The al-Qaida leader envisaged an economically battered US withdrawing from the Middle East – and a global Muslim uprising. Then the tide turned

On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.

The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.

Before the release of a joyful film on the history of the Sheffield band, frontman Cocker and director Garth Jennings talk dark times, taking inspiration from Abba – and why there could yet be another record

When the director Garth Jennings first moved to Paris, Jarvis Cocker, who was living there, dropped in on his old friend. “And I nearly got you arrested,” the Pulp frontman recalls. It was bonfire night, and Cocker had taken some welcoming fireworks over to Jennings’ place. “It turned out Garth’s apartment was quite near to the – not an army base, but what’s it called?”

“The École Militaire,” says Jennings.

The coffee and cream pudding has always been popular. But now it’s inspired a dedicated cafe and countless products, from drinks to ice-creams to buns. What’s behind this big cultural craving?

When Giancarlo Fanigliulo opened Marrone, a cafe dedicated to tiramisu in London’s Soho in August, he hadn’t anticipated he would sell out within two and a half hours. “I was expecting a buzz, but I wasn’t expecting queues around the corner,” he tells me. “It was insane.”

This kind of excitement about the Italian dessert is not a one-off – we are, it seems, living in an age of tiramisu-mania. Nearly all of the high street coffee chains have offered some kind of tiramisu coffee as a seasonal special (in the US, Dunkin’ currently has four different tiramisu-flavoured drinks on its menu). Meanwhile, Haagen-Dazs and Carte D’or now sell tiramisu ice-cream, London chain Buns from Home offers a tiramisu-flavoured croissant-dough bun and social media is awash with tiramisu recipes and videos of “tiramisu drawers” – trays of the dessert ready to serve out of drawers in chefs’ kitchens – as popularised by the viral one at Manchester pasta restaurant Onda.

In 2022, my country entered a new era of cruelty. It will take more than one election to get the old, tolerant Sweden back

Last year, a baby named Emanuel was born in Sweden. Before his first birthday, his parents were told that Emanuel could no longer stay in the country. The department of migration ordered his removal, alone, to Iran – despite the ongoing war.

Emanuel’s parents were legally in the country. They had Swedish residency permits, but the laws that allowed them to stay were tightened after the baby’s birth, and the family got sucked into a Kafkaesque maze of official hurdles, designed to limit migration to Sweden.

Nigel Farage said demonstrators in balaclavas were ‘horrible’, but others in the party defend them as ‘brave, passionate patriots’

Nigel Farage’s condemnation of the masked men whose blockade of Dover stole headlines on the final day of his party’s annual conference was swift, describing their actions as “horrible”.

Yet less than a week on from the public debut of the black-clad members of Patriot Platform, Reform is gripped with internal friction over the activists. There has been unease among some members and councillors about Farage’s criticism and some outright praise for the group as “patriots”.

Some people don’t understand my lifelong enthusiasm for roadside stop-offs – now visiting and cataloguing them is what I do for a living

When I was 10 years old, the highlight of my summer holidays was going to work with my dad, who is a lorry driver. For a couple of years in the mid-2000s, I’d excitedly climb into the cab next to him and we’d set off on a 10-hour trip. My job was to follow the AA Road Atlas, and I’d joyfully track the services marked on the map as we thundered along.

My dad thought stopping was a waste of time, but his designated rest stops were my favourite part of the trip. Depending on the journey, we might stop for two or three meals. I always hoped at least one would be at a Little Chef. I loved their Olympic Breakfast, a massive full English, and every meal was rounded off with a lollipop – what more could a 10-year-old want?

Bill would allow terminally ill adults with less than six months to live to end their lives, after the approval of a panel of experts

Labour MP Lauren Edwards, the bill’s sponsor, is the first to speak.

She has criticised the House of Lords for what she said was the obstruction of the assisted dying bill in the previous parliamentary session.

Memorials and remembrances will mark the 25 years since the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 on 11 September 2001

The United States is marking the 25th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on Friday, with memorials and remembrance ceremonies taking place across the country to honor the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks.

In New York City, the national September 11 memorial and museum will hold its annual commemoration ceremony, with the families of victims gathering at the 9/11 Memorial Plaza and reading aloud the names of those killed in the 9/11 attacks and in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Exclusive: Calls from Labour grow as 105 MPs write to PM urging ‘obvious’ step to alleviate cost of living crisis

Andy Burnham is coming under increasing pressure from his own MPs to commit to improving paternity leave in the UK in the next budget, with more than a quarter of Labour MPs writing to the prime minister to urge him to take action.

Ahead of the chancellor’s first budget next month, 105 MPs have written to Burnham calling on him to increase statutory paternity leave to help alleviate the cost of living crisis and arguing that lowest-paid fathers are the hardest hit by meagre paternity leave provision.

Welcome boost for chancellor with unexpected rise put down to rapid growth of AI in services sector outweighing Iran war fallout

The UK economy grew in July as the rapid expansion of AI appeared to outweigh the economic damage from the Iran war, in a welcome boost for John Healey.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed a surprise 0.4% increase in gross domestic product (GDP), compared with 0.3% growth in June. City economists had forecast zero growth.

Since June, an app has allowed survivors, who are overwhelmingly women, to see exactly where their stalker is

On a large screen in a control centre in eastern Seoul, a dot representing a man closes in on a woman. The dot changes direction, and the distance reading between them falls from 845 metres to 792.

On the woman’s phone, the same map is loading. A probation officer rings her: the stalker is approaching, don’t panic, officers have been dispatched. The man is a stand-in and the scenario is staged, but the system is real.

National Audit Office says failure to implement £70bn modernisation would also hold back economic growth

• The ‘great grid upgrade’ is off track – ministers should spell out the risks for bills

Consumers will pay higher energy bills unless the UK government speeds up work on a vast programme of upgrades to the electricity grid to enable the switch to renewables, the public spending watchdog has warned.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said that without faster action the extra costs associated with managing the ageing power network, which are ultimately passed on to the public, could reach £7.8bn a year by 2030.

UK government reviewing allegations about My Surrogacy Journey after complaints about medical costs

The UK government has said it is reviewing allegations about a British-owned surrogacy service after surrogates in Mexico who faced health complications including a hysterectomy had their insurance claims rejected.

The Department of Health and Social Care is considering whether the UK-based provider My Surrogacy Journey should remain listed on gov.uk as one of four domestic surrogacy agencies available to intended parents, after its Mexican sister company received complaints.

Vice-president dog-whistled, exaggerated claims of success and echoed Trump talking points to excited audience

JD Vance made a clear pitch that he should be the heir to Donald Trump on Thursday night, closing out the Republicans’ midterm convention with a blistering speech that featured exaggerated claims of success, criticism of Democrats as “lunatics” and an aggressive dismissal of a protester waving a Mexican flag.

Speaking in Dallas, the vice-president showed he could channel the basest instincts of his boss, filling his remarks with dog whistles and echoing Trump’s false claims that Democrats “cheered” the 7 October massacre of Israelis.

Christina Stambolian dress from 1994 has defined a whole category of fashion and is expected to fetch up to £220,000

The dress that Diana, Princess of Wales wore one September evening in 1994 would have been memorable for its design alone – black, fitted, off-the-shoulder, skintight and short. However, it has another distinction, of defining a whole category of fashion – what has since become known as “revenge dressing”.

Worn by Diana the same night Charles would reveal his infidelity on TV, the dress was quickly labelled “the revenge dress” by the media. It has its own Wikipedia page, with the same title.

The world’s most powerful country responded to the worst terrorist attack in its history by inflicting terror of its own – around the world, and at home

As clear as that cloudless September morning, Jenna Jacobs McPartland remembers the moment everything changed. “I was cleaning the bathroom and watching the Today show in the background and nine months pregnant,” the 52-year-old recalls by phone. “I think they were showing ‘Today throws a wedding’ when the news broke in.”

A plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. McPartland did not know that her husband, Ariel Jacobs, was attending a conference at its Windows on the World restaurant. “I called his office to say, ‘Hey, turn on the TV. Do you guys know what’s going on?’ His assistant said, ‘Oh my God, Jenna, he’s there.’ The whole world disappeared and there was this sort of hollow collapsing feeling.”

Swindon drone factory was target of Russia plot involving British man, court hears; Poland says Ukraine border crossing came under threat. What we know on day 1,661

(Reprise)
The 80-year-old continues his tireless output, delving into the past for inspiration to variable results – though two lengthy brand-new songs are real showstoppers

You can’t fault Neil Young for his industry. Second Song is his second new album of 2026: the first, a double live set called As Time Explodes, was released just over three months ago. Indeed, at 80, his work schedule seems mind-boggling. Since 2020, he’s released nine new albums, a 30-minute EP, five self-directed films and three more films directed by others, 10 archival live albums, six archival studio albums and two immense box sets. He has embarked on tours with his longstanding backing band Crazy Horse, his recently convened backing band the Chrome Hearts, and solo. He has gone to public war with Spotify, Amazon, Ticketmaster and – briefly – the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury, and penned umpteen op-ed pieces about politics, the environment and corporate media for his online newspaper the Times-Contrarian. When he recently cancelled a European tour citing exhaustion, it was hard not to think: well, I’m not surprised.

You do find yourself wondering if his workload is such a good thing: not just for an elderly gentleman’s health but also for the quality of his output. Young has always prized spontaneity over finesse, but some of his more recent releases have suggested that at least a soupçon of finesse might not go amiss. Last year’s Talkin to the Trees, however, seemed to cross the line that separates the instinctive from the dashed off. Young frequently sounded as if he was making the material up as he went along, with nugatory results: “When today has come and gone, I might be singing my new song,” he offered on Family Life. “Might be short, it might be long, but I’ll be singing my new song.” If some of the melodies sounded familiar, that’s because they were. Not one but two tracks echoed the tune of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land; First Fire of Winter was essentially Young’s 1970 masterpiece Helpless with different lyrics; Thankful rewrote 1992’s Harvest Moon.

Your top culinary discoveries, from Bled cake in Slovenia to sardines in Portugal and seafood soup in Spain

• Tell us about autumn days out in the UK – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Last August, the smoky aroma of grilled sardines drifting over the beach in Portimão woke me up from my sunbathing on the beach. Attracted by the aroma of barbecued fish, we found ourselves in the old port where, for €12, I was served two delicious sandwiches on rustic bread of sardines in garlic and olive oil, with a small cold beer. I sat down, ate and chatted with locals on benches at simple communal tables. The important thing seemed to be to enjoy food together. The next morning, a reenactment of the fishing boats arriving loaded with fish, as they once were, was a real spectacle – complete with guitar playing, drum-banging and excited seagulls whirling and wailing above in the hope of a feast. Later, concerts and dancing animated the town as the party for the sardine festival went on well into the night. Cooking demos and dishes including sardine-based soup and salads, added to the enjoyment. I never imagined such pleasure could be had from the simple sardine.
Joe

With a character inspired by Wittgenstein, this exploration of the mysteries of the universe draws on multiple philosophical traditions

For several years I ran community groups that involved reading books aloud with other adults. Sharing the experience of reading in that way made me notice how, when one or more of us was baffled by a story, this bafflement was rarely experienced without an accompanying sense of mild anger. It was so easy to make us, the readers, angry – at the characters; at the author; perhaps even at the nature of this reality on which we’d lost our grip. We were confronted with the fact that our capacity to understand the world was limited. We didn’t like that.

Irish author Adrian Duncan’s fifth novel, A Thought Without Collision, takes risks with this bafflement: it relates and conveys an experience of being mystified by the universe. As it opens, in Ireland in 1923, it is becoming apparent that six-year-old Catherine has exceptional academic gifts, and that her father’s farm is failing. In the next chapter, set in 1951, Dr Josef Alois, a Tyrolean émigré academic in his mid-50s, is living in his self-built house on the east coast of Scotland. He is alone until Catherine reappears, “a handsome woman in her mid-thirties”, and now an Oxford professor. The second chapter ends starkly: Alois “is more unwell than he believes and will perish in one month and eleven days”.

The sax star turned his back on fame to embrace free jazz. Caught on a tape machine hidden in an overcoat, newly revealed recordings show how he did it

In August 1965, at the height of his fame, saxophonist John Coltrane headlined the DownBeat jazz festival in Chicago. Taking to the stage with a new member of his band, young experimentalist Archie Shepp on tenor, Coltrane’s quartet blew through a series of jagged and free improvisations, straying from structured compositions and, instead, hurling down sheets of sound so loud and aggressive that they reportedly caused widespread walk-outs. DownBeat’s own reviewer later wrote: “They gave as tasteless a display of musicianship as I’ve ever heard … Shepp and Coltrane seemed to be more interested in trying to out-honk, out-squeal and out-bleat each other than in playing music.”

That 1965 performance should have been a triumphant moment, after five years of Coltrane’s star ascending. Since leaving Miles Davis’s “first great quintet”, with whom he had recorded what would become the bestselling jazz album of all time – 1959’s Kind of Blue – Coltrane founded an entirely new harmonic language in jazz with the 1960 release of his solo LP Giant Steps, had a radio hit with his 1961 version of The Sound of Music’s My Favourite Things and, in January 1965, formulated his own spiritual imagining of jazz music with the Grammy-nominated album A Love Supreme. He was already a giant of the genre, contributing dozens of compositions to the standard repertoire, but two years later, in 1967, aged just 40, he would be dead of liver cancer.

Eileen and Keen Umbehr were convinced the wrong person was convicted for double-homicide. After sending Pulitzer-winning journalist Joe Sexton 2,714 emails about it, he agreed to investigate – and it led to a messy entanglement

HBO is no stranger to true crime, though its offerings tend to be more prestige than your average, with documentaries such as the unrelenting sex cult nightmare The Vow and The Yogurt Shop Murders, a measured reinvestigation into the deaths of four teenage girls in Texas in the 90s. They have form, too, in drily funny sagas, such as McMillions, about a high-stakes conspiracy to fix the McDonald’s Monopoly promotion. Rarely are their documentaries both solemn and bizarro, with the exception perhaps of The Jinx. An unnerving tale of millionaire real estate heir turned convicted murderer Robert Durst, it occasionally lingered on the stranger points of his story, like the time he shoplifted a $6 sandwich for kicks.

All this makes sense, really: it’s not like most homicides lend themselves to a deadpan retelling. A Killer Story is not laugh-out-loud funny, either. But this very meta three-parter manages to tell not one but two killer stories, one disturbing and the other absurd. The first concerns a woman, Dana Chandler, who is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her ex-husband and his new girlfriend. The second is about a true crime-obsessed stranger, Eileen Umbehr, who becomes fixated on the case, spamming a journalist with tips. The emails from Umbehr were, says Joe Sexton – previously of the New York Times and investigative newsroom ProPublica – “a crazy assortment of shit … I [didn’t] know whether to call the cops on her or fucking hire her!”

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

Any MP not voting for it on Friday will condemn thousands of us to die in agony. The public is hugely in favour too, so do the right thing

Once in a while, footsoldiers of the House of Commons, you are able to make history by leaving your own indelible footprints on the social fabric. Eras with a Labour majority always leave a legacy of progressive freedoms – whether on abortion, capital punishment, divorce, gay rights, racial discrimination, gender equality or, last time, civil partnerships. But tomorrow is your final chance to bequeath one of the last freedoms over our bodies: the freedom of the dying to choose when to depart them.

The terminally ill adults (end of life) bill, which goes for a second reading vote in the Commons tomorrow, gives anyone who is dying the right to request and be provided assistance with ending their lives. If it fails to pass, that’s the end of it for the rest of this parliament: future parliaments may be less progressive. So please, MPs: turn up and vote on Lauren Edwards’s bill, to ensure this Labour era leaves its own great social-reforming milestone.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

I’ll miss Monty Don, and I know I’m not alone in finding the show a balm for the soul. But this is the perfect opportunity for a shake-up

It’s finally happened. National treasure Monty Don is hanging up his TV garden shears and saying goodbye to Gardeners’ World after more than 20 years as the BBC show’s lead presenter. I’ve been a grower for more than a decade myself, and Monty has been a steady and wise omnipresence throughout my journey – especially as he’s been on the right side of contemporary gardening debates over the environment and wildlife, and the use of chemicals and peat in horticulture.

That is where the overlap between our worlds of growing end, though. My modest patch of a few veg beds at the end of a small, chaotic and mostly gravelled garden is a universe away from the two-acre dreamscape that is Longmeadow, Don’s garden at his home in Herefordshire. I suspect I’m one of millions who’ve looked longingly at Monty’s remarkable space and the impressive infrastructure (not to mention hired hands!) that make it so special, and cursed the fact that such an ideal garden will never be within reach of us ordinary folk. That’s not to say that it hasn’t been a glorious setting for Monty to share his abundance of plant wisdom from, but now that the search for his replacement is presumably on, perhaps this is an opportunity for a little reimagining.

Claire Ratinon is an organic food grower and writer

The Sussexes must have hoped for a warm welcome. Then they read the king’s delicately savage letter about ‘private citizens’

As welcome-back-to-Britain gestures go, the lord chamberlain’s letter, sent on behalf of King Charles on Monday to remind Harry, Meghan and everyone watching that they’re still “private citizens”, was so perfect as to restore me to monarchism. After six years in the wilderness, what greater comfort for Prince Harry than to find himself, once again, in the familiar waters of this country’s passive aggression, being attacked by his father via the merciless phrase “fully respected”, and provoking from the prince a coded up-yours in the form of his publicly stated “surprise”.

Well, it’s up there with better cheese, bread and the NHS, isn’t it?! Even the most Eurocentric American can’t match us for this kind of subtextual bare-knuckle fight. Before we get into what else the returnees may be enjoying this month, let’s fully excavate the letter’s encrypted hostility. First, the king’s repeated use of the words “personal” and “private” – as in “the charitable work of the Duke and Duchess is a personal matter for them both and undertaken in their private capacity” – is so intense, so heavy handed, as to go beyond merely calling his younger son a civilian and come perilously close to the ultimate insult, “middle class”.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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.

Oops, Nige’s round-robin email skipped over the most embarrassing and dark details – let’s set the record straight

Which one of us has not dreamed of getting a personal email from Nigel Farage? So imagine the excitement that Reform supporters must have felt when a message from their leader dropped into their inboxes late on Wednesday night. And mine. Could he also be about to offer everyone in the country £5,000 in return for electing a Reform government?

Sadly not. Even Honest Bob’s planned welfare cuts won’t cover that. Instead, Nige was treating us all to his reflections on his party conference that had just ended. The only drawback was that there appeared to be some gaps in his memory. Let’s be kind and assume he was pushed for space. So let’s help him fill in the blanks.

For Australians, Afghanistan became the country where a generation of soldiers served their longest war. For Afghans, it became a country where another generation struggled to build a new life

A quarter of a century ago today, the world witnessed a devastating series of attacks on the United States that would change the lives of millions across the globe, setting off a vicious cycle of violence that continues to reverberate.

I vividly remember watching the breaking news of the 9/11 attacks on our old television, which we had only recently connected to the cable TV network in Pakistan. We had been sheltering there since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and could not return because of the civil war and the subsequent Taliban rule.

The change in policy is a direct result of sustained pressure from activists and organisers across the Palestine movement. But what comes next?

The announcement on Tuesday by the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, of an import ban on goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as a comprehensive sanctions regime, is a hard-won victory for the Palestine solidarity movement.

This is not simply a change of heart by the government: it is a direct result of sustained pressure from activists and organisers across the Palestine movement, who have consistently held the government’s feet to the fire over its complicity in the atrocities being committed in Gaza and the West Bank. Miliband’s announcement shows us what organised and persistent campaigning can achieve, and inspires confidence that movements can force political change.

Em Hilton is a Jewish writer and organiser. She is the co-founder of Na’amod: UK Jews Against Israeli Occupation, and the policy director at Diaspora Alliance

Some inventions, like the dishwasher, improve our lives. But driverless cars will lobotomise us

I’ve found a hill to die on. Driverless cars. Why? Really, why? If driverless cars are the answer, then what is the question? Who asked for them? Oh yes, they’re fine for the novelty value, for the lols, for the clicks. We probably know someone who’s been to California or China and sent home a video of their driverless journey. Fine fun for feeble minds, if you ask me. And feeble-minded is how we’re all going to end up if this madness takes hold.

It’s been a slippery slope since the invention of automatic transmission, rendering our left legs and arms redundant and sparing us the trouble of feeling our way up and down through the gears. Then there was the coming of satnav, before which time we needed a sense of where we were in the world and which direction we were facing. Now that’s gone, we can find our way anywhere without really knowing where it is. Not good.

Kneejerk reactions to overcrowding will do more harm than good. Ministers should focus on probation

It is not hard to see why ministers are considering converting parts of the women’s prison estate for use by men. While Andy Burnham’s decision to narrow the early-release scheme was born of political necessity, it has made an already acute capacity problem worse. Excluding manslaughter and further sexual offences cut projected early releases from 6,000 to 4,500. The family of PC Andrew Harper, who was killed on duty in 2019, welcomed the assurance that his killers would not be released early. But the change left overcrowded English and Welsh jails with even less room.

The government is trying to innovate. Last week it was announced that £110m will be spent on creating new cells in existing jails, by converting underused spaces such as storage and laundry areas. Deportations are to be speeded up, if foreign governments can be persuaded to cooperate. There is an overdue and welcome commitment to examine how indeterminate imprisonment for public protection sentences can be phased out.

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.

Young people still want partners and children. Governments must address the insecurity and isolation preventing them from building families

Why are people in one of the world’s richest, safest countries having so few children? Singapore is asking that question. In 2000, its fertility rate matched America’s at 1.6 children per woman. By 2025, it had dropped to 0.87 – almost half the US rate. Singapore’s leaders, worried about population collapse, have reached for the chequebook. Each child, including those born to unmarried parents, will get $55,000 in government support by the time they turn 17. Yet a quarter of Singaporeans say they do not intend to have children. Wealth and security, clearly, don’t guarantee more babies.

UN data shows that global fertility fell from 5.3 births per woman in 1963 to 2.2 in 2023. But this masks a growing divide. In some poor sub-Saharan African countries there are around six births per woman. Compare this with England and Wales, where the figure is just 1.39. More than half of the world – including a billion women in India and China – have a fertility rate below the global 2.1 “replacement level” needed to sustain populations without migration. But even in poor countries with high mortality rates and consequently higher replacement rates, births outpace deaths. In Nigeria, for example, the fertility rate of 4.4 exceeds its replacement rate of 2.6 children per woman.

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 a report that said use of the disciplinary measure had almost tripled in England’s secondary schools

Your article quotes Tom Bennett, “a leading expert in behaviour management”, suggesting that internal exclusions are “a form of inclusion” (‘Internal exclusion’ of England secondary school students almost triples in three years, 3 September). That does not reflect my own experience. If a student is internally excluded, it must be as a last resort. I spent several months in the isolation room at my secondary school, and it didn’t feel inclusive to me.

Like many of the students disproportionately affected by internal exclusion, I was from a disadvantaged background. I also had undiagnosed dyslexia. For me, internal exclusion meant I was unable to learn alongside other students – I’d simply get a printed handout from a teacher of the lesson notes and was told to read them.

Warren Brown lists some of the former PM’s achievements, but Stuart Finegan signals deep disappointment with his legacy

Zoe Williams may be right to describe Keir Starmer as a poor politician, but what did we expect (Farewell Keir Starmer, a terrible politician whom we desperately wanted to be something more, 2 September)? After 14 years of economic stagnation and a succession of career politicians as prime minister, we had a leader who previously had a proper job and career outside politics. Starmer’s legacy might be to demonstrate why we need to invest in a better cadre of skilled professional politicians.

Those still pining for Starmer may remind us of achievements such as removing the two-child limit on universal benefit, more free school meals, Best Start family hubs, greater employment rights, increases in the minimum wage, renters’ rights, more GPs, lower waiting lists, the Hillsborough law, better relations with Europe etc. But they shouldn’t bother – no one was listening then, and they certainly aren’t now.

Readers respond to Aditya Chakrabortty’s article about the closure of the Vauxhall plant

The closure of the Vauxhall plant in Luton is not the failure of capitalism but its success (‘Capitalism is dying’: in Luton, these former car workers have a moral tale for our times, 4 September). Producing goods on the cheap and selling for the highest price is why the car plant is now in Turkey. Zero-hours contracts, child labour and governments unable to protect workers are global symptoms. To reverse this we need to own production – nationalise. Marx was right.
Jonathan Hauxwell
Crosshills, North Yorkshire

• To the former Vauxhall worker who believes “capitalism is dying”: no, it is alive and well. Unfortunately, you have paid the price for it.
Ian Osborne
Wichenford, Worcestershire

American sailors who were at sea for 286 days really have nothing to complain about, insists Chris Hardy

You report (4 September) that sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln spent a “record uninterrupted 286 days at sea”. That’s nowhere near a record: Nelson and his fleet blockaded Toulon for two years, 1803-05, without going ashore.

The American sailors complain about the food on their carrier; Nelson’s ships were exposed to terrible weather in which they pitched and rolled violently, and were cold, wet and plagued by rats. No electricity, let alone fridges; they ate salt pork and rock-hard bread full of weevils, drank green water, and every so often fought a battle or sailed to the Caribbean and back.

⛳️ Solheim Cup updates from 6.40am BST at Bernardus Golf
⛳️ Live scores | And send any thoughts to Scott via via email

Europe do indeed escape from their travails on 1 with a half. Alison Lee leaves her birdie putt short, and Nanna Koertz Madsen tidies up. But the USA strike back on 2, Nelly Korda wedging close with her approach on the par five, and Lottie Woad can’t save the day with her 15-foot right-to-left putt. All square in the opening two matches.

Corpuz/Korda A/S Hull/Woad (2)
Koerstz Madsen/Boutier A/S Coughlin/Al. Lee (1)

⚽️ News and updates before the weekend’s football action
⚽️ Premier League: 10 things to watch out for | Mail Tom

Manchester United were back in Europe’s elite competition after a two-year hiatus and in need of something to soothe them after the trauma of their last-gasp coughing up of two points in last Sunday’s Premier League draw at Everton. And before the extremely serious business of the derby here against Manchester City on Sunday. They got it on the back of a first-half performance that burned slowly before catching fire.

Nicolas Jackson is ready to impress, Spurs are scrambled and the 199th Manchester derby takes place at Old Trafford

• Premier League top scorers 2026-27: who is leading race for the golden boot?

With 10 top-flight goal contributions between them across three games already this season, the Chelsea trio of Morgan Rogers, João Pedro and Cole Palmer are the early pace-setters for the Premier League’s most prolific, fluid and high-octane attacking unit. But on the occasion of his 100th Premier League appearance, a scruffier and more ungainly unit will be hoping to steal their thunder, as high-flying Hull try to register a top-flight win against Chelsea for the very first time. Yet to score this season but with a couple of near misses to his name, what Oli McBurnie has thus far lacked in goal contributions he has more than made up for with selfless graft and off-the-ball grunt work, making a total mockery of Steve Clarke’s decision not to include him in Scotland’s World Cup squad. The Hull striker ought to prove a real handful for a decidedly porous home defence, and a goal would be a fitting way to mark a century of Premier League appearances. Chelsea have not won any of their past four league matches against promoted opposition and, given Hull’s blistering start to the season, victory on Saturday seems anything but a foregone conclusion. Barry Glendenning

Chelsea v Hull, Saturday 3pm (all times BST)

Liverpool v Fulham, Saturday 3pm

Crystal Palace v Ipswich, Saturday 3pm

• Hampshire paid £1m by ECB after missing out in 2023

• County challenged decision to give Headingley match

The lack of Ashes cricket in the north of England next summer is the result of a legal dispute that followed the allocation of venues for the 2023 series against Australia, which also involved the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) paying about £1m in damages to Hampshire.

The Guardian can reveal that Hampshire brought a legal challenge against the ECB after missing out on hosting the Ashes in 2023 to Yorkshire, who staged the third Test – which England won by three wickets – at Headingley.

• Second seeded Kazakh comes from set down to win 3-6, 6-4, 6-4

• Sabalenka awaits in title decider after blitzing Jessica Pegula

One set may have already passed in her first US Open semi-final, but Elena Rybakina still had not arrived inside Arthur Ashe Stadium. While an inspired Coco Gauff blew through the first stanza covering every inch of the acrylic surface as their 22,000-strong audience screamed for the Kazakhstani’s blood, Rybakina was wild and erratic from the baseline and her peerless serve was nowhere to be seen.

Nobody reaches the summit of professional without being able to problem-solve through difficult days on courtthough, and Rybakina gave a brilliant showcase of the underrated toughness at the heart of her success as she coolly recovered from a set down to overpower Gauff and seal her spot in her first US Open final with a 3-6, 6-4, 6-4 win.

The inaugural Knight-Stokes Cup was a special occasion not just for the teenagers playing on Lord’s hallowed turf, but for the English game as a whole

State-school cricket has had its day at Lord’s, at last. On a ground that has this summer hosted men’s and women’s international Tests, the Women’s T20 World Cup final and the Hundred finals, on Thursday four school teams played in front of the Pavilion and Father Time for the Knight-Stokes Cup, named after two state-educated cricketers who have captained England’s Test teams.

Heather Knight and Ben Stokes recorded video messages for pupils from Altrincham grammar school, John Hampden grammar school, Penistone grammar school and Chelmsford County high school before they competed in the boys’ and girls’ finals. The privileges did not stop there – full use of the Pavilion dressing rooms, lunch and media duties made this a day to remember and inspire.

It was a night for romance given the astonishing story that Sabah brought with them to Old Trafford for their Champions League debut. This is a club that did not even exist a decade ago and nobody saw their bolt to the title in Azerbaijan coming last season; in 2024-25, they had finished 41 points off the top. The job that their manager, Valdas Dambrauskas, has done since taking over in the summer of last year is extraordinary.

It was also a night for cold, hard reality. Manchester United were back in Europe’s elite competition after a two-year hiatus and in need of something to soothe them after the trauma of their last-gasp coughing up of two points in last Sunday’s Premier League draw at Everton. And before the extremely serious business of the derby here against Manchester City on Sunday. They got it on the back of a first-half performance that burned slowly before catching fire.

England Open squad have internal tensions but the women’s team blends rising talent with experience

Uzbekistan, the host nation, are the favourites to win the 208-team biennial chess Olympiad in Samarkand, which has its opening ceremony on Tuesday, and its first round (of 11) on Wednesday.

The defending champions, India, China and the US are Uzbekistan’s most dangerous rivals. India would have been the open Olympiad favourites but for the shaky form of the world champion, 20-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju, who was the top board gold medallist in Budapest two years ago but is likely to play lower down the order in Samarkand. USA are led by the world No 3 Fabiano Caruana and the world No 5 Wesley So, but their lower boards, including the variable Hans Niemann, look more vulnerable.

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Many mayors welcome power to impose tourist tax but industry warns of ‘irreparable harm’ and job losses

Ministers are facing a backlash from the hospitality industry after they announced mayors in England would be given sweeping powers to levy taxes on holiday accommodation such as hotels and Airbnbs.

The plan, presented on Thursday by Angela Rayner, the local government secretary, will allow mayors to impose a “tourist tax” without a cap on how much they can charge and with few controls on how they can spend it.

Insiders at the firm fear tech’s advancement could cause human extinction, while others are calling their declarations of concern a ‘setup’

A day after a former researcher at Anthropic made an apocalyptic declaration about artificial intelligence, more researchers and staff members at the AI startup publicly agreed with him and posted their own dire warnings.

In response, Elon Musk and other conservative figures on X, formerly Twitter, called the chorus of concerns a “setup” and a “psyop”.

Ukraine’s foreign minister says Russia is deliberately targeting civilians

One person has died and six were injured in this morning’s Russian attack on a petrol station in Kyiv, city mayor Wladimir Klitschko said in the latest update.

In other news, five people died, and 40 were injured after a Dutch tour bus crashed into a roadside barrier and overturned in eastern Switzerland.

The country is one of just three that still permits commercial whaling, while its government has faced mounting pressure to ban the practice

Iceland will submit a bill in February 2027 which could permanently ban whaling in its waters, a move that would leave Norway and Japan as the only two countries to permit commercial whaling.

Whaling in Iceland has been put under intense scrutiny since a government-commissioned report was published in 2023 that found harpooned whales took two hours to die. The report led to a temporary suspension of the hunt that year.

Pro-democracy activists Chow Hang-tung and Lee Cheuk-yan were found guilty of ‘incitement to subversion’ in controversial national security case

Two pro-democracy activists who were put on trial for organising an annual Tiananmen Square massacre vigil in Hong Kong have been sentenced to seven years in jail, in one of the city’s most significant national security cases.

Chow Hang-tung, 41 and Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, were found guilty in August of incitement to subversion. The court found they had “incited other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the state power”.

Widespread damage across Ni‘ihau, Kauaʻi and O‘ahu, while in Japan further heavy rainfall causes widespread flooding

Hurricane Lowell caused significant damage to Hawaii’s western islands this week. On Tuesday night the centre of Lowell tracked 50 miles (80km) from the island of Ni‘ihau in Kauai county as a category 2 storm with winds of up to 110mph. The strong winds resulted in widespread power outages across Ni’ihau, and the islands of Kauaʻi and O‘ahu.

The event was particularly notable because a tornado watch had been issued for Kauaʻi on Monday night and into Tuesday morning. According to research maps from Iowa State University, it was likely to be the first tornado watch in Hawaii’s history. In the event, a tornado was not documented, however hurricanes can produce tornadoes and most often occur in thunderstorms within rain bands away from the centre of the hurricane. Currently, five named stormed have occurred in the central Pacific with the strong El Niño this year being a key driver in the above normal hurricane season, as noted by the National Weather Service.

Global shift towards clean electricity could trigger ‘cascade’ of progress, helping reduce air pollution, cut waste and revive oceans

A rapid global shift to clean electricity could trigger a “cascade” of progress towards repairing the damage to the planet by the climate crisis, according to a report identifying the environmental solutions most likely to bring about change.

The analysis focuses on “positive tipping points” – thresholds beyond which a sustainable technology or practice becomes increasingly cheap, widespread or politically popular, allowing progress to become self-propelling.

Environment Agency says talks under way about increasing prices for industrial users to try to reduce poor water management

Ministers are exploring making water more expensive for some users, in the face of severe supply shortages.

Despite the UK being a famously wet country, the precarious nature of the water supply has been made particularly acute this summer, with almost three-quarters of England and all of Wales in drought and 27 million people facing restrictions on their water use.

Emissions of planet-heating methane and CO2 from natural sources are worsening the climate crisis, paper says

Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world’s forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found.

As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.

Home secretary tells officers to make ‘full use’ of their powers after masked vigilantes cause weekend of chaos

Shabana Mahmood has urged police to curb the activities of far-right, anti-migrant groups which have “obvious malign intent” after a weekend of chaos caused by balaclava-wearing vigilantes.

In a meeting on Thursday, the home secretary told senior officers to make “full use” of their powers, including bans on face coverings, after police were assaulted and ports were disrupted in Kent and Hampshire.

Bronwen James, 30, admitted offences against two girls at schools in Wiltshire and Hampshire, and found guilty of charges involving boy

A former PE teacher is facing a lengthy jail sentence for grooming and sexually abusing three pupils at two schools.

Bronwen James, 30, admitted offences against two girls at schools in Hampshire and Wiltshire and was found guilty by a jury of charges involving a boy.

No 10 says new fleet of trains built in Derby will support 6,000 jobs across UK

A fleet of battery-powered trains is to be built to “bring faster, more reliable journeys to the north”, Downing Street has announced.

The 29 trains, which will be run by TransPennine Express, will be built at Alstom’s Litchurch Lane works in Derby from 2028, supporting 350 local jobs, and nearly 6,000 across the UK, according to the government.

French company Puy du Fou is planning a £600m history-themed park in Oxfordshire. A Guardian investigation has found the company continued working with associates of Konstantin Malofeyev, a pro-Kremlin oligarch under sanctions, on plans for a theme park in Russian-occupied Crimea for longer than it had previously disclosed, and later explored projects in Iran and China.

Business reporter Rob Davies explains his findings, including documents that raise questions about whether Puy du Fou’s activities tested the limits of EU sanctions imposed after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

He also examines the far-right politics associated with Puy du Fou’s founder, Philippe de Villiers, and asks whether the company is a suitable choice to tell Britain’s national story

• Kremlin connections: the Russia links to a £600m UK theme park

Her Horizon Fund seeks $100m to stop practice harming 230m women and girls globally

Frontline activists and leaders in the fight against female genital mutilation, which has affected more than 230 million women and girls worldwide, have welcomed an unprecedented $15.5m (£11.4m) fund aimed at creating “unstoppable momentum” to finally end the practice.

The launch of the fund comes as women’s rights are increasingly under attack and donor funding is in sharp decline, particularly for work led by FGM survivors in local communities. It is thought to be the largest single philanthropic contribution to ending the practice of FGM.

Kevin Reddington says prosecution did not offer evidence that client’s killing of her children constituted murder

Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer on Thursday asked the judge who oversaw the Massachusetts woman’s murder trial to declare her not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, saying prosecutors had failed to ⁠prove that, despite being mentally ill, ⁠she knew killing her ​three young children would be wrong.

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington made the request to Judge William Sullivan six days after the trial ended in a deadlock, and as a fourth member of ⁠the 12-member jury went public to describe how a single juror had prevented the panel from reaching a unanimous verdict.

Testimony from Israeli military insiders involved in surveillance and remote killings features in documentary produced by the Guardian

Testimony from 24 Israeli military insiders ​on the secret ​systems used in ​the war on Gaza​ has been revealed in a new documentary film about the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

NAZA, a film from the Oscar-winning Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, was shown at the Venice international film festival on Thursday as the only documentary competing for its prestigious Golden Lion award.

Iran and its proxies move closer to full control of two shipping chokepoints as regional conflict widens

• Explained: why the fighting in Yemen matters globally

Houthi forces in Yemen are making a concerted drive to take over the country’s Red Sea coast fully, claiming control of the key port of Mocha in the most serious wave of fighting with the Saudi-backed government in years, bringing the Iran-aligned group closer to full control of a key shipping route.

Seizure of the coast and some of the islands in the sea would be a strategic disaster for Saudi Arabia and the US, taking Iran and its proxies closer to full control of two choke points for western shipping on opposite sides of the Arabian peninsula: the Bab al-Mandab at the southern end of the Red Sea and the strait of Hormuz in the Gulf.

Crude jumps above $107 a barrel amid concerns over Middle East conflict and out-of-control government borrowing

Nervous investors across big economies have been dumping government bonds, driving up the cost of borrowing, as surging oil prices amplified fears about rising inflation.

The cost of a barrel of oil jumped 6% to above $107 on Thursday amid concerns that advances by Houthi rebels along the Red Sea coast in Yemen could choke off Saudi crude exports.

US government adviser Paul Christiano warns of risks to AI industry as he joins OpenAI’s non-profit foundation

OpenAI is not on track to reduce the risk of “catastrophic” loss of control to an acceptable level, a member of its non-profit board has said, amid spreading public and political concern that super-advanced AIs could one day wipe out humanity.

Paul Christiano, a US government technology adviser, said: “There is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.”

Billionaire Alex Beard and his former deputy appear in London court over alleged payments to African officials

Glencore’s billionaire former head of oil trading has pleaded ⁠not guilty ⁠to ​two bribery charges after allegedly facilitating payments to west African officials in order to advance the Swiss commodity group’s operations ⁠in the continent.

Alex Beard, 59, denied two counts of conspiracy to make ⁠corrupt payments at Southwark crown court in London on Thursday, in a case brought by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

Boss Richard Walker is ‘proud to be backing Britain’ with a store in the capital, Stanley

• Business live – latest updates

The supermarket chain Iceland has said it will open a shop on the Falkland Islands in early December.

The shop, to be launched in partnership with a local retailer, Kelper Stores, will be the first UK high street brand to have a presence in the British territory and will be in the capital, Stanley.

Dominic Dromgoole’s new book, Time Frames, shows how this format’s stuffy reputation belies the room it has made for daring experiments from Chekhov to Brecht and beyond

How do you make theatre history come alive? One way is through creating lists backed up by quirky essays. I tried that myself in The 101 Greatest Plays, which is one reason why I’m in awe of Dominic Dromgoole who, in Time Frames extends the possibilities of the format and comes up with a book that is passionate, personal, informative and argumentative. It just seems unfair that a director should outperform most of us critics.

He starts with the advantage of a strong framework. His book covers the years from 1865 to 1965, when the proscenium theatre was dominant, and deals with more than 70 playwrights. Today we celebrate the limitless possibilities of theatre with open, apron, traverse and circular stages but Dromgoole enthuses over a time when plays were mainly enclosed behind a proscenium arch. He describes the form as “liberatingly restrictive” like the 14-line sonnet or the 12-bar blues and he has a point.

The 12th edition of the BredaPhoto Festival opens on 11 September 2026. Under the title Our Songs Came Through, the festival in the Dutch city of Breda brings together stories of comfort and resilience

• BredaPhoto Festival 2026: Our Songs Came Through 11 September – 25 October 2026

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor star in a gorgeous love story that spans decades of yearning, while Guy Ritchie brings Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill together for a slick action caper

Feted young actors Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor have teamed up for this melancholy romance about music and missed connection. Mescal plays Lionel, a gifted musician who meets a more scholarly academic, David (O’Connor), while studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, in the midst of the first world war. Reunited after armistice, the two travel around rural Maine together, recording their folk music on the new-fangled “wax cylinders” and – ultimately, fleetingly – falling in love. Director Oliver Hermanus’s previous work includes Living, the Bill Nighy-starring re-imagining of Kurosawa’s 50s classic Ikiru, and this is a similar symphony of longing and decade-spanning desire.
Saturday 12 September, 7.50am, 2.50pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

They join pub landlord Joe for more a night of more convivial chaos. Plus: cosy crime in Brooke Shields’ You’re Killing Me. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, Channel 4
It’s opening time once again at Joe Lycett’s paisley-carpeted boozer, and even though the pub is only open for an hour a week, Lycett isn’t a man to do things by halves. Accordingly, the premises are legit, the bevvies are real and hopefully so is the atmosphere of convivial chaos. This week, Joe welcomes Lenny Henry, who offers Brum solidarity as temporary bar manager, and comic Joanne McNally, who proves a lively punter. Phil Harrison

Film premieres at Venice as researchers question who took famous Spanish civil war shot of ‘falling soldier’, credited to the pair’s Robert Capa alias

She was one of the most fearless female photojournalists of the 20th century, and the first known to have been killed while covering a war. But in life and in death, the work of Gerda Taro has often been overshadowed by the collaborator and lover whose alias she invented and sometimes shared: Robert Capa.

That may be about to change with a new biopic that seeks to pull the pioneering photographer from out of Capa’s shadow, which is premiering at the Venice film festival just as researchers claim to have proof that his most famous and controversial picture was actually taken by her.

Gary Oldman’s hit spy show is as pungently scripted and beautifully performed as ever. Plus: Jack Reacher’s formidable protege gets her own show

There are various blasts from the past as this sour and salty espionage drama returns for season six – although some have more staying power than others. In a development that might hint at a show approaching the end of its natural lifespan (although it’s been renewed for a seventh season), someone is killing former occupants of Slough House. Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb is typically unsentimental about this but other Horses are more concerned – particularly given the return of an old antagonist who proved to be a ruthless and relentless foe with a connection to the team. Slow Horses feels unlikely to surprise us at this point but it’s still pungently scripted and beautifully performed.
Apple TV, from Wednesday 16 September

(Ghostly International)
Unpredictable and utterly beguiling, the septuagenarian beloved by Harry Styles brings a hint of mischief to his innocently charming songs

Haruomi Hosono is one of the most influential figures in Japanese music. In 1969, his psych-folk group Happy End were the first rock group to sing in Japanese; decades later, their song Kaze wo Atsumete was rediscovered for the Lost in Translation soundtrack. He was also an integral member of electronic pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, and scored movies and video games, while his solo albums swing from foundational city pop texts to experiments in ambient and arch exotica.

Now 79, with disciples including Van Dyke Parks and Harry Styles (who named 2022’s Harry’s House after 1973 solo album Hosono House), he still makes whatever music he wants. His 23rd solo album is wilful, playful, unpredictable and utterly beguiling. Rooted in the Japanese concept of omoiyari, roughly translated as compassion, these songs are big-hearted, focusing on warmth and positivity: opening reverie Note of Mothership features a chorus of overlapping voices murmur-singing “we are mothers”; the sweet Happy Holiday repeats its title over an enchantingly simple melody; Sincerely is a sleepy, Leon Redbone-esque strum.

(Edition)
With guests including Robert Glasper, Parlato turns her immaculate phrasing to soft funk, dancefloor numbers and interpretations of Stevie Wonder and Tears for Fears

Hearing Gretchen Parlato’s spellbinding version of the Herbie Hancock song Butterfly was unforgettable when the eloquent LA-born singer’s star glimmered into view in the 2000s. The unique qualities she revealed soon brought her worldwide acclaim. Butterfly would open in an onstage silence only broken by Parlato’s soft handclap on a Brazilian groove, eventually turned into a wordless vocal hook, and then the awestruck natural-world homage of the lyrics written by Hancock’s sister Jean. She would time phrases between deliberately emphatic in-breaths like cymbal hits, and arrestingly morph words in and out of abstract sound.

The Wise Ones arrives as her third album since 2021, when she returned from six years of parenting. Here, she’s backed by longtime partners including guitarist Lionel Loueke, folk-rockish and jazz-influenced multi-instrumentalist Alan Hampton and Parlato’s percussionist husband Mark Guiliana, plus guests including Robert Glasper, Meshell Ndegeocello and Becca Stevens.

(Sony)
Alongside supple and distinctive accounts of Rhapsody in Blue and the Piano Concerto and Preludes, the French pianist showcases his jazz chops in reinterpretations of Gershwin’s timeless songs

Ever since Lucas Debargue took fourth prize at the 2015 international Tchaikovsky competition, he’s refused to be pigeonholed. His distinctive journey brings him now to George Gershwin, complementing the piano concerto and preludes with beguiling original explorations of the composer’s songs in the form of a dozen études. His supple account of Rhapsody in Blue is based on Gershwin’s solo piano arrangement, to which he adds his own partly improvised cadenzas. Like everything here, it comes up fresh as a daisy.

The Piano Concerto in F brings Debargue’s jazz credentials to the fore (he cut his teeth on the club circuit). The Orchestre de Paris under Elim Chan provides an admirably clear and concise accompaniment. The edge-of-your-seat stakes are reminiscent of André Previn.

As the French Canadian superstar returns for her first concerts since she was diagnosed with stiff person syndrome, we count down the best of an unabashedly romantic catalogue. Wind machines at the ready!

When Céline Dion’s era as a foolproof hitmaker ended, she seemed weirdly liberated and more willing to take risks. Witness the video for Ashes: an impressively atmospheric ballad from the soundtrack to Deadpool 2, in which she gently mocks her own image in the company of Ryan Reynolds, in character as the antihero.

An American Chinese student studies Mandarin in Taiwan, in this heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family secrets

What is Taiwan? A former Japanese colony? A centre of the semiconductor industry? A democracy overseen by American imperialism? China’s next military target? An island of Austronesian Indigenous tribes? Is Taipei a cultural emblem of Taiwan, or just another booming global capital out of touch with the rest of the country? What stories will Lily Chen, an American Chinese student at Yale and Rebecca F Kuang’s funny and deadpan protagonist in Taipei Story, discover in this melting pot while spending 10 weeks learning Mandarin?

A prolific maverick with rare satirical wit, Kuang has built a career debunking authoritative institutions. Babel (2022) highlights the prejudices of the British empire through a fantastical Oxford translation institute; Yellowface (2023) transplants a heist thriller into the dark heart of American publishing; Katabasis (2025), a journey into the underworld, gives the academic inferno at Cambridge a new lease of death. Centring on a tough Mandarin language school, Taipei Story explores the torture, hilarity and pretension of learning a second language, but here Kuang also offers a heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family wounds.

Beautifully written by her daughter, this is a funny and intimate eulogy to the 60s star of The Avengers who went on to specialise in fierce, complicated women

The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra? I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time. In an interview with Michael Parkinson, she observed how marriage was “all rather pagan, don’t you think? … A lot of women see it as security. Well, I’m not a woman who yearns for security.”

Taking over from Honor Blackman as the high-kicking Emma Peel in the 1960s spy series The Avengers, Rigg refused to play subordinate sidekick to Patrick Macnee’s Steed, turning her character into a beacon of female empowerment. When Rigg learned that not only was Macnee paid significantly more than she was, but the camera operator was too, she demanded a raise. She got it, but that didn’t stop the press from labelling her as a grasping diva. Fifty years later, she told Newsnight: “Equal pay. That’s what feminism means to me, only that.”

A refreshingly optimistic book that asks us to grasp the educational opportunities of AI, rather than shrink from them

In 1979, the government asked Wilfred Cockcroft, a now largely forgotten maths lecturer from the University of Hull, to write a report about a crisis in the teaching of his subject to children. It was wide-ranging and meticulous, and included a chapter on a technological innovation that was suddenly becoming available to the average consumer: the calculator.

Many parents and teachers feared that the gadget would undermine a basic skill and a pillar of education – one of the sacred three Rs – producing generations of dumbed-down drones who could reach for a device in their pockets to avoid the hard graft of arithmetic.

A journalist embarks on a wild goose chase that might – or might not – be informative about the male condition

Recovering from surgery at home in upstate New York in 2023, Jon Ronson awoke to a string of texts from his adult son about a weird evening he just had at a stranger’s castle in Connecticut. Having gone along with a friend who’d been invited to a party there, he arrived to find a few lost-looking young women with the sixtysomething host, Chris Mark, a steel heir filming a reality show about “101 princesses” whose first rule was “Never say no to King Chris”.

As a parent, Ronson is worried; as a reporter of more than 30 years on the cranks-and-crooks beat, he’s already on the clock. After trawling online whispers of sinister goings-on at the castle, he decides to pay a visit to Mark, who proudly shows off the stalactites and waterfall in his “cave-themed” bedroom before explaining how he picks up women on dating apps to “adapt” them to life as “princesses”. “The only girls that really work are drug addicts ... they don’t know what’s going on,” he says. Almost touchingly, Mark asks Ronson to sign an NDA, and the book describes Mark flooding his phone with threats when he declines.

PlayStation 5; Insomniac Games
Logan is well realised by Liam McIntyre and some exquisite character art, but there are lapses in narrative and emotional arcs and some of the combat feels like a chore

It was always going to be difficult to follow Spider-Man. Insomniac’s three games based around the web-slinger are masterpieces of superhero wish fulfilment, allowing you to swoop above a depiction of Manhattan alive with graffiti artists, roving journalists and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, his life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems the ideal protagonist for a moody action adventure. Yet somehow this well-made game falls short of its potential.

Set years before the founding of the X-Men, Marvel’s Wolverine sees a disenfranchised Logan falling back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination and the X Team are out to stop him – but there is a secret buried in Wolverine’s past that’s about to cause an eruption. It’s a decent setup, filled with the sort of intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we expect from the X-Men.

Once hailed as the future, even the likes of Google, Sony and Microsoft have struggled to make streaming games fun, fast or affordable

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In August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza.) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future.

Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later.

Historically a new Grand Theft Auto game inspired controversy around violence – but this time people are getting exercised about its romance

There was never any doubt that Grand Theft Auto VI’s extended look would elicit a viral reaction from the internet. Having won the Game Awards’ Most Anticipated award twice consecutively, Rockstar’s forthcoming crime opus is one of the most frothed-over games in recent memory, or indeed ever. It’s nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.

One aspect of the game has provoked an unexpectedly vehement response on social media: not violence, but romance. Protagonists Lucia and Jason are in love, you see, and as a player, part of your job is keeping their spark alive and their relationship strong, so that their criminal escapades are underpinned by a strong connection to one another. Holding hands, enjoying a date at the beach, spontaneously texting one another when apart – all of these interactions will strengthen their bond. You’ll be putting in a lot of work to ensure this couple thrives, which is why some people have come to believe that playing GTA VI counts as micro-cheating.

As one card recently sold for £12m, opportunistic thefts have surged – envelopes are being opened en route, costing small businesses thousands

Pokémon’s success over the last 30 years has seen it grow from a much-loved Game Boy classic, to a world-dominating brand with TV shows, spin-off games, toys and even a theme park. The trading card game is a huge part of that, with more than 85bn cards printed over its lifetime, and the appetite for them shows no signs of slowing down. Packs get snapped up after release so quickly it’s now almost impossible to find them in shops, and a booming resale market is driving the hobby into murky waters.

One card recently sold for an eye-watering £12m, and an increasing number of people have gotten into the collecting business on the hunt for huge profits, leading to a rise in thefts targeting card shops. More recently though, some small businesses have reported that their sales have been hit by thieves targeting envelopes within Royal Mail, leading to thousands in lost revenue.

Hampstead theatre, London
Maria Friedman plays a 15-year-old with a rare ageing condition in a heartfelt and funny show that manages to sustain its sweetness

It’s a bizarre concept for a musical: a girl with a rare condition that causes her to age four times faster than her peers, in a family so dysfunctional that she’s the normal one. Meanwhile, the musical highlights are songs about cheque fraud and scurvy. And yet, somehow, through all this artifice and elaborate setup comes a show so sincerely heartfelt, one that is genuine, hilarious and utterly endearing.

Kimberly Akimbo started out as a play, in 2001, by Pulitzer prize-winner David Lindsay-Abaire, adapted into a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori (Shrek, Fun Home, Caroline, or Change) in 2021. It was lauded on Broadway, where audiences fell for its feels and kooky charm and it won five Tony awards.

Yard theatre, London
Starkly staged panorama of Black female experience rushes through its scenes but is delivered with feeling by terrific cast

It has been 50 years since this “choreopoem” by Ntozake Shange premiered on Broadway and brought the emotions and experiences of Black women to the stage. And yet, until now – in this production directed by Diane Page for the Yard theatre’s reopening – it has never received a major London run.

Collectively, the poems form a rich panorama: tales of domestic abuse bound up in a threatening marriage proposal; infidelity that brings a devastating HIV diagnosis; and an eight-year-old girl who is inspired by the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. In so many ways, they could have been written yesterday. Journeying between US cities including Chicago, St Louis, New York and San Francisco, seven brightly coloured “Ladies” – played by five actors here – cry out their stories, ready to be heard. Shange’s lyrical writing mixes their pain with surges of joy, as each woman takes her turn in the spotlight while the others watch on in witness and support.

Manfred Karge’s play about a woman acting as her dead husband was a cause célèbre in the 80s. It remains a bracing portrait of a divided person in a divided culture

It was Pierre Audi, the much-mourned founder of the Almeida, who way back in 1986 sent me a coffee-stained copy of Jacke wie Hose.

Manfred Karge’s one-woman play is a study of female survival in a terrifying world. Ella is a working-class woman who takes on the identity of her dead husband, Max, to endure what Brecht memorably dubbed “the dark times”: the 12 years of Nazi rule. But Karge extends this to include the division of Germany into two nation states (one communist, one capitalist) and the reconstruction that followed.

Cadogan Hall, London
The 78-year-old has astonishing range but gets bogged down in middling rock, though later delivers some gorgeous acoustic songs – and a slinky Marvin Gaye cover

Todd Rundgren is a confusing man. After his tune-packed 1972 album Something/Anything? drew comparisons to Carole King and Brian Wilson, he took a pharmacopoeia of psychedelics and made a vexing masterpiece, A Wizard, a True Star, with no singles at all. He’s produced classic albums by Meat Loaf and the New York Dolls but he’s also released a record of nothing but vocals (A Cappella) and the world’s first interactive album (No World Order). Counting only the artists who appeared on his last two albums, his fans include Trent Reznor, Robyn and the Lemon Twigs. He called his memoir The Individualist.

Rundgren certainly looks the part. With his Addams Family hair, tinted goggles and limber dance moves, he could be a goth raver. Everything he says sounds teasingly sarcastic, even when he’s thanking the audience for spending their “discretionary income” on a ticket. He says the curfew means he can’t tell stories about the songs but it would have been worth sacrificing a couple of his two-hour show’s stodgier numbers to hear them.

After a year of frenzied conjecture, the new hosts putting the razzle back into Strictly are Johannes Radebe, Emma Willis and Josh Widdicombe. They talk night sweats, sparkly pants – and the hilarious fake show cooked up to fool the press

Johannes Radebe, one of the three new presenters of Strictly Come Dancing, can barely contain his glee. Asked where they were when they heard they’d got the job, Radebe is quick to wind up his co-hosts. “We’ll never forget that call,” he grins. “It was a weekday afternoon and I was at home, preparing for that night’s performance of [West End musical] Kinky Boots. But go on, tell the Guardian where you two were.”

“We all got the same message, asking us to jump on a Zoom,” says Emma Willis. “We didn’t know if it was good news or bad news.” Josh Widdicombe picks up the story: “I thought, ‘Surely they wouldn’t tell me to my face if I hadn’t got it? They’d just text my agent or something.’”

Finalist in 2025’s inaugural celebrity iteration will be the host of several variants, which will see different characters banished, murdered and victorious

In another twist for the intrigue-cloaked world of The Traitors, Nick Mohammed is to star in the new West End play based on the ridiculously gripping TV series.

Mohammed, a finalist in the BBC’s first series of The Celebrity Traitors last year, will now play the host of the show, effectively taking over the role of Claudia Winkleman for the stage version. There are several different variants of the play, written by John Finnemore and directed by Robert Hastie, so audiences over the course of its run will see different outcomes as characters are banished, “murdered” and exposed as faithful or treacherous in the fierce competition to win a cash prize. The Traitors – Acts of Betrayal begins performances at the Gillian Lynne theatre in London in May.

The Bill & Ted actor answers your questions about working with Keanu Reeves, whether there will be a fourth instalment and nights out in Brixton with the Death Wish director

You were born in London but grew up in America. When do you feel most British? DonarudoToranpu
The UK is still my second home. I’ve worked there a lot as an adult. When I’m back in London, I like walking on Hampstead Heath, so I would say that’s where I feel most at home.

Having played Marko in The Lost Boys and then John Polidori in Haunted Summer, have you been tempted to take on another vampire-related role? And was getting staked to death while you were sleeping a bit of a disappointing end for Marko – what would have been your preferred way of going out in style? Death by stereo, perhaps? Finbarre and MoreorLesPaul
I’d love to do another vampire movie. I love those characters. They’re interesting and great fun to play. There are some really good vampire movies – I’m grateful I was in one that has, for some reason that none of us can figure out, really stood the test of time. And I love Marko’s death. As an actor, the first time you get staked is the most memorable.

The Ali G and Borat creator is reported to be taking the lead in The Popinjay Cavalier, a swashbuckling comedy Tarantino is developing for early 2027

He will soon be seen resuming his old Staines rudeboy persona in the film
Ali G: Who Iz I?, but Sacha Baron Cohen may also be eyeing a new departure – on stage.

The actor will reportedly star in Quentin Tarantino’s first play, The Popinjay Cavalier, which is billed as a “rambunctious comedy of deception and disguise” and a “sweeping celebration of theatre and its heightened romance”, set in 1830s Europe. According to Deadline, Baron Cohen will play the swashbuckling title character in the play, which Tarantino will also direct.

Exclusive: Southern Cryonics operates out of a shed in Holbrook in rural NSW. Experts say reanimation is ‘a dream’ but true believers are willing to pay for a second chance at life

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I’m standing atop a very tall ladder, peering down through a haze of liquid nitrogen vapour into a giant stainless steel flask containing three smaller containers.

Inside the smaller wedges – which are labelled 005, 006, 007 – are three of Peter Tsolakides’ “patients”. The frozen bodies belong to people who, before their death, paid handsomely to be cryogenically frozen in the hope of one day being brought back to life.

From an energy-efficient bungalow in the South Downs to an historic chapel in Northumberland

After months of testing and countless hours seated, our endurance sitter picked the best office chairs for every budget

• The best gaming chairs – tested

What’s the most important thing when you’re spending hours in front of a computer? Is it having the fastest internet? The sharpest screen? The perfect keyboard? No. When you’re spending most of your day on your bottom, the most crucial element is what’s directly underneath.

With a good office chair, you can handle a long working day without any feelings of discomfort. With a bad one, you can expect backache, neck ache, tender glutes and assorted nagging pains. Who wants to return to work when the last day left you feeling achy and decrepit?

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The creative director talks 80s knitwear, joyful knickers and a love of Boots with the Filter

• How I Shop with Millie Mackintosh

Laura Jackson is a creative director and broadcaster who works across design, food and culture. She co-founded the homewares website Glassette in 2021 and later founded the skincare brand Rocco. Her broadcasting career spans television, radio and digital.

Jackson launched a collection with British jewellery brand Astley Clarke in September 2026, featuring gemstones, celestial motifs and tarot symbolism.

Christmas might be months away, but beauty Advent calendar waiting lists are filling up fast. From cult favourites to cruelty-free picks, here are the ones worth buying

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As I write, an ice-cream van has just parked outside my flat. It’s the middle of this year’s umpteenth heatwave, and I’m finally understanding the appeal of a cold shower. That can only mean one thing: it’s time to start testing the best beauty Advent calendars.

I wish I was joking, but many beauty brands and retailers have been curating their 2026 beauty Advent calendars since before last Christmas. And since these calendars offer a selection of high-end cosmetics, bestselling beauty staples and new launches at far less than their usual combined price, they’ve become a festive staple for beauty fanatics.

From loafers to lunch boxes to fancy stationery, these picks for kids, teens and grownups will bring that new-term energy, whatever your age

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Shiny shoes. Freshly sharpened pencils. New rucksack. Back-to-school season is here, and even for those of us no longer in full-time education, the energy of this time of year is undeniably one of fresh starts and renewed momentum.

A couple of well-chosen items, from a notebook to inspire ideas to a lunch box that might encourage you to bring in your own food, are often all it takes to feel a touch more pulled together after a languorous summer. So whether you’re looking for school kit or your own stuff, here’s our pick of the best back-to-the-grind products for kids, teens and grownups.

It has become common for people to wait in long lines for cafes, bakeries and ice-cream shops. But why? And what do the owners think?

At 9.45am on a warm Saturday in September, a queue snakes down the pavement in Notting Hill, west London. Stretching for 20 yards past office blocks, estate agents and cafes, the line is waiting peacefully for an unusual morning snack: frozen yoghurt. The purveyor is the dessert shop Yo-Chi, which opened only a fortnight ago, one of the many hospitality businesses making queueing an increasingly common part of the British dining experience.

“We wait in line for everything now,” says 23-year-old Hannan Mahamud as she stands midway down the queue with three friends. “I queued for an hour the other week for a cookie, although it wasn’t worth it. We heard about Yo-Chi through a creator on TikTok who works in an office building across the road and posts queue updates. We thought it might be a fun day out.”

Make the most of the early-autumn glut of fruit with this quick, squidgy-crumbed bake that’s bursting with berries

Every year, I get annoyed with myself for not making the most of blackberry season, and then it’s gone before I’ve had a chance really to enjoy them. They’re such great berries to bake with, and here I’ve scattered them in a simple ricotta cake. It’s a quick, one-bowl bake with a perfectly squidgy crumb that’s bursting with fruit.

As the colder nights draw in, I’m craving elevated classics that remind me of childhood. It’s all about fish fingers, pies, sausages and eggs – and chips with everything

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Last weekend, my family congregated at a restaurant in Edinburgh to celebrate my parents’ diamond wedding anniversary. Good though the meal was, the farewell lunch my mum prepared the next day sparked more in the way of fond reminiscence. With her retro feast of chicken kiev, oven chips and peas, we could almost have been back around our kitchen table 30 years ago (in those days, though, my mum would never have allowed the younger generation to add ketchup).

It’s also the kind of meal that feels apt for the change of season, for the first weeks back at school or work, when everyone’s finding their feet and wants something easy and familiar. Thomasina Miers’ fish fingers and mushy peas fit the bill, too, as does Rowley Leigh’s fish pie and Tim Hayward’s nan’s corned beef, with yet more chips and peas. If all that’s too much of a good thing, my own corned beef hash might appeal instead? For a more specifically Scottish take on that combination, I love Colman Andrews’ idea of adding black pudding to classic mince and tatties (Rachel Roddy’s hearty cheese and chip omelette, meanwhile, would have been brilliant if we’d actually had any chips left over – time may move on, but teenagers don’t change).

Whether you go for traditional champagne or sherry, or branch out with muscadet and picpoul, an appetite-whetting glass of wine will set you up for the evening ahead

Beginnings are important. As a writer, I’m all too aware of this: from the right introduction, the rest tends to flow. The same logic applies to drinks: a good beginning eases proceedings. For this reason, I am unbendingly particular about how I take my morning coffee and, if I’m drinking, what form an evening’s aperitif should take. Life’s too short for bad beverages, after all.

An aperitif is arguably less a specific drink than an appetite-whetting moment with a glass of something. But what? Typically, when it comes to wine, an aperitif will be light and crisp, with any fruit character at the more green or citrussy end of the spectrum. Brioche-y sparkling wine, be that champagne, crémant or something English, and dry sherry such as fino and manzanilla, with their savoury notes, are traditional choices to ready your palate for food.

There’s a risk in trying to get our girls away from frilly skirts that we swing all the way to a different kind of enforcement, advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith writes

• Read more Leading questions

I am the mother of a six-year-old girl, and I have relatively progressive views about gender. Among other things, I try to give my daughter a choice of clothes that are practical – T-shirts, leggings – and that tend to be unisex in colour scheme. There are no overly fussy and frilly skirts and dresses in pink and sparkles in her wardrobe. As much as possible, I try to buy non-sweatshop brands. These choices are part of a world system of values I want to show my daughter – that being a “girl” is so much more than just wearing a frilly dress; that we can have well-made things without contributing to the suffering of others.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, loves buying these sorts of clothes for her granddaughter. She is a kind and caring woman, and this is one of her love languages. These clothes are often gauche, overly feminine, expensive and poorly made.

Jasper stands accused of being wasteful but feels aggrieved that Mindy says he’s being lazy. Is this a race to the bottom? You decide

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

Opening new products when old ones aren’t empty is wasteful – and he does it to avoid cleaning up

As weight loss drugs have risen all around the world, it has reshaped users’ relationships for better and for worse

As GLP-1 use continues to rise in the US and the UK, people’s bodies are being reshaped – as are their relationships.

“Relationships tend to develop a sense of equilibrium and predictability over time,” says Dr Lindsey Berisha, a licensed clinical psychologist who has worked with clients using GLP-1s for over 10 years. “When one partner undergoes a significant change, it can shift that equilibrium, and even positive change can create uncertainty for both partners.”

He was the gorgeous furry tabby who made my day, even when he waltzed into my flat just to finish my takeaway. Now he’s a campus celeb, with a part-time job guarding the doors of the village shop

In 2022, when I moved into halls of residence at the University of Sheffield, my biggest concern was no longer having a furry friend to come home to, as I’d had a cat since I was 11 years old. Then I met Harold.

My first encounter with this gorgeous tabby was quite unusual. One day, in our 10-bed flat, a flurry of messages appeared on the group WhatsApp chat after my fellow roommates caught an intruder on the sofa, innocently munching on my leftover pizza.

Solid battery life, snappy performance and quality software make for a great smaller phone with a killer camera

Google’s latest Pro phone is out to prove it has the best camera on a smartphone while embracing customisation, allowing you to change the look and feel of your photos far beyond simple filters even if that means making them technically worse.

The Pixel 11 Pro packs the best of Google’s hardware and software into a still-pocketable and easy to handle frame, instantly making it a contender for best smaller phone of the year.

Screen: 6.3in 120Hz QHD+ OLED (495ppi)

Processor: Google Tensor G6

RAM: 12 or 16GB

Storage: 256, 512GB or 1TB

Operating system: Android 17

Camera: 50MP + 48MP UW + 48MP 5x tele; 42MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 7, UWB, NFC, Bluetooth 6, Thread and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (1.5m for 30 minutes)

Dimensions: 152.7 x 71.9 x 8.4mm

Weight: 204g

Transport for London has fined me and warned that if I don’t pay it will possibly destroy my car

I paid the £12.50 London Ulez charge on my Amex card within hours of driving through the zone. I was then fined £90 for non-payment. According to my card issuer, Transport for London (TfL) had failed to collect the £12.50.

TfL’s letter threatened a £180 fine, rising to £360, and possible destruction of my car, if I did not pay. My appeal was rejected.

Thefts spike during freshers’ week so make sure you choose a good lock and check your insurance

For hard-up students, a bike is a low-cost way to travel. But with cycle theft at an all-time high, experts are urging young people not to skimp on insurance and to buy a good lock.

Recent data from Aviva shows one in five (19%) of insurance claims involving student possessions relates to bicycles.

I arranged for my daughter to attend three sessions during the school holidays but the venue and one of the dates were changed

I booked my daughter for three sessions during the school summer holidays at The Gymnastics Academy. The reservation was made and paid for last November because of a promotional offer.

In June, I received emails from The Gymnastics Academy, confirming a session for a venue I had not booked. I was concerned my account had been hacked.

Can blending these popular fruits in a smoothie adversely affect the berries’ nutritional benefits? Experts weigh in

This year was shaping up to be a banner year for bananas: they were lauded as “2026’s big viral taste”, landed pride of place as Prada’s new lip balm flavor, and were even deemed “the next pumpkin spice”.

But this summer, the Mel Robbins Podcast featured Dr Rhonda Patrick, a biomedical scientist, who said that adding banana to a blueberry smoothie could adversely affect the nutritional benefits of the berries.

Research finds temperature and amount of hot drinks consumed heightens possibility of developing disease

Drinking very hot tea and coffee triples the risk of developing cancer of the gullet, the world’s largest study of the link between them has found.

The findings show that people should let very hot cups of tea and coffee cool down until they are comfortable to drink, in order to reduce their risk of the disease, cancer experts said.

Key regions of the brain linked to movement, learning and emotions were affected and may lead to cognitive problems

Babies born to mothers with anaemia have smaller brains, particularly in key regions linked to movement, learning and the regulation of emotion, according to a study.

Researchers said the differences, first detected at the age of one, could lead to cognitive problems when children started school.

Who’s more likely to steal sweets from a child? According to science, it’s the rich. A study seemingly confirming our suspicions about the moral behaviour of the wealthy was one of the winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel prizes, which honour research that makes you laugh and then think. Science editor Ian Sample tells Madeleine Finlay what the researchers think could be behind the phenomenon, and they explore some of the other awards, including one for a surprising quality we look for in our friends and another for a biomechanical definition of kissing

He put personality into boxers, collaborated with the pope (sort of) and is to thank for novelty socks. The British designer’s new book reveals there’s more to Smith than his stripes

In July, the British designer Paul Smith celebrated his 80th birthday and he has now released a memoir to mark the occasion. Threads: My Life in Style tells Smith’s story, from growing up in Nottingham and leaving school with no qualifications to selling suits to celebs, including Gary Oldman and David Bowie.

Here are nine of our favourite lesser-known takeaways from the book.

I’ve always cinched my outfits at the waist, but shifting to a looser silhouette has helped me keep my cool in more ways than one

This was the summer of the Great Untuck. The long hot summer of 2026 finally taught me to do what fashion has been nagging me about for years, which is to quit tucking in my shirts and T-shirts. To stop assuming that the top half of an outfit must be neatly cinched by the waistband of the skirt or trousers.

It wasn’t a style epiphany, to be fair. It was just too hot to do anything else. An extended run of hot weather at home changes how you dress. In the old-school type of British heatwave, which lasted about half a week, I was too giddy with excitement at not having to wear a cardigan to think more strategically. But this summer was different. And eventually I discovered what hot-climate cultures have always known, which is that loose, generously sized clothing that maximises sun protection while minimising skin contact is way more pleasant to wear in the heat than anything short and tight.

Designer mixes burnt-out velvet and shredded denim with a mythology that keeps getting more profitable

The opening show of fashion’s month of catwalks was not on the official schedule, but Viola Davis and Cynthia Erivo were snuggled on to celebrity-packed benches in a cathedral-sized marble hall where tapestry-hung walls and a gilded coffered ceiling framed a view over lower Manhattan.

Ralph Lauren, 86, took his bow at the end of this women’s wear show casually dressed in a varsity jacket spelling out New York. In an industry obsessed with youth and novelty, Lauren is more relevant than ever in his ninth decade.

From face tints and self-tan to summer scents, these lightweight buys saw me through multiple heatwaves

You’ll normally find me looking back on my favourite products of the past 12 months at year’s end. But this summer has been so freakishly hot and sweaty it has required its own toolkit and, by extension, its own list of exceptionally well-performing products that deserve rapturous commendation.

The first is Refy’s Skin Base (£30), a sheer face tint so thin and so lightweight it has been all I could bear to wear since July. It’s suitable for all skin types, but not at all appropriate for those who hate any hint of shine. While the texture is totally ungreasy, breathable and so comfortable as to be imperceptible, it does look unmistakably dewy, so avoid if you’re devoted to matte. Personally, I take the view that, in this heat, one might as well steer into the skid, but I am, admittedly, at an age when a juicier look works in my skin’s favour. Anyway, this is makeup that truly feels like absolutely nothing, and what it lacks in coverage can be made up with concealer where needed. Maximum points from me (I wear shade 140N).

Repurposed railway lines make accessible and family-friendly walking and cycling routes. Here are some of the best, from Somerset to the Highlands of Scotland

Start/finish Coombs Road in Bakewell to Blackwell Mill in Chee Dale, but there are lots of access points along the way
Distance 8.5 miles
Cycle, hike or ride a horse along the Monsal Trail to explore a swathe of Derbyshire’s industrial history. This former stretch of the Midland Railway line winds past the imposing structures of two 18th-century cotton mills, through illuminated railway tunnels and over the Headstone Viaduct, which gives glorious views of the River Wye and Monsal Dale below. Interpretation and listening panels along the route explain the area’s history, geology and wildlife, while a short detour on to Monsal Head offers a panoramic view of the viaduct itself. Pause here for lunch or a pint at the Monsal, or stop in at Hassop Station Cafe, which offers bike rental alongside hefty sandwiches, homemade cakes and wood-fired pizza at weekends.
monsaltrail.org.uk

A remote 18th-century chapel deep in Sami lands is the goal of the Präststigen, a 37-mile trail that traverses some of the country’s most spectacular scenery

I wasn’t exactly in “Sunday best”, but I had made some effort. Well, I’d changed my underwear for the first time in a couple of days and given myself a baby-wipe bath. Still, as we filed into the chapel at Alkavare, I felt more a member of an expedition than a congregation. We sat on the low wooden benches, waterproof jackets rustling and leather walking boots stamping on the flagstone floor to keep warm. Fortunately, the priest, Mogens Amstrup Jacobsen, appeared to be a “man of the Gore-Tex”, as well as a man of the cloth, as he unzipped his own black rain jacket to reveal his dog collar. As the service began, the Arctic wind whipped through cracks in the dry stone walls, insulated only with reindeer hair, and candles flickered in their brass sconces.

I had hiked to Alkavare following the Präststigen, or “Priests’ trail”, a 37-mile (60km) route from Kvikkjokk that could stake a claim as Europe’s wildest pilgrimage route, and certainly one of its most beautiful. The Präststigen follows the path that priests would once have taken to the chapel, built in 1788, to perform a service each summer, and today, on the last weekend in July, intrepid hikers and perseverant pilgrims can attend that same service.

Conservationists have helped Cantabrian brown bears claw their way back from the edge of extinction in the beautiful mountains of Asturias – and carefully controlled nature tourism allows visitors to see them

Once upon a time, in the woods outside Pola de Somiedo, lived a family of Cantabrian brown bears. The villagers reported sightings of a mother bear who had lost a leg to a hunter’s trap, her two cubs and two adult males, either of which might have been the father. In those days, at the end of the 1980s, they seemed to be the last of their kind in this part of Asturias. Meanwhile, the wider population dropped to about 60 bears across the surrounding Cantabrian mountain range that gave the species its name.

They have since clawed their way back from the edge of extinction here in northern Spain, and nature guide Luis Frechilla believes their numbers may now be upwards of 500 again. “They’re still classed as endangered,” he tells me, until the official count hits 1,000. But relative abundance makes them much easier to see today in Somiedo natural park – one of Spain’s first such protected areas, established in 1988.

On a self-drive break in search of Lake Saimaa’s autumn colours, we encountered blue skies, cosy lakeside cabins and saunas, great food – and lots of stubbornly green trees

I wasn’t sure what to expect from an autumn trip to Finland, my first ever to the country, but spending an afternoon sprawled on a deck chair beneath blazing blue skies certainly wasn’t part of it. After a morning walking beneath the leafy canopy at the Mustila Arboretum – the oldest, most extensive botanical garden in the country – and a lunchtime wine-tasting (more of which later), my friend Sara and I pitched up at the Sahanlahti resort, deep in the Finnish Lakeland, only to find sun-drenched scenery that felt far more Mediterranean than Nordic.

Sahanlahti was the second stop on a mid-September road trip from Helsinki to the shores of Lake Saimaa; a journey in search of ruska, the spectacular autumn colours that blaze for a few short weeks before the long Finnish winter sets in. However, on our opening drive east from the airport to the Radalla resort, set on Lake Urajärvi, most of the thousands of trees we drove past were resolutely green, with just the very tips of the leaves tinged with auburn, like a foliage balayage.

Since Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, there has been a 63% rise in Americans renting properties in Scotland. Politics is one reason – but there are many other surprising motivations …

Four years ago, when Tammi Gaw, a 50-year-old property adviser, moved from Washington DC to Glasgow with her Scottish partner, friends and family laughed at her. “People back home kept asking me: ‘Ha ha, why would you want to move to Scotland, where it rains all the time?’ Now those same people are asking me: ‘Hey, how do I move there?’”

They are not alone. According to data from Rightmove, 28% of inquiries from Americans about buying a home in the UK are about Scotland, a larger number than for London. And a recent survey from lettings platform Goodlord reported a 63% rise in the number of Americans renting properties in Scotland since Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024.

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

Every now and then the Thursday quiz stares broodingly out of a rain-streaked window, adopts an immaculate cheekbone-highlighting pose and hums a bit of David Sylvian. The sun shines high above, the “birbs” swoop down upon the crosses of old grey churches, and September is here again. Fifteen questions on topical news, general knowledge and obscure trivia await you. Let us know how you get on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 264

Allendale, Northumberland: My late-flowering poppies have lit up the garden, and it’s not only me who’s taken an interest

The opium poppies have now set seed, their leaves rattling like crisp packets, the vents beneath their pod lids open for the seeds to be scattered. Dotted throughout my flower borders, adding stature to the vegetable garden, Papaver somniferum is the breadseed poppy, its large, floppy petals unpredictable in colour: pale lilac, purple, pink or sometimes with fringed petals. The unexpected brings a freedom and a randomness to the garden.

Those blue-grey seeds are sprinkled on bagels and bread, baked into cakes or ground as a thickener for curries, adding protein, plant fats and trace elements such as manganese. But in its unripe state this is the plant that gives opium, a two-sided drug, both medicinal and destructive as a sedative – its specific name somniferum means sleep-bringing.

Rob Pike was 17 when he and three of his closest friends were in a car that smashed into a tree and split in half. He explains how he coped with the devastation

After the car stopped rolling and came to rest on its side, Rob Pike remembers being “hyperfixated” on the rainwater pouring down his face. When he tried to wipe it away with his arm, he realised it wasn’t water. “I look at my arm and it is covered in blood. The next moment, it hit me: oh my gosh, we crashed.”

He was in the back seat next to his best friend, Daniel McCoy. “I look up to my left to see if Daniel’s OK. He’s probably about a foot away from my face and … he’s not OK. I’m looking at my dead best friend and I wish that wasn’t my last memory of him, seeing how broken he was.” They were 17.

Every decade, the BBC’s continued existence must be secured through an elaborate multi-year negotiation with the government. But what does charter renewal actually involve – and will it secure the BBC’s long-term future?

In a temperature-controlled room in a suburb of Reading, the basis of the BBC’s existence is kept in a flat, square, faded navy case, the size of a large pizza box. Inside is a stack of vellum – calfskin, pounded until it forms a milky and translucent paper that is supposed to last for thousands of years. The queen’s red wax seal is secured to its base with red and gold cord. The pages are strapped down with two strips of white elastic, more PE kit than Buckingham Palace.

The document is unique. Like hundreds of other British organisations, the BBC was founded via a Royal Charter, granted by the monarch of the day. But unlike Oxford colleges, the British Film Institute, or the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, the BBC was given an expiry date. When the British Broadcasting Corporation was founded, in the 1920s, radio was seen as such an uncertain, risky technology that the government only gave it a 10-year guarantee, after which it would have to seek a new charter.

Visitors got a first glimpse of the medieval artefact after it went on display at the British Museum in London

On the day Bayeux tapestry tickets were released, Megan Stockwell was at the beach. She was so determined to lock down her spot, that she sat with her toes in the sand for an hour, waiting in the online queue.

“The whole ticket buying experience felt like what other people would do to get Taylor Swift tickets. I was like, ‘oh God, am I, like, the geek version of this?’” she recalled.

Ask-a-Muslim campaign takes to streets as country faces prospect of extremists entering highest levels of government

Not far from one of Scandinavia’s biggest shopping malls, Kashif Virk stood on the pavement, handing out flyers and smiling at those who passed by. On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon, the Swedish-born imam had taken to the street to invite people to ask him anything they had ever wanted to know about Islam.

For years, Sweden’s far right has peddled its own, distorted view of Islam, portraying it as being at odds with Swedish values. The Ask-a-Muslim – or Fråga en Muslim – campaign, conceived by Virk in 2017, was his way of fighting back.

We would like to hear your experience of seeing the Bayeux tapestry exhibit at the British Museum

The British Museum’s Bayeux tapestry exhibit opened on Thursday 10 September, and has already broken the British Museum’s record for the number of tickets sold in one day.

Have you seen the Bayeux tapestry at the British Museum? How far did you travel to see it? Tell us all about your experience below.

We want to hear from people under 30 about how you feel about the future and whether it’s changed the way you live your life, for better or worse

The future feels a little hard to plan for right now.

We’ve just lived through the hottest summer on record, global conflict looms large and AI has people wondering whether their job will still exist in five years – assuming they’ve got one in the first place.

We’d like to hear from people in the UK who have accessed medical cannabis from a private health provider and find out about their experience

In 2018 Theresa May’s government changed the law to allow the NHS and private providers to prescribe cannabis-based medical products.

The NHS prescribes medical cannabis for a few conditions such as children and adults with rare, severe forms of epilepsy and people with muscle stiffness and spasms caused by multiple sclerosis (MS). However, the vast majority of prescriptions for medical cannabis are being issued through private healthcare.

We would particularly like to hear from people whose commute has been affected by others who keep Lime bikes or other ebikes in their private areas and gardens

Nearly half of Londoners aged 18-34 now use Lime bikes weekly, and the rental ebike company reported 16 million commuter journeys in 2024.

But are you a Lime bike or other ebike user who has experienced selfishness from other riders during the commuter rush? Specifically, have you recognised a problem with “Lime bike hoggers” – users who keep booked bikes in their private areas so that you can’t actually access it?

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