Priscilla can pinpoint the moment she realised that her throuple was falling apart. Her fiancee, Kiara, had started kissing their shared girlfriend, Olivia, in a way that went on for just a little too long. One night, after the three of them had gone out for a romantic dinner in Savannah, Georgia, where they live, Olivia and Kiara started kissing in the front seats of the family car and it seemed as if they were never going to stop. About 10 minutes in, Priscilla tried to reach out and touch her fiancee’s shoulder, but her seat belt was buckled. Unbuckling and leaning forward felt intrusive. And, anyway, Kiara and Olivia seemed to have forgotten all about her. Watching the kiss unfold, squashed into the back with all the baby seats and toys, Priscilla thought about how by rights it was her turn to sit up front. She was always in the back seat. She felt a flicker of something competitive. “I worried, am I desired less than her?” she recalls now. “Will I be replaced?”

In the early days, Priscilla felt giddy with the excitement of being in a throuple. She and Kiara had been together for eight years, and adding a third person to their relationship felt like a way of exploring non‑monogamy without losing one another, because every new romantic experience would be shared. Olivia was an old friend, so Priscilla and Kiara’s children were comfortable with her. When the kids were in bed, they would walk to the beach holding hands as a three, to watch the sunset. At night, they would curl up to sleep together, and form a kind of cuddle chain. Priscilla would cuddle Olivia, and Olivia would cuddle Kiara.

Treasury says shoppers will get a ‘fairer deal’ as new rules for BNPL credit are introduced on Wednesday

Millions of shoppers will enjoy more rights and protections from Wednesday as new rules for “buy now, pay later” take effect in the UK.

The government said it was delivering on its commitment to end the buy now, pay later “wild west”.

In the UK, these scams have become an epidemic, rising 147% between January and March, compared with the same time last year. Why are they suddenly so common? And what can you do if you’re charged thousands for a quick, easy job?

Sarah was alone in her flat with her three-month-old baby when a man put a card machine in her face and demanded she pay £2,209. A few hours earlier Sarah, 30, had been for a walk with her daughter when it dawned on her that she had left her keys at home. She did what most people would do in the same situation: search Google for a nearby locksmith. “I had a screaming baby, so I needed someone to quickly let me in,” she says.

Sarah came across a seemingly legitimate company, near the top of the search results, which was sponsored. The company’s website said prices started at £45 and claimed they had received “4,500-plus five-star reviews and counting”, so she called them. When the locksmith arrived, Sarah says, he “seemed pleasant and relatively quiet” at first. After examining her lock, however, he told her it was a high-security one and the only way to get inside was to drill it open. He broke his way in and changed the lock before delivering another blow: he had accidentally damaged the internal mechanism, which also needed replacing. After Sarah got inside and placed her baby on a changing mat, the locksmith told her the price: £2,209.

We booked the £1,070-a-week retreat because of the facilities, but when we got there they were a round-trip away

Last month’s tale of a winter break spoiled because easyJet Holidays had neglected to state that the hotel’s heated pool and spa incurred hefty charges was discordant music to another reader’s ears. He writes:

We returned last month from an easyJet Holidays break at a “wellness retreat” with prominently advertised spa facilities, which turned out not to have any spa facilities whatsoever. We had booked a £1,070 week at the Vasia Sea Retreat in Sissi, Crete, because I wanted access to a gym at least twice a day as rehabilitation from a serious knee injury, and my wife was keen for pool and pilates classes.

Snappy performance, long battery life, great keyboard and excellent new haptic touchpad make the best of Windows 11

Microsoft’s Surface laptop for consumers is back, faster and with longer battery life and a hefty price increase because of the high cost of memory and chips.

The Surface Laptop 8 is a straight replacement for the seventh edition from 2024, which was the first of Microsoft’s new generation of ARM-based, Qualcomm-powered PCs designed to better rival Apple’s MacBook Air and other thin and light machines.

As a teenager I declined a painful operation to straighten my spinal curvature, and it was a decision I sometimes regretted. But through daily stretching and exercise, my relationship with my body was transformed

I was 13 when a spinal surgeon gave me unsolicited career advice. “Scoliosis won’t ruin your life,” he said, peering over his spectacles, “unless you want to do bikini modelling.” As a young teenager, I hadn’t thought much about job prospects, let alone modelling, but his words stung. It also curdled my situation into a lose-lose scenario: either have a painful operation to fuse metal rods with my spine, or endure a lifetime with an abnormally twisted back.

Until this point, I’d perceived my spinal curvature in terms of the inward experience: pain. Now, I became aware of an external dimension: a disfigurement. Something to be hidden. This did me no favours as a teenager in the age of Instagram. While I declined the operation due to the risks and the extended leave from school, the surgeon’s blithe remark burdened me with shame.

Analysis of 12 indicators including asthma, obesity and vaccination finds child health is ‘national embarrassment’

Children in the UK will grow up to be one of the unhealthiest generations in decades, with child health outcomes having declined or stalled completely across all areas, a group of leading paediatricians has said.

Reduced vaccination rates alongside rising hospital admissions for asthma and mental health disorders are all contributing factors to the UK’s record on children’s health, which should be seen as a “national embarrassment”, their analysis has found.

Doing a split may look impressive, but experts caution it should not be done without practice and it may not be for everyone

On Love Island USA’s recent eighth season, contestant Kenzie Annis quickly distinguished herself with her ability to perform the splits, abruptly deploying the maneuver in fits of both delight and rage.

Seeing the splits on TV shows such as Love Island and RuPaul’s Drag Race can make people “want to take on that challenge and to push themselves to new heights”, said Ramoni Overton, a yoga instructor and YouTuber based in Los Angeles.

Ministers consider bringing e-cigarette laws in line with tobacco as data shows 20% of teenagers have tried vaping

Vapes could be sold in plain packaging as part of a range of proposals to stop them being marketed to children.

The UK-wide plans also include limiting device colours to white, black or grey, and keeping vapes out of sight in shops, according to the Department of Health and Social Care.

The ubiquity of GLP-1s is wreaking new havoc on bridal designers who must scramble to accommodate rapid weight loss

In bridal stores across the world, solicitous sales assistants are being trained to ask a new, blunt question: “Are you planning on losing a drastic amount of weight?”

Wedding season’s new disruptor is semaglutide, now used by 10% of engaged couples, according to a survey by the wedding planning platform Zola. In the same survey, 42% of couples said the ubiquity of GLP-1s has made them feel they should “look a certain way” for their wedding.

Wide-legged and flowing, they are causing a storm on social media, with people posting videos of the fabric getting caught in escalators and causing painful trips

Name: “Zara death pants.”

Appearance: Flowing, wide-legged, with a high waist, elastic waistband and front pockets.

Fashion is getting braver with accessories again, so lean into it by embracing loud earrings and chunky pendants

This summer, I want jewellery that makes some noise. Real noise – earrings that swish, bangles that clatter – and visual noise as well. Stuff to wear when you want to be seen and heard. The total opposite, in other words, of the jewellery most of us have been wearing lately. Charming, delicate jewellery has become the default. Two necklaces of different lengths on fine chains. One has a heart pendant, the other an initial or a birth stone, am I right? Maybe a curated earlobe of tastefully small mismatched diamond hoops.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this look. It is really nice. In fact, this is exactly the problem.

This nifty addition to your makeup bag will give the impression of a person with time, skill and polish – with every little effort

A liquid eyeshadow is the answer to all your eyeshadow misgivings, and I will die on this hill. One neutral, long-lasting shadow gives the impression, however false, of a person with time, skill and polish, when in fact its effort:effect ratio is a joke.

Just daub on to the middle of your lid from lash line to socket, avoiding the inner and outer corners in the first instance, then take a clean fluffy shadow-blending brush and buff in a windscreen wiper motion to spread across to the corners and soften any hard lines.

Preston and St Helens were heartbeats of the industrial age, but their power faded. In the last of our series, we discover how their legacy is finally being celebrated

• Where tourists seldom tread, parts 1-20

This double act of “Lancashire” locations is my final celebration of Britain’s bypassed towns. My native county has dominated my life of late, and one key question asked in these columns has been: can you holiday right at home?

The French author Xavier de Maistre believed you could fit a journey inside a single room. And in Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase the Argentine-French writer Julio Cortázar turned a walk upstairs into a quest. An entire county offers enough adventures to fill a life.

As Christopher Nolan’s star-studded adaptation is released, Australian archaeologist and cyclist Sam Wood has recreated Odysseus’ journey on two wheels

Backpacking around Europe is a rite of passage for many young Australians but when Sam Wood proposed a trip with his two brothers in 2009, he had something a little more ambitious in mind.

An avid cyclist who studied classical archaeology at the University of Sydney and spent three years working at the British Museum, he suggested retracing the route that the Carthaginian general Hannibal took over the Alps with his war elephants in 218BC.

A catamaran service from Dover to Boulogne is the perfect start to a trip exploring the Pas-de-Calais and marshes of Saint-Omer by bike, boat and kayak

“It’s all about tuning into the culture of the sea,” helmsman Chris O’Brien tells me, scanning the rippling cobalt horizon from the wheel of a catamaran. “People find the water, and the meditative experience of sailing, healing.” Meditative isn’t a word that usually comes to mind when talking about cross-Channel ferries on a bank holiday weekend, but this is no ordinary ferry.

Launched last year, SailLink operates a largely wind-powered (engines are only used when necessary) service from Dover to Boulogne up to five times a week between April and mid-September, with a new Shoreham to Fécamp route due to start trials later this year.

Would walking buddies convince reluctant children that hiking can be fun? A group trip with an Enid Blyton vibe proved a hit with the whole family

“I’m not going to wake her up,” I hiss at my 12-year-old son who’s standing half naked in a dark corridor of a Victorian house. “Please, Mum. She said we could come at any time! I don’t want to get Lyme disease,” he begs.

This is not the kind of drama I was expecting when I signed up to a family walking holiday in Exmoor. A few meltdowns about an extra mile or a blister perhaps, but not a night mission to one of the guides to request a tick removal.

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

And so after nearly 70bn matches – or so it seems – the Fifa World Cup has reached the sharp end. But regular readers will know that they face the sharp end of the challenge of the Thursday news quiz every Thursday. Fifteen questions await on topical news, general knowledge and pop culture. Plus collective nouns for some reason. There are no prizes, but let us know how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 256

St Dominic, Cornwall, to Reigate: Along the way, this nervous passenger passes rolling downlands of cereals, Stonehenge, and of course, lorries loaded up with straw

At the start of the second heatwave, we visit Jack’s twin and her family in Surrey. From our landmark clump of beech loaded with mast, the car brushes through lanes of rampant deciduous growth woven with bedstraw, honeysuckle and incipient fruits of bramble. Our neighbour’s cut and cleared hayfield overlooks luminous flowers of sweet chestnut, with dead ash in Nanie Rowe’s wood.

Across the Tamar, through a patchwork of woods and pastures, we meet the first lorry-load of straw – essential supplies from upcountry needed for winter bedding. By Exeter, the dampness eases off and the motorway cutting through red sandstone reminds me of fertile arable land, much of it encroached on by suburbs. Along slower stretches, I look sideways beyond the ubiquitous ragwort to pick out features such as the wooded eminence of Cadbury Castle. Near Ilchester, Somerset, trailers of chopped “cut-whole” straw stems and unripened grain are carted along the three-lane highway.

When is it OK to go shirtless? What time can you start drinking on holiday? And can you ask a stranger to apply your sunscreen? Experts explain the behaviour that’s hot this summer – and what’s really, really not

Summer means a loosening of rules and norms. Eating with your fingers is suddenly encouraged, near-nakedness is everywhere and a 6am airport pint is unremarkable. It’s a hot, sticky recipe for social chaos and – if you share my view on showing off ungroomed feet – possibly the end times of human civilisation. Here, then, is everything you need to know about summer etiquette.

Easy to grow, hardy and charming, these once-maligned flowers are having a much-deserved comeback

You might not know the term Caryophyllaceae but I guarantee you’d be able to spot a carnation, which is part of this family. Garage forecourt carnations have been having a semi-ironic fashion moment as a cut flower for a while now, but I’m yet to see them making a garden comeback.

I’d always dismissed the whole family as fusty, old-fashioned bedding plants for fussy little gardens. But it turns out that whoever is in charge of the carnation comms is having a good run. I keep seeing them around. Rose campion, another Caryophyllaceae, has even turned up in my garden – or rather, it has survived there. I didn’t plant it, and a photo from last July shows a scorched wasteland (it’s now a haven for moths, grasshoppers and bees, which shows what not mowing can do). But they’re biennial (they take two seasons to get from seed to flower), so I guess it was biding its time. It’s bright pink with a soft grey leaf, and not the kind of thing I’d choose, but I’m enjoying it so much I’ll be encouraging it to self-seed in the wildflower patch.

Aiden is an unforgettable young caregiver in Walthamstow, east London, who has been looking after his mum for over half his life. Every few weeks, Aiden and other young carers get a rare night off thanks to tenacious council worker Satvinder, who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough. This film joins them as they reclaim a few hours of their teenage lives back.

Is Mum OK? is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them. There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class.

Anna Liedtke files criminal complaint in Israel over alleged attack by female guards and says abuse was intended to silence campaigners

The third time Anna Liedtke was subjected to an illegal strip-search in Israeli detention, female prison guards forced her on to her knees, covered her mouth to stop her screaming and raped her, according to interviews and a criminal complaint filed in Israel.

She described hearing male guards laughing during the attack, which she believes they watched and may have filmed. It took place in an area separated from the prison hallway by a partially drawn curtain that her attackers had left open.

Five decades since punk bible Sniffin’ Glue, DIY magazines are in rude, rich health. Their creators talk fandom, community-building and resisting the algorithm

‘The most important part of the word ‘fanzine’ is ‘fan’,” says London-based zine-maker Jon Marsh. Existing outside mainstream media, free from the demands of release cycles and search engine optimisation, music fanzines are obsessions turned into tangible objects; self-published primarily for the maker’s own enjoyment, but with the potential of forging connections with like-minded people.

In the 1970s, punk zines such as Sniffin’ Glue, Alternative Ulster and Ripped & Torn allowed fans to share news and enthusiasm quickly and cheaply. Half a century on, music fanzines are enjoying a resurgence as a form of resistance to algorithm fatigue and the hyper-capitalist music industry. “Digital attention span is at an all-time low,” says hip-hop musician ExP, creator of the West Yorkshire Hip-Hop zine. “You’re almost definitely going to spend more time looking at a zine than anything you see scrolling. It’s more interesting and more real.” In the words of Stephen McRobbie, from indie-pop icons and fanzine regulars the Pastels: “It’s the long way round compared to other media, but the scenery is always better.”

Peat bogs are essential to the environment, holding twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests. But in the UK, 80% are damaged, most of what is extracted is used in horticulture – and some campaigners fear the problem is getting worse

‘I don’t see how I can possibly do my job and eat mushrooms,” says Sally Nex, a campaign advocate for the Peat-Free Partnership. “An awful lot of the food you buy in the supermarket is grown in peat: field mushrooms and little button mushrooms, salads and many brassicas, herbs in pots … all of those have started in peat.”

I’m taken aback. I’ve bought peat-free compost for years, but I’d never considered “hidden” peat. “I would imagine that most people are buying peat-free compost at the moment – certainly, you only have to go into a garden centre to see the amount of peat-free options you now have,” says Nex. “But you may not realise that an awful lot – probably most – of the plants that are on sale in that garden centre are also grown in peat.”

Ahead of Andy Burnham taking over from Keir Starmer, we’d like to hear what qualities, values and priorities people want to see in the next prime minister

Andy Burnham is to become the next prime minister after winning the backing of 349 of the party’s MPs to replace Keir Starmer.

In a recent op-ed in The Times, Burnham wrote: “Doing politics differently means levelling with the public, engaging them in decisions and ensuring more social value in return for increased government spending.”

We want to hear from those working or living at sea, including maritime workers, sailors, port staff and family about how the situation is affecting their work

The conflict in the Middle East continues to disrupt shipping across the region, including in the strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s busiest maritime routes.

Donald Trump has once again threatened to take control of the strait of Hormuz, as he announced the reimposition of a naval blockade on Iran and demanded a 20% tariff on all cargoes shipped through the key maritime passage.

We would like to hear about the highs and lows of university clubs and societies

As a new academic year approaches, we would like to hear from students and recent graduates (five years ago or less) about their experiences of university clubs and societies that freshers might find instructive.

What was your best experience of a university club or society? And what was your worst?

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