About 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in employment, education or training – and the obstacles they face are bigger than ever. Those unemployed for a year or more explain how they are coping

Thomas doesn’t leave the house much. Apart from walking his dog, the only other excursion the 24-year-old regularly makes is a “humiliating” weekly trip to Iceland, where he stocks up on seven £1 frozen meals, usually an assortment of bland curries with the occasional garishly sweet, takeaway-style Chinese meal. “You’re going in and buying seven and the cashier is 100% thinking: oh, that’s one a day,” he says.

Half the time, he doesn’t bother eating them. “You just sit there and go: I don’t want it again. I’ve had it for two days on the trot.”

Claudia Sheinbaum started as an activist. Now she is Mexico’s president. Has she stayed true to her ideals?

The president’s dressmaker works at home, down a narrow road in a working-class neighbourhood on the southernmost edge of Mexico City. There is no sign, just the house number marked in chalk on a rusted metal door. In the brightly lit, pink-walled room at the back of her modest house, Olivia Trujillo sits at her sewing machine, piecing together the president’s signature suits and dresses. Trujillo sews everything here, accompanied only by her family, three dogs, and one green parrot. Once finished, an assistant spirits away the items by motorcycle straight to the National Palace, where the president lives. Claudia Sheinbaum’s clothing – tailored from modest fabrics produced in Mexico and featuring Indigenous motifs – is one of the many ways that her administration communicates its slogan: “For the good of all, first the poor.”

The dressmaker has just one problem with the president. People who wear made-to-measure clothes normally sit for the tailor twice: first, to have their measurements taken, then a second time for final adjustments. “Not once has she done a fitting for me, never!” says Trujillo, an exacting and neatly turned-out woman in her 60s. She knows the president is busy. “Still,” she objects, “any normal woman does a fitting for important clothes, like their wedding dress.”

Pixar’s new film tells young viewers that technology has stolen their childhood and that parents need to wise up fast. Its stars answer your questions on the series’ radical new message

What is the thing you’ve learned most from this new film? Secretmission
Tim Allen [the voice of Buzz Lightyear]: It sounds really self-gratifying, but it’s taking about 20% less time to make a better product. I know now how to focus and isolate my voice. I don’t do as many takes. Sometimes they’ll even say to me: “I think we got it. You can stop.”

Tom Hanks [Sheriff Woody]: Really? I will sometimes ask: “Please tell me you have it because I’m so done with this.” I find it to be exactly the same as it was at the get-go, except maybe there’s a little more importance put on it. I don’t think anybody picks our takes doing a Toy Story movie lightly. But I found everything else is just one damn thing after another.

Watching 108 hours of football is not for everyone but there are some crackers in the group stage, including Scotland v Brazil, Netherlands v Japan and France v Senegal

By Opta Analyst

The days of watching every game at the World Cup are long gone for most of us. The expansion to 48 teams means 72 group games will be played just to narrow the competition down to 32 sides – the number we have had at the last seven tournaments. Fans will have to sit through 108 hours of group-stage football – plus a lot of injury time and drinks breaks – just to get to the number of teams we have become accustomed to since 1998.

Given the unsociable kick-off times for many supporters across the world, it is going to be difficult to watch every game. So, with that in mind, we have picked a more manageable number to make sure you watch during the group stage.

While he denies wrongdoing, Sullivan traded on the idea of womens’ bodies as consumable objects. His terrible era laid the ground for the 21st-century porn industry

There was a time, not so long ago, when female breasts appeared daily in some national newspapers. It was part of a culture that stripped and infantilised women, presenting very young “girls” with a nod and a wink, as though it was all a joke. Feminists who objected were dismissed as killjoys, even though the campaign against what became known as “Page 3” was ultimately successful.

This week’s Panorama programme revisited that era, focusing on the alleged activities of one man, David Sullivan, who made a fortune from sex shops and sleazy tabloid newspapers. The allegations against Sullivan, which he angrily denies, are that he “interviewed” young women at his mansion in Essex and demanded sex in return for furthering their careers as “glamour models”. The women’s stories were horrible.

Joan Smith is an author, journalist and a former chair of the mayor of London’s violence against women and girls board

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.

Politicians, social media and far-right agitators convinced people that migrant-targeting violence would solve all their problems

Within minutes of the footage going online – of a Black man stabbing a white man – there was a sense of inexorability to what came next in Northern Ireland.

The grievances, the social media platforms, the politicians’ doublespeak and the international cheerleaders all provided a fuse. On Monday night came the spark.

PM ‘unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs’ for defence, says Healey, as he also takes aim at Rachel Reeves

Ryan Henderson, assistant chief constable for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, is about to hold a press conference about last night’s rioting.

Andy Burnham is facing criticism after saying that he thinks the Waspi women should be entitled to “some” compensation.

I’ll stick by the Waspi women because they deserve some recompense for the unfairness.

One government figure decried Burnham’s intervention as “pathetic”, adding: “He can’t say no to anyone.”

An ally of Sir Keir Starmer likened Burnham’s economic agenda to that of hard-left former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and argued that the mayor’s intervention would harm his chances of manoeuvring the prime minister out of Downing Street.

Andy Burnham’s continued support for Waspi women is both welcome and hugely refreshing. While some politicians have broken their promises, it takes real courage to speak out and say what millions of people across the country and hundreds of MPs from all parties already know - that 1950s-born women deserve justice.

Andy has always recognised the unfair way in which state pension equalisation was introduced.

As mayor of Greater Manchester, he supported Waspi women in the city-region with early access to concessionary travel, providing some recompense to them within affordability limits.

Hilary Benn says 16 people arrested and 12 police officers injured during second night of disorder

The Northern Ireland secretary has condemned “racist thuggery” in Belfast after a second night of violent anti-immigration protests, in which 16 people were arrested and 12 police officers were injured.

Hilary Benn said during the violence, which followed a serious knife attack on Monday, people were stopped in their cars to be asked where they come from and were targeted because of the colour of their skin.

US launches second round of airstrikes on Iran, and Tehran responds by targeting Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan

• US strikes Iran for second day, as ceasefire appears close to collapse

Three Indian seafarers were killed in a US attack on an oil tanker earlier this week, India’s shipping minister, ‌Sarbananda Sonowal, said.

“It is deeply unfortunate to learn of the tragic incident aboard the Palau-flagged MT Settebello. Sadly, three Indian seafarers initially reported missing are now confirmed dead after bodies have been located and identified,” he wrote in a post on X.

The Middle East is being pulled deeper into crisis & the consequences reach far beyond the region.”

Home secretary also urged to force tech firms to share data on stolen devices and if they are reactivated

The Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has asked the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to force all phone companies to make stolen devices “unusable bricks” in order to make them harder to sell on and less desirable to steal.

London is widely regarded as the phone-snatching capital of Europe, with between 200 and 300 devices stolen each day. The city accounts for up to three-quarters of all mobile phone thefts in England and Wales.

PC Jess Turnbull was responding to separate crash when she was hit by Mercedes

A 19-year-old police officer has died after being struck by a car while responding to another crash.

PC Jess Turnbull, a Northumbria police officer since September last year, was described by her chief constable, Vanessa Jardine, as “dedicated and committed” with so much to look forward to.

It was the day when Thomas Tuchel showed his hand for England’s World Cup opener against Croatia in Dallas next Wednesday and his players hinted at what can happen when they play with intensity and slick connections.

The paucity of the opposition had to be considered. Costa Rica barely even saw the ball; it was entirely a rearguard effort from them. But there was nevertheless encouragement for Tuchel, who went strong with his lineup, the occasion framed, really, by who he picked at the outset.

Analysis pinpoints areas most vulnerable to hotter, drier weather causing ground to shrink and drag foundations down

Millions of homes are at risk from climate-related subsidence, according to an analysis by the British Geological Survey (BGS).

As hotter, drier summers driven by global heating become more frequent, the ground under houses can shrink and drag down a property’s foundations. The most vulnerable areas include London, Essex, Kent and a tranche of land from Oxford up to the Wash on England’s east coast, according to scientists, who say mitigation measures will be needed.

London, the east of England and the West Midlands have highest number of cases, as UKHSA urges families to get children vaccinated

Two children in England have died from measles, health officials say, as data shows more than 100 new reported cases in the last fortnight.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Thursday that two children had died this year, one from “acute measles” and the other from the “late effects of measles”.

Film-maker says he approached producer ‘Cubby’ Broccoli after Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were hits, but was knocked back both times

Steven Spielberg said that he was turned down twice by the producers of the James Bond movies – and now they couldn’t afford him.

Spielberg was speaking to The Rest Is Entertainment podcast and was asked if he had any “regrets” about not directing a 007 movie. Spielberg said that he had approached Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the legendary Bond producer who worked on every “official” Bond film between Dr No in 1962 and License to Kill in 1989, after Spielberg’s 1975 shark thriller Jaws became a major hit, but was turned down. Spielberg said: “I’d always wanted to make a James Bond film from the day I saw Dr No. So I called Cubby Broccoli after Jaws and I volunteered. I said, if you need a director, I would love to direct one. And he said, no. And he moved on.”

Remote aircraft targeting supply traffic on route connecting occupied regions to Russia

Russian forces call it the “Novorossiya” route, the crucial main supply line that snakes through the Ukrainian territories under Moscow’s occupation, linking Rostov-on-Don in Russia to Melitopol, Mariupol and Crimea via the Sea of Azov coastline.

In recent months, however, Ukrainian forces have given the R-280 a new name – “the highway of death” – in reference to the Ukrainian drones that dominate the airspace above the road, hunting down convoys of Russian military traffic.

Nor is the dreamy promise that this tech will unlock boundless potential and productivity

Everything we hear about artificial intelligence is conflicting, and hearing about it feels inescapable. AI is terrible. AI is wonderful. It will break the world. It will transform the future. It’s essential to embrace it. It’s a moral imperative to abstain from using it.

Already, AI is projected to generate nearly unfathomable amounts of revenue. In the last quarter of 2025, it represented nearly 60% of the growth in the US economy. Already, pundits and economists wring their hands about what calamity will befall us if and when the AI bubble bursts.

With some matches being held in nearby Miami, a Cuban response to US military action could mar the tournament

As Cuba crumbles under a nearly five-month-long US oil blockade, many on the island hope that the World Cup might save the island from US attack – or at least offer a respite until the competition ends on 19 July.

“The beginning of the World Cup will make it more difficult for the United States to carry out a military action in Cuba,” said Carlos Alzugaray, Cuba’s former ambassador to the EU. “Cuba is very close to the US, and can hit many targets inside the US, especially in south Florida, with drones or other weapons.”

Violent drug barons, brutal monarchs, interdimensional murderers … television has no shortage of horrifying baddies. Here’s our pick of the worst

Javier Bardem biting off toes in Cape Fear. Richard Gadd stomping on heads in Half Man. Nightmare neighbour David Morrissey whipping up mob violence in Tip Toe. Yes, TV villainy is everywhere. Which got us thinking about the biggest baddies in small-screen history.

When compiling our list, we discounted children’s TV, which is a whole separate category. We also omitted reality TV pariahs, from Nasty Nick to Lisa Vanderpump, as well as talent show judges such as Simon Cowell and Craig Revel Horwood. Instead, we concentrated on comedy or drama, where villainy is at its fictional worst.

Jordan wants one catch-all digital resource for him and Charlene, so their social lives don’t clash, but she prefers to communicate in person. You decide whose time is up

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

I’m not trying to control her but having one shared calendar helps us plan our lives together

If you fancy roaring around Japan’s open roads, scaling impossible mountains and playing with post-apocalyptic Pokémon, this year’s highlights mean you can do so without leaving your chair

Ten years ago, the Ghostbusters reboot was released into a firestorm of rage and revulsion. What did the onslaught show us about film, fandom – and does it stand up today?

Criticism of Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot began more than two years before its release. Specifically, it started the moment that the director of Bridesmaids and The Heat announced, in 2014, that he and writer Katie Dippold were to cast four women as paranormal exterminators. The fate of their film was all but sealed.

A year later, the first trailer for the film swiftly became the most disliked film trailer on YouTube – and then most disliked YouTube video ever. Such a concerted campaign of vitriol did not lessen with the film’s release.

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

The men’s Fifa World Cup starts today, and the challenge before the quiz master is to stay up all night every night watching tons of meaningless group matches between the likes of Syldavia and Borduria to keep up a record of not having missed a single World Cup game since 1978, while also continuing to function as a normal living member of society, rather than as an exhausted zombie.

The challenge before you, however, is simple: 15 questions on topical news, general knowledge and popular culture. There are no prizes, but equally you don’t have to stay up for a 3am kick-off. Have fun. Allons-y!

(Dirty Hit)
Aided by Jack Antonoff, Kim Gordon, Sampha and more, the cello-playing singer-songwriter’s abstracted yet tuneful second album is worth the seven year wait

Seven years separate the release of cello-playing singer-songwriter Kelsey Lu’s debut album, Blood, from its follow-up. Lu has suggested the long gap was an act of artistic rebellion against a music industry obsessed with providing a constant stream of new product – “tuning into my intuition, trusting myself and building a team to support that”, as they put it.

Perhaps they wanted to carve their own path after a cover version – of 10cc’s I’m Not in Love, used in HBO drama Euphoria – became their most successful song, or perhaps they simply didn’t have the time to make an album amid their plethora of other interests. They have scored two movies: the Bafta-winning Earth Mama and the Netflix documentary feature Daughters. They have collaborated with Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Yves Tumor, Mykki Blanco, Jamie xx, Boys Noize and visual artist Kevin Beasley and contributed a version of Manchild to a Neneh Cherry tribute compilation and more. They have been photographed by Nan Goldin for a Gucci campaign and staged a performance art piece at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. They have also appeared on stage with Debbie Harry, while dressed as Kermit the Frog, recreating the Blondie vocalist’s famed 1981 appearance on The Muppet Show.

In Mexico, football is played wherever space permits. The Reuters photographer Raquel Cunha spent three months taking photos of amateur matches across Mexico City and beyond

Across Mexico, a co-host of the 2026 World Cup, football pitches are laid out wherever communities can find the space. On the edges of towns, on highway underpasses, and even in a volcano crater, spaces are cleared that allow people young and old to share in the dream of the beautiful game.

In an impoverished neighbourhood in Monterrey, northern Mexico, 14-year-old Humberto Guadalupe, nicknamed “Messi” by friends and family, spends his weekends on the community’s only football field, surrounded by abandoned cars and dirt roads.

Humberto Guadalupe (left), 14, and Eduardo Reyes, 12, play football, followed by snacks organised by evangelists, in Monterrey

It is not enough to revile them both. Understanding the personal and ideological divergence is essential to taking back the ground they now occupy

For all their claims to be mould-breaking politicians, the feuding Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe are in many ways predictable and traditional rightwingers. Two wealthy white men in their 60s from southern England, with private educations and previous careers in the City, they were once members of the Conservative party – before, like many in their demographic, they decided it was not anti-EU enough. Out of this mix of dissatisfaction and privilege emerged the nationalistic, socially conservative politics that has dominated much of the past decade, shaping British discourse and influencing Labour and the Tories, despite the ever clearer failure of its flagship policy, Brexit.

Some of the intensity of the civil war on the right, which has erupted since Lowe left Reform UK in disputed circumstances last year and then set up his own populist party, Restore Britain, in February, is down to the smallness of the differences between the two leaders and their parties. Farage and Lowe are both aggressive, digitally enabled communicators who sometimes dress like old-fashioned country squires – signalling that they want to both disrupt and preserve – and draw from the same pool of activists, strategists and policy ideas.

Supporters come way below sponsors in the stadium-seat pecking order. No wonder some fans plan to binge-watch matches on a Spanish package holiday

There is nothing wonderful in the world that men in suits can’t find a way of spoiling. Football World Cups used to be great: massive events to which the world’s eyes were glued. Not one of us watched, or went to, West Germany, Argentina, Spain, Mexico or Italy and thought: “You know what? This is all very well – but if only it was all a bit bigger.”

It was plenty big enough, but not big enough for the men in suits, for they had willies to wave, and so the tournament had to grow, because growth is good and bigger is always better. So now we have 48 teams competing not in one country but over a whole continent.

A new survey seems to correlate anger with being unhappy – but it can be an energising and frankly entertaining emotion too

A while ago, to amuse myself, I ran a search through my text archive for the phrase “I can’t stand it”, which delivered pages and pages of returns. Some recent things I can’t stand, in no particular order: the phrase “clutching her pearls”; a very obviously made-up anecdote in a big profile in a major magazine; someone’s passive aggressive use of the word “anyway” in an email; a reporter friend’s colleague who, every time she finishes a story, goes into the system and changes two small things on it so he can shoehorn his name next to hers on the byline; David Beckham sucking up to the royals; Jimmy Fallon’s large face; the opening episode of the Russell T Davies show Tip Toe; weather, specifically high wind.

If I was transported with rage by all of these things, I assumed it was a byproduct of age. You can’t miss the sheer amount of menopause content floating around at the moment telling us how age makes us angry, even though, apparently, the menopause remains a taboo (it could be more of a taboo!). As it turns out, however, it isn’t just me and other women in midlife who are furious, but rather British women in general, and to a degree that outstrips our counterparts in other countries. I take surveys with a pinch, but this particular poll was extensive, organised by a global health initiative in which 76,000 women worldwide were questioned about their physical and emotional wellbeing. Last week, the findings were released, including the fact that British women are among the angriest in Europe – angrier than the Germans, Swiss, French and Dutch – and that we’re getting angrier with each passing year.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Youth unemployment is harming the mental health of a generation. A sluggish economy will only make things harder

Unemployment is bad for anyone, but really hard on the young. That’s because prolonged periods of worklessness in your late teens or early 20s scar you for life. As academic studies have shown, it can cause depression and affect earning potential for years to come. There is a clear link between poor mental health and being unemployed.

That’s why Alan Milburn’s probe into youth unemployment won’t be one of the government-commissioned reports that is quickly filed away and allowed to gather dust. It makes uncomfortable reading for ministers. The number of people aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training (Neets) is rising, and the costs of inactivity are increasing. Britain has a jobs problem, and it’s getting worse.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

As ICE-style deportation rules come into force, the unsavoury circle the EU wants migrant deals with includes the Afghan regime. This is a nadir

I sometimes think of the former EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson, who just six years ago spoke of crafting a European migration policy with “cool heads and warm hearts”. What’s happened since is the exact opposite.

Governments across Europe – with the exception of Spain – are cracking down harder than ever before on migrants through measures they once dismissed as politically toxic. It is a dream come true not only for the EU’s far right but also for mainstream conservatives and centre-left politicians such as Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen.

Most fathers would shield their children from death. Mine, a psychologist, did the opposite

My dad and I kept a running list of ways we didn’t want to die. Being buried alive was always No 1. Whenever we learned about unusual deaths – accidents involving farm machinery, medieval torture, mobsters encasing victims’ feet in cement before throwing them in the ocean – we added them to our shared catalogue.

Most fathers would shield their children from such morbid fascinations. Mine, a psychologist, did the opposite. He saw death as life’s most honest teacher and ensured I wouldn’t meet it as a stranger.

Amanda Sloat is professor of practice in international relations at IE University in Madrid, Spain

There’s a downside to too much convenience: it harms our bodies

There is a seductive fantasy being floated by AI executives that all the efficiency their products will bring us will lead to humans finally returning to their essential, best selves. Picture it: when this day arrives, we’ll spring from our chairs, push aside our keyboards and, supposedly, do all things we’ve been meaning to do: hike, cook and finally take a pilates class.

It’s true – AI has already taken some workday drudgery, such as reading and writing contracts, presentations and quarterly reports, off some people’s plates. Within a few years, we’re told, a team of invisible digital assistants will take over mundane domestic chores too: making medical appointments, renewing our car insurance and planning. The vision is enticing: finally, the moment when we can stop switching-switching-switching between screens and devices, put our health first and flourish. Unfortunately, if the history of innovation teaches us anything, it’s that labor-saving technology has rarely, if ever, triggered healthier habits.

Drive-throughs and microwaves did not lead to more time spent walking in nature. When escalators replaced stairs, email took over from walking over to talk to a colleague, and wandering through the video store was swapped out for streaming from the couch, few of us considered how these tiny conveniences would chip away at our physical health, year after more efficient year. A task that took almost no effort used to be described with the saying: “You hardly need to lift a finger.” Now, we literally lift a finger and – tap – the chore is done.

Violence on the streets of Northern Ireland is the real-world expression of a sinister mechanism that goes unchecked online

Masked men who drive terrorised families out of their homes cannot be called protesters, since the word implies legitimate grievance. The outbreak of racist violence in Northern Ireland this week is connected to the politics of migration, but not in the way that the mob and those who incited it claim.

The ostensible trigger was a brutal assault, partially captured on video. A man of Sudanese origin has been charged with attempted murder. The footage was widely shared online. The attack was depicted as part of a wider threat to white Britons by foreign “invaders”. Far-right agitators summoned vengeful crowds. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the activist who campaigns as Tommy Robinson, was instrumental in this process. So was Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, whose platform helped mobilise racist fury.

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.

Rows over US visas and excessive ticket prices have overshadowed flawed tournament preparations. But fans will still hope for a gripping spectacle

One hundred and four matches involving 48 competing nations, to be played in 16 venues across a continent and four time zones: the sheer scale of the men’s World Cup in Canada, the United States and Mexico, which begins on Thursday and ends on 19 July, makes it easily the biggest and longest football tournament ever staged.

Whether it will ultimately be judged the greatest in sporting terms will depend on the 1,248 players competing in gruelling conditions, ranging from the heat of Houston to the high altitude of Guadalajara. But after a lead-up marred by hubristic hype, visa rows and the eye-watering cost of buying tickets for games, for many people it will be a relief when Mexico finally kick off against South Africa in the Estadio Azteca on Thursday evening.

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

Readers respond to an article by George Monbiot on the companies cashing in on unregulated children’s homes in England

Regarding George Monbiot’s article (Horrific, unregulated, and very profitable. The companies making cash from England’s children in care, 5 June), several years ago, as a newly elected councillor, I was shocked by the high cost of placing children in private residential care. When I discussed this with friends and family, their reaction was largely one of disbelief that this had been allowed to persist.

This situation highlights a widespread “robber baron” mentality that has been allowed to develop under the guise of the presumed efficiency of the private sector. Too often, this has become an opportunity for significant profit extraction from the delivery of crucial public services. As highlighted in Monbiot’s article, the adoption of such a model in the care of some of society’s most vulnerable is especially distressing and underscores the need for prompt policy reform. However, this is not a recent development, and substantive action from the government has yet to materialise.

If the UN has no need of Germany’s voice or influence, it may have no need of its large funding contribution either, writes Michael Pfeiffer

Germany has failed, for the first time, in its bid for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations security council (‘Embarrassing’: pressure on Merz after Germany’s failure to win UN security council seat, 4 June). In New York, the federal republic was defeated by Austria and Portugal – and by a clear margin.

Did the countries that withheld their votes from Germany pause for even a moment to consider the consequences? Did they ask themselves whether it was wise to subject the second‑largest contributor to the UN – responsible for 5.27% of all state contributions – to such a public rebuff? Evidently not. Otherwise Germany would hardly have been so demonstratively humiliated.

Prof Kathy Willis responds to research showing that the poorest areas in the country face the deepest cuts to green spaces

The new research covered in your report (England’s poorest areas face deepest cuts to green space under planning law changes, report finds, 4 June) highlights the stark inequalities that exist across England when it comes to accessing nature-rich places and unlocking the many health, wellbeing and economic benefits that they can provide.

In short, the research has found that if you live in the poorest places in England, you are likely to have less or no access to nature. This is set to get worse because of government policy changes.

Dr Penelope Jackson, Sue Lewis and Fiona Willan respond to an article and letters on art overload

I read with interest your article (The hill I will die on: Let me tell you the one big problem with art galleries. There’s too much art, 30 May) and the follow-up letters (5 June) full of advice from readers. Everyone will have an opinion on how to visit an art gallery. Clearly, trying not to view everything on show is key here. But what people have failed to grasp is that if galleries don’t show a vast amount of their collection, they are criticised.

For example, the National Gallery in London hangs about 40% of its collection, which is more than others such as Tate Britain, which has a tiny fraction on show at any given time. And the National Portrait Gallery would struggle to hang its entire collection. Galleries and museums are caught between a rock and hard place. They try to show as much as is logistically possible, but that doesn’t mean visitors have to eyeball each one. We should, however, be grateful that these cultural institutions collect and try to showcase as much as possible, for we don’t all like the same things.
Dr Penelope Jackson
Tauranga, New Zealand

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⚽️ Infantino tells fans to ‘chill’ in response to Fifa’s critics
⚽️ Match centre | Player guide | Bracketology | Mail John

BTL chat is thus far dominated by Gianni Infantino’s ritual pre-tournament torching of his own dignity. SonOfThe Desert offers this:

“Infantino is just absolutely wretched, isn’t he? An absolute nothing of a man, sucking up to tyrants because he thinks it makes him look strong.

”But you know what’s really annoying me? All those heads of national associations who could have unified around a candidate - anyone - to oppose Infantino and try and rescue Fifa from humiliation. Couldn’t be bothered though, could they? Might’ve had to do some actual work that way.

New York has honored two footballing greats by temporarily renaming streets after Thierry Henry and Pelé ahead of the World Cup kickoff …

Crowds gathered at West 50th Street and 6th Avenue in downtown Manhattan to mark the unveiling of “Thierry Henry Way” by city officials, according to FOX Sports.

Fifa president has prostrated the organisation before Donald Trump and lost control of his own tournament as a result

Even the Nazis tried to tone things down a bit. Before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, acutely conscious of how it might be perceived by foreign visitors, the Third Reich tried to soften some of its harder, more intolerant edges. Antisemitic signs and images were removed from shops and other public places. Der Stürmer was removed from newspaper kiosks. Paragraph 175, the country’s strict anti‑homosexuality law, was temporarily suspended.

By contrast, the 2026 men’s World Cup is being co-hosted in a country utterly indifferent to what a foreign visitor might think of it. In this respect, the US of Donald Trump is tonally different to any host of a major sporting event that has preceded it: a country that actively wants you to see the darkness in its heart, the inhumanity at its core, that gets off on your revulsion.

If you had the chance to meet Diego Maradona, what would you do? Smell him? That’s what our chief sports writer, Barney Ronay, did at the 2018 World Cup during Argentina’s first group game of the competition. To keep up with more of Barney’s adventures in his World Cup video diary, follow @guardiansport on TikTok.

It may just be time to forget the sullied buildup and enjoy the tournament although co-hosts are not optimistic

It has been difficult to go anywhere in Mexico City this week without seeing Hugo Sánchez, the great former Real Madrid striker, trying to sell you something. Raúl Jiménez is on a few billboards and Toluca’s Alexis Vega on a couple of others, but Sánchez remains the king. Football adverts predominate. At the airport a Fifa sign obstructs the view of the arrivals lane for those with foreign passports, which might seem an apt metaphor if immigration procedures, here at least, weren’t absurdly straightforward. Amid the endless traffic, worsened by a teachers’ strike and associated street protests, women wander selling knock-off Mexico shirts.

Does that constitute a pre‑tournament mania? Perhaps not. There’s a newly added football element to many of the murals around Coyoacán, at which many of the Frida Kahlo murals appear to be looking askance – but then stern disapproval was her default look. There are flags hanging from walls and from ceilings in bars and cafes in some areas, but the excitement of waiters and taxi drivers at meeting somebody actually going to the World Cup suggests there hasn’t been any great influx yet. If traffic jams are a sign of excitement, then Mexicans are bang up for it but, anecdotally, few seem to expect much from their side and most seem feel a little frustrated at being a sideshow to Donald Trump’s main event.

• All England Club announce 20% rise from last year

• Increase unlikely to appease tennis player group

Wimbledon has announced the biggest prize money increase in the history of the Championships, but the rise may not appease the top tennis players in dispute with the grand slam tournaments.

The All England Club revealed a prize money purse of £64.2m, a 20% increase from last year and a £10.7m rise. The increase represents, according to the players, roughly 15% of the revenue generated by the Championships.

• Knicks erase 29-point deficit to win Game 4

• Anunoby scores winner with 1.2 seconds left

• New York take commanding 3-1 Finals lead

The New York Knicks stared into the abyss and somehow found a way out.

Facing a 29-point deficit in front of a shell-shocked Madison Square Garden crowd, New York completed the largest comeback in NBA finals history on Wednesday night. OG Anunoby’s tip-in off a Jalen Brunson missed three-pointer with 1.2 seconds left made the difference in the 107-106 win over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 4. The Knicks are now within one win of their first NBA championship in 53 years.

• Head coach failed to save club from relegation

• Peixoto led Gil Vicente to sixth in Primera Liga

Wolves have sacked Rob Edwards and are poised to appoint the Portuguese head coach César Peixoto as his replacement. The 46-year-old Peixoto was most recently in charge of Gil Vicente, who finished sixth in the Portuguese top flight last season.

The news came as a huge shock to Edwards, who was alerted to rumours of a deal for Peixito on social media. Edwards, who is abroad on holiday, was informed in a phone call that his tenure was over after seven months, leaving even senior club staff stunned.

• National League sides write to FA as backlash intensifies

• Plans viewed as ‘a disaster waiting to happen’

An alliance of 52 Women’s National League clubs who oppose plans for Women’s Super League’s academy sides to be added to the third tier of the English pyramid have written to the Football Association to call for a vote on the matter.

The clubs, which represent a more than two-thirds majority of the 72 FAWNL clubs that compete in tiers three and four of the pyramid, believe the competition’s rules dictate that they are entitled to call for a special general meeting about the proposals.

• Cooper Lutkenhaus, 17, wins 800m by 0.01sec

• Gout Gout sixth; Tebogo says: ‘He has a long way to go’

There are few venues more deeply embedded into track and field’s soul than the Bislett Stadion. An extraordinary 70 world records have been set here. Plenty of reputations have been made. Plenty more left frayed, too.

And so it proved again as the brilliant 17-year-old American Cooper Lutkenhaus added to his staggering résumé by taking down the Olympic 800m champion, Emmanuel ­Wanyonyi, with a race for the ages in Oslo. But another, the Australian star Gout Gout, learned what it is like in the big leagues.

• O’Neill signs one-year contract with one-year option

• 74-year-old aiming for ‘more days like those’ after double

Martin O’Neill said his appetite was whetted by winning a double last month to deliver “more days like those” at Celtic after he was confirmed as their manager on a one-year contract with a one-year option.

O’Neill had two interim spells this season and finished it by securing the Scottish Premiership title on a dramatic final day and beating Dunfermline in the Scottish Cup final.

• Mboko forced out with knee injury after heavy fall

• Williams’ focus now shifts to Berlin wildcard spot

Serena Williams’s first tournament since coming out of retirement has ended prematurely after her partner Victoria Mboko was forced to withdraw from the Queen’s Club tournament after injuring her knee when slipping on the grass in her singles match on Wednesday.

Williams made a sensational return to competition at 44 after a four-year absence on Tuesday alongside Mboko as the pair defeated the third seeds Nicole Melichar Martinez and Erin Routliffe 7-6(2), 6-2. The pair were scheduled to face Leylah Fernandez and Laura Siegemund on Thursday afternoon.

• Stokes in talks with agent and advisers over his future

• Atkinson also left out, with Baker and Archer set to play

Joe Root will captain England in next week’s second Test against New Zealand after Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson were left out of the squad for breaking the team curfew as they celebrated victory in the first game of the series on Sunday night.

While the England & Wales Cricket Board continues its investigation into that incident Stokes, the team’s full-time captain, is being given some time to consider his future. He is reported to have spent Wednesday in meetings with his agent and advisers debating whether to stand down as captain permanently, or to end his international career completely. He may still choose to do neither, with the former England captain Michael Vaughan having joined those backing him to stay. “Yes, he broke a curfew,” Vaughan said. “Is that a sacking offence as England’s Test captain? I don’t think so. A short suspension would be fine, but this is not a big enough incident over which to lose the captaincy.”

• City intensify their pursuit of England midfielder

• Forest want fee to match British record £125m for Isak

Manchester City have made a second bid worth £122m for Elliot Anderson which has been rejected by Nottingham Forest, who want a British record transfer fee of £125m before any add-ons for the England midfielder.

City’s offer follows an initial bid of £80m for the 23-year-old and is worth a guaranteed £106m plus £16m in potential add-ons. This would break the club’s record transfer of £100m paid to Aston Villa for Jack Grealish in August 2021.

Sources say firm is asking for more than £1bn in row that could put pressure on two countries’ relationship

• Business live – latest updates

The Chinese owner of British Steel has started a formal process under an international treaty to win compensation from the UK government over its decision to nationalise the Scunthorpe steelworks.

Jingye Steel said it would seek to recover money via China’s bilateral investment treaty with the UK, after more than a year of negotiations over the size of any payout. The dispute could put pressure on the relationship between China and the UK.

Budget airline describes inquiry as ‘bogus’ as watchdog says it is only large carrier flying from UK to impose charge

• Business live – latest updates

Europe’s biggest low-cost airline, Ryanair, is facing an investigation over the mandatory fee it charges a parent to sit with their child.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the Irish carrier’s terms and conditions require at least one parent to sit with their children, including those with disabilities, and bills them about £8 a flight to do so.

Lawyers ask prosecutors to upgrade charges from manslaughter in light of text messages discussing fire risk

Lawyers for victims of the deadly New Year’s Eve fire in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana have formally asked prosecutors to upgrade the charges against the bar’s owners after text messages emerged discussing the danger.

Forty-one people were killed and 115 injured in the blaze at Le Constellation bar, which investigators believe started in the basement when sparklers attached to champagne bottles were held too close to sound-insulating foam on the ceiling.

Exclusive: Letters from inside the underground H Unit of Oklahoma state penitentiary allege beatings, vermin, degrading punishment and in many cases no access to a most basic necessity – natural light

• Oklahoma prison criticized for allegedly incarcerating people in squalid underground cells with no natural light

“Down here in the tombs, there aren’t any windows,” writes Tremane Wood from inside his cell, in a modern-day American “dungeon” that few people have ever heard of.

“It’s really like living in cave,” he writes in another letter. “It’s dark and damp. Sometimes this place drives people mad. The hardest part is the isolation.”

Twenty people were killed and 120 injured in the attack at the Erawan Shrine, a popular tourist destination

A Thai court has handed out death sentences to two Uyghur men from the north-western Chinese region of Xinjiang for a 2015 bombing in the centre of Bangkok that killed 20 people.

The explosion occurred at the Erawan Shrine in the centre of Bangkok, an area popular with foreign tourists. As well as the 20 people killed, another 120 were injured. Five of the dead were from mainland China and two from Hong Kong.

Under US rules, even a distant strike can suspend a game – and some will take place in Florida, the thunderstorm state

Hot weather will be a major concern at the World Cup, but lightning may also prove a particular problem. Under US safety regulations, a strike within 10 miles (16km) of a stadium triggers a 30-minute suspension of the game, during which players must leave the pitch.

The size of the safety zone was dictated by research on the distance that lightning can strike from a storm even with no clouds overhead. This is more than a theoretical risk. During a game in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998, an entire team was killed by a single bolt of lightning. There have been many other deadly incidents.

Some remains found in Diamantina fracture zone date back more than 5m years and reveal species and ecosystems unknown to science

The oldest, deepest and most extensive whale graveyard yet discovered has been found in the south-eastern Indian Ocean, with fossils dating back more than 5m years.

Whale falls – the term for dead whales that sink to the ocean floor – are not uncommon, but most have been found at depths of less than 4km (2.5 miles). By contrast, the newly discovered necropolis reaches depths of more than 7km, and extends hundreds of miles across the sea floor.

Critically endangered Tapanuli orangutan population falls after heavy rain and landslides, fuelled by climate crisis, in North Sumatra

Extreme rainfall and landslides fuelled by the climate crisis killed 7% of the remaining population of the world’s rarest great ape, a study has found, prompting fears for the species’ survival.

The research suggests 58 out of the remaining 800 critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans (Pongo tapanuliensis) were killed after more than 1,000mm (39in) of rain fell over four days in Indonesia’s North Sumatra province in November 2025. This equates to 11% of the local population and 7% of the entire species.

Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity in May even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy

Even as Donald Trump boosts coal over clean energy, solar power is hitting new milestones in the US and remains the leading source of new power.

Data released Wednesday by global energy thinktank Ember, along with a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (Seia) and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, show the continued growth of solar and decline of coal in the United States despite federal policy. In May, for the first time, solar supplied more of the nation’s electricity than coal, or 12.8%, Ember said. Coal supplied 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever.

New name, Bristol Dockyards, and museum revamp aimed at becoming more rooted in community, says chief executive

One of the UK’s maritime landmarks is being renamed as part of a drive to make it “cooler” and more inclusive.

For a decade, the dockland site in Bristol that houses the ocean liner SS Great Britain, which was designed by the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, has been promoted as Brunel’s SS Great Britain.

The UCL study also found physically punished children were more likely to struggle in school

Children smacked by their parents struggle to get good exam results and are more likely to bully others, causing a negative impact on society, according to new research calling for smacking to be banned.

The study by University College London (UCL) found that children in England who were physically punished at the ages of three, five and seven were significantly less likely to pass GCSE exams compared with other children, even after factors such as family background were taken into account.

Whistleblowers from Mitie allege some employees have made offensive remarks or liked abusive social media posts

One of the government’s key contractors has launched an investigation into allegations of racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and hate speech among staff working in immigration removal centres, the Guardian has learned.

Whistleblowers from the company, Mitie, have alleged that some staff members working in immigration removal centres and deporting migrants have made offensive comments at work and in social media posts.

Prime minister is ‘hellbent’ on fighting any contest, even if his future may be out of his hands, sources say

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer’s closest aides are “war-gaming” how to win a leadership contest ahead of Andy Burnham’s much-anticipated return to Westminster if he wins the Makerfield byelection, the Guardian understands.

Downing Street sources said the prime minister had taken the last fortnight to think seriously about his future but was now “hellbent” on fighting any contest. His team is working through various scenarios, including sacking ministers who publicly support Burnham.

Sabine Nkusi, who fled Kigali during the genocide, leads initiative aimed at challenging stigma of sexual violence

As a 14-year-old, Sabine Nkusi witnessed the horrors of the genocide against the Tutsi in her home country of Rwanda. Fleeing Kigali with her parents, brother and sister, she saw women lying dead by the road, many who had been the victim of sexual abuse.

She vowed to God that if she survived, she would dedicate her life to trying to give dignity to women who suffered this unspeakable brutality. “I said to God … if I’m ever going to make it out of here … I want to be part of something … a vehicle to end that sort of violence.”

Singer and actor has denied all charges after more than 20 women made allegations against him dating back to 1990s

The French singer Patrick Bruel has been charged with rape and sexual assault in one of the biggest #MeToo cases in the French music industry.

The 67-year-old, a major figure in French pop culture, was placed under formal investigation over four cases that included alleged rape, attempted rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira faces fraud charges after allegedly persuading family to take her into their home

A 38-year-old woman has been arrested in Brazil accused of pretending to be a 12-year-old girl to deceive a couple who took her into their home for more than a year.

Amanda Maria Souza de Oliveira was charged in the southern state of Santa Catarina with fraud and false identity offences.

Guardian review finds group tied to Cleta Mitchell and Heather Honey funded misleading ads in swing states

As the 2024 election approached, advertisements began popping up in key swing states suggesting local officials had discretion not to certify elections.

The advertisements, reported at the time by ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch, were misleading. Certification is not optional, and officials are required to certify the vote once the proper process for any election challenges are complete and an official challenge is complete. The warnings, nonetheless, arrived at a moment when Donald Trump and allies seemed to be gearing up to contest the election results if he lost.

European Central Bank expected to raise interest rates today

The financial markets are surprisingly calm this morning, as conflict erupts again in the Middle East.

European stock markets are mostly higher this morning, while the oil price is now slipping back.

“As has often been the case during the Iran conflict, the UK’s flagship index has found support from its collection of energy companies and more traditionally defensive names. Miners and other China-linked stocks were lifted by data suggesting the country is investing heavily in AI and consuming raw materials at a healthy rate.

“Selling in AI-related stocks, of which London has very few, put shares on Wall Street under pressure yesterday and that’s extended to Asia today.

Broadcaster reveals its revenues from expanded tournament are running about 30% higher than Euro 2024

The World Cup will be the most lucrative sports event ITV has ever aired, the broadcaster has said, with bosses calling the tournament a “six-week summer Super Bowl moment” for TV advertising.

The channel is airing 51 of the 104 matches across the men’s tournament, co-hosted by the US, Mexico and Canada, which is the biggest yet after an expansion from 32 to 48 teams.

Mike Ashley’s retail group has made a near-€2bn takeover bid for fashion house, in which it already holds a 26% stake

• Business live – latest updates

Shares in Hugo Boss jumped nearly 7% on Thursday after the company said it would “thoroughly examine” a near-€2bn takeover approach from the Sports Direct owner Frasers Group.

Mike Ashley’s fashion and sportswear group has pounced on the German fashion house, in which it already owns just over 26%, saying late on Wednesday that it was offering about €1.98bn (£1.73bn) to take full control of the business.

England supporters face paying inflation-busting £95 for an adult shirt as the tournament begins in the US

Fans of World Cup teams kitted out by Nike face the highest costs if they want to buy a replica shirt before the tournament kicks off this week amid a “striking” overall increase in prices.

Alongside the official match versions, which are retailing for as much as €160, manufacturers typically make “stadium”, or replica, versions aimed at supporters.

He’s the perfect comedian to cool down these incendiary times. As Philly Philly takes his Uh Oh standup show on tour, he talks about woke traps, lefty blindspots – and gen Z’s lurch to the right

Born in Stoke-on-Trent to a British mother and Chinese-Malaysian father then raised in Borneo and educated in Brunei, Bath and Cambridge, Phil Wang – or “Old Wang”, as he refers to himself mock-imperiously on stage – has certainly been around. Today, the 36-year-old standup with the pleasantly befuddled air is in a cafe near his home in London, wearing high-waisted baggy black trousers, a blue shirt, salmon-coloured New Balances and a baseball cap bearing the word “Chump”. Most significantly, he is sporting a moustache.

Wang went public with his face furniture two years ago but the upcoming tour of his new show, Uh Oh, will mark the first time he has taken it out on the road. Is the tache here for good? “Well, I’ve got five minutes of standup on it now,” he says over coffee. “Until I come up with a better five minutes, it’s staying.”

The musician opens up about her mental health, government corruption and why conservative backlash won’t stop her speaking her mind

Mon Laferte has a sore throat. Halfway through our conversation, in a studio with no windows at the Sony offices above New York’s Madison Square Park, singer Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte meekly asks her manager for a latte without lactose, or coconut milk, if they have it. It’s the first truly hot day of spring. She’s in between arena dates across Latin America of her Femme Fatale tour. Tonight, she’ll skulk through Manhattan with rhinestone-studded eyelids and a Marilyn Monroe wig to film the Femme Fatale music video. Today, her hair is dyed red, cropped in spiky Marcel waves. She’s wearing a black slip dress and a pair of artful, lace-up tabis.

With a career spanning over two decades, Laferte holds more Latin Grammys than any other Chilean singer and is the country’s biggest female streaming star, with over 18m monthly listeners. In October of 2025, Laferte released her tenth record, Femme Fatale, a jazz album that saw her step into a vampy alter ego; this month sees the continuation of the story with companion album Femme Fatale Vol 2. Like the archetype, her vision of pop stardom is biting by design. “The archetype is the dangerous one, no? Dangerous for being free, secure,” she tells me in Spanish. “Femme Fatale is a name the press have given me.”

Co-creator of Walking with Dinosaurs returns with Surviving Earth, a blockbuster new series that shows ‘how life bounced back’ from deadly events throughout history

Almost three decades have passed since producer Tim Haines reimagined natural history with Walking with Dinosaurs, using CGI and animatronics to bring to life the beasts that roamed these lands millions of years ago.

With his latest project, Haines is applying that same visual magic to look even further into the past. Surviving Earth, a docuseries premiering on Thursday on NBC, explores eight mass extinction events going back 450m years through the lives – and eventual annihilation – of the creatures that preceded or existed alongside the dinosaurs.

J Balvin and Tyla perform at the first one in Mexico City. Plus: did James Dean create a new model of vulnerable masculinity? Here’s what to watch this evening

6.15pm, ITV1
Is it coming home? At this point, even asking that feels like a jinx. But here we go, with a summer of very inconveniently timed games between a whopping 48 teams. Three ceremonies will kick the tournament off, starting with one in Mexico City Stadium, where J Balvin and Tyla will perform. The Toronto and LA events follow on Friday. Hollie Richardson

With a whip-smart drag queen cast and celebrity cameos, Adam Shankman’s film is a refreshingly kooky twist on the summer movie caper

Given the grip it exerts on the drag world in the US and beyond, it’s almost quaint to remember the janky beginnings of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which debuted in 2009 with cheap plywood sets, a “lounge” sponsored by Absolut Vodka and special guests including Michelle Williams (the less famous one). Now, it’s a high-gloss spectacle that has won 14 Emmy awards, is credited for bringing pageant-style drag fully into the mainstream and is a magnet for star guest judges including Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga.

There’s a sense that latter-day Drag Race is running on fumes, with 29 seasons including All Stars spinoffs and finale viewing figures that peaked in 2016. But the cottage industry that has grown up around it has never been bigger: former contestants like Trixie Mattel and Katya host a wildly popular podcast, while Bob the Drag Queen toured with Madonna and Jinkx Monsoon is the toast of Broadway with roles in Oh, Mary! and Chicago. Meanwhile, the show’s production company World of Wonder cannily keeps access to Drag Race’s 14 current international spin-offs exclusive to their own streaming platform, Wow Presents Plus.

Luhrmann’s goofy and lovable film is reissued for generations who don’t know where TV’s Strictly Come Dancing got part of its name

Generations who don’t know why TV’s Strictly Come Dancing is called that (or even what the old Come Dancing show used to be) need to catch up with Baz Luhrmann’s debut directing feature from 1992; it is goofy, lovable and as sweetly romantic as you like. It was the feelgood crowdpleaser from Australia that made Luhrmann a star, and that “strictly” sounded a defiant note. Ballroom dancing may not have been cool (though it is now, more or less), but the film revealed it had passionate fans and underdog cred, like being an Abba nut in PJ Hogan’s Muriel’s Wedding from 1994, which also starred veteran Oz comedy turn Bill Hunter in a very similar role.

Strictly Ballroom also laid down the narrative template for Strictly Come Dancing; the film’s pairing of the brilliant dancer and the gutsy ingenue became the professional/celeb partnership on TV, and the not-so-secret eroticism of their growing relationship in the rehearsal studio became the small-screen’s all-important practice montage and backstory content. Brilliant young ballroom dancer Scott Hastings (smoulderingly played by Paul Mercurio) has been preparing for a prestigious national championship since he was six years old. His blowsy mum Shirley (Pat Thomson) is a teacher and frustrated dancer, while timid dad Doug (Barry Otto) is depressed, as a result of an awful dance-related trauma climactically revealed at the end. Scott has in the past got into trouble for departing from the strictly conceived dance steps, controversially improvising flashy moves of his own devising, but now looks as if he can win, reined in by his competent but uninspired partner.

As the musician and producer reaches 82, a new documentary reveals his life working with everyone from James Taylor to Carole King to Paul McCartney

Peter Asher didn’t want to do this interview. He had the same reaction several years ago when directors Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller approached him about making a documentary about his life and career. “I don’t think so,” he recalled telling them in our interview, which wound up taking place only after several entreaties from the film’s publicist that he do this one sit-down. “My life has been startlingly devoid of the standard rock’n’roll drug-and-sex dramas,” Asher said. “So I thought a documentary about me isn’t something people will want to see. It sounds boring.”

On the contrary, Asher’s story stands among the most dramatic and consequential in music history, spurred by achievements that shifted the course of pop more than once. Through Asher’s pivotal role in the lives of stars like James Taylor and Carole King, he played a key role in instigating the soft revolution that allowed singer-songwriters to dominate the charts in the 70s. He’s also partly responsible for the so-called “LA sound”, epitomized by the pristine albums he produced for stars like Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. At the same time, he raised the profile of the studio musicians he employed so dramatically, affecting how average listeners understood and appreciated the instruments they heard on the albums they loved. Small wonder the documentary on his life is titled Everywhere Man.

The musician first visited Aldeburgh as a teenage fanboy. Now, he is at the centre of this year’s festival as its featured artist – and he’s opening with his favourite opera

Ryan Wigglesworth cuts a confident figure striding through the Royal Academy of Music in London. He’s been a professor here since 2019 – juggling his duties with his role as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, guest conducting internationally, regular recitals as a pianist, and a busy schedule as a composer. Oh, and he’s also the father of three “boisterous” young children, whose sleepless antics have left him bleary and clutching his coffee this morning.

He sits at the head of the long table in the Academy’s oak-panelled boardroom, looking perfectly at home. Was he inevitably going to end up here?

As he publishes a memoir, the pioneering guitarist talks about rejecting spandex and hair metal, his fears for breakthrough hit Black Hole Sun – and completing nine unfinished Soundgarden songs

Kim Thayil has always felt like an outsider. For example: the Soundgarden guitarist has lived in Seattle, a city infamously addicted to coffee, for more than four decades, but only started drinking the stuff himself during lockdown. “I was pretty against-the-grain to my Seattle friends, who always wanted to meet up at coffee shops,” he grins, cradling a freshly brewed cup of java in his kitchen. “My girlfriend in the 80s and 90s even worked at the original branch of Starbucks and made coffee with a French press every morning. But I drank tea, because my parents are Indian.”

Thayil’s Indian heritage also set him apart from his peers. In his new memoir, A Screaming Life, he writes that when he and bassist Hiro Yamamoto formed Soundgarden in 1984, the group was “two-thirds Asian”, and that “as liberal and accepting as the punk scene was, it was still largely white, and I was ever aware of that”. Nevertheless, Soundgarden went on to become pioneers of Seattle’s grunge movement, a multiplatinum-selling, critically acclaimed, Grammy-winning group whose breakthrough hit, Black Hole Sun, transcended their gnarly milieu to become an enduring anthem.

From Thundercat’s all-star funk to Kacey Musgraves’ hymns to solitude, we look at some of our favourite music of the last six months from across the pop spectrum

• Listen to a Spotify playlist of every album here

This impressive and charismatic debut novel revisits an actor and a director over various collaborations

The central characters of Frida Slattery As Herself, Ana Kinsella’s debut novel, are the eponymous Frida, 23 when the novel opens, and John Reddan, five years older. Both live in Dublin. Frida loves acting but has never had a significant role, and didn’t even get into drama school. John is a writer-director who has just had a play put on at a “real theatre”. What’s compelling about Frida is not necessarily what she says, thinks or does, but the way she is, and a large part of that lies in the physicality Kinsella writes into her. Frida, we learn, is “addicted” to the theatre. “Every time she came off stage she felt like a prizefighter. The curtain fell in the community theatre and there she was, rolling her neck, bobbing on her feet.”

However, Frida’s acting aspirations are going nowhere. She eventually confides in her friend Catherine, who at university was a much more successful actor in student productions, but now has a proper job (“She owned an espresso machine and Frida lived in a bedsit”). “I just want something to happen,” Frida says. Catherine introduces Frida to John. They meet in Kehoe’s pub, then he asks Frida to accompany him on an errand which turns into a long, mystifying walk through Dublin, during which he interviews her. She asks in return what he is working on: “Are there any roles for women in their early twenties?” To which he responds, “Is that how you think of yourself, Frida? As nothing more than ‘a woman in her early twenties’?”

There are some advantages to being an older debutant, including knowing what it’s like to fail and not having your new novel overshadowed by early literary promise

Recently I was at a film event where I was introduced to a big producer by a very nice actor. The actor said, “this is Patrick, he has a debut novel coming out soon.”

The producer looked me up and down and said, “You took your time.”

A young woman begins a career in the adult industry while, 30 years later, her friend tries to find out what happened to her, in an addictive, twist-filled story

Just as there is a lack of pornography made by women, there is a lack of books about making pornography written by women. Recent nonfiction titles such as Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History and Fiona Vera-Gray’s Women on Porn have sought to address the silence and moral confusion, while Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles imagined a student mum paying her way with OnlyFans.

Now Allie Rowbottom, author of a memoir, Jell-O Girls, and a novel, Aesthetica, braves the dicey terrain in her sleazy, cinematic second novel. Published into a contemporary landscape where algorithms promote increasingly extreme content, Lovers XXX takes us to the so-called golden age of the Los Angeles porn industry, through the eyes of two teenage runaways who trade troubled homes for big-city dreams.

This bleak but brilliant tale of enigmatic alien entities and slow social collapse exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now

M John Harrison’s prose has thrilled me since I was a teen. It has thrilled others, too, including Angela Carter, Deborah Levy and Robert Macfarlane, but snobbery about the genres in which he made his mark – science fiction and fantasy – has hindered the respect his achievement deserves. His rigorously realistic novel Climbers, published in 1989, looked as though it might change that, but subsequent work has remained genre-fluid and uncompromisingly peculiar.

In the 1970s and 80s, he wrote stories about Viriconium, a fabled city crumbling into decadence and anarchy. These swashbuckling yet sinister tales functioned as escapist adventures for readers who preferred a far-flung nightmare to the contemporary humdrum. But in the 21st century, the world we inhabit has become utterly fantastical and Harrison has no need to revisit Viriconium; his anarchic, disintegrated metropolis is London and The End of Everything is set in an unnamed town on the Kent coast.

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch; Vertigo Games
This clever update captures the 1990s magic of the original… including some of the technical issues

The 90s were a gold rush for adventure games. LucasArts kicked off the decade with its legendarily irreverent Monkey Island games. Then, Cyan Worlds materialised to deliver a series of atmospheric and boundary-pushing odysseys with Myst and Riven. Nestled between these primary genre texts is The 7th Guest, a lesser-known but still notorious adventure that earned plaudits for its unique FMV visual style, blending live-action filmed footage with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds. It was remade originally for VR, and now has been reconfigured into something playable on PC and consoles, its digital cobwebs cleared and tricky puzzles tinkered with for a fresh (or nostalgic) audience.

We are dropped into the ectoplasmic shoes of an amnesiac apparition, arriving at the gloomy haunted home of a toy-maker. Armed with a time-bending lantern and a Ouija board-shaped map, your job is to solve a historical whodunnit by literally illuminating events from the past. It’s a melodramatic, surprisingly campy adventure that effectively evokes the overzealous CD-Rom horror of its original era.

From horror galore to Chinese action games, the key trends, trailers and surprises from Summer Game Fest’s many, many hours of streams and broadcasts

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Did you spend hours of your weekend watching a relentless series of video game adverts? No? I don’t blame you – Summer Game Fest, the collection of livestreams that has arisen in place of the giant annual E3 video game expo in Los Angeles, is extremely overwhelming. There are the bigger, longer shows: the PlayStation and Xbox streams, the main SGF show hosted by Geoff Keighley and Lucy James, Future’s duet of the Future Games Show and the PC Gaming Show. Each show is two hours long. Then there are all the indie showcases: cosy games, women-led games, Black voices in gaming, Day of the Devs. Between them, they show off hundreds of games that might pique your interest.

I picked out exactly 34 highlights here: the biggest news, the most interesting-looking smaller games. But from the barrage of trailers I was also able to discern some trends. Here’s what we can learn.

Hundreds of video games were shown at June’s annual bonanza. After watching more than 15 hours of showcases, our video games editor picks the highlights

The sequel to a revered 2014 horror game from British developer Creative Assembly: this time you must evade the xenomorph on the surface of a storm-ravaged colony world.

Released just before the World Cup kicks off, this upstart football game is positioning itself as a credible alternative to EA Sports FC

This month something extremely unusual happened in the video game world: someone launched a new football game. It used to be that the market could support a vast array of contenders, from arcade kickabouts such as Super Sidekicks and Hat Trick Hero, to serious simulations named Actua Soccer or This Is Football, to eccentric oddities such as Namco’s LiberoGrande which made you experience the whole match as a single onfield player.

For the past decade plus, however, the scene has been dominated EA’s Fifa series, now EA Sports FC. With the exception of Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, now eFootball, there have been few competitors – and few plucky upstarts.

In 1984, an unlikely coalition was formed between London LGBTQ+ campaigners and Welsh miners. Now their story, as told in the 2014 film Pride, is coming to the stage. The original demonstrators share what the new production means to them

The National Theatre’s new summer musical is all about real people, but here’s a strange feeling – many of them are literally sitting around me tonight. In a buzzy, early preview for Pride: The Musical at Cardiff’s Sherman theatre, there’s Reggie Blennerhassett and Ray Aller, a couple who have been together for 44 years, wearing T-shirts printed with the poster for a notorious 1984 fundraising gig they helped organise. Its name? Pits and Perverts.

Siân James watches her younger self dance at an LGBTQ+ club in Soho, while retired tailor and actor Jonathan Blake is recast on stage in a glitzy robe and kaftan, performing a Broadway-style showstopper. “My words coming out of his mouth as he sang!” Blake shakes his head more than four decades later. “I was utterly floored!”

Production fusing the band’s sixth album and Shakespeare’s masterpiece will open at the Barbican later this year

Hamlet Hail to the Thief, an acclaimed stage production fusing Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead’s sixth album, is to open at the Barbican theatre in London this autumn.

The show had its world premiere at Aviva Studios in Manchester last year and then ran at the Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is a co-production between Factory International and the Royal Shakespeare Company and was co-created by Radiohead frontman, Thom Yorke, and the directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones. Yorke reworked the 2003 album, which is performed live on stage by a cast of musicians and actors, the lyrics reinforcing themes of grief, despair and paranoia in the play.

Hampstead theatre, London
Joshua Harmon studies his family’s fraught matriarchal relations in this thoughtful drama

In an empathetic act of theatrical archivism, American playwright Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews) follows the shifting, sinking relationship between his mother and grandmother. Tracing the family’s fractures back through Harmon’s life, We Had a World is a thoughtful if sedate staging of duty, care and the relational ties that can’t be shaken loose.

Renee (Suzanne Bertish) is a far better grandmother than she ever was a mother. Bertish sparkles in the freewheeling role, in turns elegant and generous, then petulant and sour. Anna Francolini has the more austere role as Josh’s mother, Ellen: sharp and stubborn, but never less than bursting with love for her son (played with sweet sincerity by Ryan Kopel). When Josh learns why his mum finds her mum so difficult to love, his relationship with his grandmother is recontextualised, and he is stuck in the middle of their war.

From his deathbed photographs of his former lover to a face emerging from dirt, New Yorker David Wojnarowicz is the festival standout, although Renèe Helèna Browne’s film about cows contains multitudes

Setting the mood for this year’s Glasgow International (GI) is a show dedicated to David Wojnarowicz – artist, writer and fixture of the 1980s East Village scene. Including paintings, photographs and video works, it is arranged inside a Georgian terrace house so decayed that you can see through perforations in the building’s fabric. Stoop to peer between crumbling bricks and you’ll see a reproduction of a mural of a cow’s head that Wojnarowicz painted in the New York piers. On the top floor, Wojnarowicz’s deathbed photographs of his former lover Peter Hujar occupy one elegiac wall. Look up. Through the splintered ceiling play fragments of a film unfinished at Wojnarowicz’s death, in 1992, aged 37.

Sometimes the artist’s voice permeates the friable architecture, emanating from the soundtrack to Itsofomo (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) playing on a box TV. “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg,” he declaims with spitting fury. The words had specific context – New York during the Aids epidemic – nevertheless Wojnarowicz’s rage at a system that failed to serve or preserve him feels emblematic.

The reclusive figure spent decades filling every surface of her apartment at the legendary New York hotel with artworks that rose in teetering piles. Some are now on display for the first time in Glasgow

When the artist Yto Barrada stepped through the door of room 503, up on the fifth floor of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, she was overwhelmed by what she saw. Every inch of the walls was plastered with Xeroxed word art, graphic reproductions of geometric sculptures, hundreds of photographs of passersby in the street below and collections of leaves laid out in grids. Piles of cardboard boxes and crates, full of yet more artworks, prints, books and maquettes, created teetering canyons through which Barrada had to turn sideways to navigate. Every visible surface was covered with sculptural forms in brass, marble and wood. In the midst of it all, on a small daybed surrounded by this aggregation of 40 years of fervent work, was Bettina, as the resident artist of the famous New York landmark was simply known.

“One sees Bettina and understands that some disaster has taken place, long ago,” writes Barrada in Bettina, the book she edited with the designer Gregor Huber, published by Aperture in 2022. Barrada was one of only a handful of people the reclusive artist had permitted to enter 503 since she moved into the Chelsea in 1972. Despite the bohemian buzz around the hotel, with neighbours including Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and many of Andy Warhol’s entourage, Bettina chose to lock herself away, devoting her life to conceptual works that seemed to flow unstoppably from deep within, a creative impulse she likened to a divine energy.

Stranger Things actor makes first public comments about his ex’s revealing hit album which tracks the dissolution of a relationship

David Harbour has spoken about his ex Lily Allen’s tell-all album West End Girl for the first time in a new interview.

The Stranger Things actor, who is on the Emmys trail for the HBO crime drama DTF St Louis, separated from the singer in early 2025 after they married in 2020. The couple filed for divorce months after their separation.

‘The tabloids will always try to sensationalise. But it was 6.30pm. If Kate really had been falling out the door blind drunk, it’s not a picture I’d particularly want to take’

I have photographed Kate Moss a fair few times. The first time was probably around 1990, during the Johnny Depp days. I also shot her with Jefferson Hack and many of her other boyfriends, but it was only on official occasions, Topshop launches and things like that.

There was a period when whatever she did, 200 photographers would turn up. For her 33rd birthday, I was asked to cover her party at the Dorchester hotel. Then I got a call saying she was at the Donmar Warehouse theatre watching a matinee of a play with Rhys Ifans in it. “Could I go over there and get a picture of her leaving before arriving at the birthday party?” When I got there, there must have been 200-250 people outside. They had the front door surrounded – photographers, camera crews, fans, you name it. It was absolutely packed. I quickly realised that getting a decent picture was going to be very difficult.

Plaque installed at actor’s former home in Pimlico, central London, where he lived from the age of five to 12

Laurence Olivier has joined David Garrick, Henry Irving, Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward in having an English Heritage blue plaque outside his former London home.

Ian McKellen unveiled the plaque at 22 Lupus Street in Pimlico, where Olivier lived from the age of five to 12 and discovered a talent for acting under the watchful eye of his father, a curate at St Saviour’s church across the road.

Follow the folklore and you will discover a landscape full of wonder and powerful women – from a fearsome Scottish warrioress to the first queen of a united England

It’s just past midday and I appear to be inside a rain cloud. Soaked to the skin, my walking boots squelching through tufts of grass and black bog mud, I can hear hundreds of streams rolling off this wide mid-Wales peak, each vying to be the fastest. I’ve hiked around more than 8 miles (13km) of Hafren Forest trails to the top of Mount Pumlumon Fawr (Plynlimon), to reach a wooden post carved with the words Source of the Severn. And I’m here, alone, because I’m hoping to meet a river goddess.

It’s perhaps not as strange as it first sounds. Starting about 150 years ago, the folklorist John Rhys travelled across Wales to archive as many local myths as possible, and among them was the very tale that brought me to this peak: the story of the birth of the River Severn, in which three sisters – Hafren (Severn), Rheidolyn (Rheidol) and Gwy (Wye) – each choose their own route to the sea. My trip to the river’s source was itself a moment of mythically inspired travel, something that has been common practice in the British Isles for as long as we’ve told stories, not least as a means of passing them on.

Savour the glorious sound of mussels popping open and finish cooking the pasta in the shellfish liquor really to ramp up the flavour

If you put your ear close (but not too close) to a covered pan full of mussels, olive oil, garlic and a bit of white wine (not too much) over a lively heat, you will hear the sound – a cross between a crack, or that of a rip and an unzipping – of the mussels opening. To begin with, it’s intermittent, so you lift and look under the lid to reassure yourself that they are indeed starting to open … But there are only a few, so the lid goes back on. You shake the pan until, like popcorn, the mussels are off – crack, rip, unzip – at which point, get the lid off and the mussels out, so you can admire the liquor. Taste to see how salty it is and measure how much you have: you want about 200ml, so take some out, reduce or add water to get the proportions and taste to your liking.

Spaghetti (or linguine) with mussels is a recipe that benefits from finishing the cooking of the pasta in the sauce, which is also a great technique to know generally, because it can be applied to countless pasta recipes. The benefits of finishing the cooking in the sauce (or broth) are: deep flavour (because the pasta absorbs and gets completely coated in the sauce), shine and a slightly thickened sauce, thanks to the starch that seeps from the pasta and combines with the fat.

Whether it’s Harry Styles’s retro tailoring, CMAT’s joyful mash-ups or Metallica’s silver tones, here’s how to nail concert dressing – without looking like a tribute act

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s June style essentials

Over the past few years, dressing to see your favourite artists live has moved on from just throwing on a band tee and calling it a day. With ticket prices higher than ever, concerts are special events; as a result, there’s been a noticeable shift towards dressing up. Fans are embracing intricate looks inspired by the live shows, songs, albums and even obscure references only the most hardcore listeners would understand. With this, the question of “what to wear” has never felt more important.

The good news? You don’t need to turn up in a full costume to feel part of that experience. There are subtle ways you can channel your favourite artist’s aesthetic while still wearing something that works beyond the venue doors. Here’s how.

Whether it’s water-saving showerheads or natural sponges, these easy swaps cut waste and make your bathroom a little kinder to the planet

• The best refillable beauty products for a sustainable routine

As a sustainability journalist, I’ve often despaired at how unsustainable our bathrooms are – from water use to plastic bottles to chemical-heavy cleaners. However, there are ways to reduce their carbon footprint. As water becomes increasingly precious, hacks for our loos that cap its usage are useful, as are smart showerheads that cut down on water, particularly as baths these days feel like a guilty indulgence.

Swap plastic-packaged and chemical-loaded products, such as bleach and multipurpose sprays, for eco-friendly ones, and buy secondhand good-as-new fixtures. From bamboo loo roll to solid shampoo bars, here are my tips for a more planet-friendly bathroom.

Our writer found a surprisingly effective way to cut down his smartphone use. Plus, what to eat while watching the World Cup – inspired by all 48 teams

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I recently learned through Apple’s Screen Time app that I was spending about eight hours a week on my phone browsing Reddit and Instagram. That’s 17.3 days a year spent consuming entertaining but ultimately pointless fluff. So my piece looking for solutions for phone addicts was highly personal.

The warning signs are if your phone is the first thing you look at in the morning and the last thing you look at in bed, says Prof Marcantonio Spada, emeritus professor of addictive behaviours and mental health at London South Bank University and chief clinical officer at Onebright, who I spoke to for my article.

Swimwear season is upon us – so here’s our pick of the most flattering, practical and comfortable costumes

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s June essentials

The trick with swimwear shopping is to stick to well-established criteria. Your priorities, of course, are comfort, support, coverage and price. But while your demure black one-piece might cover those bases, you shouldn’t settle for a costume that does the bare minimum.

Take tummy control swimwear. If you want support in that area, you don’t have to avoid bikinis. Try a high waist pair with a built-in control panel, or a tank top. Ruching is fairly standard these days (as is a tie at the side) and does the trick by tucking everything away. If in doubt, wear something printed to distract.

These singular wines from France’s gastronomic heartland are expensive to make and to buy, but if you know where to look, they don’t have to break the bank

Everyone loves white burgundy. Made from chardonnay grapes, these wines from France’s gastronomic heartland, stretching from just south of Champagne to just north of Lyon, are singular: graceful, textured and full of joy. But prices tend to be less friendly; Doug Wregg from organic wine importer Les Caves de Pyrene says “affordable burgundy” is “almost an oxymoron” due to limited supply, labour-intensive production techniques and historic prestige. The recent slew of poor vintages has made those low yields even lower, and prices higher. But good examples do exist at under £25 a pop, which is where I’ve set my budget benchmark today.

That sum won’t get you premier cru meursault, or anything from the Côte d’Or, a narrow hillside of celebrated limestone slopes south of Dijon, but there is still plenty within reach. Not least aligoté, the region’s second white grape, which can reliably be found for less than £25 (try Majestic’s Famille Gueguen number at £15.50 a bottle on the “mix six” offer), but “white burgundy” always means chardonnay, which is my focus today. A sensible start is in the Mâconnais, the southernmost point of Burgundy’s wine-producing area, where warmer temperatures and clay-limestone soil make for a rounder style of wine. Almost every supermarket has an own-label Mâcon Villages – I spent many a tidy Friday night in my twenties in a south London park with the Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference iteration (now £12.50 – inflation!) and a large bag of Doritos Cool Original (a good pairing, incidentally) – and they tend to be easy, fruity table wines. Usually, they’re unoaked, too, removing a layer of process that helps keep the price down. That said, oak doesn’t necessarily mean better; rather, its absence arguably lets the terroirs sing louder. Wregg’s Domaine des Cadoles 2022 Mâcon Chardonnay in today’s pick is a lovely example, at once mineral and creamy.

Ever since the Post Modern Times cafe in Minneapolis ditched its price list, half the customers have chosen not to pay. It’s still making a profit

Name: Pay what you wish.

Age: Popular since the 00s, but dating back to at least the 80s.

A viral trend based on an eastern classic, this rolled, multilayered dish is a fun way to use up wilting leaves that also looks impressive on the table

When I started looking into the idea of a lettuce omelette, mainly to use up leftover dressed salad, I soon found out that it’s something of a social media trend, as well as a classic Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese dish. In the trending recipe, the egg whites and yolks are often separated, then the whites are mixed with lettuce and cooked first. This is rolled, then the yolks go into the same pan and, once they’re set, they’re rolled around the whites to make a beautiful, multilayered omelette with a white-green interior and a golden outside. It’s a great way to use up dressed salad, but fresh or wilted leaves will work, too, if those are all you have. I prefer bitter and spicy leaves such as mustard, mizuna and rocket, but everything works. Iceberg, for instance, is often used in modern Chinese recipes. Serve this plain, or with crispy chilli oil, soy sauce flavoured with minced garlic and ginger, miso mayo, or all three. To make miso mayo, mix 60g mayonnaise with a tablespoon of white miso paste, then stir in an optional teaspoon of sesame oil, some finely grated garlic and ginger, and a squeeze of lemon.

An unusual frittata with a risotto base, and a simple but delicious salad combination that’s sure to be a big hit

I love this salad – the combination of soft, juicy chicken, crisp leaves and anchovy croutons is so delicious. We serve it on the terrace at my restaurant and, when the sun is shining, it is the biggest seller by a country mile. But, first, an unusual frittata, which is essentially a risotto base with asparagus: it’s not difficult to make and is perfect for lunch, and even better as part of a picnic.

Up there by myself, I decided life might be best on my own. That thought has shaped my travel and relationships ever since

I grew up in Kenya and was nine when we went camping by the beach in Mombasa, with two other families. The constant games and laughter were new to me, as we were a quiet, rather insular family. I went bodyboarding, watched crabs emerge from holes in the sand, climbed all over rusty cannons in the old fort and bought colourful strips of kanga fabric in the market to make sarongs.

One day, my father asked some fishers to take us to the reef in their canoes. It was a good mile offshore: I wanted to stay behind with Mum, but Dad fixed me with a look and said: “You’ve got no sense of adventure, have you?” Then I knew I had to go, clambering shakily into the wobbly wooden construction, clinging on to the sides for dear life.

Like many couples, my husband and I bickered over who would do what and who did more. We came up with a radical solution

It was when my second child was born in 2021 that I realised I needed a new system for parenting. We were coming out of lockdown, and I was tired and overwhelmed. During the pandemic, my husband and I had built our own mini unit in the UK, as our families lived in the US. I had decided to start my own literary agency as soon as my daughter was old enough to start nursery at six months. It wasn’t ideal timing, but I wanted to start as soon as possible.

I approached finding a parenting system the way I think many women of my generation do, with the same intensity that we would have approached a school dissertation. I decided to crowdsource my research: I watched videos of home-schooling mums in the US demonstrating their morning routines, I read every parenting book I could, I listened to podcasters interviewing mothers who seemingly “had it all”, and listened to others who argued that “having it all” was impossible.

Chronicling your humdrum, solitary life has become an online trend. It’s certainly perplexing. Is it also empowering?

Name: Loneliness influencers.

Age: A few months old.

He walked out of his way to get me on to the right street, then handed me the brolly saying, ‘Here, you take this’

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

It was bucketing down, absolutely pouring. I was on my way to a birthday dinner but got lost in central Sydney’s labyrinth of streets, so I ducked into an internet cafe to look up directions to the restaurant. I then wrote those directions down by hand – such were the times!

As I stepped out of the cafe, I realised just how bad the weather had become and how ill-prepared I was for the rain. As I stood waiting to cross the road, swiftly getting wet, a man waiting for the lights in the opposite direction offered up his big rainbow umbrella to share. I gratefully accepted and, still a little unsure of where I was going, asked if he knew the way to the restaurant.

The clock is ticking to take advantage of this valuable UK scheme, as the benefits are to be restricted from April 2029

Millions of workers are able to take advantage of a scheme that allows them to boost their pension and pay less tax, and experts are urging people to “max out” this valuable perk before the rules are tightened.

Salary sacrifice lets you exchange some of your wages for a different benefit from your employer, such as a company car – or, in this case, pension contributions. You will then pay less tax and national insurance (NI) on your lower salary.

Also: Anthropic advocates for a ‘pause’ on AI advancement – days after filing to go public on the US stock market

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the US tech editor at the Guardian. Today we’re discussing Donald Trump’s neediness for AI and the contradictions of Anthropic’s safety-first posture.

OpenAI confidentially files for initial public offering on US stock market

Apple debuts revamped ‘Siri AI’ and new child safety features for iPhones and iPads

The Guardian view on children and the internet: rolling back big tech’s untrammelled power | Editorial

Silicon Valley including Meta has embraced Maga politics, says Nick Clegg

Bernie Sanders’ AI sovereign wealth fund plan is good. But we think this is better | Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier

Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land

Billions spent and hypothetical returns: the AI boom explained with six charts

‘A driver of political violence’: how the breakneck AI boom is fueling anti-tech extremism

The line is vital for our elderly relative’s care, but after 20 calls BT seems unable to resolve the problem

My elderly aunt, who lives alone, has been unable to receive incoming calls for more than two months after BT switched her analogue service to Digital Voice.

Her care is overseen by a rota of relatives who check on her and arrange medical appointments and in-home help.

Bereaved relatives have been bombarded with calls, emails and letters addressed to the deceased

ScottishPower sent a debt collection letter to my house demanding £130 owing on my late brother’s gas account. I am his sole executor and had informed it of his death.

The company, meanwhile, owed a £430 credit on his electricity account. It eventually paid this with a cheque issued in my late brother’s name, which could not therefore be cashed.

Influencers often brand sugar as inherently harmful – but not all sweet foods are created equal

‘It’s a common myth,” says Dr Emily Leeming, a dietitian at King’s College London – and one that thrives on social media. The confusion, she says, often comes from people cutting out sugary foods and feeling better. But that can be because removing ultra-processed sweet treats improves the overall quality of a diet (making more room for wholefoods).

Leeming says influencers who call sugar “toxic” often see it as inherently harmful – solely responsible for weight gain, poor blood sugar control and heart problems. But in controlled studies where calorie intake is kept the same, diets high in sugar don’t appear to worsen weight loss, metabolism or key health markers. “It’s not ideal nutritionally if you’re missing out on fruits, vegetables and whole grains,” Leeming says, “but sugar isn’t in itself directly harmful in that context.”

Doctors say diagnosis is usually clinical and doesn’t rely on a blood test, with symptoms often starting in the mid-40s

There’s a special frisson to period changes in your mid-forties. Every deviation from your usual pattern can feel like a harbinger of the menopause transition, also known as perimenopause.

One might spend years staring at their underwear, wondering: am I or aren’t I?

Keren Landman MD is an independent health reporter who is also trained as an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist, with experience serving as a disease detective at the CDC and conducting HIV and malaria research in resource-poor countries. Her public health newsletter is called Landmansplained

Drug that stops cancer cells hiding and a breakthrough for pancreatic cancer among highlights from Asco conference – but there were also notes of caution

Doctors, scientists and researchers shared new research about ways to tackle cancer at the 2026 American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco) annual meeting, the world’s largest cancer conference.

The event in Chicago, attended by 40,000 health professionals, featured more than 200 sessions and 2,700 poster presentations on this year’s theme, “the science and practice of translation: improving cancer outcomes worldwide”. Here are the five biggest takeaways.

As demand for cobalt, gold and other minerals grows, mining is accelerating deforestation in the Congo basin – and increasing the risk of deadly Ebola outbreaks

For decades after the discovery of Ebolavirus in 1976, outbreaks of the disease were relatively small and contained, affecting a few hundred people at most.

Not any more. In recent years, outbreaks of Ebola have been much larger, affecting thousands and even tens of thousands of people across multiple countries. The 2014 outbreak of Ebola in west Africa infected more than 28,000 people in 10 countries on three continents. The current eruption, which began in early May and shows no signs of abating, has caused 363 confirmed cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has crossed into Uganda.

Sonia Shah is the author of five books including Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, and writes the newsletter Cross Pollinations on Substack

More customers are seeking out meticulous e-file manicures, but there are concerns about the risk of infection with the cuticle-raising beauty treatment

A drill with a speed of 35,000 revolutions per minute sits on Alina Huck’s orderly work station. The drill bit is the length of an almond, and as soon as it touches the client’s nail it whips up a fine dust of dead skin.

“It’s definitely a satisfying experience,” says Huck, a Sydney-based nail technician who has spent nearly a decade specialising in e-file manicures, also known as Russian manicures.

When the singer got married in London last month, her skirt suit made headlines. But she was hardly the first to reject tradition. Here are the stories behind some other beautiful but unconventional outfits

For some people, wearing a big white dress on their wedding day feels as key as the rings. For others, less so.

When Dua Lipa wore a Schiaparelli couture white skirt suit as she wed the actor Callum Turner in London last month, she joined a long line of women who have opted for a suit. Not least Bianca Jagger, whom Lipa was speculated to be emulating – the model and activist caused a stir when she got hitched to Mick Jagger in 1971, wearing a Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking jacket and bias-cut skirt.

Want to keep your makeup in place but always end up looking shiny? These sprays have a blurry finish that flatters everyone

I don’t know how any makeup wearer lives without setting spray, but for oily skins I do recognise it has pitfalls as well as many benefits.

Setting spray keeps makeup in place when warm weather might otherwise melt it away, and allows for creamier, more flattering products to be used in place of powders. But it also cuts through the dusty look of any powdery makeup to give it a softer, more youthful finish.

From France’s catwalk looks to Virgil van Dijk’s classic approach, these are the teams and players to watch

The 2026 World Cup may not kick off until Thursday, but the fashion tournament has already begun, as teams arrive at training camps across the US.

Fashion moments range from the outfits players wear to get to training, to the suits worn on planes and their training gear. The French team’s training camp in Clairefontaine became something of a catwalk this week thanks to the style of players such as Jules Koundé and Kylian Mbappé. Meanwhile, brands including Loewe, Gabriela Hearst, Patta and the rapper Drake’s Nocta have worked with teams on suiting and training gear.

Affordable, family-friendly and largely flat, the Lelångenleden is a gateway to an otherworldly wilderness with wild swimming, canoes and cabins as part the ride

Imagine the Swedish landscape and a stereotypical scene of idyllic red cottages with white trim, foregrounded by a lake of glimmering blue, might spring to mind. Beyond perhaps, adding depth, lies a band of birch and spruce, and a midsummer view of wooded islands.

Now, add to this image the sight of two half-naked men lunging from a tiny sauna cabin into the cold shock of a lake. One screams. The other ducks his head under, pops up, shivers, then does it again. His skin has the pinkish tinge of salmon, but he’s smiling.

Matosinhos was built on fish, but today its retro seafood restaurants and canneries sit alongside great art spaces, museums and landmark architecture

This once declining industrial city is on the up, but not so much that it has been ruined – yet. See it now, mid-gentrification, before its humble seafood restaurants become overpriced and its beautifully curated museums and galleries overrun.

The newly designated Joyce Country and Western Lakes Unesco Geopark in Galway and Mayo celebrates a 700-million-year geological history that has produced a unique terrain and rich cultural heritage

‘If you take all these springs together in terms of flow, it’s by far the largest in Ireland, and one of the biggest systems in the world,” said Dr Benjamin Thébaudeau, geologist for the newly designated Unesco Joyce Country and Western Lakes Geopark in western Ireland.

Over a few days, I discovered that this massive system of limestone springs and caves is the engine that drives this landscape, in the same way as an underground train network powers a city. It’s a place where rivers disappear into limestone fissures and subterranean lakes, and where roads twist through drowned valleys beneath mountains shaped by fire and ice.

Rallying the kids can be chaotic and frustrating, but from Interrailing all the way to Turkey to Vespa rides in Naples, these trips brought families together

Finland has been named the world’s happiest country for nine years running, but arriving in Helsinki, dishevelled from one of my first flights with my nine-month-old baby, I was less interested in national rankings and more in having a nice nap. My husband, Jake, and I had emerged from the fog of newborn life and the idea of a holiday felt possible again. My ambitions were small: a sunset beer, a walk in the woods, reading a few pages of my book uninterrupted.

In an age of spiritual isolation, witches are flocking to the woods of Ireland and elsewhere to form covens of ‘sisterhood’

On the floor of a sun-drenched room in a 200-year-old Irish estate, a group of 15 witches gather to commune with the spirits. Everyone has someone they want to talk to – dead ancestors, forest fairies, the witches who came before them – and the room has the same expectant charge as the first day of school. Some of the witches wear long black capes and bandannas. Some wear Columbia fleeces, spaghetti-strap tank tops and Adidas sneakers.

Isabella Ferrari, known as Penny the Witch, guides the women as they make divination maps, sheets of paper covered with “yeses” and “nos” that work like Ouija boards: the witches ask their questions and the spirits guide the crystal pendulums in their hands towards the answer. One of the women, Tara Monte, screeches as her pendulum begins circling uncontrollably. “Isabella, do I stop this? Someone really wants to talk to me.” Later, she will confess she believes it was her archangel Michael letting her know yes, her parents were proud of her. Yes, they still loved her.

The socially relaxed city has seen a cautious feminist revival despite authorities’ growing alarm at women who shun traditional roles

In a small, unassuming bookstore in south-west China, a discreet community of women dream of a more equal future. Here in Chengdu, 42-year-old Shen Shen runs one of the country’s leading feminist bookstores.

“The world doesn’t lack bookstores for men,” she says, surrounded by piles of volumes by authors including Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir and Chizuko Ueno.

Few things are more feared than a dementia diagnosis. Now people living with the condition are fighting against damaging stereotypes and demanding proper medical support

When Maxine Linnell, 78, a retired psychotherapist living in Leicestershire, learned that she had dementia four years ago, the diagnosis proved less challenging than some people’s reactions. “What was striking was how many people’s attitudes changed almost immediately … they stop seeing you as a person and see only dementia, some professionals included. Like this is the end and everything after will be devastating.”

The assumption that you go overnight from diagnosis to late-stage dementia isn’t confined to family and friends. Julie Hayden, a nurse and social worker from Yorkshire, was diagnosed nine years ago at the age of 54, long after sensing that something was wrong but being constantly told that it was depression or menopause; her doctors still associated dementia with old age and didn’t consider that she might have had young onset. “At the point of diagnosis,” she recalls, “most of us are told: ‘Well, it’s dementia, nothing we can do about that. Best go away and get your end of life affairs in order.’”

She starred in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, had to stoop when she danced with Fred Astaire, then became world-famous – and a gay icon – in the original Batman series. But her life behind the scenes has been just as interesting ...

Julie Newmar is showing me her secret garden: an oasis of greenery around her house in Brentwood, Los Angeles, that is crammed with trees, flowers, sculptures and labyrinthine paths. It feels like a little piece of old-school Hollywood, untouched by the world outside. “Here, try one,” Newmar says as she leans over from her mobility scooter and picks me a blueberry from a bush. “Isn’t that nice?” It’s a well-maintained jungle of begonias, jasmine, geraniums, fruit trees, and above all, roses. She has 90 varieties, she says, including one named after her. “That one’s Marilyn Monroe,” she says, pointing out a creamy pink one. “Doesn’t it look like her flesh?” Monroe’s former house is just up the road, she mentions. Newmar has lived here for decades with her son, John, who has Down’s syndrome. They spend a lot of time out here.

“I would say my life is about beauty,” Newmar says. “I want to be a beautiful old woman; beauty in the garden; beauty in your behaviour, in your treatment of others. Because we all know that life’s a circle. All this stuff comes back. And in my 90s now, one has evolved. Big things happen now and they’re more in the metaphysical, they’re in the ‘what can I do for others?’ Because I’ve already done it for myself.”

There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class. Do they feel supported? In Walthamstow, east London, we meet a group of carers as they are collected for a rare night off that brings a sense of community and a glimpse of fun for a few hours every few weeks. It’s hosted by Satvinder, a tenacious council worker who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough and provides them crucial emotional support.

This film is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them.

Reform UK leader has been unusually quiet in recent weeks – at great cost to the party during a crucial byelection

Fake images of Nigel Farage have been ubiquitous online lately – but the real politician has proved far more elusive since it was revealed seven weeks ago that he took a £5m personal gift from a crypto billionaire.

And while an AI-generated depiction of the Reform UK leader was falsely shown getting violent on BBC’s Question Time, Farage has been largely avoiding the TV studios where he might face questions over the cash.

Sumayah Nakazibwe and Stella Ariokot feared they would be next as fires took hold of neighbouring houses

For four hours, two Ugandan care workers, Sumayah Nakazibwe and Stella Ariokot, were barricaded into their house near Crumlin Road, north Belfast, as smoke leaked in, and flames licked the walls of neighbouring properties.

“It all started like people were just marching, young boys between the age of nine and 20,” Nakazibwe said. “They were all putting on black, and masked.”

We would like to hear from people who have been affected by the disorder following anti-immigration protests

Police have used water cannon against rioters in Northern Ireland during a second night of anti-immigration protests.

It dispersed a crowd of about 300 people on Wednesday night who burned a truck and threw bricks and petrol bombs close to the Sandyknowes roundabout near Newtownabbey, eight miles north of Belfast.

We would like to hear your advice that might help younger people looking for a job

About 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in employment, education or training – and the obstacles they face are bigger than ever. With this in mind, we would like we would like to hear your advice that might help younger people looking for a job.

Do you have experience of looking for work that you could share? What useful tips do you have for job seekers? Let us know below.

We’d like to hear from UK adult adoptees about they navigated their reunion with a birth parent

Guardian journalist David Batty has described the complex family trauma many adult adoptees have to navigate during reunion with their birth parents, often without professional support.

We would like other UK adult adoptees to share their experiences of adoption reunion. How challenging was it to forge relationships with birth relatives and to maintain them? What, if any, support did you receive? How did it impact your relationship with your adoptive family?

With ministers considering measures that could include restrictions on under-16s’ access to social media, we would like to hear from parents and carers about what changes they want to see

The UK government is expected to announce new measures to protect children online, as ministers examine the impact of Australia’s world-first social media ban for under-16s, six months after it came into force.

We’d like to hear from parents and carers about their views on a potential social media ban or other restrictions.

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