The UK prime minister clearly still adores the band. Perhaps he’s attracted to songs about sham justice and murderous meat factories, shot through with nihilism and exquisite despair

As an origin story, Andy Burnham: Smiths Fan has a lot going for it. It’s plainly authentic: he can name the time he saw them live (Salford University, Queen Is Dead tour, 1986). A cynical young man in a hurry might fake that now, but not back when he first said it, in 2013. Asked by Labour Uncut for his desert island tracks during his 2010 leadership bid, three of the eight were sung by Morrissey (two Smiths singles and one off Viva Hate), which is superfan territory.

That’s a softball exercise to endear yourself to Labour members; you have eight chances to hit every base, and to blow three lives on an artist who had already, by then, been dabbling in nationalism for 18 years (we’ll come back to this) was dicey and brave. You’ll recall that Burnham did not win that election. If you were an enemy state, amassing this hinterland for an asset, you’d have basically done a really good job.

I was in India, performing dentistry on my first animal patient, and it was supposed to be a straightforward operation

I’ve been a dentist for 40 years. I spend most of my time treating patients at my surgery in Chichester, West Sussex. When I studied to become a dentist in the 1980s, I didn’t think I’d be getting my hands anywhere near the teeth of any exotic animals.

Twenty years later, in 2000, that changed. A patient of mine, Alan Knight, the CEO of International Animal Rescue (IAR), showed me photographs of the inside of a bear’s mouth. The bear was called Jojo and his teeth had been broken off by poachers. Some of the teeth were too rotten to be saved – if left untreated, Jojo would become more prone to infection and abscesses.

Their raucous pop music has made Katseye the biggest girl band in two decades. Can they weather toxic fandom, critical pans and a dwindling member count?

Before screenings of their new documentary, the members of Katseye appear in a video message to thank fans for their support. Their followers, Eyekons, have played a critical role in their rise to stardom, so it makes sense that Katseye: Wild Hearts, released in global theaters this month, takes a beat to shout out to them. Perhaps more than many other big music groups today, the group’s rise has depended on their relationship with their devotees who ensure that few corners of the world are safe from Katseye mania.

Katseye’s multinational members – Daniela, Lara, Manon, Megan, Sophia and Yoonchae – were selected through a combination of fan votes and judge scores on the 2023 YouTube reality competition The Debut: Dream Academy. The joint project between American record label Geffen Records and Korean entertainment company Hybe aimed to create a global girl group, with hopefuls participating in a rigorous bootcamp to test their singing and dancing skills. The following year, Netflix’s docu-series Pop Star Academy: Katseye – which documented the group’s nascent era, behind-the-scenes drama and all – catapulted them to a new level of visibility.

Why do the Texan innovator’s records take so long to make? ‘It’s important to gather the data,’ she says: the death, dating and dopamine behind her exquisite comeback alongside the Alchemist

Erykah Badu needs the lights down low. The singer, producer, actor and registered doula shuffles into a private room at London’s Soho hotel and quietly asks for some changes to the atmosphere: lights dimmed, soft seat. A green juice would be great.

As it turns out, Badu was out last night with Dave Chappelle, sitting with the comedian at a grand piano and playing songs into the wee hours. She looks mischievous when she thinks about the impromptu party, but declines to go into detail about what, exactly, went on. Instead, the 55-year-old smiles at me, eyes wide, her gold teeth glinting in the low light: “Oh yes,” she says slowly and quietly, like some kind of mysterious warlock. “It was a late one …”

The prime minister has lifted the spirits of the public and party members, and must use that goodwill to push through change

He bounded into the packed rally, a spring-heeled intruder whose very presence announced a coup at last year’s Labour conference. And so it was. Andy Burnham spoke with ebullient self-confidence, yet without aggression or a barrage of insults. They tried to stop him with a bogus constitutional fix barring him from standing in Gorton and Denton. But those Labour hierarchs lost it without him. His subsequent Makerfield victory proved their mistake and opened the door right into No 10 without dispute.

At that standing-room-only rally on proportional representation he made a pitch-perfect noteless speech of personal passion about the failure of politics to connect, the decline of Westminster, the public’s distrust and the risk of this lost public belief in democracy. His hands were clean, he never benefited from the monster majority that first past the post had delivered so unfairly to Labour MPs: he wasn’t there at the last two elections. He quit out of despair, returning to repair.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Other governments could seek similar concessions, while separate legal action is pending in places ranging from Kenya to the Netherlands

In October 2021, Abrham Meareg’s father, a professor of chemistry in Ethiopia’s northern town of Bahir Dar, was shot at close range and died outside his family home. This was in the middle of the country’s civil war.

For weeks, Facebook’s algorithm had actively promoted posts calling for the academic to be murdered, according to Meareg and Foxglove, a nonprofit organisation supporting Meareg’s lawsuit against the company in Kenya. These posts included photos of his father and his home address.

Nepal has reported 538 deaths and Tibet five, with 1,500 people still missing amid race to find survivors

• Flood risk forces halt to rescues in Tibet, as Nepal death toll rises to 469

• Visual guide: how the deadly flooding unfolded

• Tell us: have you been affected by the flash floods?

More now on the Nepali army’s rescue operation to save about 100 people trapped in a tunnel at a hydropower project swamped by Wednesday’s flooding.

“Two helicopters have been dispatched but it is challenging because it is tough to even locate the entry points of the tunnel,” army spokesperson Raja Ram Basnet told AFP.

Relief efforts are also under way to provide the rescued people what they need.

The army is still working to safely evacuate more than 100 people trapped in the same tunnel.

Roadmap for increasing department’s share of GDP will be deferred until next year’s review

The chancellor will delay setting out when the UK will meet the target of allocating 3% of GDP on defence until next year’s spending review, the Treasury has confirmed.

John Healey resigned as defence secretary in June under Keir Starmer’s leadership, accusing the prime minister of being “unable” and the Treasury “unwilling” to “commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country”.

Experts call for joined-up support through the postnatal period amid concerns GPs are not trained to spot symptoms

Thousands of UK women develop undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after childbirth every year, research has found.

The frightening and dangerous condition is being missed in at least 15,000 women a year across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the true toll could be double that or more, according to the authors of research in a leading medical journal.

Course at Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort was painted with words ‘Gaza is not 4 sale’ and clubhouse was sprayed with graffiti

Seven people charged with vandalising Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf course in Scotland have been accused of malicious damage “having a terrorist connection”.

The clubhouse at the five-star Trump Turnberry hotel and resort on the west coast of Scotland was graffitied on 8 March last year and the course was dug up and painted with the words “Gaza is not 4 sale”.

Soaring demand for services has led to tenfold increase in spending in a year in some areas, says NHS Alliance

NHS leaders have warned that the costs of meeting soaring demand for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism services in England are “running out of control” and have become unsustainable, with spending in some areas rising by as much as tenfold over the course of a year.

The NHS Alliance, which represents health managers, said the rise in demand since the coronavirus pandemic was forcing some to close waiting lists and look at reining in other services they provide.

Monarch’s death comes at turbulent time for royal family over association of crown princess with Jeffrey Epstein

King Harald V of Norway, Europe’s oldest reigning monarch, has died aged 89, the royal palace in Oslo has announced. He was succeeded immediately by his son, King Haakon VIII.

“It is with deep sadness that we announce that His Majesty King Harald passed away today. King Harald passed away peacefully at Oslo University hospital on Friday 28 August at 6.35am,” the palace said in a statement.

Exclusive: Michael Boren, a senior official overseeing the US Forest Service, is accused by Democratic senators of ‘inappropriate interference’

Donald Trump’s administration is facing calls to launch an investigation into allegations that Michael Boren, a senior official who oversees the US Forest Service, pressed agency staff to deploy additional resources to fight a fire burning near his Idaho ranch.

Three Democratic senators accused Boren of “inappropriate interference” in a letter seen by the Guardian, demanding answers from Brooke Rollins, US agricultural secretary. Boren serves as undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment.

‘My sister was always thinking of others,’ Parton’s younger sister Stella wrote in a Facebook tribute

Dolly Parton’s younger sister Stella Parton has shared a moving tribute to the late country music singer on Thursday, revealing that Dolly offered to receive experimental cancer drugs “in the hope of helping others in the future” – an act of kindness and generosity that extended until the end of her life.

“My sister was one of the most generous, thoughtful and kind people I’ve ever known,” Stella wrote in a tribute shared on Facebook on Thursday. “What the world saw is exactly who she was.”

Sales of beans, lentils and soya bean derivatives on rise while Britons buy less real and fake meat

British shoppers are munching more beans, lentils, tofu and tempeh – while cutting back on real and plant-based fake meat – to save money and improve their diet.

The amount of beans, pulses and soya bean derivatives sold in the UK increased by 7.3% in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year, led by a rise in cheap dried lentils, an analysis has found.

From the first US and Israeli strikes six months ago to the battle for Hormuz, this timeline plots how Trump’s war on Iran quickly became a regional conflict with global economic consequences

On 28 February 2026, the US and Israel began large-scale strikes on Iran. Tehran responded by attacking Israeli and US allies across the Gulf.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day of strikes, and the strait of Hormuz – a crucial waterway for transporting oil – was effectively closed soon after. The conflict quickly became a regional war with global economic consequences.

Donald Trump: EPA/Trump Vance transition team

US CENTCOM: AP

Abbas Araghchi: AP

Esmail Baqaei: Getty/Anadolu

Masoud Pezeshkian: AP

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf: Getty/NurPhoto

Iran flag: Alamy

As well as being quieter, cheaper to run and easier to clean, induction cookers can cut kitchen temperatures by up to 10C

Leaping flames, searing heat, copious sweat and scorchingly inventive swearing – restaurant kitchens are never a place for the faint-hearted, but this summer they have been sweltering in successive heatwaves to a dangerous degree.

Some restaurants, cafes and bakeries in the UK grew so hot that they were forced to close, or reduce their hours, for the safety of their staff. There is still no maximum working temperature, despite calls from the TUC, and tens of thousands of kitchen staff are thought to have carried on working in “furnace-like” conditions.

Problems including derailments have hit network during one of the hottest and driest summers on record

Britain’s railways have faced a string of heat-related problems this summer, including a derailment near Lewes in East Sussex two weeks ago that injured 30 people, and another the next day when the rear carriages of a Greater Anglia train derailed “in an upright position” at Wickford railway station in Essex, with no reported injuries.

The problems came during one of the hottest and driest summers on record, with a series of heatwaves, and drought declared across large parts of England and Wales. Britain’s railways, built for a cooler, wetter climate, have been put under pressure. Network Rail said the summer had “presented exceptional challenges to the railway”.

Nigella on Bake Off! Attenborough in Blue Planet III! Blade Runner 2099! Plus Adrian Mole, Harry Potter and a certain Celebrity Traitors … here are all the must-see shows of the season

• Rising star Lara Ricote on the real heartache behind her new breakup comedy

Wayward and chaotic, in the grand tradition of The Word and TFI Friday, Late Night Lycett proved that Joe Lycett had fully inherited Friday nights on Channel 4. Its follow-up sounds even more TFI-esque. The Lycett Arms is a real east London pub, open for just one hour a week, which required Lycett to train to be accredited with a level 2 award for personal licence holders. The show promises “top-drawer comedy entertainment from Joe and a pub full of celebrity guests”. What could possibly go wrong?
• Channel 4, 4 September

News that Scott is working on a follow-up to his maligned 2017 film leaves me worried the franchise has run out of shocks

If any science-fiction saga looked beyond recovery, it was the Alien franchise. For the 38 years that followed James Cameron’s Aliens, film-makers contrived to find every imaginable way of not making a good Alien film. They tried killing everyone the audience cared about before the opening credits, marooning Sigourney Weaver on a planet populated entirely by bald British character actors, cloning Ripley, pitting xenomorphs against Predators, and sending scientists across the universe to ask an enormous, hairless space bodybuilder why he made them. They even ponied up the thick end of $100m for a film in which Michael Fassbender teaches himself to play the flute.

And then in 2024, we got Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, in which actual xenomorphs chase actual human beings down actual corridors for the clearly defined purposes of either killing them or putting smaller xenomorphs inside them. Better still, a year later we got Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth, which reminded us that giant, murderous space insects are in fact less awful than tech trillionaires.

Rich harmonies mix with synth, harp and aquatic grace on the intriguing first single from the New York songwriter’s debut album

From New York, USA
Recommended if you like Jessica Pratt, Minnie Riperton, Cocteau Twins
Up next Debut LP Follow the Light released via Jagjaguwar on 16 October

In Robert Silverberg’s 1973 sci-fi anthology New Dimensions 3, there’s a story by author Terry Carr called They Live on Levels. The simplest outline of this tale is that thanks to a technological breakthrough, humans are able to exist and communicate through different planes of existence. Through musical styles and generational layers, the spectral folk of New York-based songwriter June McDoom expresses this very notion in stunning fashion.

From secluded coves in Ireland to an evening passeggiata on Italy’s Aeolian islands, readers share their discoveries
• Tell us about your most memorable food and drink discoveries in Europe

Giant griffon vultures glided parallel with my bus as it reached the highest point of Cres, the least populated of the four main islands in the Kvarner Gulf at the very north of the Croatian Adriatic. Covered in scrubby heath, olive groves and lavender, with small towns and villages on its coastline, its wildness is its appeal. Some, like Cres town, are unobtrusively set up for holidaymakers; in others local people just quietly get on with the life they’ve lived since the Venetians ruled here. All are lapped by the turquoise, crystal seas Croatia is known for.
Rhiannon

Exercise mats that don’t slip, easy-grip kettlebells and floor sliders … fitness experts share their best buys for staying active at home

• The best massage guns – tested

You don’t have to spend a fortune on gym membership, or need loads of space, to get into shape. From the best basics to larger equipment for more complex workouts, here’s the home workout kit loved by fitness professionals, along with equipment I’ve personally put through its paces.

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Jonathan Freedland speaks to Dan Alexander of Forbes about how Donald Trump made so much money last year at the same time trade wars, military wars and a rising national debt hurt the US economy

Nepalis and Tibetans must not pay the price – with their lives, livelihoods and money meant for education and health – for global heating caused by wealthy states

• Sunil Acharya is an international climate policy and just transition specialist based in Kathmandu, Nepal

As a Nepali citizen working on international climate policy for more than a decade, it is difficult to look at the harrowing images coming out of the catastrophic flash flood that thundered down valleys in Nepal, sweeping down the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers, and not feel angry.

Not just because of the destruction, but because it comes after years of warnings from scientists and civil society that a rapidly warming planet would make disasters more frequent, more intense and harder to predict. This is what the cost of delaying global climate action looks like.

Sunil Acharya is an international climate policy and just transition specialist based in Kathmandu, Nepal

Doreen Lawrence and other victims of police surveillance have waited decades for justice. Delays and expense due to Met intransigence are no excuse to deny them that

In June 2013 Peter Francis, a former Metropolitan police officer, broke a 20-year silence about the role he had played in surveilling the family of Stephen Lawrence in a documentary jointly made by the Guardian and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme. Two years later, thanks in part to the programme, the Home Office established an undercover policing inquiry, commonly known as the spycops public inquiry, to shed light on the scale of surveillance of activists and trade unionists. That inquiry is now under threat.

Francis had served in the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a Met unit founded in 1968 whose officers lived for years at a time inside political and campaigning organisations under false names.

Imran Khan KC is a practising solicitor

There are howls of protest from the right about plans for Birmingham to be a 20mph city. But it will be a good thing, and others will follow

If it can happen in Birmingham, it can happen anywhere. Moves by Birmingham city council to impose a 20mph speed limit on all roads, apart from a few major thoroughfares, marks a turning point in transport policy that could and should attract imitators.

Remember that in the 60s Birmingham was the city that had a racetrack ​style networks of roads at its heart, ​and a tangle of elevated ro​utes and roundabouts that pushed pedestrians underground and ensured no one would be mad enough to try to cycle. Moreover, it was the headquarters of the UK’s car industry, and its roads were designed more as a test track for new models than a way for people to get to the shops. The emphasis on roads above all else was a deliberate strategy by a city that saw its future inextricably bound up with motoring manufacturers.

Plus, views from the Cotswolds of Harry and Meghan’s return, and the embarrassing anachronism that is Ali G

Is there anything sadder than the end of summer? As schools go back next week and parents rely on the boosting effect of a return to routine, we look around for other ways to soften the blow. A few things this year that might make it easier: the need for rain ensures that the advent of autumn is slightly less depressing than usual; people with attic conversions in which you could bake a muffin over the summer will be able to use them again; and if you happen to be a woman of 50 or thereabouts, the fresher weather is ... a relief.

This summer has been a tipping point. But it’s not too late to save what makes this place unique

When I first started visiting Marseille more than 20 years ago, few could have predicted that France’s then beleaguered second city would become one of the most popular destinations in the most-visited country in the world. Tarnished by stereotypes and home to some of Europe’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, the port city seemed down on its luck, unloved and, in the eyes of many, somewhere to avoid. Tourists stopping at the city’s Saint-Charles station would clutch their bags while waiting for their connecting train to rural Provence, or the beaches of the Côte d’Azur.

Two decades on, poverty and drug gang violence still affect parts of Marseille, but this rough diamond has been reinvented as a modish holiday destination. Last month, I saw a local TV channel asking whether Marseille had become France’s capital of tourism, after Booking.com revealed it had surpassed Paris and Nice as the most searched-for destination for French users of the site. Breathless foreign media coverage – the New York Times published a “36 hours in Marseille” guide in 2019 and another one in 2025 – has driven the number of overseas visitors. From seaside petanque to vocoder rap and pizza served on aluminium plates, influencers revel in the golden-hued aesthetic of the urban riviera and promote the city’s most Instagram-friendly corners. Tourist numbers are expected to reach almost 7 million this year.

The singer had a serendipitous mixture of humor, humility and humanity. We could all stand to channel it a bit more

The moment that the world found out that Dolly Parton had died, I was in a hair salon in the reddest congressional district in New York state. The neighborhood on the shore of Lake Erie where I move every summer voted solidly for Donald Trump in 2024.

I often pass a lawn sign that has something misogynistic to say about New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, and the mere mention of Kamala Harris’s name can bring derisive jokes. Of course, there certainly are liberals and independents to be found, but on balance the area leans right.

The president senses a crisis in his cult of personality. He believes the path to victory is through unwavering devotion

Donald Trump has framed his theme for the midterm elections. It has come to him as naturally and inevitably as staring into the mirror, beyond any logic or argument, his definitive answer to no specific issue, providing no understanding of any particular problem, but transcending all of them. His political theme is more primal than programmatic, more instinctive than analytical, a heartfelt expression to protect his greatest romantic attachment, his obsessive fixation, his idealized object: himself.

Trump’s campaign theme is unrequited love. Unlike the pollsters, media consultants and pundits, he alone has grasped the magnitude and the source of the existential crisis threatening his politics. He has identified the problem for the Republicans as the faltering measure of complete devotion to him. His demand has nothing to do with mutual affection. It is a ploy to reassert his slipping control, a manipulative test to prove loyalty to him, or else. There can be no absolute rule without an absolute ruler; no absolute ruler without absolute submission; no absolute submission without the expression of absolute love. His sadness at its fading gives way to anger, paranoia and greater acts of retribution. He equates the fear he instills as a form of love. Trump accepts subservience, from whatever motive, as affection or its closest equivalent. He cares nothing about sincerity, so it’s all in the show. The less love displayed, the more fear required. Yet there is no rebound, but only deeper rejection.

Medicine, food and other supplies are the urgent priority. But the rising risks from shrinking glaciers must be faced too

Thousands of people in Nepal and Tibet are in desperate need of emergency assistance following Wednesday’s disaster. With 360 people confirmed dead, more than 1,300 others are still missing as search and rescue operations continue. The precise sequence of events linking glacier collapse to flash floods is yet to be confirmed. But there is no doubting the enormous destructive power of the brown torrent that can be seen on video clips surging down the steeply sided Himalayan valleys, sweeping away everyone and everything in its path.

Testimony from survivors about terrifying near-escapes and losses is reminiscent of previous disasters, including the 2004 tsunami. With some of the worst-affected areas still cut off and accessible only by helicopter, there is a high level of uncertainty about the total number of people who have died or homes that have been destroyed. Existing medical, food, shelter and sanitation supplies will need to be replenished. Pledges of help for locally led relief efforts from foreign governments and agencies, following reports that hundreds of those missing were tourists or pilgrims, must lead to swift action. People need basics including electricity and clean water before they can start to rebuild and recover.

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.

Soaring prices are plunging struggling families into debt. The government must support them in the short term as it invests in a clean energy future

Fuelled by the consequences of Donald Trump’s disastrous war on Iran, household energy debt in Britain is continuing to soar, rising to a record £6bn by the end of June. That figure is set to hit £7bn by the end of the year, as the government’s cap on gas and electricity prices goes up to a three-year high in October. The human cost among the less well off will be more people regularly choosing whether to skip meals, ignore other bills or stay cold this winter.

Such is life at the sharp end of the cost of living crisis, which Andy Burnham has made it his priority to address since arriving in Downing Street. The day after he became prime minister, Mr Burnham announced that VAT would be removed from electricity bills from the beginning of October. But the Middle East-related rise in the price cap, announced on Wednesday, more than wipes out the effect of his cut. In an era of geopolitical volatility, high energy costs have become the new normal.

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.

David Griffiths says mayors could be empowered to build water infrastructure, while Kevin Whately suggests incorporating communal storage into new housing estates

Pete Ford (Letters, 20 August) rightly reminds us that “The Victorians … built reservoirs, aqueducts and local water-storage infrastructure.” But who were these “Victorians”? Generally speaking, they were local councillors and their professional engineers.

Taking my own town as an example, within 40 years of its incorporation as a borough in 1868 it had built five new reservoirs, as well as taking over others previously provided by ad hoc groups of commissioners, with water delivered through 240 miles of mains. By 1897 it was one of 610 urban councils with their own water undertakings.

Readers respond to Polly Toynbee’s article calling for mandatory exam resits to be scrapped in a first step towards education reform

I was delighted to read Polly Toynbee’s demolition of compulsory GCSE resits (How can we stop destroying the prospects of a generation? Scrapping compulsory GCSE resits will be a start, 24 August). Of course, level 2 qualifications in maths and English should be accessible to all school leavers who need them. However, the depressing treadmill of resitting resits is thin educational gruel and Michael Gove should be ashamed for espousing such a killjoy policy.

As a governor at a large further education college in Bedford, I find it depressing to receive data at every single board meeting focusing on GCSE resit results for thousands of students who “failed” maths and English just a few months previously. Speaking to students and staff, it is apparent that resitting exams is counterproductive. Compulsory GCSE resits are a negative learning experience, offering no reflection on how to improve. In most cases students merely fail again.

Whether mathematics thrives or perishes in the age of AI depends on what it is that society values in the human intellect, writes Dr Henry Bradford

I share Kasra Rafi and Bruce Schneier’s impression that recent mathematical breakthroughs by AI consist in clever recombination of existing ideas, not development of truly novel theory (No, AI doesn’t mean the end of mathematics – at least not yet, 25 August). The question is: what happens to mathematics if this changes?

Like many mathematicians, I have done much soul-searching in recent weeks, especially since a key problem in my own field of group theory (the existence of non-sofic groups) was solved this month by OpenAI’s Astra model. Astra’s proof consists largely in a slight twist on theorems by my colleagues Gabor Kun and Andreas Thom. That said, even a few months ago I would have found the idea that AI was capable of such a breakthrough incredible, so it seems foolhardy now to bet against AIs achieving superhuman capabilities in all areas of mathematical thought in the coming years.

Colin Hines says Andy Burnham’s focus should be on drastically cutting fossil fuel use in a way that reduces bills and generates secure jobs

It is hardly surprising that many who were optimistic and supportive of Andy Burnham becoming prime minister, but who also prioritised tackling climate chaos, are becoming increasingly unsure about him, given his tardiness in emphasising this threat as an overriding policy objective (Labour ‘could lose up to 50 seats’ to Greens if new drilling in North Sea approved, 19 August).

One of the problems he faces is that the political debate around energy is obsessed with relatively short-term fossil fuel supplies. Instead, the focus should be on drastically and rapidly cutting fossil fuel use in a way that reduces bills and generates secure jobs through a devolved energy programme for every postcode.

• Transfer news and buildup to this weekend’s fixtures

• Get in touch: contact Luke via email

Brighton women’s manager Dario Vidosic said of his time at the club:

I have loved my time at the Albion and am proud of what we have achieved together. Leaving has been a difficult decision, but I believe it is the right time for me and my family to begin a new chapter.

I would like to thank the players, staff and supporters for their support throughout my time at the club and wish everyone associated with Albion every success in the future.

Updates from day two at Lord’s; play starts 11am
Day one report | Sign up for the Spin | mail Tim

62nd over: England 266-9 (Atkinson 38, Tongue 14) Scrap that: Atkinson takes a leg-bye off the second ball of this over. As Tongue prepares to face Abbas, the keeper, Mohammad Rizwan, calls for a helmet and goes up to the stumps – so Josh Tongue is now being treated like Joe Root. The ploy could backfire by making Tongue’s nicks harder for the slips to pick up. And it doesn’t seem to bother Tongue, who plays an uppish flick for a single to steal the strike.

61st over: England 264-9 (Atkinson 38, Tongue 13) Ali bowls to Atkinson, who promptly steps away to leg, dreaming of a six over backward point, but connects only with thin air. The over ends in a flurry of singles – one to each batter and then a tight one to Atkinson, who may have decided that he needs to protect Tongue from Abbas.

Winning the Europa League and finishing fourth did not inoculate Villa and Spurs were not hampered by a season of woe

In theory Aston Villa supporters should have been rubbing their hands together at the prospect of a Champions League season. Equally, Tottenham fans could have been despondent after a relegation battle that went to the wire. A 17th-place finish meant Spurs earned about £35m less in Premier League merit payments, which are based on final league position, than Villa.

Yet the mood in the two camps is reversed. Spurs have spent an estimated £322m in the transfer window, and that excludes the loan of Manchester City’s Omar Marmoush, for whom they are committed to paying £55m after this season. Sales have reduced the outlay to a net £140m, but Spurs fans seemed buoyant, at least until the first match, when they were soundly thrashed by one of the data scientists’ teacher’s pets, Brentford.

• Alcaraz back in action after four-month injury layoff

• Novak Djokovic faces Mariano Navone in first round

Carlos Alcaraz has been handed a tough draw on his return to singles competition after a four-month injury layoff as he faces the in-form Russian Roman Safiullin in the first round of the US Open.

Alcaraz, the defending champion in New York, has not competed in singles since sustaining a right wrist injury at the Barcelona Open in April, with the Spaniard missing the French Open, where he was also the defending champion, and Wimbledon. He was understandably rusty and tentative with his first serve when making his first competitive appearance since the injury alongside Serena Williams in the mixed doubles event on Tuesday, with the pair losing in the quarter-finals and the 44-year-old Williams even outperforming him during large parts of their time on court. His opening match against the world No 98 Safiullin, who has risen more than 100 places in the world rankings this year after returning from injury and defeated Alcaraz indoors at the Paris Masters in 2023, will be a significant first challenge.

Have you been following the big stories in football, athletics, rugby league, cricket, boxing, tennis and cycling?

Jo Potter’s side charged to promotion and have brought in striker Bethany England as they bid to stay up

Guardian writers’ predicted position: 13th (NB: this is not necessarily Sophie Downey’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips)

Last season’s position: 2nd (WSL2)

Updates from the latest round of Championship matches
Day one roundup | Sign up for the Spin | Mail Tanya

There is play at last at the big beast bash at Edgbaston, but it isn’t going so well for Notts, who are 19 for 2 after losing Hameed and McCann for ducks.

As that man Ben Sanderson spoils the dream with a nipbacker into the pads. Kent 170 for one.

The Indian, just 21, scored his second major success of the summer following Norway Chess at Oslo while Wesley So halved to Sinquefield Cup victory with nine straight draws

India’s world No 12, Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, won the Grand Chess Tour finals in St Louis on Thursday night when he defeated the US world No 2, Fabiano Caruana, in a mix of classical, rapid and blitz games by 15-13. It was the 21-year-old’s second major success of the summer following Norway Chess at Oslo and it earned him a record $200,000 first prize, up from $150,000 in 2025.

Earlier, Wesley So, the US world No 6, won the prestigious Sinquefield Cup and over $100,000 for the second year in succession, despite a run of nine mostly colourless draws.

America’s second biggest sporting obsession returns this weekend, which means marching bands, 100,000-seat stadiums, ancient rivalries and, increasingly, the operating model of a sport being invented in real time

Is college football healthy? It’s a seductive question, one that now comes up every year around this time. Actually, it never recedes, so it’s just with the sport all the time. It’s also the wrong question, because whoever answers it is free to choose their own adventure. The television ratings are way up there in the galaxy. Money rains down on dozens of programs and thousands of players. Marching bands continue to march. Yet a lot of teams are stranded by realignment or an economic inability to keep up in a transfer arms race. Their fans – actually any team’s fans – may be exhausted by escalating asks for their dollars.

If you have been checked out of the sport for a while ahead of this weekend’s first set of games, you may feel like your body has been frozen for a few decades. Indiana, (yes, really) are the defending national champs, fresh off a 16-0 season that puts them on the list of the handful of best teams ever. Texas Tech, once likened to Siberia by a former coach who is now a US senator, are the fiercest program in the Big 12. Ole Miss are good for the first time since integration. At least Ohio State and Georgia are still powerhouses.

Exclusive: Experts and former officials say accounts are running dry, and funding a war with no clear endgame is the main challenge

Donald Trump’s war on Iran has driven the US military into a severe financial crisis, with the US navy forced to transfer money from its payroll and other sources to cover the costs of combat, according to documents seen by the Guardian, and interviews with navy officials, contractors and defense analysts.

The US-Israeli operation, which has depleted US munitions stockpiles and prompted retaliatory Iranian strikes that have wrecked strategic bases across the Middle East, is piling pressure on budgets across the military.

About 80 people sign open letter to Andy Burnham calling for legislation to protect voice ownership

Nicola Coughlan, Hugh Bonneville and Matt Lucas are among a group of actors backing a campaign against artificial intelligence voice cloning.

Save Our Voices Now, which is also being supported by Luke Evans, Jen Brister, Siobhán McSweeney and Pearl Mackie, aims to stop the practice in which AI technology is used to replicate a real person’s voice to say anything it is prompted to.

Unpopular new policy comes as midterms loom and control of Congress could be decided by several Michigan races

Every day $1bn worth of goods crosses the river dividing Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, two largely blue-collar US and Canadian cities that have come to act as one in the creation of North America’s auto industry.

News this week of Donald Trump’s escalating trade spat with Canada has everyone worried. Political and economic leaders and observers labeled the move an act of “hubris” , blamed Trump’s “ego”, and called the escalation “insanity”.

Prof Pierre Akilimali, who heads DR Congo’s response to an outbreak that has so far killed more than 2,700 people, says tackling the disease requires trust and respect

The statistics, says the man responsible for overseeing the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), are meaningless. That it is now the largest outbreak, the most deadly strain, that 100 days have passed, that the death rates keep climbing, says Prof Pierre Akilimali, should never detract from the human tragedies at the centre of this virus.

“It is behind those numbers that matters; it is the father, the child, the loved relative. Behind every case is a person and behind every person is a family. For us Congolese, we hold on to that as we work.”

Moscow threatens retaliation after Andy Burnham says UK will help Ukraine start producing long-range missiles

Russia has said it could retaliate against the UK for its support of Kyiv by striking military targets inside and outside Ukraine, amid reports that the director of the CIA warned the Kremlin against attacking Nato during a secretive visit this week.

Andy Burnham, Britain’s prime minister, said on Monday the UK would allow Kyiv access to classified technology to start ⁠its own production of Storm Shadow ​long-range ​cruise missiles. France has also agreed to supply missile technology. Maria ⁠Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said on Thursday Britain and France were “playing ⁠with ​fire”.

Woolston Eyes in Warrington, a dumping ground for canal dredgings, has become best place in UK for black-necked grebe

A dumping ground for dredgings from the Manchester Ship Canal has become the best place in Britain for the rare and beautiful black-necked grebe, hosting 64% of Britain’s breeding population.

Since 2021, Woolston Eyes in Cheshire has been restored, extended and turned into a mosaic of freshwater pools, reedbeds, willow scrub and rough grassland, managed by the RSPB and Woolston Eyes Conservation Group.

Flash flooding and mudslides in Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures, while convective storms hit western Europe

After an “unprecedented” deluge in Chiba in mid-August, Japan has experienced further extreme rainfall in recent days. Moisture from the Sea of Japan brought relentless heavy rain to the prefectures of Ishikawa and Toyama on Thursday.

In Himi, Toyama, 361.5mm of rain fell in 24 hours, equivalent to half the average annual rainfall in London and Paris. Several rivers burst their banks, triggering flash floods and mudslides, felling and damaging buildings.

In this week’s newsletter: pollutants from fossil fuels and wildfires damage nearly every part of our bodies – but initiatives such as cycle zones can make our cities safer

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Air pollution affects nearly every person on this planet. Yet global efforts to combat the scourge – which is associated with about 8 million premature deaths worldwide every year, can damage nearly every part of our body and is linked to everything from miscarriages to dementia – lag decades behind our knowledge of its impacts.

Tens of millions of people in Indonesia are now suffering in swathes of thick smoke caused by “slash and burn” agriculture and exacerbated by the hot conditions. In India, ground-level ozone from vehicle fumes and industry has emerged as the key summer threat, while outside its megacities there have been protests in areas affected by toxic coal dust. Across the northern hemisphere this summer, wildfires driven by the climate crisis have spread poor air across continents – already, 1.5 million people globally die every year from the impacts of wildfire smoke.

Nearly 1,400 missing, mostly tourists, after Nepal-Tibet flash flood kills at least 270

Two planned datacentres will have higher UK carbon emissions than ExxonMobil, analysis finds

‘Environmental violence’: inside the fight to save indigenous land from becoming a nuclear dumping ground

Unusual heat this year may have melted ice and thawed bonds that hold glaciers in place – leading to catastrophe

• Nepal-Tibet flash flood – latest updates

• What caused the flash flood in Nepal and Tibet?

The devastating flash flood that has ripped through the border communities of Nepal and Tibet has heightened fears that the climate crisis is destabilising the geology of mountain and polar regions, threatening millions of people.

Satellite imagery suggests a glacier collapse high in the Himalayas was the primary cause of the deadly torrent of mud, water and ice that tore along the Bhotekoshi River on Wednesday. It swept away buildings and roads and left at least 360 dead and 1,400 missing.

Sally-Anne Bowen, now 65, convicted of assaulting boys at Christ’s College, Finchley, where she was chemistry teacher

A chemistry teacher has been found guilty of indecently assaulting two teenage pupils at an all-boys school in the late 1980s.

Sally-Anne Bowen, who taught at Christ’s College in Finchley, north London, assaulted the teenage boys when they were aged around 14 to 15 and she was in her mid-20s.

Environment Agency issues 40 flood alerts across Midlands, Yorkshire and south-east of England

Dozens of homes have been damaged by flooding and the Met Office had issued warnings for thunderstorms and heavy rain at the end of a summer in which most of England and the whole of Wales was declared in drought.

The Met Office said thundery showers in England and Wales could cause 75mm of rain to fall in just 12 hours in some areas.

Minister calls for Instagram owner to extend sweeping new safeguards for young users to Britain

• UK politics live – latest updates

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The UK government expects the Instagram owner Meta to roll out the same protections for children in Britain as those it agreed in the US on Wednesday, as part of a court settlement that could cost the company up to $18bn (£13bn).

Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, said on Thursday he did not want young people in the US to have “a higher rate of protection” than those in Britain, after Meta settled a lawsuit brought by dozens of US states accusing the company of harming children with dangerous products.

Home Office was housing 16,021 asylum seekers across 160 hotels at end of June, while small boat crossings down 23%

• UK politics live – latest updates

The number of asylum seekers living in hotels has halved in a year, Home Office figures show.

Sweeping changes to the asylum system have also led to a significant drop in legal arrivals and asylum claims, but the numbers of asylum seekers housed in private accommodation has increased as the government moves people from hotels into privately rented houses in multiple occupation (HMOs).

It is polite to reposition a guest’s shoes when they arrive, but the emergency services in one city advise just skipping that part

Etiquette, manners and consideration for others are integral pillars of Japanese society but there are times when they might go a step too far, according to one city’s emergency services.

The fire department in the central city of Kanazawa has urged people not to tidy up the shoes that paramedic crews have taken off when entering a house, warning it could hinder their ability to get in or out quickly, particularly when carrying someone on a stretcher.

After decades of sporadic conflict in South Sudan, many civilians have been left with life-changing injuries from gunshots and landmines. The country also has high rates of disability resulting from disease and snake bites.

The photographer Kieran Seager followed patients and staff at a centre in the country’s capital, Juba, recording the process of physical rehabilitation

Anthropic ​argued designation as ‘supply chain risk’ could cost the company billions ‌of dollars in lost business ‌and reputational harm

A US federal judge ruled Thursday that sanctions imposed in February by the Trump administration against AI giant Anthropic were illegal, finding that the government had punished the artificial intelligence company for publicly criticising the Pentagon.

“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” Judge Rita Lin said in a 59-page decision.

Renewed scrutiny comes after police officer accused of falsifying records in order to close the cases of people who were later found dead

South Korean police will re-examine about 310,000 missing persons cases closed over the past three years, prompted by a scandal in which an officer was arrested on suspicion of falsifying records to close files on two people who were later found dead.

The case has drawn national attention, with President Lee Jae Myung ordering an investigation into the police handling of it and telling the force to draw up a reform plan.

Rolling coverage of the latest events in global financial markets, the economy and major corporate moves

In the metals market, supply fears have pushed the zinc price up to a four-year high.

Zinc, which is used to galvanise steel, hit $3,955 a metric tonne this morning, its highest since May 2022.

LME [zinc] inventories have been drawn sharply lower, mine and smelter disruptions have restricted refined availability, and supply outside China has become notably tight.

With consumers facing a thinner pool of immediately available units, relatively modest buying has produced a larger price response than elsewhere in the complex. Copper remains supported by the same availability concerns.

Jes Staley made comments to US lawmakers investigating his links to the convicted sex offender

The former Barclays boss Jes Staley has denied having sex with a woman dressed as Snow White, after being questioned about an infamous email exchange about Disney princesses with Jeffrey Epstein.

The comments were detailed in newly released transcripts from a closed-door interview last month with US lawmakers as part of their investigation into Epstein, who died in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex-trafficking charges.

Experts say findings mean breast screenings for cancer could also flag cardiovascular problems in women

Doctors have discovered a way to use routine mammograms that screen for breast cancer to spot heart disease, the world’s leading – and frequently underdiagnosed – cause of death in women.

Researchers analysed the scans using artificial intelligence and were able to successfully identify women with coronary heart disease, high blood pressure or who had suffered a stroke.

Decision not to improve resilience sooner described as ‘unacceptable gamble with our national security’

Hundreds of Britain’s smallest power plants could remain at a higher risk to state-sponsored cyber-attacks until the 2030s despite a successful Iran-linked hack last month, it has emerged.

Officials this week briefed energy bosses on the breach, which is understood to have shut an unnamed small gas power plant for four days last month, and put the industry on alert over the growing cyber threat facing energy infrastructure.

The Mexican-American comedian had just split from her boyfriend when she filmed Break Clause, about an ex-couple living together in London. She talks trading telenovelas for Edinburgh and embracing your feelings

• The 50 best TV shows of autumn 2026

In Break Clause, recent graduates Lil and Ben move from Leeds to London after the former lands a job at an architecture firm. Yet as soon as the couple start settling into their new flat, everything goes horribly wrong. Ben (Samuel Bottomley) reveals he slept with someone else at their leaving drinks the night before, so Lil (Lara Ricote) immediately ends the relationship – but quickly discovers their rental contract is far harder to get out of. Cue an agonising six months of cohabitation and a novel will-they-won’t-they (get back together) setup for a winningly bittersweet new sitcom.

You may recognise Ricote from recent appearances in two other Channel 4 comedies: Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping and Sam Campbell’s crackers Make That Movie (although probably not from the “funny and crazy” telenovela she briefly worked on as a teen). But Break Clause is the Mexican-American comedian’s first leading role. It also happened to be the “best case scenario” for Ricote’s debut: let’s just say getting into character wasn’t a problem.

Edinburgh has given festival audiences a look at two long awaited musicals – Bliss and Disenchanted! – with both aiming to now scale up their spectacle

The Edinburgh fringe is mostly where new work is forged but that’s not the full picture. Amid all the hot-off-the-press shows are a number of familiar titles that have been around for years yet are only making their professional UK debut now. That’s the case with two fairytale musical productions hoping for a longer life whose festival run is a chance to engineer that happily ever after.

Bliss, co-created by Tyler Beattie and Emma Lively, won a new play award in the US in 2019 and had its world premiere in Seattle the year after. A handful of its songs were released in 2022. Now developed into what is billed as “the biggest new musical of the Edinburgh fringe”, it has a cast of 17 which exceeds regular fringe proportions – as does the running time (80 minutes rather than the standard hour).

John Slattery stars in The Rainmaker, which is already a hit in the US. Plus: catch Fontaines DC’s set at Reading Festival. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, ITV1
This glossy legal drama, a hit in the US last year, is based on John Grisham’s novel. Set in Charleston, it follows ambitious young couple Rudy (Milo Callaghan) and Sarah (Madison Iseman) who are associates at the esteemed Tinley Britt. But Leo is fired after a run-in with John Slattery’s smarmy boss Leo – and he takes a job at a slightly less, let’s say, refined firm. Cue a battle of the lawyers. Hollie Richardson

A father and son must team up to find a serial killer in a cheaply made and increasingly uninteresting thriller

It’s not as if Robert De Niro’s choices have improved all that much since the nadir of the mid-2000s (last year did see him crop up in a Scott Eastwood-led actioner and The Alto Knights) but there’s something specifically rubbishy about his latest that transports us back to that particularly cursed time. The Whisper Man, a film as openly stupid as its title would suggest, could have been released in between the evil clone horror Godsend and imaginary friend thriller Hide and Seek, the kind of bottom-tier project that offers the actor a nice big cheque and the audience a nice little nap.

It’s a familiar pile of B-movie schlock – serial killers, missing children, bumps in the night, more imaginary friends – and there is some initial junky fun to be had as we wonder just where it all might be headed. I was hoping for a destination a little more deranged or vaguely surprising, the film making a silent promise that we’re hurtling toward somewhere wildly unexpected before dumping us in a ditch instead.

A creepy folk horror set in a rural Scottish village riddled with evil activity, plus Robert De Niro and Adam Scott star in a gripping serial killer thriller inspired by a hit book

Athina Rachel Tsangari’s adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel looks like a homage to 1970s British folk horror films – complete with Wicker Man-style animal masks and rituals. But the evils turns out to be more economic and social than supernatural. In an unnamed rural Scottish village, the diffident Master Kent (Harry Melling) rules benignly over the agricultural workers, including his former servant, the reserved Walter (Caleb Landry Jones). But then Kent’s cousin (Frank Dillane) arrives with plans to enclose the common land and raise sheep. The inequities of power, and the way the dispossessed can blame outsiders for their lot, come to the fore in a brooding, earthy tragedy.
Friday 4 September, 11.05pm, BBC Two

In spite of capable performances and deployment of hygge, gothic and Nordic noir elements, you’ll search for a feasible plot or a character insight in vain

Adapted from the 2017 novel by Anna Ekberg (actually a male writing duo), this thriller from Denmark chucks in a bit of everything into the mix: hygge lakeside melodrama, manor-house gothic, and Nordic-noir corruption. But this franticness can’t disguise that it’s a dopey and facile thriller that, despite capable performances, plumbs neither its characters’ depths nor hits thematic pay dirt. It also merits a stiff investigation from the plotting police.

Despite amnesia that leaves her unable to remember her life prior to running an idyllic Norwegian rural cafe, Louise (Natalie Wolfsberg Madueño) is gearing up to get hitched to crime writer Joachim (Pål Sverre Hagen). When a tourist approaches and calls her by another name, she is sufficiently shaken to take a DNA test; it confirms she is actually Helene Söderberg, a Danish shipping heiress presumed dead, with a husband and son back home. Originally found stowed away on a cargo ship, she handed over an ID card – for Louise Anderson – which the authorities accepted. Now wanting to reclaim her identity, she pitches up on the capacious doorstep of company executive Edmund (Claes Bang), her former partner.

(ALTER)
The Grammy winner unites former clients including Lamar and Ravyn Lenae for a playful, dazzling voyage through the guitar’s diversity, from alt-rock to Afrobeat

On this long-awaited debut, Grammy-winning hip-hop producer Dahi steps out from the booth and into the spotlight. He’s best known for transforming a dreamy Beach House sample into Kendrick Lamar’s hit Money Trees, alongside chameleonic production work for SZA, Madonna, Drake and many more. Now that Dahi’s got the mic, what does he want to say?

Blending the brittle 90s British rock he loved as a California teen with the west African grooves his father played in the house, Black Boy (Alternative) celebrates the guitar as a transcendent tool that spans genres and continents. No other album this year will boast such starry guest features – Dahi calls up former clients Lamar, Childish Gambino, Vince Staples and Ravyn Lenae alongside experimentalists such as Moses Sumney, Baby Rose and Fousheé – but it’s testament to the strength of his vision that these distinct voices come together like a bedded-in, playful house band. All trust, no ego.

(Editions Mego)
Lewis mines beauty and intimacy from her minimalist blend of samples and rich instrumentation, sounding as profound whether they last 11 minutes or 38 seconds

The first thing you hear on Opening, the new record from Swedish musician Klara Lewis, is a grainy fog of ambient noise: the sound of waves, a roadside or perhaps just the creaks and echoes of the room she’s recording in. The whining reversed strings that soon emerge from the murk create a wistful atmosphere, but then things take a turn: the loop clips and distorts with strobe-like intensity; after several minutes, it cuts off mid-bar, as though it’s been unplugged.

This deconstructed, shape-shifting approach is typical of the self-styled “sound sculptor”, who has been composing uncanny instrumentals from a combination of acoustic instruments and processed samples since 2014. As always, she imbues the harsh experimentalism with real feeling throughout this gorgeous collection of tracks. On City, the lo-fi guitar loop and faint traces of chatter lend a sense of warmth and intimacy to the whooshing field recordings and churning electronics. On standout Vaknar, Lewis builds something soaring and beautiful, where the reverse tape effect creates a dreamlike wooziness and the high-pitched bursts of noise feel increasingly ecstatic, in the spirit of Joshua Chuquimia Crampton or early Arca.

McCarthy/Waarts/National Symphony Orchestra Ireland/McAdams
(Nonesuch)
Dennehy’s Limina, based on areas of the body, is firmly grounded in the harmonic series, and sparklingly executed here, while Stephen Waarts gives a bravura performance of the Violin Concerto

These two concertos, beautifully paired, again find Donnacha Dennehy writing music that is both firmly grounded – both rhythmically and in his fascination with the harmonic series – and, to the ear at least, joyously unfettered. Limina was written in 2023 for the pianist Eliza McCarthy, who is a powerhouse soloist here with the National Symphony Orchestra Ireland and conductor Ryan McAdams. It’s a serious piece born of a slightly playful idea. Its three movements are each named for a part of the body, staking out one area before moving to the threshold, or limina, of the next. Head starts with synapses firing high up the keyboard in sparks and glitter; it travels downwards, frenetic energy dissipating, towards Chest, which evokes breathing – not with regular rhythms but with gentle palindromic phrases that swell in and out and sigh back towards the same bass pitch. Nervous System begins deep in the gut, with coarser sounds – low piano vamping, and slapped bowing from the strings – but eventually escapes its tether and disperses around the keyboard.

The Violin Concerto, written in 2020, is just as propulsive, and the outer movements especially are a workout for Stephen Waarts, who gives a bravura performance. In the middle movement his violin soars, pushing off from the orchestral support to trace slow, weightless somersaults in the air. The finale has a thrilling sense of motion creating its own gravity: as with so much of Dennehy’s writing, it’s as if the music is held together by centrifugal force.

(Reprise)
The crossover star’s introspective sixth album is full of memories of his mother, who died in 2025, bringing his dextrous guitar to songs rooted in tradition and yearning

On the face of it, 2025 was a landmark year for Billy Strings. His fifth album, Highway Prayers, won him his third Grammy. The first bluegrass album in more than 22 years to debut at the top of the US album sales chart, it confirmed him as the genre’s biggest crossover star in decades. He was feted by everyone from Bob Dylan to Post Malone to Willie Nelson, the latter describing him as “the John Coltrane of bluegrass”, a pretty impressive soubriquet in anyone’s book. As the New York Times noted, he was now capable of filling the arena-sized venues that his idols – Doc Watson, Clarence White, Tony Rice, Béla Fleck – could never have dreamed of performing in, packing them out with an audience that look less like traditional bluegrass aficionados than Deadheads: a vast, mobile, hippy-ish army that call themselves Goats. They’re presumably drawn by the ease with which Strings occupies the no man’s land between country and expansive, psychedelically informed improvisation, his willingness to put acoustic guitar through umpteen effects pedals and stretch out songs for 20 minutes on stage.

It’s a side of Strings’ music that’s only hinted at on Highway Prayers’ follow-up: as Burn the Other End and Lucid Daydream draw to an end, they briefly unravel into a kind of abstraction that you can imagine as a jumping-off point for heady, out-there exploration live. But So Much for Goodbyes is an album more concerned with introspection, and understandably so. In the midst of 2025’s successes, Strings’ mother died of an overdose. His chaotic upbringing is a matter of record. His father died of a heroin overdose when he was two, both his mother and his stepfather were addicted to meth and he left home at 14 on the grounds that “there was no food in the house and my parents were strung out”. But Strings said he had “no idea” she had relapsed, and her death seeps into every corner of the album: its title and cover art – based on a collage his mother was working on the night she died; the concluding instrumental that bears her name, Debra’s Waltz; the songs that, on the surface, appear to have nothing to do with her passing.

Poetry with wonder and wit; a heartwarming tale for horse lovers; a portal to the future; a brilliant YA wartime romance and more

Small Monster, Big Monster by Allan Sanders, Phaidon, £7.95
Refrigerator is EMPTY. Monster is FULL (of pizza!). An eye-wateringly bright board book, featuring splendidly zany, toddler-pleasing pairs of opposites.

The Flying Machine of Dreams by Kate Wakeling, illustrated by Viviane Schwarz, Otter-Barry, £12.99
A delectable picture-book collaboration that perfectly distils the wonder of the everyday, from the textures of a leaf to a squishy-cushioned den. Wakeling’s irresistible poetry is richly heightened by Schwarz’s sweet, strange illustrations.

A heartbroken woman becomes fixated on a famous writer in this witty, touching follow-up to Sorrow and Bliss

The protagonist of Meg Mason’s new book, the follow-up to the 2020 tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, is an invisible woman. She might well be standing there but you won’t notice her. She’s a techie at literary festivals – the person who shuffles up to a famous writer a few minutes before their event and apologetically slides a microphone cable down their shirt while they’re making small talk with the chair or accepting a bottle of room-temperature mineral water from an anxious publicist.

No man is a hero to his valet, and no writer is a hero to the technical staff lurking in the wings of a venue. Mason’s opening pages present a teasing but not quite libellous series of cameos from real writers: George Saunders deciding at an inconsiderately late stage to insist on swapping his headset for a lapel mic; Ann Patchett being frosty with a fan; Mick Herron accidentally stepping on someone’s foot and not apologising.

The much-discussed Life of M is the latest in a lineage of celebrity satire that spans from Virginia Woolf to The Devil Wears Prada

In Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, the famous actor protagonist participates in an event at a book store after hours. The actor, M, is joined by “a writer of some renown” and a fashion model who possesses “some vague self-absorption”. A brand sponsored the affair. I spent literal hours trying to find the real-world equivalent of the opaque fictional passage. I scrolled through the backlogs of influencers I know to appear bookish in their content, who might have fallen prey to Dior’s Ulysses tote bag drop or Miu Miu’s “literary club”. I even stooped so low as to DM a Natalie Portman fan account, asking for leads.

As has been widely reported, M’s character is based on Portman. One journalist was credited with the scoop, but she simply finished her advance copy sooner than the rest of us; it’s clear from page three, when Cusk describes M’s breakout film as having “immediately brought her childhood to an end” (obviously Léon: The Professional; Portman was 11 when she was cast) and a later film about obsessive, wild ballerinas (Black Swan). But the rumor that Portman is unhappy with her portrayal – an impression that cannot immediately be gleaned from the book itself, especially depending on interpretation of its final lines – has trickled down to the raggiest of tabloids.

A terminally ill woman makes a final trip to Egypt in an exquisitely wrought portrait of end-of-life reckoning

Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch that it is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. In the shallow and infantilising age through which we are living, Colin Thubron dares to assume that his readers are adults. Passage is a very beautiful, very moving, authentic work of art. Hardly more than a novella, it sits lightly in the hand, but its emotional and aesthetic weight overtips the balance.

Thubron began his career as a travel writer and a large part of the action of Passage is set in a vividly but economically evoked Egypt. This is not the teeming Egypt of Cairo or Alexandria, but of the countryside, the villages, and the great immemorial tombs and ancient monuments. The best travel writers know that “abroad” is most convincingly evoked not by awed exclamations at the world’s wonders, but by an attitude of relaxed familiarity. Thubron is obviously an old Egypt hand, or at least has the skill to convince us that he is.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Asobo Studio
The medieval franchise is transplanted to Crete, conjuring action-adventure magic from familiar ingredients

The path in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a familiar one. Amid ancient ruins and sun-dappled gorges, a young woman, Sophia, dutifully treads the same footsteps as a Minoan warrior from millennia ago, one with whom she seems to share a visionary connection. The “resonance” between these two characters is made clear by their echoing actions – a crank pushed in the bronze age that still works in the medieval present, for example. Through these spliced timelines, it becomes clear that Sophia, compelled by her supernatural gift, possesses little agency. Destiny beckons her forwards.

This is a smart meta concept for a game that, at its most basic level, boils down to keeping your left thumb planted firmly on the analogue stick, always pushing Sophia onwards in linear fashion. You jostle her through ornate corridors rendered as higgledy-piggledy pirate camps and cobbled Venetian streets. For the greater part of the game, you propel her through the Minoan remains of Crete, which harbour a dark and terrible secret. It is classic third-person action-adventure fare, building on the template laid down by the likes of Tomb Raider and then refined and complicated by titles such as The Last of Us. Little, from an interactive perspective, surprises: you dash, vault and swing between teetering podiums, squeeze through tiny gaps in rock and crouch behind conveniently placed walls to avoid enemies.

The flat routines of a dead end railway job screen out an approaching menace in a quietly intriguing game from the indie developer of Cat Lady and Lorelai

Lonely jobs have provided excellent material for independent video games over the years. From Papers, Please to Firewatch to The Stanley Parable, players have been happy to spend hours dwelling in depressing cubicles or rural hideaways, usually because there is an intriguingly hidden point to it all.

In Trainwatch, a character named Troy has taken a seemingly godforsaken job as a railway worker in an unnamed desolate backwater. His main task over the course of a single month is to manage a level crossing, closing the gate whenever a train comes, while also carrying out daily chores such as cooking and washing. It sounds serene, but Troy is also running away from something. The other stipulations are that he stays sober and calls his wife every night. And there is something lurking in the fog at the edges of the fields – one day he must face it.

An increasing tension between players and publishers about ownership of titles could lead to a divestment from the system the big companies are trying to enforce

At the time of press, there is a well-publicised protest taking place in the video games community. PlayStation 5 owners are being encouraged to log off from their consoles between 23 and 30 August – no playing games, no downloading new titles. The motivating factor is Sony’s decision to cease physical game disc production from January 2028. After that, games will only be released as digital products. In an act of poor timing or wilful defiance, Sony chose this week to send out a mass email reminding customers of their PS5 terms and conditions: “The software is licensed to you, not sold,” states the relevant clause. “You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to play … ” It knows, of course, that most customers won’t open the email, let alone read it.

There has always been a tension between game players and game publishers – an underlying sense of mutual mistrust. Players are wary of their favourite franchises being canned, or games being delayed or released with bugs. Publishers and manufacturers are wary of piracy and the capricious tastes of consumers. But now the atmosphere among many game players feels more starkly political than ever. Microsoft has been targeted by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement for its ties to the Israeli military; the consumer advocacy group Stop Killing Games is gaining support; players have protested over the purchase of Electronic Arts by a Saudi-led consortium – boycotts have been proposed in part due to the possible ramifications regarding LGBTQ+ content in titles such as The Sims. As the games industry has grown and globalised, its impact on culture, society and politics has increased. Yet, on an individual level, gamers and consumers are feeling increasingly powerless.

PC; Nathan Grange, Léonard Lemaitre, Niels Tiercelin, IronEqual
Race across impossible dystopian cityscapes in this exhilarating game of wall-runs, death-chancing leaps and split-second improvisation

At first, Vholume seems like a quick rush through some smartly selected references. Has this breathless yet austere parkour game been designed or ingeniously curated? The urban gymnast moveset comes from Mirror’s Edge. Level names use terms like conapt, first coined by Philip K Dick. And the environments themselves are dystopian and surreal, Half-Life 2’s City 17 colliding with the blasted avenues and mute archways of de Chirico. Many games have influences. Vholume has actual taste.

All the surface stuff fades away when the game is in motion, however. Vholume’s an on-foot racing game in which you hoof it through spectacularly odd environments, moving from one beam of concrete to the next. You’re clipping your wall-runs and power-slides together to bridge seemingly impossible gaps between buildings, forever in search of the next stretch of track, the next turn, the next jump that gets you to the level’s exit and the worldwide leaderboards. And once that’s done, you have a choice: onwards to another gauntlet, or back to the start of this one again to slice a few microseconds off your score? Or maybe you’d rather head over to multiplayer to race against the ghosts of others?

Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Colliding complex and contrasting moods, Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied was rendered with clarity and conviction

When Sigmund Freud met Gustav Mahler in 1910, he suggested that, following a childhood trauma, “the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was inextricably fixed in Mahler’s mind”. Freud was famously uninterested in music, but had he known Das Klagende Lied, he would have found ample supporting evidence for his diagnosis. Composed in Mahler’s late teens and fusing opera, symphony, oratorio, lieder, part-song and even church music, the cantata collides comedy and tragedy at every turn – most remarkably towards the end, when the offstage wind band continues cheerfully as a wedding goes disastrously wrong with the revelation that the bridegroom won his bride by murdering his younger brother.

Mahler withdrew the first movement, Waldmärchen, and its manuscript remained unavailable until 1969. Performing all three movements but incorporating Mahler’s later revisions, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under former chief conductor Donald Runnicles made a strong case for the original tripartite structure.

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Even one of her own bugs takes the mic as the wild card comedian delivers these disconnected bits

There’s an excellent joke about art school in Marty Gleeson’s show, but even without it, we might guess that the Irish comic comes from an art school background. In Dog Ear, convention is for the birds, with one leftfield idea following the next in a disorienting array. A visit to the future accompanied by fluttering beats on the bodhrán? A standup set performed by one of the thousands of bugs on Gleeson’s body? A funeral for her 187-year-old alter ego, at which she must solemnly shake the hand of every single audience member? Throughout her fringe debut, Gleeson delights in ensuring we’ve never the slightest idea what’s about to happen next.

That makes it an offbeat delight to encounter, and at its best, this Limerick exile’s material is captivatingly unexpected. Even before its droll punchline, her routine about asking Santa, increasingly ardently, for a “big juicy booty” is quite the gambit. Another, extending the closing credits of a news bulletin ad absurdum, is similarly strange – and, like much of her material, tests the limits of how long something uneasy can happen before a punchline arrives to redeem it.

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Watching a man labouring to strike up conversations in the smoking area of a nightclub proves not just funny but also touching and uplifting

Ever pretended to use your phone to avoid the shame of being Norman No-Mates at a party? Freddie Meredith’s new show is a 60-minute channelling of that experience, an hour-long cringe at a man labouring to strike up conversations in the smoking area of a nightclub.

Meredith, a familiar face to viewers of Big Boys, Such Brave Girls and other TV series, has alighted on a familiar social type here, albeit one rarely so brilliantly depicted. His alter ego is a shy and insecure beta male desperately trying to look – well, alpha is out of his reach, but even basic social functioning would be an upgrade.

Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh
Songs, physical comedy and clever design come together in Theatr Iolo’s adaptation of Arnold Lobel’s offbeat story, aimed at over-fives

Arnold Lobel was a writer with a keen sense of the seasons. Frog and Toad Are Friends, one of my favourite books since childhood, has a wonderful story where the excitable Frog wakes up his grumpy friend Toad and tricks him into enjoying the dawn of spring with him. Those stories celebrate togetherness but Lobel’s collection Owl at Home is about aloneness and being at one with your surroundings – even when the arrival of winter brings a snowstorm blowing through your roost.

With his hair gelled into tufts, George Williams plays Owl in this adaptation by Rina Vergano and Theatr Iolo, directed by Lee Lyford. We find Williams dozing in an armchair on Anisha Fields’ accomplished set, which retains the cosy essence of Lobel’s illustrations but is less twee. The roost functions as an equally eccentric character in itself, filled with contraptions, dark wooden furniture and a periscope to nervously keep an eye on the world outside.

Led by the nose from game to terrible game by increasingly disturbing and terrible adverts, I feel like I’m in the cinema scene from A Clockwork Orange

We’re all escaping something when we play video games. Mostly it’s the drabness of real life, where we don’t get to command kingdoms using armies of dragons, win Champions League trophies with our local team, or inhabit the body of an improbably speedy hedgehog.

Sometimes I play them because I want to escape from the version of me that gets paralysed by depression, and boy has the black dog been sniffing at my bits recently, because the Atlantic Ocean is separating me from my wife for a few months. For 30 years she has been the light that banishes that darkness, and I am honestly lost without her. If that sounds pathetic, you haven’t met her. She leaves everybody she meets feeling better. It’s a superpower that warrants a call from the X-Men.

A zero-emission compact hydrogen power plant will drive the main stage at Clifton Down in Bristol

When Lorde, Little Simz and Wet Leg stride on to stages in Bristol this weekend, they will not only be entertaining tens of thousands of festivalgoers but taking part in what is being billed as a world-first clean power project.

The two stages at Forwards festival on Clifton Down are being driven almost entirely by green power – a combination of hydrogen and mobile batteries charged with sustainable energy.

Having directed documentaries about David Bowie, Radiohead and Joy Division, Grant Gee takes on a biopic of the turbulent and tragic American pianist

In 1997, Grant Gee directed the video for Radiohead’s single No Surprises, a four-minute film that featured Thom Yorke miming the song inside a water-filled diver’s helmet, apparently almost drowning in the process. In the three decades since that promo, Gee has made a host of diverse feature-length films about artists: Radiohead, David Bowie, Joy Division, the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, the émigré German novelist WG Sebald. They are often impressionistic, dreamlike explorations of art, memory, place and the strange pressures put upon artistic lives.

“It’s a narrative form I’ve used again and again,” says Gee. “A character begins in one condition; a crisis slowly develops; the viewer watches that crisis in a forensic yet empathetic way; the crisis passes; the person returns to something like the original state, but transformed. Someone comes very close to drowning, but doesn’t drown. What does that do to them?”

Montreal-born actor also voiced KARR in Knight Rider and the monster in Predator, having started his career on Canadian TV and radio

Peter Cullen, the actor behind the voice of characters including Eeyore in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh franchise and Optimus Prime in Transformers, has died aged 85.

He died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, a statement said.

Across six decades, the late country singer and pop culture icon turned self‑presentation into a flamboyant art form

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Dolly Parton may have had a record 25 US country No 1 singles, released 66 studio albums and earned six Golden Globe nominations, among many other achievements, but the Tennessee-born star also had an incredible number of fashion moments. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, she famously quipped when asked about her style. As we bid her farewell, six Guardian writers reflect on their favourite Dolly looks.

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Do you need a soft mattress if you sleep on your side, or are firm models better for your back? And what about pillows? Here’s what the experts say

• The best mattresses, tested
• The best mattresses for back pain

Most of us, me included, sleep on our sides. Drooling into your pillow and giving yourself a dead arm may not be as photogenic as Sleeping Beauty lying prettily on her back, but it’s probably better for you. Studies have found that sleeping on your left side can help reduce snoring, sleep apnoea and acid reflux, and the experts I spoke to for this article say side sleeping is good for your back and your sleep.

Side sleeping brings its challenges, though, and I don’t just mean the drool. The curves of your body need somewhere to go. If your mattress isn’t cushioning your hips and shoulders, or your knees are pressing against each other, you may struggle to sleep well and experience aches and pains. An overly soft surface can also cause problems, as you’ll know if you’ve ever spent the night on a friend’s concave sofa.

Suri’s eco-friendly brush fixes several flaws in the first-generation model – here’s what it does better (and what still needs work)

• The best electric toothbrushes, tested

When I wrote the Filter’s guide to the best electric toothbrushes, one brand I didn’t need a sample from was Suri. I already owned one of its brushes, drawn in by its impressive commitment to sustainability in a sector that seemed blissfully unbothered by the climate crisis unfolding around us.

Unfortunately, a few things held it back from taking the top spot, and I’m pleased to say that these have mostly been addressed with the Suri Pro 2.0. Is it the best you can buy? Still not quite, but the gap has significantly closed, and there are fewer caveats than ever when giving it a recommendation.

With a genuinely impressive lifetime guarantee, Nectar’s mattress outperforms pricier rivals for comfort and motion isolation

• The best mattresses, tested

Memory foam has been called the Marmite of the bed industry. Nice soundbite, but I think it’s more like butter – because many mattresses now include a “comfort layer” of this squishy material to make them more palatable. You wouldn’t eat a whole block of butter, though, and you probably wouldn’t want to sleep on a mattress made entirely from memory foam. Too much squish, too little support.

The Nectar Classic memory foam, like so many of the best foam and hybrid (foam and springs) mattresses, tempers the marshmallowy feel of true memory foam by sandwiching it between other types of foam, namely breathable polyfoam and dense support foam. As I discovered when testing it, this creates a lovely balance of comfort and firmness that feels more like a hybrid mattress, only without the bounce.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The former reality star and author talks family heirlooms, organic veg and splurge-worthy jeans with the Filter

• How I Shop with Fred Sirieix

Millie Mackintosh rose to fame as part of the original cast of the reality show Made in Chelsea, filming five series before leaving in 2013. She has since established herself as a fitness, health and beauty ambassador, releasing her own beauty collection with Boots in 2017, and publishing Made: A Book of Style, Food and Fitness.

After choosing to go alcohol-free, she shared her journey in the bestselling Bad Drunk, co-written with Dr Ellie Cannon. Mackintosh speaks candidly about the realities of motherhood, mental health and self-care on Instagram.

These sweet and fruity frozen refreshers will get you in the carnival spirit

It’s only right that on the weekend of the Notting Hill carnival, rum punch is your drink of choice. Whether or not you’re heading to west London to celebrate, these ice lollies will get you in the party mood. They’re fruity, sweet and balanced with plenty of fresh lime, and I always like to make sure there’s enough leftover rum mixture to pour over ice to drink while the lollies are setting.

Sardines, mackerel, herring, pilchards, sprats and anchovies ... canning only makes the umami flavour better. They’re my top choice for pasta

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I can’t find it, despite having spent the past 35 minutes looking, but somewhere in the house is The Crisis Cook Book. It’s a standard paperback, postbox-red with white writing on the cover, and full of recipes from chefs including Rowley Leigh, Heston Blumenthal and Jeremy Lee. Not having found it, I needed Amazon to tell me it was published in 2007 and compiled by Nick Lander, at the time the Financial Times’ restaurant correspondent. He asked 28 chefs to donate three recipes – their favourite starter, main course and dessert – and proceeds from the book went to the national homelessness charity Crisis.

The reason I needed (and still need – it is now a mission) to find the book is because inside it is Rowley’s recipe for pasta with tinned sardines, fennel, chilli and lemon zest. It’s a recipe that I have made so many times, and for so many years, that I don’t need to look at the book; but, equally, because I’ve made it so many times and so much time has passed, I have no idea how far I have drifted from the original, and want to check. I’ve even written about this recipe in my weekly Guardian column, without referring to the book or even mentioning Rowley! Not that a store-cupboard version of the Sicilian pasta con le sarde (pasta with sardines and wild fennel) is owned by anyone, although Rowley did teach me.

Whether they’re consumed as a considered glass for one or something to sip on a short trip, miniature wine bottles are back with a bang

In the 1920s, the London wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd was asked to create a wine cellar for a doll’s house, commissioned by Queen Mary, to showcase the best of British craftsmanship. Designed by Edwin Lutyens, it had running water, electricity, a library of tiny books and, naturally, a wine cellar stocked with 1,200 miniature bottles, including vintage ports, an 1889 Montrachet and top-tier bordeaux. These days, the doll’s house resides in Windsor Castle, but Berry Bros has a replica of that cellar in its own Mayfair cellar, complete with 5ml bottles of those same wines.

It is fair to say that this is not representative of the calibre of wine one generally finds in miniature bottles, a format associated with air travel and what I once called “journey juice” – ie, a drop that would last me the six stops from home to London Victoria on a Friday night. Google “miniature bottles of wine” and you’ll overwhelmingly be served examples from the very biggest wine brands in the world. This is also true of canned wines, although I’d argue there’s more interesting wine going into cans than small bottles.

Including, to my surprise, a 100% cacao bar …

Although I’m un peu fatiguée of chocolates in bonbon shape with coloured cocoa-butter splashes atop, I appreciate this is the way many chocolates truffles are made. Overcoming that prejudice, I tucked into a box of Scoff chocolates. They were beautifully fresh tasting – they are made in batches throughout the year and the latest batch has just been let loose. I liked every one of the nine flavours I tested, from lemon to malted milk. But the ingredient list is long and a bit mainstream; a cleaner, more artisan approach and this would be a winning brand.

Marks & Spencer has brought out some 1980s classics in original packaging for those wanting to go full Rivals: look out for Now!, Jet, Sparks and Coconut Grove and see which chocolate classics they remind you of. My testers loved them.

There are two things to consider, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Are you hurt by the way she treats you or the way she sees you?

• Read more Leading questions

I’m struggling with a dynamic with my sister-in-law. We’re not a natural fit personality-wise, and I’ve tried to be mindful of that. At times I wonder whether she might be jealous of the life I have with her brother and our children. I often encourage my husband to spend time with her without me, because she doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy me being there. As a result, we now mostly see each other at family gatherings, which happen about once a month.

There’s a recurring pattern where she corrects me quite sharply, with an impatience that often feels disproportionate or plain mean. She might snap while I am talking to her parents (with whom I have a good relationship), laugh at how I pronounce a placename, or dismiss a question as though it’s too stupid to answer. These interactions are quick and barely noticeable to anyone else, although my daughter and husband have both observed and agreed it was pretty mean.

Helen says grabbing friends’ leftovers is a no-no. Bill thinks wasting food is wrong. You decide who should eat their words
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I know Bill hates waste, but pouncing on people’s leftovers is embarrassing, unhygienic and rude

With many adults admitting they feel lonely, meetup platforms offer the chance to make new connections

Would you pay £20 a month for the chance of making a friend, on the understanding that an algorithm – not you – gets to decide who you’ll meet?

Driven by the decline of “third spaces” such as youth centres and pubs, an increase in remote working and rising loneliness – 40% of adults aged 16 to 29 feel lonely “always, often or some of the time”, according to the Office for National Statistics – paid social events are now in vogue.

Research shows young adults often feel isolated. So alongside embracing ‘grandma hobbies’, they want to get involved with the places they live and be good neighbours

Name: Community-maxxing.

Age: The portmanteau is recent, but Homo sapiens have always been social creatures.

We want our balance back, but we can’t access the money to pay for essential repairs and settle an electricity bill

Last November, Lloyds Bank informed me, in my role as treasurer of my parish church, that the church account was to be closed and that I should open a new business account instead. This can only be done online, but a fault with their system prevented me – and local branch staff – from doing so.

At the branch staff’s suggestion, I opened the new account with a different bank in early March. Since then, I’ve been trying in vain to get Lloyds to transfer the balance from the closed account.

Britons will be able to buy ‘balcony’ systems they can install themselves from 27 August thanks to rule change

Despite this summer bringing hours of sunshine, many Britons have been unable to cash in on free electricity generated by the sun. Rooftop solar panels are usually out of the question if you live in a flat or rent your home, and the cost has made them prohibitive to many more households.

However, this could be about to change because next week the first wave of low-cost “plug-in” solar panels will go on sale in Great Britain.

It has not paid me for months and I am in severe financial distress, and apart from my husband while I try to sort it out

I stopped receiving my NHS pension in May and, when I rang to ask why, I was informed that I was deceased.

I have repeatedly called to no avail and my emails have received auto-generated responses.

Sign-up perks may capture the attention but should the focus be on the interest-free overdraft?

• Students on their biggest financial shocks

• The best student deals and discounts

• An insider’s tips on student money

In the scramble to sort out university accommodation, join freshers group chats and work out how a student loan payment is meant to stretch across a whole term, there is one big decision that is easy to put off but worth getting right: which student bank account to open.

Student accounts work like any other current account but come with two extras that don’t apply to the general public: an interest-free overdraft, and a lot of perks designed to hook you in as a customer for life.

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

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

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

Scientists found those who had used hormone replacement therapy were 10% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia

Hormone replacement therapy may reduce the risk of dementia, a study has found.

Scientists tracked more than 180,000 postmenopausal women in the UK in the largest study of its kind. They found that those who had used HRT were 10% less likely to develop any type of dementia and 16% less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the most common form, compared with those who had never used it.

Discussing people’s bodies can be fraught. We asked eating disorder experts how to do so – or not – responsibly

In the age of Ozempic and people being open about plastic surgery, discussion about people’s bodies is rife. At the same time, nobody seems quite sure how to talk about them, as shown by recent coverage of celebrities like Ariana Grande.

It is a fraught topic. We asked eating disorder experts for guidelines to follow when talking about other people’s bodies, and how to do so without doing harm.

Creatine has become the go-to supplement for anyone wanting to give their fitness a boost and build muscle. It’s even made it out of the gym, with influencers touting its cognitive benefits. But what’s the science behind creatine, and does the evidence stack up? Madeleine Finlay hears from science editor Ian Sample and Dr Justin Roberts, professor of nutritional physiology at Anglia Ruskin University

Is it true that … we should all be taking creatine?

Athletes and fitness influencers use creatine, but what is it? And does it work?

The 70s was a golden era for the jumpsuit, but I’m happy they’re back, thanks to Harry Styles, Benson Boone and – of course – me

Since appearing on The Traitors, I’ve become synonymous with jumpsuits. In fact, I’ve been required to wear one at every public appearance I have made since it aired, despite only wearing two on the show. That’s the power of the jumpsuit, I guess.

When I was packing for the show, I wasn’t even sure I would bring them – and not everyone watching liked them. Lots of people did, but I got messages saying: “What the hell is he wearing?”. The memes were also phenomenal. My favourite was my head on John Travolta’s body in a still from Saturday Night Fever.

The event feted its 25 year anniversary with labels like Zambesi, promising emerging designers and an explosion of Māori and Indigenous culture

New Zealand fashion week took place in Auckland this week at the heritage-listed Shed 10 on Waitemata harbour and other venues across the city. Founded by Dame Pieter Stewart in 2001, now run by entrepreneur Feroz Ali, the 25th anniversary featured a mix of established names, exciting newcomers and a dramatically enhanced Indigenous program. The event boasted three separate group showcases of creatives from not just the Pacific region, but India, Taiwan and the US, in addition to the inaugural New Zealand Indigenous fashion symposium.

If ‘lifespan’ is the time you’re alive and ‘healthspan’ the years you’re disease-free, then ‘hotspan’ is the period you’re attractive and vibrant. Want to increase yours? Experts share their tips

Forget 12-step skincare routines, red light therapy and injectables – the single most important thing you can do for your skin is wear UV protection. “Not just sun protection, but UV protection, every single day, regardless of weather or season,” says Dr Jennifer Owens, resident aesthetic expert at the Reborne Longevity clinic in London. “Up to 90% of visible skin ageing is caused by UV exposure – nothing else comes close in terms of impact.”

Cute, egoless canines offer a break from a world that feels dominated by ‘nepo babies’ and ‘Maga lady aesthetic’

What do Nicole Kidman, a pair of “nepo babies” and a beagle called Sansa Martínez Berlingeri have in common? They all appear on the covers of the all-important September issues of Vogue and Dogue. But the winner of the unofficial battle of the covers? The one with the keenest sense of smell and a penchant for playing with socks.

The September covers of British Vogue and Vogue US have come under intense scrutiny after their recent release, while their canine counterpoint, Dogue, has been almost unanimously celebrated.

Built in the 60s and 70s to curb a holiday exodus to Spain, with apartments inspired by Mayan pyramids and featuring ‘intergalactic curves’, La Grande-Motte is having another moment in the sun with fans of modern architecture

My dream holiday is a trip back in time. Not to see the results of seismic Pompeii or 15th-century Machu Picchu – although I love both – but somewhere created specifically between the mid 1950s and 1970s, when cities were getting weird. I love postwar architourism, exploring urban planning at its most frenzied and optimistic. I have relished trips to Niemeyer’s Brasília and Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh in India, where the monumental and visionary modernist architecture and interiors are at odds with the minimal population. So La Grande-Motte, the retro futurist folly of a resort town on the southern coast of France, a 30-minute drive from Montpellier, had long been on my “must visit” list.

The tourist board of this Occitanie seaside town likes to flag up some superficial parallels between it and the aforementioned cities, but this isn’t a high-concept capital city or administrative hub. It was built in the late 1960s and early 1970s purely to persuade the French to stop going south to the Costa Brava in Spain. As part of an initiative by the French government, a stretch of windswept mosquito-infested coast between Montpellier and Perpignan, including Gruissan and Port Leucate, was reimagined as an alternative to the Côte d’Azur with several new-build beach towns. La Grande-Motte would be the weirdest project. It was made for fun. It’s also well positioned to visit the nearby salt marshes and 13th-century walled-in town of Aigues-Mortes, for when you want to feel as if you’ve ticked a few more holiday boxes.

The crowds at the top of Yr Wyddfa, the highest mountain in Wales, are now so huge that seasoned hikers and climbers are simply walking past them. Is everyone just making a mountain out of a molehill?

Name: The Snowdon queue.

Age: A decade and a half, give or take.

In the shadow of the crowded Lake District, this quiet coast path offers great views, breathtaking nature and a striking new hotel on the historic waterfront

What’s the edgiest region in the UK? I don’t mean in the sense of sketchy or fashionable, but where on the map of these four nations feels most at the margins of everywhere else? For my money, the north Cumbrian coast is a strong contender. Hemmed in by the Lake District fells on one side and the Solway Firth and Irish Sea on the other, this strip of towns and villages, farms and nature reserves, clinging to the low-lying littoral, has been battling nature, weather, geology and geography throughout its history.

Coastal erosion is part of the challenge. Like the railway navvies before them, the planners and builders of the England Coast Path (ECP) have done sterling work at plotting a viable footpath and shoring it up. But there are and always will be sections that are compromised and even impassable. I chose a section that would take three days, walking southwards, and my final destination, St Bees, was only reachable via a diversion. It’s all part of the adventure, and we’re lucky to have the ECP as a national trail, as it means issues and obstacles on the English coast will usually be promptly addressed.

From smoked kippers in Northumberland to dolphin spotting in Dorset and a palm-fringed village on a sea loch in the Scottish Highlands

The historic harbour is the hub of this working East Neuk fishing port, home to a fleet of about 30 small trawlers and creel boats. Their catches are sold at the covered market on the quay each weekday morning, and served at the harbourside Dory Bistro and Chip Ahoy at the Larachmhor pub. Pittenweem (which means “place of the cave”) also has a Victorian-era swimming pool next to the beach, which is filled by the tide twice a day. After falling into disrepair, it was saved by a local group called the West Braes Project and reopened in 2021, along with the crazy golf course. Early each August, there is an annual arts festival with exhibits by nearly 200 artists in harbourside spaces, heritage buildings, homes and studios. Pittenweem is flanked by two other pretty harbour villages, St Monans and Anstruther, while a third, Crail, is a little further north; the Fife Coastal Path links them all. The Bank in Anstruther has harbour-view rooms (doubles from £120 B&B).

It’ll soon be autumn, but the record-breaking weather has taken its toll on my vegetables

I’ve grown plants in heatwaves before, but this year has been different. Back-to-back heatwaves feel far more intense than the shorter ones I’m used to. Records for heat and dryness were broken in August, and my veg patch has dealt with it in myriad ways.

You might think more sun equals more growth, but that isn’t necessarily the case. When under heat stress, plants close their stomata – the pores on the underside of their leaves – hindering the movement of water and exchange of gases needed for photosynthesis. This can result in a check on growth that I’ve seen in several of my plants, some of which dropped their flowers before they could start bearing fruit.

From the arched windows and decorative chimneys of a Victorian police station to a white seaside cottage highlighted in vivid blue

Dublin’s representative in the traditional festival defiantly reckons with xenophobia and balances Gaelic pride with her Somali heritage

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Last week marked the climax of Ireland’s Rose of Tralee festival, an annual celebration of Irish women, culture and the Irish diaspora. When Suad Mooge was chosen as Dublin’s participant in the festival earlier this year, she quickly became a symbol of Ireland’s fraught conversation around immigration and what constitutes Irish identity.

I caught up with Suad on a video call a week after the festival’s culmination, and found someone reflective and determined in the face of criticism.

People with persistent predatory personalities cause an inordinate amount of pain. Recently, our shared understanding of them has grown – and it could help protect us

The classic checklist for psychopathy was developed in 1980 by Prof Robert Hare, who is still the recognised giant of the territory. The 20 traits, which ranged from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, were based entirely on prison populations. This worked because not only did Hare have the benefit of a large sample, with pronounced psychopathic behaviours, but he was able to compare interviews and self-reporting with data collected about the individuals – so inconsistencies could be identified.

However, Hare knew this approach was limited. In 1976, he said that he simply didn’t know to what extent his results could be generalised to non-incarcerated psychopaths, including female ones. “Research into the socially successful psychopath is badly needed,” he concluded. Even decades later in the early 2000s, when Hare wanted to look into psychopaths in politics, he still needed to go to prison to find them (Pinochet’s henchmen in Chilean jails). Research into the higher-functioning psychopath – who doesn’t get caught, or maybe doesn’t even resort to crime – has proved elusive, not least because self-reporting questionnaires don’t work. Psychopaths lie; arguably, that’s their main thing.

A glacial collapse registering as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event occurred near the border on Wednesday morning

Hundreds of people have died in catastrophic flash floods in Nepal. Here’s what we know so far about what caused the disaster.

With Reuters and Associated Press

Georges Dib, who had 8.7m TikTok followers, was arrested on Sunday after being sentenced in absentia to life in prison

Known to his 8.7m TikTok followers as Dr Food, Georges Dib was a popular Lebanese food influencer who would hold giveaways, post behind-the-scenes tours of his food production facilities and wax philosophical about the ingredients of success.

But Lebanese authorities allege that when the camera was off, the chef was living a double life. For months they sought his arrest on charges of international drug trafficking and production, accusing him of hiding narcotics in his pastries.

Floods and mudslides have swept away houses and roads with many hundreds missing

Hundreds are missing and at least 160 people have died after torrential floods ⁠hit the Himalayan border areas of ⁠Nepal and in ​Tibet in China. An avalanche of ice and rock triggered massive flash floods causing widespread damage to villages and infrastructure.

Officials said hundreds of travellers from countries including India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Malaysia, were reported missing.

We would like to hear your tributes and memories of the performer - whether you met him or admired his work

Tim Curry, performer of screen and stage, who made his name as the flamboyant Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, has died aged 80.

Curry got Tony nominations for his varied stage work on Broadway as Mozart in Amadeus, Alan Swann in My Favorite Year and as King Arthur in Monty Python’s Spamalot. He also made a supremely creepy Pennywise the Clown in the 1990 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s It. But above all he is most remembered for one role: Dr Frank-N-Furter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the screen version of the 1973 stage show.

It’s not always about the big things we achieve, sometimes the little accomplishments can be enjoyable. Tell us about yours here

Sometimes it’s the smallest accomplishments which bring the biggest joy. Something as simple as reorganising your cutlery drawer, for example, or repairing garden fence can prove surprisingly satisfying; it needn’t be just running a marathon or writing a novel provide a sense of achievement.

With this in mind, we want to hear about the small accomplishments which give you joy.

What track gets your feet moving the moment you hear it – and on to the dancefloor? I Feel Love by Donna Summer? Or We Found Love by Rihanna? We’d love to hear what yours is

There are some songs which are guaranteed dancefloor fillers whether it’s at a wedding, a club or a music festival.

We would love to hear from people about the song that always gets them on the dancefloor. Are you throwing shapes to Beyoncé’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) or ABBA’s Dancing Queen? Why is your go-to song for dancing your favourite?

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