Relocation coincides with proposed laws that opponents say would entrench power of US tech billionaires in country

Dozens of protesters converged on Peter Thiel’s mansion in Buenos Aires this week after a congressional session raised questions about the billionaire’s presence in the country.

In white masks, they held signs saying “Peter Thief” and “No to the Peter Thiel law” in front of the wrought-iron gates of the $12m (£8.9m) residence, which Thiel bought in April as he moved his family to Argentina.

As the Trump administration refuses to end its war in Iran, it is steering into the storm, not out of it

Russia hasn’t yet killed large numbers of Europeans outside Ukraine, but it’s getting closer. The night of 4-5 August, an airport bus driver discovered an armed drone lying near the tarmac of the Leipzig-Halle airport, which is a central hub of Europe’s logistical support to Ukraine’s war effort. A cargo jet, meanwhile, may have struck a second drone shortly after takeoff, forcing an abrupt landing, and investigators found a third drone laden with military explosives nearby.

In 2024, incendiary devices hidden in parcels ignited in DHL cargo at the same airport. Had these detonated in the air, a major air catastrophe and large-scale civilian casualties would have ensued, probably resulting in a broader war.

People online are distressed at men butchering words such as ‘hyperbole’ and ‘hors d’oeuvres’ – highlighting a gender reversal in ‘intelligence gaps’

There are common non-negotiables we look for in a prospective partner. They should be kind, caring and thoughtful. Having a shared interest helps. So does remembering important dates and anniversaries. But how much does it matter if they know how to pronounce the word “gnocchi”?

Turns out that’s a potential dealbreaker, at least according to a (rather judgy) cohort on TikTok. See: the “Illiterate Boyfriend” trend, which is testing some couples on the app. Users have compiled a list of what are essentially SAT words for women to ask their male partners to read. Many of these men – this is an overwhelmingly heterosexual activity – fail to finish the list unscathed. They trip over entries such as “hyperbole”, “cynicism”, “diaphragmatic” and the oft-butchered French term, “hors d’oeuvres”.

Thousands of heat-related deaths in record-breaking temperatures appeared to only intensify hosts’ climate denials

As the first heatwave of the record-breaking summer arrived on 23 May, GB News host Cristo Foufas was not happy: “I am sick to death of the naysayers saying firstly that we’re all going to die and that we have to put out heat alerts, because, you know, just drink some water and drink a bit less rosé in the sunshine.”

“We used to call it Darwinism,” replied co-host Renée Hoenderkamp. She is a medical doctor.

He grew up in the ghetto, became a global superstar – then gave it all up. Why did he step away from the spotlight?

Mr T explains why he’s late, but he wants to make one thing clear – this is not an apology. “You caught me in my devotion, and nothing comes before God. So I won’t say I apologise for the delay. I just want you to know that God comes first in all my life. For allowing my success, I give God the glory.”

He is here to discuss a new Netflix documentary, Untold Mr T: I Pity the Fool. At 74, he rarely gives interviews. But when Mr T decides to talk, he really does talk. What Mr T thinks, Mr T says. And I’ve never heard anyone trash the very thing they’re here to promote quite like Mr T does today.

Across the world, hundreds of people have come to believe they have made extraordinary scientific discoveries with AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Others say their AI has ‘awakened’, or is leading them to a higher spiritual realm. The Guardian journalist Michael Safi begins investigating a phenomenon labelled ‘AI psychosis’, travelling to the US to meet two people who have been on weird journeys with their chatbots

Prolific author campaigned against domestic violence, female genital mutilation, pornography and the Vietnam and Gulf wars

• ‘We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls’: Gloria Steinem – a life in quotes

• Hillary Clinton leads tributes to Gloria Steinem: ‘Her activism was rooted in optimism’

Gloria Steinem, the American feminist and journalist whose activism helped push through greater rights for women around the world has died, aged 92.

Steinem “passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her”, a statement shared to her Instagram page said.

Event is likely to be largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into a world already in a climate crisis

The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts.

The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever recorded.

Party podcast and social media host Ray Addison fronted films about province where China is accused of genocide

Reform UK’s top media presenter has worked for a Chinese state propaganda channel within the past year, the Guardian can reveal.

Ray Addison, who presents the political party’s in-house podcast and social media campaigns, fronted films about Xinjiang province – where the Chinese government is accused of committing genocide – for state media in September 2025.

Government lawyers tell coroner disclosing intelligence would pose serious risk to national security

Ministers are seeking to block intelligence material from being heard at an inquest into the death of two men killed in the 2025 Manchester synagogue attack.

Lawyers for Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, told a coroner on Thursday that disclosing the MI5 files would pose a serious risk to national security.

Barrister representing four who smashed drones at Israeli arms factory says ruling of ‘terrorist connection’ led to heftier sentences

Palestine Action activists who were the first defendants convicted of property damage and whose offending was deemed to have a “terrorist connection” have launched an appeal of “fundamental constitutional importance” against the judge’s finding.

Charlotte Head, 30, Leona Kamio, 31, Fatema Rajwani, 22, and Samuel Corner, 24, received lengthy sentences in June for smashing up drones and other equipment at Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems’ factory in Filton, Bristol, in 2024.

Judge voices concern about possible copycat incidents after boy, 16, found guilty over attack at school in Pembrokeshire

A judge has expressed concern over possible copycat attacks on school staff as he sentenced a teenager who stabbed a teacher in the head to four and a half years in youth detention.

Judge Thomas KC said it was the second such attack in south-west Wales in two years and that the authorities might have to consider what security measures were in place to protect teachers.

Claim relating to 1960 attack on hundreds of protesters part of wave of litigation over apartheid crimes in South Africa

The day dawned brightly on 21 March 1960, as residents of the South African township of Sharpeville gathered to protest against pass laws, which forced “Black, Indian and Coloured” South Africans to carry documents at all times specifying where they were allowed to be.

Abraham Mofokeng joined the march, one of dozens organised nationwide by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a breakaway group from the African National Congress (ANC). “The weather was very nice, the sun was out. You could not have suspected that the day would go so horribly,” said Mofokeng, who was then a 20-year-old factory worker.

We round up this year’s winners at awards for achievements that ‘first make people laugh and then make them think’

It’s that time of year again: a select group of scientists have been summoned to a ceremony to receive coveted prizes, be showered in paper planes, and leave with a 10tn dollar bill, albeit in the form of a phased-out note from Zimbabwe. It is, of course, the annual Ig Nobel awards.

Not to be confused with the more prestigious and career-changing Nobel prizes that will be announced in Scandinavia next month, the satirical Ig Nobels are awarded for achievements that “first make people laugh and then make them think”.

• Former official says he ‘tried to stay in the centre circle’

• Referees’ group thought to be puzzled by remarks

The former Premier League referee Mike Dean claims he used to take part in secret challenges while officiating, including trying to stay in the centre circle for as long as possible, as he confessed to “just joking about” during matches. The remarks, made by one of the most well-known officials in the English game, have been met with bemusement by refereeing officials who say there is no evidence of any such behaviour having ever taken place.

Dean was a member of the select group of referees for more than two decades before he retired in 2022 and a brief spell as a video assistant referee followed. In an interview on Jamie Vardy’s podcast this week, Dean shared anecdotes from his time as a top-flight official in the pre-VAR era. “We used to say, ‘We’ll kick off now. Right, see how long we can go without blowing a whistle,’” he said. “I’ve done that a few times in the Premier League, before VAR obviously – [I] went 20, 25 minutes without blowing a whistle.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that traps more than 80 times as much heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and causes 25% of global heating today. We definitely don’t want this gas spewing needlessly into the atmosphere, but in 2023 that’s exactly what environment editor Damian Carrington found was happening when he reported on 1,000 super-emitting methane leaks across the globe. Now Turkmenistan, the worst country for mega-leaks, has begun to plug them. Damian tells Madeleine Finlay why some experts call stopping leaks the climate ‘emergency brake’ and reveals which countries are still failing to act.

Huge rollout of farms could harm ecosystems and threaten food sources of vulnerable communities, say experts

Nearly half of the world’s wild fish catch will be ground into animal feed for farmed fish if plans to expand aquaculture go ahead, a report has found.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is aiming to increase aquaculture – where fish are farmed rather than caught in the wild – production by 75% by 2040.

British Museum, London
The greatest battle ever depicted in art is here at last – and it hurtles along, making your heart pound with its sense of doom and destiny, culminating in fires and corpses on a battlefield full of pathos

It should not work. It should not even exist. Nothing about the Bayeux tapestry makes sense according to any norms of art: its creators couldn’t do proper portraits or pictorial depth or landscapes or any of the sophisticated things we associate with timeless masterpieces. When they depict a church, they have to write what it is: Ecclesia. But these artists – or who knows, perhaps she was a single artist – created something so stupefying and delightful, so abundant in visual thrills, horrors and humour, it beats almost everything else ever painted or carved – let alone embroidered on a strip of linen.

And now here it is, in front of my eyes, close enough to touch if it wasn’t behind a glass screen of such high quality you never catch a reflection. The British Museum’s display of this wonder is perfect. It’s laid out in its case, the length of a gallery, which you reach after some archaeological foreplay involving armour, quotes from chronicles and info screens. Then you see the colours of the tapestry below you from a parapet – russets, greens, yellows – after which you simply start at the beginning and follow the story rightwards. Surrounded by darkness and picked out by finely adjusted lighting, the Bayeux tapestry shines. My only quibble is the ethereal soundtrack – shouldn’t there be drums, oliphants, troubadours?

The activist’s memoir, due to be published this month, now stands as a posthumous testament to her remarkable life

Gloria Steinem was due to speak at a women’s lunch in New York at the end of this month and at more events in October, illustrating the central theme of An Unexpected Life, her new memoir, which, when it’s published a few weeks from now, will stand as posthumous testament to the 92-year-old icon: just keep going. So it is, after her death on Wednesday, that the book’s opening pages unfold with a deep, added poignancy and when Steinem expresses gratitude for a life that has been both happier and longer “than I ever imagined”, one is struck by the greater gratitude we probably owe her.

An Unexpected Life is a follow-up of sorts to My Life on the Road, the activist’s memoir of a decade ago, and as the tributes pour in, the book offers us an opportunity to go back over Steinem’s hardscrabble origins in Toledo, Ohio, and the roots of her activism. This is where it all happened, the formation of a woman who would come to define second wave feminism by combining a tough-as-they-come stance with something that looked a lot like serenity. Reading the first half of the book, one is reminded of Steinem’s original power and the improbability and iconoclasm of her journey, in which a childhood governed by poverty and dysfunction turned into a lifelong mission to resist the narrow templates laid out for her.

The Canadian singer-songwriter answers your questions about her trailblazing career, her spirituality, and collaborations with the likes of Neko Case, Laura Veirs and Pee-wee Herman

I left the Canadian prairies many years ago, but they remain my home. How do you feel about that part of western Canada, where the prairies meet the Rocky mountains, which shaped us both? What does Alberta mean to you now? NicholasLittle
All of my artistic preferences were formed by the minimalism of the prairies, by the affordable space and the stillness. There weren’t many things around, so a field with bales would be this incredibly graphic moment, or a tree or a certain hill – very small increments of beauty placed in vast amounts of space. The sky was very important and a feeling of – I wouldn’t say loneliness, but solace, perhaps. That’s my bottom line, my basic instinct. It’s the frame that that informs all of my art, the way I decorate my house, the way I sing, the way I dress. That sort of minimalist nature is embedded in me.

Many people can sing a song well, but you’re a vocalist who emotes raw vulnerability. Do you work like a method actor – entering, or reliving, the reality of the song during the practice period? verdantearth
I try to sink myself into the lyrics for sure. I try to create visuals, sort of an emotional internal movie of what the lyrics possess, to relive it emotionally. With [Case/Lang/Veirs track] Honey and Smoke, for example, I imagine watching somebody I’m in love with dancing with somebody else and feeling jealousy.

Experts say that the smell comes from a chemical compound called 2-nonenal, and it can show up much earlier than one expects

Last week, my mom complained that she’s starting to smell “like an old person”.

She had grabbed her favorite sweater and draped it over herself at the movie theater. “It smelled like my grandmother,” she said, almost whispering. “I thought someone must have borrowed the jacket. But it was just me.”

Amelia Dimoldenberg’s series helped turn YouTube into a world-beating phenomenon. As it bows out, we remember its best bits – from mocking MC Ghetts to that sizzling tension with Billie Eilish and Andrew Garfield

When Amelia Dimoldenberg posted a video to social media this week, telling an unknown companion “we need to talk”, it felt like a monumental announcement was on the horizon. And so it came to pass. Chicken Shop Date, Dimoldenberg’s YouTube series, is coming to an end.

The press release covering the announcement came packed with superlatives. Chicken Shop Date has generated 34m hours of views over the years, and has reached 97% of all countries on the planet. What it didn’t mention is that Chicken Shop Date helped to legitimise YouTube as a platform that has taken on – and perhaps beaten – television. The very fact that the Guardian is covering the end of a YouTube video series in the first place is, in part, down to Chicken Shop Date.

Venice film festival: Rooney and Kate Mara play the real-life Chaplin sisters who spoke in unsettling unison in this silly, pointless drama

Werner Herzog is such a unique film-maker that even a dud from him has some interest, but sadly a dud is what this is. It is a fiction feature based on a true story which – despite a few laughs – systematically wastes the audience’s time, as well as the talents of its formidable female leads, real-life sisters Rooney and Kate Mara. You can almost feel this pointless, aimless film making it up as it goes along, losing its way, line by line, scene by scene.

It is inspired by the story of twins Freda and Greta Chaplin from York in the UK; they eerily spoke in unison and in the 1980s were the subject of a highly publicised court case for harassing a neighbour. Herzog’s movie transplants their story to Ireland, in which the Maras play weirdly but comically interdependent sisters Jean and Joan Holbrook whose lives are sent in all sorts of loopy directions. Orlando Bloom plays the roguish neighbour who breaks the women’s hearts (Herzog imagines them as a short-lived throuple), and Domhnall Gleeson is a caring social worker who tries to make them less dysfunctional by taking their case after they move away from the scene of their sexual resentment and legal shame. (During the trial they shout out the spoonerism of the title.)

In rural America, guns are a fact of life. But even conservatives agree that properly locking them up is crucial in preventing deaths

I have six guns in my house.

The first was a vintage Winchester 12-gauge. It was the winter of 1990, and my husband and I had just moved from an urban block in north-west Philadelphia to a 100-year-old farmhouse in Appalachian Virginia, where my family goes back seven generations.

Instagrammers have upended the British restaurant scene, and amassed followings in the millions. But has their moment already passed?

In 2017, two aspiring YouTubers going by the name Topjaw published a video posing the London foodie’s most important question: what to eat in Chinatown? They enlisted the help of longtime Instagrammer Kar-Shing Tong (better known by his username @ks_ate_here), who took them on a lovingly curated loop of the neighbourhood. Cantonese siu mei duck at Four Seasons, Chongqing-style handmade noodles at the now defunct Little Wooden Hut, and Barshu on Frith Street, where they decadently cracked a whole crab for the camera. Any of the 100,000-odd viewers who watched it at the time would be well served by its responsible (if unspectacular) recommendations. But in retrospect, the video may be of more interest to historians. In its unassuming and rapidly cut seven minutes, you can almost see the tectonic plates of the food world begin to shift.

Tong is the elder statesman: the @ks_ate_here account began in the social media dark ages, first on Twitter then on an Instagram that was dominated by static photography. He’s in his element in the video, dutifully explaining the history and technique behind the dishes. He is relaxed and affable in front of the camera, but in his own work he doesn’t show his face often – it just wasn’t the style. Topjaw is something different. Nine years ago, it was still embryonic: host Jesse Burgess sweating profusely at any hint of chilli, cameraman Will Warr unable to use chopsticks. But the formula was there. The constant checking in to see if what they’re eating truly is “the best”. Even doubled over from the heat of a spicy fish soup, Burgess’s eyes always find the camera. He holds out food for inspection and addresses the imagined viewer. The audience is out there. “KS has 40,000 Instagram followers! 40,000!” Burgess says, pointing at Tong with aspirational glee.

The PM’s warmth and feelgood policies, such as scrapping VAT on energy bills and a taskforce looking at political donations, offer something rare: hope

Of all the epithets thrown at a new prime minister, “people-pleaser” bounces off Andy Burnham. After all, the polls have him with a favourability rating of +13, making him the only party leader who scores above zero. His manner as he responded to all 125 of his questioners on his first Commons appearance this week had a warmth and empathy that his predecessor lacked. It’s a natural timbre, a good bedside manner for an uneasy country.

Keir Starmer’s rating as he left office was -36. He was defenestrated precisely because of his unpopularity. That baffled his allies, but his ratings crashed early into an electoral death zone from which no leader returns. His revenge comes in giving Labour a potentially awkward byelection confrontation with Zack Polanski: although, just as Burnham defeated the right in Makerfield, any candidate under his leadership stands a good chance of defeating the Greens in Holborn and St Pancras.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Paris converted tens of thousands of on-street parking spaces into docking stations, fundamentally changing its approach to public space

• Agustin Guilisasti is founder and CEO of the London ebike operator Forest

Shared ebikes have become a key part of London’s transport network. From Hounslow to Greenwich, it’s rare to step on to the street without seeing one, and they now facilitate millions of journeys every month. Forest recorded 3m rides this July alone, a new high. Demand keeps rising, and operators are logging ever-higher ride-per-bike ratios, a key measure of how intensively fleets are being used.

This is good news for London, which gains a cleaner, healthier and more sustainable way to get around – one that eases reliance on private car ownership. And, with new research revealing that air-quality improvements driven by the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) have led to better lung health in children, the benefits of reducing polluting journeys are increasingly clear.

Agustin Guilisasti is founder and CEO of the London ebike operator Forest

Tory leader scents Labour weakness on defence spending and declares it’s 2030 or bust

• UK politics live – latest updates

There’s something about Kemi Badenoch making a keynote speech – everything she does comes billed as keynote these days – about defence that makes most normal people a little nervous. Because when Kemi talks about defence, what’s really on her mind is war. Starting one, if possible.

Kemi is never happier than when picking a fight. With herself, if no one else is around. You get the feeling that, left on a desert island she would be dreaming of Apocalypse Now. Flying low over the Mekong delta in a helicopter gunship, the Ride of the Valkyries playing through her earphones while she yelled: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Ben-Gvir did not come into power in a vacuum: he was helped into his position by an international community that has afforded Israel complete impunity

Let me introduce you to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of Israel’s far-right Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party, the minister of national security, and an almost cartoonishly evil man. You’ll have heard his name before: he made international news when he filmed himself taunting bound activists who had been detained trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. But you might not be familiar with many of his recent shocking comments, because they haven’t been widely covered by much of the US media.

Let’s start with an AI-generated video that Ben-Gvir posted on Twitter/X on Sunday and then deleted. It shows portly Palestinian prisoners being loaded on to a conveyor belt and going into a detention camp, then emerging emaciated. The caption is “we promised – we delivered!” which seems to be a reference to the national security minister’s promise to worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners. An ambitious goal, considering conditions are already hellish: Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has likened the prisons where Palestinians are kept to “torture camps”.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist

Like Johnny Depp and Chris Brown before him, Homme has got past his chequered history to retain an adoring fanbase. Almost a decade post-#MeToo, audiences no longer seem to care

As part of the promo for Queens of the Stone Age’s new album Perfecth, the band has set up a novelty complaints hotline for fans to call. “No bitching too big, no whiny too tiny,” it promises. I’ll bite: how about the fact that frontman Josh Homme’s ex-wife Brody Dalle testified in court that he head-butted her so hard that she “saw stars” and said he had fantasised about killing her? Or that he kicked a female photographer in the face? It’s certainly not what anyone’s talking about as part of Homme’s friendly neighbourhood rock star image rehabilitation: duetting on Shania Twain’s new album, taking the couch on Celebrity Gogglebox, teatime BBC 6 Music interviews.

Homme and Dalle clearly had a complicated relationship: he allegedly tried to throw her boyfriend off a balcony; he claims that she was violent towards him; both have taken out restraining orders against one another; Homme has full custody of their kids after Dalle’s boyfriend was found to have forged her signature on an application for a restraining order. Homme has recently talked about coming through a dark period, including successful treatment for cancer, and getting a handle on his vices. Nevertheless, there is clear footage of him brutally kicking the camera of photographer Chelsea Lauren back into her face, which he acknowledged in an apology video, and court testimony from Dalle alleging that a drunk Homme told her “I want to fucking strangle you right now” on one occasion, and head-butted her on another.

The government’s sluggish response has been disastrous for everyone involved – and for Sánchez’s message on immigration

More than a month after an estimated 72,000 people suddenly crossed from Morocco into the Spanish territory of Ceuta, the city remains in chaos and the damage inflicted on the Spanish government is becoming clearer. Most of those who made the crossing have returned to Morocco. The scale of the incident was nevertheless extraordinary, and about 140 people are thought to have died.

Also extraordinary was the response of the 22 EU governments that rounded on the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, rather than demonstrate the solidarity one might expect from allies. Perhaps less surprising was the exploitation of the crisis by rightwing and far-right parties in Spain and beyond, Donald Trump’s attacks and the interventions of Russian state-linked actors and Israeli critics on social media to fuel division.

Every story about Dolly Parton’s generosity should shame the super-rich, who could easily make the world a better place for all

Since the moment the news broke that the great Dolly Parton had died, we have been inundated with all manner of Feelings. The internet is flooded with tributes to Dolly by people from all walks of life, who knew her personally or only from afar. There seems no end to the sharing of stories and thoughts about her, and in what feels like a miracle in this divided world, it has only been positive. Even on social media, where people tear down nice things like it’s their full-time job, I’ve seen nothing but adoration. She is not only beloved for her musical genius, but also for her generosity, her sense of humour, her support for other artists, her active care for marginalised communities, her attitude to living, her truly kind spirit.

I am one of these enthusiasts, of course. I have loved Dolly since I was a kid. I remember going to the Nashville country music museum in my 20s and seeing her handwritten lyrics for Jolene. A shiver went down my spine at the thought of 27-year-old Dolly writing that song, not knowing how far she would go, and the great good she would do for the world.

The Conservative leader’s choice of a new shadow chancellor shows a lack of insight into the reasons why the party was defeated at the last election

To outlast a prime minister always counts as some kind of achievement for an opposition leader, although Kemi Badenoch cannot claim credit for Sir Keir Starmer’s downfall. Sir Keir’s wounds were mostly self-inflicted. To the extent that opposition pressure was involved, it was electoral threats from Reform UK and the Green party that stoked Labour party frustration to a regicidal pitch. The Tory leader’s role was largely as a spectator.

Mrs Badenoch still hopes to use regime change to her advantage. She thinks the economy, and fiscal discipline in particular, will be her most fruitful line of attack. In their first confrontation at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, the Conservative leader called Mr Burnham a “spendthrift” and “people pleaser” who will dodge the tough decisions required to prove Britain’s creditworthiness on international markets. She expects him to yield to Labour MPs’ demands for budget increases, which will then have to be financed with tax rises.

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.

International law, European action and UK public opinion point the same way. Britain should stop helping to sustain Israeli settlements economically

In the Commons this week, the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, appeared to have accepted the principle of a trade ban between the UK and Israeli settlements, which Britain says are illegal under international law. This is long overdue. The test now is whether his promised “comprehensive reset” deserves the name. Stopping settlement-produced goods at the border is not enough. Britain should prohibit its companies from sustaining settlement activity – by financing, constructing, insuring, advertising – in territory whose occupation it regards as unlawful. The ban must have teeth.

The UK can no longer ignore the violence and pressure exerted on Palestinians in the West Bank by Israel’s government, military and settlers. There have been more than 1,400 settler attacks so far this year, according to the UN, against a record 1,800 registered in 2025. An election campaign has only made matters worse. Last month, Israel issued tenders for 1,234 homes in the 3,401-unit E1 development east of Jerusalem. The country’s ministers gave the green light for the controversial settlement – long condemned for effectively bisecting the West Bank – expressly to “erase” the idea of a Palestinian state, the creation of which the UK officially supports.

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.

Prof Lyla Mehta says the glacial floods and loss of life are a stark reminder that climate disruption is global and highly unequal. Plus letters from Lynda McDonald and Jan Bengtsson

The recent glacial collapse and catastrophic floods in Nepal and Tibet are not isolated tragedies (Report, 28 August). They reflect accelerating climate disruption that disproportionately affects the countries and people that are least responsible for global emissions.

As climate change intensifies, glaciers around the world, including in the Himalayas, are melting at unprecedented rates, destabilising ecosystems and causing glacial collapse and ice-and-rock landslides, destroying settlements, villages and livelihoods in minutes. No one died when a Swiss glacier collapsed last year, owing to early-warning systems that were in place. But a lack of early-warning systems means that the disaster in Nepal and Tibet has led to hundreds of deaths and thousands missing.

The advantages of 20mph speed limits are celebrated by Rod King, while John Hopkin says drivers who speed won’t be deterred unless tougher action is taken against them

Thanks to Christian Wolmar for his insightful article on a 20mph limit and how it would be a good thing for Birmingham (Dear culture-war motorists, look to the future. We’ll all be driving at 20mph soon, 28 August). He is right to identify that the world has changed from when the car was king and we planned our city mobility almost exclusively around automobiles.

At 20’s Plenty for Us we have seen our movement developing from being classed as radical in the 2000s, to progressive in the 2010s and the new normal in the 2020s. As 20mph limits have been adopted by progressive authorities, we have seen the significant benefits extend beyond pedestrians and cyclists to those who drive.

Readers respond to the Trump administration’s decision to change Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America’

I think too much is being made of this (Apple Maps renames Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America’ for US users after Trump order, 2 August). It is common for geographical features straddling borders to receive different names in different jurisdictions.

Consider, for example, Lac Léman and the Bodensee, La Manche and Les Îles Malouines. Wales has only recently reclaimed Yr Wyddfa and Bannau Brycheiniog, and for a reminder and dramatisation of how renaming played out in Ireland, look no further than Brian Friel’s Translations. Perhaps we can look forward to Lake Cleveland (previously Erie) and Lake Trump (previously Superior)?
Owen Stewart
Gatley, Greater Manchester

Museums have countless examples of the common fossils from these Lower Jurassic rocks, says the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre’s Phil Davidson

The vast majority of the fossils revealed on this rapidly eroding part of the Jurassic Coast hold very little scientific importance and are not in need of protection or recording (Letters, 28 August). Museums around the world have countless examples of the common fossils from these Lower Jurassic rocks, thanks to the efforts of fossil collectors, who since the pioneering palaeontologist Mary Anning (1799–1847) have saved fossils from the same process that reveals them, the action of the sea.

The majority of these scientifically important fossils are saved from destruction after the winter storms, not during the peak tourist season in the summer. Allowing tourists to collect and take home their discoveries helps them foster a sense of curiosity and encourages an interest in the natural world, which is especially important for future generations.

The latest updates from Flushing Meadows on day five
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It feels rather odd saying this, given that Osaka is a two-time former US Open champion, but she’s something of a wildcard contender this fortnight, having not won a title since 2021. But over the past year she’s been building momentum, after returning from her maternity leave in 2024, and there were plenty of green shoots on the grass at Wimbledon, where she beat Aryna Sabalenka en route to the quarter-finals. And Osaka has started strongly today, leading Siniakova 3-1 and serving at 40-15. Make that game, as the 13th seed’s pace is too much for the Czech to handle.

Swiatek is serving for the first set at 5-3. And on her second set point, at her advantage, she takes it, when Podoroska prods a return wide. After starting with three holds to love, the set got closer, but the eighth seed found a way through and she’s skipping to the back of the court to start the second set. She looks up for this – and most importantly, more confident than she has done for so much of this year.

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3rd over: Ireland 10-1 (Hunter 0, Lewis 5) MacDonald-Gay starts off tight before going too short and too wide: Lewis puts everything into her cut shot, granting her a boundary.

2nd over: Ireland 5-1 (Hunter 0, Lewis 1) Amy Hunter, who hit 62 in the opener, joins her captain.

• Forward follows Gabriel Jesus out of champions

• Martinelli’s contract thought worth £17m a year

Arsenal have confirmed Gabriel Martinelli has joined the Saudi Arabian side Al-Hilal for £60m. It is understood the deal for Brazil forward includes a sell-on clause.

Martinelli, who joined Arsenal from Ituano in 2019, has fallen down the pecking order at the Emirates despite being part of the squad that won the Premier League title last season. His fee surpasses the previous record £40m received by Arsenal when they sold Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain to Liverpool in 2017.

At the end of a busy transfer window which spanned the World Cup, here are some of the subplots of the summer

The World Cup is always a good shop window. Yan Diomande was already a rising star at RB Leipzig but shining for Côte d’Ivoire in the US helped push up his price tag before a £115.7m move to Real Madrid. There were other breakout stars: Switzerland’s Johan Manzambi, whose signature Aston Villa pipped Newcastle to; Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Kerim Alajbegovic, who went to Juventus; and Ghana’s Caleb Yirenkyi, who is now in the Premier League with Coventry. Cape Verde’s cult hero Vozinha now keeps net for the Chilean giants Colo-Colo and Morocco’s attacking dynamo, Ismael Saibari, has rocked up at Bayern. Billy Munday

The founder of The Ringer and Grantland was famous for discovering and developing writers. Now he is promoting a technology eroding the creative industries

Bill Simmons may have stopped writing with any regularity in the mid-2010s – he claims his fingers don’t work – but that won’t stop him from reminding you of his greatest hits. On a recent podcast about Russell Westbrook’s retirement, he couldn’t stop quoting his old columns. He first referenced an article from the 2012 NBA finals, and wasn’t finished until 11 minutes into the podcast. His guest, The Ringer contributor Kirk Goldsberry, deserved an award for patience. But the biggest blight on the episode came later, in the form of a bizarre ad read.

“This episode,” Simmons announced, “is brought to you by ChatGPT, the Bill Simmons Podcast AI sponsor.” (Emphasis mine; his overenthusiastic delivery mandates the italics.) Simmons said that he had asked ChatGPT what Westbrook’s defining game was. “That was a pretty good answer,” he said of ChatGPT’s offerings, as if it were a precocious, loveable nephew, before encouraging his listeners to try the platform.

At the top end, the title race is wide open from the outset, with Manchester City bidding to retain their crown

It has been a summer of change for women’s football in England, with expansion of the Women’s Super League to 14 teams bringing three new sides into the fold, huge transfers hitting the headlines, changes to the League Cup and a new name on the WSL trophy as we prepare for kick-off on Friday.

Players have had a proper break over the summer, with no major international women’s tournament for the first time in six years (Covid delays pushed back the Tokyo Olympics to 2021 and the European Championship to 2022, followed by the 2023 World Cup, 2024 Paris Olympics and Euro 2025). As a result, managers have had a full pre-season with all available players for the first time in more than half a decade, too.

Enzo Fernández and Sandro Tonali had big-money summer moves, but can they hold a candle to past greats?

Perhaps the only thing you really need to know about the modern midfield role is that Enzo Maresca reckons that Marc Guéhi can play it better than Mateo Kovacic. Guéhi, in reality a centre-back, started the season in midfield for Manchester City, ahead of Kovacic, the now-departed Nico González, and Matheus Nunes. In this context City’s purchase of Enzo Fernández for a club record £125m can be seen in one of two ways: either an enormous statement of intent, or a hell of a lot of money to pay for Guéhi’s understudy.

We jest, of course. Fernández is in fact a very different kind of midfielder to Guéhi, largely on the basis that he actually is a midfielder. Versatile, able to receive deep from the goalkeeper or the centre-halves; capable of recycling or progressing the ball in tight spots, driving into final-third positions as a No 8, ghosting into the penalty area and offering an advanced goal threat. Like Elliot Anderson, signed from Nottingham Forest for £116m but so long ago that in transfer window time it no longer counts, Fernández is one of the new breed of Premier League central midfielders who seems to offer everything; albeit in modest qualities, and whose primary attribute appears to be the absence of exposed risk he represents.

• PSG reluctant to let Echegini join Manchester City

• New United coach Olid promises attacking style

Arsenal are expected to finalise the signing of the France defender Élisa De Almeida before the 11pm BST Women’s Super League transfer deadline. The club are understood to have agreed a fee of just over £500,000 with Paris Saint-Germain for the 28-year-old.

PSG, for whom De Almeida has played since 2021, are less willing to let their Nigeria midfielder Jennifer Echegini go. The 25-year-old is understood to be the subject of interest from Manchester City but PSG were fighting hard to keep her on Thursday morning.

• Teenage striker racially abused on social media

• Club working with authorities to find those responsible

Hull City have condemned racist ⁠abuse directed at their new signing Robinio Vaz on ⁠social media ⁠and ​said they were working with authorities to identify ⁠those responsible.

The 19-year-old striker joined the promoted ⁠Premier League side on loan ​from Roma ‌on transfer deadline day. Vaz’s move was announced in a social media post that garnered a high volume of derogatory comments aimed at the Frenchman.

Air bases used by US in UAE and Kuwait hit as Israeli defence chief says Iran’s regime fears collapse due to economic pressures

Iran has continued to demonstrate an ability to target bases in the Gulf used by the US despite six months of war and a new sanctions regime described by the Trump administration as an “economic D-day”.

As Iran’s military targeted US bases in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, despite threats of further strikes by the US president, Israel’s defence chief warned that economic pressures from the sanctions could lead Tehran to escalate to more “extreme measures”.

Green party leader says he will ‘stand up for people struggling to pay their bills’ if he becomes MP for Holborn and St Pancras

Zack Polanski has announced his intention to fight for the Commons seat vacated by Keir Starmer, setting up a high-stakes byelection pitting the mass campaigning of his Greens against a resurgent Labour under Andy Burnham.

Local Greens in Holborn and St Pancras still have to formally select their candidate under a process that will not be completed until next Friday. But it seems inevitable they will endorse Polanski, under whose leadership the party has soared in the polls, with membership more than tripling.

Exclusive: Centre party says it will change law to end plight of those hit by post-Brexit policy if it gains power in upcoming election

• Europe live – latest updates

A leading Swedish opposition party has promised an urgent reprieve for British nationals facing deportation from the country over Brexit administrative issues.

Niels Paarup-Petersen, the migration spokesperson for the Centre party, said it would introduce laws to end the suffering of people such as the 78-year-old British widow Joyce Thomas if, as polls project, it forms a new centre-left coalition after the general election in 10 days’ time. Thomas has been told to leave by next Wednesday after 21 years in Sweden.

Pedro Sánchez continues to defend Rabat after police report claiming border forces helped 70,000 cross border

• Europe live – latest updates

Spain has seen no evidence “whatsoever” that Morocco planned or facilitated a mass border breach into its north African territory of Ceuta, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has told parliament.

The address on Thursday followed the emergence of a police report, commissioned by a judge and widely quoted in the media, claiming Moroccan border forces had actively aided about 70,000 people to cross the border in late July.

Domestic security service says clash with military intelligence directorate ‘definitely shouldn’t have happened’

Several people have been injured in a shootout in central Kyiv between two branches of Ukraine’s security services, in an incident Volodymyr Zelenskyy described as “disgraceful”.

The shootout, which took place on Wednesday morning in a downtown area of the capital, was between officers from the domestic security service, the SBU, and the military intelligence directorate, the HUR.

Although it's scientific consensus that the climate crisis is happening, climate change denialists have found support in the highest office during the second Trump administration and significantly influenced current climate and environment policies. The Guardian's fossil fuel and climate reporter Dharna Noor explains why such rhetorics could be dangerous for our planet

Each year, people from across the world gather in a grove sacred to the Yoruba goddess Osun to be healed, conceive or realise their deepest wishes. But toxic lead, mercury and cyanide is leaching into the river

7Devotees in white clothing line the riverbank, praying as they carry offerings of fruit, kola nut and sacrificial animals in supplication to Osun, the Yoruba goddess of fertility, beauty and healing, whose carved form stands with arms outstretched a few metres away in the Osun River.

It is the final day of Nigeria’s annual Osun Osogbo festival in honour of the African deity, in a tradition that has existed for hundreds of years and draws people from across the diaspora.

Yeye Omifunto Ojo performs a sacrifice at the Osun River

As graduates of an online training course gather from across the continent, the consensus is overwhelming: computers and saving animals go together

On a bitingly cold night in Lapalala Wilderness nature reserve in South Africa’s Limpopo province, Duncan Kanyakera watches as instructor Jacques Viljoen deploys a thermal drone in search of a lone cheetah. Once the drone has disappeared into the inky sky, Kanyakera, from Tsavo in Kenya, and 20 other conservation professionals from across Africa turn their attention to the open-air screen in anticipation.

Many of the students – from 11 African countries as far flung as Benin, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar – witnessing the demonstration have earned their places at Lapalala after performing well on an online training programme for protected area technicians (PAT) run by the Connected Conservation Foundation (CCF). Also on the course, are five members of Peace Parks staff in training.

Exclusive: Home Office concedes skilled workers abused by sponsors can change employer and complete visa term

• UK politics live – latest updates

Care workers, chefs and others in danger of losing their migration status under post-Brexit rules if they leave an exploitative employer will be helped by new visa changes, the Home Office says.

Officials said if an employee was found to be a victim of modern slavery they would be allowed to work for any employer for the remainder of their visa.

Aso and Baran fled Iran, crossed the Channel together and were both returned to France. After risking their lives to reach Britain again, the friends found themselves facing very different fates

At the end of last year, two men fled Iran. Aso and Baran* were strangers at the time. The way their stories would cross, then diverge, reveals the cruel arbitrariness of the UK asylum system in general, and the government’s controversial one in, one out scheme in particular.

Before he left Iran, Aso, 28, had converted from Islam to Christianity, putting his life in imminent danger. “I had to keep my conversion to Christianity a secret,” he says. “I knew if I was caught, I risked being executed by the Iranian regime … one of my relatives, who I trusted, paid smugglers to get me out last November.”

Magistrates in Hereford withdraw case against London mayor over untaxed Nissan Micra that is not his

• UK politics live – latest updates

A car tax conviction against the mayor of London has been withdrawn after it transpired that he was targeted by a “scam” that led to him being fined for failing to tax a car that was not his.

Sadiq Khan was found guilty last month under what has been described as a system of “conveyor-belt justice”, in which magistrates decide on hundreds of cases a day, sometimes spending less than a minute on each.

Wayve robotaxis added to Uber app and will have human in front ready to take over if needed – but only 15 cars licensed

Londoners are now able to hire self-driving taxis for the first time, after rides in Wayve’s autonomous vehicles were added to the Uber app on Thursday.

The chances of landing a robotaxi on request immediately are slim, with only 15 vehicles so far licensed. That contrasts with the more than 100,000 private hire vehicles in the capital – roughly the same number of Uber customers who have registered to take autonomous rides.

Opposition leader says interim government lacking democratic mandate to negotiate on natural resources

The Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has questioned Donald Trump’s oil deal with Venezuela’s interim government, declaring that the country’s natural resources do not belong to “an illegitimate regime”.

In her first public comments since Trump announced what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history” with Venezuela last Friday, Machado walked a diplomatic tightrope between challenging the controversial agreement and trying not to rile the White House.

Futuro Nazionale party’s speedy poll rise poses questions whether PM will return to her roots before election

• Europe live – latest updates

Giorgia Meloni’s government has become the longest-running in Italy since the second world war – a milestone the prime minister is determined not to let pass unnoticed.

In the port area of Bari, the capital of the southern Italian region of Puglia, where Meloni hosted the G7 in 2024 and where she spends her summer holiday, preparations are well under way for a festival-style showcase of her rightwing administration.

After judge allows partial access rights, Catherine Birmingham and Nathan Trevallion say the enforced separation ‘broke each of our hearts’

A couple have told of their heartache, trauma and stress after fighting for two years for their right to parent their children as they choose in the glare of the world’s attention.

The three children of a Melbourne woman, Catherine Birmingham, and her British partner, Nathan Trevallion, were removed from their “dilapidated” off-grid home in Italy last year.

Billionaire financier, who previously walked out of a deposition, instead launches lawsuit against the committee

The billionaire financier Leon Black did not appear on Thursday in front of the House oversight committee for a scheduled deposition about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and has instead launched a lawsuit against the committee arguing that it does not have the authority to compel him to turn over non-disclosure agreements.

Black was a top Epstein client over several years, and the committee is investigating the men’s relationship as well as the existence of any NDAs to which Black is a party.

Swap rates rise to three-year high as increase in oil prices leads to fears of higher inflation

• Business live – latest updates

Homeowners in the UK are braced for a jump in mortgage rates, driven by higher inflation and interest rate increase expectations amid turmoil in the global bond markets.

UK swap rates, which lenders use to price mortgages, have risen to a three-year high, as this week’s global bond market sell-off ripples through the economy.

Firm will complete fewer homes than expected in year to 31 October – between 1,350 and 1,400

The British housebuilder Crest Nicholson has warned of a surprise loss this year as it bemoaned difficult trading in a “subdued” property market.

In an unscheduled trading update, the company said it would complete fewer homes than expected in the year to 31 October – between 1,350 and 1,400, down from its previous estimate of 1,400 to 1,500.

Semi-conductor giant bets that support for open AI models could offset potential slowdown in demand for chips

Nvidia will buy the popular developer platform Hugging Face for nearly $13bn, betting that support for ⁠open AI models could offset a potential slowdown in demand for the semiconductor giant’s chips.

Shares ⁠in Nvidia were ⁠slightly lower ​after the $12.93bn (£9.57bn) deal – which ranks among its biggest ever – was announced for the database of AI models on Thursday.

Department store chain’s Gift List ‘vodcast’ will be hosted by TV presenter Angela Scanlon

• Business live – latest updates

John Lewis is launching an online chatshow and social media studio to help make itself and its products more visible to chatbots and more prominent in AI search results.

The department store chain’s Gift List “vodcast” hosted by the TV presenter Angela Scanlon will air on YouTube with clips disseminated via other social media channels and comes after the success of its sister chain Waitrose’s Dish podcast.

On the 300th anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels, we celebrate the biggest film stars of them all – from a stone colossus to a metal-munching alien and a 50ft woman on the rampage

Not a first-person-shooter BFG, alas, but one of Steven Spielberg’s worst films, reducing Roald Dahl’s story to digital pap. Mo-cap Mark Rylance, whose cutesy ungrammatical babbling should have been left on the printed page, is the 24ft Big Friendly Giant who kidnaps an orphan girl, Sophie. Ugh. Big Creepy Giant, more like.

Elegance Bratton’s civil rights drama in the Jim Crow south confronts you with almost unbearable brutality

Black people officially won the unrestricted right to vote in the US in 1965 but many still encountered hurdles on their path to the ballot box: 11 states in the south quickly introduced a poll tax requiring an annual fee to be allowed to vote. The practice unambiguously targeted poor Black communities in an early form of thinly veiled racist voter suppression. Vernon Dahmer wouldn’t stand for it. In January 1966 the Hattiesburg, Mississippi-based Black activist and NAACP chapter head promised to cover the fee for those struggling to afford it. “It’s a proclamation that we here, that we matter,” he says in an early scene in By Any Means, a considered, if blunt, drama inspired by the real-life aftermath of Dahmer’s murder by the Ku Klux Klan.

It is Mississippi in the mid-60s and Wayne Strider (a sturdy Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is new to the local FBI unit, having recently moved back to his home state from Chicago, and is dealing with bosses who turn a blind eye to racist crimes. “White guys can get away with murder,” says one Black colleague while shaking his head. After his boss receives a message from President Johnson to prioritize the Dahmer murder case, Strider is teamed up with a widely feared mobster, Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg with a rather distracting prosthetic nose), who has been shipped in from Brooklyn as part of an off-book mission to track down the Klansmen and bring justice to the killers.

Finally landing on Mubi, this Spanish mega-hit about six sisters drilled into becoming viral Christian pop stars is wildly ambitious, blackly funny and a true triumph. Oh, and there are UFOs too

At Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona in 2024, nestled alongside the likes of Pulp and Charli xcx was an unusual addition to the bill. Stella Maris arrived on stage as haunting home movies, religious iconography and glittery gifs popped up on the screen behind them. Part-Haim, part-Heaven’s Gate, the six sisters performed their hits: “Christian electronic dance music” that their late mother, apparently, believed would help them to save the world.

The performance was very real, but the band was not. It was a stunt for the Spanish TV mega-hit La Mesías or The Messiah, which was released there in 2023. Its seven episodes centre on an estranged brother and sister, Enric and Irene, who discover that their siblings have become a viral pop band. Cue a soft-focus, flashback-heavy trip into the family’s past, thick with emotional neglect, parental narcissism and religious fanaticism. Oh, and there are UFOs, too.

Venice film festival: Mohsen Gharaei’s powerfully acted domestic drama watches as the failing patriarch attempts to contain family rebellion

Iran is a prison and everybody is inside: cons and non-cons; parents and their children. That’s the message hammered home, never subtly but with terrific force and conviction, throughout the course of Mohsen Gharaei’s hothouse domestic drama, which plays in the Orizzonti section in Venice. It’s about a low-level jailer, crushed by life, who returns from the day job and proceeds to incarcerate his own family. He does so out of love and to reassert his authority, to protect his wife and kids from the world and from their own foolish notions. For him, it’s a bone-headed busman’s holiday. For his family, it’s a nightmarish tragicomic staycation.

Veteran Iranian actor Farhad Aslani is perfectly cast as Rashid Hafizhi, Gharaei’s misguided prison guard. Rashid is a burly bear of a man who nonetheless carries an air of bewilderment and defeat, as though he’s smart enough to know that everyone in the vicinity is just that little bit smarter than him. He’s been falsely accused of aiding and abetting a jailbreak and is facing imminent eviction from his rented family home. Then, just when it seems his day can’t get any worse, Rashid learns that his cherished eldest daughter, Ensi (Laleh Marzban), is planning to run off to seek work as a model in Turkey. Modelling in Iran is a non-starter, she explains. Ensi has to cover her arms and neck for each job, while the power supply is so unstable and the lights have a tendency to cut out in the middle of a photoshoot.

The Hollywood hottie is back as the quarterback in disguise, in an oddball comedy that is naughty, lovable and disarmingly unique

In the first episode of season two of Chad Powers, there is but one concern: the main character’s nose has fallen off.

The TV outlet for the wacky side of movie hottie Glen Powell, Chad Powers presents itself to us having willingly taken on the burden of a ludicrous premise. Powell is Russ Holliday, a former hotshot college-football quarterback who, eight years ago, committed a career-cancelling faux pas during the televised game that was meant to make him a star. With his sporting dreams suddenly vaporised, he became an obnoxious playboy. But then, just as he felt his feet starting to scrape rock bottom, he heard that a university in Georgia was holding open tryouts for a new quarterback. Donning prosthetic whiskers, teeth, hair and an occasionally unreliable nose – a slightly more sophisticated version of a joke-shop disguise – Russ became “Chad Powers”, a southern oddball and the new star of the team, while constantly dealing with the threat of being found out and sent home.

(Polydor)
The 22-year-old is impressively frank about indulging industry sleaze in her pursuit of fame on a debut that puts a distinctive spin on the best of 00s hedonism

There’s something very striking about hearing a pop star in 2026, their voice larded with Auto-Tune, opening a song with the line “I can’t really sing”. We live in an era where fans seem more aware than ever of the nefarious music business machinations that lurk within the star-making process, one where you’re never far away from online outrage decrying some artist or other as an industry plant. Nevertheless, admitting that the ubiquitous audio processing software is sometimes deployed for a helping hand, not a futuristic aesthetic, feels strangely jarring. On one hand, well of course it is. On the other, actually announcing that without it, you might be honking like a despondent goose, in the first line of a song, still amounts to a dramatic breaking of the fourth wall.

That said, it’s very much on brand for Adéla Jergová, who started her career as a contestant on a TV talent show – she failed to make the cut for crumbling “global girl group” Katseye, as documented on Netflix’s Pop Star Academy – before established names alighted on her as a more left-field solo proposition: Grimes co-produced her early single Machine Girl. New artists are well advised to have a USP, something that helps them cut through the mass of peers vying for public attention on streaming services. The 22-year-old Slovakian has chosen to differentiate herself from the serried ranks of post-Brat female pop stars by spiking her songs about hedonism and messy sexual encounters (“no bed frame, we can do it on the carpet … you eat real good for a starving artist”) with a kind of meta commentary on what it is to be a female pop star.

A hernia may mean his screaming days are over, but the Napalm Death alum’s influence on metal echoes on in unexpected places – and with ‘heavy, ugly’ experiments in the pipeline, his passion for ‘outsider music’ remains strong

On 4 October 2024, Justin Broadrick felt a pop. The singer and guitarist of pioneering industrial metal duo Godflesh had felt pain in his groin for several years. After a coughing fit following a show in Sofia, Bulgaria, he knew he had a hernia. “It was a small knob in my groin,” says Broadrick. “I got back home and told my partner, and she was like, ‘Let’s watch how it goes.’” He continued to perform live for another year, wearing up to two hernia belts at a time. By the time he got it surgically treated in February this year, it was 13cm long.

The next month, Broadrick shared a picture of himself in hospital and announced that Godflesh’s near-four-decade career will soon end. His condition had been caused by the physicality of shouting over their music since he was 18; he just turned 57. If he were to do so again, he would risk blowing out his abdominal wall entirely. There will be two more studio albums – starting with this autumn’s reliably crushing Decay, recorded pre-surgery – and possibly some archival releases and remixes. But beyond that? Nothing.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Elgar’s Enigma Variations sounded fresh and striking in the German orchestra’s reading, while Tchaikovsky’s fourth symphony was thrilling and monumental

Is the Berlin Philharmonic the best orchestra in the world? Quite possibly. The only potential disappointment about the first of their two Proms under their chief conductor Kirill Petrenko was that there were just two works. Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4 made an insightful pairing, though, sharing an autobiographical aspect that, in different ways, reveals much about their composers.

The Elgar – bread-and-butter repertoire for UK orchestras but not yet for German ones – was approached with a freshness that made these portraits of the composer’s friends and family seem particularly affectionate. The opening can sound like merely a warm-up for what’s to come; here, though, from the very start the string tone was sumptuous and pregnant with possibility, the phrasing meaningful. This attention to detail continued throughout a performance that gloried in the richness of the orchestra’s sound and the full extent of its range, from the softest of melancholy cello solos to the floor-shaking throb of the Royal Albert Hall organ in the finale. A particularly striking moment came with the stark timpani rolls in the penultimate variation, conjuring the sound of a ship’s engine to honour a friend who was then on a long sea voyage – or, reading deeper, perhaps a lost love who had emigrated years before.

The building of a cemetery during the pandemic inspires the Huddersfield-born author to reflect on childhood memories and the changing local landscape

When Huddersfield council proposed turning some local grazing land into a cemetery during the Covid lockdown, some nearby residents were unhappy. Not poet laureate Simon Armitage, who also lived close to the site. In the introductory essay to his poetry collection, New Cemetery, he notes how the dead would be ideal neighbours for a writer who enjoys quiet. He also “figured that once the departed had taken up residence in the soil, they were unlikely to be evicted to make way for some other form of public amenity or private eyesore”.

From his home, Armitage watched as the cemetery took shape, the pastures giving way to walkways, parking bays and neatly arranged burial plots. The verse is rooted in his ruminations around the cemetery’s creation, which coincided with the death of his father who had taught him how to win a fight and the best way to hold an axe (“You’re holding it all wrong / It’s not a pen”). Each poem is named after a species of moth, among them Common Quaker, Dark Brocade, Pine Beauty and May Highflyer, and written in three-line stanzas.

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I’ve been enjoying Contrapposto by Dave Eggers. The premise that love and art are the only things that make life worthwhile pulses beautifully through this novel and its two protagonists, spanning decades of their obsession with both, and each other. The tragedy is they are not sufficient alone for a relationship to survive to the exclusion of everything else (namely capitalism, which always has a place at the table), but they remain essential and enduring. Nowhere is this better evoked than here. Think John Williams’s Stoner but with art instead of literature and stuffed with more memorable characters.

The literary critic brings his vast reading to bear on life’s most inescapable fact

Terry Eagleton is not a fan of sloppy thinking, especially when it comes to the granite fact of death. He particularly doesn’t like the attitude of Dylan Thomas who famously urged his ailing father to “not go gentle into that good night”. If the “night” – death – is so “good” then why, asks Eagleton reasonably, would Thomas want his dad to dawdle? Shouldn’t DJ Thomas, rather, be encouraged to trot towards his lovely end like an ecstatic marathon runner on the home straight?

Eagleton’s reproach to Thomas’s doublethink should not be read as panicky denial about the reality of his own mortality. To the contrary, Eagleton, who at 83 admits that he wasn’t sure whether this book would end up being published posthumously, finds it hard to think or write about much else. After a 60-year academic career spent tussling with Marxist literary theory, not to mention the epistemological void at the heart of postmodernism criticism, these days Eagleton is more interested in pondering death and how it “lacks a sense of occasion”. It might visit, for example, while you happen to be dressed in a giraffe outfit.

Simukai Chigudu’s filmic memoir details the confines and conflicts of growing up in Zimbabwe during political turmoil.

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Last week, I finally managed to snatch one read out of the jaws of a hectic summer. On a series of very long-haul flights (highly recommended as a way to break reading droughts), I fell into the world of Simukai Chigudu’s Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire. I finished the book just as I was landing in Nairobi, Kenya. In a daze, I stepped on to the tarmac in the chill of equatorial winter.

The book was about growing up in post-colonial Zimbabwe and navigating life between the ex-colonised and the ex-colonial power. But the account of Chigudu’s life also captured, in ways that sometimes left me breathless with the shock of recognition, what felt like a broader shared experience for those of us born to parents whose traumas we never understood. This week, I reflected on how Chigudu’s experience connects to that of a wider post-colonial African generation.

Deep sorrow mingles with illicit desire in this potent novella, the follow-up to a 2006 story about an isolated family in the Catalan mountains

Twenty years ago, Colm Tóibín published a steadily desolating novella set in the high villages of the Catalan Pyrenees. A woman walks out of her house and her life, starts along the mountain road and disappears in the snow. Her son Miquel, failing to find her body, waits through the dark months for the thaw. A Long Winter, which appeared in a standalone volume and then as the final story in the 2006 collection Mothers and Sons, followed Miquel through dramatically extreme circumstances and patient endurance. It was told with the most restrained prose ever likely to be employed for a son’s view of vultures circling a corpse.

Now, in The Bridge, a single year has passed in Miquel’s life and he is eking out an existence with his hurtful, unyielding father. The sheep are grazing their high summer pastures; a side hustle smuggling contraband brings in a little much-needed cash. In the bare conditions of the lonely farm, any warmth of feeling is a kind of contraband smuggled in by night; love between men is doubly illicit. The grave tenderness that grows between Miquel and his father’s maltreated servant Manolo gives The Bridge its emotional centre. These young men salve the emptiness with a few quiet words and touches. We sense their youthful beauty and resilience, their suppleness in a place of fixity.

As FromSoftware’s new multiplayer game The Duskbloods nears release, the legendary game director behind Dark Souls talks connection, pessimism and of course, feet

Since 2009’s Demon’s Souls, Japanese video game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has shown the world a different way to think about game design. His games defy convention with punishing fights, obscure rules, and unknowable, inhospitable worlds. The “Soulslike” genre – named after Demon’s Souls and its sequel Dark Souls – is now ubiquitous, influencing multimillion-sellers from God of War and Star Wars: Jedi to Hollow Knight. Miyazaki’s most recent success, 2022’s Elden Ring, which credited Game of Thrones author George RR Martin as a co-creator, sold over 30m copies and inspired Alex Garland to adapt it for the big screen at A24. It earned Miyazaki a spot on Time magazine’s “most influential” list, an accolade he shares with just one other game developer: Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyazaki is now 51 and has been FromSoftware’s president since 2014, elevated from game designer to CEO after the success of the Souls series. He has a cherubic face that could pass for 35. He rarely speaks publicly, and never on camera. When he does speak, he answers questions like one of his characters – softly, sadly, his head bowed, making eye-contact only when I am speaking. Outside the studio where we speak is the sprawl of Tokyo’s Shinjuku, an ever-changing maze where tourists get lost and pop-up stores appear and vanish without a trace. Today, a J-pop band performs in the square as the cicadas scream from the trees. A gilded statue of Malania, one of Elden Ring’s toughest bosses, looms over this dimly lit conference room inside From’s headquarters, a bonfire checkpoint away from the chaos.

As Rockstar’s blockbuster prepares to dominate the headlines, it’s time for the mainstream media to stop treating video games as a novelty that needs explaining

Predictably, the Grand Theft Auto VI “extended look” which premiered on Netflix last week was a success for all involved. The 30-minute preview scorched to No 1 on the viewing chart and even brought the site down for a few minutes as millions of gamers tried to watch what was, effectively, a very long teaser trailer. According to data collated by Eurogamer, more than 9,000 Twitch streamers covered the show leading to 5,227,798 hours of viewing there alone. And this was just the beginning of what will surely be two months of escalating hype – and unprecedented media attention.

Call me cynical, but I suspect the coverage of GTA VI in the media over the next few weeks will follow a familiar pattern. Mostly, it will be five-minute slots wedged in near the end of news bulletins in which games journalists, industry analysts and other pundits will be asked why the game is such a big deal, how much it cost to make and how much revenue it will generate. Perhaps a few will try to reignite the hoary old “violence in video games” debate, there will be presenters laughingly admitting they’ve not touched a game since Pac-Man, rolling their eyes and wallowing in their ignorance, in a way they never would while discussing any other art form. Somebody will venture the subversive view that “games are no longer just for kids”; somebody else will say “games make more money than films and music put together”. And that will be that, job done for another decade … or until there’s a funny story about Pokémon.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Bit Reactor
Split priorities between scripted and emergent story moments hamper an otherwise brilliant Star Wars-themed successor to XCOM

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the term “emergent storytelling”, you’ve likely experienced some of the unscripted tales that can bubble up out of a game’s systems. Perhaps you’ve led a scheming dynasty in Crusader Kings, or watched a favourite hero succumb to madness in Darkest Dungeon. Maybe you’ve surrendered yourself to the infinite yarn-spinner that is Dwarf Fortress – or read about it from the mid-00s forums where users helped popularise the term “Let’s Play” by chronicling their games in descriptive posts. Or perhaps you’ve played Firaxis’ XCOM, the alien invasion tactics hit that several key members of Zero Company studio Bit Reactor had a hand in.

Zero Company hinges on a concept as simple as it is perfect: take the complementary class abilities, tough dice rolls, and permanent character deaths of XCOM, and house them in a sci-fi setting known for spaghetti western blaster duels, last stands and heroic sacrifices. As creative director Greg Foertsch puts it, “Star Wars is about loss.” Which losses you end up mourning in Zero Company depends on you.

There are juggernauts and indie gems aplenty for when the nights draw in, from an ingenious puzzle game to blockbusters such as Marvel’s Wolverine and Call of Duty
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

After 20 years away, Capcom’s hyper kinetic action adventure returns, pitting skilled samurai Miyamoto Musashi against hordes of warriors and demons in Edo-period Kyoto. Master the complex combat then prepare for flashing blades, disembodied limbs and geysers of spraying blood.
• 4 September; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox

Actor will play 15th-century hero in sweeping production about Welsh rebellion against English crown

There are myriad films, plays and books focusing on heroes of English, Scottish and Irish history but far fewer that tell the stories of the great figures of Wales.

A major new play about the Welsh nobleman Owain Glyndŵr’s early 15th-century rebellion against the English crown will help redress the balance this autumn.

The ex-marketing manager’s win, for his spoof Sycamore Gap-inspired whodunnit Rewilding, arrives just as he’s gearing up for a new season of hit sketch show SNL UK – which he calls ‘the hardest job of my life’

For the last month, Chris Cantrill has been performing his fringe show Rewilding daily in a lunchtime slot. And yet, when we plan to speak about his victory in the Edinburgh comedy awards, the interview is arranged – on the festival’s penultimate day – for lunchtime. Can he really have won the fringe’s major prize, and – hell of a mic drop, this – immediately sacked off his last two shows? “I couldn’t be happier not to be at the festival today,” he says, on video call from his Northumberland home. But the cancellation, it transpires, is long-standing, because work starts immediately post-fringe on the new series of SNL UK, for which he writes.

“But I’m absolutely over the moon not to be doing my show right now,” he admits. “I’ve got a lot of adrenaline in my body slowly seeping out, and I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.” The Edinburgh comedy award (it used to be the Perrier, and was won in the past by Steve Coogan, The League of Gentlemen and Frank Skinner) has been a long time coming for Bradford-born Cantrill. This year’s was his fourth nomination, twice as a solo act, and twice as part of his duo The Delightful Sausage, alongside 2024 winner Amy Gledhill. He is, as I tease him when we speak, a comparatively senior winner, the oldest since Bridget Christie, also 42, 13 years ago. “Finally, a victory for the middle-aged white man!,” he retorts, then bursts into laughter. “Common sense at last!”

Theatre Royal Bath
Antihero actor Garry becomes a magnificent new kind of beast as Gerri, played with blistering hilarity by Tracy-Ann Oberman

The reputation of Noël Coward’s plays has involved escaping restrictions: his recorded clipped, waspish tone in key roles and a perception that, at a time when gay men’s careers and lives were at risk, the dramatist could not be socially and emotionally truthful.

Seven years ago, in an Old Vic revival of Coward’s 1942 off-stage comedy Present Laughter, Andrew Scott – as actor Garry Essendine, a gorgon of priapic self-importance – memorably banished the parodic playing style and probed forbidden subtext. Changing Joanna, one of Garry’s love interests, into Joe made characters bisexual or in sham marriages.

Òran Mór, Glasgow
Comedy chemistry drives a play that asks if three contrasting characters – conspiracy theorist, pregnant mum, hen-do attendee – can find common ground

Trapping three nightmare neighbours in the dodgy lift of their Glasgow high-rise, Ready tae Drap has lots of sparky, slapstick humour – but not so much nuance.

Crotchety conspiracy theorist Pat (Isabelle Joss) is in her 70s and armed with barbed, uninvited observations. Saintly, exhausted Muslim mum of two Aaliyah (Tinashe Warikandwa) is on the verge of giving birth to her third child. Dry-humoured Lauren (performed by playwright Éimi Quinn) is the play’s millennial, fourth-wall-breaking narrator, clad in fishnets and bunny ears for a hen-do. It’s a classic setup: can these contrasting characters find common ground in a tight spot?

McDonagh’s new film, Wild Horse Nine, stars John Malkovich as an agent in 1970s Chile who feels ‘guilt and regret’ over his role in global interventions

The US’s history of intervening in democratic processes around the world deserves more attention in the light of current political developments, playwright and film-maker Martin McDonagh has said, as his Oscar-tipped film about a rueful CIA agent premieres at the Venice film festival.

“I’ve been very interested in the truth of what the CIA has been doing over the last 60 years, and the awful things they’ve done all around the world,” McDonagh said about Wild Horse Nine, his first film since his 2022 tragicomedy The Banshees of Inisherin. “I think maybe something that’s not talked about enough. We know what the KGB are like, but we probably don’t question the CIA’s activity as much as we ought to.”

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia has staged the first Preston retrospective in 20 years, exploring what was gained and flattened in her quest to create a singular Australian aesthetic

Hanging at the entrance of the new Margaret Preston exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria are three of her instantly recognisable still lifes. Each depicts a vase brimming with native flora: bell-shaped gumnuts, silvery eucalyptus leaves and bristly banksias. These are identifiably Australian plants, painted in what might be described as an Australian style, reflecting Preston’s lifelong ambition to define a national aesthetic. Look more closely, though, and this simplistic story begins to unravel.

Her 1928 painting Western Australian Gum Blossom features a blocky background of creamy rectangles that gesture to the modernist and abstract movements that were flourishing in Europe at the time, as well as the flattened forms of Japanese woodblock prints. The black and white geometry of the second work, Native Honeysuckle, echoes cubist paintings by the French artist Fernand Léger. And all three point to Preston’s interest in Indigeneity, a fascination intertwined with her appreciation and appropriation of Aboriginal art.

He is famed for creating a golden loo that was stolen and a $6m banana that was eaten. But, says the sculptor ahead of a major new show in Germany, there’s more to his work than pranks and provocation

Maurizio Cattelan, the art world’s merriest prankster, pauses when asked which object in his sprawling new Berlin show is most likely to be defaced, stolen or eaten, then emits a foghorn of a laugh. “There is no need to vandalise anything,” says the trim, soulful Italian, explaining that he has already taken care of all that, given how the work cuts villains, imposters and straw men down to size. “But,” he says, referring to the show’s more daring works, “maybe we need someone to resuscitate people.”

Cattelan, who speaks in a lilting English, grins broadly, a mischievous glint in his brown eyes. Speaking on the subterranean level of Mies van der Rohe’s weightless Neue Nationalgalerie (NNG) in Berlin, he darts between the impish and the profound in conversation, mirroring the dizzying range of his work. The silver-haired sculptor is best known for duct-taping a banana to a wall in 2019 and calling it Comedian, in a droll commentary on the excesses of the art market. The joke became even funnier when it sold for $6.2m, then hilarious when its buyer took a bite out of his purchase and swallowed it.

Misfits Together, by Bastille’s Dan Smith and To Kill a King’s Ralph Pelleymounter, is set amid the 1950s’ ‘red scare’

It was lampooned as the union of the “hourglass” and the “egghead” – the marriage, in the summer of 1956, between Hollywood superstar Marilyn Monroe and Pulitzer-winning playwright Arthur Miller. Now, a new stage musical is to give a nuanced and intimate portrait of that famous relationship, treat each as trailblazers in their own way and reveal parallels between the volatile state of the US during the 50s “red scare” and now.

The production, which opens next autumn at Leicester’s Curve, is called Misfits Together, a reference to the film Miller wrote for Monroe that was released shortly after their divorce in 1961. It is a foray into musical theatre by two indie musicians, Dan Smith of the band Bastille and Ralph Pelleymounter from To Kill a King, who have recorded the score as a studio album. The first track, Oh America, is out on Thursday.

It’s kind of you to wonder if you should change the way things were left, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But it’s possible his preference is already clear

• Read more Leading questions

My dad died suddenly earlier this year, with no will, and I am unsure as to how I should distribute the estate. We are talking about very modest sums of money – about £5,000 ($US6,750; $AU9,500) in total.

My dad was a very ethical person. While his death was unexpected, he had a sense it was coming. Around six months before he died, he arranged for the disposal of many personal effects. The lack of a will, given his self-discipline and preferences for forward planning, is odd.

Robin keeps used packaging on the kitchen ledge. Benny thinks that’s unhygienic. You decide who’s talking rubbish

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

We’ve had little flies buzzing around – I know they’re coming from the recycling

Missed out on a fan this summer? Chill your space with our pick of the best still in stock, including tower and misting models

• The best portable neck and handheld fans
• Dyson HushJet Mini Cool fan review

Our world is getting hotter. Summer heatwaves are so frequent, they’re stretching the bounds of what we think of as summer. Hot-and-bothered home working and sweaty, sleepless nights are now alarmingly common.

Get a good fan and you can dodge the temptation of air conditioning. Aircon is incredibly effective, but it uses a lot of electricity … and burning fossil fuels is how we got into this mess in the first place. Save money and carbon by opting for a great fan instead.

We boiled litres of water to find the best electric kettles, from hard-water heroes to vintage-style, repairable and wifi-connected models

• The best air fryers, tried and tested for crisp and crunch

Despite the march of progress, the humble kettle remains a kitchen staple. It’s what we turn to in times of strife, when spirits are flagging, or to start our day. When a visitor calls, one of the first things we often do is put the kettle on.

Many small appliances have evolved beyond their original form, but the kettle’s basic principles remain largely unchanged. Water goes in and heats until a thermostat switches it off; the water then pours out, and we enjoy a cuppa. However, the technology that goes into a kettle has been slowly improving: better insulation to keep water hotter for longer and reduce reboils; different temperature settings to suit every drink from green tea to herbal brews; and more features such as filters and concealed elements to keep scale out of our cups.

The seasons might be changing, but the muggy weather remains, and heatwaves are on the rise. Stay comfortable on the move with our tried and tested portable neck and handheld fans

• The best fans for your home, tested
• Shark ChillPill 3-in-1 fan review

So far this year, we’ve seen five heatwaves in the UK. The climate crisis means things are heating up year on year, and while we can hide in air-conditioned shops and offices, our homes can get uncomfortably – sometimes dangerously – hot.

We also have to go outside – or worse, pack ourselves like sweaty sardines on sweltering public transport. On those occasions, a portable fan can make all the difference between manageable discomfort and indulging in an inadvisable quantity of ice-cream. Their recent popularity has led to manufacturers churning out cheap-but-not-especially cheerful products that ultimately end up as clutter in your house – or worse, landfill, where an estimated 4.3m will end up this year alone.

Got that new term feeling? Embrace the September reset with tailored blazers, hints of cashmere and a surprisingly excellent tee

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Nobody has handed me a timetable in decades, but I still love that new-term energy, and this edit leans right into it. A blazer that is properly tailored, rather than assembled from buttons and hope. Closed-toe shoes to ensure a proper soft landing after months of sandals. A T-shirt from a brand I was fully prepared to be sniffy about, until it made me eat my words. And a packing solution, because the only sane way to deal with the end of summer is to plan a holiday, obviously.

There’s also a genius lip colour for lip balm addicts like me, a bag doing a very convincing impression of something 10 times its price, and one long-sold-out cardigan that was worth every month of the wait.

Palatable premix cocktails – well, ones that adults like, at least – are far and few between

For somebody whose children recently learned how to crack open a tinnie, this week’s tasting was a perilous one. Cans covered in seductive, brightly coloured pictures of parasols, palm trees and their favourite fruits filled the kitchen, and both the seven- and the five-year-old tried to take a swig. Premix cocktails are disproportionately marketed to young drinkers – gateway booze, if you will, as the likes of Bacardi Breezer pineapple was for me – and often have a one-note, cloying taste. Absolut’s passionfruit martini and Malibu’s piña colada are cases in point: both have sugary, synthetic fruit flavours that mask, or even eliminate, the taste of the base spirits. Is it any wonder that, in 2024, Britain had the worst rate of child alcohol consumption in the world? These drinks make it easy to forget that you’re even drinking alcohol.

Perhaps more than any other theme, writing about premix cocktails has made me confront the very question of why we drink alcohol. Take me as an example. My Bacardi Breezer years were undoubtedly a question of booze for function; it loosened my teenage inhibitions and I had a laugh. The fact that this so-called “alcopop” was so saccharine chimed with my childish predilection for sweetness, and conveniently masked the flavour of the rum, which may at the time have offended my uninitiated palate. Twenty-five years on, and my palate is a different place, and I welcome the notes and nuances of a well-mixed drink. I now drink alcohol to savour it, and I like what I’m drinking to give me pause; it doesn’t need to be hard work, but I do like it to make me think.

September’s preserving season is a race to capture the heady flavours of summer fruit

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The ideal time to make lemonade, when lemons are juicy and plentiful and cheap, is in the dead of winter, when the last thing you want is a cooling glass of lemonade. Similarly, jam-making is best done on a grey November afternoon, when the windows are steamed up and the kitchen is the warmest place in the house. Winter is exactly when you want to be standing over a great pot of bubbling fruit and boiling sugar, but much less so in summer, which is when all the good fruit is in season. From May until mid-October, our fruit supplier bills spike exponentially as boxes and boxes of seasonal fruit in its absolute prime make their way to our kitchen for a jam session, and the practice of turning them into a sweet spread is part profession, part obsession. Jam is very much our jam.

Early in the season, we can just about cope. The soft fruits start to come in when the weather is still behaving itself, and we love giving them a little seasonal accent – elderflower comes with the last rhubarb, as well as with the first strawberries and apricots, and it pairs wonderfully with all of them (if you are starting there, Felicity Cloake has a very thorough guide to the perfect strawberry jam). Cherries, meanwhile, go with just about anything, while young bay leaves often find themselves heading into the blackcurrant pot. Fennel fronds and peaches are another favourite, and we make some whenever we can get those two at the same moment. It is an amazing combination: sweet, perfumed and just a little bit green.

A fresh, seasonal vegetable soup that can be made in advance and only improves in texture and flavour over time

Now that I am an accomplished sourdough maker, soon to start my own micro-bakery and YouTube channel … Only joking! Now that I can make half-decent, variable loaves of sourdough, I have become more aware of how the temperature in the kitchen affects food. Not that I was completely unaware, of course – I have curdled enough milk and neglected enough eggs – but feeding, then watching the sourdough starter in a jar, and then the dough itself, seeing how the process takes hours in winter, speeds up in spring, then takes on a foaming, bubbling and at times terrifying life of its own in summer, are lessons in living microorganisms and fermentation.

It is a shame, then, that I didn’t give the same attention to the pan of summer minestrone I had felt so pleased with myself for cooking, cutting the courgettes carefully so they looked like Trivial Pursuit scoring wedges, while drinking tea and listening for the bottle bank lorry to drop the glass into its box, and before the sun (or anyone else) was up. Even though the combined taste of minestrone and milky Yorkshire tea is interesting, I knew it had turned out particularly well. I put on the lid, left the pan at the back of the stove and went out.

Book recreates recipes from period following end of Spanish civil war when people faced food shortages

Few dishes are simpler to prepare than Spain’s signature dish of tortilla de patatas, which – aside from disputes about onions – requires nothing more than two basic ingredients and a pinch of salt. But where to begin if you have neither eggs nor potatoes?

That is the question the chef and food writer Berta Álvarez Acal sets out to answer in Recetas de Guerra (Wartime Recipes), a compilation of recipes covering the years of hunger after the end of the Spanish civil war in 1939.

I was forced to examine the idea of sexual pleasure after a tumor was removed from my spinal cord

Ten years ago, my right elbow started to hurt. The internet suggested I had tennis elbow, so I stopped playing tennis. Once the outer elbow pain moved inward, I changed my self-diagnosis to golfer’s elbow. I stopped lifting weights, competitive dragon-boating and bouldering.

For good measure, I consulted an occupational therapist about my nightly bullet-vibrator routine after reading that golfer’s elbow is common among construction workers who operate heavy-duty vibrating machinery. He listened closely and said he’d note VRI on my patient chart. I asked what VRI meant, eager to end my diagnostic journey. “Vibrator-related injury,” he responded. We busted out laughing.

Assisting an ageing loved one can start with small tasks but may lead to full-time caregiving that requires more support

Helping an ageing parent or loved one often begins with easy-to-field requests: Pick up a prescription. Drive them to a doctor’s appointment. Grab groceries.

However, light tasks – just “helping out” here and there – may eventually snowball into the avalanche of full-time caregiving, a phenomenon becoming known as “caregiver creep”. Like “caregiver burnout”, it’s not a formal term, but there is growing awareness about this slow build among healthcare providers and experts.

After a burglary, my parents decided we needed extra security. Jerry was the answer – and this hungry, handsome hound helped us all in countless ways

Jerry came into our lives because a burglar had broken in. My mum had woken in the middle of the night to find an intruder in our kitchen. He scarpered, but the psychological damage was done. Two days later, my dad came home with the cutest little rescue puppy, with traces of beagle and labrador in him. He was two months old, had a black, brown and white coat, and big, bashful eyes. We called him Jerry because we had a cat called Tom. “I’m not sure how he’ll protect us,” I said. “He will,” my dad replied.

Jerry was very laid-back and Zen. He became part of the family straight away. He also became the therapy dog we hadn’t realised we needed. With two teenagers in the house (me and my older brother) and a hyperactive younger brother, someone was always in a strop and needing to let off steam by taking him out for a walk. Each time, Jerry obliged. I’d bore him with my latest teen-romance trauma; he was a very good listener. Sometimes, he’d have five walks a day, with both of my parents taking their turn. He certainly got his steps in.

Camille had bad experiences with men, so when she met Marcus they took things slowly. Now sex is a shared joy

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

Marcus will go down on me for as long as it takes. He has a gentle touch and is an amazing kisser

As more companies turn to AI, they’re hiring freelancers to clean up its mistakes rather than create original work

Lisa, a freelance graphic designer based in Spain, noticed a shift in her work after the release of ChatGPT in 2022. She went from receiving slow one-off jobs creating logos and packaging to an onslaught of requests asking her to fix versions that were generated by artificial intelligence – from sharpening fuzzy images for printing to turning flawed designs into usable files.

By 2025, Lisa, who asked not to be fully named to avoid solicitations, said 90% of her incoming logo and packaging design requests required cleaning up AI-generated content, work that accounted for 60% to 70% of her annual income. But the grind was exhausting. Clients lowballed her;' some AI-generated designs were so flawed that she had to recreate them from scratch and she worried about being complicit in AI-driven copyright infringement. By the end of the year, she began turning those jobs down.

He doesn’t have an account with them, but is being bombarded with demands for money and threats of debt collectors

My autistic son has been bombarded for years by letters to his home from OVO Energy addressed to “The Occupier”, with demands for money and threats of debt collectors. He is supplied by Scottish Gas.

He was required to let an OVO agent into his flat to “prove” he didn’t have an OVO meter. Neither this, nor countless phone calls, has stopped the demands.

While many young people have found jobs and built careers, some have struggled to complete their courses

The crisis in the youth employment market, with almost a million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) across the UK, has placed fresh emphasis on ways of getting employees into the workforce.

The government hopes to increase focus on technical and vocational learning in England from the age of 14. In parallel, there is an ambition to create thousands more apprenticeships.

There’s no excuse for being UV-reckless with these new options

Almost half of UK adults do not apply sunscreen daily. If you think even this woeful figure sounds surprisingly high, I agree with you – some surveys have daily SPF use as low as 8% in the male adult population.

My own feeling, based on hundreds of conversations with the UV-reckless, is that most would probably offer “greasy texture and feel” as their defence. And yet almost a third of the population wear moisturiser.

Studies have found that anti-inflammatory drugs can improve your mood. But what does that mean for conditions such as depression and anxiety?

Inflammation is the immune system’s response to injury or infection. If you cut yourself and the area becomes red and swollen, that’s inflammation: immune cells are rushing to fight germs and repair tissue.

But inflammation can also occur in the body during illnesses, and a low level of inflammation can arise from obesity or ageing. “A marker of that inflammation tends to be elevated cytokines in people’s blood,” says Prof Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London and author of Immune Health: A Myth-Busting Guide. “They’re the molecules immune cells use to communicate with each other.”

More and more young people are engaging in sexual strangulation. But experts say there’s no safe pressure – and we have to start talking to teenagers about it

When touching someone’s throat, it can only take the pressure of a handshake to cause serious injury, unconsciousness or death. These injuries, which include brain damage and stroke, are often internal and invisible, showing up days or even months after the initial incident occurred. Experts say many who participate in sexual choking are not aware of the risks.

Choking or sexual strangulation is common among young people, says Prof Heather Douglas of the Melbourne Law School. In a 2024 survey of 4,702 Australians aged between 18 and 35, she and her research team found that 57% reported ever having experienced sexual strangulation; 51% reported ever having strangled a partner and 43.9% reported participating in both.

The public health emergencies in 2022 and 2024 saw the virus reported in 145 countries, but in the new cases children appear particularly affected

A fresh outbreak of mpox in Guinea Bissau – the country’s first – means the virus formerly known as monkey pox is back in the headlines. So what has changed?

Since 2022, there have been almost 190,000 lab-confirmed cases of mpox reported worldwide in 145 countries. Before then, outbreaks of mpox tended to be relatively small and in a handful of African countries, where the viral infection was known to be endemic.

September is the most fun time of year to shop, but it can also be dangerously seductive. Keep your wits about you with these tips

I used to love back-to-school shopping when my children were little. The miniature highlighter pens, the name labels, those pop-out pencil cases from Smiggle, even the intergenerational wrangling over when the price of a water bottle becomes unreasonable. I love the ceremony of new beginnings. The curtain-raising drama of it all.

Luckily for me, you don’t have to grow out of back-to-school shopping even though your children do, because in fashion September is considered the start of the new year. This is eminently sensible, because this time of year is a much better moment for a restart than January. The actual new year is dark and bleak and makes resolutions and projects feel intimidating rather than exciting. But right now, the evenings are still light, and while I’ve still got a bit of a tan pretty much anything feels possible.

Looking for an alternative to fast fashion, Eve Ogden Schaub decided to create a garment from homegrown flax

From crop tops to shorts and brightly patterned dresses, many of today’s clothes are the result of fast fashion. But one woman is taking a radical approach to challenging this trend by growing her own dress.

Eve Ogden Schaub is in the midst of a project to create a linen garment made from flax she is growing at home, documenting the process in videos shared on her Instagram account.

Due to its ubiquity in fast fashion, gen Z are pushing back against the synthetic material and using it as an insult

In 2015, Kate Moss called an easyJet pilot a “basic bitch” and a catchy new insult meaning obvious and uncool hit the mainstream. Had it happened in 2026, Moss might have used the word “polyester”, reportedly gen Z’s new favorite diss, levied at cheap-looking videos on TikTok, and sometimes at other users’ taste.

But its use as a figurative insult also echoes a literal backlash against polyester, now the most-produced synthetic fibre on the planet.

The ‘dad’ look favours straight lines and muted colours, while ‘dudes’ prefer baggier clothes with adornments

There is a competition going on at the US Open this week and it’s not the one involving rackets and balls. Instead, leading men who are not entered into this year’s draw are serving looks rather than aces.

Tennis legend Roger Federer took to the court on Tuesday in navy blue polo shirt and shorts, navy blue sweatbands and navy blue socks. The cuts were trim and the top was tucked in. The young Spanish player Carlos Alcaraz wore a Nike vest, untucked and the colour of Ribena, maroon shorts, and trainers that looked like a sweetshop counter.

A fragment of temperate rainforest lies on the edge of Dartmoor, and following years of conservation work, its owners have now opened up a sustainable campsite next to this fragile ecosystem

Mist blankets the valley as I wheel my camping gear down the small hill towards a clearing ringed by trees and shrubs. A picnic bench sits at its edge, angled towards the reason why I’m here: one of the last remaining fragments of temperate rainforest in Britain. I’m pitching my tent at Wray Valley Camping, a low-impact site on Dartmoor’s eastern edge between Lustleigh and Moretonhampstead, where I’ll spend five days on one of the site’s “nearly wild” pitches.

Also known as Atlantic woodland, temperate rainforests depend on a rare combination of high humidity, rainfall and consistently mild coastal temperatures where the sea moderates the climate. They once stretched from the western Highlands of Scotland down to Cornwall, covering 20% of the UK, and sheltering rare and delicate lichens and plants. Today more than 95% of our temperate rainforest cover is gone, but Devon’s near-constant dampness and its exposure to the Atlantic make it one of the last strongholds for this rare habitat.

Distilleries are the backbone of Islay’s economy and tourist trade. Thanks to their success, other businesses – from breweries and farms to restaurants and chocolatiers – are now thriving and adding to the island’s appeal

The Paps of Jura disappear into the mist as I pedal along the shores of Loch Indaal, and the rain cloud I’ve been racing finally catches up. I stash my hire bike at Port Charlotte youth hostel, quickly change and make it to Lochindaal Seafood Kitchen just before the downpour.

I’m soon warmed, by the welcome then by a bowl of creamy fish chowder. “We’ve plenty of fresh seafood just in,” is all the temptation I need to order the seafood plate. It’s a bowl for one, but a hungry one, and soon I’m picking and cracking my way through piles of fat langoustines and crab claws, with hot whisky-butter scallops and plenty of bread and butter.

The famous pueblos blancos in southern Spain’s Sierra de Grazalema natural park teem with wildlife amid a limestone wonderland of peaks

‘The wind is in from Africa / Last night I couldn’t sleep.” Joni Mitchell has ear-wormed her way into my head as my wife and I step out from Zahara de la Sierra into the mountains of Sierra de Grazalema natural park. The Africa bit probably comes from yesterday’s visit to Zahara’s castle museum. Here, high above the tiled terracotta mosaic of village rooftops, we learned how the recapture of this picturesque hill town was a turning point in the Reconquista – the military campaign of the 1400s that saw the Catholics retake southern Spain after seven centuries of Moorish control. As for sleep deprivation, I may just have overdone it on last night’s tapas.

Either way, Africa feels present as we tramp through the countryside of Andalucía, if only in the wildlife. The painted lady butterflies drifting over the flower-spangled verges, the turtle doves purring from the olive groves and the booted eagle drifting overhead: all are summer visitors recently blown in from the great continent to our south.

Pierogi are a religion in Poland, but I’d never been a believer. Could a recce in the charming Baltic city convert me?

I used to live in Poland. I worked in a fish-and-chip shop in the western city of Poznań, boning cod and peeling potatoes for £1.50 an hour. With the exception of that job, I enjoyed everything about my time in the country, not least the food. I liked the chicken broth with noodles, the slippery herring, the knuckles of pork the size of basketballs, the cold beetroot soup that beats gazpacho hands down.

One thing I was less delighted by were Polish dumplings – pierogi. It wasn’t that they weren’t nice – they were – it was more that they didn’t seem to warrant the extreme levels of affection and esteem Poles often bestow on the doughy parcels. By being ambivalent about them, I was going against a well-established grain.

Appledore, Devon: By-the-wind sailors have been washed up in great numbers this summer. I stumble on a single one of these bright blue beauties

Amid the hot grit of the estuarine beach, a cool light glints. Not the habitual shade of mussel shells, nor even the shimmer of sea glass, this is a blue so bright that at first I mistake it for a kind of plastic, perhaps the discarded part of a pair of goggles.

I’m about to pick it up when something prompts me to pause, mid-swoop; an inkling that this is not synthetic, but animal.

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

Every now and then the Thursday quiz pauses to ponder humanity’s ongoing obsession with setting records for things that do not need to exist. Last week we had a cat breaking the world record for toe-count and a robot running the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt. One feels a bit unnecessary, the other feels like the plot of a dystopian 1980s sci-fi film. Neither feel like things we used to actually count. Never mind. Here are 15 question on topical news, general knowledge and pop culture to amuse and delight. No anteaters were harmed in the making of this quiz. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 263

For a decade I lived with a fear so bad that I once tried to climb out of a tube carriage while it was in motion. Then a hypnotherapist told me to ask my parents one very important question

In 2000, I had been living in London for just over a decade and working at EMI Records for five years. I had moved to Brixton from Surrey – where space and peace were generally abundant – in the late 80s, and I’d noticed I was becoming increasingly anxious and claustrophobic, particularly on public transport.

As things got progressively worse, I had a string of distressing panic attacks. Every time, it felt like the world around me was closing in. Then, in July 2003, during my daily commute between Brixton and the South Bank, I had a panic attack so intense I tried to climb out of the tube carriage doors. Thankfully, other passengers held me back until we arrived at the next platform – but I knew the problem was no longer something I could ignore.

Inkpen, Berkshire: From lurid yellow to a moorland brown; from the scent of fire smoke to sheep urine. It’s amazing what some rainfall can do

After an entire heat-baked summer without rain, the land looks strange and unlike itself. Fields, banks and grassy margins are the lurid yellow ochre of climate fiction – the mise en scène captured with eerie relevance in the recent BBC TV drama The Rapture.

There are cracks so deep in Weaver’s Field that the farmer can push his arm in up to his elbow. Spots of bird’s-foot trefoil and sky-blue chicory (the latter on uncannily short stems) polka-dot the otherwise dead pasture. Sentinel field oaks seem unaffected, but shallow-rooted beech trees, familiar in giant caterpillar shapes on the downs, shed shrivelled brown leaves and a poor, early beechnut mast. Gnarly field maples are almost leafless, while sycamores bracket the green with their browning leaf-curl. Even in the keepered woods, laurel has wilted.

The race to study the North Water between Canada and Greenland before it changes has led to a bold plan for an Inuit-run protected area

Electric-blue meltwater sprays up under Terry Noah’s snowmobile as he races across sea ice extending out from Canada’s northernmost public community: Grise Fiord in Nunavut, a hamlet of 144 people closer to Murmansk in Russia than the Canadian city of Toronto. The bay’s cliffs loom higher and higher like stone icebergs as he approaches his destination across the bay.

Noah pulls his sled carefully over a seal’s breathing hole, about the circumference of a basketball. Using a custom-made winch, he lowers a submersible instrument into the sea below the ice.

Thousands remain missing and aid is hampered by treacherous conditions in communities almost wiped out of existence

Searching for the body of his wife in the mud, Dil Bahadur Shrestha lamented that he did not even have a shovel left. For now, he has been using his hands to try to find her as he picks through the ruins of his house.

On Wednesday morning last week, Jamuna Shrestha, his wife of 50 years, had been at home in Betrawati on the banks of Nepal’s Trishuli River, feeding her beloved chickens and goats.

Dil Bahadur Shrestha, who is searching for his wife of 50 years, Jamuna.

Exclusive: Tobias Ellwood says he gave MPs inaccurate information in 2018 provided by his department, the MoD

• I inadvertently misled parliament over a British nuclear scandal. Now I’m demanding justice

A former defence minister has admitted misleading parliament over the existence of crucial medical records relating to nuclear bomb test veterans.

Tobias Ellwood has said he unwittingly gave MPs incorrect information in 2018 when he told them he had been unable to locate information on veterans’ blood tests after being given incorrect information by officials at the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of Gloria Steinem – whether you met her, or appreciated her work

Gloria Steinem, the American feminist and journalist whose activism helped push through greater rights for women around the world has died, aged 92.

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of Gloria Steinem – whether you met her, or appreciated her work.

Are you dealing with subsidence or other issues caused by the hot weather?

During a dry spell, such as the successive heatwaves that affected some parts of the UK this year, houses built on clay-rich soil suffer as moisture is sucked away by trees and bushes. This causes the clay to shrink and foundations to drop, causing structural problems.

We would like to speak to homeowners who are dealing with damage to their homes which is likely to have been caused by this year’s extremely hot, dry weather.

We would like to hear from people who live in an area where there are plans for AI datacentres to be built – or who already live near one

The Scottish National Party and the Greens have backed a moratorium on new developments of AI datacentres, as part of a growing backlash against the boom.

There are currently around 450 large data centres across the UK. These warehouses contain computing infrastructure that power cloud services and, increasingly, AI.

We want to hear from young people who have chosen to start their own businesses rather than follow a traditional career path

A growing number of Gen Z are starting their own businesses, with the number of Start Up Loans taken out by young founders rising by 132% over the past five years, according to analysis by the British Business Bank. Meanwhile, Hiscox analysis of Companies House data found nearly 400,000 Gen Z directors are now running UK-registered businesses.

We’d like to hear from people aged between 18 and 29 who have started a business about what inspired you to do it and how you got started. How is your business going? What have been the biggest challenges and rewards? Do you see yourself continuing to run your own business in the future?

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