As a young mother, Tareena Shakil fled with her toddler from the UK to Syria and joined Islamic State. Now she’s giving dating advice on TikTok. How did she get here?

If you met Tareena Shakil today, you would have no idea that the person in front of you had served time in prison for terrorism offences and holds the dubious distinction of being the first British woman convicted of joining Islamic State. Now 36, Shakil is glamorous, heavily made-up with long, tousled hair. When we meet at a plush hotel in Birmingham, she wears a sharply tailored dress, waist cinched in with a wide leather belt, and carries a Louis Vuitton handbag. She is bubbly and warm, with a disarmingly open demeanour. In short, this isn’t what springs to mind when you hear the words “terrorism conviction”.

What Shakil actually looks like is an influencer – which is fitting, because that’s what she is trying to be. She has gained most traction on TikTok, where her profile has about 50,000 followers. She gives relationship advice, usually sitting in her car and talking straight to camera. Her content is a mix of humour (“Muslim men who go to the gym while fasting – brother, the world needs more people like you”) and advice about the dating game (“Men are natural born hunters … they love the chase” in one video; “When they block you, it’s a punishment because they know it’s going to hurt you” in another). In among this are videos that hint at something darker (“If your partner hits you, you must leave, it doesn’t matter how much they cry or say they’ll never do it again”). She never directly references her own complicated past but, she tells me: “There’s an element of my own experience in most of the videos I make.”

The first lady has put the Barbra Streisand effect in overdrive with a PR nightmare of her own making

You’ve probably heard of the Barbra Streisand effect: the phenomenon where attempts to censor information end up drawing more attention to it.

Now we might soon be referencing the Melania Trump effect: the phenomenon where holding a surprise press conference to state that you did not have a relationship with a dead paedophile, and would like people to please stop speculating about the matter, immediately causes people to start speculating about the matter.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist

An exclusive extract from Famesick, her new memoir

• ‘I got everything I dreamed of … ’: read an interview with Lena Dunham

Rehab doesn’t happen to you. You happen to rehab. That’s something I kept thinking when, at night, I wept myself to sleep in the tastefully appointed room where I could not keep any sharp objects, not even tweezers, and did not have a lock on my door.

I realised it the moment I walked in and they demanded I remove my Marni booties, in keeping with their no-shoes policy, and I began to argue, muttering something about how I was self-conscious about my feet (a lie). I realised it when they asked me what sorts of things I liked to eat, and I considered it briefly, then said “goat yoghurt” like it was normal. I realised it when the woman who was tasked with watching me pee into a cup through a cracked door looked like I was giving her much more anxiety than she was giving me.

An unmissable book for every year of your early life – with recommendations from Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen, Katherine Rundell and more

The news about reading in general, and childhood reading in particular, is not good. Last year a National Literacy Trust survey of more than 100,000 young people between the ages of 11 and 18 discovered that the number of children who read for pleasure is the lowest since records of this sort began. Only about a third of children say they actively enjoy reading, and the number who report reading daily in their free time is has halved over the last two decades. It’s down to less than one in five.

Whether we blame this on screens, social media, or on a renewed enthusiasm for healthy outdoor activities, the facts are clear. Children are reading less, taking less pleasure in doing so, and there’s already talk of the dawning of a “post-literate age”. Yet books make available the best, wisest and most beautiful things that humankind has conceived, and children’s literature offers a host of classics, old and new, to be introduced to new generations of readers.

For the super-rich with cash to burn, all those Rolexes and rare Labubus may not fill the void. But for me, a little goes a long way

When wages have stalled for nearly 20 years and I recently came face to face with a tube of toothpaste that was nearly £7 in my local Sainsbury’s, the idea that money can’t buy happiness seems almost offensive. It ultimately comes from a blinkered concept of what money can do. Sure, if you only use your money to buy things, the happiness it provides will be shallow and fleeting.

Having said that, I refuse to believe there’s a single person out there overpaying on rent who wouldn’t be happier if they owned a house outright. Loosely speaking, yes, Rolexes and rare Labubus have nothing on, say, spending quality time with the people you love. But sadly, the latter costs money, too. Free time is part of a growing number of basic human needs that have become more or less commodified, and under whatever wacky stage of capitalism we’re currently at, more money equals more time to pursue your interests and ultimately find meaning in life.

Eleanor Margolis is a columnist for the i newspaper and Diva

Jack, 31, a nature consultant, meets Heather, 23, who works in marketing for a homelessness charity

What were you hoping for?
A nice evening, to meet someone new and see what type of person I would be matched up with.

US and Iranian media report peace talks have begun in Islamabad, while Netanyahu says Israel remains committed to fighting Iran

• US and Iran hold talks in Islamabad as Pakistan seeks to broker peace deal

• US officials claim Iran unable to find mines it laid in strait of Hormuz

The UK will host a strait of Hormuz meeting next week, bringing together multiple countries aiming to restore free movement of ships through the strait, which has been blockaded by Iran since the beginning of the war and inflicted heavy damage on the global economy.

A British official told AP that the meeting will oppose the idea of tolls being charged for passage through the waterway, as proposed by Iran as part of ceasefire negotiations.

Her death led to landmark ruling that sustained domestic violence can make an abuser criminally responsible for their victim’s suicide

On the night of 27 July 2023, Kimberly Milne jumped to her death from a road bridge.

Her suicide came after months of mental health crises, compounded by a campaign of domestic abuse at the hands of her former partner. In this regard, to the officers who attended the scene, Kimberly’s was a depressingly familiar story.

President already has issued sweeping pardons throughout second term, including for 1,500 US Capital riot defendants

Donald Trump has reportedly said he will issue pardons en masse to his closest advisers at the end of his second presidency, promising them in casual conversations over the last year.

“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office],” the president reportedly said in a recent meeting, garnering laughs from the room, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing an anonymous source.

Arrests and detentions took place at first mass demo since group’s ban was ruled unlawful by high court

More than 200 people have been arrested at the first mass demonstration opposing the proscription of Palestine Action since the group’s ban was ruled unlawful by the high court.

Hundreds of people gathered in Trafalgar Square in London and presented signs reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Hundreds of demonstrators sat on camping chairs and on the ground as they held up their placards on Saturday afternoon. The Metropolitan police said 212 people had been arrested by 4.50pm, with their ages ranging from 27 to 82.

A Guardian investigation reveals how the prediction market can shape news – and how it rules on ‘the truth’

“Horekunden” was rapidly losing patience.

His frustration was with the Institute for the Study of War, a US thinktank which produces a daily map of the frontline in Ukraine.

• Trainer Willie Mullins wins third National in a row

• Well-backed favourite wins incident-packed race

In a race where fortunes can switch in an instant, I Am Maximus and his trainer, Willie Mullins, are on a roll like few others in Grand National history. The 10-year-old’s two-and-a-half-length victory on Saturday, powering past Iroko and the faltering Jordans, who had a three-length lead over the last, was his second in three years, having finished runner-up behind a stable-companion here 12 months ago. Mullins has now won three Nationals in a row, the first trainer to do so since Vincent O’Brien in 1955.

From horse and trainer, it is the stuff of legends. Red Rum, the most cherished Aintree hero of them all, was the last to win the race in non-consecutive years. He came home for a record third success – “preceded only by loose horses”, in Peter O’Sullevan’s famous commentary – in 1977. Mullins’s fourth win – his first was with Hedgehunter in 2005 – gives him a share of the all-time record, along with George Dockeray, Fred Rimell and Ginger McCain.

At the end of a stormy week for Arne Slot there was respite in the form of a morale-boosting display from Rio Ngumoha. Liverpool’s 17-year-old winger marked his second start in the Premier League with a goal and a key part in the second for Mohamed Salah as the faltering champions recorded a first league win since February.

Liverpool appeared vulnerable after painful cup quarter-final defeats at Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, but Fulham never put that theory to the test. They were passive throughout as Liverpool, found the energy and finishing to reach the landmark of 1,500 league wins at Anfield. It was their second win in six league games after a Champions League away fixture this season and should repair confidence before a daunting assignment against PSG on Tuesday.

Police rescued boy after neighbour reported sounds of a child coming from vehicle in Hagenbach in eastern France

A malnourished nine-year-old boy was rescued after being locked in his father’s van since 2024 in eastern France, a prosecutor said.

A neighbour alerted police to “sounds of a child” coming from a vehicle in the village of Hagenbach, near the borders of Switzerland and Germany.

️ Latest updates from Moving Day at Augusta National
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Max Homa led at this stage two years ago, ending the week in third spot after falling away over the weekend with a pair of 73s. Undaunted, he came back last year, and tied for 12th. The 35-year-old Californian has fallen in love with Augusta National late in life, and he’s going well again this week. Birdies at 1 and 2 have whisked him up the standings to -4.

While we’re waiting for the leading players to take to the course, we’ve got time to indulge in a wee spot of Masters nostalgia. This episode of This Golfing Life, a wonderful new golf podcast hosted by the award-winning journalist and author Dan Davies, dives deep into the career of the 1980 and 1983 champion, the legendary Seve Ballesteros, and comes much recommended. (Fans of Paddington and Maurice Flitcroft may enjoy this episode too.) Get on it!

Officials accept that time has run out to pass law to allow transfer of islands to Mauritius

The UK government has been forced to shelve its legislation to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, after the US dropped its support for the agreement.

On Friday, UK government officials acknowledged that they had run out of time to pass legislation within the current parliamentary session, which ends in the coming weeks.

Corruption scandals and a surging opposition have turned the vote into the biggest test yet for the long-serving populist leader

The drone footage showed a sprawling residence in northern Hungary, complete with manicured gardens, a swimming pool and an underground garage. But it was what came next that captured much of the country’s imagination: zebras darting across the countryside.

Britain’s standing in the world was never the same after its assault on Egypt in 1956. Now the US risks repeating history in the Middle East

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump’s addiction to framing every event in the most apocalyptic terms is what allows conservative commentators such as Mark Levin to praise him as “a once-in-a-century president”.

But Trump cannot play out his entire presidency on a reckless high wire without eventually falling off – potentially taking America with him into a steep decline into the unknown.

The organisers of Eggtek in Lulworth and local police have two very different stories about how trouble started at the Easter event

A couple of thousand ravers were given the secret location for one of the annual highlights of the free party scene – the Easter bank holiday weekend Eggtek event.

The sun was shining and they arrived at a field on Ministry of Defence land in Lulworth, Dorset in a state of high excitement about a weekend of dancing to techno music playing from a variety of different stages and sound systems in the heart of the countryside.

The rightwing populist’s support for the majority-Hungarian population of Berehove means they may offer their votes in return

• Hungary elections: what is at stake and who is likely to win?

Across much of Ukraine, Sunday’s parliamentary election in Hungary is being followed with a singular hope: that Viktor Orbán, the Kremlin-friendly leader who has made opposition to Kyiv a centrepiece of his campaign, will be voted out after 16 years in office.

But in Berehove, the mood is more complicated.

Empire Polo Club, Indio, California
The pop star turned the desert into an ambitious theatrical revue with elaborate sets and celebrity cameos

Way back in the good old days of spring 2024, the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter ended her first Coachella set with a bold promise: “He’s drinking my bath water like it’s red wine / Coachella, see you back here when I headline,” she trilled as part of the ever-rotating, always naughty outro lines for her song Nonsense. Carpenter is a famously cheeky performer – her music, chock-full of double entendres and witty punchlines, is as much musical comedy as pop – but it seems, for once, that she was dead serious. Just two years later, she returned to the desert as the calling card for this year’s opening night, tongue still firmly in cheek. “I can’t believe I’m headlining Coachella!” she exclaimed to cheers that, true to form, she immediately melted to laughs – “Actually, I can … but it’s nicer to say that, right?”

Carpenter has reason to boast; the days when she chased virality with bawdy Nonsense outros now seem long gone. Her Coachella debut also marked the release of a daffy ditty called Espresso that soon turned everyone into “that’s that me” caffeine addicts, and catapulted the diminutive pop star (“oh I make quite an impression / five feet, to be exact,” she purrs in the delectable hit Taste) into pop’s big leagues. Near-constant touring and two albums – the no-skips Short n’ Sweet and the comparatively B-side Man’s Best Friend – cemented her status as one of pop’s consummate entertainers, churning out finely crafted, relentlessly horny hits at a pace not seen since perhaps Rihanna in the early 2010s. Nonsense, that 2022 song that first got my attention, didn’t even make the 20-plus song set list at Carpenter’s wildly ambitious headlining set, an audacious flex of ability and budget that declared her intentions for A-list permanence.

It’s a barbecue favourite, but which halloumi is firm, salty and satisfyingly squeaky and which is a milky mess?

• The best (and worst) supermarket feta

I used to get through about 300kg of halloumi each summer at my festival cafe. Our halloumi wrap was a bestseller, filled with superslaw (sprouts, cabbage, raisins, parsley and seeds), tahini sauce and broad bean falafel.

Halloumi is a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) product that has to be produced and packaged in Cyprus, and be at least 51% sheep and goat’s milk (cow’s milk can make up the rest). The curd has to be cooked and folded, which gives halloumi its characteristic shape and texture. This is why the block sometimes splits during cooking, a sign of authenticity that’s often mistaken for lack of quality. No preservatives, colourings or milk powder are allowed, either.

From catwalk versions to online vintage finds, the workwear staple is being recast as a marker of laidback cool

In many wardrobes, the thick, checked shirt is usually found among the gardening clothes, or it might be worn as an extra layer on a bitterly cold day. But, in 2026, for the first time since the 90s, it’s becoming a bona fide fashion item.

Flannel shirts have recently been worn by fashion editors and stylists on the front row, by the models Adwoa Aboah and Emily Ratajkowski and the Manchester City manager, Pep Guardiola. Brands including Marni, Chloé and Chanel had versions in their recent shows. And more significantly, this week comes the much anticipated new series of the Gen Z drama Euphoria, stills from which show Jacob Elordi’s character, Nate Jacobs, wearing a Bottega Veneta “flannel” shirt made of leather. Originally from the spring/summer 2023 collection, and worn by Kate Moss on the catwalk, it costs £4,600 in the shops.

The actor on the killer T rexes he’d like to meet, a 90% life lesson, and an awkward moment with Amy Adams

Born in Maryland, Richard Schiff, 70, came to fame when he was cast in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park. From 1999 to 2006 he played Toby Ziegler in the TV drama The West Wing, receiving an Emmy for his performance. Other work includes the series The Good Doctor and Ballers, and the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. He stars in Copenhagen at Hampstead Theatre until 2 May. He is married with two children and lives in Montana and New York City.

What is your greatest fear?
People finding out my greatest fear.

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days

David Attenborough celebrates the natural magic occurring close to home, and Keanu Reeves stars in Jonah Hill’s meta comedy-drama. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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

Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page star in a slinky new romcom, while the dissolute teens of the US drama are back in their 20s

You, Me & Tuscany
Out now
Where would the romcom be if everyone told the truth? When impulsive cook Anna (Halle Bailey) tells a porky pie about being engaged in order to justify her presence in an abandoned Tuscan villa, a train of events leading to true love is – naturally – set in motion. Regé-Jean Page and Nia Vardalos co-star.

• Arsenal manager says players must show character

• Iraola hails statement victory after run of draws

Mikel Arteta admitted Arsenal’s 2-1 defeat by Bournemouth was “a big punch in the face” and said his players must show more character if they are going to end their 22-year wait to be crowned Premier League champions.

Alex Scott struck the winning goal 16 minutes from time after Viktor Gyökeres had equalised from the spot for a nervy Arsenal after Eli Junior Kroupi’s opener. It means Manchester City now have a chance to cut Arsenal’s lead at the top of the table to six points with a game still in hand when they face Chelsea on Sunday, with Arsenal travelling to the Etihad Stadium next Sunday.

Outstanding trainer of his generation makes history with fourth victory in Aintree spectacular via I Am Maximus

Remember what Gary Lineker said about football being a simple game – you play for 120 minutes and the Germans win on penalties? The Grand National now has its equivalent. Tipping the winner of the most fiendish handicap in racing really is a simple game. Forget spending weeks assessing the form, weights, trends and attributes of the 34 runners. Just trust in Willie and let history do the rest.

For a moment or two, when Jordans established a seven-length lead on the turn for home, the prospect of a 28-1 upset loomed large. But then I Am Maximus began to purr, a packed crowd of 59,962 started to stir, and soon history was being made in a chaotic and stirring race.

• Leinster 43-13 Sale

• Leinster host Toulon at Aviva Stadium on 2/3 May

Semi-final number 17 beckons for Leinster. The one-time serial champions of this competition will take another, against Toulon, back at the Aviva in a couple of weeks’ time. Sounds epic. Probably will be. But Leinster are still not quite convincing.

This was a Sale team missing a host of their best players. No one gave them a chance, but they made a real nuisance of themselves for a good 50 minutes before yielding to the inevitable. Four Leinster tries in the last half-hour put them away, but after the home team’s struggle to do the same here against Edinburgh last week Toulon, who are hardly a study in eloquence themselves at the moment, will fancy their chances.

• Late double gives Hearts 3-1 win, Celtic overcome St Mirren 1-0

• Aberdeen end winless run by beating Hibernian 2-0

Celtic leapfrogged Rangers to move second in the Premiership with a 1-0 win over St Mirren but Hearts stayed clear at the top as two late goals saw them past Motherwell 3-1.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s first-half strike was enough at Celtic Park, while Rangers head to Falkirk on Sunday and can reduce Hearts’ lead to one point again with victory.

• England 33-12 Ireland

• Victory marred by injuries to Talling and Hunt

The Women’s Six Nations is still searching for a giantkiller, with the ever-dominant England not needing a consistent performance to overcome one of their main challengers in Ireland. So if people in Edinburgh see glasses of water shaking, trees being shoved to the floor and massive footprints on the ground next week, do not be alarmed, it’s just the Red Roses coming to town. Still, Ireland showed they had narrowed the gap as they cut the Red Roses’ winning margin to 21 points from 44 in last year’s tournament.

The overwhelming presence of the world champions will be diminished in round two at Murrayfield, as Morwenna Talling and Natasha Hunt were dealt long-term injuries. The exact prognosis has not yet been confirmed but the England head coach, John Mitchell, said he expected them to be ruled out for the rest of the tournament. The loss of Hunt is a blow but that of Talling is more significant, with four locks now missing because of injury or pregnancy.

Conor Benn v Regis Prograis also at Tottenham Stadium
Makhmudov on Russia’s grizzlies, God and Tyson Fury
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Arslanbek Makhmudov may look ferocious but Donald McRae found him to be very friendly when they sat down together. Unless, perhaps, you are a bear.

Although it does sound like he regrets that particularly contest. “It was very terrible to be honest,” Arslanbek told Don.

Two more Igor Thiago goals, yet another solitary Brentford point and a shared dream of European football that remains alive for both clubs. If a game can simultaneously prove drab and pulsating, this was somehow it – all bluster and endeavour forming a peculiar blend of incohesion in the hope of securing a rare continental prize.

A draw was, perhaps, a fair outcome, for all of Keith Andrews’ understandable disappointment at his side conceding Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s injury-time equaliser. Brentford have lost just one of their last nine Premier League matches, but the past four have, frustratingly, been drawn.

Mats Wieffer’s double reflected Brighton’s season, making the perfect late runs to secure the points at Championship-bound Burnley. It was their fifth win in six matches to leave them two points behind sixth-placed Chelsea.

Scott Parker was left frustrated after Jaidon Anthony and Bashir Humphreys scored but lengthy video assistant referee delays offered hope and the technology had to work hard to spot the illegalities. Ultimately, Wieffer settled the match, tripling his tally for the club, to boost Brighton’s European hopes, while leaving Burnley 12 points from safety with six games to play.

• Controversial penalty sparks 2-0 Ipswich win at Norwich

• Bottom-side Wednesday draw 0-0 at leaders Coventry

Ipswich gave their hopes of automatic promotion a massive boost by recording a hard-fought 2-0 win over Norwich at Carrow Road, while Coventry must wait for another day after being held 0-0 at home by Sheffield Wednesday.

Ipswich moved into the top two, with at least a game in hand on their nearest rivals, as first-half goals from Jaden Philogene, with a harsh penalty, and George Hirst completed a long overdue double over their East Anglian rivals.

Soon, thanks to the advance of robots, the only reason left to send humans to the moon will be as an ultra-expensive sport

• Martin Rees is the astronomer royal and a former president of the Royal Society; Donald Goldsmith is an astrophysicist and science communicator

The 2020s has seen a revival of the “Apollo spirit”. The US and China are seemingly in a race to send humans to the moon by the end of the decade – and thereafter, perhaps, even to Mars. Nasa astronauts have just returned from a 10-day journey looping around the moon. Although they arrived back safely, Nasa accepts that the lack of data makes it impossible to quantify the risks involved – this represents only the second launch for the Artemis system and the first to carry astronauts.

To date, estimated expenditures on the Artemis programme are close to $100bn (£75bn). The “one big beautiful bill” that the US Congress passed in July 2025 allocates $9.9bn for the Artemis IV and V missions. Still greater expenditures are envisioned for a well-developed lunar base.

Carer’s allowance turns 50 this year, but it’s no reflection of the labour of the millions who cook, clean and nurse behind closed doors

Imagine your house is on fire, and when you dial 999 the call handler suggests you try putting the blaze out yourself. Resources are tight, you see, and demand high, and the service increasingly relies on volunteers. Or perhaps your child’s maths teacher is off sick. The headteacher texts and asks if you can leave work to explain algebra to the class. It’s your family, after all, so shouldn’t you be the one to help?

The idea is ludicrous of course. And yet that’s exactly what is happening to the almost 6 million people in the UK who are unpaid carers for sick, disabled and older relatives. While we rightly wince at headlines of DIY dentistry and patients on NHS waiting lists crowdfunding for surgery, it has long been normalised for family to fill the gaping holes in the social care system.

Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and the author of Who Wants Normal? Life Lessons from Disabled Women

As the president spirals over his disastrous war, his threats have escalated beyond the red line of international law

Donald Trump has hung nine glowering portraits of himself throughout the White House, each one projecting a variation on the theme of intimidation. But gazing into his narcissistic pool of grimacing images has not calmed him when in his mind’s eye he stares into the abyss of the worst failure of his life.

Trump’s fiasco has inspired him to heightened performances of profane, vile and vicious threats. His grammar of atrocity has escalated from hateful rhetoric to threats of war crimes. What might have initially appeared as rage-quitting the video game that the White House communications department makes of his Iran War has crossed an inviolable red line of international law. His pouting and foot stomping have led him into the gravest territory.

It is the voting public in Israel that will settle their PM’s fate later this year. But all they have heard are promises of ‘total victory’ that prove to be hollow

It is a record of abject failure. I am not speaking of Donald Trump, though I could be. Instead, I am talking about his partner in this terrible war.

Naturally, Trump has been the star of the show. He has been the face of the 40-day war on Iran, whether dialling up the threats against the country in foul, bloodthirsty language – “a whole civilisation will die tonight” – or announcing on his own social media platform a two-week ceasefire and the talks that are supposed to begin this weekend in Islamabad. But Trump has had an ally at his side, who only now is entering the spotlight. That ally is Benjamin Netanyahu.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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

The Ukraine war on our doorstep is a constant threat. Contaminated drinking water is a dangerous new twist

In the second week of March, the nature vlogger Ilie Cojocari went out to film the arrival of spring on the Nistru (Dniester) river, 70 metres away from his home in Naslavcea, a village bordering Ukraine on the northernmost point of Moldova. But as he approached the river he could smell the stench of oil rising up from the water and see dark spots floating on its surface. Something was wrong.

Two days earlier, Russia had attacked Ukraine’s Novodnistrovsk hydropower complex 15 miles upriver. Cojocari had been kept awake all night by the sound of shelling. “No one slept in the [Moldovan] district of Ocniţa that night,” he told me.

Paula Erizanu is a Moldovan journalist and writer based in Chișinău

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.

Amid death, threats, obliterated buildings and wasted money, the administration’s remarks have been head-spinning to witness

Trump threatened to commit genocide and Iran came to the table. A little threat – plus the deaths of thousands of Iranians and 13 Americans, the obliteration of schools, homes, hospitals and mosques, the waste of $40bn by the US and losses to the Gulf nations of as much as $200bn – is all it took. Ergo: threatening genocide works.

That, anyway, is what the “secretary of war”, Pete Hegseth, strongly suggested in a press briefing on Wednesday, the day after the president vowed to wipe Iran’s “whole civilization” off the map and then a few hours later announced a ceasefire, obviating the need to wipe Iran’s civilization off the map, at least for two weeks.

Military euphemisms can be deadly. Yet the brutal rhetoric of the US and Israel is proving still more lethal

“Metaphors can kill,” the linguist George Lakoff wrote in an influential essay on the Gulf war. “The use of a metaphor with a set of definitions becomes pernicious when it hides realities in a harmful way.” He described the effects of the US employment of business cost-and-benefit analogies, sporting comparisons and the fairytale of the just war with heroes and villains.

All veiled the reality of conflict. Euphemism was long the preferred choice for the US military. Spokespeople discussed “collateral damage” rather than civilian deaths and “surgical strikes”, framing destruction as both precise and part of a necessary and ultimately healing process. Donald Trump chooses naked menace instead. This week he issued a genocidal threat against Iran, having previously threatened to bomb it “back to the stone age” and destroy bridges and power plants – schools and medical facilities having already been pulverised. He said that he was “not at all” concerned about potential war crimes.

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.

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and the Oscar-winning film One Battle After Another are grim parables of today. But they are not without hope

As Margaret Atwood has said, all dystopian fiction is “really about now”. No wonder the genre is flourishing. This week Atwood’s bleak vision of a future America as a patriarchal theocracy returned to TV screens with the adaptation of her prize-winning 2019 novel The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, set in a chillingly recognisable militarised America, swept the Oscars last month.

Back in 1984 when Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, she feared that its central premise – that the US could be transformed from a liberal democracy into Gilead, a theocratic dictatorship after a coup – was too outrageous to convince readers. She need not have worried. By the time the novel was made into the award-winning TV series in 2017, it was all too believable. Arriving just after Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and the rollback of women’s rights, the show felt made for the moment. Atwood was hailed as a prophet. The red-and-white handmaid robes became a symbol of female defiance across the globe. “For a long time we were going away from Gilead and then we turned around and started going back,” Atwood said of her decision to write a follow-up more than 30 years later.

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

Readers respond to an article by Sally Kyd on how road safety rules are being broken and lead to countless deaths every year

Sally Kyd’s article (Too many drivers see road safety rules as a personal affront. It’s time to tighten up UK laws, 6 April) rightly highlights the alarming inadequacy of our current legal framework regarding driving offences. The ambiguity between “dangerous” and “careless” driving not only undermines public confidence, but insults the victims of road violence, as seen in the heartbreaking cases of Mayar Yahia and the Lincoln teenagers. Kyd is absolutely correct: relying on the abstract, subjective standard of a “competent and careful driver” is failing us, especially as road policing diminishes and driving standards visibly decline.

However, while redefining offences and restoring road policing are crucial steps, they largely address the symptoms of poor driving after the fact. To truly transform road safety and reframe driving as a lifelong responsibility, we must proactively mandate enforced, ongoing regulation. Currently, a motorist can pass a test at 17 and never face another assessment, despite decades of changes in vehicle technology, traffic density, and the Highway Code itself. This is illogical and unsafe. We urgently need a system of mandatory periodic retesting to ensure skills do not degrade into the dangerous complacency that Kyd describes.

Dr Nigel Fairweather and Philip Clarke on the newly released Nasa photographs showing the far side of the moon

There has been much excitement about the crew of Artemis II seeing the far side of the moon (Artemis II swings back around after completing record-setting moon flyby, 6 April). Let us remember that on 7 October 1959 the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 (also known as Lunik 3) photographed the back of the moon for the first time. A picture was sent down to Earth and printed in Pravda newspaper using standard wire-photo equipment.

Meanwhile, the Daily Express obtained the photograph via the Jodrell Bank radio telescope but got the proportions wrong, printing it too wide or too narrow (I’m not sure which). I was a schoolboy obsessed with space, so I wrote to Pravda in Moscow asking for a copy of the newspaper with the (correct) moon photograph and they kindly obliged. Incidentally, around the time I had heart surgery a few years ago, I dreamed that I’d been in a figure-of-eight orbit around the Earth and the moon. I awoke from surgery, flung my arms in the air and declared loudly: “I’m alive!” (I’d been told I had a 90% chance of survival.)
Dr Nigel Fairweather
Brixham, Devon

Readers respond to an article by Bim Adewunmi on encountering the reticence of British people after she spent a decade living in the US

It’s funny how returning “home” can feel alien and apprehensive when you’ve spent years living abroad (I’m back in London after a decade in the US – and I miss those friendly New Yorkers, 5 April). There’s a reverse culture shock when your world-expanded self arrives back in a city you’ve known so well, and missed, but now see through a different lens.

In my experience, something always pulls you homeward eventually. You miss the infrastructure, the convenience, the variety and, mostly, the people. Not just your close friends and family, but the general populace too: the shop staff who leave you alone, the fellow commuters who know not to make eye contact, let alone dare small talk, the restaurant bill that arrives with service already included and no pressure to calculate the appropriate tip.

Christian nationalism has as little to do with the true values of Christianity as national socialism has to do with the values of socialism, says Rev Prof Nick Ross

Thank you for your editorial on the religious right (The Guardian view on Britain’s religious right: using and abusing faith in the pursuit of power, 5 April). The truth is that Christian nationalism has as little to do with the true values of Christianity as national socialism has to do with the values of socialism. It is a perversion of the faith … almost an oxymoron in its combination of opposites.

I serve in a church in the heart of Smethwick in the West Midlands, where our congregation reflects the area, being made up of those born and bred in the area, the families of the Windrush generation and new immigrants and asylum seekers from Africa and Asia.

Former Ukrainian major general says 4kg of material was most likely an attempt to influence Hungary’s election

• Hungary elections explainer

The amount of explosives discovered in Serbia last week would not have been enough to destroy the Balkan Stream gas pipeline, prompting an expert to conclude it was probably a Russian intelligence plot aimed at influencing Hungary’s impending election.

A former Ukrainian major general and a munitions specialist told the Guardian calculations made by his company showed the 4kg of explosives recovered by Serbia’s military security agency in Kanjiža could not have seriously ruptured the pipe.

Lynette and Brian Hooker, from Michigan, were years into a sailing adventure when Brian said his wife fell overboard

Lynette Hooker bounced around the deck of the docked Soul Mate, smiled into the camera and proclaimed, “We’re finally leaving Kemah,” referring to a Texas port town.

“It’s only been four months,” she said as her husband, Brian, tugged on some rigging as they got ready to set sail.

GB News confirmed presenter was taken ill last week and he is said to be responding well to treatment

The television presenter Eamonn Holmes is recovering in hospital after a stroke.

A spokesperson for GB News, where Holmes presents the breakfast show alongside Ellie Costello, said that the Northern Irish broadcaster became ill last week. He is said to be responding well to treatment.

Three people wounded in attack at Grand Central subway station by man who stated he was ‘Lucifer’, police said

Police in New York City shot and killed a man who stabbed three people on a subway platform in New York City’s Grand Central station, the city’s police commissioner said.

Jessica Tisch, who leads the New York police department, told reporters at a news conference at the station that officers, flagged down by a witness to the stabbings at about 9.40am, had encountered a suspect, armed with a machete, who defied at least 20 verbal orders to drop the weapon and repeatedly stated “that he was Lucifer”.

Finbar Sullivan was stabbed in north-west London in early evening on Tuesday and pronounced dead at scene

A man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after the death of 21-year-old Finbar Sullivan, who was stabbed to death in London’s Primrose Hill.

The Metropolitan police arrested a 27-year-old man on Friday. A second man, who is 25, has also been arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender. Both remain in police custody.

Iran war drives demand for solar panels, heat pumps and EVs, with energy bills expected to rise 18% from July

British households are turning to green home energy upgrades in record numbers to try to keep bills down as the Iran crisis sends global oil and gas prices soaring, data from leading energy suppliers suggests.

Figures show demand for solar panels, electric vehicles and heat pumps in Great Britain has leapt since the war began on 28 February, as households brace for a sharp increase in monthly payments when the next energy price cap takes effect in the summer.

On Monday, a public inquiry will reopen, nine years after the plan was proposed and a toxic local battle began

When Fidelma O’Kane retired more than a decade ago from her career as a social worker and lecturer, she thought she would be “travelling and having a glass of wine and eating chocolate and reading books” while based in the quiet, hilly corner of rural County Tyrone where she has lived almost all her life.

It didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, an idle remark from a neighbour would set O’Kane on a path that would become an all-consuming mission. A mining company, the neighbour told her, was planning to drill for long-rumoured reserves of gold in the Sperrins, the low peatland mountain range in Northern Ireland where O’Kane’s family has lived for generations.

Ex-footballer to decorate gnome for annual event after organisers lift ban on the ornaments dating back to 1927

Rare roses and stunning irises are usually among the most coveted items at the Chelsea flower show. But this year, the star attraction might be pink, sequined – and decorated by David Beckham.

The former England football captain is co-designing a garden at the May event with King Charles and as part of that effort he has been given a garden gnome to paint. It will be auctioned off for charity.

Neill says ‘one of the most beautiful and remote places in the world’ will be permanently changed if Bendigo-Ophir wins fast-track approval

The grapevines in Sam Neill’s vineyard in Central Otago – a picturesque region known for its undulating hills and wines – are pregnant with pinot noir grapes, almost ripe for picking as autumn arrives.

“My family has been here for over 150 years. I’m connected to this land like nowhere else on earth,” the 78-year-old actor and winemaker says. “It’s perfect for wine. It’s great for tourism. And it’s one of the most beautiful and strange, remote places in the world.”

Police arrest man on suspicion of being in charge of a dog dangerously out of control and causing injury resulting in death

A 19-year-old woman has died after being attacked by a dog at a property in Essex.

Police have arrested a 37-year-old man on suspicion of being in charge of a dog dangerously out of control and causing injury resulting in death, after the incident on Friday. He is now in police custody.

Sudanese national Alnour Mohamed Ali, accused of piloting small boat, is charged with endangering life

A man accused of piloting a small boat carrying four people who drowned trying to cross the Channel has been charged over their deaths.

Alnour Mohamed Ali, a Sudanese national, was charged with endangering life after two men and two women died trying to board a small boat crossing the Channel on Thursday, the National Crime Agency said.

Conservative leader promises biggest peacetime rearmament effort in UK history if her party is re-elected

The Conservatives would reinstate the two-child benefit cap and use the savings for a wide-ranging spending splurge on defence in what Kemi Badenoch said would be “the biggest peacetime programme of rearmament in our country’s history”.

Speaking at a defence conference in London, the Tory leader criticised the government for Britain’s “lack of readiness” for war, which has been exposed by recent world events.

Conservatives disowned Derek Bullock in 2023 after he allegedly used racial slur to call for people of Pakistani heritage to be shot

A Reform UK candidate for next month’s council elections was twice disciplined by the Conservatives over alleged offensive or racist comments, while another shared conspiracy theories about Covid, it has emerged, as the full slate of candidates was confirmed.

More than 5,000 council places in England are being contested on 7 May, along with several mayoralties, and elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, in a significant test for all the major parties.

Even as a triumphant moon flyby primes agency for a 2028 landing, Trump’s proposed budget cuts cast pall on US space program

The astronauts on board Artemis II were “almost poets”, Nasa’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, declared on Friday, referring to their inspiring words as they swung above the lunar surface.

They were, he said, “ambassadors for humanity” as they became the first humans to travel to the moon and return safely to Earth since 1972, on a mission that broke a distance record.

Chris Kempczinski’s taste test was mocked online, to which he said his mother had taught him: ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full’

The chief executive officer of McDonald’s recently blamed etiquette guidance from his mother for a February on-camera taste test that made him a target for ridicule – and summarily recorded another video of him eating one of the fast-food giant’s offerings in a manner potential consumers found awkward.

Chris Kempczinski suggested to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) earlier in April that he was simply heeding maternal advice to never talk with his mouth full when he took the humorously small bite at the center of a viral video which depicted him discussing and sampling the new Big Arch burger from McDonald’s.

Archaeological record suggests hunter gatherers were playing games of chance at the end of the last ice age

Native American hunter gatherers were using dice for gaming and gambling more than 6,000 years before the practice appeared anywhere else, a new study argues.

It says dice were being made and used on the western great plains of North America at the end of the last ice age, more than 12,000 years ago.

Born into slavery, Adolf Ludvig Couschi Badin became part of Swedish royal court and left legacy of books and letters

In 1760, a Black child around 10 years old arrived at the Swedish royal court as a “gift” to the queen. Adolf Ludvig Gustav Fredrik Albrecht Couschi, who became known as Badin (derived from the French for joker or prankster), later held titles including chamberlain, court secretary, ballet master and civil servant.

He is thought to have been born into slavery between 1747 and 1750 in the former Danish colony of St Croix (now part of the US Virgin Islands), where he was “owned” by Christian Lebrecht von Pröck, who took him to Denmark. He was “received” by Gustaf de Brunck, a Swedish councillor of commerce, who later “donated” Badin to Queen Louisa Ulrika.

Temporary limit in England and Wales won’t stop many facing higher charges from autumn due to jump in inflation from Iran war

• Government caps some student loan interest at 6%

Some students and graduates are likely to pay slightly less interest on their student loans than expected as a result of action taken by the government this week.

But while many higher earners will benefit from the news that interest will be capped at 6% for the 2026-27 academic year, many others are likely to have more interest added to their student loan from this autumn than is being applied at the moment. For that, they can blame Donald Trump.

Suspect arrested but not identified and has allegedly made similar threats to OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters

A 20-year-old man allegedly tossed a molotov cocktail at the home of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, before the sun rose on Friday, according to statements from San Francisco police.

The suspect, who allegedly threw the fire bomb at the $27m North Beach residence around 4.12am, has been arrested but not identified. The same person allegedly threatened to torch OpenAI’s headquarters in the city. No injuries were reported.

Credit can be used to offset future bills as full-year losses at UK division widen to £41.3m and it adds 92 stores

Starbucks’s UK retail arm received a £13.7m corporation tax credit last year, even as its sales increased 6% and it added more than 90 stores.

The credit, which can be used to offset future tax bills, comes after losses widened to £41.3m in the 12 months to the end of September – almost matching the £40m it paid in royalty and licence fees to its parent company.

Prices were up 3.3% over the year, adding to the unpredictability that first came with Trump tariffs

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US inflation soared in March amid the US-Israel war with Iran, with prices up 0.9% compared with last month and 3.3% over the year, according to new data released on Friday.

The spike in the consumer price index (CPI), which measures the price of a basket of goods and services, is the largest in nearly two years and the first official measure of how the conflict has affected US consumer prices, particularly as Iran blocked the strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas would typically pass.

Fraudulent music streams have long been a scourge for the industry, but experts say generative AI has supercharged it

Jason Moran, a renowned jazz composer and pianist, got a strange call from a friend last month. The friend, bassist Burniss Earl Travis, was curious about Moran’s new record that he saw on the music streaming service Spotify.

“It has your name on it,” Travis told him. “But I don’t think it’s you.”

Stardom came fast and hard for the wunderkind who created the hit HBO series Girls aged just 23. Now she’s written a tell-all memoir about why she was forced to retreat from the spotlight

• Lena Dunham on going to rehab: read an exclusive extract from Famesick

If there is something to be learned from the words people pick for their passwords and proxies, then Lena Dunham’s choice of aliases – pseudonyms that, as a public person, she has used over the years to conceal her identity when checking into rehab or ordering room service – give us a tiny glimpse into the writer and director’s self-image. Among her staples, “Lauri Reynolds” (after her mum, Laurie, with whom she is strikingly close); “Rose O’Neill” (after the American millionaire illustrator, who lost her fortune to burnout and hangers-on); and my favourite, “Renata Halpern”, an alias Dunham shares with readers of her delicious new memoir, Famesick, without explaining the name’s origin.

“Has anyone else clocked the Renata Halpern reference?” I ask Dunham, who is in her apartment in New York, talking fast via video call while waiting for an egg-and-cheese bagel to be run up from the deli. On the brink of 40, she is in her dark-haired era – very Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – which, this morning, is set against a bright orange shirt and the pale, glowy skin she describes as the single happy side-effect of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic condition of the connective tissue with which Dunham was diagnosed in 2019. Later this month, she’ll return to London, where she has lived for the last five years with her husband, Luis Felber, and where she enjoys greater anonymity than in her native New York – although, she says, not enough to dispense with the aliases. (“Just when you think no one cares, someone does something creepy, so you have to watch out.”)

Fanning is a young single mother who makes adult content in this hilarious series. It is smart, sexy and bold – and Pfeiffer is unmissable as her ex-Hooters-waitress mother

I promise, it’s the title that drew me in. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a new Apple TV show (out Wednesday), starring Elle Fanning as a single mum who becomes an OnlyFans model. It joins a niche canon of similarly blunt titles about generic obstacles. To wit: Fleishman Is in Trouble; Big Trouble in Little China. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is better, though. Check out the assonance, the rhythm. It has great mouthfeel, to borrow a word from food reviewing, one I instantly regret.

Our hero, Margo Millet, is a first-year college student who falls pregnant by her professor. The married academic tells her to get an abortion; her friends agree with him. She has the baby. She drops out of college, falls into money troubles. She attempts to fall out of them by joining the notorious content creation platform. She does nude video shoots, in the character of a sexy alien. If none of this inflames you, can I interest you in Nick Offerman as Margo’s pro-wrestler, drug-addicted father? Or Michelle Pfeiffer as her blue collar, ex-Hooters-waitress mother? No? Are you dead?

In this week’s newsletter: From forgotten gems to cult curios, these shows quietly shaped our viewing habits, and some of TV’s most charming oddballs deserve your attention

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The quizshow will never die. Nuclear war could rid the earth of all living creatures bar the cockroaches and still, a shiny floored half-hourer hosted by Stephen Mulhern will somehow be airing on the emergency broadcast system. Quizshows have been airing on British screens since 1938, when a televised spelling bee was broadcast on the BBC, and they have remained remarkably resilient. Today they seem a good accompaniment to an era where everyone seems to be tapping away at puzzles on their phone.

Scroll down the channel guide of your TV and it won’t be long until you find a quizshow (and that one will almost certainly be The Chase). The format remains completely irresistible to commissioners. Relatively cheap and endlessly replicable, it serves as perfect filler for teatime TV. If one fiendishly high-concept quiz doesn’t catch fire it can be quietly cancelled without too much bother, knowing another will be conjured up in short order. If it really catches fire, in the manner of Pointless, Tipping Point or The 1% Club, primetime and the hallowed celebrity special awaits. And if it really catches fire, then well, you have something that can trundle on for decades (The Chase is now almost old enough to vote) before being regurgitated endlessly in repeat form on Challenge.

What happened to his disappearing Höfner bass? Plus: Jack Whitehall helms Saturday Night Live UK before it takes a break. Here’s what to watch this evening

8.45pm, BBC Two

There are hints of Ted Lasso and Schitt’s Creek in this delightful series in which an unexpected death triggers all manner of fun and games. It’s lovely comfort TV

Ah, the roar of the greasepaint – the smell of the crowd! Who doesn’t love the theatre? Or at least the idea of the theatre. Not the fact of the theatre – spending a fortune on a ticket, getting dressed up and going into town, either hungry or with too early a dinner inside you, trying to suspend enough disbelief to engage with Actors doing Big Acting in front of you when you’re too used to Small Acting watched from the sofa in front of a streaming platform. Then home too late to recover properly before bed.

It’s not just me. I know it isn’t.

American Classic is on MGM+

Pushing his winsome songwriting into rootsier territory with a little help from co-producer MJ Lenderman, the New Yorker’s debut album is primed to soundtrack your summer

From New York City, New York
Recommended if you like The Clean, This is Lorelei, The Feelies
Up next Debut album Hercules out 10 July

Tracey Nelson’s self-titled 2025 debut EP was one of the year’s best lesser-heard gems: Five tracks of sparkling, winsome indie-rock that recalled classic antipodean jangle bands the Clean, Twerps and Dick Diver. Tracks such as New Years Flowers and Just Shoot Me Now suggested that Austin Noll – the NYC-based singer-songwriter behind the project – was a classicist with a keen sense for bright melodies and self-deprecating one-liners.

(New Year)
Londoner Alex Peringer breaks from his intriguing and outlandish dance music with this debut album of charming bedroom-pop ballads

A decade ago, Londoner Alex Peringer intrigued underground club circles with his outlandish take on dance music. Structured around dizzying time signatures and wry tales of unfulfilling lovers and pills gone wrong, his tracks referenced everything from UK funky to new wave and sea shanties. Then came several years of near silence – now broken by this self-released debut album, How Long Has It Been? The record acknowledges this break not just in the title, but also in its sound. On first listen, it couldn’t seem more different to Peringer’s early work, with those discordant constructions now replaced by the warm tinkering of the Rhodes electric piano and ostensibly earnest sentiment. But traces of that eccentricity still linger in this collection of atmospheric bedroom-pop ballads.

The record takes winter as its theme, though it feels fitting for this transitional time of year, with its stories of introspection and dodgy weather set against soft, simple arrangements. A handful of subtly wonky elements stop it from sounding overly polished or guileless: Before and After slips in a reference to a “fateful bong”; on the dreamy duet Two Lovers, glitches cut through the twinkling keys and mumblecore guest vocals. Elsewhere, the chords waver on Black Keys, one of several gorgeous and forlorn instrumentals.

(Polydor)
The British singer-songwriter replaces introspection with euphoric choruses, 80s synths and even happy hardcore on her vivid second LP

As a profession, pop stardom has been in existential crisis for some time. It used to be simple – a hit single was the only real qualification – but in a post-monocultural world, the job title is often bestowed as a result of more piecemeal success: a Brit rising star award and Taylor Swift support slot here, 4m monthly Spotify listeners and a Top 5 album there.

This, specifically, is the CV of Lincolnshire’s Holly Humberstone, who has established herself in the pop sphere without ever troubling the singles chart. While an undeniable banger has eluded the 26-year-old, her sound is faultlessly chart-friendly. Like Swift, Humberstone delivers earnestly wordy lyrics in intimate, near-ASMR tones atop 80s synth-pop decorated with a deluge of hooks. For this second album, she has dropped the hint of gothic melancholy that accompanied her debut, Paint My Bedroom Black. Cruel World is peppy bordering on euphoric: inordinately sunny break-up song To Love Somebody is powered by a stadium-ready pre-chorus, while the brilliantly catchy White Noise plugs into nostalgically naff disco to channel imperial-phase Kylie.

Colin Currie Group
(Colin Currie Records)
The fourth Reich album for Currie’s specialist ensemble celebrates the composer’s precise patterns with an enjoyably chilled feel and plenty of dynamic niceties

The Colin Currie Group formed 20 years ago to honour Steve Reich’s 70th birthday with a performance of Drumming. This year, the great American composer turns 90, making this, the group’s fourth Reich album on Currie’s own label, a double celebration.

Sextet, hailing from 1985, features two keyboardists playing piano and synthesisers alongside four percussionists on marimbas, vibraphones, bass drums, crotales, sticks and tam-tams. Shifting patterns interlock with the precision of a Swiss watch across one of the composer’s typical fast, slow, fast, slow, fast arcs. Currie’s recording flickers with subtle nuances with a naturalistic sound less closely mic’d than in Reich’s own classic accounts.

The South African author on discovering Colette, being inspired by JG Ballard, and the subversive joys of Asako Yuzuki

My earliest reading memory
The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss, particularly the little red fan the cat holds in the tip of its tail. At the age of five, I was reading The Famous Five, getting to grips with Enid Blyton’s most complex characters, Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin. I was born in apartheid South Africa. The children in the Famous Five series had no human rights problems and it is set in Dorset, a landscape that was totally unknown to me. My bedroom window in Johannesburg looked out on a garden of bone-white grass and a peach tree.

My favourite book growing up
I was delighted to move on to the imaginative sophistication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. CS Lewis’s lucky strike was to come up with the idea that a wardrobe was the portal to another world. Although she terrified me, I wanted to meet the White Witch, who rode on a sleigh pulled by white reindeer.

A Stoic philosopher navigates midlife in this madcap comedy from the author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette

What would Marcus Aurelius have made of the Kardashians? Would Seneca have been amused by mindfulness apps? These were questions I had never consciously pondered before reading Maria Semple’s new novel. Neither, in my irrational and unvirtuous state, had I spent much time considering the application of Stoic philosophy to any other key aspects of modern life.

Semple, best known for her exuberant, ingenious bestseller Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, here presents us with Adora Hazzard, Stoic philosopher and divorcee. Adora lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side, spending her days tutoring the twin sons of an old-money family in philosophy and seeking to live according to Stoic virtues, without recourse to destabilising “externals”. But her settled life is soon disrupted by that most classic of externals, the handsome stranger. “Curse these alluring men who throw us off our game!” (Marcus Aurelius, paraphrased.)

Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley; Night Babies by Lucie McKnight Hardy; Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell; Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker

Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley (Gollancz, £22)
In a Britain racked by the effects of climate change, about 50 years from now, Marc Winters’ quiet life as a ranger on a nature reserve in Essex is about to be disturbed. Counter-terrorism officers arrive to question him about events from eight years before, when a cult his sister Izzy was part of had self-immolated. He’d hardly been aware of this group of “deep dreamers”, who thought they could change the world through a sort of mental time travel enabled by psychotropic mushrooms. But now both government agents and deep dreamers alike think Izzy must have passed some vital information to her brother, whether he knows it or not. With no idea of the existential danger he faces, Marc sets out to investigate. Beautifully written, blending close attention to the natural world with hallucinogenic dreams and a mind-boggling premise, this is an eco-thriller like no other from one of Britain’s best SF writers.

Night Babies by Lucie McKnight Hardy (John Murray, £18.99)
When their house is flooded, Astrid and her husband take the refuge offered by her friend Flora in the Brecon Beacons. Astrid was particularly affected by the flood, which damaged paintings intended for her first solo exhibition at a prestigious London gallery. The old chapel her friend is renovating becomes her new studio. But instead of working to salvage her portraits, she becomes obsessed with painting the landscape of lake and sky. She tries to shrug off her bad dreams, strange physical sensations, missing items and the dirty, child-sized handprints on the walls, but disturbing facts about the chapel’s history emerge, and she’s not the only one affected by what appears to be a malevolent haunting. She’s haunted, too, by memories of a student art trip to Florence, a significant turning point in her friendship with Flora. Astrid is her own worst enemy, but her issues – ambition, envy, ambivalence about motherhood – will resonate with many readers. A sophisticated, chilling tale that works both as supernatural and psychological horror.

From an extraordinary debut inspired by a real-life breakdown to a creepy masterpiece, here’s a guide to the Scottish novelist’s works

Next week marks 20 years since the death of the Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist Muriel Spark. She was best known for her 22 novels – uncanny, astute and witty – beginning with her 1957 debut The Comforters. Here, James Bailey, the author of a new biography, Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, guides us through her oeuvre.

***

As The Super Mario Galaxy Movie storms the box office, we look back at the best forgotten games inspired by Tetris, Lemmings and … vitamins?

It should be no surprise that the latest Super Mario movie is smashing box office records – despite the, let’s say mixed, reviews. Nintendo’s iconic plumber has been a pop culture staple for 45 years, starring in some of the bestselling video games ever made, from the original Donkey Kong through to the joyous Super Mario Bros Wonder and the chaotic Mario Kart World.

But as with any storied showbiz career, there have been some lesser works. Who can forget – or actually remember – Hotel Mario, a door-shutting puzzle game for the doomed Philips CD-i console? Or what about Mario Teaches Typing, a 1992 educational game for the PC in which players navigate the Mushroom Kingdom by … correctly inputting words. Yet there have also been genuine treasures lost along the way. Here, then, are seven of our favourite much-overlooked Mario odysseys.

As real astronauts vanish behind the moon, games have long tried to evoke the fragile quiet of drifting through space

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Last week’s launch of the Artemis II space mission was a stunning spectacle, the 17-storey-high rockets erupting into cacophonous life before wrenching the craft through the Earth’s atmosphere. But the images that have come since hold just as much impact: the tiny Orion craft and its four-person crew drifting silently through space, further and further from home.

In his autobiography, the Apollo astronaut Michael Collins described this feeling perfectly. Left in the command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on the lunar surface, he wrote: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”

PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox, Nintendo Switch 2, PC; Deck Nine/Square Enix
Max and Chloe, the two teen protagonists of the 2015 game, reunite as adults – giving players the chance to finally finish their journey

In 2015, Life Is Strange stood out for two reasons: its female protagonists, a depressingly rare feature at the time, and its unique brand of millennial cringe. The thirtysomething Frenchmen who created this series may not have had the best grasp of the 2010s teen lexicon, but they did have a good gauge on what’s important about any coming-of-age story, and that’s the relationships between the characters. Max Caulfield, the shy, time-travelling wannabe photographer, and Chloe Price, the traumatised, punk-rock tearaway, had a memorably intense friendship. It was the heart and soul of that game, and now, 11 years later, they are reunited as adults in this final chapter of their story.

For a lot of players, Max and Chloe felt like more than best friends. The game’s original developers were not brave enough to make this explicit in 2015, but newer custodians Deck Nine retconned a romantic relationship between Max and Chloe into 2024’s Life Is Strange: Double Exposure. You can still play Reunion as if the two really were just friends, resulting in some awkward ambiguity in some scenes. Whichever way you slice it, though, this is a game about first love, and how it always stays with you, even when its object does not. And damned if it didn’t make me feel something.

We are paying more for a PlayStation so that idiots can use ChatGPT to mislead people on dating apps – something is rotten in the state of gaming

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When the PlayStation 5 launched almost five and a half years ago, it was listed at £449 in the UK. If you were to buy one at the recommended retail price today, it would be £569.99, or £789.99 for the updated Pro model. Sony has just raised the price of its console by another £90, the latest in a series of hikes. This is unprecedented: consoles have always decreased in price over time (until they become retro collectibles – the other day, I saw someone asking £200 for a SNES on Vinted). So, what’s going on?

Unfortunately, this is another case of artificial intelligence ruining things for everyone. AI data centres need lots and lots and lots of computing power to be able to present you with lies whenever you Google anything, and this has pushed up demand and pricing for RAM and storage. This isn’t the only reason prices are rising – the wars in Ukraine and Iran have caused global economic disruption, and rampant inflation has eaten into many companies’ bottom line. But AI is the cause that’s easiest to get angry about, because it doesn’t need to be this way.

The Bombay Beach Biennale started as an intimate event and has grown dramatically – but some question whether it sustain its DIY atmosphere

It is hard to imagine a stranger place for a large outdoor art festival than Bombay Beach – a tiny, visibly impoverished California desert town over 150 miles east of Los Angeles and 235ft below sea level. The heat is scorching even in March, and the smell of decay wafts over from the nearby Salton Sea; a dying inland lake created by an irrigation engineering disaster over 100 years ago.

But the Bombay Beach Biennale is not your ordinary art festival.

Swedish artist, now regarded as predecessor to Kandinsky and Mondrian, died thinking world was not ready for her work

The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died believing the world was not ready for the mystical paintings that would shock the art world half a century later.

The painter, now credited with pioneering the abstract art movement, did not seek recognition after peers rejected her avant garde works. Instead, she ordered that they be hidden for 20 years after her death and never sold.

City Hall, Sheffield
The masterful performer previews her allegorical new album about the ‘fight for democracy over tyranny’ amid a set full of immaculate musicianship

Ahead of her 18th studio album, In Times of Dragons, and on her first tour in three years, Tori Amos is navigating the brutal state of the world in a way only she knows how: by channelling Celtic gods and turning into a half-dragon, half-woman character. The allegorical tales that make up her forthcoming record – “a metaphorical story about the fight for democracy over tyranny” – are evident on the early outing and live debut of Shush. A dark, doomy, track that slowly unfurls like a southern gothic tale, albeit one about battling an evil billionaire lizard demon husband. It’s big, dramatic, world-building stuff. But it’s also emblematic of Amos’s knack for delivering complex, weighty subject matter with deftness and fluidity.

However, this is not a run through of her as-yet-unreleased album. Instead, Amos dives deep into her vast and sprawling back catalogue, from the delicate deep cut Ruby Through the Looking-Glass to the atmospheric, slow-burn jazzy grooves of Little Amsterdam.

Royal Albert Hall, London
On a tour playing Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister in full on alternate nights, Stuart Murdoch and co wittily reanimate their world of aesthetes and misfits

It’s a double 30th anniversary for Belle and Sebastian, whose first two albums, Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister, both came out in 1996. Not that most people heard Tigermilk back then: only 1,000 copies existed until its 1999 reissue. Taken together, though, they were a perfect introduction to frontman Stuart Murdoch’s private universe of aesthetes and misfits (like the girl in Expectations, “making life-size models of the Velvet Underground in clay”), as instantly inviting as the Smiths’ debut, Wes Anderson’s 90s movies or JD Salinger’s short stories.

The Glaswegians quickly became more diverse and extroverted but it was these two records, performed here in full over two nights, that made them cult worthy. As former bassist Stuart David says in the introductory film, they had a “slightly shambolic magic”.

The biggest names in and out of Hollywood are choosing to be interviewed by their peers rather than journalists, leaving many more revealing questions on the table

We live in a time where ultra-rich businesspeople have accrued more wealth and power than ever, creating a growing sentiment that they ought to be held to account, no doubt exacerbated by the fact that a wealthy businessman is in his second self-enriching term in the US presidency. So naturally, CNN, Donald Trump’s supposed nemesis, has figured out the best way to use their resources to better interrogate this elevated class: by letting them interview each other about their businesses. The 1 on 1 is named not for an actual journalist going up against a major business leader; they would probably never agree to that. So instead, CEOs can “grill” each other about whatever they mutually agree are the correct things to ask fellow elites. A spokesperson says these conversations will be “refreshingly direct”. Refreshing to who, exactly, is not specified, but you can take a guess.

This is disappointing but also inevitable. Interviews, especially on-camera interviews with people not directly involved with politics, have increasingly become all-subject, no-perspective affairs, starting from the ground zero of the entertainment industry – a leader in content-light mutual admiration. For a splashy new Vogue piece, for example, the journalist whose byline is affixed to a conversation featuring Meryl Streep and Anna Wintour, tied to the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, takes the fly-on-the-wall version of journalism to an extreme: the “moderator” of this conversation is Greta Gerwig, Streep and Wintour’s fellow celeb. Chloe Malle, the writer and Wintour’s successor as Vogue editor, meanwhile, compares herself to a “court stenographer” without mentioning that in courts, typically the lawyers and judge aren’t all on the same team. There’s no byline at all on the introduction to another recent piece where Marc Jacobs – finally, a leg up for this underappreciated figure! – interviews Sabrina Carpenter. Presumably someone else was actually in the room with them – unless Jacobs brought his own recorder, did his own transcriptions and anonymously wrote that intro. Journalists, apparently, should be neither particularly seen nor heard.

I was on the verge of failing Mandarin, when a last-second pivot caused me to utterly fall in love with Korean culture, and send me in a totally new direction

The first time I discovered South Korea was during a Mandarin homework mishap in 2013. I was 16 and lacked all the characteristics required to be good at languages: confidence, a thick skin and any desire to talk out loud. Forced to choose a language, Mandarin seemed like the best option for me – with a self-proclaimed photographic memory, I spent hours cramming complex Chinese characters, convincing myself I could pass my exams without speaking a word. I could not.

My vow of silence was shattered three months in, when I was introduced to my native-Chinese conversation teacher. As suspected, I was woeful. I cried, she cried. Stunned by my ineptitude, she quietly wiped a tear away with her knuckle as she helplessly suggested that I watch Chinese TV dramas to improve my pronunciation instead.

Stars including Sabrina Carpenter, Karol G, David Byrne and Addison Rae also head to the desert for the first of two sold-out weekends of live music

Justin Bieber is set for a major live performance comeback at this year’s sold-out Coachella with rainy weather set to be a possible spoiler.

The Canadian singer will face his biggest live stage since he abandoned his 2022 tour over health concerns. Bieber was experiencing “full paralysis” on one side of his face after being diagnosed with Ramsay Hunt syndrome. “I wish this wasn’t the case but obviously my body is telling me I gotta slow down,” he said at the time.

Will artificial intelligence save us or destroy us? According to a growing band of thriller scriptwriters, we should be very afraid indeed

Maybe the “H” in Line Of Duty will turn out to stand for “hard drive”? After all, AI has become TV’s go-to villain, as proven once again in last week’s penultimate episode of BBC stablemate The Capture. Sinister puppet-master Simon was unmasked at long last and – spoiler – he wasn’t a person.

“Wait, Simon’s a computer?” asked a baffled agent. “He’s a bit more than that,” replied a smug army bigwig. “We’re using AI to support, map, execute and command ops. Simon factors in more risks and variables than you lot on the ground are capable of knowing. Tell him your objective and he’ll calculate your mission and recalibrate it for you in real time. The stats don’t lie. Simon saves lives.”

I am settling in for my usual haircut when, before I know it, my wife and the hairdresser are signing me up for a ‘treatment’

In the beginning I used not to be able to tell Kelly and Hayley – the identical twin hairdressers who came to the house appointments – apart. Eventually my wife furnished me with a handy mnemonic: Kelly cuts, Hayley highlights. From then on, I knew them by their tools.

I don’t need that crutch any more: since my wife decided to go grey, we only have Kelly. She arrived at 11, and I am already in the chair, hair wet, a towel over my shoulders. Kelly is on her phone. My wife is sitting across the table from me.

Whether you want budget, organic or vegan, these are the best meal delivery services from our writer’s test of nine

• The best chef’s knives – tested

Recipe box services are the best thing to happen to time-poor foodies since, well, sliced bread. They’re cheaper than a takeaway, often less processed than a ready meal, and much more culinarily adventurous than beans on toast.

You have to do the actual cooking, but not the shopping. Recipe boxes contain every ingredient you need (well, most do), often in the exact measurements required. “Meal kits” cut hassle even further by including preprepared stocks, sauces and other flavour bombs, plus ready-chopped veg. All you have to do is put them together following the steps in the recipe, which can take less time than queueing at a supermarket checkout.

They’re pricier than the competition, but have key features: the music doesn’t skitter when you step out of Bluetooth range and they can handle water and dust

• How do Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 compare against hearing aids? I put them to the test

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Over the past eight years, I’ve reviewed dozens of portable speakers from every top brand. And I can confidently say that Sonos makes three of the best portable speakers of them all.

There’s Sonos Play, the brand’s newest portable and the Goldilocks of its lineup in size, sound and features. The Roam 2, a Toblerone-shaped speaker that’s small enough to go anywhere. And the Move 2, a powerhouse that doesn’t sacrifice bass performance.

The little one:
Sonos Roam 2

Floss without the faff with our expert-tested water flossers, from travel-size models to countertop jets

• The best electric toothbrushes, tested

There isn’t much I miss from my pre-Invisalign “gappy teeth” days, but it was far more difficult for food and plaque to get stuck in the gaps – something I took for granted at the time. Using floss between my pre-braces teeth was easy, but ultimately pointless, like using a pipe cleaner to buff the Dartford Tunnel.

With all the gaps closed, that’s no longer the case, and my water flosser has become a welcome part of my dental routine. A water flosser fires an intense jet of water between the teeth to dislodge debris and leave your mouth feeling fresher.

Best water flosser overall:
Waterpik Ultra Professional

Best budget water flosser:
Operan Cordless Oral Irrigator

Our seasoned traveller braved obstacles and mud to put the best cabin bags to the test – from hard-shell to budget, wheeled to lightweight

• The best travel pillows, tested

Let’s start by saying that if you can avoid taking a flight, that would be best. Aviation accounts for 2.5% of global carbon emissions – and the levels released by aircraft could double or triple by 2050.

Regrettably, you can’t always reach your destination by rail, sea or hot-air balloon. If flying is unavoidable, one way to reduce your carbon footprint is to take a cabin bag, rather than hold luggage. This encourages you to pack less, so your baggage is lighter, and less fuel is required to spirit it through the stratosphere. If that doesn’t move you, consider that you’ll also pay lower fees to the airline.

Best cabin bag overall:
July Carry On luggage

Best budget cabin bag:
Tripp Holiday 8 cabin suitcase

A vegetarian noodle stir-fry full of vigour and flavour

I love going to my local Chinese supermarket; it’s like being at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, where the world (and ergo my mealtimes) are full of wild possibilities and new travels for my tastebuds. A new favourite ingredient is rose red beancurd, so called because it’s red and fermented in a combination of red yeast and rose petals. The overall effect in this noodle recipe, a take on the Thai street food dish, suki hang, is that it imparts a delicious char siu flavour when cooked, which is a lot of magic for a single ingredient.

An upmarket, smoky ‘tegroni’ that is simplicity itself to make

All you need to make this is a glass and a spoon. We’ve switched out the tequila from the original noughties twist on the negroni and instead brought forward our favourite spirit, mezcal, to bring a lightly smoky profile to proceedings. The perfect pairing for this drink is a campfire, so it’s an especially good one to premix in a flask and chuck in your backpack for a spring camping trip.

Daniel Craig Martin, co-founder, Bar Shrimp, Manchester

Miso brings a level of mouthwatering complexity to these otherwise simple cookies

Everyone has different ideas on what makes the perfect chocolate chip cookie, with everything from thickness and chewiness to the amount of chocolate up for debate. In my opinion, no cookie is worth eating if it’s not well salted; without it, everything feels a little off balance and flat. My not-so-secret way of salting cookies is to use a bit of miso. Not so much that it becomes a miso cookie, but just enough to bring a slightly savoury, umami vibe that makes the cookies a bit more complex-tasting and not sickly sweet.

From the ideal time to go discount-sticker shopping to the best day of the week to visit charity shops, industry insiders offer their advice on how to keep costs down as prices rise

From supermarkets’ yellow-stickered items to apps for free food, there are many ways to lower your shopping bill amid the cost of living crisis. Retail workers share their insider info on how to save money at grocery stores, street markets and charity shops.

Alda feels Rachel should follow jewellery ‘rules’, but Rachel likes to mix things up. You decide whose argument rings true
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I know she’s expressing herself, but when you mix everything up, it looks thrown together and cheap

They’re not Alda’s hands to worry about – I like my mismatched mess. Why does it matter to her?

Experts weigh in on why some people have an inexplicable barrier to responding – and what they can do about it

“There’s no such thing as a bad texter. They just don’t want to respond,” said influencer Delaney Rowe last year on the online talkshow Subway Takes. “People go around thinking being a bad texter is like a pathology, but it’s not. It’s a cop-out.”

“I don’t believe in bad texters,” announced radio host Dan Zolot last year. “If you want to answer you will answer.”

After I collapsed during a run along a beach, my loyal dog Beau sprang into action

When I lost my wife, Jo, to cancer eight years ago, I knew it was time for a fresh start, so I packed up my London home and moved to Poole on the Dorset coast. I longed for a companion, so I welcomed a labrador puppy into my life, naming him Beau in a nod to the time Jo and I had spent living in France.

A gun dog from Derbyshire with a sleek black coat and deep brown eyes, Beau was an adorable and mischievous puppy who kept me on my toes right from the start. When he was six months old, he rummaged in a fisherman’s bucket and swallowed a fishing line and hook. Thankfully, it came out the other end, narrowly avoiding surgery.

Japan’s ban on married couples having different surnames has prompted an event to highlight people’s reluctance to change their name

At the very least, the three men and three women calming their nerves on a Friday evening at a venue in Tokyo know they have one thing in common.

Spaced out across booths, they will soon be placed in pairs and given 15 minutes to get to know one another.

All children born in the UK between September 2002 and January 2011 have a CTF – but £1bn has not been claimed

At some point in the midst of 2009 I made a decision that would change my son’s life: I started paying £10 a month into his child trust fund account.

It didn’t seem like much but, almost 18 years later, thanks to the performance of the stock market and the original government payment, he’s about to get about £10,000. At first he had no idea what to do next, financially, and he’s not alone.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The interiors guru talks museum shops, sake and loft insulation with the Filter

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Michelle Ogundehin, former editor-in-chief of Elle Decoration magazine, is the head judge on the BBC’s Interior Design Masters and co-host of Grand Designs: House of the Year. She trained as an architect and also works as a commentator and consultant, as well as being a trustee of the Design Museum.

Her bestselling first book, Happy Inside, explores how home shapes health and happiness; her forthcoming book (spring 2027), Your Powerful Home: 4 Steps to a Home that Heals, looks at your home as a partner in your wellbeing, an ethos she shares through her Happy Insiders Club, which offers guided monthly coaching.

From a modernist townhouse in London to a historic farmhouse overlooking Bridgewater canal

Through no fault of their own, she faces repaying £100 a month until she is 93 or face legal action

My 66-year-old mother has been told that she has been overpaid her civil service pension by £40,000 and must repay it, or face legal action. Once the tax she’s paid on the income is deducted, she owes £32,000.

Her monthly pension payments have now been cut, which means her annual income will fall from £19,700 to £12,000, and she was, additionally, ordered to repay £496 a month for five years. This was later reduced to £100 a month, and a charge was put on her house as security. She’s been told she will have paid everything she owes when she’s 93.

Data on almost 28,000 patients suggests understanding gene variations could improve treatments for obesity

Scientists have discovered how genetics may help explain why weight-loss jabs work better for some people than others.

Variations in two genes involved in gut hormone pathways, which regulate appetite and digestion, may help account for different weight-loss results or side-effects when taking glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP1) medicines.

It sends us to sleep and wakes us in the night, excites us and depresses us, gives us confidence one moment, anxiety the next. How does this messy drug wield so much power?

Whatever you think of alcohol, you have to admit that it’s versatile. Ever since the first humans started smashing up fruit and leaving it in pots to chug a few days later, we’ve been relying on it to celebrate and commiserate, to deal with anxiety and to make us more creative. We use it to build confidence and kill boredom, to get us in the mood for going out and to put us to (nonoptimal) sleep. Where most mind-altering substances have one or two specific use-cases, alcohol does the lot. That’s probably why it’s been so ubiquitous throughout human history – and why it can be so hard to give up entirely.

“We often call alcohol pharmacologically promiscuous,” says Dr Rayyan Zafar, a neuropsychopharmacologist from Imperial College London. “It doesn’t just calm you: it can stimulate reward pathways, dampen threat signals, release endogenous opioids that can relieve pain or stress, alter decision-making and shift mood, all at the same time.”

Oxford team’s technology picked up danger signs with 86% accuracy in study of 72,000 patients in England

Oxford scientists have developed a simple AI tool that can predict the risk of heart failure five years before it develops.

More than 60 million people worldwide have the condition in which the heart cannot pump blood around the body as well as it should. Spotting cases before they develop into heart failure would be a big step forward, experts say. Doctors could prepare better for and manage the condition at an earlier stage or even prevent it entirely.

Scientist who established productive growth of HIV in an immortalised cell line, which led to the development of the UK’s first antibody test for the virus

The virologist Robin Weiss, who has died aged 86, was the outstanding scientist of the UK’s response to the Aids pandemic. In 1984 he led the team that identified the CD4 molecule as the cellular receptor for HIV, the causative virus of Aids. Subsequently he established productive growth of HIV in an immortalised cell line, and this allowed the development, with Richard Tedder, of the UK’s first antibody test for HIV, later commercialised by the Wellcome Foundation.

Critically, this test allowed HIV-infected people to be identified accurately and at scale. Robin was the first to demonstrate antibody neutralisation of HIV, a fundamental basis to vaccine development. These major scientific advances were all achieved while Robin was the youngest-ever director (1980-89) of the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London.

Designer who left fashion house in January said to be considering options for his 40% stake ahead of talks with lenders

Stefano Gabbana left his post as the chair of Dolce & Gabbana at the start of this year, the fashion house he co-founded with his then partner, Domenico Dolce, has said.

The Italian luxury brand said Gabbana had tendered his resignation, effective as of 1 January, “as part of a natural evolution of its organisational structure and governance”.

Don’t save them for holidays – with the right styling white trousers will be the linchpin of your spring wardrobe

Her rare cover appearance with Meryl Streep may be to promote The Devil Wears Prada sequel, but it also marks a shift from elusive editor to carefully curated personal brand

In the world of magazines, when someone announces they’re leaving a job, their colleagues will traditionally present them with their own personalised mock-up of the magazine’s front cover. Perhaps their face is superimposed on the body of a previous celebrity cover star. There are probably some witty cover lines referencing memorable office moments or their favourite snacks. It’s a rite of passage – and this week, Anna Wintour was bestowed with her very own cover. But instead of a jokey imitation bidding her adieu, it was the real, glossy deal, coming to a newsstand near you on 28 April.

In a somewhat surprising effort to promote the forthcoming The Devil Wears Prada 2, Vogue’s May issue sees Wintour share the cover with Meryl Streep, whose steely Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of the fictional title Runway, is said to have been inspired by Wintour. “Seeing Double. When Miranda met Anna” reads the cover line. While Wintour has fronted various industry titles, including Interview in 1993 and Ad Week in 2017, it’s the first time an editor has placed themselves as the subject. In another fun twist, both Wintour and Streep are wearing Prada.

After decades of focusing on faces, manufacturers, beauticians and surgeons are offering us younger-looking hands. Is this more about money or scientific progress?

I lay my hands on the table, palms down, for inspection. I’m in the consulting room of the president of the British College of Aesthetic Medicine (BCAM) in London. Like most people, I use my hands a lot. I type for hours a day. I go bouldering, which means I have a lot of calluses. I cook, clean, cup my chin while staring out the window. What I’ve never done is to look at my hands as objects of interest in their own right. They’re an afterthought. The means to an end. But now that Dr Sophie Shotter has picked them up in hers and is weighing my flesh and pushing at the skin with her thumbs to see how it moves, I can see faint ripples of diamonds, the texture of crepe paper.

“Your facial skin is very clear, very smooth. When we look at your hands, you’ve got a bit more of that laxity going on,” Shotter says. “You don’t have pigmentation. You’re not covered in sunspots. But the veins and tendons testify to a loss of volume. The extreme end of that is one day we get what people describe as ‘old lady hands’ – significant volume loss with skin fragility overlying it.”

While Málaga battles overtourism down the coast, this ‘forgotten’ working port city revels in its outsider status

Perched high on the battlements of Almería’s 10th-century Alcazaba, looking over the mosaic of flat roofs tumbling down to the sea, I’m reminded of author Gerald Brenan’s travel classic South from Granada, and his impression upon arriving in Almería in 1920: “Certainly, it seemed that the sea was doubly Mediterranean here, and the city … contained within it echoes of distant civilisations.”

A British adventurer, Hispanist and fringe member of the Bloomsbury group, Brenan had walked to Almería from where he was living near Granada, apparently to buy extra furniture in preparation for a visit from Virginia Woolf and friends. A century later, my journey here in a 30-year-old van from London is somewhat less notable, but as I marvel at the almost surreal incandescence of the Med, and the maze of ancient streets below me, I too am aware of a sensation of time travel.

Your top off-the-beaten track discoveries, from gorges in Galicia to vineyards in La Rioja
• Tell us about a trip to Italy – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Recently travelling from Madrid to San Sebastián, we spent three days in picturesque Briñas in La Rioja, staying at the beautiful Finca Torre de Briñas (doubles from €189 B&B). The neighbouring town, Haro, reached via a 40-minute walk by the Ebro River, hosts several of the largest wine producers in the region (CVNE and Muga are recommended). You can stop in and sample them, before heading into the town centre, which has several tapas spots to fuel the walk back to the hotel. Bliss.
Tom Dickson

A cycle tour of the Sierra Nevada backcountry proves a bumpy but beautiful ride through cinematic scenery

When you get into a van with an Englishman, five Irishmen and a Scotsman, you know someone is going to end up looking silly. For the next few days, my aim is for it not to be me. The van is taking us from busy Málaga to remote Andalucía for four days of gravel biking, something I have never done and for which I am not sure I am cut out.

Most of my cycling experience is limited to a flat five-mile commute through London, or long-distance road touring holidays. I love sailing across smooth asphalt, and have always been slightly snobby about the rough stuff. Why bump along when you can glide?

In the sparsely populated Queen Charlotte Sound, tourists can accompany the skipper-come-postman as parcels are dropped off via the scenic route. No heart rate check required

For a travel destination famous for offering the adrenaline rush of extreme sports, from bungee jumping to the parachute drop, it’s an unlikely tourist activity – but an irresistible one. If you’re travelling in New Zealand, don’t miss out on the chance to deliver the mail. By boat.

It happens in the Queen Charlotte Sound, part of the Marlborough Sounds in the stretch of water that separates New Zealand’s North and South Islands. For over 160 years, New Zealand Post has ensured the handful of families who live on the bays and inlets of the sound receive the same mail service as every other resident of the country, no matter that they live in isolated homes accessible only by boat. Six days a week, the mailboat leaves from Picton, the skipper doubling as postman for the three- or four-hour voyage – and these days passengers can come along for the ride.

The language teacher was running in the desert in Arizona when he saw this enormous, oddly human-looking plant

Joseph Cyr works as a language teacher at an American secondary school. He was born in South Korea, and spent his childhood living across Germany and the US, in Georgia and Arizona. “As an adult I have lived in Seattle, Paris and Nicaragua before moving back to Arizona,” he says. “I took this in Saguaro national park, on the edge of Tucson. It’s about an hour north of the US-Mexico border.”

It was a school holiday, so Cyr was doing a trail run when he took this image. His route was quiet; he saw only a few people on horseback and this saguaro cactus. The largest cactus in the US, it grows only in the Sonoran Desert, where the Saguaro national park lies.

From Kling Klang and the Queen of Mauretania to Elf, Peterbald and Sphynx, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 What was discovered on a dish containing Staphylococcus aureus?
2 At which Jewish festival is it traditional to serve triangular food?
3 Whose daughter became Queen of Mauretania in 25BC?
4 Kling Klang in Düsseldorf was which band’s studio?
5 Which Briton was the first person to deadlift 500kg?
6 What are studied by a dendrochronologist?
7 Which warrior class was abolished in the 1870s?
8 On the Calculation of Volume is a seven-novel series by which Dane?
What links:
9 Gladstone only; eg Salisbury, Baldwin; eg Churchill, Wilson; eg Thatcher, Truss?
10 Alexander III; Austerlitz; Alma; Bir-Hakeim; Jena; Léopold Sédar Senghor?
11 Bambino; Donskoy; Elf; Peterbald; Sphynx?
12 Althea & Donna; Ken Boothe; Desmond Dekker; Boris Gardiner; Sean Paul?
13 Pacific Warriors; Invictus; Murderball; The Brighton Miracle; This Sporting Life?
14 Manchester and Sheffield, via Ladybower reservoir?
15 Earl of Essex; 16th US president; Australian bushranger; wartime German industrialist?

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

• ​Submit a question

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

Abel Ortiz was brought from Mexico to LA when he was just two months old and has been​ living undocumented​ ever since. Now 38, he has a full life​ cutting hair, building a community, loving​ a city that has never fully loved him back.​ ​In a time of escalating ICE raids and the ache of uncertainty, Abel has made a radical decision: he’s leaving – not because he has to, but to escape perpetual limbo and be free to see the world

The Bible-thumping US defense secretary is overseeing another strategic disaster in the Middle East. Is this a war or a crusade?

Nine months and six days before a Tomahawk missile tore through the gaily decorated classrooms of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, ripping apart the bodies of schoolchildren, teachers and parents, the personal pastor of the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, delivered a sermon at the Pentagon.

“There’s a temptation to think that you’re actually in control and responsible for final outcomes, especially for those who issue the commands and do the aiming and the shooting,” preached Brooks Potteiger, Hegseth’s closest spiritual adviser, at the first of what have become monthly Christian worship services at the Department of Defense. “But you are not ultimately in charge of the world.”

Ever Andrés Mercado won a World Press Photo award for his work on the Manacillos festival, which takes place among the Afro-descendant community of Yurumanguí. Here he talks about the ancestral ritual and why it’s so important

Every year, hundreds of Afro-Colombians climb into wooden boats and set sail down the Yurumanguí River. They navigate dense rainforest, scramble through mangroves, and battle charging river currents, to disembark about 12 hours later in the remote village of Juntas.

It is here that they reunite and gather for an ancestral ritual: the Manacillos festival.

People living in the Juntas village of Yurumanguí use the festival as a way to unite and attract more people who, for years, had to flee the territory.

Tribalism has not faded over the past decade. Instead, new research reveals our politics has become ever-more polarised and fractious

On 23 June 2016, the British voter changed. Before that day, they picked a party, usually red or blue. By that morning, only two tribes mattered: remain or leave. And they kept mattering long, long after the result was declared. Rather than bin those short-lived and now stale allegiances, voters made them their personas. No longer a “Labour man” or a “Conservative family”, they became instead “remoaners” or “Brexiters”. Even today, 60% of Britons still identify themselves by where they scrawled a single cross in a one-off poll 10 years ago.

Ask about the difference Brexit has made and the answer normally concerns policy or high politics: how our economic trajectory has become bumpier, or how the Tories keep getting into punch-ups with each other. But it became so much bigger than Boris v Dave. The civil war blazed through the country, and recruited nearly all of us to one side or the other. The effects still ripple through our elections and media today.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

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The conflict in the Middle East continues to disrupt shipping across the region, including in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s busiest maritime routes.

The US and Iran have agreed to a provisional two-week ceasefire, which includes a temporary reopening of the strait. But maritime traffic through the narrow channel linking the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman remains affected, with vessels still facing delays, diversions and heightened security risks as the situation evolves.

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Crisis in the Middle East, Russian shelling in Ukraine, Artemis’s lunar flyby and World Press Photo winners – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

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