We asked you what you most wanted to put to our Guardian columnist. You responded in droves, querying her ‘beef’ with Burnham, who she thinks is this generation’s Hugh Grant, and what she really thinks about Richard Osman ...

• ‘There is light at the end of this tunnel. But the tunnel is filled with sewage’: an exclusive extract from Marina Hyde’s new book

What are your bunker plans?
James, Portugal
Masses of things to read, incredible food and an unethical doctor with an insane war chest of interesting pills. The second that bunker door closes, the doors of perception are opening.

Will Restore gain more traction by the next election and genuinely split the rightwing vote?
Natasha, London
They won’t split it in some 50‑50 way, but they could peel off a bit more from Reform’s right flank. Nigel Farage is looking vulnerable. In the Woody Allen film Deconstructing Harry, Robin Williams plays an actor who literally goes out of focus. Having once been sharp and clear, his nervous system is so shot that he becomes a physically blurred and imprecise distortion of himself. Metaphorically, something similar has happened to Farage in recent months.

There’ll be exhaustion, love tinged with occasional rage, even moments of black humour. But my mum would want me to tell you: don’t be afraid

My mother’s house looks exactly as she left it.

Two novels sit by the armchair, their pages neatly marked for book group. Pinned to the noticeboard is a shopping list in only slightly shaky writing, with “FRUIT!” in urgent capitals, and “make soup” underlined. The sole outward signs of something missing are her cats twining needily around me – loneliness having finally overcome their innate horror of visitors – and the one thing I can’t bear to look at, which is the empty hospital bed marooned bleakly in the sitting room. Delivered by social services when it was deemed she could no longer manage stairs, it is now stripped bare, awaiting collection. Another family will be needing it.

Have a baby and the world falls over itself to offer advice. But losing a parent remains a private, bewildering, lonely affair

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Tapestry’s loan to UK is just another chapter in the love-hate relationship that has spanned the centuries since it was created

Five British prime ministers ago – and six French ones – when Emmanuel Macron first confirmed that France would return the Bayeux tapestry to Britain after 1,000 years, he told an audience at Sandhurst and Theresa May – the No 10 seat-warmer of the day – that when it came to France and Britain there were “two things that nothing can change, be it a vote or a political decision: our history and our geography”.

It was January 2018, 18 months after the UK had voted to leave the EU, and relations between the near neighbours were not good. The French political establishment had been shocked and angered by Brexit; personal relations were frazzled, and cross-Channel government contacts measurably dwindling. This was not a rupture that a piece of embroidered medieval linen, however perfectly it represented that tangled history, was going to solve on its own.

Has your cat been gaining weight and staying out at night, only to arrive home reeking of marijuana? These are just some of the signs that a neighbour is trying to entice them away ...

When Amy’s cat, Sid*, first started spending more time away from home, Amy* put it down to wanderlust. A former street cat, Sid had landed on his feet in her leafy London suburb, but still retained his free-roaming sociability. When Sid began disappearing for up to days at a time though, Amy worried. She put a tracker on his collar to find out where he was going. She didn’t expect to discover him a few doors up the road.

Sid is roaming – but most of the time, for entire afternoons and even sometimes overnight, he is with Amy’s neighbour. “He is in her house, constantly, all the time,” she says. This is not a coincidence. Sid might not be getting six dinners, like his famous namesake in Inga Moore’s 1990 children’s book, but the neighbour is certainly spoiling him, as she recently let slip to Amy’s partner. “She’s feeding him organic chicken!” Amy says indignantly.

Danielle Gillam-Kirton claims police botched investigation into her parents’ deaths in Spain and is demanding answers

When Danielle Gillam-Kirton’s parents, Pete and Fran Gillam, were killed in July’s Spanish wildfires, she felt her nightmare could get no worse. The much-loved couple had built their home in Bédar in Almería after retirement, becoming part of a tight-knit community. Fran, a former headteacher, loved to organise quiz nights to raise money for the local school and the couple enjoyed playing padel at a nearby sports club.

Spanish police told Gillam-Kirton that the vehicle in which her parents died had been “inspected meticulously” and no possessions had been found. But Gillam-Kirton, an assistant headteacher from Nottinghamshire, was sure her parents must have been wearing their wedding rings when they died.

Girl bands from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are going global with their fusion of traditional and modern sounds

“We all know that music is a universal language,” says Maloi Ricalde from Filipina girl band BINI, which mixes tropical pop with traditional songs, English with Tagalog, and silver knee highs with pastel colours.

“Incorporating Filipino language, Filipino culture, Filipino sound, into our music, it really gives identity and meaning to our music,” Ricalde tells the Guardian.

Exclusive: Guardian investigation reveals targeting of World Central Kitchen convoy was result of widely used military tactic

• Death on the road to Rafah: the night the IDF targeted World Central Kitchen aid workers

Seven aid workers killed in an airstrike in Gaza were marked as targets under an Israeli military practice of establishing guilt by association, a Guardian investigation shows.

A top Israeli military prosecutor announced last month that he would not pursue criminal proceedings for the April 2024 incident in which drones fired missiles at three clearly marked World Central Kitchen (WCK) cars soon after they had escorted a food aid delivery to Gaza. Three British humanitarian workers along with an Australian, a Palestinian, a Pole and a dual US-Canadian national were killed.

Splits emerge within party after resignation of officials reported to police for apparent plot to evade donations law

Nigel Farage sought to shore up his damaged leadership on Friday as he attempted to distance himself from two of his most senior officials reported to the police for apparently plotting to evade the law on foreign donations.

As the scandal engulfed Reform UK’s party conference in Birmingham, Farage was forced to suspend close aides Dan Jukes and head of policy James Orr after an undercover investigation by reporters from a group called Verbatim.

Insurers in England and Wales tell of busy August with one reporting near-140% jump in claims

UK insurers are experiencing a surge in the number of homeowners making claims for subsidence after the hottest summer on record, with Hastings Direct reporting a near 140% jump to an all-time high for August.

Insurance firms have been overrun by calls and online queries, as well as a rise in claims during the five heatwaves that followed the warmest spring ever recorded in England and Wales.

Workers who blame algorithms for lowering their earnings are getting help from academics to find out how the system works

Gig economy workers are urging delivery platforms to open up the “black box” of computer-driven algorithms that determine the jobs they are offered and how much they are paid, blaming increased use of AI for lowering wages.

A group of food delivery riders in Edinburgh say their rates of pay have fallen and their working conditions have deteriorated at the same time as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat, the three dominant gig economy platforms in the UK and Ireland, have increased their use of automation.

Comedian and his wife, Cerys Morgan, set up charitable foundation in memory of Felix, who died shortly after birth

Russell Howard has announced the death of his baby son, in what he described as the “most devastating time of our lives”.

The 46-year-old comedian said his family had been “changed for ever” after their “beautiful baby boy”, Felix, died shortly after birth.

Experts say invasive species are creating ‘pollinator deserts’ and could have serious impact on food security

British beekeepers have called for a national awareness campaign about the impact of Asian hornets as they warned the invasive species was creating “pollinator deserts” and threatening food security.

Native to south-east Asia, the yellow-legged hornet is thought to have arrived in Europe in 2004 and has continued to spread ever since, its numbers probably boosted by increasingly warm springs and summers.

Togo-sponsored resolution called to phase out traditional map that depicts continent as similar size to Greenland

The United Nations has voted to adopt a resolution for the world to formally phase out the traditional Mercator map of the globe in favour of one that more accurately displays Africa’s size.

In a session at its headquarters in New York, the UN general assembly officially retired the 16th-century Mercator projection in favour of one based on the more accurate 2018 Equal Earth design.

Portrait of a Lady had been missing since 1940 before being photographed in 2025 in Argentinian home of Nazi officer’s daughter

Argentina must return to the rightful owner’s heir an 18th-century painting stolen by Nazis from a Dutch Jewish art collector, a judge has ruled.

Portrait of a Lady by Italian baroque painter Giuseppe Ghislandi was missing for eight decades before being photographed in 2025 hanging in the home of the daughter of a senior Nazi officer who had fled to Argentina after the second world war.

Arnold Dix, an Australian engineer and geologist who worked at Ground Zero after 9/11, says finding two workers alive in Trishuli 3A ‘gives us hope’

There is renewed hope amid the devastation wreaked by the flash flooding disaster on the Nepal-Tibet border as the world witnesses “one of the great rescues of the 21st century”.

Nine days after the deadly floods, two workers were pulled out alive from a flooded hydropower tunnel in Nepal.

A spate of serious safety incidents have increased fears about the power and impenetrability of the most advanced models

Picture humanity in a boat being swept down a raging river, praying there is no Niagara Falls ahead. Or imagine standing with the pioneering physicists in 1942 before they triggered the first self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reaction beneath a Chicago stadium.

These were two of the analogies used this week by Prof Robert Trager, an expert in the nascent field of AI governance, to describe the perilous but potential-filled moment the world stands at with accelerating artificial intelligence.

US president suggests he might support his Argentinian acolyte’s drive to reclaim sovereignty of disputed islands

Donald Trump has long embraced vengeance. “I am your retribution,” he declared to an admiring audience at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) as he commenced his march back to the White House.

It is unlikely Argentina, and far-flung holdovers of the former British empire, were on the US president’s mind at the time.

Sunday’s election could bring in Germany’s first far-right state government since the Nazi era

Germany is embarking on a crucial election period this month, with three key state polls that could markedly change the political terrain and make life decidedly harder for the federal government under the chancellor, Friedrich Merz.

All eyes are on Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, where about 1.7 million people are eligible to vote, followed by Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin on 20 September. In all three contests, the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is expected to make strong gains.

It’s been an era of global instability, complete with ejector-seat prime ministers, Mars-bound baddies and even a celebrity ski-massacre trial …

• How posh are you? Do you have a therapist? What would you say to Trump at a party? Marina Hyde answers readers’ questions

Let me kick off by letting a little daylight in on magic. If you’ve got a book out in September, you’re probably sending the publisher the final version of the introduction four months earlier. So I guess the moment I truly knew that Keir Starmer was finished was the moment, in the first days of May, when I typed the words “we’ve had three prime ministers since my last book”. At that point it became an absolute cast-iron cosmic inevitability that we would have had yet another prime minister by the time the book was out. Nailed on. It’s the equivalent of lighting a cigarette so the bus turns up immediately.

So, four prime ministers in four years … Good times, possibly, for someone whose job involves writing about prime ministers. But not good times for Britain, or indeed for the seemingly endless series of outgoing premiers. Being British prime minister has become the biggest ejector-seat job since the noughties, when the US would announce they’d killed “the al-Qaida No 3” about twice a month.

Don, 76, who works in TV and film, meets Claire, 63, a counselling charity manager

What were you hoping for?
To meet someone interesting. To be part of a cultural phenomenon called the Guardian Blind date. To have a pleasant lunch.

Irish boxer lauded for her tenacity and inspiration before her last fight in front of 80,000 people at Croke Park

When Katie Taylor steps into the ring on Saturday night to defend her titles and once again enthral Ireland, there will be a bittersweet tinge. After a singular career that pioneered women’s boxing, the super-lightweight champion and Olympic gold medallist is bowing out. She is 40 and it is to be her final bout.

“The end of an era, isn’t it?” said Trevor McMahon, her brother-in-law and founder of a gym where she trains. “It’ll be an amazing night but it’ll also be a little bit sad. Everything she did, it might not ever be achieved again.”

England’s manager Thomas Tuchel called the officiating ‘just not good enough’ in the fiery last-16 tie. Now Alireza Faghani gives his version of events

It was 6pm on 5 July in Mexico City, and Alireza Faghani, a 48-year-old Australian-Iranian, was asleep in the locker room, snoring. His assistants had turned the music down. Had it not been for the muffled roar of nearly 90,000 fans through the concrete walls of the Estadio Azteca, he could have slept until the following morning.

Faghani was the referee for Mexico v England in the last 16 at the 2026 World Cup. Mexico hadn’t lost a competitive game at the Azteca since 2013, at least in part because they’re used to the conditions. Situated 2,240 metres above sea level, the air contains less oxygen. Opponents struggle to breathe, let alone win.

It’s deliciously satirical, fizzes with electric chemistry – and it’s snortingly funny too. If you haven’t watched the worst named show on TV yet, do so. Right now!

Sometimes the best things in life have the worst names. The Beatles. Smeg fridges. Nintendo Wii. But top of the tree is Colin from Accounts (Monday 7 September, 10pm, BBC Two), a name so bland I almost slipped into medical unconsciousness upon hearing it. It’s worse than bland. There’s an aspect of comedy-tie zaniness to it, a “Look, we’re calling our possibly office-based sitcom the most boring thing we can think of!” tedium. One can imagine the lazy jokes, the stock characters. Within 15 minutes of watching it, I was genuinely toying with the idea of a CFA tattoo.

How did this unpromising Australian import become my favourite? By being a showcase for fearless writing, electric chemistry and delicious comic timing. Written by real-life partners Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer, it tracks the relationship of medical student Ashley and Gordon, a brewery owner and ball cancer survivor. The romance, like their writing, is allergic to schmaltz. Their meet-cute occurs in the street when Ashley flashes a boob at Gordon, causing him to crash his car and permanently disable a stray dog that they unwillingly adopt together. (That’s Colin. It’s not really about Colin.)

As the battle for current account customers takes a new twist we look at how tempting the offers really are

Fancy up to £500 of “free” cash – or how about a complimentary eco-friendly electric toothbrush? Many of Britain’s banks are offering sizeable “welcome bonuses” and other freebies in an attempt to convince people to switch to their current accounts.

This week the battle was turned up a notch. Santander is offering £240, while NatWest is hoping to tempt high-earners to defect by dangling the carrot of £500.

Guardian Australia’s weekend wrap of essential reads from the past seven days, selected by Miles Herbert

• Get this in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for Five Great Reads here

Hello and welcome to the weekend.

This week, we have selected stories that will move you. A dispatch from a disaster zone, where rescue teams are sifting through scattered, buried remnants, a feature about walking away from a community that once welcomed you, and a piece on running just to see how far you can go.

Our premier political comedian heads out on tour, while the 70-metre-long woven story of 1066 arrows its way to Britain for the first time

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
Out now
Widely popularised by an episode of Friends in which Ross makes an ass of himself with Isabella Rossellini, the notion of the “celebrity sex pass” completes some sort of cultural loop here as another Friends star, Jennifer Aniston, comes full circle to play a version of herself, the subject of Tom’s (Michael Cassidy) get-out-of-jail lust freebie. A romcom from David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer).

Here’s how to follow along with our coverage – the finest writing and up-to-the-minute reports

Willem Dafoe stars as an ageing bohemian being embraced by a younger generation, while the troubled K-pop stars put the emphasis on their songs. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

A first win for Andoni Iraola’s Liverpool, the introduction of the latest star signing in Bradley Barcola making for a successful Friday night. Better yet, continuing signs that Alexander Isak, last year’s model, is coming back to life, his two, well-taken early goals securing the three points. That Cody Gakpo, Isak’s supplier, might have been at Manchester City or Tottenham had the transfer runes been right, added further to a sense of renewal. Liverpool’s attackers were full of the speed and invention sorely lacking for much of last season.

Once Barcola arrived in the second half, those velocity levels increased yet further, Liverpool playing the attacking style, high on risk and entertainment, the appointment of Iraola promised. “We are starting to get to the way we want to play,” said Isak afterwards.

• ‘It’s tricky to handle when you’re trying to compete’

• Alcaraz into fourth round after straight sets victory

Aryna Sabalenka briefly stopped her match at the US Open to complain about the strong smell of cannabis on her court as she comfortably reached the fourth round in New York.

Sabalenka, the two-time defending champion, continued her attempts to rebuild her form as she overcame a challenging test from Kamilla Rakhimova before winning 6-3, 6-4.

Before his home grand prix, the Mercedes driver opens up on his rocky debut season and quest to become the first Italian world champion since 1953

If Kimi Antonelli feels any pressure as the favourite to take the Formula One world championship at just 20 years old and in his second year in the sport, it is imperceptible. He admits F1 can be brutal but a thing of beauty too, a labour of love for the Italian who has been a revelation this season.

Compelling and brilliant, that he is also endearing and likable marks Antonelli out as more than just a potential champion. Sitting in the Mercedes motorhome it is impossible not to be struck by how young he looks, the tousled hair, engaging smile and eyes gleaming with youthful enthusiasm. He speaks with an open candour, the air of a kid in a sweetshop who still can’t quite believe all those sherbet lemons are there for the taking.

• American duo lose 6-3, 6-7(6), 7-6(7) to Maya Joint and Chan Hao-ching

• Serena and Venus crash out of women’s doubles in first round

In the end, after so much toil and admirable fight, defeat came swiftly for one of the greatest doubles teams to ever share a tennis court. Upon their return to prime time in New York, Venus and Serena Williams fought desperately to overturn the various deficits they found themselves in over three hours inside a thunderous Arthur Ashe Stadium.

They came close. The Williams sisters had clawed their way back into the match after trailing a 1-4 in their final set against Chan Hao-ching and Maya Joint, and they established a 5-0 lead in the third set tie-break. Just as they appeared to be on the verge of victory, they were brushed aside, losing 6-3, 6-7 (6), 7-6 (7) in the first round of the US Open.

• British sprinter finishes third behind Olympic 100m champion

• Pole vault superstar Mondo Duplantis pulls out with injury

Britain’s Amy Hunt was given a jolting reminder of the gap between her and the world’s very best female sprinters as she finished nearly half a second behind Julien Alfred in the Diamond League 200m final.

But afterwards Hunt insisted that coming third in a season’s best time of 22.16sec, on tired legs on a dank Brussels night, amounted to one of the better races of her career.

• Mbappé sees late penalty saved by Valles

• PSG are beaten by league leaders Monaco

Real Madrid’s perfect start in La Liga ⁠ended on Friday when Real Betis beat them 1-0, with the ⁠substitute Troy Parrott ⁠scoring ​nine minutes from time and goalkeeper Álvaro Valles saving a stoppage-time ⁠penalty from Kylian Mbappé.

The clash began at a high tempo but the pace ⁠dropped after the interval in the heat in ​Seville. The Republic of Ireland star Parrott, introduced ‌in the 68th ‌minute, broke the deadlock in the 81st when ‌he reacted quickly after Thibaut Courtois parried a header into his path.

There are few scenarios since Millwall Lionesses broke away from Millwall and became London City Lionesses that would have felt more surreal than the idea of Alexia Putellas captaining the side to a statement win in a WSL season-opener in Bromley just seven years later.

Here we are though: referees have to get used to the formerly talismanic Barcelona captain stooping to pick up the coin after the toss, as is her custom; players must get used to eyes and cameras looking past them to focus in on the influential No 11; and the two-time Ballon d’Or winner has to get used to playing with teammates not drilled in a very specific style of play from such an early age that it becomes an inherent part of them.

• Leigh 48-10 St Helens

• Charnley scores and agrees contract extension

It ended not so much with a bang, but with a whimper. One of rugby league’s most extraordinary streaks has felt as though it was coming to an inevitable end for quite some time but as it transpired, St Helens’ 64-year run of making the playoffs ultimately concluded in a manner that summarises their fall from grace.

You have to go back to 1962 to find an end-of-season playoff series that did not include one of rugby league’s true heavyweight clubs. In the Super League era, they have won 10 titles and were champions of the world as recently as 2023. But this, sadly, is a shadow of that side – and indeed that club.

• Fast bowler left out of England squads to face Sri Lanka

• Player being investigated regarding late-night episode

Brydon Carse has been left out of England’s white-ball squads to face Sri Lanka at the end of the season and told to “work through the issues” that led to him being handcuffed by police outside a bar in Derby last month.

Carse, 31, is being investigated by the Cricket Regulator regarding the late night incident in August that prompted his removal from England’s plans for the ongoing Test series against Pakistan. Derbyshire police are also looking into an alleged assault that night, albeit Carse’s involvement is not currently known.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s character once exposed the contradictions of an emerging multicultural nation. But nearly 30 years on Britain has changed – and so has the joke

And so the nostalgia machine grinds on, dragging another pop culture corpse back into the light: yes, it’s the return of Ali G. Respeck.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s skull-cap-wearing, “rudebwoy” wankster is staging a comeback with Ali G: Who Iz I?. The new film, premiering next month, is a mockumentary that sees the character starting a family with long-term companion Julie (thinking his approach to fatherhood will be “absent”) and embracing TikTok, all while donning new fake dreads and a rastacap.

Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian

Just as the party leader had hoped to change the narrative, along came Channel 4 News to spoil his conference fun

Why, oh why, oh why? You could almost feel Nigel Farage’s frustration. Why was it always him? Surely it was about time someone gave him a break. There he was trying to earn some money from a Thai crypto billionaire and a gold bullion dealer, and yet still Reform kept getting linked to dodgy cash.

It was almost as if a pattern was emerging. First there was the £5m gift, then the Posh George donations via Dicky Tice, and now Channel 4 News had done a sting on him and two of his most trusted aides in which it looked as if they were happy to break the law on political donations. Life can be so damned unfair at times. Always kicking you when you are down.

Such is the US president’s narcissism that he would see a Democratic victory as proof that he’s indispensable – meanwhile, his every decision spells calamity for voters

What is Donald Trump playing at? If it’s true that the best way of understanding the behaviour of an organisation is to assume it’s controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies, perhaps that same logic extends to the current conduct of the president of the United States. Maybe he secretly wants Republicans to lose the looming midterm elections that will decide the balance of power in the US for the next two years and for which the first postal ballots were sent out today.

That’s not as mad a theory as it sounds. Indeed, there are at least two reasons why Trump might either be unbothered by Republican defeat in November or even covertly desire it. We’ll come to those, but let’s start with a pattern of behaviour that is hard to explain as anything other than calculated self-sabotage.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

The only thing more dodgy than Reform’s financial dealings is the egregious lunchtime combination of oysters, Guinness and champagne

How many sarcastic air quotes is too many for quoting Nigel Farage’s suggestion that Reform have been ““““““““hoaxed”””””””” by some undercover investigators into appearing to seek to get round electoral law to bag a £500k donation from a foreigner, as well as commissioning off-the-books polling and failing to identify it to newspapers? I don’t feel eight was too many. I could run to nine. Amazing, really, that it’s been as long as a few weeks since Farage had a crash-out and forced a byelection. All any of us wants is for Nigel to once again resign after a staged shitfit and ask a few thousand members of the public to judge him.

For whatever reason, though, the law of our country does not amount to an “ONLY THE PEOPLE OF CLACTON CAN JUDGE ME” tattoo, and so it is that as Reform’s conference gets under way today, the party has been reported to the police for allegedly using foreign money to fund its activities. It’s all based on a covert sting carried out by Verbatim – an investigative group founded by journalists from the non-profit Centre for Climate Reporting – and broadcast last night on Channel 4 News.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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

What a Time to be Alive! by Marina Hyde (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20) is released in September. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The prime minister talks the talk about reversing decades of privatisation and austerity, but we’re yet to see any policies to this end

If Starmerism sought to present the Labour government as more rightwing than it is, Burnhamism seeks to do the opposite.

The change in rhetoric is certainly stark. Unlike his sulking predecessor, the new prime minister offers both an analysis and a vision. British stagnation and decline, Andy Burnham correctly told the House of Commons, can be explained by a series of “wrong turns” taken from the 1980s onwards: the privatisation of economic power, the deindustrialisation of the country and the ruinous austerity that followed the 2008 crash.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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

A string of distractions on the US government’s own website invite you to catch pixelated migrants – showing gaming’s potential to be nastily weaponised

The Trump White House on Thursday released a horrible little propaganda arcade via its website, a collection of nasty riffs on popular games. Wrapped in the cutesy, nostalgic aesthetic of early-90s pixel art, these mindless fascist diversions are harmless-looking, but their intent is stomach-turning: this is the appropriation of play in service of propaganda. It’s just the latest in a series of attempts from Trump’s administration to use video game memes and imagery to further its messaging.

Having riffed on Halo and Pokémon in social media ads last year, inviting potential ICE recruits to “stop the flood” and “catch ’em all”, this time the administration has ripped off a series of recognisable games. Flappy Bill, perhaps the least gross, is a version of the old mobile hit Flappy Bird, except here you’re an eagle with a scroll in its claws. Supply Line could almost be an educational game about healthy food in schools, where you sort junk food off a conveyor belt destined for school lunches, except for some reason you play as a boxer who becomes more bloodied with every seed-oil containing, ultra-processed food item that you fail to punch into the garbage chute.

An undercover investigation raises issues around foreign money, political transparency and the rightwing populist party’s fitness for power

Reform UK’s conference was to open showcasing a party ready for government. It did so with two top aides removed after an investigation aired on Channel 4, its finances under police scrutiny and seven in 10 voters, polls suggest, regarding its leader, Nigel Farage, as sleazy – double the number who thought the same of Andy Burnham. Reform, a rightwing populist party, says it will take power back from a corrupt establishment. The latest scandal raises a question: does Reform oppose the influence of big money – or just who benefits from it?

Undercover reporters from Verbatim Investigations, founded by journalists from the US Center for Climate Reporting, pretended to be a wealthy American father and his UK-based son who wanted to donate to Reform. In the UK, foreign donations are banned from politics. But that allegedly was ignored. Verbatim’s team filmed their meetings with James Orr, a Cambridge academic specialising in ethics, and Reform’s head of policy, as well as with Dan Jukes, Mr Farage’s close aide. Both have been “removed” from their posts.

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.

The number of students taking creative subjects at A-level and GCSE is at a record low. The arts must not become the preserve of the most privileged

How many of the young people who attended Reading and Leeds festival or a Prom this summer will be picking up a guitar or clarinet when they return to school? New figures suggest not many. The number of students taking A-level music is at a record low: under 5,000, a drop of nearly half from 15 years ago. “We are facing the worst-case scenario prospect of A-level music disappearing from English state schools entirely,” warned Deborah Annetts, the chief executive of the Independent Society of Musicians. Music GCSE entries have also fallen. It has the widest attainment gap for disadvantaged students of any subject. Private violin lessons are beyond the purse strings of most parents.

The statistics for drama are similarly bleak. A-level drama entries have almost halved in 10 years, with by far the biggest drop in state schools. Forty per cent of state schools no longer even offer music or drama GCSEs. Leading universities have been forced to close music departments and arts courses. The number of teachers training in creative subjects has also declined sharply over the past 15 years. It is no coincidence that the Ebacc, which prioritised core academic subjects at the expense of the arts, was introduced by the Conservatives in 2010. No wonder the worlds of music, theatre and television have become so privileged.

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 Paul Sagar’s article suggesting a ‘Care First’ year for students in exchange for 50% off university fees

I am sorry that Dr Paul Sagar experienced his injury, but grateful for his moment of enlightenment (The big idea: Could this policy fix the care system and slash student debt at the same time?, 30 August). It is the sort of suggestion that family carers such as myself have been making for years, having been failed by the statutory services for decades.

It needs backing up with some infrastructure: more special schools, more special colleges, better provision in mainstream schools for children with special needs via smaller class sizes, and through more care villages/intentional communities with accommodation, not only for those needing care and support but also for the staff and volunteers on the same site, and housing for family carers.

A camera can interfere with fully experiencing the moment, writes Greg Lewis, while Alan Payling recalls the privacy of the photo booth

Phoebe Greenwood is right (Sunsets, disasters, dinners: we now record them all with our phones. But what is that doing to our souls?, 29 August). Having been a photojournalist, I find that the camera can interfere with fully experiencing the moment.

Many years ago, my wife discovered previously unknown relatives in Denmark. When we visited, they took us to a cemetery where one of her ancestors was buried.

Gary Calder responds to an article by a Guardian Money reader who got even by stringing the fraudsters along

Anyone wishing to get their own back on bank-card scammers using the method described in your article (‘I’ve £80k in the account, here’s my pin’: turning the tables on the scammers, 29 August) might like to add a touch of realism to a made-up bank-card number by picking a known issuer identification number (the first six to eight digits) and ensure that the last digit conforms to the Luhn algorithm (it’s a check digit used to pick up errors in entering all the other digits). Further fun could be had by choosing an interesting postcode, such as SW1A 2AA (or 2AB – 10 and 11 Downing Street), SW1A 2JL (New Scotland Yard) or SL4 1NJ (Windsor Castle).
Gary Calder
Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire

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Sundays in the 1950s are remembered by Bob Waring and Martin Cooper

In 1958 Tony Hancock had a very different take on the British Sunday from Sian Dudley’s bucolic vision (Letters, 30 August), as outlined in the Hancock’s Half Hour episode Sunday Afternoon at Home: “I might just as well be in bed: there’s nothing else to do. [Sigh] I wish I hadn’t got up now … I hate Sundays. It’s not like this on the continent: it’s their big day over there. All the cafes open and football matches and race meetings – everybody’s gay. Aahh! Not over ’ere though! Everything’s shut up.”

My memory accords with the bard of East Cheam. What we have now, and didn’t then, is choice.
Bob Waring
Southport, Merseyside

Defense lawyer had asked for time to request emergency stay after jury was split 11 to one

The judge in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of killing her three young children, has declared a mistrial after the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict and remained deadlocked after a week of deliberations.

Jurors in Plymouth state court spent more than 38 hours in deliberations over the charges against the 36-year-old mom, which came on the heels of a weeks-long trial that directed national attention to maternal mental health issues that can occur postpartum.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he has told SBU to deliver ‘appropriate, tangible response’ to Kyiv strike

The head office of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency has been hit in a Russian drone attack, sending plumes of black smoke rising into the air in the heart of Kyiv.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said he had instructed the SBU to deliver an “appropriate, tangible response” to the strike, while the foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, described it as a “major escalation”.

Lorena Isceri was thrown off a motorway bridge, allegedly by ex-boyfriend Federico Vella

A 45-year-old woman abducted and thrown off a motorway bridge near Florence has become the seventh alleged femicide in Italy since mid-August.

Lorena Isceri was abducted on Thursday afternoon, allegedly by her ex-boyfriend, Federico Vella, in the Rifredi area of Florence, before being forced into the boot of his car and driven towards a bridge on the A1 motorway.

In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123 and the domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 988 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org

Indira Talwani’s ruling presents major setback for president as first states begin to send out mail ballots for midterms

A federal judge on Friday again blocked Donald Trump’s executive order to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-in voting, the latest in a legal back-and-forth playing out less than two months before election day.

US district court judge Indira Talwani initially placed a temporary order blocking the president’s mandate and has now extended that prohibition with a stronger preliminary injunction. The ruling comes hours after North Carolina became the first state to start sending out mail-in ballots for the 3 November midterm elections.

Actor, who also played title roles in Robin’s Nest and Dick Turpin, dies peacefully at Royal Variety Charity care home

• Richard O’Sullivan obituary

• Sex symbol in a 70s tank top: how Richard O’Sullivan blazed a trail for funny, frisky, cheeky chappies

Richard O’Sullivan, known for his role as Robin Tripp in the 1970s TV sitcoms Man About the House and Robin’s Nest, has died aged 82.

The actor, who was also famous for playing the title character in the TV series Dick Turpin, died peacefully with his family at his side at the Royal Variety Charity’s care home on Friday, the organisation said.

A mysterious island has emerged in Williston Lake in Canada. A local resident shared a video of a floating 'island' with trees growing from it – which has appeared, disappeared and appeared again within two months. Satellite imagery has confirmed its existence and disappearance, and experts say the rising water level has set free trees that have been growing on woody debris on the shore

National Audit Office urges government to act as climate crisis, disease and cyberattacks pose growing risks

The climate crisis, disease and cyber-attacks pose growing risks to the UK’s food supplies and the government needs to act to make the system more resilient, according to the public spending watchdog.

The National Audit Office (NAO) is urging the Department for Food, the Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) to work more closely with households, communities and businesses to ensure the flow of crucial food into the country can withstand supply shocks that are becoming increasingly common and severe.

Isle of Lismore, Argyll: They skim over the surface like stones, making such a hullabaloo you could hear them a mile away

I hear them before I see them: a wailing, or something more like ululation. High-pitched, repeated vocalisations that are neither man nor cat, but somewhere in between. I throw open the cabin door, unsure what to look for, and for a moment see nothing new: only the rocky strand and the sweep of dark wrack high above the shoreline.

The strange, warbling sound comes again. Ai-ai-ai-ai. Not quite screaming, not quite howling, not quite trilling, but all of those things at once.

Exclusive: As millions of people face hosepipe bans, many companies are not required to report, let alone cut, use of public supply

Less than 1% of businesses in England use more water than the daily needs of 10 million people, as millions of households face hosepipe bans and three-quarters of the country is in drought.

Businesses across England use 2.6bn litres a day from the public water supply, which includes potable and non-potable water provided by water companies. In total, businesses account for about 30% of public supply use, with two-thirds of their consumption in water-stressed areas, according to Mosl, the organisation that operates England’s business water market.

Five jailed after targeting victim and subjecting him to ordeal linked to past relationship breakdown

Dramatic footage shows a kidnapped man jumping from a first-floor window into a tree before running into the street and, by chance, coming across a police car.

Lincolnshire police said the ordeal of the unnamed man had been “horrifying” and the presence of a marked police vehicle “may have saved his life”.

The star of Man About the House scored an unprecedented run of hit series during the 70s and 80s, bringing a youthful vitality that audiences – and tabloids – loved

• Richard O’Sullivan, star of 70s sitcom Man About the House, dies aged 82
• Dandies, docs and robbers: a life in pictures

Having started as a child actor – first appearing on screen aged seven – Richard O’Sullivan, who has died aged 82, went on to a major TV career playing still relatively youthful characters, representative of the social and sexual freedoms that grew from the liberations of the 1960s.

Between 1972 and 81, he appeared in more than 100 episodes of peak-time ITV comedies as funny, frisky men in their 20s and 30s. The first of these was Dr Lawrence Bingham in the hospital sitcom Doctor in Charge, radiating a cheeky charm that led to his career-defining casting as Robin Tripp in Man About the House, in the mid-70s and its spin-off, Robin’s Nest, a few years later.

Collective training exercises for UK-based units to be suspended for most of this year amid budget pressures

The British army has been ordered to halt non-essential training exercises in an effort to save money.

Troops preparing to be deployed or on deployments, those who are on standby or in a quick-reaction role will continue to train as normal. But collective training exercises for UK-based units are being suspended for most of this year amid budget pressures.

Nazir Afzal to focus in review’s first stage on support given to professor in immediate period before his death

The University of Cambridge has asked Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England, to lead the first part of its review into the death of the scholar Jason Arday.

Arday died at his home in south London on 14 August, nine days after his resignation as a Cambridge professor amid swirling allegations of plagiarism and inconsistencies in statements about his career.

Lawmakers condemn agency for ‘obstructing the pursuit of juice’ over death of nearly blind Nurul Amin Shah Alam

Democratic lawmakers are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security turn over records and fully cooperate with an investigation into the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind Rohingya refugee who died after US border agents left him outside a closed coffee shop on a freezing night in Buffalo earlier this year.

At a press conference in Buffalo on Friday, standing just a few feet away from where Shah was found dead, Tim Kennedy of New York was joined by Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat on the House homeland security committee, Lou Correa of California, and Nellie Pou of New Jersey in calling on DHS to cooperate with the Erie county district attorney’s investigation.

Officials say pair were rescued from Trishuli 3A hydropower tunnel in Nepal after being trapped at depth of 170 metres

Two people have been pulled out alive from a hydropower tunnel in Nepal nine days after deadly flash floods buried the projects in deep mud and left them trapped.

The workers were rescued during an operation at the Trishuli 3A tunnel, a hydropower project in one of the areas worst affected by last week’s floods, according to the army spokesperson Brig Gen Raja Ram Basnet.

Abelardo De La Espriella posts video of himself with rows of body bags as performative populism continues to sweep Americas

Colombia’s hardline president, Abelardo De La Espriella, has provoked outrage after posting a video on social media in which he strides through rows of white body bags that he says contained the corpses of 23 “neutralised” guerrillas.

De La Espriella took power last month vowing “all-out war” against illegal armed groups and he published the footage on Thursday in an apparent attempt to show he was fulfilling that pledge.

Mourning turns to anger as residents of Kuhestak say Baloch communities are being placed in path of conflict

People in Kuhestak, a predominantly Baloch city in Iran’s southern Hormozgan province, are mourning after a strike on a wedding killed at least four people, including a child, and injured more than 60, according to local authorities.

The blast hit at around 9.30pm on 1 September, turning a night of celebration into one of devastation for the small coastal community, which is on the strait of Hormuz.

From mortgages to inflation, concerns about the public finances of major economies have wide-reaching consequences

When Donald Trump was asked recently about the threat of rising interest rates on US government debt, he told baffled reporters: “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, his bellicose words did not soothe fractious bond markets, and his resumption of the bombing campaign against Iran only made matters worse.

Under-pressure carmaker will shed 15% of workforce and halve its product line in sector’s biggest ever restructure

The car company Volkswagen has approved controversial plans to shed 100,000 jobs in a battle for survival as it faces fierce competition from Chinese rivals.

After the latest round of talks this week, the company announced a further 50,000 job cuts and agreed a staggered end to current production at four German plants: Emden, Zwickau, Hanover and the Audi site in Neckarsulm between 2031 to 2034. There are no specific plans beyond that.

Bank of England governor says central bankers must explain decisions or risk being seen as ‘unrepresentative elite’

The governor of the Bank of England has said the rise of populist politicians presents a serious challenge to independent central banks.

As Nigel Farage’s Reform UK gathered for its annual conference in Birmingham, Andrew Bailey said central bankers must be prepared to explain their decisions to the public or risk being attacked as an “unrepresentative elite”.

Energy secretary could recommend new North Sea drilling next week, as ministers also consider approval for Rosebank oilfield

Ministers are poised to approve a controversial new gasfield in the North Sea this month, according to government sources, and are considering approving a major oilfield later this year.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, will give her recommendation to approve the Jackdaw field off the coast of Aberdeen as soon as next week, according to people close to the decision, and the formal approval could follow a week after.

In this week’s newsletter: A non-exhaustive list of the films to keep an eye out for this autumn

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The next three months or so is one of my favourite spells in the film calendar, as a load of Oscar hopefuls with big stars and auteurs attached come out of hiding. You can catch a decent movie at the cinema every week until Christmas – but you might want a guide to direct you to the right ones. This week’s Guide does exactly that.

What’s more, it’s not exhaustive: there will be films landing from the autumn festivals that haven’t yet been given a release date and a host of big awards movies due in the UK in January (Danny Boyle’s Murdoch movie Ink, Robert Eggers’s Werewulf, Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut). But, this should keep you going until the days start getting longer again.

Half a century on, Jim Henson’s fuzzy felt friends are as influential as Monty Python and the Beatles. It’s been a wild journey of nightclubbing, light operas, duetting with Debbie Harry and tying John Cleese to a chair

Fifty years ago today, it was time to play the music and time to light the lights. On 5 September 1976, the British public first met the Muppets – an epochal moment in the history of light entertainment whose reverberations are still felt to this day.

This was the show that saw Rita Moreno conclude a performance of Fever by smashing a puppet’s head between two cymbals, Alice Cooper convince the characters to sell their souls to the devil and Vincent Price cover Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend, accompanied by ghosts. The Muppet Show was not like other television programmes.

Joey Essex and John Bercow are unlikely team mates in The Box. Plus, the inside story of Saturday Night Live. Here’s what to watch this evening

8.15pm, ITV1

Telluride film festival
In a remote Colorado farmstead, a family with a mother gone missing finds a strange buoyancy and freedom as they wait for the snows to melt

Andrew Haigh’s mysterious and beautiful new film is adapted by him from the 2006 story by Colm Tóibín, transplanting the action from the 1930s Spanish Pyrenees to the wintry, vertiginous landscapes of Colorado about the time of the Korean war. It is a poignant, subversive study of grief and desire, and the terrible, infantilised loneliness of men without women; it is fiercely acted, and wonderfully shot by cinematographer André Turpin.

Lester, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, is a grizzled, hardened farmsteader in the remote hills whose family has a certain sufficiency from their livestock; he makes a precarious living breeding rabbits for their meat and fur. One son, Tommy (Kit Connor) is leaving for military service, leaving behind his shy brother Mikey (Fred Hechinger); Mikey has secret gay longings, which are nourished by furtive glimpses of glossy Cosmopolitan magazines, with their impossibly exotic visions of big-city fashion and design.

Horgan’s hilarious new show probes the perils of ageing and the horror of being single again – and it has sex scenes so wild you’ll be laughing for weeks. The creator and her co-stars open up about Youth

When Sharon Horgan walked into HBO to pitch her new series, Youth, she basically just said “sandwich generation” to them. Alex, the protagonist, is squished between a teenage son and two elderly parents. That’s the classic; the rest of it – the recent divorce, the dating hell, the busy, creative professional life full of pricks – is the icing on the sandwich (if you like). Horgan had been incubating some of the characters for five years, but “honestly”, she tells me, “I said about three sentences and a week later, they said yes. I’ve never had that experience before.”

You might think you can imagine it, but Youth is unlike any portrait you’ve ever seen in the gallery of (for brevity) menopausal women doing everything for everyone. There’s an urgency and valour to it that is very much drawn from Horgan’s own experience. “Everything just changed for me when I hit my 50s,” she says. “I was very bamboozled but I really had a hunger to make time count.” Not every situation is lifted directly from her own life, post-divorce – she’s also borrowing from her friends, she emphasises – but in general terms, the pressures, the worries, the outrages, the surprise and the delight are all so exquisitely drawn that even if it’s not Horgan herself, you hope someone, somewhere, is living this in real life.

Telluride film festival
Alice Bailey Johnson and Kate O’Flynn lead a complicated, quietly heartbreaking drama about friendship, ageing parents and the sadness of lives moving inexorably on

Mike Leigh’s new film – perhaps his last – is a poignant, intergenerational drama of happy-sad acceptance that life goes on, until it doesn’t go on. And then you have to come to terms with the mortality of your elderly parents and by that same token, with the end that is waiting for you too. The decency and clarity of the film are a tonic. It is a movie with one of Leigh’s overtly positive and even sugary titles, like Life Is Sweet (1990) or Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), as distinct from his darker ones: Secrets & Lies (1996) or Hard Truths (2024). But his sweet titles are not simply satirical and intended to mean the opposite: it is more complicated and elusive, and even the contrast here between the two heroines’ private and professional lives isn’t straightforwardly a matter of irony.

As so often, the dialogue has that unique Leigh cartoonish quality that isn’t caricature, and the characters often speak with an almost wartime chirpiness in a world of peckers kept up and noses kept clean. This is a perkiness that the thirtysomethings have unexpectedly inherited and modified from their old mum and dad, and Leigh leaves it to the audience to judge the consequent tone of the drama and the appropriate tone of their response.

The Vancouver band earned a cult fandom for their uncompromising gigs. As they ready their brutal debut album, they discuss subverting audience expectations and the nightly toll of excavating trauma onstage

You’d be hard pressed to find a band with fewer airs and graces than Piss. First, there’s the unavoidable matter of their name, which they style in all caps, no nonsense; a word that scans as vulgar and combative but also somewhat facetious when displayed on their merch in loopy cursive, sometimes decorated with bows. The Vancouver quartet’s music is a merciless cyclone of hardcore, poetry, sound collage and performance art that revolves entirely around singer Taylor Zantingh’s experiences with sexual violence.

On stage at Eindhoven’s Hit the City festival in late August, the band greets the stacked crowd with a trigger warning before drummer Garreth Roberts, bassist Gavin Moya and guitarist Tyler Paterson launch into pulverising fits of noise-punk, broken up by audio samples of children laughing and feminist writer Andrea Dworkin talking about pornography. Zantingh hurls herself around, clutching at her stomach and flinging her pigtails before winding down to a nervous, twitching standstill. The intense set is finely tuned to present a narrative of gender-based violence not as entertainment, but as lived experience. They play it exactly the same every night, and have done for the last two years.

O2 Arena, London
Fans scream ‘eat zucchini’ as if their lives depend on it as the six-piece’s remaining members strut their way through chest-rattling hits, ludicrous bangers and flaccid flops

It takes a certain amount of resilience to be a Katseye fan. Since debuting three years ago via the boot camp meets reality TV show The Debut: Dream Academy, the multinational K-pop hybrid girl band have put their so-called Eyekons through the wringer. Last month alone they lost their second member to a “personal health and wellness” related hiatus, with Sophia joining Manon (who stepped away in more mysterious circumstances back in February) on the sidelines. Weeks later, they landed their first US No 1 album with Wild, a collection led by the carbonated dance-pop rocket Pinky Up – a song referred to by the band’s many online detractors as “skibidi toilet music” (ie slop).

Even as this debut arena tour arrived in the UK, there were fears the newly reshaped quartet might be reduced to a trio after Megan sprained her ankle. But if the fans are worried, they don’t show it, their ear-piercing screams drowning out the opening Hootie Frutti, a sonic melange that somehow makes Brazilian funk sound leaden. By the time petulant hyperpop bop Internet Girl kicks in they’re screaming lines like “eat zucchini, eat zucchini” as if their lives depend on it.

Royal Albert Hall, London
In their second Proms concert, the Berlin Phil brought Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (with Augustin Hadelich the virtuosic and breathtaking soloist), and a detailed and compelling take on Scriabin’s third symphony

It’s the clarity that hits you first. The soft thuds of timpani that open Beethoven’s Violin Concerto landed from the back of the stage with the immediacy of taps on the shoulder, quietly urgent. The string sound was simultaneously luminous and translucent. Pizzicato bass-lines were shaped as if the main event and bubbled upwards through the rest of the texture. You’ll hear orchestral playing to match this on high-end studio recordings, of course, where the entire process can be geared to achieving such crystalline polish. And the BBC’s sound engineers can work miracles in real time on radio broadcasts of Proms performances. But to produce such lucidity live – particularly in the Royal Albert Hall, with its monumental bathroom acoustic – is another thing entirely.

For that, you need an orchestra of the calibre of the Berlin Philharmonic under its chief conductor Kirill Petrenko. But violinist Augustin Hadelich also served up his own brand of astonishingly flawless musical beauty as the soloist in the Beethoven. In the first movement, his rising octaves appeared to float out of the orchestra, his bowing inaudible – the kind of violin-playing, in fact, that appears to defy the laws of physics. The slow movement was a masterclass in bel canto, the third a biting, bouncing romp as both Hadelich and Petrenko pushed gleefully through the rondo theme. The apparent ease of Hadelich’s virtuosity – all his energy seemingly focused on phrasing and dialogue with the orchestra – was nothing short of breathtaking.

Nacho Pezzati’s new album Swerved taps into the moody ambience of the UK north-west underground, ratcheting a tangible and thrilling sense of unease

From Barcelona, Spain
Recommend if you like Space Afrika, Shackleton, Purelink
Up next Swerved out now

Swerved, by Barcelona-based producer Nueen (Nacho Pezzati) is a bassy, moody, darkly ambient album that travels through R&B, drill, cloud rap and dub without any obvious changes in its grey-black weather. But this is slowly churning music, on the brink of rot. By the 10th track, Copicat, the unease is tangible; after a slow, agonising ratcheting build of fanbelt hi-hats, the album’s only drop arrives with the weight and power of a cloudburst. It’s thrilling.

Fetch by Colin Bramwell; Girling by Eve Esfandiari-Denney; The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber by Jay Gao; Belling the Leopard by Clementine Ewokolo Burnley; The Matter by Padraig Regan

Fetch by Colin Bramwell (And Other Stories, £14.99)
Bramwell’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s work into Scots won him considerable recognition: it took the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation prize and the Highland Book Prize. Between source and target language, there is always a gap; the translator endeavours within that gap to identify meaning and intention, and that is the difficult work of translation. Fetch, Bramwell’s own debut collection, lyrically thematises this gap in the poet-human’s condition: “I’m an instrument for something else / a digital piano that if you opened it up / you wouldn’t understand the wiring.” Fetch (in Celtic folklore, a doppelganger) is by turns solemnly tender, comically worldly, literarily devout. Here you’ll find deep engagement with Russian poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, poems that fuse Scots and English, alongside filial memories and premonitions of fatherhood. “Death is certain, but back then I was too young for that shit.” For a debut, Bramwell’s poetics convey an uncanny sense of wisdom, patience and, eventually, peace.

Girling by Eve Esfandiari-Denney (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Before theme and subject, there is the pure, iridescent beauty of Esfandiari-Denney’s sentences; a singular voice that is alluring and sensuous, pleasurable to follow to whichever subject the poet chooses. The subjects are girlhood-cum-womanhood, the line between debilitating illness and delusional wellness (“thank god / you invested / in lion’s mane”), the flickering concept of free will for a species so programmed by genes: “I have wondered to what extent my cancer diagnosis is my mother’s, or my grandmother’s cell mutation, before my own … I look up from a cigarette mid-sentence…” The collection hybridises recognisable prose forms: the essay, the diary, the text message, the anecdote. These are interspliced with short-lined lyric poems that startle because of the bubbly voice from which they come: “I hope it’s ok to die. I can / become something / like actualised metaphor.” The magic of this collection is that it is never highfalutin, finding a way to make an ending like “DJ are you listening did you read to the end will you blow my voice a kiss” powerfully funny and moving.

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s niece has picked up the thread of her much-loved family saga series, taking the story into the 1960s

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s beloved family saga the Cazalet Chronicles spans three decades in the life of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family. The first four books, written in the 1990s, run from a bucolic prewar 1937 to a bruising 1947, while the fifth, 2013’s All Change, skips ahead, sitting lonely in 1956. The books are exquisite doll’s houses of feeling and object: both period detail and eternal emotion are rendered precisely and vigorously in Howard’s lovely prose. “Panoramic, expansive, intriguing as social history and generous in their storytelling,” Hilary Mantel wrote in the Guardian. The enormous cast of characters – four late-Victorian siblings, their parents, their children and partners and ex-partners and servants and friends and lovers and enemies and cars and houses – sprawl deliciously over the years. The family fortunes rise and fall. Marriages fail; deaths occur; babies are born; people fall in love. Things change; things stay the same.

Written a decade after the death of the original author, The Golden Hours by Louisa Young adds a sixth to this quintet. As with all Cazalet novels, to describe the plot would be impossible: it is simply that many people, whom we have come to love over the course of the previous novels, live their lives, now in the early 1960s.

The American author on falling in love with The Great Gatsby, being inspired by Dylan Thomas – and the memoir of a canoe trip in Texas he comes back to

My earliest reading memory
The deaths of Old Dan and Little Ann in Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows were etched into my being as a first grader in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

My favourite book growing up
Stephen King’s The Stand. I completely lost myself in the story. I don’t think I realised at the time what a rare gift it is to have that experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spaceship-shaped gallery, featuring works from Banksy, Norman Rockwell and Frida Kahlo, is devoted to ‘visual storytelling’ – and is finally ready to open

“I’m used to doing the impossible,” George Lucas said on Wednesday. But “this one almost broke my will”.

The film-maker was describing the decades of work that went into his latest project, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, as it was unveiled to the press in Los Angeles eight years after breaking ground, following attempts to build it in two other cities. Shaped like a spaceship and towering over the nearby University of Southern California – Lucas’s alma mater – the long-awaited institution finally opens on 22 September. It aims to be a testament to visual storytelling across all kinds of media – paintings, comics, murals, photography, sculpture.

National Theatre, London
Letitia Wright plays the ambitious young reporter seduced into cutting corners with contentious reporting in a brilliantly kinetic production

Tracey Scott Wilson’s play follows in the fine tradition of the fast-paced newsroom drama, beginning with the cold-blooded murder of a white schoolteacher by an unknown Black assailant as his pregnant wife watches. Cue moral panic, rolling news and the entry of a fiery young journalist determined to solve the case.

That is where the Watergate-style investigative blueprint warps because Yvonne (Letitia Wright, of Black Panther fame) is no simple hero in pursuit of truth. She is an ambitious Black woman, assigned to an enclave of a newspaper reserved for Black journalists. Her imperious editor, Pat (Lorraine Toussaint) is after positive news stories on the Black community while her white editor boyfriend, Jeff (Wilf Scolding) promises her a bigger gig if she proves herself worthy.

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

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

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

The Bayeux tapestry arrives, the Americas go mainstream and modern, and Manchester threads its way to Korea and India – all in your weekly dispatch

The Bayeux tapestry
Blood and thunder, friendship and betrayal, marginal monsters and raw sex – all human life and more is depicted in this medieval artistic masterpiece that tells an epic national story with unrivalled punch and power.
• British Museum, London, from 10 September until 11 July 2027

In 1989, the Chariots of Fire actor took on the incredible task of playing Shakespeare’s prince while terminally ill from Aids. This weekend sees the world premiere of Elsinore, a new film about the episode, itself heavily-tipped for awards

Ian Charleson was one of the finest actors of his generation and an important figure in the fight for gay rights. Yet the extraordinary circumstances of his final performance as Hamlet, just months before his death, are less familiar.

Now, a new film is bringing that haunting production back to life. Elsinore, directed by Simon Stone and starring Andrew Scott as the Scottish actor, will premiere at Telluride this weekend before opening the London film festival in October.

The activist said her two years studying and travelling in country ‘made me who I am’

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

• Gloria Steinem: A life in pictures

When Gloria Steinem’s plane touched down in Bombay in 1957, she could not have known that her stay in India would become what she later called a “pivotal, life-dividing event [that] made me who I am”.

She was 22, with a degree in government from Smith college and was travelling on a Chester Bowles fellowship.

Nick Park began modelling the character as a feline, before finding it too difficult and changing him to a dog

The creator of Wallace and Gromit has revealed that the world’s most famous stop-motion animated dog was nearly a cat.

As Aardman Animations marks its 50th anniversary, Nick Park, who joined the studio in 1985, told the BBC he had originally modelled Gromit as a feline companion for Wallace.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

It’s raining in our hallway. Could my louche bathing regime be behind the showers?

August is the traditional time for something major to go wrong with my house. So I’m not surprised, as I’m getting dressed one morning, to hear the middle one shouting something about it raining in the hallway.

“What?” I say, standing on the landing with a shirt half pulled over my head. “What do you mean?”

The imposing red-brick mills of its industrial past are a stunning example of urban regeneration in the former ‘city of a thousand chimneys’

Sometimes travel delivers a real shock. I’m moving along the boulevards in the Polish city of Łódź, enjoying the excellent cafes and warm sunshine, when I spot the vans. They are parked up on the verge, with racks of clothing and heavily laden tables behind. I can’t resist a Sunday morning market and walk towards a group of men huddled around a car that is covered in blankets. And then it happens. They turn – and I see they are weighing pistols in their hands. I recognise the lean profile of a German Luger, and then the bulkier Colt 45.

There is a second of doubt. I hesitate. They replace the weapons on the display and walk away laughing. I approach. On the car roof is a row of dusty soldiers’ helmets. “We were repairing a pavement in the centre of town,” says the seller cheerfully, handing me a badge to inspect. “Imagine! For 80 years, all this stuff was just under our feet.”

Want every day to be a good hair day? We tested 22 hair dryers to find the best, from gentle diffusers to high-speed and travel-ready models

• The best hot brushes, tried and tested by our expert

In my years of reviewing beauty tech, it was upgrading my hair dryer that made the biggest difference to my routine. I used to dread hair-wash days: the chore of shampooing, conditioning and rinsing my hair, plus the time – and aching arms – spent getting it dry again.

My clunky, bargain-bucket hair dryer of seven years was weighty, deafeningly loud, and took a painstaking 20 minutes to dry my hair. So happier days really did arrive when I switched to a new model.

Whether you want a smart-but-stylish commuter rucksack or a hike-friendly pack, our writer lugged 16 over hundreds of miles to find the best bags for your buck

• The best travel mugs for taking hot drinks on the go

Chart your course through a fun, active or productive day, and you’ll often find cause to carry things. Backpacks are arguably the best people-powered way to do it, used by pretty much everyone from Napoleonic soldiers and Ötzi the Iceman to ultra-marathoner Courtney Dauwalter, as well as innumerable workers, students and travellers.

The best backpack to choose depends on which elements of your own world you wish to carry, and where you’re planning to take them. You can choose between smart-looking options suitable for work and travel, hiking-focused day packs and trail packs designed for outdoor itineraries, and versatile backpacks with water-resistant materials and a high storage capacity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A delicious and triumphant blend of Levantine and Malay cuisines

This is a dish with roots in ancient Egypt. There, it started life as ful medames, the famous fava bean dish lightly seasoned with cumin, garlic and lemon. Then it was, reportedly, brought to Johor in Malaysia by Arab traders. It has since been adopted and adapted with a fierce sort of love, plus more spice and a tin of baked beans. I adore it. It’s a very delicious dinner and a triumphant blend of two cuisines.

High food prices are affecting everyone right now, but it turns out they are affecting some people way more than others. Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks at the grocery price situation and official healthy eating advice in different countries to find out how food prices are hitting lower-income households harder and whether it’s even mathematically possible to eat a government-recommended healthy diet

A bar for the bountiful season, with a rubbly oat crust, a soft fruit filling and a crisp topping

September is always a wistful time for me. Summer has all but slipped away, the days are noticeably shorter and the children are heading back to school. But there is comfort, too, in settling back into familiar routines. These bars, with their buttery oat crust, soft fruit filling and crisp, golden topping, are just the sort of thing to have waiting for whenever everyone drifts home. I like to use a mixture of apples – some that soften and collapse into the filling, others that hold their shape – to give the bars a little more texture and interest.

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

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

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

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

• Read more Leading questions

My dad died suddenly earlier this year, with no will, and I am unsure as to how I should distribute the estate. We are talking about very modest sums of money – about £5,000 (US$6,750, A$9,500) in total.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sell-off raises concerns of higher borrowing costs for households. Here’s what it could mean

The bond market sell-off has sparked fresh fears of higher borrowing costs for UK households. We look at what the turmoil in financial markets could mean for your mortgage, pension and savings.

From a period cottage in Oxford with its own blue plaque, to a quiet leafy pocket in a bustling area of London

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

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

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

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

The pressure to self-optimise at the start of the new school year can lead to disappointment and burnout. Instead, here are seven ways to slow things down and reap the benefits

It is a hangover from our school days that September can feel like a time for getting back to the grind. As in January, there is a sense that we should return as better workers, partners, friends and parents. This sense is even stronger now a culture of optimisation – has taken over – evidenced by the fad for adding “maxx” to everything. Yet that can lead to disappointment and burnout, which Mental Health UK reports up to 91% of adults were at risk from over a recent 12-month period.

One antidote to this drive is to embrace a slower way of living. Rather than always rushing from one activity to the next, we could be enjoying life.

New Zealand decision follows Australian approval in 2023 of psychedelics to treat PTSD and treatment-resistant depression

Two psychiatrists in New Zealand won approval on Friday to prescribe pharmaceutical-grade MDMA to people with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The move by New Zealand’s pharmaceutical regulatory body Medsafe makes the country only the second worldwide to approve the party drug for use in treating PTSD, following Australia in 2023.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neville may have been mocked for wearing them on Monday Night Football, but he is actually bang on trend

From Kylian Mbappé’s World Cup style to Erling Haaland’s hair tie, football has had many viral fashion moments in 2026.

Perhaps the one that speaks to the fashion crowd, and a larger debate happening in menswear right now, is Gary Neville being mercilessly teased on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football for sporting wide-legged trousers.

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

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

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

In an era when feminists were stereotyped as unattractive, the pioneering writer’s style created a Trojan horse

• Gloria Steinem obituary

• Gloria Steinem: A life in pictures

When people wanted to dismiss Gloria Steinem, they spoke about how she looked. Talking about the pioneering activist and journalist who turned feminism into a major civil rights movement, it might seem reductive to focus on her glasses.

But after Steinem – whose death at 92 was announced on Thursday – wore them on the cover of Newsweek in 1971 next to the cover-line The New Woman, the lightly tinted aviators – often worn over her hair – became an accidental form of self-branding that made her instantly recognisable. They were as indelibly linked to her legacy as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s jabots or even Anna Wintour’s sunglasses. They also became one of her greatest weapons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Execution, Greenland and West India to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s ‘Frankfurt’, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 At his funeral in 1219, who was called the “greatest knight in the world”?
2 As the crow flies, what is London’s closest international capital city?
3 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s “Frankfurt” was a celebrated design of what?
4 Which Bowery club was the focus of New York punk?
5 Which route is abbreviated as LEJOG?
6 In 1944, the USS Saint Lo was the first major warship to be sunk by what?
7 Which 75-year-old sporting curse was broken in July?
8 What is known as the “barking deer”?
What links:
9 Jim Clark; Graham Hill; Dan Wheldon (2); Dario Franchitti (3)?
10 Baby Reindeer; Fleabag; Six; Stomp; Taskmaster?
11 Dr B Ching; Lady Liberty; MD; Old Sparky; Piloti; Q-Brick?
12 Execution; Greenland; St Katharine; Royal Victoria; West India?
13 Miki Fare; Musse Pigg; Myszka Miki; Topolino?
14 Cry Baby in 2003 and Embers in 2021?
15 Hill House; Cheam preparatory; Gordonstoun; Geelong Grammar?

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

There’d been no morning sickness, cravings or tiredness. My mum didn’t believe I’d had a baby – even after seeing her on FaceTime

When I was 19, I went to college in Texas, where I met my boyfriend Preston. It was 2023 and I had big plans. After finishing my degree in criminal justice, I wanted to go to law school. I wasn’t in a rush to get married or have kids. My mum had drilled into me a fear of getting pregnant at a young age. I was on the pill and careful with contraception.

In May 2025, I took a trip to London, returning to campus in August after the summer holidays. I noticed I was slowly gaining weight; by January this year I’d gained 10lb. I put it down to my late-night snacking and lack of exercise.

Increasing heatwaves mean we need to rethink what we grow. The good news? You can still go cottagecore

The only spot-watering my garden has seen in recent months was done by the builder in a quiet moment. I hadn’t asked him to, but I think he saw the state of things and took pity on an acer I’d given up on. I explained I’d been using the drought as an, admittedly extreme, experiment to find which plants are resilient to multiple heatwaves, but said he was welcome to take the acer back to his well-irrigated garden.

My observations are that the roses hung in there. Not flowering, as I’ve seen others doing, but mine are probably younger. The wildflower meadow has been surprisingly floriferous; it’s been a good year for zinnias – although not good enough to make me like them. The volunteer buddleja that was hacked to the ground in April made an Oasis-worthy comeback. Euphorbias, meconopsis, sage, erigeron: all fine. Volunteer robinia saplings loved life. Verbascum coped. My son has been eating passion fruit straight from the vine.

Family-run Al-Qarara Seed Bank is striving to help Palestinians gain sovereignty over their food security

Salama Ayesh Muhanna still remembers the first seeds he planted on his family’s land in al-Qarara, Gaza. At just 17, Muhanna had proudly sprouted cucumbers.

“I was very happy because I saw the results,” Muhanna says. “We were farmers at heart.”

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

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

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

A Maltese businessman has been cleared of involvement in the journalist’s death, but his trial revealed the challenges faced by those leading the search for her killers

The conclusion of the longest-running murder trial in Maltese history has left a country in turmoil, and a grieving family still searching for answers.

At 7.30pm on Wednesday, gasps and cheers echoed around hall 22 of the courts of justice in Valletta, as a jury pronounced a businessman accused of ordering the murder of the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia not guilty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Nepal-Tibet flood disaster, Russian strikes in Kyiv, the Plaskett Fire in California and Notting Hill carnival – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists