There is legitimate scrutiny of antisemitism on the left, but at the same time, rightwing media outlets offend with impunity. That makes no sense

The media’s message appears to have cut through. At the crucial rally against antisemitism in London on Sunday, Zack Polanski, the Jewish leader of the Green party of England and Wales, was not invited to speak, on the grounds that he had not done enough to root out antisemitism from the party. But Nigel Farage was invited, on the grounds that his party, Reform UK, has “expressed very broad support for the fight against antisemitism”. More than two thousand Jews saw things differently and signed a petition arguing that the invitation to Farage “fundamentally undermines” the message of solidarity in defence of Jewish safety and dignity. I agree with them.

Antisemitism must be stamped out everywhere. “Never again” means zero tolerance for this age-old hate, wherever it occurs and whoever voices it. It is indeed a problem on the left, and I’ve often found myself in dispute with those who downplay or minimise it.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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A recent study by Aviva found that one in nine new homes in England are being built on land at risk of flooding – often entirely within planning rules. Josh Toussaint-Strauss investigates how the system allows developers to profit while homeowners bear the cost

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When the birds started nesting on her land at Useless Bay, Chile, Cecilia Durán Gafo decided she would protect them from people and predators

Five pairs of rubbery feet carry velvet-sheathed black-and-white bodies towards the rope line separating the king penguins from the dozen or so visitors, who look on in awe. As these emissaries shuffle over, a hundred of their cohorts parade on a nearby bank, splashing around in the water and regurgitating food into their chicks’ open beaks.

The king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus) makes its home almost exclusively on islands in the Southern Ocean. But it has been coming to this wind-battered bay in southern Chile’s Tierra del Fuego region for hundreds of years, probably because its shallow shores offer protection from marine predators and humans.

You may think you know when someone’s trying to deceive you, but there’s a clever trick very few people are aware of – one that has eluded AI and Traitors contestants alike

Can you tell if someone is lying?

Close your eyes. You’re already twice as good as you were before.

Ahead of the 70th grand final on Saturday, it’s time to test your knowledge of Europe’s biggest pop spectacular. But can you sort your Loreen from your Vanilla Ninja?

Good evening Europe – and good morning Australia! It’s that time of year again, when most of mainland Europe plus a few other countries gather to decide which three-minute pop spectacle will lodge itself in your brain for at least the next 10 years.

From Vienna this year, expect glitter, key changes, baffling staging decisions and at least one entry that makes you wonder if you have accidentally ingested hallucinogens. Somewhere in among it all, a winner will emerge.

Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continues and is deepening divisions across Lebanon. Supporters of Hezbollah call the group “the resistance” and see the conflict as existential. Despite agreeing to a ceasefire, Israel still occupies parts of southern Lebanon and insists Hezbollah must disarm for there to be peace—a view shared by many Lebanese. With communities split over Hezbollah’s future, The Guardian travels across Lebanon to find out how the conflict is widening divisions and affecting life across the country.

Streeting calls on PM to resign and implies that he would stand as a candidate in a leadership contest

Al Carns, the defence minister first elected in 2024, will launch his own leadership bid if a contest starts, Sky News is reporting.

Asked about this last night, Carns told Sky: “I’m just a humble junior minister.”

Unless Labour understands that insecurity on an emotional level as well as on an economic one, we will continue to lose voters who would naturally align with us. Working-class voters have not simply left Labour. Many feel Labour stopped understanding their lives, and so they looked elsewhere.

What is the point of Labour if it does not represent Sheffield, Stoke-on-Trent, Barnsley, Swansea and Aberdeen? What is the point of the Labour party if it cannot replace despair and frustration with hope, stability and purpose? The party was founded to give ordinary working people security, dignity and bargaining power over their lives.

Exclusive: Former deputy prime minister says investigation ‘clipped my wings’ as she settles £40,000 in unpaid stamp duty

Angela Rayner has been cleared by HMRC of deliberate wrongdoing or carelessness over her tax affairs, the Guardian can reveal, paving the way for a potential leadership bid as Keir Starmer’s grip on power unravels.

The former deputy prime minister has settled £40,000 in unpaid stamp duty after initially paying the lower rate, but has not paid any penalty as a result of the investigation. HMRC was also satisfied there was no tax avoidance.

Despite slim majority of 528, many constituents of potential Labour leadership candidate seem rather fond of him

• UK politics live – latest updates

Wes Streeting’s potential leadership bid has been the subject of mockery from figures within Labour, while the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s slapdown of the now former health secretary in the Commons on Wednesday went viral on social media.

However, in Streeting’s parliamentary seat of Ilford North, his constituents seem rather fond of him and pleased with the prospect that their MP could get the keys to No 10. Lesley, who works in Tesco in Barkingside, said: “He’d be very good. He comes into Tesco’s a lot, he’s a nice man. He talks to all of us.”

Revelation comes as Reform UK leader faces parliamentary investigation into money received from crypto billionaire

• UK politics live – latest updates

Nigel Farage bought a £1.4m property in cash shortly after receiving a £5m personal gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

The revelation came as the Reform UK leader appeared to change his line on the reason for the £5m gift, saying in an interview on Thursday that it was a “reward” for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years.

Security was heightened in Beijing ahead of the two leaders’ crucial talks, where they discussed economic cooperation, trade and Iran

• Trump lands in China for high-stakes summit with Xi Jinping as Iran war looms over talks

• Explainer: five key issues on the table at summit

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Donald Trump will drive through a Chinese capital that is smoggier than it was on his last visit in 2017, when the authorities launched emergency measures to clear the skies of pollution days before his first state visit to Beijing.

Factories were ordered to halt production and heavily polluting cars were banned from the roads in the days ahead of the US president’s trip nearly a decade ago, an era in which China had declared war on air pollution and made special efforts to clear the skies ahead of important political events such as visiting dignitaries and the Beijing Olympics.

King Charles visits Golders Green to show support as commissioner says counter-terrorism team leading 11 investigations

Counter-terrorism officers in London have launched 11 investigations and arrested 35 people after “a sustained period of attack” upon the Jewish community, the head of the UK’s biggest police force has disclosed.

In one of his starkest comments on antisemitism in the UK Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner, told MPs in a letter: “British Jews are not currently safe in their capital city.”

Veteran broadcaster accuses channel of ‘clear violations’ of Ofcom’s due impartiality rules

• UK politics live – latest updates

The former Sky News political editor Adam Boulton has said GB News should lose its broadcasting licence as he accused Britain’s media regulator of failing in its duty to protect impartial television news.

Boulton, who was Sky News’s political editor for 25 years after the channel launched in 1989, said he believed it was too late to revoke GB News’s broadcasting rights, despite bringing a partisan brand of coverage to British television since its debut in 2021.

Outgoing health secretary declares Labour’s ‘plan for the NHS is working’, though experts question how goal was reached

Hospitals in England have hit a key target for improving the time it takes patients to get treatment, which prompted Wes Streeting to declare that Labour’s “plan for the NHS is working” before departing as health secretary.

Streeting had told the NHS to ensure that hospitals treated at least 65% of patients within 18 weeks by the end of March. New NHS England figures published on Thursday showed that hospitals did so, treating 65.3% of people on the NHS waiting list within that timeframe in March.

Docked ship reportedly seized outside UAE port by “unauthorised personnel”

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said ships entering the strait of Hormuz must cooperate with the Iranian navy as reports emerged of a ship being seized outside a United Arab Emirate port and taken towards Iranian waters.

The UK Maritime Trading Organisation said the docked ship was seized by “unauthorised personnel” while it was anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates port of Fujairah near the southern entry to the strait of Hormuz.

Link to US-based site, whose operators were fined £950,000 by Ofcom, appears in Google’s search results and can be accessed in UK

Google has denied breaching the Online Safety Act by promoting a “nihilistic” suicide forum associated with 164 deaths in the UK where it is supposed to be banned.

The UK’s internet regulator fined the forum’s US-based operator £950,000 because the site, which “presents a material risk of significant harm”, can still be accessed in the UK despite British laws criminalising encouraging or assisting suicide.

Parole Board tells victims of black cab rapist that it had decided against open conditions or release

The black-cab rapist John Worboys has been denied parole for the second time.

The Parole Board told his victims on Thursday that it had decided against either releasing Worboys or allowing him to move to open conditions within prison.

Exhibition of Melsonby hoard in York challenges ideas about life in northern Britain 2,000 years ago

Iron age objects that tell a dramatic story of female power and that dispel the myth that northern Britain was a left-behind backwater have gone on display for the first time.

The objects exhibited in York are from the Melsonby hoard, the largest trove of iron age metalwork ever found in the UK, which experts say could alter our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.

West Bank home described as ‘ideal for outdoor gatherings’ is among 41 listed rentals in illegal Israeli settlements

Some of Mohammad al-Sbeih’s fondest childhood memories are of his small farm in the hills south of Bethlehem, where three generations of his family grew wheat and barley.

“It was a hard plot to farm as it was on a hillside with terraces, but it was so beautiful,” Sbeih remembers.

The GDP boost has raised the chancellor’s prospects for staying in post, whoever wins the Labour leadership battle

• Business live – latest updates

• UK economy records surprise 0.3% growth despite Iran war

The message from Rachel Reeves is clear. After Britain’s economy defied the predictions for a slump in March, despite the fallout from the Iran war, why put things at risk with a roll of the dice in domestic politics?

Responding to bumper growth of 0.3% in March – much stronger than City economists’ forecasts for a 0.2% contraction – the chancellor said the figures showed she had the right economic plan, in a comment laced with subtext.

A countdown of the greatest literature published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?

There are so many causes here that aren’t up to him, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Rather than trying to change him, change the goal

• Read more Leading questions

I am in a relationship with a lovely man who I first dated when we were 19 and 20 years old respectively. Now in our mid-50s, we have been together for three years. We laugh a lot and enjoy doing lots of things together – his enthusiasm for travel matches mine.

The issue is he sleeps a lot – at least 10 hours a night but could be 12 hours. He could easily stay in bed until 1pm on any day off. This means when we are on one of our frequent trips away, we rarely get to do things together in the morning – a time I love. I’ve addressed it with him and he sometimes makes the effort, but then reverts back. We don’t live together and only see each other one day a week, so time is precious and I often end up waiting around for him to get up.

Ahead of her new album, the singer-songwriter answers your questions on big 90s nights out, financial survival and the time a whole tube carriage serenaded her

I’m curious how you found out you could sing, how you developed your voice and what singing means to you? VladimirS
I found out I could sing while I was doing experimental theatre in 1989 – it was a cultural crossover between Ukraine and the UK. My biggest fear was singing in public and I wanted to do something I was afraid of, so I turned a Rimbaud poem into what I imagined was a blues song. And I loved it. Afterwards, I met this producer, William Orbit – I was 19 and he was 37 – through one of the women in the play whose husband was the manager of the Pogues. William decided: “She can sing. I will make a star of her.” He hooked me up with a wonderful singing teacher. But I probably will never see myself as a singer. Even last week I was like: “Oh yeah, I guess I am a musician, that’s ended up being what I do.” I still can’t quite get my head around that.

When making a new song up, do you have a job to do, or are you inspired? And in which order do the songs come, regarding melody, chords, words? gin007
I get inspired and that’s why I write. I could be walking in nature or having a conversation and it’ll spark something in my head and I’ll make notes. Then I’ll go to the piano or guitar and often if I’ve got something percolating, that will find its way into the chords. So, melody, words and chords often come together at once. Then I do the work, which is the filling it in. The easy part is the la la la, here’s the idea, here’s the shape, here’s the form, and then it’s like: this all came unconsciously, how do I write to that standard consciously? That can be really, really challenging. It can make your skin crawl because it’s hard to write a good song.

Filmgoers born after 1997 are reviving cinemas’ hopes of survival. They tell us about the social experience where ‘there’s absolutely no commitment to chat’

People born between 1997 and 2012 are now more frequent cinemagoers than some older age groups, according to a US-based survey by Fandango, with 87% having seen at least one film in a cinema in the last 12 months compared with 58% of baby boomers.

With this in mind we asked young people about why they love the cinema.

For every standing ovation there’s a riotous backlash – the film festival’s history is littered with boos, protests, furious rows and career-defining disasters

Part of the appeal of Cannes is its sense of old-school glamour. It is, however, a shame that the glamour often comes at the expense of logic and practicality. In 2015, a group of women were barred from the gala screening of Todd Haynes’ historical lesbian romance Carol for not adhering to the rule that women must wear high heels. The same happened to producer Valeria Richter, even though part of her left foot had been amputated. A year later, Julia Roberts made her displeasure about this known by walking the red carpet barefoot.

Zeal for ‘the Hamptons of England’ has rubbed off on sales, with luxury British fashion brand back to a full-year profit

• Business live – latest updates

The luxury fashion brand Burberry has said a new £2,000 handbag named after the Cotswolds has bolstered sales, as the English region becomes increasingly popular with wealthy Americans.

Joshua Schulman, the company’s chief executive, said its tote bags – which mix leather and the signature Burberry check – had helped drive its best performance in bag sales since 2023.

Our reviewer braved Peak District downpours to see which brollies – from budget to mini to windproof – stayed standing

• 10 stylish and practical ways to look good in wet weather

We Britons have loved brollies since about the turn of the 19th century. Previously an aristocratic luxury, today they’re a broad tent covering tight budgets and expensive tastes alike. You’ll see them sprout like mushrooms whenever rain hits the high street.

Most decent umbrellas will keep you dry(ish), but peek closer and you’ll find that not all are the same. Some have a stronger, smoother mechanisms; others are lighter and more comfortable to hold. The best stand out for thoughtful details: from polished wooden handles to gleaming tips, a brolly’s aesthetic finish can often be a clue to how long it will last.

Best umbrella overall:
London Undercover Classic

Best budget umbrella:
Doppler Zero 99

Two mothers fought British bureaucracy to obtain lifesaving cannabis medicines for their children. But most patients are having to go private – at huge cost

In the summer of 2012, Britain was in a festive mood. It was the year of the queen’s diamond jubilee and the London Olympics, and the country was celebrating. But for former hairdresser Hannah Deacon and her young family in Warwickshire, it was a summer of ambulances, hospital wards and doctors rushing in and out of emergency rooms.

Eight months earlier, Deacon had given birth to a healthy baby boy named Alfie. The early months of his life had been challenging for her and her partner, Drew, as they are for any first-time parents, but by the summer, Alfie was sleeping and feeding well, and it felt like the family was settling into the new rhythm. However, one night the couple woke up to find their baby’s little body gripped by a paralysing seizure.

The UK has been suffering since going it alone, but Starmer’s noncommittal approach has made things worse. No wonder voters are angry

Ten years on from the referendum, Brexit still shapes British politics. It has smashed the two-party duopoly and continues to divide the country. Keir Starmer’s struggle to remain prime minister after last week’s drubbing for Labour in elections in England, Scotland and Wales is proof of that.

Voters took politicians at their word after the decision was made to leave the EU. The reason “Take back control” worked as a slogan was that it chimed with the public mood in large parts of Britain.

Fixating on questions of whether Altman is untrustworthy, or whether Musk is even less so distracts from a far deeper problem with AI

If it wasn’t already clear, Elon Musk and Sam Altman hate each other.

While the two men were once co-founders of OpenAI, they’re now locked in a vicious feud, playing out in all its theatrics in front of a judge and jury in a California courtroom. Musk is suing, alleging that Altman and OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, tricked him into forming and funding the organization as a non-profit before they subsequently restructured it to have a for-profit entity. OpenAI says Musk was well aware of those plans and frames the lawsuit as an attempt to derail a competitor.

Prisoners have a right to communicate with the media about their cases. Yet after 41 years in jail, Bamber has been banned

A few weeks ago I wrote a lengthy email to Jeremy Bamber, who has been in prison for nearly 41 years after being convicted of murdering five family members. Bamber has always protested his innocence, and the late Guardian prison correspondent Eric Allison and I have frequently written about Bamber and the White House Farm murders in the Guardian over the years.

In the email, I asked about aspects of his case as I often do, chatted about a football match I’d been to with my younger daughter at the weekend, mentioned that I’d been out for lunch with a forensics expert, and said we had an amazing blossom tree across the road that had just come into full bloom. I also emailed a photo of the blossom tree.

Simon Hattenstone is a features writer for the Guardian

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.

Dawkins appears to have gone from atheist to AI-theist: perhaps he doesn’t view AI as God, but he certainly seems to see it as God-like

Are you there God? It’s me, Arwa. I’ll be quite honest, I’m afraid I’ve never been a believer. I agreed wholeheartedly with Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, when he argued that belief in God is a “pernicious” delusion. But perhaps I should reconsider my position. Recent events have led me to question Dawkins’ judgment about life, the universe and everything.

Those recent events are the evolutionary biologist publicly concluding that AI may be conscious. In an op-ed, Dawkins recounted how he gave the Anthropic chatbot Claude the text of a novel he was writing. Dawkins writes: “He took a few seconds to read it and then showed … a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!’”

If I were in government I’d propose a very different response to the challenges we face – starting with protecting people from the cost of living

• David Blunkett was Labour home secretary from 2001 to 2004

While I welcome many measures in the king’s speech, an alternative might look something like this.

My lords, and members of the Commons: my government is committed to winning back the support of the British people and demonstrating that they are “on the side” of those who are working – or who have worked – hard to make ends meet.

David (Lord) Blunkett was Labour home secretary from 2001 to 2004

Having the cancelled director of the Rush Hour franchise – one of the president’s favourites – on Air Force One is exactly the kind of gesture he enjoys making

One of the least pressing yet most irritating aspects of Donald Trump’s US is the reintroduction of a bunch of people we never thought we’d have to hear from again. Men (and it’s mostly men) who, under previous administrations, were banished to the far corners of our collective consciousness, have come roaring back – this week on Air Force One. I’m referring to Brett Ratner, film director and subject of multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, all of which he denies, who was comprehensively cancelled in Hollywood but has reemerged this week to – what are the chances? – accompany the US president to China for his summit with Xi Jinping.

If Ratner, who was dropped by Warner Bros in 2017, is not an obvious choice of travelling companion for the US president, he does at least fit the mould of men with appalling reputations alongside whom Trump stands a good chance of looking almost appealing. Many in Trump’s inner circle, prior to being plucked from the mire for possible advancement, had been on the brink of cancellation – take your pick from Pete Hegseth and Robert F Kennedy Jr – such that a sketchy past appears less of an oversight when it comes to Trump appointees and more of a qualification.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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Japan and Taiwan have enviable care systems because they had the courage to plan – some solutions are radical, most are hiding in plain sight

It’s mid-afternoon in Fujisawa. Schoolchildren, rucksacks on their backs, bound into a room where a group of pensioners welcome them boisterously, before sitting them down to help with their homework. This group of older people is looked after by some of the pupils’ parents. Up the road, a cluster of university students live above some over-75s. They get half-price rent in return for checking in on them on their way to and from studies.

This multigenerational community I visited in a small town not far from the port of Yokohama is one of 5,000 in Japan.

Keir Starmer’s programme is fatally limited by the timidity of an election manifesto that shied away from hard arguments

Ending 14 years of Conservative rule was supposed to bring an end to dysfunctional government. In the speech that launched his 2024 general election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer said that “a vote for Labour is a vote for stability … a vote to stop the chaos”. Less than two years later, Sir Keir’s government looks no sturdier than its predecessors. The prime minister’s chances of serving a full term in office look slim.

There are as many reasons for this precipitous decline as there are Labour MPs calling for a change of direction. The common analysis is that a project branded by the single word “change” has neither transformed people’s lives for the better nor given them confidence that a transformation is coming. For many voters, the prime minister is the embodiment of a miserable status quo.

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 critically ill Nobel peace laureate should be released. Iranians’ human rights are under attack from both the regime and the US-Israel war

“Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner’s rope,” the Iranian Nobel peace laureate Narges Mohammadi observes in a forthcoming memoir smuggled from her cell. “Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail – and then make sure no help arrives, or they create conditions in which death can come easily, helping it along by standing in the way of life-saving care.”

Long denied adequate treatment, Ms Mohammadi is now in a critical condition. She was found unconscious in her cell after a suspected heart attack in March and had been experiencing chest pain, loss of consciousness and extreme weight loss. She was finally moved to hospital this month, with authorities approving her transfer to specialist care in Tehran only this week. Supporters fear that she will be sent back to prison if her condition improves.

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.

Fiona O’Farrell, Sarah Mulholland and Jennifer Evans on the ongoing circus surrounding potential challengers to Keir Starmer’s leadership

As an active and loyal Labour member, I am infuriated by what is happening within the party (Burnham allies warn against quick ‘coronation’ of Streeting if Starmer quits, 12 May). The ongoing circus about the leadership is a terrible distraction from the numerous global and national issues that the government and the prime minister should be focused on. But the most infuriating aspect of the entire shambles is the relentless speculation and briefings from so-called “allies” of Andy Burham.

No Labour member has an innate right to be selected as a parliamentary candidate. The assertion that a sitting Labour MP should give up the seat voters elected them to, necessitating a byelection so that Burnham can run, then assuming that he would automatically retain the seat, is arrogance beyond belief. And it makes the party look ridiculous.

A ‘case study in hope’ is not how Fernando Quintana Marrero would describe life for Londoners who feel exploited and unheard

In your interview with Sadiq Khan to mark his 10 years as mayor (11 May), he describes London as a “case study in hope”. This will feel deeply disconnected from reality for many Londoners.

Yes, there have been improvements in areas such as air quality. But ordinary people do not experience London through political narratives or carefully selected statistics. They experience it through soaring rents, housing insecurity, overcrowded transport, rising living costs and the growing sense that this city is becoming unaffordable for anyone on a normal salary.

Ian Williamson and Susan Gregory respond to an article by Sam Wollaston on pub closures and share experiences in their own communities

For campaigners like us, who are fighting to rescue their village pub, Sam Wollaston’s article about the The Hare and Hounds in Bowland Bridge, Cumbria, could hardly be more depressing (‘Now the village is dead. It’s awful’: why was one of Britain’s best pubs forced to close?, 7 May). Wollaston is, of course, quite right about the long list of challenges that are putting pubs out of business. Yet despite the odds being stacked against us, there are groups like ours all over the country that are refusing to give up – and a good many are succeeding.

We are trying to buy the Somerset Arms, which closed three years ago, leaving the Wiltshire village of Semington without a pub. We have tremendous support from the community and we take great encouragement from pubs like the Hop Pole Inn in nearby Limpley Stoke. It also stood empty for many months but has recently been named Camra’s pub of the year. I have seen for myself what a huge impact it has had on the life of the village. The Somerset Arms will rise again. We hope that the Hare and Hounds will too.
Ian Williamson
Chair, Semington Community Benefit Society, Wiltshire

Michael Hecht responds to a study calling for New Orleans residents to be relocated due to rising sea levels

Here in New Orleans, we are not climate deniers. For more than 300 years, New Orleans has defended its unique position, most recently with a $15bn storm wall system that kept the city bone-dry during a category five storm.

That is why it was frustrating to read the Guardian’s unquestioning coverage of a recent Nature Sustainability perspectives paper by Torbjörn Törnqvist and colleagues (‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds, 4 May). Rather than science, the study is an ideologically driven policy argument dressed in the guise of geological inevitability.

️ Updates from the first round at Aronimink Golf Club
️ Official live leaderboard | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail David

Bryson’s touch is all over the shop. He overcooks his downhill 30-foot putt from the fringe at the back of 11 … and the ball catches the slope of the green, rolling 60 feet past! So nearly off back down the fairway! That leads to an inevitable bogey. Also dropping a shot: Jon Rahm on 1. His approach disappears down a swale to the right of the green, and he can’t get his ball back up with his first chip. Rory also bogeys, the result of that errant drive and skulled wedge, and for a course supposedly there for the taking, Aronimink sure is baring its teeth.

It Can Happen To The Best Of Them dept. Rory McIlroy’s ball, having hit a tree down the right of 1, comes straight down and disappears into thick rough. He lashes at it with great force, but the ball only squirts out of the cabbage, a topper that dribbles 100 yards down the fairway. We’ve all done it, Rory on fewer occasions than most. But here he is. So much for his pre-tournament claim that “strategy off the tee is pretty non-existent”, huh. And there’s no blaming a blister on his pinky toe for that one.

• Hearing over spying allegations on or before Tuesday

• Fans warned before booking travel and accommodation

The English Football League has indicated that Southampton could be kicked out of the playoffs and that the date of the Championship playoff final may be delayed if the club are found guilty of breaching regulations.

Southampton have been charged by the EFL for allegedly spying on Middlesbrough’s training within 72 hours of their first-leg meeting and for not acting “with the utmost good faith”.

The outspoken Russian-born Kazakhstani on how his lowest point has turned into the best 12 months of his career

There are few experiences on the professional tennis circuit more uncomfortable than being Alexander Bublik’s opponent. The task of deciphering one of the more talented and unpredictable players is challenging enough, but there is also a risk of being on the receiving end of a few stinging insults.

Over the years, Bublik has become notorious among Russian-speaking fans for his scathing rants about his rivals. There have been times when he has loudly wondered, to nobody in particular, how on earth his opponent could be ranked so high and others when he has focused on viciously skewering their games. He has also reserved plenty of scorn for himself and the sport as a whole.

• Tournament will feature six men’s and women’s teams

• Grand final at Brentford’s Gtech Community Stadium

A rugby union version of the Hundred aimed at attracting younger fans to the sport is to be launched in September. The world’s leading sevens players, possibly bolstered by some exciting up-and-coming 15s talent, have been contracted to play in the Ultimate Sevens Championship which will involve events in Spain, Wales and France followed by a grand final at Brentford’s Gtech Community Stadium in west London on 24 September.

The new tournament will feature six men’s and women’s teams with an initial player salary budget of £2m. The top 75 players on the world sevens circuit have already been recruited to represent one of six squads representing six different global regions with the aim of attracting future individual franchise investment.

In generating a constant stream of outrage, debate and engagement, much-reviled tech has become its own spectacle

“Just keep delaying,” Darren England tells the referee, Chris Kavanagh, at West Ham on Sunday afternoon. The title is on the line, possibly relegation too, and as replay after replay queues up on the tape machine, who could blame a humble video assistant for wanting to savour the moment?

To survey it from all the relevant angles, consider all contingencies. To feel the sensation of all that awesome power at his fingertips. They’re calling it the most important VAR review in Premier League history. Stuart Attwell, you’ll never sing that.

Six years ago interim manager was working for a charity in south London. On Saturday he leads Chelsea out at the FA Cup final

As meteoric rises go, Calum McFarlane’s takes some beating. Six years after he and his assistants Harry Hudson and Dan Hogan were working for a south London charity that provides football and education for disadvantaged children, they will lead out Chelsea to face Manchester City in Saturday’s FA Cup final.

There have been accusations of cronyism given they have connections to Joe Shields, Chelsea’s co‑head of recruitment, that go back years, to when McFarlane, Hudson and Hogan were at the charity, the Kinetic Foundation, or beyond. But James Fotheringham, Kinetic’s co-founder, is dismissive of that.

A stoppage-time eruption and a crying Manolo González means the Catalan club’s long-awaited victory changes everything

After 143 days and many more sleepless nights Manolo González was liberated, if only for a little while. In the 92nd minute of the 19th game of 2026, something amazing happened: Espanyol won and Espanyol went wild. A goal up against Athletic Club, a late Gorka Guruzeta header had shaken them more than the post it hit, a familiar fatalism refusing to leave, and they were desperately hanging on to what they had now and had lost too many times before, whistling for this suffering to finally end, when at last they could let go. “You have to be strong in life but, bloody hell, we all have limits,” González said, and they had reached theirs but now, on a Wednesday evening in May, they were released.

Ramon Terrats, a boyhood Espanyol, nodded the ball on. Kike García, the only member of the squad born in the 80s and a man with a bit of the 80s about him, a 36-year-old, 6ft 1in, 12-stone striker they call the “labourer of goals”, a sub who had only been out there six minutes, ran on to it. Keeping his head, he guided a shot past Unai Simón so everyone else could lose theirs. The clock said 91.06. The scoreboard said 2-0. The table said: 14th, 42 points, 11 wins. And 29,943 people said: argrhjrfujhkngsafkjhfskljdzrogjdgixjkgjhlkbxcfh. As for González, he broke down and cried.

Under the knowledgeable guidance of Babett Peter, the Frauen-Bundesliga club have their country’s big two, and the Champions League, in their sights

Frankfurt remains one of the most prominent and historic names in women’s football in Germany. The old 1. FFC Frankfurt ruled the nation for almost a decade, winning the Frauen-Bundesliga seven times between 1999 and 2008, including five in six seasons, and secured four European titles between 2002 and 2015.

The best of Germany, and sometimes beyond, represented Frankfurt before clubs such as Wolfsburg, and subsequently Bayern Munich, took charge, but now the city’s name is back challenging at the business end of the table.

The new Women’s Super League season kicks off this weekend with some big-name coaches and a new format

By No Helmets Required

Wigan have won more league titles than any other team in men’s rugby league, but their dominance in the women’s game is a recent and rapid development. They swept the board last season, winning the Challenge Cup, League Leaders Shield and their first Women’s Super League title since 2018. As Wigan begin the defence of their title against Leeds Rhinos this weekend, we take a look at the main issues facing the league.

The continued development of the league is reflected in the increase of high-profile coaches leading women’s teams. Denis Betts, the former Wigan, England and Lions player who previously coached in Super League, guided Wigan to the treble last year and has led the way for others to follow. The season opener on Saturday between York Valkyrie and Huddersfield Giants brings together two former Bradford Bulls full-backs, with Leon Pryce in charge of York and the former Scotland coach Nathan Graham now managing Huddersfield.

Chancellor says ‘now not the time to put economic stability at risk’ as ONS records 0.3% growth in first month of Iran war

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The chancellor has seized on official figures showing the UK economy was more resilient than feared at the start of the Iran war as evidence to keep the current Labour leadership in place.

Rachel Reeves hailed the fact that the economy unexpectedly grew in March, during the first month of the conflict in the Middle East, as proof the government had “the right economic plan”.

The Hacks star spoke at Cannes about fallout from pro-Palestine comments and joining a tradition of Jewish allies

Actor Hannah Einbinder has said the cost of not speaking up about Palestine is greater than losing her Hollywood career.

The Emmy-winning Hacks star, who leads the new queer slasher drama Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, told an audience at Cannes film festival she would not be deterred from standing up for causes she cared about.

Widespread nature of attacks prompts warnings that Moscow is trying to overwhelm air defence systems

Russian missiles and drones are pounding Ukraine for a second day, as almost continuous heavy attacks hit the country, with Kyiv bearing the brunt of an assault that has killed at least eight people, including a 13-year-old, and injured 44 in the capital.

The overnight attacks followed heavy daylight raids with missiles and drones across the country on Wednesday, one of the longest single attacks of the war.

Doctor in Brandenburg state allegedly committed the crimes, including child rape, between 2013 and 2025

German prosecutors have charged a paediatrician with 130 counts of sexual abuse, including the rape of children, most of them in his care, in a case that has caused shock and prompted clinics to step up safeguards.

The 46-year-old doctor, whose name has not been released, has been in custody since November after a mother suspected her child had been assaulted and notified authorities. The doctor worked in clinics in Brandenburg state, surrounding Berlin.

A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery aims to bring people together in increasingly atomised country

Can a collective portrait of Britain hold together a country that feels as if it is splintering apart? That is the quietly radical hope behind Es Devlin’s new installation at the National Portrait Gallery: a living portrait comprised not of monarchs, politicians or celebrities but of thousands of ordinary faces drifting slowly into and out of one another.

Created in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab, A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery invites people across the UK to upload a selfie, which is then transformed into a portrait rendered in Devlin’s smoky charcoal-and-chalk style before joining a constantly evolving and revolving carousel of portraits projected on to a framed screen.

If resolution is passed, governments will recognise their legal responsibility to cut greenhouse gas emissions

The UN’s willingness to tackle the climate crisis in a fair and legal way will be tested next week during a critical vote of the UN general assembly in New York.

Every member state is being asked to back a series of landmark findings on climate justice from the international court of justice (ICJ) as part of a new political resolution. If passed, it will mean governments recognise they have a legal responsibility to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, including tackling fossil fuels.

Greenpeace finds cocktail of pesticides including seven banned in EU may have been used on seven categories of vegetables and soft fruit

It is a beautiful early summer Sunday afternoon and you have stopped for a pub lunch. A waiter sets down a roast served with carrots, peas, parsnips, potatoes and onion gravy, and then for pudding, strawberries and cream. It feels like the perfect rustic meal to accompany a day in the country.

However, a report by Greenpeace, published on Thursday, has found that the ingredients of the traditional Sunday roast have potentially been treated with a cocktail of more than 100 pesticides. Data from the Fera pesticide usage survey for 2024, showed 102 – including seven banned in the EU – were used on seven vegetable and soft fruit categories.

Environmentalists hail decline but warn weakened laws could reverse gains

Brazil’s Atlantic forest, the country’s most threatened biome, last year recorded its lowest level of deforestation since monitoring began 40 years ago, a new report shows.

The forest is Brazil’s most populous biome, and home to 80% of the population and major cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In 2025 it recorded 8,658 hectares of deforestation, marking the first time it has fallen below 10,000 hectares since 1985.

King Arthur is said to have transformed into a chough when he died, its red feet and beak representing his bloody end

Decades after disappearing from the jagged cliffs around Tintagel Castle on the coast of north Cornwall, a bird with legendary connections to the area has returned.

The custodian of Tintagel, English Heritage, and local ornithologists have declared that choughs – charismatic corvids with red beaks and feet – are back.

Privilege being mistaken for competence as study reveals no evidence to suggest companies run by state-educated peers underperform

Chief executives who attended private school are perceived by investors as a “safer bet”, according to a study, despite there being no evidence they perform or behave differently to their state-educated counterparts.

Companies run by privately educated bosses tend to experience lower stock market volatility, even though there are no meaningful differences in their performance, decision-making or crisis management, the research from the University of Surrey found.

Member of army squad sent with medics to assist suspected hantavirus patient recounts descent to remote island

The hardest part of the parachute jump, according to Capt George Lacey, is falling backwards through the air. It is Saturday and Lacey, and his squad of six plus two medics, have just leapt out of an RAF transport, 2,500 metres over the south Atlantic.

“The parachute can only go forward so quickly,” he says, meaning that it has to be pulled at precisely the right moment. “So you have to turn into the wind and basically fly backwards, which is a very weird sensation, as you can imagine.”

Merged institution will become second largest mainstream university in UK with about 47,000 students

King’s College London has agreed to merge with Cranfield University, creating a new UK “super-university” that would rival many of its international competitors in size and research output.

The merger would result in King’s taking on another 5,000 mainly postgraduate students and becoming the second largest mainstream university in the UK, with about 47,000 students, overtaking the University of Manchester and behind only University College London.

Creator of Politidex hopes free online app will help humanise politics and act as a way of ‘flipping the narrative’

The year is 2016 and Pokémon Go has taken over the world. People are wandering for miles on end, disrupting concerts, and even slamming into poles in their attempts to capture fantastical cartoon creatures.

Ten years later, a new generation are flocking to another Pokémon-inspired game. Instead of Pikachu, Charizard and Blastoise, however, players are catching and training up their local politicians in order to build their own political parties. Some MPs are even catching themselves.

All 11 onboard survived after the plane made an emergency landing near the Bahamas

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A military rescue crew in Florida has spoken of the “pretty miraculous” survival of all 11 people it saved from a plane crash in the Atlantic Ocean, and its own scramble to safety with five minutes of fuel left.

Members of the 920th rescue wing, based at Patrick Space Force base, not far from Cape Canaveral, raced on Tuesday to reach the passengers and crew in choppy seas. They had emerged from a small Beechcraft twin-propeller aircraft that ditched into the water about 80 miles east of Melbourne on Florida’s east coast.

Evika Siliņa stands down after coalition collapses following sacking of defence minister

Latvia’s centre-right prime minister has resigned over her government’s handling of Ukrainian drones that strayed into Latvian territory from Russia, bringing down her coalition government months before elections due in October.

Evika Siliņa announced her resignation on Thursday, a day after the Progressives party, her left-leaning coalition partner, withdrew its support over her decision to fire the defence minister, Andris Sprūds, a Progressives member.

US plaintiffs say waterfront site was improperly transferred for Trump’s personal gain

A group of Miami residents has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump and the state of Florida over a land giveaway for his proposed presidential library.

Almost three acres of prime waterfront land that once belonged to Miami Dade College (MDC) were illegally gifted to the US president by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, the lawsuit states.

Asymptomatic people allowed off ship from Wednesday afternoon but those infected ordered to remain in isolation

A norovirus-hit cruise ship carrying mainly passengers from the UK and Ireland has had a French lockdown order lifted.

All 1,701 people onboard Ambition were prevented from disembarking for more than 24 hours after it docked in Bordeaux on Tuesday after one person died of a heart attack and dozens became ill with a vomiting virus.

Defying criticisms of ‘slop’ and ‘theft’, the growing culture of AI-powered creativity is attracting interest from Hollywood

In a former hemstitching workshop where artisans sewed pleats for Stockholm’s 19th-century bourgeoisie, a distinctly 21st-century craft is taking root: AI film-making.

One day last week, an actor, director and composer squeezed into a tiny studio booth to record a voiceover for their next AI release. Critics disparage AI movies as “automated slop” or cheating, and fume at what they claim to be industrial-scale copyright theft. But this had a distinctly homespun feel, the little team fussing over a monologue by a poetic Scottish gorilla inhabiting a transhumanist cyberpunk universe. It was a bit like recording the Archers, one of them joked.

Britain’s largest carmaker says sales also hit by competition in China as it publishes financial results

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Jaguar Land Rover’s annual profits have slumped by more than 99% as it counted the cost of US tariffs and a cyber-attack that disrupted its factories for months.

Britain’s largest carmaker made only £14m in profit before tax and exceptional items in the year to March, down from £2.5bn the year before, according to financial results published on Thursday.

Brand owner Mondelēz was accused of reducing weight of Alpine Milk bar from 100g to 90g without significantly altering the packaging

Many chocolate lovers consider shrinkflation a serious crime – and they have been vindicated after a German court ruled that the makers of Milka cheated consumers by cutting the bar’s size, while keeping the wrapper the same.

The three-week case in a regional court was brought by Hamburg’s consumer protection office. It accused the chocolate brand’s US owner Mondelēz of deceiving shoppers by cutting the weight of Milka’s classic Alpine Milk bar from 100g to 90g without significantly altering the distinctive purple packaging.

Exclusive: Doctors say ‘highly concerning’ poll highlights risk to patients of turning to AI for medical advice

One in seven people are using AI chatbots for health advice instead of seeing their GP, a UK study has found.

The poll of more than 2,000 people found that – of the 15% turning to chatbots – one in four had done so because of long NHS waiting lists.

It sustains all life. It is where we all end up. Yet we treat it appallingly. As her latest enormous mud sculpture looks set to cause a sensation in Britain, the Colombian artist explains why she works with soil

The earth’s cool breath is the first thing that hits me. Scented with clove and cinnamon, it catches my senses by surprise in the dim, while a vast soil sculpture emerges around me as if from a dream, just as the artist intended. I’m contained within its mammoth, terraced walls of reddish soil and struck by the silence, the peace felt in being held by nothing but earth. Another visitor lies on the ground nearby, contemplating the circular, 12-metre-high structure towering above us. I resist the temptation to stroke it, instead smelling and observing the work, feeling a mixture of curiosity, fear and solace.

I’m in Mexico City, inside The Womb Space, a cavernous earthwork by Delcy Morelos. Now in its ninth and final month, the show has been a word-of-mouth sensation, drawing more than 60,000 visitors. Its draw lies in an often nostalgic appeal to the senses – a woman in her 70s enters and whispers: “It smells like my ranch! Like playing in the dirt as a child.” Remarkably, it turns out the sculpture’s soil was actually sourced from the region the woman is from. Together, we take in the earthwork’s cascading plant matter, its humidity and the uncanny aliveness emanating from within. It’s almost like standing inside a mountain: you feel humbled and somehow more primal, the response more visceral than cerebral.

This gave a young Cruise entry into the A-list, as the brilliant, courageous rule-breaking pilot, frenemy of Val Kilmer and in love with Kelly McGillis

‘This gives me a hard-on”; “Don’t tease me”; “I want some BUTTS!” The comedy takes on sexual identity in Top Gun have become so widespread after Quentin Tarantino’s monologue on the subject that it would be revisionist now to claim that this film was 100% heterosexual. But maybe the joke arose from cinephiles’ civilian naivety about what military life and language have always been like in reality.

In the glory days of the Reagan administration, producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer optioned a magazine article about the US Navy Fighter Weapons School in San Diego, California; this trained an elite corps of pilots in dogfight confrontations with the enemy, with the sword-of-honour first prize being nicknamed “Top Gun”. Tony Scott was appointed to direct and 23-year-old Tom Cruise broke through into the A-list as Lt Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a brilliant pilot whose dad flew in ’Nam and who infuriates yet entrances the uptight high-ups with his instinctive, courageous, rule-shattering brilliance. One cigar-smoking commanding officer almost does nothing in the film but bark “God-DAMMIT, Maverick!” as a junior officer reports Maverick’s latest piece of aerial cheek.

This Netflix drama about a maverick cop crime-busting high-stakes heists might seem cliched at first – but it gets better and better by the minute. Hi Herc!

Detective Isaiah Stiles (Matthew Law) is extremely committed to his job, but it brings him no satisfaction. The long hours he dedicates to crime-busting with the LAPD have alienated his teenage son and infuriated his wife, Candace (Gabrielle Dennis), to the point where Isaiah is sleeping in the summer house. He is permanently vexed. But he isn’t meant to be happy: he’s a maverick cop.

The maverick-copness of its lead character is the first of many crime-show cliches shamelessly replicated by Nemesis, the first Netflix show from writer Courtney A Kemp, creator of the gangster drama Power and its various spin-offs. Isaiah carries the trauma of an old case where a junior colleague was killed in pursuit of a gang of elite thieves: now, whenever a robbery goes down in Los Angeles – and a big one has just happened, with bags of cash brazenly swiped from a posh party’s high-stakes poker game – Isaiah suspects that his white whale, the man who pulled the trigger years ago, is behind it. To the consternation of colleagues, he has a whiteboard in his office covered in photographs and sticky notes.

There are echoes of both Kill Bill and Thelma & Louise in Aleshea Harris’s sharply told tale of sisters heading to kill their father

An R-rated suspense thriller, Is God Is, also follows in the tradition of female buddy movies like Thelma & Louise. Kara Young and Mallori Johnson star as Racine and Anaia, young adult twins who still bear the physical and emotional scars of a house fire that nearly consumed them as girls. The blaze sent them into the foster care system and condemned them to a lifetime of stares, derision and pity – leaving them isolated, self-reliant and deeply embittered.

Their isolation is broken when a letter arrives from their mother, Ruby (Vivica A Fox), whom they had presumed dead in the fire but who is now nearing death from the far graver injuries she suffered in the inferno. Reunited at her bedside, Ruby reveals that the fire was an act of domestic violence committed by their father (Sterling K Brown) and asks her daughters to avenge her. “Make your daddy dead,” Ruby instructs them. “Real dead.” Anaia, the shy, “ugly” younger twin, recoils from the request; Racine, the fearless and more conventionally “beautiful” sister, embraces it eagerly, setting them on a Kill Bill-style quest for closure.

Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomons provide a vision of haughty Englishness up there with Gosford Park and Phantom Thread

Steven Soderbergh has a certain superpower, not always bestowed on even the most important directors: a capacity to surprise. This is a restlessly productive film-maker, travelling light creatively, developing eclectic projects, shooting on digital, using intimate locations and getting the very best from an invariably classy cast. He has recently found himself in the UK and his latest London-set movie is terrifically exhilarating and funny, as bracing as a large vodka and tonic before lunch: fast, literate and funny with a key plot progression elliptically and unsentimentally managed.

The Christophers is a movie about contemporary art and about what Alan Bennett in his play about Anthony Blunt called “a question of attribution”, and it puts new life and wit into the (perhaps) tiresome subject of movies on this subject: what has value and what does not. An irascible, dyspeptic old English painter called Julian Sklar, wonderfully played by Ian McKellen, is a once dominant but now outmoded and disliked artist of the School of London variety, living solo in a chaotic bohemian townhouse in the capital’s Bloomsbury district; he is a man given to toweringly witty and cantankerous rants against everything that presents itself to his raddled senses.

(Ourness)
Seething with righteous anger and moshpit-ready tracks, the Australian artist’s genre-hopping but cohesive LP makes a case for the durability of the form

Last September, Genesis Owusu road-tested material from his then-untitled third album at three intimate gigs at Sydney Opera House. Performing in the round for adoring fans, he radiated the confidence of an artist sharing music he deeply believes in. What made the new songs so arresting were the contrasts – snarling punk intermingling with neosoul and dexterous hip-hop – all grounded in Kofi Owusu-Ansah’s magnetic charisma. Even then, months before the album’s release, it was clear the next era of the Ghanaian Australian artist would be something special.

Now titled Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge, Genesis Owusu’s third album arrives with significant expectation after its predecessors – 2021’s Smiling With No Teeth and 2023’s Struggler – rode waves of acclaim and went on to win the Aria album of the year. Following the dense symbolism of those records, with their vivid imagery of black dogs and the unkillable roach, Genesis Owusu has made clear his latest exists “very much on planet Earth in the 2020s”.

A wannabe folk singer’s humdrum life as a shrimp catcher is upended by the arrival of a mysterious American stranger in the Booker-listed tale

Seascraper opens with Thomas Flett rising at five in the morning, eating a cooked breakfast made by his mother and pulling on his oilskins. Thomas is 20, though the ache in his bones makes him feel considerably older – a symptom of the hard physical labour of his job. That job is shanking: dredging the seashore for shrimps at low tide using a horsedrawn cart. Thomas does the same work that his grandfather did decades before him and men from the north-west of England have been doing for 500 years. But his heart is no longer in it: the pay is poor and the work is solitary and dull. He dreams of being a folk singer, playing to audiences in pub backrooms and parlours, and, unbeknown to his mother, has been working on some songs.

Benjamin Wood’s novel, which spans two days, brims with atmosphere and detail; you can practically smell the fish guts and seaweed as Thomas stands on the beach and picks over the morning’s haul. The audiobook is narrated by Wood, whose gentle and evocative delivery underlines Thomas’s hard-bitten existence and his quiet longing for a different future.

Bamberg Symphony/Hrůša
(Deutsche Grammophon)
The first appearance of these distinctive works on the Deutsche Grammophon label is a red-letter day

Written in exile between 1942 and 1953, all but one of Bohuslav Martinů’s six symphonies were commissioned or premiered by US orchestras, yet each exudes the vigorous spirit of the composer’s Czechia homeland. Too often neglected, their first appearance on Deutsche Grammophon is a red-letter day for these distinctive, eminently likable works.

The Bamberg Symphony was founded in 1946 by musicians driven out of Bohemia and Moravia. The music is thus deeply embedded in their DNA and Jakub Hrůša knows just how to draw it out. Martinů’s idiosyncratic sound world incorporates orchestral piano and bristling percussion, while his neo-classical pastoralism is regularly subverted by a bustling rhythmic energy. Tempos accordingly are brisk but never rushed, while crisp, crunchy textures are clean and meticulously detailed.

(Dead Oceans)
With help from Aaron Dessner, Bon Iver and Lucinda Williams, the Americana artist shares his uncertainties around his roots and relationships in unhurried, subtly melancholic songs

The first track on Kevin Morby’s eighth album is called Badlands. It refers to the unforgiving terrain of the American midwest and also comes freighted with pop cultural references: the title of Terrence Malick’s bleak 1973 neo-noir movie loosely based on the spree killings of Charles Starkweather; the ferocious track from Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town that depicts the lot of a frustrated blue-collar worker “smashing in my guts” in a nowhere town. Unforgiving terrain, violence fuelled by nihilistic rage, frustration: the listener is thus primed for a song on which Morby, who was raised between the farmland of Missouri and the suburbs of Kansas City, paints a stark picture of the America from which he hails. But Badlands isn’t so straightforward. It’s driven by big, punchy, slightly distorted drums, but the music that plays over them is strangely laid back: a clean, clear guitar plays a gently addictive riff, Morby’s vocal has a conversational tone, there are sweet vocal harmonies. On the one hand, the lyrics talk about “the big disaster we call home”, but on the other suggest that “heaven is a place on Earth beneath the golden sky”. He concludes, with a shrug, “I can’t tell if I’m in heaven or the badlands.”

It sets the tone for an album that, in the best way, can’t quite work out what it thinks, conjuring a series of grey areas. Morby is particularly acute on the weird push and pull exerted by one’s home town, comforting familiarity and nostalgia (“home smells like cinnamon and the sad passing of time”) and doing battle with the sense that you never quite fit in: “Where no one ever makes a sound except me on this guitar,” as Morby puts it, a bluesy acoustic lick suddenly disrupting the austere sound of Cowtown for emphasis. But a sense of equivocation seeps into everything. On Natural Disaster, Morby can’t decide whether his swings in mood are something that should be dealt with via medication or meditation or just a natural occurrence, like landslides or hurricanes, that he furthermore needs as songwriting fuel. Die Young looks back on youthful hedonism with a shudder (“thank God we didn’t die young”) that can’t fully undercut how fondly he relates a succession of on-the-road touring scrapes.

It was the birthplace of the liberal tradition, but also the incubator for Nazism – what can this historic city tell us about democracy?

‘Weimar is Germany in a nutshell,” 1990s president Roman Herzog once quipped: “a town in which not only culture and thought were at home but also philistinism and barbarism.” The small city (population 65,000) sits at the heart of the nation and acts as a shrine to its sons Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche. In 1919 the country’s first democratic constitution was promulgated in its national theatre. It was chosen as the site of Germany’s rebirth precisely because its aura of refined culture contrasted so sharply with the “Prussian militarism” of Berlin. From 1919-1925 it hosted the Bauhaus School, led by Walter Gropius, placing it at the forefront of art and design.

Yet, starting in the mid-1920s, Weimar, which was also then the state capital of Thuringia, became pivotal in the rise of the Nazi party and its first, regional, experiments in government. After 1933 it competed with Bayreuth for recognition as the “spiritual home of Nazism”.

This moving work about an irascible woman in her 70s who conducts her most intimate relationships through letters has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize

Epistolary novels were once all the rage, from the epic Clarissa to the lurid fun of Dracula. They don’t come along very often now, perhaps because they can be tricky to do well: all those gaps and omissions, the need for a flawless command of tone and voice, the problem of creating movement within an unusually hermetic form. But every now and then a book appears that’s a breakout success. The 2000s saw two epistolary smash hits in We Need to Talk about Kevin and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (boy, are those different reading experiences), while in the 2010s there was Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

Now we have Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent. It’s been one of those word-of-mouth sensations that puts a spring back into publishers’ steps, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, now shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction. It’s easy to see why, given that it’s such an immensely enjoyable read.

Modernist poet whose work is considered hard to grasp but rewarding for the reader who persists

The poetry of JH Prynne, who has died aged 89, has been called opaque, hermetic, impenetrable, forbidding even, and at times it was all of these. But it also sang. To read his Kitchen Poems (1968), The White Stones (1969) or The Oval Window (1983) is to encounter a writer for whom sound and sense were never separable.

As Robert Potts wrote in the Guardian: “Prynne is hard-going, off-putting and much disliked by many more traditional writers; he is also, when one gets into him, so good that he changes the way you think and feel.”

To a light led sole in pit of, this by slap-up barter
of an arm rest cap, on stirrup trade in
crawled to many bodies, uncounted. Talon up
crude oil-for-food, incarnadine incarcerate, get
foremost a track rocket, rapacious in heavy
investment insert tool this way up.

And so, then, the
magnetic influence of Venus sweeps its
shiver into the heart/brain or hypothalamus,
we are still here, I look steadily at nothing.
“The gradient of the decrease may be de-
termined by the spread in intrinsic lumin-
osities” – the ethereal language of love in
brilliant suspense between us and the
hesitant arc. Yet I need it too and keep
one hand in my pocket & one in yours,
waiting for the first snow of the year.

Radical hope and rage combine in this tale of ecological precarity and resistance among sex workers on a brothel island

‘Yes, you will leave this place,” the chorus of child protagonists in a community of sex workers say at the start of Tahmima Anam’s incantatory and fiery new novel of female defiance, Uprising. “This story will save your life,” we were told three times in Deepa Anappara’s 2020 debut, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, also featuring precarious children dwelling in the margins. What is the distance between imagination and action, lived realities and dreams? How can solidarities be forged in such circumstances? Uprising holds within its pages some answers and a deep conviction – for a better life, a more just world – and then reaches out and fights for it.

As a journalist, Anam visited the infamous “floating brothel” Banishanta in Bangladesh; her new novel, set on an isolated island “at the end of the country, in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea”, fictionalises the island’s community and ecological precarity. Here, a generation of daughters grow up watching their mothers trapped in sex work – “we knew that the work was something that was paid for in money, and also in bodies” – and wish a different life for themselves. The women are controlled by the cruel Amma, who was once herself sold into sex trafficking. The victim becomes the perpetrator – and the children are discerning enough to know that their mothers are “not here because they had done something bad, but because something bad had been done to them”. The first lesson of the island? No one is coming to save you – and living here changes you, as inexorably as the rising tides.

Why are Nintendo releasing a straight-up remake of the space-flight shooter – with many of its original limitations – rather than a fresh new take?

The Nintendo 64 was not my first video game console, but it was my formative one. Getting to grips with 3D movement in Super Mario 64 with that weird three-pronged controller is one of my most visceral childhood memories; the long, long wait for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the background noise to a huge chunk of my youth. But back in the 1990s (in the UK at least), it felt as if nobody had an N64. When everybody had a PlayStation instead, I felt I was the only kid in my whole city who cared more about Banjo-Kazooie than Crash Bandicoot.

If even Zelda seemed comparatively niche in Europe in the 90s, Lylat Wars (known elsewhere as Star Fox 64) was a real deep cut. It’s a 1997 space-flight shooter starring Fox McCloud and his squad of animal pilots laser-blasting across different planets in nimble crafts called Arwings. I played this game to absolute death in 1998, when I got it for my birthday alongside the fabled Rumble Pak, which made your controller vibrate and shudder whenever something cool was happening on screen (fun fact: Lylat Wars was the first console game to feature controller rumble). But I really hadn’t thought about it much since. Then, last week, Nintendo announced a Switch 2 remake.

Previously prohibited use of websites such as Omoggle that connect a streamer to a stranger’s video feed now allowed

Last week, at 4am, 19-year-old Sammy Amz was scrolling through X when something caught his eye: a popular Twitch streamer was competing in a 1v1 “mog-off” with a stranger, and losing.

The next day he opened the Omoggle gaming website and began to play. Quickly he matched with another user – green dots appeared on their faces onscreen, as the website began to compare their measurements: canthal tilt, palpebral fissure ratio, nose-to-face width ratio and so on.

PS5, Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Annapurna Interactive
The nostalgic antics of a trio of tenacious teens make for silly yet undeniably enjoyable gameplay, framed by a playlist of bona fide bangers

The older we get, the more we tend to romanticise our teenage years. As bills pile up, we yearn for the simple days of drinking cider in parks. We often tend to forget the bad parts: the frustrating lack of autonomy, the unrequited crushes and the doofuses you’re forced to tolerate in the playground. But after four hours spent hanging out with the pretentious teens in Mixtape, I felt pretty relieved to be in my 30s.

Set in a nondescript town in northern California, Mixtape follows the exploits of tenacious trio Rockford, Slater and Cassandra as they head to a legendary party on their last day of high school. With Rockford about to leave her friends to move to the big city, she wants to immortalise the gang’s time together in musical form. Every song on a carefully curated mixtape triggers a totally tubular flashback to one of their shared memories.

For anyone needing a break from binging The Pitt, you can always put in your own shifts as a hospital manager, surgeon, paramedic and of course as a demonic morgue assistant

Like the rest of the western world, our household is currently binging medical drama The Pitt, revelling in its visceral depiction of life in a modern emergency department. So far the series has yet to inspire a video game tie-in (though there has been an amusing parody), but fans wishing to try their hand at tense medical (mal)practice, should not despair. Here are eight of the best hospital games spanning more than 40 years of gruesome interactive surgery. Squirt some hand sanitiser and come this way.

Royal Opera House, London
As the central couple, SeokJong Baek and Aigul Akhmetshina are dramatically persuasive and expressive in this revival of Richard Jones’s staging that works hard to make Saint-Saëns’ often dramatically inert opera zing

“Who wants to hear Samson et Dalila?” asked George Bernard Shaw in a masterfully scathing review of Saint-Saëns’ opera in its 1893 UK premiere. “I respectfully suggest, nobody.” Samson et Dalila’s fortunes since suggest an alternative answer. But the piece remains an odd hybrid of opera and oratorio, held together by the best of its music and the talents of the two principal singers.

On the headline-act front, the Royal Opera’s first revival of Richard Jones’s 2022 production is a triumph. South Korean tenor SeokJong Baek returns as Samson, the role with which he made his acclaimed Covent Garden debut. Where dramatic chemistry with Elīna Garanča, the 2022 Dalila, was evidently in short supply, this revival boasts a role debut from the ever-astonishing young mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina. Fresh from a winning streak of Carmens, Akhmetshina exudes dramatic self-possession and physical ease, her seductive intensity the ideal foil for the tortured awkwardness of Baek’s hero.

Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London
The detective and his sidekick return for a new case by Joel Horwood in an alfresco setting that playfully refers to nearby attractions

Outdoor drama is a pleasure complicated by the plot twists of the season. A day of almost hourly showers left the evening air so ominously moist for Sherlock Holmes that the detective could reasonably have announced: “The rain’s afoot.” A deluge held off but gave way to such coldness that the smoke and dry ice in the production competed with the actors’ breath clouds.

Billed as “a new mystery”, the script by Joel Horwood is a sort of bridge between Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890). The conceit is that we are seeing the “real” events that Dr Watson, frantically transcribing most of the play’s dialogue into a notebook, later published as the second Sherlock Holmes book.

Ever fancied creating your own enormous effigy? One Cornish art collective has reinvigorated the practice – and now they want to draw on the public’s skills, too

This New Year’s Eve, environmentalist and author Lisa Schneidau did something she had never done before. She welcomed in 2026 with giants. “At a certain time of the evening, they started appearing from all over the town. Then everyone flooded out of their houses and congregated into a massive procession of giants and lights and drums and music. It was absolutely extraordinary.”

Schneidau’s fairytale experience happened in Lostwithiel, the Cornish home town of the art collective The Lost Giants (TLG), a group of craftspeople and artists reviving the British tradition of making giants and beasties and goliaths. The giants she celebrated with were made of wooden frames and cloth, papier-mache and card, but were full of life.

To apply for a giant, go to The Lost Giants website

The Guardian’s David Levene braved two-headed worms, Pussy Riot protests and a tank of urine to bring you this photographic extravaganza from the celebrated arts festival

With the release of Michael and not one but four Beatles feature films under way, I am once again calling for a moratorium on these films (with one exception)

In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of discussion around the new Michael Jackson biopic. It is a film that has seen huge success at the box office, while receiving mixed (mostly negative) reviews.

It has been skewered as a shallow film, more like a well-performed playlist of Michael Jackson songs than a deep dive into his complicated story. The movie also ends in 1988, a seemingly deliberate choice to avoid having to reckon with the darker aspects of his life that followed.

Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney

Tim Allen, Joan Cusack and Greta Lee join Hanks to answer your enquiries about the forthcoming animation and its previous instalments

Is there a more eagerly anticipated movie this year than Toy Story 5? For many people (with and without children), you can keep your Odysseys and Minotaurs and Place in Hells, because the return of Woody, Buzz and friends is what cinema is really all about. The series so far has made $3.3bn, and last year’s teaser trailer had 142m views in 24 hours – of which only 140m were my son pressing refresh.

The new film, which is released worldwide on 19 June, sees Jessie the Cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack) leading the gang in eight-year-old Bonnie’s room, with Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) her second-in-command, after the departure of Woody (Tom Hanks) at the end of Toy Story 4 to help abandoned toys find their owners.

Painting that inspired depiction on £20 note more likely the work of John Opie, says Romantic artist’s biographer

In 2020, Tate Britain hosted the launch of a new £20 banknote bearing representations of The Fighting Temeraire by JMW Turner and the artist’s most famous self-portrait. Now a leading expert has said the latter work, part of the Tate collection, is not by Turner at all.

Dr James Hamilton, who has published books on Turner and staged exhibitions at museums and galleries nationwide, said that while the painting does depict the English Romantic painter, it is likely to be the work of his contemporary, John Opie.

The 26-year-old has received rave reviews for his micro-budget horror Obsession, support from Ari Aster and control of a Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake

Things have been going scarily well for 26-year-old film-maker Curry Barker.

The past 18 months have seen him level up from lo-fi YouTube comedy skits to an $800 horror short that went viral to a breakout feature picked up for $15m to being handed the reins of one of the most legendary franchises in Hollywood. It’s almost too good to be true.

In 2024, when she filmed a quick video in her car on a work break, she thought nothing of it. But in days she had become a meme. What followed was excitement, opportunity and a crushing pressure ...

Jools Lebron was in her car, taking a break from her job in a supermarket, when she posted the TikTok video that would change her life. “You see how I do my makeup for work?” she told her followers that day in August 2024. “Very demure, very mindful … A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.”

“At first, it was like any other video,” she says, on a video call from her home in Chicago. “A few likes, a couple of comments. But then I started noticing the numbers moving faster than usual – faster than anything I had seen before. I remember refreshing my phone and just staring at it like: ‘Wait … what is happening?’”

Mark is frustrated that Lucinda’s open-door policy allows mosquitoes into their flat. You decide who needs to get a handle on this issue

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

Closing them doesn’t take a huge amount of work; it takes seconds and stops heat and insects getting in

Keeping them open feels more relaxed and homey – plus, it’s better for the cat

Agonising over what to buy the three-year-old in your life? Our writer enlisted a panel of mini testers to round up the best of the best

• The best gifts for two-year-olds

Three-year-olds are a unique breed. Growing in confidence and independence daily, they’re no longer toddlers, but they’re still a way off starting school. With both of my children, I’ve found three a funny yet challenging age. My youngest is three and is now determined to do everything by herself, despite not quite being able to, resulting in frequent tantrums. She’s forming new friendships and is full of curiosity and wonder at the world (we get extremely detailed and lengthy descriptions of the tadpoles living in her classroom).

Three-year-olds are into just about everything, with the confidence of someone much older – especially anything you put out of reach (my three-year-old just successfully opened several wrapped presents that weren’t for her) – but too much choice can be overwhelming for them.

Camping season has arrived, but which mattress is worth packing? Our expert rigorously tested 27 to find the best for durability and comfort

• The best camping chairs

Whether you love sleeping under the stars or only do so under duress, a decent camping mattress will at least help ensure you are well-rested and better equipped to handle the wider thrills and spills of outdoor living.

The days when your only choice was between a foam roll mat or a leaky airbed and foot pump are long gone. From self-inflating mattresses to lightweight sleeping pads and insulated airbeds, the comfort and portability of sleeping mats have dramatically improved. But with so many types of camping mattresses available, costing from tens to hundreds of pounds, it can be difficult to know where to start.

Best camping mattress overall:
Therm-a-Rest NeoLoft

Best budget camping mattress:
Decathlon Simond MT500 XL inflatable trekking mattress

From rinsing wool in a colander to deep cleaning your washing machine, here are 15 expert tips to help your clothes last and last

• How to make your leather last a lifetime

It’s a common problem: you buy something new and start wearing and washing it regularly, only to find that it has developed a slightly grey tinge or faded colours after just a few months. Most clothes aren’t fragile, but they’re not indestructible either – and the way we wear, wash and store them makes more of a difference than we think.

Looking after your clothes properly can mean they last longer, hold their shape and don’t need replacing nearly as often, which is better for both your bank balance and the planet. And while investing in well-made pieces is important, what you do afterwards matters just as much.

From Kylie’s prosecco to Margot Robbie’s gin, we taste the star-backed booze to see what actually tastes good – and what’s just selling a dream

If you were incredibly late to the party, you’ll have become aware of celebrities making their own brands of alcohol in March, when Margot Robbie’s artisanal gin, Papa Salt, hit the rocks. Specifically, bars were refusing to stock it because oyster shells had been involved in its distilling.

It was such a charming tale; Robbie fell in love with London when she lived in Clapham in the 2010s, and wanted to give something back, namely, a gin with the flavours of Australia: wattleseed, wax flower, and oyster shell. “But what barman wants to have to ask every customer that orders a gin and tonic whether they’re allergic to shellfish?” was the question posed by Joanne Gould, food and drink writer and regular tester of alcohol on the Filter, with devastating inarguability.

From James Bond’s breakfasts to the kimchi fried rice in Crying in H Mart, a book’s food can often linger longer in our memories than its characters or storylines

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

When I first had the idea for my debut novel, The Underdog, which came out last week, I knew it had to include food. After all, the received wisdom is to write about what you know and, after almost two decades’ worth of recipes, features and restaurant reviews, it’s surely my specialist subject. Though a grumpy terrier threatens to steal the limelight, the book’s (ostensible) main character, Katy, is a newly qualified pastry chef who goes from turning out heritage duck egg and black garlic mayo sourdough sandwiches in a painfully pretentious London cafe, to making cheese scones with foraged sea buckthorn jam on the west coast of Scotland. Her journey also involves a Michelin-starred restaurant and a bespoke baking business (as well as a couple of disastrous run-ins with bitchy critics, including on a television gameshow involving Sue Perkins and a chocolate souffle challenge).

I had an absolute blast writing the book, and the food sections were definitely the most fun – thinking about what a starred restaurant might serve with a salted chocolate tart, say (Fergus Henderson’s recipe is here, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t pair it with a beetroot sorbet and walnut crumb), or what a critic might order for lunch at Margot Henderson’s Rochelle Canteen (bitter greens, like our own Rachel Roddy’s, for a start). In fact, from the glistening, bronzed hunk of pork with salsa verde and pressed potatoes set in front of the UK’s most feared culinary taste-maker, to the merguez and chip baguette Katy eats on the pavement after kidnapping a dog she doesn’t even like, the food is the real star.

Perhaps the non-alcoholic alternative for wine drinkers should not be a wine at all, but a different sip altogether? We slurp through some likely candidates …

After my positive pregnancy test eight years ago, the first thing I did was buy an industrial quantity of the non-alcoholic aperitivo Crodino, which is something of a negroni dupe for bitters hounds. There are plenty of really good, alcohol-free cocktail options nowadays, and beer drinkers, too, are amply catered for in the non-alcoholic department – but what of wine?

I may sound like an old fart, but for me, at 41, the pleasure of drinking wine is more about a sense of occasion than the stuff’s mind-altering qualities. (Collagen and social inhibition, I have discovered, wane in tandem.) So the challenge for wine drinkers who aren’t drinking is to find a proxy to sip and enjoy in the same way. Something that comes in a wine bottle. Something you drink from a glass with a stem. Something that works with food. Something that isn’t Shloer.

A deliciously rustic, risotto-style pasta using seasonal spring veg and finished with butter, parmesan and lemon zest

I am in more or less the same position as with last week’s recipe, only this time the pods contain broad beans, which are slightly easier to read than peas. This is because the pods are longer and become softer and floppier as they age, so you can see and feel if the beans inside are large and hard, which, like peas, is because their sugar has turned to starch, and which makes them more suited to longer cooking. The other thing about broad beans is their opaque jackets, which thicken as the beans age and get more bitter, but they can be removed by picking them off with a nail, or by dunking the beans in hot water for a minute, then in cold water and squeezing the jackets off and across the worktop. Even older, larger beans can be enjoyed raw or lightly cooked; they are brighter, too, like green tiddlywinks.

As well as dealing with pods, I have been reading about broad beans in recipe books and stories, looking out in particular for references to how they are consumed in spring, which in Italy is often alongside young sheep’s cheese – a great combination, as is broad beans and lancashire cheese. It turns out, though, that the mentions I have enjoyed most are to be found in England, and in George Eliot’s Adam Bede. One instance is when Adam, having walked past the leafy walls of scarlet beans, late peas and bushy filberts, strides over a “superfluity of broad beans” in Mrs Poyser’s garden; another when he eats cold broad beans out of a large dish with his pocket knife, and finds a flavour that he would not exchange for the finest pineapple.

Caramel vape with your latte? ‘Banana ice’ with your curry? The perfect pairing is out there – and vapeologists are keen to help you find it

Name: Vape sommelier.

Age: Emerging.

Female home owners report feeling stuck between men’s contradictory expectations – they are told to be independent, but not assume the breadwinner role

When Tiffany Tate put the wheels in motion to buy her first home, it felt like a win – until a date’s response stopped her cold.

“If you buy that house, what’s a guy going to do for you?” he said. It was just after their first date, and just before what would be their last.

A tiny bird with a giant ego, Crispin was a remarkable singer – especially if you told him how talented, intelligent and gracious he was

I was around four years old when my parents bought me Crispin, my first pet. A handsome yellow canary, Crispin was bad-tempered and behaved like an alpha male. He would spend hours preening. I thought he was enchanting.

A gentle female canary, Mariflor, arrived soon after. She became Crispin’s other half and the mother of their chicks, Maribel and Quintin. Having a canary family compensated for my lack of siblings and extended family. It gave me a sense of responsibility and filled my life with joy.

When Leah and I planned a family, we wanted to be as mutual as possible. Could reciprocal IVF – Leah carrying an embryo made from my egg – be the way forward?

Late last year, it became my friend’s favourite party trick. “Rosa’s going to have a baby next week,” she’d say to a group of people who didn’t know me. I’d watch their faces as they tried to inconspicuously scan my body, detecting no sign of a bump. “Congratulations!” they’d say, smiles tight, clearly wondering what other delusions I might have up my sleeve.

I was, however, about to have a baby. At daybreak on a warm October day, our beautiful, 6lb 10oz, 19.5in‑long baby girl was born; skin pink and taut, scream wet and bright. I held my wife’s hand and head as our daughter emerged from her body – a daughter who had initially come from me.

Ali used to want sex more than James, and feels guilty that she doesn’t enjoy it as much as she used to
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Any pressure to have sex doesn’t come from James – it comes from within, from a fear of complete loss

We had booked a cruise for him and his carers, but we had a string of problems when we tried to change names

In November 2024, I booked a cruise for my wife, myself and our severely disabled son for this July. I’d booked well in advance to ensure an accessible cabin for my son. At home, he needs round-the-clock care from a rota of eight carers, so we made extra bookings for three to accompany him.

Because the care team has other commitments, I couldn’t confirm their names at the time of booking and was told to do so by this April, when the balance had to be paid.

If you are looking for a new account, there are some good rates around, but also pitfalls to watch out for

Earning as much as 7% on your savings sounds great – but what’s the catch? The top-paying accounts often come with strings attached, which could mean your money is not working as hard as you thought.

That’s important because there is a lot of cash sitting in fixed-rate savings accounts that are about to reach the end of their term. The total amount in accounts maturing between April and June is £90bn, according to the savings app Spring – and that money will need to find a new home.

Haringey council’s penalty seems extortionate – especially when other authorities charge lower amounts

I read your story about a man fined £500 for dropping a cigarette butt on the pavement.

I have been issued with a £500 fixed-penalty notice (FPN) by Haringey council for putting a butt in a refuse sack awaiting collection on the street.

Criminals exploit confusion or anxiety over new IHT rules by offering a ‘safe haven’ for savings pots

The caller pitches a great deal. Shift the moneysaved in your pension and reinvest it in a scheme overseas where you can avoid it being caught under next year’s changes to the UK’s inheritance tax (IHT) system.

From April next year, any money left in a defined contribution pension after your death, which is most workplace and all private pensions, will be pulled into the IHT net.

Rather than bribery, or hiding carrots under ketchup, the key may be to expose foetuses to healthy flavours

It is an age-old battle with small children that most parents will recognise: please, please, eat your vegetables.

Some will read them books with titles such as The Boy Who Loved Broccoli. Others have been known to smother veg in tomato ketchup, or mix avocado and fruit with Greek yoghurt and call it icecream. Or resort to plain bribery.

Social media is awash with clips of people paying to be ‘bathed’ in sound. But what’s the science behind the practice?

• Read more in the Antiviral series

I, for one, am partial to a bath: what’s not to love about a dim room, candles and nary an electronic device in sight?

But a wellness trend that has emerged in recent years makes soaking in tepid water seem quaint: increasingly, people are paying to be “bathed” in sound.

Long considered an important milestone in one’s fitness journey, pull-ups build upper body strength and look impressive in the gym

The pull-up has long been seen as an important fitness metric. From 1966 to 2013, public middle and high school students in the US were required to do pull-ups as part of the presidential fitness test (an evaluation Donald Trump has considered reinstating). US Marine Corps members were long required to perform pull-ups as part of their regular physical fitness test, and prospective UK Royal Marines must complete a minimum of three to four pull-ups before they are eligible to join.

There is no definitive data on how many adults can perform a proper pull-up, but two things are clear: they are very difficult and look extremely cool.

Lat pulldowns.

Bent-over dumbbell rows.

Single-arm dumbbell rows.

Wide upright rows.

Shoulder shrugs.

Scientists are discovering more and more associations between poor oral health and everything from heart disease to dementia. But can flossing and brushing properly guarantee a longer life?

Isn’t it weird that dentistry and medicine have been kept largely separate? Why should our mouths be treated differently from the rest of our bodies? Going to the dentist often feels like more of a lifestyle and cosmetic add-on, especially for adults in the UK. And, even if you can find an NHS dentist, the service is not free at the point of use like medical doctors are.

The origin story for this rift is that dentistry began, in the middle ages, as a trade – with tooth extractions handled by “barber surgeons” and dentures crafted by jewellers and blacksmiths. Today, dentistry and medicine still have their own separate training routes, professional bodies and NHS setup. Generally speaking, medical doctors can’t act as dentists, and dentists aren’t medical doctors. But the tide is turning on this conceptual separation, because the links between oral health and systemic healthcare are becoming ever more apparent.

Designer suggests decision to stage show in Los Angeles is part of strategy to deepen label’s cinema presence

Like Christian Dior, the founder of the house he now leads, fashion designer Jonathan Anderson’s ambition is to be not just a Parisian couturier but a Hollywood power player. “We think of Dior as this romantic character, but he was also a very savvy businessman,” said Anderson before a blockbuster catwalk show in Los Angeles. Stage Fright, the Hitchcock caper-noir for which Dior dressed Marlene Dietrich, was the show’s origin story. “There is all this amazing correspondence between Dior, Dietrich and Hitchcock, which shows how he navigated the money that it cost to make that film. I think we underestimate how much negotiation Dior did with studio executives. He was very smart in that way.”

Anderson, 41, who was born in Northern Ireland but since being appointed to Dior splits his time between London and Paris, has his own Hollywood side hustle as the costume designer for Luca Guadagnino’s films, and is set on reinvigorating Dior’s relationship with the film industry.

In an unexpected turn of events, brooches have escaped from Granny’s jewellery box, climbed out the window and gone clubbing

I have arrived in my brooch era about two decades ahead of schedule. I had brooches earmarked for a later life stage, accessories that would chime with The Archers, gardening, possibly solving the odd crime in the village, that sort of thing.

But in an unexpected turn of events, I am already the correct age to wear a brooch. Not because I’m old, but because brooches have changed. They have cast off their church fete vibe and become cool. Zendaya wore a diamond serpent brooch pinned to the back of her white jacket to last year’s Met Gala. At a press conference before the recent Mexico City premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2, Meryl Streep added no fewer than six brooches to the lapel of her pillarbox red Dolce & Gabbana suit. Pedro Pascal wore a silk Chanel camellia the size of a sunflower to the Oscars. The brooch has escaped from Granny’s jewellery box, climbed out the window and gone clubbing.

Co-founder of Gap whose tastes helped establish the template for the clothing brand’s affordable ‘preppy’ look

The first branch of Gap was a single small storefront selling men’s denim and vinyl discs at 1850 Ocean Avenue, in the classy Inglewood neighbourhood of San Francisco, the city which, at the time of the store’s opening, 1969, was at the centre of hippy and other youth cultures. The founding story is that a middle-aged real-estate developer, Donald Fisher, couldn’t find Levi jeans in his size – with a 31in inseam – in the city, and set up the store to supply Levi’s piled wall-high in all cuts and sizes. But much of what the world now thinks of as Gap actually came from his wife, Doris Fisher, who has died aged 94.

The Fishers invested their life savings in the $63,000 start-up cost of the store, which Donald wanted to call Pants and Discs. The night before they had to instruct the signwriter what to paint on its fascia, Doris came up with “The Generation Gap” (referring to the divide between their age group and the then-young baby boomers), then shortening it to “The Gap”; although her style choices for Gap clothes often diminished rather than accentuated age and gender differences.

In the age of Botox, Ozempic and injectables, some women want to spend less on bridal beauty – and just be themselves

I got engaged last summer. Immediately, I started imagining how I would look at my wedding. The woman who appeared in my mind had different hair, different teeth and a completely different body than me. “I will transform my arms by the time of my wedding,” I kept thinking, though I did not take any action to transform my arms. It was inconceivable that I would show up to my wedding looking like myself.

Each social media app fed me wedding prep recommendations, including dieting (rebranded as “eating clean”), working out five times a week, regular laser treatments and facials, red light therapy, lymphatic drainage massage, teeth whitening, Russian manicures, eyelash extensions and multi-step hair routines. I saw an essay by a woman who wrote about spending $30,000 on her physical appearance. “In the lead-up to my wedding I treated my body like a design project and gave myself full [rein] to indulge in every and anything I had ever remotely considered,” she explained.

There are few places where history can be felt more powerfully than these pathways, walked by explorer, author and TV presenter Nicholas Crane

How often do you look down and wonder who created the path your feet are following? Or ask the cause of its curves and dips? Formed over thousands of years, paths form an “internet of feet” – a web of bridleways and hollow ways, drove roads and ridgeways, coffin tracks, pilgrimage trails and city pavements. Whether you’re hiking a National Trail or pottering along a National Trust footpath, there’s a good chance you’re following ancestral steps.

It’s thoughts like these that led me on a journey to track the evolution of British paths for my book, The Path More Travelled. Eleven thousand years ago ice age hunter-gatherers arrived from Europe’s heartlands, moving through the wilderness along broad “routeways”, that later widened to tracks when horses and then wheels were adopted in the bronze age. For more than 2,000 years, traffic moved no faster than the speed of a horse, until the internal combustion engine drove pedestrians off the road just over a century ago.

Improve your mountain skills by day and party by night at the Arc’teryx Alpine Academy in Chamonix

After a day spent hiking across the Col d’Entrèves glacier, a sugar hit is required. I descend on the cable car and join the queue at the ice-cream counter. Above me, surrounded by jagged peaks, looms the huge white figure of Mont Blanc, serene and pure against a brilliant blue sky. Although it’s late afternoon, people are still heading up the mountain, and there are two clear groups. On one side are the tourists, who are about to be lifted into unfamiliar frozen realms at 3,375 metres (11,072ft), hoping to grab a picture and return. Mixed among them are the weathered faces of mountain experts: hikers confidently heading for a high-altitude hut, or climbers with coils of rope.

How many of those tourists, I wonder, are wishing they could be mountaineers, secretly regretting the twists of fate that kept them away from that path? But all is not lost. The aspiring adventurer, no matter what age or background, can begin the journey to competence in the mountains. The annual mountain festival I am attending aims to facilitate that by offering the chance to gain hands-on experience with experts.

The island of Samsø offers tranquil walks, biking, birding, distillery and pottery tours, and locally sourced fare – including citrusy ants

‘We have lammerullepøllse – lamb rolled sausage – today,” says Daniel Hesseldal-Haines, chef at Det Lille Sommerhotel on the Danish island of Samsø. “It tastes better than the translation sounds. And,” he gestures towards a woman sitting by the window, “the lamb is from Camilla’s farm.”

Camilla gives us a friendly wave, and my eyes fix upon her sweater, featuring row upon row of colourful motifs. Think Fair Isle but less orderly: each stripe holds a different design. “Oh, I made this,” she says. “It’s hønsestrik – chicken knitting. You can use it to tell your story – so this one is about hiking,” she adds, pointing to each section: “These are my footprints, this is my tent, my coffee flask …”

From B&Bs and cabins to fincas and family hotels, these rural boltholes make ideal bases for exploring the region’s mountains, trails and historic towns and villages

For centuries, outsiders have been lured to the radiant hills and valleys of Andalucía, not least the Moors of north Africa who left such an impact on the land and culture. More recently, an influx of northern European aficionados has fostered a string of seductive, small-scale guesthouses to join some idiosyncratic Spanish-owned properties. These are idyllic, tranquil settings in which to de-stress and recharge, hike, ride, cycle, cook, swim or simply stargaze – the rural skies here are blissfully free of light pollution. Nor are cultural highlights ever far away, whether in Granada, Córdoba or Seville.

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

Welcome to the Thursday news quiz, where curiosity is in full bloom thanks to our illustration by Anaïs Mims. Even the most carefully arranged facts can contain a hint of uncertainty, so beware the rogue question marks popping up among the petals of knowledge. Fifteen questions on topical news, pop culture and general knowledge await. There are no prizes, but we always enjoy hearing how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 247

The answers to today’s pronunciation puzzles

Earlier today I set you these two word puzzles. Here they are again with solutions.

1: Pronounced the same, spelt differently.

(Second option) (Switch back and forth)

(Suitable) (Commandeer)

(Satisfied) (Components)

(Conference attendee) (Assign)

(Price reduction) (Disregard)

(Way in) (Enrapture)

(Incorrect) (Disabled)

(60 seconds) (Tiny)

(In attendance) (Give)

(Fruit and vegetables) (Generate)

(Deny) (Rubbish)

(Distress) (Surprise victory)

Alternate

Appropriate

Content

Delegate

Discount

Entrance

Invalid

Minute

Present

Produce

Refuse

Upset

Horticulturalists express alarm after award-winning Matt Keightley launches app that can automate designs

With glasses of champagne sipped among the peonies, Chelsea flower show is generally a friendly and genteel occasion. But this year, the secateurs have been drawn as gardeners clash over the use of AI in designing the exhibits.

Matt Keightley, an award-winning designer who has created gardens for figures including Prince Harry, is using artificial intelligence to design his garden for the prestigious show, held at the Royal Hospital gardens in Chelsea, London, next week.

As an astronomer, I had witnessed many celestial phenomena. But nothing prepared me for those few minutes in 2017 when the world fell silent

I have never driven with more determination than when rushing away from Shelby Park in Nashville. We had reached Davidson Street when my husband shouted: “There! There’s sunlight!” I skidded into a car park of a printing company with barely any time to spare. We jumped out of the car, put on our dark glasses, and looked at the quickly disappearing sun. It was surrounded by clouds, but a tiny sliver of light was still shining. This was 1.27pm on 21 August 2017. We had travelled all the way from London to Tennessee to experience the Great American Eclipse – an astronomical phenomenon I had never seen before.

As an Italian-born astronomer, I had always felt at a bit of a disadvantage. I have a doctorate in astrophysics, focused on collisions between galaxies. I have seen many celestial phenomena – comets, planetary alignments, fireballs, galaxies, northern lights – but not a total solar eclipse.

Millions of documents chronicling generations of trauma saved from Gaza and East Jerusalem in 10-month Unrwa operation

East Jerusalem to Amman should have been an easy trip: a short drive down to the Dead Sea, across the border checkpoint and swiftly on to the Jordanian capital.

But in the early summer of 2024, the distance appeared an almost insurmountable obstacle to humanitarian workers from Unrwa (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), as they sought to safeguard huge quantities of archival documents vitally important to decades of recent Palestinian history.

John Lithgow plays the gay and often nude septuagenarian father of Colman’s character in Jimpa, a new story of intergenerational queerness. She explains why her own dad would have ‘sat and cried all the way through it’

In Jimpa, Olivia Colman plays a woman called Hannah who leaves Adelaide with her husband and 16-year-old child to visit her father in Amsterdam. This is Jimpa – the word sticks better once you know it’s a compound of Jim and grandpa. At the airport, the teenager, Frances, who’s trans, drops a bombshell: they want to move to the Netherlands and finish their schooling there. Hannah and her husband, Harry, respond thoughtfully, not freaking out.

But once they arrive in Amsterdam, Jimpa, played by John Lithgow, brings enough drama for everyone – something he’s been doing for 40 years, since he left his family for a fuller queer life than Australia at the end of the 20th century could offer. The film revels in revealing the sort of lifestyle he enjoyed instead.

In 2023, the Guardian profiled a group of women who had formed an unshakeable bond after they saw their attacker convicted and decided to waive their anonymity. That interview has now led to a documentary

The three women refer to each other as “the girls”, even though they are in their 40s and 50s, long past girlhood. They have a WhatsApp group called Sister Solidarity, even though they are biologically unrelated.

The unshakeable bond between Laura Hughes and Lauren Preston, both 45, and Mary Sharp, 58, came about for the saddest reason – all three were raped and abused by Martin Butler, a manipulative drug dealer on their estate in London who groomed and coerced them decades ago.

Find out how we compiled our list of the 100 best novels published in English – and nominate your favourites

• See 100-41 on the list here

This week, we reveal our list of the 100 greatest novels published in English, as voted for by authors and critics around the world. We polled 172 authors, critics and academics for their top 10 novels of all time, published in English, and asked them to rank their choices in order of preference. We scored the titles according to how often they were voted for, and then added a weighting based on individual rankings to produce the overall list of 100 greatest books.

What would be at the top of your list? Which authors do you think should be there? What are your favourite novels of all time?

If you have been affected by the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship, we would like to hear from you

Twenty Britons from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak continue to be offered practical and emotional support as they isolate at a UK hospital.

Along with the 20 British nationals, a German who is a UK resident, and a Japanese passenger, were taken to Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral on Sunday after the MV Hondius docked in Tenerife.

We’d like to hear how you’re adapting your expenditure as the cost of living rises amid the conflict in the Middle East

Rising prices and economic uncertainty linked to the conflict in the Middle East are putting pressure on household budgets across the world.

The International Monetary Fund has warned the conflict is pushing up the cost of energy and food, increasing borrowing costs and weighing on economic growth. Surveys suggest millions of households are already making changes to cope – cutting back, dipping into savings or taking on debt.

Whether it’s on the beach, along the prom or over dramatic cliffs, tell us about your favourite seaside walk – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

The King Charles III England Coast Path, which launches officially this year, is opening up miles of previously inaccessible coastal terrain to walkers in England. We’d love to hear about your favourite coastal walks all around the UK, from the White Cliffs of Dover to the Western Isles of Scotland.

The best tip of the week, chosen by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet wins a £200 voucher to stay at a Coolstays property – the company has more than 3,000 worldwide. The best tips will appear in the Guardian Travel section and website.

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