This evening service from London to Crewe is hot, sweaty and heaving with people, many having to stand or sit in the gangways

The 5.46pm train from London Euston to Crewe is the low point of Nikhil Patel’s week. “I’ve never gotten a seat. I always stand up even when I get here early,” says the 22-year-old, struggling to keep his balance while the gangway underneath sways from side to side.

Painfully for Patel, who is commuting back and forth to the capital for a computer science internship, it’s the first leg of a three-hour journey home to Walsall. He grabs the back of a chair to remain steady but says he’s just thankful that the train has left on time – and that it’s even on the move at all.

Humans are the only animals whose faces redden with embarrassment. Should we see that as an affliction, or as a blessing?

‘Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions,” Charles Darwin once wrote, and he wasn’t wrong. Though certain species of bird pinken up as a means of communication, and uakari monkeys have red faces when in good health, we seem to be the only animal that flushes as a sign of embarrassment.

“It’s a very truthful signal,” says Prof Sophie Scott, the director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. “It’s not fakeable, and there aren’t many things that humans do that fall into that category. You can’t blush on command.”

The UK and Europe have been facing extreme heatwaves – Greenpeace recorded temperatures of up to 53C at one London playground in recent weeks. It’s clear our cities are not equipped to deal with the soaring temperatures brought by the climate crisis. With the ‘Super El Niño’ on its way, next year is forecast to get even hotter. But is anyone really doing anything about it? The Guardian’s deputy opinion editor Kirsty Major goes in search of playgrounds that are adapting to our new reality

Whether you’re nursing a joint, have an existing condition or just don’t feel like running, these exercises help get your cardio in

The runner’s high might be contagious. In 2024, fitness tracking app Strava recorded a 59% increase in users attending social running events and run clubs globally. Applications for London’s marathon have increased 40% since 2024, while New York City’s received about 20% more applicants this year. Overall, an estimated 56 million Americans regularly run on a treadmill and 51 million jog, according to a report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association.

But running has a reputation for being rough on our joints. There is some good news for those chasing the high: one 2023 study found little relationship between recreational running and arthritis of the hip or knee, and another suggests that the impact of running causes cartilage to adapt, fortify and thicken over time.

Britain exported 139,000 tonnes of rubbish to Turkey last year, leaving smallholders and poor districts of Adana to cope with the debris, microplastics and toxic smoke

• UK plastic ‘waste colonialism’ found to be polluting Turkey’s farming heartland

Plastic debris clings to the reeds in a waterway metres from where Ayhan*, a farmer in Adana, southern Turkey, is harvesting aubergines. “We get pollution from all sides here,” he says, referring to the plastic recycling zone upstream, as well as a nearby textile plant that he suspects is making the water acidic. “The plastics are all there, by the bank, and the fumes come this way.”

Between May 2021 and July 2024, 13 British companies sent 545 shipments of household and supermarket plastic waste, totalling 52,000 tonnes, to the Kemal Deniz recycling zone, under a mile from Ayhan’s aubergine fields, according to data analysed for the Guardian by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), an international NGO.

Brian Logan offered advice for young comedians, discussed being spotted at a show, demystified star ratings, and considered whether the fringe is really ‘Edinburgh’

Achhca asks: Hi Brian! Reviews at the fringe seem to have extra weight to them, especially the exact star rating - four stars can go on the poster, three stars may as well be zero. What are your criteria for stars, and is it informed by the knowledge that a 4+ will end up stapled on posters across the city?

And brion asks: Why have you offered so few five star reviews? What is your rubric for a five star score?

Brian: I try to think about star ratings as little as possible. My job, as I see it, is to write something insightful, respectful and hopefully entertaining about a show; and to express all I have to say about that show in words. At a stretch, I recognise the usefulness, to some, of then appending a star rating to that review. But I wish we didn’t have to. It’s reductive and dumb. My own kids ask me after I’ve seen a show ‘what did you give it?’ rather than ‘what did you think of it?’ That makes me sad.

But: let’s not take ourselves too seriously! There was once, reputedly, a critic who never gave three-star reviews because he knew no one would read them. But most shows are three-star shows – i.e. good, enjoyable, competent if unexceptional. I’ll try to err on the side of enthusiasm whenever I can. God knows my own work has received enough two- (and lower) star reviews over the years. I know how depressing that is.

Matter to whom? They matter to me. My experience of art (books, movies, TV, whatever) is so massively enriched and improved by cross-referring it with the experience of reviewers. As soon as I close the last page of a book, I jump online and read what other people have said about it. I love to read what cleverer or better informed or just different minds to my own think about the shows and paintings and songs that I’ve experienced too. I find it weird that anyone might think otherwise.

Whether reviews matter in terms of an artwork’s success or failure (and who gets to define that?!) is less clear. Depends on the show. Depends on the circumstances. At any rate, reviewers are part of an ecology that responds to the art and entertainment that gets put out into the world, and one of the many factors that may influence how those artworks are received, understood and savoured. And the world would be more drab and undistinguished without them. (But then, I would say that…)

Country convenes emergency meeting of ministers from Arab and Islamic world, fearing such a move could ‘trigger a religious conflict’

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

Jordan is convening an emergency meeting of foreign ministers from the Arab and Islamic world over what it says is an “imminent” threat of an Israeli takeover of the most important Muslim site in Jerusalem, with the potential to “trigger a religious conflict”.

The meeting on Wednesday – and the Jordanian warning – follow an escalating pattern of government-backed incursions by Jewish religious extremists on the compound around al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock, in violation of a status quo treaty overseen by Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy, by which only Muslims can pray at the site.

Probation inspector for England and Wales says ‘clunky’ system needs huge increase in staff

• UK politics live – latest updates

The electronic tagging system that will be relied upon to monitor thousands of offenders released early from prison is failing to alert the authorities of potential breaches of conditions, a watchdog has warned.

Martin Jones, HM inspector of probation in England and Wales, said the current system relied upon hard-pressed police and probation officers looking up individual cases and then deciding whether potential breaches need to be investigated further.

All passengers thought to have been taken to Boulogne after major air and sea rescue operation by France and UK

A dinghy carrying 157 people has capsized after its engine caught fire as it attempted to cross the Channel from France.

The people onboard were rescued from the water after a major air and sea operation was launched using UK border security and French vessels along with an RNLI boat.

• Senior Fifa duo pile pressure on under-fire president

• Wenger reveals he knew nothing about investment plan

Gianni Infantino’s authority was dealt a further blow after his No 2, the Fifa secretary general, Mattias Grafström, called the failed World Cup private investment plan a “sad and reproachable series of events”.

In further evidence that senior Fifa personnel continue to distance themselves from Infantino and his botched scheme, Arsène Wenger issued a statement on Tuesday morning saying the project’s withdrawal was “absolutely necessary and beyond question”. The former Arsenal manager is Fifa’s chief of global development and had publicly been silent about the crisis unfolding in world football.

£2.2bn project will allow about 100,000 more flights a year to use Britain’s second busiest airport

• Business live – latest updates

Gatwick airport is to start development of its second runway after campaigners lost a legal challenge to the plans.

The court of appeal on Tuesday dismissed a bid by local campaign groups to challenge an earlier high court ruling that the scheme could proceed.

Exclusive: More than 60 accounts on X have been made unavailable in Saudi Arabia, after similar action on Snapchat and Facebook

Elon Musk’s X has become the latest major US social media company to block the accounts of Saudi Arabian dissidents so they are no longer visible inside the kingdom, following orders from Saudi authorities.

Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that platforms including Snapchat and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram had blocked dissidents’ accounts over allegations by Saudi authorities that they were violating local law.

Poetry sales surpassed £8m in the first 30 weeks of 2026 and are expected to reach a record high this year thanks to blockbuster adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old poem

UK poetry sales are on course to reach a record high this year, buoyed by the success of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey.

Poetry sales surpassed £8m during the first 30 weeks of 2026, an increase of 13.3% on the same period last year, according to data from market researchers NielsenIQ.

Juan Jesús Vivas says influx seen as ‘at least encouraged or permitted’ by Rabat, as Spain demands EU solidarity

• Explainer: why is Ceuta a migration flashpoint?

A growing chorus of voices has accused Morocco of helping to fuel the crisis in Ceuta, with the leader of the Spanish enclave describing last week’s border crossings as an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity that was seen as being “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco”.

Spanish officials ⁠said on Monday that an estimated 69,500 people who had arrived late last week in Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory in north Africa, had returned to Morocco in recent days. About 2,500 people who had made the crossing were believed to still be in Ceuta.

Rhys Ifans, Matthew Rhys, Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Mark Lewis Jones among actors voicing characters from 1977 blockbuster

There are a few links between the Star Wars franchise and Wales, including the secretive building of the Millennium Falcon in an old hangar in the far south-west of the Celtic nation.

But until now, speakers of Welsh – Cymraeg – have not been able to hear the words of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia spoken in their own language.

Gianni Infantino’s reign as Fifa president is in severe peril after the collapse of his plans to sell off parts of the World Cup to private investment. Many Concacaf countries are considering following Europe’s lead by formally removing their support for the Fifa president, and there are widespread calls to remove him from his post. Lucy Hough speaks to columnist Jonathan Liew

Turritopsis dohrnii has the ability to turn back into a baby jellyfish and grow up all over again

• Revealed: the top ten invertebrates of the year

Immortality is generally considered the realm of the gods or science fiction, a fantasy that’s actively pursued by tech entrepreneurs in macabre experiments that include injecting “young blood”, cryopreservation, or resurrection in an AI afterlife.

But one ethereal, thimble-shaped jellyfish has already cracked the code.

It’s Invertebrate of the Year again! From 3-12 August, every day we will be profiling one of the thousands of amazing invertebrates that our readers have nominated, and then, when you have got to hear about all of them, we will open the voting so that you can choose your favourites. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with thoughts and ideas: email us at environment.desk@theguardian.com with Invertebrate in the subject line.

A new feature briefly allowed Google Earth users to overlay AI-generated images on locations of their choosing

• This was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Sign up to receive it here.

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week we’ll be discussing a regrettable decision by Google Earth, the dramatic fall of the “Nostradamus of AI”, and what happens when AI agents go rogue.

Having cut his teeth in the holiday camps of the north, the comic bestrode 80s TV with his unthreatening brand of fun, being knighted by the pope in 2015
• Jimmy Cricket, comedian known for his ‘And there’s more!’ catchphrase, dies aged 80

After the comedian Jimmy Cricket chose the catchphrase, “And there’s more!” he may have reflected that the words would one day have a poignant irony. As has now happened after his death, aged 80.

The stage name was adopted by James Joseph Mulgrew, from Cookstown in Northern Ireland, when he worked as an entertainer at the Butlin’s and Pontins holiday camps from the 1960s at a time when these summer resort venues were an academy for UK entertainers.

Cycling legend on living with a stage 4 diagnosis, fundraising with Miguel Induráin and why Andy Burnham could be key to his ambition of helping others

Sir Chris Hoy arrives a couple of minutes late and the apologies roll from him. I don’t have a chance to tell the six‑time Olympic sprint cycling champion that waiting an hour for a star interviewee is more common. Hoy is already deep into a story about how he and his wife, Sarra, were walking here when an unknown man stopped him on the street in Glasgow.

The stranger had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer and he wanted to share what had happened to him and, I suspect, find new strength by talking to a compassionate public figure. Hoy has lived a full life with stage 4 cancer for nearly three years. He has also worked tirelessly to highlight the fact that prostate cancer affects more men in this country than any other cancer while, at the same time, to offer a tangible sense of hope when there is horror for men, and their families, after a terminal diagnosis.

From the cost of milk and chocolate to diesel and electricity, every part of producing the summer treat has been hit by the climate crisis and other shocks

Name: Iceflation.

Appearance: An ice-cold rip-off, with a Flake on top.

They’re perfect for time-poor cooks, but which deserves your counter space? From combi models to smart designs, here’s what our expert recommends

• The best air fryers

If you’re at a restaurant and hear a ping a couple of minutes before your meal arrives at your table, it’s unlikely to be a good sign. But microwave ovens are a brilliant tool in the home kitchen. They’re fearsomely fast at heating up – or even cooking – food when you’re time-poor and lacking the energy to make something wholesome after a hard day at work. And in hot weather, cooking by microwave isn’t just quick: it also won’t warm your home.

Microwaves work best for heating food with a high water content (they make the water molecules in food vibrate to create heat). However, before testing, I asked around to find out what people use theirs for most, with a view to using this information to shape my tests. I learned a few things – like lots of people eat mug cakes. Who knew? And that wheat bags are a popular alternative to hot-water bottles. But the majority of folk use their microwave for reheating cold cuppas, defrosting frozen batch-cooked meals, warming food, popping microwave popcorn – and, of course, cooking jacket potatoes more quickly. I used these insights to shape my testing.

Soon after my first visit to Ukraine four years ago, I began language lessons. It taught me more than I ever expected

Almost as soon as I returned from my first reporting trip to Ukraine, in October 2022, I decided to start Ukrainian lessons. Not as an act of solidarity, exactly, but as a marker that I was committed to returning. I wanted to know some Ukrainian in order to feel less helpless, to edge towards a better understanding of what I was reporting, and to be more courteous to those whom I encountered. And I hoped, in time, to be able to pull myself through a piece of poetry in the original.

I began meeting Olha, my teacher, by weekly video call later that autumn. She was in Ivano-Frankivsk, her home town in the far west of Ukraine, I was in London. With endless patience and humour, she led me by the hand through the unfamiliar letters of her language, those elegant, sensuous shapes of the Cyrillic alphabet.

Summer is not what it once was. We have been robbed of one of life’s great joys

Far beyond the fires raging across Europe and North America, the smoke, dangerous to breathe, hangs in the air, dimming the view, changing the very color of sunlight into something grimly unsettling.

An estimated 20,000 are said to have died in the extreme heat in Europe earlier this year, and heat is climate change’s quiet killer, compared to the dramatic violence of death by fire or flood. In eastern Washington, 600 homes have just burned down, and in both Europe and North America, firefighters have died in the effort to contain the climate-fueled firestorms.

Many fear losing their independence if they agree to care workers looking after them. Any social care review must take this on board

• Emily Kenway is the author of Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It

Lisa^* has used her local glazier so many times that he gives her a discount. For months, when care workers arrived at her mum’s home, they would find the front door locked and the elderly woman – who has dementia – resolute in her determination to bar their entry. Often, the only solution was to break the glass in the front door. When I met Lisa, who was a participant in a research project I ran, her mother had finally accepted help, but it had taken years of frustration and smashed glass. Unlike Lisa, Lily* never got to acceptance. After two years spent trying to persuade her elderly father to accept social care, she lied. He thinks the people who visit twice a day are nurses, legally required to dispense his dementia medication.

Experiences like these are common among people caring for ageing parents. They present an uncomfortable challenge for those who, like our new prime minister, Andy Burnham, wish to fix our care system. Many people are like Lisa and Lily: they are providing eldercare not because of the lack of social care, but because their ageing relatives will not accept external help, or at least not without a years-long fight.

Emily Kenway is a social policy doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the author of Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It

*All names have been changed

Sure, it’s about jealousy, infidelity and paranoia, but the Killers’ biggest hit is a dancefloor banger: any marriage that starts without it is guaranteed to end in divorce

I’ve been to two weddings where the bride and groom refused to play the Killers’ pop-rock hit Mr Brightside, and both ended in divorce. Well, not yet or anything – but I’m sure it’s coming. How happy can a couple really be if they’re not willing to play the biggest banger to ever bang moments after their hearts have been bound together as one? There are some things that should never be missing from a wedding unless you outright detest your guests. Canapes, yes. Cake, sure. And the opportunity to scream, “Comin’ out of my cage and I’ve been doin’ just fine” next to someone’s Auntie Debs? Undoubtedly.

Why should a song about jealousy, paranoia and infidelity pump through the speakers on your special day? Because everyone knows it. Mr Brightside is the third most sold and streamed song in the UK, and it’s the longest-charting single in this country’s history, even though the Killers are (somehow) American. Unlike much else these days, the track transcends borders. In 2025, YouGov asked more than 1,000 Americans which songs they knew all the words to, and Mr Brightside came in 15th place. The songs above it included The Star-Spangled Banner, Happy Birthday and Jingle Bells.

Amelia Tait is a freelance features writer and the author of Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveller

It was framed as a perfect storm because nativists dearly wanted it to be. Looking on, progressives failed to meet the moment too

The live streams are still running, training their cameras on the beach at Ceuta, where nothing is happening. The self-styled citizen journalists are still pounding the streets, capturing their shaky smartphone footage. Zia Yusuf of Reform UK was out there at the weekend, wearing a crisp white shirt and smart tailored trousers, lest anyone confuse him with the other brown people there. The bad brown people.

Why was the migrant incursion at Ceuta, on the Spanish-Moroccan border, such a big story across the world? How did it manage to pique the interest of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, to feature on NBC’s Nightly News, not – shall we say – a programme massively predisposed to spotlighting news stories from continental Africa? What about it so exercised Europe’s heads of government? What made it an irresistible front-page story in the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph?

Even in the face of appalling repression, girls yearn to fulfil their educational potential. We must set up a global fund to help them

Next weekmarks the fifth anniversary of the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban as US coalition troops were evacuated from the country. That’s five years for the terrorists to have consolidated their grip, so now is a good time to reflect on what the “coalition of the willing” left behind.

Through vindictive edict after edict, these five years have brought an ever-escalating repression of Afghan girls and women – with far too little done by any outside authority to speak up or stand up against the most egregious denial of girls’ rights in the world today.

The vocal vaccine sceptic and wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff turned to the former US science adviser when she was worried about Covid. Now, she’s claiming it was a cunning plan

You should keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and Stephen and Katie Miller as far away from your general vicinity as humanly possible. Many people will not need to be told this. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, is famous for masterminding the first Trump administration’s family separation policy and Muslim ban. His wife, Katie, is similarly enthusiastic about mass deportation and has reportedly said she didn’t feel compassion for families separated at the border. Stephen met Katie when they were both working in government, but she has since left politics to start a podcast. Now she asks guests such as JD Vance important questions such as: is a hotdog a sandwich?

While I may not need to inform you that the Millers are bad news, it seems Dr Anthony Fauci is only just getting the memo. The former top US government science adviser, who helped guide the country’s Covid-19 response, was forced to appear at a US Senate committee hearing last week. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky framed the hearing as an investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Really, however, it was an opportunity for Republicans to harass Fauci, who is widely loathed among the Maga base. He has become such a target of vitriol that Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci before leaving office in case he was prosecuted by the Trump administration.

The animal was no bigger than a pug and, when you scratched it, lay on its side and snorted with joy. Who could ask for more?

I went to a market recently in the Cévennes, in southern France. It was piled high with things that in principle I’m interested in, but wouldn’t want to own – giant Victorian scissors, tomatoes in the shape of a heart, 70s airline trays, carafe after carafe for the distribution of Ricard, art deco atomisers and vintage cycling tops.

It wasn’t purpose-built entertainment for the wide array of family preferences. My brother has an attention span – he can lose an hour talking about a cheese cloche and he doesn’t even speak French – and I do not. My sister likes to amass giant volumes of fonts that may be ancient, but are also available on a computer; my brother-in-law does not. My niece likes to pick up every single thing and put it back down again; my other niece does not. We were reconciled to conducting most of the expedition solo, so I was already on my own when I walked in and met a pig.

An undertaker’s trial has exposed a regulatory blind spot. The public, as well as trade bodies, should be involved in shaping reform

There are few more vulnerable moments in life than the days before and after the loss of a loved one. The rituals of farewell surrounding a funeral matter deeply. Hence the horrified public reaction to the crimes of Robert Bush in Hull. Bush was sentenced last week to 20 years in prison for 67 offences including 30 counts of preventing a lawful and decent burial.

When his business, Legacy Independent Funeral Services, was searched, police found multiple bodies decomposing on racks. Bush had returned the wrong ashes to families, stolen money donated to charities and spent more than £42,000 on holidays over 12 years. In court, relatives revealed the distress caused; David Gorbutt, who scattered a stranger’s ashes in place of his wife’s, described feeling “abused”.

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.

Instead of finger-pointing at Spain, mainstream EU leaders should be showing solidarity with its prime minister, Pedro Sánchez

At least 72 people are believed to have died late last week, most of them drowned or crushed as they joined tens of thousands of others in attempting to swim from Moroccan waters to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. Yet the scale of that human tragedy has barely registered, as Donald Trump has decried an “invasion” while European politicians exploit the crisis to serve their own agendas. If further evidence were needed of the way that the radical right increasingly distorts the terms of the migration debate in the EU, the last few days have furnished it.

More needs to be understood about the drivers behind a shocking episode. Misinformation on social media – orchestrated or otherwise – appears to have played a big part, following a Spanish supreme court ruling that migrants arriving by sea could not be summarily turned back. Moroccan authorities seemingly did little to prevent the chaotic exodus, which echoed previous smaller incidents and focused international attention on a territory whose sovereignty Rabat contests. If there were online indications that such an incursion was a possibility, no alarm was sounded.

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.

Readers respond to Polly Toynbee’s article on the new prime minister’s commitment to a fair system

Polly Toynbee (Battles loom over social care, but this fight must be won. At last, we have a PM who believes that, 29 July) is right that reforming England’s broken social care system will require winning the “attention, hearts and minds” of a public that knows little about it. Yet one of the biggest barriers to reform is that social care itself remains widely misunderstood, and public debate often reinforces narrow assumptions about who uses it.

Social care is too often equated with care homes and dementia services for older people. While these are vital, they are one part of a wider system. Demand has grown fastest among working-age disabled adults who are largely missing from the public and political narrative. As such, the assertion by Polly Toynbee that “the old must pay for the old” is incorrect. Social care is relied on by people of all ages.

John Barstow says oil expansion is a necessity, while David Parker wonders if the prime minister will protect the planet or the fossil fuel industry

North Sea oil expansion is a necessity (Burnham risks first revolt as PM over apparent support for North Sea drilling, 31 July). I state this as an environmentalist – not despite. Oil is a feedstock, not mere fuel. Oil is necessary for the day-to-day maintenance of wind turbines, nuclear plants and rail. Hence oil is part and parcel of supply chains for green tech. A domestic oil base brings such supply chains closer. This also underscores the case for approval of coking coal extraction in Cumbria. Green tech needs high-grade steel and high-grade steel needs coking coal.

There are much better ways of helping the environment, such as more tree planting and stopping plastic waste being dumped into our seas. The carbon sink factor would be helped. A major expansion of the UK’s North Sea oil sector will make a more cohesive UK, complete with more jobs in Scotland and the north of England, including in supply manufacturing chains.

The move is regressive and removes a successful route for international collaboration, including education and research, writes Dr Peter Trewby

The decision to abolish the medical training initiative (MTI) scheme (Medical colleges condemn scrapping of NHS placements for overseas doctors, 31 July) risks reversing years of progress in medical diplomacy and repeating earlier mistakes in the UK’s treatment of international medical graduates (IMGs).

In the early 2000s, in response to perceived workforce shortages, the government actively recruited IMGs and established a new GMC exam centre to process applicants at scale. Thousands came to the UK, but the number of available posts was insufficient. The government responded by ending the permit-free visa, which had allowed IMGs to work in the UK, so doctors could now only apply for posts when no UK graduate had applied, regardless of relative merits. International exchanges built over decades ended abruptly.

Recreational sport | Happy WhatsApps | Woodlice woes | Guessing game | Lost in film

What happened to the joy of recreational sport (‘I spent a week crying. I’ve never had an injury in my life!’ Why do so many fitness fans end up needing surgery?, 3 August)? It’s like modern life – goal and target-oriented. PBs, how many laps, lengths, miles? Have to get the laps in, even if the back is killing me. Why? Is it about bragging rights? As a lifelong sports and exercise enthusiast aged 77 and still loving it, I really don’t understand the motivation for wilfully destroying your body in the name of sport.
Barbara Smyth
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

• My experience of WhatsApp blue ticks differs (Letters, 29 July). During the Covid pandemic, every day I rejoiced in seeing the blue tick on a message from a family member who lived alone and had Covid: they were still alive.
Ann Newell
Thame, Oxfordshire

Our resident cartoon imagines some of the crisis talks at Fifa as its president scrambles for support after a botched World Cup plan

Individual time trial – updates from 13.34 BST/14.34 CET
Tour cyclists face checks after padded bra claims
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Over half the field has taken to the course, with 70 riders having started, and 41 of those arrived, with Tas still leading the pack. It may take something to beat her.

Sandrine Tas of Lotto Intermarché has set a new benchmark in Dijon: 28’49'’39, just 0.96 second faster than Le Mouël. The Belgian is the one to beat.

• Captain also voices concern over Root’s return as captain

• Stokes expresses surprise Brook was not made Test captain

Ben Stokes has trained his sights on becoming England head coach in the future and expressed concerns about Joe Root’s impending second stint as Test captain.

In his first interview since retiring from England duty in June – a two-hour chat with his former teammates Stuart Broad and Jos Buttler on the For The Love Of Cricket Podcast –Stokes again ruled out returning for next summer’s Ashes.

• Organisation has lost second chair in three years

• UK Sport commits record £33m funding for winter sports

UK Sport has withdrawn all funding from GB Snowsport for the next Olympic cycle, after commissioning an independent review into the organisation’s governance.

The news comes just six months after Team GB recorded their most successful Winter Olympics at Milano-Cortina and at the same time as record levels of funding were confirmed for British winter sport and parasport athletes before the Alpes 2030 Games.

• Le Tissier and Toone praise energy and passion of coach

• ‘We’ve always had that togetherness and that fight’

The Manchester United captain, Maya Le Tissier, said her team will “stick together” and be ready for the new Women’s Super League season, despite their head coach Marc Skinner departing.

Le Tissier and the rest of the playing squad were informed by Skinner that he would be leaving, in a meeting on Monday morning shortly before the news was announced, and on Tuesday Le Tissier and her England teammate Ella Toone paid tribute to Skinner for his contribution to the club over five years in charge, which included winning the 2024 Women’s FA Cup.

Will Rhodes played the role of Durham superhero, Rishi Patel hit another century and Joe Denly said farewell

By the 99.94 Cricket Blog

This article is from The 99.94 Cricket Blog

• Fears that action could smooth airflow around the body

• Warning came before time-trial stage to Dijon

Riders at the Tour de France Femmes were subject to extra clothing checks before Tuesday’s stage following claims some could be using extra padding in their bras to seek an aerodynamic advantage.

A communique from race organisers confirmed the checks after Dutch outlet Wielerflits reported some teams had raised concerns that padded bras could smooth the airflow around the body for the stage four time trial.

Levy could raise £19bn to help pay for Andy Burnham’s support for those struggling with bills, say campaigners

• Business live – latest updates

Campaigners have renewed calls for a windfall tax on UK banks that could raise £19bn towards Andy Burnham’s cost of living agenda, after HSBC raked in $10.1bn (£7.5bn) worth of profits in the second quarter of the year.

Bosses at HSBC reported on Tuesday that profits rose 60% year on year in the three months to the end of June, helped by fees from wealth management and insurance business, as well as higher interest rates, which allow the bank to charge more for loans and mortgages.

Winner called waste management team after she realised stub showing she had hit the jackpot had been thrown away

A €1m lottery ticket has been recovered from the rubbish in Italy after the frantic winner called on refuse collectors to help her retrieve it, according to the waste management company.

The instant win ticket was “miraculously still in one piece” after garbage workers combed through mounds of rubbish on their truck, said Roberto Nicola Toscano, the administrator of the SANB company in Italy’s southern Puglia region.

Journalist’s son says his mother was examining leak from Electrogas, part owned by Yorgen Fenech who is on trial

Daphne Caruana Galizia was investigating suspected corruption by the businessman Yorgen Fenech and members of Malta’s government when she was killed, a jury has heard.

The heir to one of Malta’s biggest fortunes, Fenech is on trial for murder, accused of commissioning and paying for Caruana Galizia’s killing in a car bombing in October 2017.

Beginning his career as an actor, Gill went on to write plays including The York Realist as well as directing for the Royal Court and National Theatre

Tributes have been paid to the director and playwright Peter Gill who died on Monday at the age of 86. His agent Mel Kenyon said Gill’s work had a “rare emotional delicacy” and was “beautifully observed and finely tuned” while the director Michael Grandage said Gill’s “contribution to the British theatre will come to be regarded as quietly seismic”.

Gill began his career as an actor at London’s Royal Court in 1958 when still in his teens. Over the next six years, he played Silvius opposite Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind in Michael Elliott’s lauded RSC production of As You Like It, as well as several roles in the British premiere of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Exclusive: Environment Agency is considering whether to prosecute Huntsman Polyurethanes over emissions of carcinogenic benzene

A plastic manufacturer in the north of England is facing potential legal action over emissions of benzene, a carcinogenic chemical with no safe level, the Guardian can reveal.

The Environment Agency (EA) is considering taking legal action against Huntsman Polyurethanes in Teesside for a potential breach of licence, which is a criminal offence.

Farmers warn impact of high temperatures, drought and wildfires on range of foodstuffs means costs will increase

Farmers across Europe are warning of a slump in food production and rising prices as crops from maize to salads suffer as a result of extreme heat, drought and wildfires.

Olive groves have also been hit as the climate crisis drives temperatures across the continent to fresh record highs, meaning the cost of olive oil – already at elevated levels – is expected to start rising again.

NatureScot refuses licence for hunt on Hebridean island of Sula Sgeir in which up to 2,000 seabirds are killed

A controversial Scottish seabird hunt has had its licence refused for the first time in 400 years, in what campaigners have called a “victory for common sense”.

In the annual guga hunt, up to 2,000 gannet chicks are killed over a 10-day period on the uninhabited Hebridean island of Sula Sgeir, 40 miles north of Lewis and Harris.

Most of the zoo’s 16 lions have struggled to cope with high humidity this summer

Three lions from a Tokyo zoo have died from suspected heatstroke and others are undergoing treatment, a spokesperson said on Tuesday, as the big cats struggle in Japan’s high levels of humidity.

Japan sweltered through its hottest summer on record last year and parts of the country have hit 40C in recent weeks, qualifying for the new “cruelly hot day” designation.

Campaigners decry Angela Rayner’s backing for Brick Lane project that has only 11 affordable homes

A £500m redevelopment of the Truman Brewery estate in Brick Lane, east London, has been approved, clearing the way for the construction of a datacentre, offices and apartments despite opposition from Tower Hamlets council and local campaign groups.

The housing secretary, Angela Rayner, made the decision in a letter issued on her behalf last week by the housing minister Matthew Pennycook, rejecting demands from the council and campaigners for the site to be used for hundreds of homes instead.

Police are focusing on Elisabeth-Jane Ross’s final hours in hope of discovering motive for her killing

Greek authorities are investigating what may have motivated a 26-year-old Afghan man to kill a Scottish charity worker found dead in a suitcase in an abandoned building in Athens last month.

Inquiries have focused increasingly on Elisabeth-Jane Ross’s last few hours alive and police believe they hold the key to revealing why the 38-year-old was targeted.

Lender was told money was being taken without authorisation, with cash used to buy credits for Claude chatbot

A Metro Bank customer has told of his fight to get more than £14,000 back after its systems failed to stop a fraud involving the AI chatbot Claude.

Zoli Rutter, a businessman from Sussex, had a total of £14,244 taken from his bank account. The scam involved fraudsters buying credits to use Claude.

Findings prompt calls for review of National Institute for Health and Care Excellence criteria in women under 50

Young women in England who later develop breast cancer are not being referred for early tests or preventive treatment because current guidelines used by GPs miss 95% of patients, research suggests.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) criteria used to decide who should be referred by family doctors for further breast cancer risk assessment and specialist care is failing to spot the vast majority of women under 50 who will go on to develop the disease in the next 10 years, according to the University of Cambridge and the Institute of Cancer Research, London (ICR).

Blanche, one of Trump’s most trusted legal aides, confirmed in writing that $1.8bn slush fund for president’s allies was dead

The US Senate judiciary committee voted along party lines to advance Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general after he confirmed in writing that a planned $1.8bn slush fund for Donald Trump’s allies was dead. Experts say, however, that Trump could easily reverse the deal.

His nomination will now proceed to the full Senate, where it will likely face intense skepticism from Democrats.

Singer and actor, whose world tour ends next month, told audience in Chicago that she had been quietly planning the move for a long time

Ariana Grande has expanded upon her recent decision to take “a step back from visibility” when her tour ends next month, as a result of what a spokesperson called “endless, ongoing public scrutiny”.

On Monday night during the first show of a three-night run in Chicago, the 33-year-old musician and actor read from notes as she told fans: “The announcement that was made yesterday was not a reactive or impulsive thing. It is something that I had decided to plan quietly, a long time ago.”

Luis Carlos Rúa revealed himself to be Elefante blanco just three days before election for ‘his own safety’. Now he is tackling graft from senate floor

When 102 senators were sworn in for Colombia’s latest parliamentary session, they included 32 women, 69 men – and one cartoon elephant.

He had some difficulty making his way down the narrow central aisle of Congress’s ceremonial chamber, weaving past fellow senators in sharply tailored suits and dresses, before taking the oath in his pot-bellied white plush costume.

Special rapporteurs say ‘transnational repression by Indian authorities’ has put Moninder Singh in danger

UN rights experts have urged Canada to take all feasible measures to protect the Sikh activist Moninder Singh, who has been repeatedly warned by the Canadian authorities of credible threats to his life.

In a letter to the Canadian government, the five UN experts raised “concerning allegations of foreign intimidation and reprisals” against Singh, a Canadian national.

Numbers using finance rises 170% in a year as leasing firms boom alongside leapin secondhand vehicle supply and surging fuel prices

The number of people leasing used electric cars in the UK has more than doubled in the last year as drivers look for cheaper ways to avoid soaring petrol prices during Donald Trump’s war on Iran.

Used electric car leasing has risen by 170% in the last year across members of the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA), a lobby group whose members buy about half the UK’s new vehicles to lease them out to businesses and consumers every year.

Factories in upbeat mood despite fears over economic impact of US war on Iran, poll finds

• Business live – latest updates

UK manufacturers ramped up production last month for the fourth consecutive month and at the fastest pace in almost two years, according to a leading survey of the industry.

The S&P Global poll of manufacturers found them in upbeat mood in July, though anxious about the prospect of a long war in the Middle East that would block supplies of oil and gas, and raise the cost of production.

Investors scramble to make sense of a shock Chinese challenge to the dominance of western chipmakers

Even for the rollercoaster world of AI, last week was particularly volatile as investors scrambled to keep up with developments that threatened the dominance of the largest western chipmakers.

It began with a double whammy. On Monday, the Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT floated on the Shanghai stock market, soaring by 466% in value to 3.3tn yuan (£365bn).

Proposed $400bn tie-up with Bristol Myers Squibb would create world’s fourth-largest drugmaker but analysts question rationale

More than £17bn was wiped off the value of Britain’s biggest drugmaker, AstraZeneca, on Monday after a report that it was in discussions to take over its US rival Bristol Myers Squibb in a deal that would create a near $400bn (£300bn) pharmaceutical group.

AstraZeneca, run by Pascal Soriot, its longtime chief executive, had been worth nearly £196bn before the news broke. BMS, headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, and known for its cancer treatments, was worth $133bn (£98bn).

In my standup, I’m not trivializing the death penalty. I’m getting people to stay engaged when the subject is uncomfortable

The first time I came out as gay to a client on death row, he said: “Josh, I don’t care what you do with your ass, as long as you’re helping mine.” That joke did something legal arguments and moral philosophy rarely could: it made him impossible to keep at a distance.

I spent seven years working as a lawyer for men on both Alabama and federal death rows. I stumbled my way into it. I was only 24, fresh out of law school and working at a big corporate law firm in Manhattan. A friend from law school asked if I wanted to join two pro bono death-penalty cases. I had no relevant experience and knew nothing about capital punishment.

Full of panache and originality, Weber’s grand opera is the work of a composer at the height of his powers – but its plot is a load of nonsense. The conductor of its Proms premiere celebrates its brilliance

Carl Maria von Weber was a great opera composer with a minimal ability to find the right libretto writers. He never made a good choice in any of the three pieces for which he’s still known.

Oberon was his final work. He wrote it in London 200 years ago for Covent Garden theatre and died of tuberculosis shortly after its premiere in 1826, aged only 39. He was buried in the cemetery just north of the Barbican, although his grave today is in Dresden. Some 18 years after his death, Wagner – who adored, and was inspired by, the older composer (there could not have been Lohengrin without Weber’s earlier opera Euryanthe) – raised the money to repatriate his body. A large crowd met the coach at the gates of Dresden and processed through the rain to the city’s old Catholic cemetery where a second funeral was held and Wagner’s specially composed fantasia for wind band based on themes from Euryanthe was performed.

The Shards brings the cocaine-addled teens of a 1980s prep school to life with a cast of newcomers and a heavy dose of sleaze

One of the first things Ryan Murphy’s TV adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards will make you ask is: where the hell are these kids’ parents? The answer is simple. This is Los Angeles in 1981, and these fabulously benumbed kids aren’t being helicopter-parented. They’re going to parties, drinking whiskey, listening to Ultravox’s Vienna on repeat and doing copious amounts of cocaine. It’s a complete vision of Ellis’s dully hedonistic America.

The FX series follows a character named Bret Ellis – a thinly-coded version of the author – in senior year at an exclusive Los Angeles prep school whose controlled, Joan Didion-coded world begins to unravel with the arrival of enigmatic transfer student Robert Mallory. At the same time, in the post-Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer era, a serial killer known as The Trawler draws ever closer to Ellis and his increasingly paranoid circle of friends. Ellis (the real one) first released his autofictional story The Shards as a serialized podcast between 2020 and 2021 before expanding it into a novel in 2023.

Tom Holland’s fourth outing as Peter Parker broke box office records but how did the web-slinger avoid growing superhero fatigue?

A year ago, the superhero-industrial complex looked like it was on the wane. All three of Marvel’s big movies for 2025 underperformed to some degree or another, outgrossed by DC’s newest reboot of Superman – which itself made less than any number of previous-regime DC movies, and was followed up by this summer’s Supergirl, a costly bomb. It looked as if the age of heroes might be coming to an end, and only seemed fitting that the next big Avengers movie was subtitled Doomsday (and had resigned itself to sharing a release date with the Imax-grabbing release of a third Dune movie).

But look out, as the song goes: here comes Spider-Man.

Anna Cazenave Cambet’s adaptation of Constance Debré’s novel is a superbly acted and affecting – if restrained – portrait of child access and interpersonal strife

Vicky Krieps gives an intelligent, finely calibrated and sensitive performance in this marital-breakdown drama from writer-director Anna Cazenave Cambet. Cambet has adapted the autobiographical novel of the same title by Constance Debré, about her bitter experience of being denied contact with her young son after her marriage breakup – at the same time quitting her job in law and then coming out as gay, and also becoming a writer (these things apparently held against her in France’s patriarchal family courts).

Krieps mimics the author’s elegant, close-cropped hairstyle in the film’s final act, and is never anything other than excellent. But I wondered sometimes if, in the course of this slightly prolix movie, the reserve and control required from her by the material were quite doing full justice to the extraordinary 18-month ordeal of not being able to see your own child.

Scott (son of Clint) is a wounded soldier behind enemy lines in this competent thriller with tense set pieces and clunky passages

If you’re looking for something to watch with a man whose eyes brim with any mention of the second world war, this will do fine. Although essentially a manly feature about men doing man stuff in battle, with just the one lady in it (an indelible Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) for a mere slip of a framing device, it’s not unequivocally macho and actually dips its toes into the murkier waters of wartime morality. As a simple exercise in suspense, it’s certainly effective, but there are clunky passages that prevent it from being top-tier entertainment.

Scott Eastwood stars as Capt John Castle, an officer in the US army who gets stranded behind enemy lines in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. His whole squadron is killed in a skirmish with the Germans; he is left injured, equipped only with a trusty portable radio he nicknames Lassie, a faithful companion that will guide him home. Like Castle himself, the film limps a little between its big set pieces, but when they arrive they’re very well staged. One tense moment involves a kind Walloon family who hide Castle under their floorboards and then suffer dearly for their kindness. In another nail-biting bit, Castle plays possum on the ground among some slain soldiers, only to realise that the corpse beside him is not only not dead but about to give him away. The very best sequence comes near the end when Castle meets a lone American in the forest who Castle starts to suspect is not quite right given his sympathetic words about Hitler and scant knowledge of baseball.

They’re expensive, elaborate – and may not contain all the music. After Olivia Rodrigo, Charli xcx and more sent out incomplete or unfinished vinyl versions, fans are feeling shortchanged

It was one of the most anticipated collaborations of the year: Charli xcx teaming up with film-maker David Cronenberg for No One Lasts Forever, the closing track on her new album Music, Fashion, Film, which debuted at No 1 in the UK.

But for fans who pre-ordered what was advertised as the “full-length” album on vinyl, an unwelcome surprise awaits. The song doesn’t contain the spoken-word contribution from Cronenberg – an astonishing reflection on art, death and eternity – that is included on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

Royal Albert Hall, London
The intricate concerto was paired with the world premiere of Dani Howard’s likable Concerto for Brass and a lush Scriabin symphony, all admirably led by Paavo Järvi

London will be seeing a lot more of Paavo Järvi when the Estonian conductor takes the reins at the London Philharmonic in 2028. Here, on the podium with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he proved a model of calm, control and clarity as well as the most sensitive of accompanists, shepherding a breathtaking account of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto by Leonidas Kavakos.

The Russian composer struggled for three years to find a soloist brave enough to take on the work’s premiere, yet Kavakos was clearly undaunted. The Greek violinist’s exceptional dexterity and pinpoint intonation at the very top of the range made light of fiendish passagework that has foxed some of the finest. The first movement’s intricate variations were exquisitely decorated, while the intensity of his playing drew spontaneous applause mid-cadenza. Järvi, for his part, was alert to the soloist’s generous rubato, keeping the orchestra in soft-shoed lockstep. As the simple eloquence of the canzonetta gave way to a helter-skelter finale, Kavakos let fly, his bow skimming the strings with unerring accuracy. A Bach encore was dispatched with similar poise and precision.

Fern Brady and Alison Spittle return for natter with no rules. Plus, the viral red phone is back on the bridge

Comedians Fern Brady and Alison Spittle return for a second series of comically chaotic chat. Expect plenty of wildly pinballing discussions with no theme other than what pops into their heads. Topics so far include Robert De Niro’s much younger partner, podcasts about nuns playing ultimate frisbee – and Brady on how “so many of Bonnie Blue’s views are so close to mine”. Business as usual, then. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

The singer and actor is partial to Mozart and once did Édith Piaf at karaoke, but to which musical showstopper does she owe everything?

The first song I fell in love with
I used to sing All I Have to Do Is Dream by the Everly Brothers with my schoolfriend who lived over the road, when I was 11 or 12. I sang the harmony and she sang the melody.

The song I do at karaoke
The only time was on holiday in Nice with a friend. We’d been out for a lovely supper and had far too much rosé, and I was about to play Édith Piaf in the West End. I ended up singing Hymne à l’amour, and he did Fools Rush In.

Written by a US army veteran, this novel of courage and cruelty during the first world war is filled with unsettlingly authoritative depictions of violence – but its characters are less believable

Kevin Powers’s fourth novel marks a return to the themes and subject matter of his acclaimed debut The Yellow Birds, winner of the 2012 Guardian first book award. Through the lives of its central characters, it explores the courage, folly, cruelty and absurdity involved in war, and the challenges of adjusting to civilian life afterwards. But while The Yellow Birds focused on the experience of US soldiers fighting in Iraq, where Powers himself served between 2003 and 2004, Children of the Wild is set amid the carnage of the first world war.

It follows the fortunes of two young men from a remote valley in Virginia. Roy is the arrogant young heir to a wealthy local landowner; Ennis is an orphan of unknown origin who has been living, like a character in a fairytale, in a shack on the top of a mountain. Ennis and Roy are first linked in a love triangle when Ennis is lured off his mountain top by his desire for Samantha, the daughter of the local minister, whose eyes have the “lustre of smoky quartz”. Roy has expected to marry Samantha, but she chooses feral Ennis. Roy accepts the setback remarkably swiftly, transferring his affections to Esther, the wealthy and shallow sister of his college roommate, Fintan. Roy and Ennis settle their differences with a mighty punch-up that cements an unlikely friendship between them.

From an ashram in India to an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru, a travel writer searches for meaning after the death of his wife

In this moving, sometimes grandiloquent grief-memoir-cum-travelogue, Rory MacLean pairs an affinity for new-age thinking with a habit of loftily holding forth (“none of us are created for naught”, “love can but lead to truth”) and a proclivity for arresting one-liners (“I watched gods walk on fire”). In his search for meaning in the five years after his wife’s untimely death from cancer, he shows himself to be both refreshingly broad-minded and unnecessarily crotchety, like a more cantankerous Michael Palin.

MacLean’s work as a travel writer has taken him across the world, whether flying a handbuilt plane over Crete or riding shotgun with a drug warlord in Burma. This is his first book since losing Katrin, for 32 years the “fixed point” in his life, whose final weeks and moments he describes tenderly. Unable to process her death, he turns to travel to seek out “thin places”: áiteanna tanaí in Celtic mythology, where the veil between worlds is porous. Starting in Jerusalem, his quest takes him to more than a dozen sacred locations, including an ashram in India, a Native American community in South Dakota, an “excruciating” Vipassanā retreat in Suffolk and, inevitably, an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru.

London’s 90s art scene forms the backdrop to this tale of a complex relationship between two artists whose identities become entangled in their creative collaboration

For all the wrong reasons, Damien Hirst’s Shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) has a claim to being the most prescient British artwork of the last half-century: a grim parable of neoliberalism. In 1991, it was still possible to mistake the predatory violence of that system for a kind of animal vitality. But today, open-mouthed, dead-eyed and decayed, it speaks only of a regime preserved far beyond its natural lifespan, lauded exclusively by institutions that can profit from its ugliness.

Alex Hyde’s second novel, an elegant Künstlerroman which plays out during a lightly fictionalised version of the YBA explosion, explores the resonance of that particular cultural inflection point: a moment when the collapse of the postwar cultural settlement, municipal culture and public institutions was transfigured decisively and ubiquitously into individualised, confessional artistic capital.

This brilliant account of attempts by the old guard to take back control captures the ludicrousness of it all beautifully

Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become. In the period that followed, Russia tried parliamentary democracy and unalloyed capitalism, then sank back into autocracy. Now it’s struggling under a wholly unnecessary war against its neighbour and former possession, Ukraine.

Why did the system of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev vanish so fast, without a fight? Because that’s how regimes fall in Russia: look at tsarism in 1917. (It almost happened again in June 2023, when the warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin’s men marched on Moscow largely unopposed; Vladimir Putin might have gone the way of Nicholas II had he not made some pretty wholesale promises to Prigozhin, then allegedly blown him up two months later.)

Denkiworks’ debut lets players pull off tricks and pull pints in a stunning, Japan-inspired setting

A freeloading tanuki, mounting debt, and a town full of possibilities will sound familiar to fans of Animal Crossing. Alas, while you won’t find accountability from Tom Nook, Kyoto-based studio Denkiworks has stepped in to heal your financial trauma with a BMX-filled adventure in which a mammal finally pays the price for their years of bad behaviour. “Even Japanese people ask why it’s a tanuki,” jokes Liam Edwards, a game designer at Denkiworks. “They have such a mythological background to them; they’re almost like dragons in terms of their mythology.”

In Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, you play as an adorable but irresponsible critter named Pon, who’s bled the coffers of the local shrine – his home – dry by buying video games and snack food instead of preparing for its semicentennial matsuri. As a result, the shrine is in total disrepair, and important architecture and cultural artefacts – such as the ema stand and the chōzuya – are left cracked and broken, unbefitting a festival half a century in the making.

Switch 2, PlayStation 5, PC; House House
The creators of Untitled Goose Game return with an online, open-world adventure that delivers slapstick silliness and bucolic majesty in nearly equal measure

Radiant sunsets glinting on lapping waves; bushland valleys that beckon with secrets; modernist buildings sat atop craggy ridges: Big Walk’s setting is as arresting as it is beguiling – a kind of architectural fever dream transplanted to a handsome Australian wilderness – but it is the images created by players that lodge deepest in the mind. Here’s one that has stuck with me: in the black of night, cicadas kicking up an almighty din, I had lost my partner. Panic. Despair. Fear. Then, there in the far distance, I saw him signalling in my direction. He was relentlessly spamming a gigantic, ball-shaped lamp on and off, the ground around him flicking from inky dark to warm pastel pink and back again, like a single Christmas light blinking from afar.

This kind of encounter is common in Big Walk, the brilliant and whimsical new online co-op puzzler from House House, the Melbourne-based studio behind the 2019 viral hit, Untitled Goose Game. Rather than playing as a honking, mischief-making goose as you do in that game, you are a bug-eyed, gangly limbed kind of bird person (think Pingu as drawn by Mondrian) for whom getting separated from your mates is all part of the fun. That’s somewhat because this rugged terrain is dense with vegetation and cliffs to fall down, and also because the game makes ingenious use of proximity and direction-based voice audio. Step out of earshot of your party and you will find it difficult to call for one another (unless, of course, you’ve picked up a Fisher-Price-like walkie-talkie).

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5; Game Freak/Fictions
Game Freak channels a post-apocalyptic reality that reflects our own repetitive erosion cycles, with a fair bit of hand-holding

Most of your time in Beast of Reincarnation is spent collecting last words. You cross paths with robots lying on the ground, who muster whatever energy they have left to provide guidance. These interactions are fleeting. Attempt to talk to them a second time, and protagonist Emma makes their fates painfully clear: “They’ve already passed on.”

The latest detour by Game Freak, the studio best known as the primary developer of Pokémon games, is an action RPG set in a post-apocalyptic Japan. Taking cues from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and NieR: Automata, you wield the sword of an outcast accompanied by an ever-loyal canine. The pair embark on a taxing and often monotonous journey to defeat the titular beast, which nonetheless serves a thematic purpose to bolster a decaying reality, while reflecting a possible future for ours.

Online multiplayer changed the trajectory of games, but the cost of keeping servers running means every virtual world is doomed to die – sooner or later

Nevan Hagarty had an idea. If he and other Halo 3 players stayed online the night of 13 January 2022, they could delay the impending server shutdown. Players knew this was coming: it had happened to Halo 2 when its Xbox Live servers were turned off in 2010, and a group managed to stay logged into the multiplayer servers for weeks.

And so, players gathered online before the server shutdown to pay homage and to mourn the game they loved so dearly. And, maybe, to keep it online for a little longer. “I must have played ’til about 4am the night of the shutdown, trading stories with so many players about their love of the game and their experiences over the last 15 years,” says Hagarty, 22. “It was a really wholesome experience I won’t forget.”

Forget cheesy acts, these days cruise ships boast the cutting edge tech to stage hip West End productions and Olivier award-winning musicals – and young people are loving it

The phrase “cruise ship entertainment” conjures vivid images, even to those who have never set foot on an oceangoing vessel. Starry backcloths, sequined frocks, tunes and croons from yesteryear, the lite-ent values of the 1970s preserved in aspic. Perhaps those stereotypes held water way back when the singer Jane McDonald ruled the reality TV waves. But – lazy thinking ahoy! – do they still?

Look at the shows currently a-sail on the high seas, from the Olivier award-winning 9/11 musical Come from Away, to hip theatre-maker Emma Rice’s acclaimed Brief Encounter. And look at the onboard production values, which “way surpass what you see in London theatres”, says Susannah Daley of Peel Entertainment, which provides shows for the Ambassador cruise line. “These ships are now being built with theatre in mind, to a really high spec, to hold between 600 and 1,000 people. What can be produced in them is pretty phenomenal.” Producer David Pugh, a veteran of the West End who has collaborated with Cunard cruises, says: “These are probably the most technical theatres, in terms of lighting and sound, that you’ve ever seen outside of the best theatres in the world.”

Drew McOnie skipped school to audition for the original. It launched his astonishing career. Now he’s getting his claws into a no-pussyfooting version of the classic hit

At the age of 17, Drew McOnie was so determined to be in the musical Cats that he snuck out of school to audition. Four days later, he was on a flight to Germany to join the international production. (Luckily, he was at a performing arts school and they forgave him.) It was a life-changing moment: at that point, McOnie’s stellar career as a dancer, Olivier award-winning choreographer and director began – and, 23 years later, it’s all about to come full circle. McOnie has created his own version of the musical he’s been obsessed with since childhood.

For any dancer growing up in the 1980s and 90s, Cats was the musical: dance wasn’t just an accompaniment, but instrumental to the show. Gillian Lynne’s original choreography is iconic – much copied by local dance schools and student shows of the era. Lynne was a force of nature, still doing the splits at 88, four years before she died in 2018. For McOnie, artistic director at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre and famed for his blazing choreography in Jesus Christ Superstar, it takes some nerve to remake it.

Bayreuth festival theatre, Bayreuth
For the festival’s 150th anniversary, the creative team have turned to AI to generate visuals reflecting Wagner’s tetralogy’s past, present – and future. The hyperactive result is a dismal, mindless mess

Unveiled the same week in which tech company Anthropic admitted that its AI model Claude had gone rogue during testing, Bayreuth festival’s new AI-generated staging of Wagner’s four-part Ring of the Nibelungen is at least timely. But anyone who assumes that the cycle’s obsession with knowledge, power and possession might make it an ideal forum for reflection on AI as a major contemporary frontier will be disappointed, as will anyone hopeful about AI’s creative potential within opera.

Commissioned to mark the festival’s 150th anniversary, the production is “curated” – emphatically not “directed” – by a team led by German stage director Marcus Lobbes. He apparently spent weeks in dialogue with AI models about possible interpretations of the Ring. According to the programme book, “power structures, capitalism, mythology, gender roles, nationalism”, all came up. So far, so mainstream Wagner reception. But if these human-machine exchanges were revelatory, you wouldn’t know it from the resulting staging, which uses AI “as an extension of a cultural memory that is never complete”.

London Coliseum
A quartet of conjurors, calling themselves the Horsemen, perform fine feats of escapology and mentalism that are undermined by smoke, lasers and pomposity

Is there an opposite of close-up magic? If there is, it would look a bit like the magic in Now You See Me, which must be visible (and audible) from space. This new spectacle, heading later this year to its spiritual home of Las Vegas, spins off from the movie franchise of the same name and features a quartet of conjurors (identifying, rather awkwardly, as “the Horsemen”) performing feats of escapology, mentalism and even time travel amid much bombastic son et lumière and self-promotion.

It could scarcely be more pompous – but happily, there are plenty of entertaining tricks to keep pomp-phobes like myself onside. The Italian Andrew Basso has arguably the stoppiest showstoppers, including his recreation of Houdini’s water torture stunt, and another where he extricates himself from padlocked chains while harbouring something very undesirable in his mouth. His French counterpart Enzo Weyne delivers an arresting number with a paper bag and a lightbulb, and there’s a fine audience participation set piece inviting us all to shred, shuffle then – as if by magic! – reassemble the playing cards we were given on the way in to the theatre.

How did the pioneering director get involved – then fall out – with the 80s’ poppiest band? How are Sam Peckinpah and Michael Jackson’s Thriller involved? Prepare for a tale of ambition, deception and shuttlecock-stuffed shorts

• When Wham! squashed Lindsay Anderson’s China film

• Andrew Ridgeley on Wham’s surreal trip to China

It was the evening of 3 April 1985 in a hotel in Hong Kong. Lindsay Anderson, who I’d engaged to direct the theatrical documentary I’d instigated of Wham!’s historic trip to China, had called a meeting of the film crew. He wanted to give a pep talk the night before we flew to Beijing.

The 30-strong team my production company had recruited for this adventure duly assembled. Lindsay gave a speech in the stentorian tones of an elder statesman addressing the House of Commons and rooted in Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day oration. And typical Lindsay, he mixed shrewd observation with sardonic wit. “Tomorrow we embark on a great adventure,” he said. “We travel into communist China with George and Andrew – ‘Apostles of the New Materialism.’”

These images of Lee Espinoza’s iconic gym in the Coachella Valley weren’t just about sport – they also helped photographer Darren Vargas deal with the death of his grandfather

She’s acting royalty – literally, having played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown – but what questions would you ask her?

It is perhaps fitting that Imelda Staunton ended up playing Queen Elizabeth II in the last two series of The Crown, considering she has been acting royalty for years. Her film career has seen her voice champion egg-layer Bunty in 2000’s Chicken Run, followed by roles in Mike Leigh’s 2004 drama Vera Drake and the 2005 comedy Nanny McPhee. In 2014, she played the formidable Welsh miners’ strike campaigner Hefina in Pride. She also plays Lady Maud Bagshaw in the first two Downton Abbey films, and voices Paddington’s beloved Aunt Lucy in all three Paddington films. For a whole generation, however, she will always be Dolores Umbridge in two of the later Harry Potter films, where she somehow made a pink cardigan almost as frightening as Voldemort.

On TV, she has cropped up in everything from Little Britain and Doctor Who to Psychoville, Brassic and a memorable guest appearance in the fourth series of A Bit of Fry & Laurie, where – for reasons known only to F&L – she was introduced as “Snutty”. Whether she’s playing a chicken, a bear or the head of state, there is always something unmistakably Imelda about her performances: warm and calm but with the distinct impression that she won’t stand for any nonsense.

It has 12 movements, 200 musicians and aims to unite America. The great US trumpeter and composer talks about his All Rise symphony, his jazz great mentors – and learning humility from his wife

At Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, Wynton Marsalis is hard to spot. When he first played this venue, in 1984, he was the prodigious 22-year-old soloist out front, blowing Haydn’s trumpet concerto under the baton of Lorin Maazel. Tonight he is embedded in the machinery: half-hidden behind ranks of strings and woodwind, a black-suited figure in the heart of his own symphony.

It’s a strange way for a composer to behave – especially one whose public persona has long been associated with certainty, polemic and the upright authority of a man who can make any argument sound like a moral law. Yet Marsalis seems almost pleased by his disappearance. “It’s my piece,” he says, as we talk in his hotel room the next morning, “but it’s not my show.”

It’s easy to lose your cool when you’re crammed into a train, bus or plane with a bunch of strangers and one of them is playing music without headphones or fighting you for the armrest. Here are the rules everyone should be following

Public transport can be a hot, noisy, cramped and stressful environment – and that’s before you add in people with pungent food, questionable hygiene and giant backpacks. Most of us know the general rules – though we don’t all follow them – about letting people off first, not putting bags on seats, where to stand on escalators and offering your seat to others. But what about the vaguer conventions? How can you avoid chatty passengers? Or manspreaders? Is it sometimes OK to put your feet on the seats? (Spoiler: it’s not.) Here, three etiquette experts show us the way to public transport propriety.

Fuelled by TikTok and street dance battles, the coupé-décalé offshoot is latest expression of Côte d’Ivoire’s pop culture

The 400-strong crowd, perched on plastic chairs and wooden benches in Abidjan’s Yopougon-Selmer neighbourhood, roared with approval as Sauce Graine twisted and turned on the spot with breathtaking speed and dexterity.

The dancer, named after the Ivorian palm nut delicacy, was competing in a series of street dance battles set to biama, a frenetic offshoot of coupé-décalé, a type of percussive dance music popular across west Africa that originated in Côte d’Ivoire around the turn of the century.

Most suitcases look hardwearing, but which ones actually are? We dropped bestselling brands’ luggage from a ladder to find out …

• The best carry-on luggage

A suitcase is like the portrait in the traveller’s attic, accumulating more than its fair share of knocks and scrapes while we refresh ourselves on the road. We trundle them over cobbles, see them tumble from luggage racks on the train – and if we choose to fly, there’s a fair chance they’ll be mishandled before we reunite at the carousel.

For our testing, we pushed 11 suitcases to the limit by dropping them on to a hard surface, as if they’d been fumbled by a baggage handler. Air travel is especially tough on suitcases, so you might get away with choosing a less-resilient case if you make the climate-conscious choice to travel by rail or sea.

Whether it’s budget barbecues or clever travel pillows, here are the favourites defining your summer

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July’s hitlist paints a picture of a month well spent. A barbecue and nifty wine cooler sleeve suggest alfresco evenings, while a bargain tent and cool box point to camping trips. Sensible but stylish walking shoes and a trusty water bottle also suggest time spent in the great outdoors.

All in all – despite the climate crisis-charged heatwaves and hosepipe bans – it sounds like you’re making the most of the summer. From a cooling mattress topper to a cheap-and-cheerful mascara, here are your favourite things from last month.

We put 10 tinned and jarred varieties to the test to see which anchovies are the best catch for your cash

• The best supermarket tinned sardines

To taste these anchovies, I invited a friend, the food journalist and author Sudi Pigott, to join me. Arriving with a packet of Pujadó Solano anchovies and her new book, Consider the Anchovy, in hand, she and I tasted 10 brands of anchovies straight from the tin or jar with sparkling water and cucumber to cleanse the palate. According to Pigott, the best anchovies are “juicy, plump and velvety, with a sweet, nutty taste of jamón!”

The anchovy supply chain has been heavily affected by El Niño, which caused abnormal weather events in Peru, where the most economical anchovies in our test were fished, and a shortage severe enough to threaten global supply and push up prices. Premium anchovies sourced from the Bay of Biscay (the Cantabrian Sea) have seen prices rise, too, driven more by growing international demand than any shortage, because the stock itself remains healthy.

Our writer spent the hottest weeks of the year churning through the top ice-cream makers, from compressor models to the cult favourite Ninja Creami. Here’s the scoop

• Kitchen gadgets top chefs can’t live without

I love a scoop or two of the good stuff, even more so when the mercury hits 30C and ice-cream starts feeling less like an indulgence and more like an essential survival tool. This is why owning an ice-cream maker has always made sense to me. I’ve been using the original Ninja Creami for years now, but before that I was spending a small fortune on gelato, fruity sorbets, frozen yoghurt and other such desserts from the frozen aisle.

Some might argue that the best ice-cream makers are a luxury, but if you’re a true dessert devotee, I believe they can earn their keep in no time. A tub of Häagen-Dazs will set you back almost £6 nowadays, which is an expensive habit if you’re getting through a pot a week during the hottest months of the year.

There is no exact plant-based substitute – the ideal option will depend on the dish. But, ultimately, it’s easiest to choose a recipe that doesn’t require gelatine

How do I go about substituting gelatine sheets for a vegetarian setting agent?
Sarah, Aberdeen
“The truth is, there’s no exact substitute for gelatine, because it has an incredibly unique texture,” says Richard Phillips, head of pastry at Timberyard in Edinburgh. Sure, there are plenty of plant-based gelling agents out there – “agar-agar [or just agar], gellan gum, pectin, carrageenan, locust bean gum, vege-gel… the list goes on,” says Phillips – but the result will never quite be the same.

“The temperature you have to use them at is different [to gelatine],” says Philip Khoury, author of Beyond Baking, so his usual workaround is to simply formulate recipes that don’t use gelling agents. Now, that’s all well and good when you’re a pastry chef, but what about the rest of us? “If, for example, I’m making a thick, pipeable cream, then I’ll use cornflour,” says Khoury, and just manipulate it to get different textures. Let’s take the panna cotta and creme brulee recipes in his first book, A New Way to Bake, as an example: “You get two very different textures from essentially the same recipe. The only difference being that if you pour the custard into a tray and chill it, it will set, whereas if you beat it with a whisk, it will turn into this luscious, creamy texture that’s just set.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Levantine summer magic in a herby and moreish Arabic frittata with a peachy fruit, red onion and rocket salad

I’ve always loved food that can be enjoyed at room temperature, or even cold the next day. As the UK, along with many other parts of the world, swelters through another hot summer, these are exactly the kinds of dishes I want to cook and eat. Fresh, light and unfussy, they require little effort, yet never compromise on flavour. This herb-packed courgette and feta ijeh paired with a lush fruit, red onion and rocket salad alongside makes the perfect meal for warm days and relaxed summer gatherings.

British cheesemakers have struggled to find a use for the 95,000 tonnes of salty whey they produce every year. But researchers may have come up with a solution

Name: Whey.

Age: As old as milk.

Jimi Famurewa, restaurant critic and food journalist, discovers how American regional deli sandwich culture is being reinvented in Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle. From hoagies and subs to hero rolls, Jimi samples the upgraded sandwiches people are queuing hours for and learns how to make the everything sandwich and a meatball sub that’s so messy, you need to eat it alone at home.

He could seem judgmental, even moody. But the whole neighbourhood mourned when this remarkable moggy went to meet his maker

When my cat Eric passed away from stomach cancer in 2001, I wasn’t sure I would ever be ready to have a pet again. But a few months later I was given another cat, Karl, by an old friend from Camberwell College of Arts in south London, who was moving back to Germany. I had known Karl when I was a student there, where he had been mates with Eric. Karl, an unassuming brown tabby with a judgmental glare, took me back to living in student halls in the 90s.

Karl was perhaps the most average-looking tabby in south London, but on my quiet street he became a legend of sorts. He accompanied my children and me on school runs. He would walk ahead with his belly swinging and take us to the top of the road. There he would wait until I dropped off the children and escort me back home.

Vivian and Thomas both left physically unfulfilling marriages and are rediscovering their sex drives in later life

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

Since menopause and being with Thomas, my interest in sex is much higher

A prospective Restore Britain voter and a Green-supporting Chinese immigrant found some common ground over small-boat crossings, but where did they land on foxhunting?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Phill, 58, Hertfordshire

Occupation Stairlift surveyor

Rachel forked out £700 for beauty treatments, Kojo confessed to a £25 cigarette habit, and Jake indulged his love of fancy timepieces. Were their other halves forgiving or furious?

Rachel and Kojo, Northampton

Reader expresses consternation after enforcement officer issues penalty notice outside station in London

I was outside London Waterloo railway station and was looking for a bin to dispose of an empty coffee cup.

The only bin I could see was completely full, but there was a plastic bag containing rubbish at the base.

Criminals hope by using threats of enforcement action, people will panic and click link to bogus parking app site

You use parking apps a lot – you have several on your phone – but it is not always straightforward. Sometimes there is a lack of reliable mobile signal, or the app crashes or behaves oddly, or it does not seem to want to accept your bank card.

Also, it is sometimes hard to keep track of which apps you have used when. So when you receive a text from RingGo saying you owe it money, you are not totally surprised.

From melted electric sockets to shabby alternatives, readers tell of dealings with platform when things go wrong

Jane Ripley* spent some time researching the best apartment to stay in for her family’s trip to Batumi in Georgia, eventually settling on one with an “exceptional” rating on Booking.com.

But when the Ripleys arrived at 11pm on the first day, they were directed to another property that was shabby and had stains on the furniture and ceiling.

Whether it is SpaceX or a bank, getting the right facts about a firm can offer vital insights before you invest in it

When Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched on to the stock market, tens of thousands of Britons clamoured to buy a stake, putting the spotlight on DIY investing.

Going it alone and buying shares in individual companies can be rewarding, but also risky. Unless you have a huge amount of cash, you are likely to end up investing in far fewer companies than if you invested in a fund. This means you are more exposed to the ups and downs of those companies’ fortunes.

From the 47-year-old runner who needs a double hip replacement to the 27-year-old CrossFitter with a ruptured ACL, those who push their bodies too hard often regret it. What are the lessons for the rest of us?

Jonathan Price has always been active and exercise-focused. Growing up in south Wales, rugby was his first love. Through school, university and beyond, he also surfed, rowed, played squash and ran competitively – on track, in 10k races and cross-country. Career and family demands meant that much of this fell away in later years, but the running stuck. He found time for marathons, half marathons – “I’d run a half marathon every weekend just for fun,” he says – and, through the working week, regular 30- or 40-minute runs to manage stress and clear his head. “I travel a lot for work,” says Price, now 50, a company CEO. “With running, all you need is a pair of running shoes and you can do it anywhere.”

By his mid-40s, though, Price’s body was beginning to object. He wasn’t recovering so well. “I could run just fine but I’d be in pain for two or three days afterwards,” he says. On top of this, every six months or so, his lower back seemed to seize up completely. A physiotherapist thought it was “tight hip flexors” and pointed Price towards “hip opening” exercises, designed to reduce stiffness and increase range of motion. Someone else prescribed him muscle relaxants, but the pain only deepened, and his range of movement continued to dip. Finally, in the summer of 2023, a chance encounter with a hip surgeon led to the diagnosis of osteoarthritis and, at the end of that year, Price, then 47, had a double hip replacement.

Want to lower your temperature and drift off to sleep quicker? An ice-cold shower might seem the best solution, but the truth is more complicated

It’s another sticky summer evening. You’re too hot to sleep. Surely an ice-cold shower is the best way to cool off and drift away quicker? Not really, says Mike Tipton, a professor of human and applied physiology at the University of Portsmouth.

“If you’re trying to go to sleep, the last thing you want to do is go into a freezing cold shower,” he says. The shock of cold water immersion causes the body to produce adrenaline and cortisol, stress hormones designed to keep us alert. “That’s just about the last thing you want before you go to bed.”

Menstrual and digestive discomfort often coincide, and a researcher who has been looking in to it for a decade tells us what she learned

Every period, right on schedule: the cramps arrive, and right behind them, the urgent need to poop.

If this is your experience, you’re in good company: in one study, 73% of healthy premenopausal women reported at least one significant gastrointestinal symptom in the days before or during their period. Abdominal pain and diarrhea were the most common complaints, but women reported nausea and constipation too.

Avoid espresso martinis and wear the right pyjamas: experts give tips on how to sleep when it’s hot outside

• Tell us: what impact have GLP-1s had on your relationships?

Getting a good night’s sleep when it’s hot out can feel impossible. Unfortunately, worrying about not being well-rested doesn’t help.

Experts say worrying about sleep in warm weather will inevitably make you feel worse. “When people cannot sleep because they are too hot, it often becomes both a physical and a mental challenge,” says Dr Shelby Harris, founder and director of NY Sleep and Psychology, and author of The Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia. “They may start watching the clock, worrying about how tired they will be the next day, or trying harder to force themselves to fall asleep.

Whether you’re in full summer mode or quietly planning for autumn, our fashion expert’s monthly picks will carry you stylishly between the two

• How to create the perfect women’s holiday capsule wardrobe

August: do you buy for the holiday you’ll be melting through this month, or the one you’ll be pretending to enjoy in a jumper come October? Answers on a postcard, please! The key to staying (relatively) sane in silly season is to embrace the contradictions.

Read on for the holiday-coded necklace I’ve fallen in love with and the elegant leather handbag I’m dreaming of when I hang up my straw basket. Plus, a lace camisole and a cosy jumper – and the absolute sweetest grip socks for my pilates girlies.

Private White VC’s James Eden says PM should not be criticised for wearing a high-quality British-made brand

It has not yet been two weeks since James Eden, the founder of the Manchester men’s clothier Private White VC, saw one of his best-known customers move in to No 10 Downing Street.

In any sane world the man who makes the prime minister’s jackets would be popping open the champagne. His garments have been seen by millions of people and described by journalists all over the world writing about Burnham’s buttoned-down style.

Celebrities including Charli xcx and Gabbriette and avant-garde brands honour tradition while also rejecting it

If a wedding day brings to mind a bride dressed in a big white dress, the styles coming down the aisle in the near future may strike you as a little different. Whether it is through celebrity references, or new brands, wedding gowns are entering a more experimental era.

For Charli xcx’s marriage to the 1975 drummer George Daniel last year, the bride wore a minidress and sunglasses.

Minty fresh flavours are out, gold plated toothbrushes are in, and dental experts are sceptical

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First it came for handwash. Then deodorant. Now, the fancification trend has claimed its next victim: dental products. From £20 toothpastes to bottles of mouthwash that sound more like a perfume than a breath freshener, a new wave of oral care is blurring the lines between function and fashion.

Rather than being shoved in an old tumbler on the back of the shelf, today’s iterations of toothbrushes and pastes are at the forefront of social media sink shots, proudly displayed alongside a three-wick candle and curated pile of skincare.

Globetrotter and TV presenter Alice Morrison trades in her camels and backup team for wild camping in one of Scotland’s most beautiful glens

‘I miss my camels. I miss the sun. I miss the vast emptiness of the desert plains …” These are my thoughts as I trudge through thick conifer plantations and my fifth consecutive hour of rain at the start of the Affric Kintail Way in the Scottish Highlands.

My last big adventure was a world first. I became the first recorded person to walk the full length of Saudi Arabia, north to south, from Jordan to Yemen. It took three years to organise, then 112 days of walking half a marathon a day, and I had a backup team plus Juicy and Lulu, my naughty but nice camels.

From Blackpool to Bournemouth, these quintessentially British institutions celebrate a lot more than fish and chips and amusement arcades

Perched in our glass-fronted eyrie, 300 metres out to sea, we watch a murmuration of starlings rise and fall and swoop around us. When the show is over, we turn our attention to the food. I have a bespoke vegan menu based on the best early summer ingredients: jersey royals, asparagus, strawberries. My boyfriend orders off the weekly changing à la carte: slow-cooked beef dumplings followed by butter-poached halibut.

We are at Ebb, a restaurant at the end of the pier in Worthing, West Sussex, which opened in May. Its art-deco design and fine-dining dishes are a far cry from the fish-and-chip shops and ice-cream parlours more commonly found on seaside piers. But traditionalists need not despair: downstairs at Perch on the Pier, fish and chips – as well as tofish (tofu) and chips – are always on the menu, with a knickerbocker glory to round things off in fine retro style.

Falling in love with a novel motivated these five travel writers to immerse themselves in locations from the Yukon and Kyrgyzstan to the Côte d’Azur

Inspired by Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express

Small boats and kayaks connect the sparse communities and flourishing wildlife living on the thousands of islets on the Baltic coast

At 5am on Arkösund bay, it is so light it could be midday. I slip out of the pretty clapboard Arkösunds hotell, opened in 1895, as a small boat putters into the Baltic Sea, the sun sparkling on its calm waters. A wooden boardwalk invites me on to a string of tiny islets as geese arrow overhead and a mother swan coaxes her fluffy cygnets into a nook under a bridge.

I’m on Sweden’s east coast to explore the Östergötland archipelago, a sprawl of about 9,000 islands scattered across the Baltic Sea a few hours south of Stockholm. Quieter and less crowded than the better-known isles off Stockholm or Gothenburg, it covers several pockets of coastline and smaller archipelagos: Arkösund, Sankt Anna, Gryt and Tjust. The larger islands are flecked with traditional red timber summer houses, and are home to seals, sea birds, and dense, verdant forests of alder, cedar, oak and pine.

It took a heatwave to get me to shed my shame and my sleeves, but now there’s no stopping me. Life is cooler in every way

‘Aren’t you hot in that?” was the question that plagued my summers as a teenager. I would never bare my arms; instead, I would cover up with a trusty black cardigan. Even T-shirts felt too revealing, too tight on the arm, too clinging to the body. I needed layers to feel comfortable. Well, comfortable isn’t the right word. I was never comfortable, despite telling everyone: “No, I’m not hot. I don’t really feel the heat.”

In my 20s and 30s, I collected a hot-weather capsule wardrobe of T-shirt dresses in various sizes, all baggy and sleeved. But why? I’m someone who should know better. I’ve read the books, I’ve shared the memes. I know, from body-positivity activists, that you don’t have to deny yourself the joy of being at the beach or pool just because a magazine tells you you have to get yourself “beach-body ready”: slimmer, hairless, perfect.

The solution to today’s puzzle

Earlier today I set you the following puzzle, suggested by Briton Alex Chui, the most successful ever candidate at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Last month Alex, who is a pupil at Tonbridge School in Kent, became the first person to win a medal at the olympiad for seven years in a row. Bravo!

Some reassurance that our puzzles are created by flesh-and-blood setters – and your clues for the name of Brockwell’s dog

The world of crosswords is generally a happy and sensible place. The human mind being what it is, though, we are not immune to entertaining ideas that are less than true.

Our equivalent of the conspiracy theory that humankind is being controlled by 5G phone masts is that puzzles are appearing that have not been created by people.

For hours we hobbled back, until we were close enough for him to place me down and run for help

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

We had heard there was an incredible waterfall somewhere deep in the Thai rainforest. Seeking it out almost killed me.

In 2003 I was travelling solo through south-east Asia when I met Paul, an American with an easy-going, natural warmth. We were the only two people bunking at a youth hostel somewhere in southern Thailand and got chatting one morning. When the staff told us about a beautiful waterfall not far from where we were staying, we made plans to hike there together.

This detritivore – known by a range of colourful names – feeds on rotting plant matter and can withstand toxic pollution

• Revealed: the top 10 invertebrates of the year

Chucky pig. Slater. Monkey pea. Roly-poly. Boat-builder. Butchy boy. Cheeselog. Hobbling Andrew. Wood pig. If there were a prize for the range and joyfulness of a creature’s English-language names, the humble woodlouse would undoubtedly triumph over its million-plus invertebrate rivals.

Over centuries of easy cohabitation with humans, it has acquired more than 300 regional names in Britain alone, and many more in other languages (such as Gwrach y Coed, “witch of the wood”, in Welsh).

People among the more than 50,000 who entered Spanish enclave this week describe the journey and their prospects

Four days ago, Youssef El Abbas saw an opportunity to reclaim the life he had lost seven years earlier. News was circulating that about 400 people had swum from Morocco to the neighbouring Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the north African coast, approximately 12 miles (19km) across the strait of Gibraltar from mainland Spain.

Here was a chance for the 44-year-old Moroccan father of four to return to Spain, from which he had been deported when his residency expired after the loss of his job in Bilbao in 2019.

Jason Arday was regarded as an academic superstar, but then questions about his work prompted scrutiny of his backstory and counterclaims of racism

When the superstar academic Jason Arday took to the stage at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference earlier this year, he delivered a talk called Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook.

The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history told an audience of his peers that the playbook in question had helped bring down some of the biggest names in US academia. Conservative “activists” were trawling through the work of black academics, looking for anything to use against them: inconsistencies, citation errors, passages in their work that were similar to existing papers.

We would like to hear from people who have recently installed renewable energy sources in their home, or considered doing so

Great Britain has recorded more new solar power installations in the first half of this year than in any six-month period since 2011, with most of the new panels going onto household rooftops rather than large-scale solar farms.

The government’s data also shows a rise in households turning to other low-carbon technology: applications to the boiler upgrade scheme, which offers grants for replacing gas boilers with greener alternatives, reached 4,512 last month – up 21% on June last year – with demand for heat pumps expected to climb further in the months ahead.

We would like to hear your experience of using peptides for therapeutic purposes

In recent years there has been a boom in interest in using peptides, from weight loss to anti-ageing and recovery from injury.

These include approved prescription weight-loss medications based on synthetic peptides that mimic natural hormones. However, sales of experimental and unregulated peptides are rising as online sellers tout them as part of a “wellness” regime.

We want to hear from people around the world who have been getting involved in local action on the climate

We’d like to hear from people across the world who have been involved in a local environmental action group or community project tackling climate change from where they live. What made you get involved?

What has the group achieved, and what obstacles have you faced? Has it changed how you feel about your local area, or led to wider change? We’d also like to hear from anyone who tried to set up a group and found it difficult to gain traction.

We would love to hear about your workhorse appliances, why they’re so impressive and how long you’ve had them

An elderly couple in Gloucestershire are reportedly still using what is believed to be Britain’s oldest working fridge.

The Electrolux appliance was built in the 1930s and bought second-hand by their family in 1949, with the owners telling SWNS that it is “still going strong”.

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