For the first time in over 50 years, astronauts will see Earth from distant space. Let’s hope the images they send back of our fragile home bring some much-needed unity

More than 50 years ago, the Apollo astronauts’ photographs of Earth seen from the moon had a jolting effect on a society distracted by division and conflict. Then, as now, they came in “an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance”, as President John F Kennedy had put it. But what he hadn’t predicted was that on the way to the moon, we would discover the Earth.

Here was our home planet, suddenly seen as a finite ball of rock, shrouded in an apple peel-thin layer of life-sustaining air. This view jarred with people’s everyday experience of living on the surface of an apparently infinite world of limitless resources. The creation of a special Earth Day soon followed, along with the founding of the campaigning environmental charity Friends of the Earth and the passing of a slew of environmental protection laws.

The last heistmeister of ‘the largest burglary in English history’ oozes charisma as he tells his wild tale. Even his contempt for his accomplices is impressive

It is a truth I feel should be universally acknowledged – that a headline-grabbing crime, which still has one of its charismatic perpetrators alive and willing to talk about it now on camera, must have a documentary dedicated to it.

The last one was the three-part miniseries The Diamond Heist, from Guy Ritchie’s production company, about the Millenium Dome Robbery (although the best line came not from the villains but from one of the laconic police officers responsible for trying to track down members of the gang as they put their plan together. They got a lead on one when he went back to the venue without his daughter. “No one goes to the Millenium Dome twice.” This is what I pay my taxes for.)

Hatton Garden: The Great Diamond Heist is on Channel 4.

Kemi Badenoch claims increased UK oil and gas production would cut bills by £200, but critics say plan won’t work

Oil prices hit $100 a barrel soon after the US and Israel launched their attack on Iran, and though prices have wobbled since, ongoing supply issues from the partial closure of the strait of Hormuz mean they could leap higher, to $150 a barrel or more, by some estimates.

The impacts could be severe – not just increases in the price of petrol, and oil for home heating, but also in the cost of gas, with knock-on inflationary pressures on food, consumer goods and industrial components.

Could AI write an entire sitcom series? That’s the plot of the new season of comedy drama The Comeback. Its co-creator explains why it’s ‘very possible’ – and why the world needs to catch up with AJLT

TV veteran Michael Patrick King has had a long, lively career, writing, directing and producing on shows including Murphy Brown, Will & Grace and 2 Broke Girls. He’s best known, though, for his work on the Sex and the City franchise, serving as its showrunner for the bulk of its run, writing and directing its two films, and masterminding its controversial 2020s revival And Just Like That. But this month sees the return of one of his most loved, and perhaps most underwatched, shows: The Comeback.

Co-created and co-written with Lisa Kudrow, The Comeback first aired in 2005, telling the story of a gormless sitcom star named Valerie Cherish, played by Kudrow, trying to return to stardom through the then-new format of reality TV. The show had an awkward, blackly hilarious tone that was a hit with critics and the Emmys, but failed to find much of an audience. Nine years later, in 2014, it returned for a masterly second season in which Valerie – now playing herself in a gritty HBO dramatisation of the events of season one, and filming the whole thing as an audition tape for The Real Housewives – confronts her failing marriage and relationships.

Only half of the 26 places appear nailed-on and some players benefited from missing the Uruguay and Japan games

Jordan Pickford remains the undisputed No 1. Harry Kane is irreplaceable up front. Declan Rice and Elliot Anderson look certain to start in midfield, nobody has emerged as a realistic challenger to Bukayo Saka on the right and Jude Bellingham’s hopes of grabbing the No 10 spot were done a world of good by other challengers failing to impress against Japan and Uruguay.

Sam Browne’s blend of brutal honesty and droll observation has made him a viral sensation. He talks about growing up in Southend, mental health and the healing power of poetry

On a cold night in east London, 21-year-old performance poet Sam Browne is telling a packed room of strangers about his second bout of psychosis. “I was in Morocco at 18, completely alone, and I started to feel that things weren’t real,” he says. “It got so bad that one day I turned to a random person and told him I was thinking of killing myself. He just said back to me: ‘Don’t do that – you’ll miss the sunset.’”

The room falls quiet and Browne breaks the tension by launching into a poem inspired by his Moroccan breakdown, You’ll Miss the Sunset. “The world is so beautiful, the least you could do is stick around to watch it,” he says with the hint of a smirk. “But it’s all shit, all of it, isn’t it?”

The president, a longtime critic of Nato, has stepped up his rhetoric after allies refused to join the US-Israel war on Iran

Donald Trump has said he is “absolutely” considering withdrawing the US from Nato, warning that the matter was “beyond reconsideration” after the refusal of US allies to join the US-Israeli war against Iran.

The president’s threats, his most determined to date, have left the alliance facing its worst crisis in its 77-year history, a former US ambassador has said.

President is expected to offer a timeline for end of the war, and speak about his threat to withdraw the US from Nato as he faces falling poll numbers and global energy crisis

• Trump says he is ‘absolutely’ considering withdrawing US from Nato

• Israel hits Iran with waves of attacks and says it killed top Hezbollah commander

The New York Times has reported that US intelligence agencies believe Iran is not currently willing to engage in negotiations to end the war, and that despite the month-long bombing campaign by the US and Israel, the government in Tehran believes it remains in a strong position.

According to officials speaking to the NYT, Iran doesn’t trust the US or believe Donald Trump is serious about negotiations.

Ministers accused of being too fearful of offending Emirates to help Britons detained for sharing images of war

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

The families of UK citizens held in the United Arab Emirates over allegations that they shared images of the conflict with Iran have voiced frustration at the British government’s failure to help.

Several British citizens are among more than 100 foreign nationals who have been detained under draconian Emirate rules that outlaw publishing or sharing material that could “disturb public security”.

US understood not to be invited directly to talks that will explore ways of reopening critical waterway

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The UK will convene 35 countries – excluding the US – to explore ways to reopen the strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping route for oil and gas that has been blocked by Iran.

Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said the next phase of discussions in the joint British and French efforts to secure the waterway would be held on Thursday, with Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, alongside international leaders.

While Pete Hegseth has mocked the ‘big, bad Royal Navy’, the First Sea Lord has sounded the alarm about its readiness

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he singled out the “big, bad Royal Navy” in a recent press update on the US-Israeli war against Iran.

Hegseth’s sarcastic comment was the latest in a long line of jibes against the capabilities and readiness of the British Royal Navy.

Ofcom research shows people also concerned old posts could affect personal or professional life

Social media users in the UK are becoming less active on tech platforms due to the rise of video apps and fears that posts could come back to haunt them, according to the communications watchdog.

Ofcom said just under half of adult social media users (49%) now post, share or comment compared with 61% in 2024. The proportion exploring new websites has also fallen, from 70% to 56%.

Mass of spectators cheers dazzling Florida launch as astronauts head to moon for first time in almost 54 years

Nasa’s moon rocket Artemis II launched on Wednesday evening, carrying astronauts to the moon for the first time in almost 54 years.

The rocket is now orbiting Earth and will continue to do so until Thursday, when the translunar injection burn will take place and send it on the rest of its 240,000-mile journey to the moon. Inside the Orion capsule, the four astronauts onboard immediately began tasks to assess how the spacecraft handled the 17,500mph ascent to orbit.

The quake had depth of 35km and its epicentre was 127km (79 miles) west-north-west of Ternate in Northern Molucca Sea region

A magnitude 7.4 earthquake has struck the Northern Molucca Sea region in Indonesia, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.

The quake, which hit early on Thursday local time, had depth of 35km and its epicentre was 127km (79 miles) west-northwest of Ternate, Indonesia, the USGS said.

British Medical Association leaders say PM’s threat to cut 1,000 new roles makes next week’s strike action more likely

Resident doctors have accused Keir Starmer of damaging the prospects of a deal to end their pay and jobs dispute by threatening to cut 1,000 new jobs for medics in the NHS.

The claim from the British Medical Association leaders came just before the Thursday deadline given by the prime minister for the union to accept the government’s final offer.

Charity calls for a levy on the very richest and the closing of tax loopholes in its report on offshore wealth

The global super-rich may have as much as $3.55tn hidden away from tax authorities, according to estimates by Oxfam.

The charity renewed its call for a wealth levy and urged governments to close tax loopholes as it published its latest analysis of the scale of offshore holdings.

Crown Prosecution Service confirms support on inquiries after arrests on suspicion of misconduct in public office

Police are receiving advice from prosecutors as part of their inquiries into Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Jeffrey Epstein.

The former duke of York and the former UK ambassador to the US were both arrested in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office over their connections with the late financier. They have since been released under investigation.

Six teenage girls arrested after hundreds of young people gather in Clapham in ‘swarming the streets’ trend

Police have urged parents to “take responsibility” after scenes of widespread disorder in Clapham, south-west London, on Saturday and Tuesday. Officers said the incidents were caused by a TikTok trend for swarming the streets.

Six teenage girls have been arrested so far, and the Metropolitan police said there would be more arrests in the coming days as officers reviewed CCTV and body worn camera footage of the disorder. It urged parents not to allow their children to take part in similar events over the Easter weekend.

McCartney and her husband faced objections including fears of threat to local otters and ‘hideous’ design

The fashion designer Stella McCartney has been granted permission to build a £5m home on a spectacular Highland peninsula after a three-year planning battle over the threat to local otters and the “hideous” modernist design.

McCartney and her husband, Alasdhair Willis, a creative director at Adidas, want to build the split-level property with a turf roof and natural stone walls on the rocky outcrop overlooking Loch Ailort, west of Fort William, 30 metres above sea level.

Actor and comedian known for voicing Gene Belcher, as well as roles in Flight of the Conchords and Archer, has suffered serious injuries

Bob’s Burgers voice actor and comedian Eugene Mirman has suffered serious injuries after crashing his car into a toll plaza in New Hampshire, before he was pulled from the fiery wreckage by a state trooper assigned to protect the state’s governor.

The crash happened just before noon Tuesday when a northbound electric vehicle struck the Bedford toll plaza and caught fire, New Hampshire state police said. Republican governor Kelly Ayotte and her security detail came upon the crash soon after, and a trooper and two others pulled Mirman from the burning car through a window, said New Hampshire state police colonel, Mark Hall.

Donald Trump has said he is considering pulling the US out of Nato, likening the alliance to a ‘paper tiger’.

It comes after weeks of denouncements from the US president against allies for not helping to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

When asked about Trump’s comments, Keir Starmer said: ‘Nato is the single most effective military alliance the world has ever seen’ and ‘whatever the noise, I’m going to act in the British national interest in all the decisions that I make’.

Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, Jon Henley

Cannabis policy still divisive two years in, with SPD hailing it while CDU minister says it is risk to young people’s health

It was a landmark piece of legislation passed by Germany’s previous, centre-left-led government: a measure that legalised the personal recreational use of cannabis for over-18s despite warnings from critics it would cause a steep rise in the drug’s use, including by teenagers, and boost criminal gangs.

Two years on, controversy over the move has still not been stubbed out, with critics and proponents at odds over its impact on consumption, youth welfare and organised crime.

Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester
Sparring lovers play a capricious game in Blanche McIntyre’s revival – but the cut and thrust is kept witty, rather than curdling into danger

In director Blanche McIntyre’s take on Private Lives, love is a dizzying thing. Staged in-the-round, Noël Coward’s vicious comedy of desire and spite is spun around like the records its sparring lovers play on the gramophone. From the moment that acrimonious exes Amanda and Elyot collide on their honeymoons, the revolve starts to turn, gradually accelerating to the point of nausea.

This queasy effect is apt for Coward’s play, which slowly peels back the ugliness of its central couple’s destructive bond. Opening in the luxurious surroundings of a French holiday resort – rendered in sleek, monochrome minimalism by designer Dick Bird – the first act is all pre-dinner cocktails and witty dialogue. The reunited Amanda and Elyot quickly ditch their respective new spouses, pompous Victor and vapid Sibyl, and escape to Paris. But in Amanda’s cluttered apartment, surrounded by booze and half-eaten plates of food, the rekindled romance starts to sour.

After being pushed to ‘distress’ by people trying to film and take selfies with the cattle in Kent, the fold has had to be taken away from public view

Name: Highland cows.

Age: More than 1,000 years old.

National theatre, London
A queenly Lesley Manville steals the show in this dark, rageful tale of seduction as contact sport

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos was serving as an artillery officer while writing his epistolary novel about a cold game of seduction in the salons of 18^th-century France which backfires on its conniving architects. It shows: love is a fight for power and control in his story, every bit as strategic as a military campaign.

Popularly known through the 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons, starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich (and also the teen version of it, 1999’s Cruel Intentions), this production is directed by Marianne Elliott and uses an adaptation by Christopher Hampton – whose play of the novel, first staged in 1985, was also the basis for the film starring Close.

Once a corporate trademark, the half-zip sweater is now fashion’s hottest look. Want to avoid cosplaying Rishi Sunak when you wear one? Our menswear expert reveals all

• Men’s spring wardrobe updates for under £100

You’ve probably noticed more quarter-zips around. This time, it’s not the City boys to blame. Rather, it’s that the fashion industry’s attitude has shifted. Once dismissed (not least by GQ, who named it “a joyless jumper for the joyless grind”), the style has been reclaimed by the very people who deemed it uncool – I even wore a Vivienne Westwood design to attend London fashion week.

In menswear circles, the rise has been slow and steady. IYKYK labels such as Mfpen and Amiri introduced them into their autumn/winter 2025 collections, before luxury houses Dior and Louis Vuitton followed suit for spring/summer 26. A few A-list celebs have been spotted wearing them (including People magazine’s sexiest man alive for 2025, Jonathan Bailey). The popularity is measurable, too – in the latest Lyst Index (a quarterly report of the world’s most coveted items in fashion), Polo Ralph Lauren’s cable-knit quarter-zip was named the top menswear buy.

How much do you know about the history of one of the most powerful computing companies on the planet?

In the 50 years since it was founded, Apple has long been seen as one of the most significant technology companies globally. The design and manufacturing decisions taken in Cupertino, California have affected product design across the world, helping usher in an era of ubiquitous touchscreen computing while insisting on exacting user experience design principles. How much do you know about the history of one of the most powerful computing companies on the planet? Test yourself with these 12 questions.

The Guardian’s Apple at 50 quiz

Brutal past experience has taught us that a cost of living crisis doesn’t affect us all the same, because we don’t all go into it with the same income or wealth

Perhaps the most celebrated writer on oil markets is Daniel Yergin. His work has won a Pulitzer and his advice sought by every president from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. Let’s start by looking at an example.

Fifteen years ago, before the US and Israel started their war on Iran, killing thousands of civilians in the process, before the strait of Hormuz became as infamous as the Bermuda Triangle, and before experts declared “the greatest global energy security threat in history”, Yergin published The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World. After hearing Trump announce a “very soon” end to the conflict for the second – or was it the third? – time, I dug out my copy. Just as I remembered, it devotes a chapter to the Persian Gulf.

Aditya Chakrabortty 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 former PM has no valid response when progressives raise a voice over war crimes, so he seeks to mute them. But we’ll take no moral lectures from him

The left, claims Tony Blair, has forged an “alliance with Islamists”. He goes further: this is simply the latest mutation of antisemitism. Extraordinary accusations require extraordinary evidence. Yet unlike with his illegal war on Iraq, our former prime minister has not even troubled himself to assemble a dodgy dossier.

This latest tirade was published by the Free Press, a woke-bashing, pro-Israel publication founded by journalist Bari Weiss, now accused of pro-Trump censorship in her new role as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The substance of Blair’s charge is what he calls “opposition to Israel”. This has become an increasingly familiar allegation. As the popularity of the Green party of England and Wales surges, its opposition to Israel’s genocide is recast as sectarianism.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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Two of the points were measures on energy bills from the autumn budget, another restated the existing energy strategy

‘We have a five-point plan for the immediate crisis,” declared the prime minister during his remarks from Downing Street on Wednesday. Really? Two of his five points were measures on energy bills that pre-date the Iran war. One was a description of support for a sub-set of consumers but dodged the key question of who else could get help.

Another stated the government’s longstanding energy strategy in unchanged terms. The last was a diplomatic policy, presumably shoehorned into the cost-of-living passage because a five-point plan sounds better than a four-point one.

Thanks to a sustained ideological assault on regulation, our country has been turned into a literal dump

This country’s a dump. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. From the point of view of criminal waste gangs, it is one big potential landfill. The chances of being caught range between minimal and nonexistent, and the penalties are mostly laughable. Successive governments have given criminals a licence to print money.

Last week, the Commons public accounts committee reported that illegal waste dumping is “out of control”. The UK is now blighted with between 8,000 and 13,000 illegal waste sites. Most consist of a few lorry loads. Some contain tens of thousands of tonnes of waste, which might incorporate everything from household products to asbestos, heavy metals and highly toxic, flammable and explosive organic chemicals. The rubbish blows through local neighbourhoods, flows into rivers and seeps into soil and groundwater. And, in most cases, nothing is done.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

In a world of data theft and online scams, there is something thrillingly analogue about these audacious robberies

Now, let me begin by saying: stealing is bad. I don’t think you should steal things. It is a good way to get yourself sent to prison and it is morally wrong to take things that don’t belong to you. Cargo theft? Bad. Stealing priceless artworks from museums where they could be enjoyed by everyone? Bad.

And yet. And yet.

The Iran war will hit food prices, fuel costs and interest rates. But with a few smart moves, we could could turn this crisis to our advantage

Energy shocks don’t just raise our energy bills – they can be turning points in how our economy runs. The UK responded to the energy crises of the 1970s by reshaping its energy system and doubling down on extracting its own fossil fuels from the North Sea. Investment poured in and the UK became a net energy exporter. When energy security is on the line, serious countries act at scale. Today, as the war in Iran continues, scraping the North Sea barrel for the last of its planet-heating fuel is no longer a solution. If the UK is to weather the shocks to come, we need to build a clean energy system for the next generation.

A supply deficit of 10m oil barrels a day and a fifth of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade is already having significant effects around the world. The UK is painfully exposed to international gas prices. The public expect inflation to soar, the market is forecasting a rise in interest rates over the next year, and costs on some government borrowing have risen to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. This is what a fossil-fuel shock looks like for an import-dependent country, and it will not stop at energy. UK food inflation is already high, reaching 3.3% in February, and we are likely to see much higher food prices in as little as three months.

Chaitanya Kumar is head of economic and environmental policy at the New Economics Foundation

Almost 30 years after scientists mapped the nerves in the penis, they’ve done the same for the clitoris. At least men have stopped denying it exists

There’s no excuse for being icliterate any more. It was a long time coming, but, almost 30 years after the web of nerves inside the penis was charted, we’ve finally got a similar 3D map of the nerves within the glans of the clitoris. You can’t see all of the nerve branches of the clitoris via dissection or clinical imaging methods, which is why this sort of visualisation is so important.

Ju Young Lee, one of the researchers behind the scan, has said she’s amazed it has taken so long for a project like this to materialise. But the clitoris has long been understudied and misunderstood. The Malleus Maleficarum, a 1486 guide to identifying witches, even described it as the “devil’s teat” and noted that if you found one, it would prove a woman was a witch. (The good news: not many men could find one. The bad news: you may just have discovered you’re a witch.)

The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

As the world’s attention is drawn to the Middle East, Donald Trump’s assault on Iran has had damaging knock-on consequences for Kyiv

After meeting European Union foreign ministers this week, Volodymyr Zelenskyy voiced exasperation over the continued blocking of a €90bn EU loan to Kyiv by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. US financial support for Ukraine has dried up under Donald Trump, so the money is desperately required. But as Mr Zelenskyy bitterly observed, it is being delayed “because one person in Europe is standing against all of Europe simply to please Moscow”.

Trailing in the polls ahead of an election on 12 April, Mr Orbán is doubling down on attempts to mobilise his nationalist base by fuelling anti-Ukraine and anti-EU sentiment. Allegations also continue to emerge, dismissed by Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, that he has in effect colluded with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to undermine European decision-making during the war.

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.

AI is interpreting journalism without regard for truth. The BBC must build the capacity to ensure its reporting is understood on its own terms

Appointing Matt Brittin, a former Google executive, as BBC director general is smarter than critics admit. Although he was on the board of the Guardian’s publisher, Mr Brittin was no journalist. He does understand platforms, scale and digital audiences.

Director generals come under scrutiny when crises hit, like this week’s sacking of Scott Mills over his “personal conduct”. It then emerged that police previously questioned the Radio 2 DJ over separate allegations, of serious sexual offences, closing the case due to lack of evidence. But the role’s underlying challenge is facing future threats to the corporation’s audience.

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.

Dr Mussaddaq Iqbal responds to the news that the prime minister has warned medics to call off their strike or lose a training offer

While I totally disapprove, as I did last time, of the doctors’ strike but completely support their demands and grievances, it is the prime minister’s response which has made me write this letter (Keir Starmer gives resident doctors 48 hours to call off strike or lose training offer, 31 March). His threat of not creating extra training posts is shocking, inappropriate and impulsive. Though on the face of it it sounds like an innocuous response showing irritation, it is probably the most convincing evidence so far of his unfitness to govern among the litany of his other missteps.

It has laid bare his government’s lack of strategy and lack of sincerity. Does he understand that, by not creating training posts, he is not only going to harm doctors’ careers, spoil thousands of young doctors’ lives and deter others from adopting this noble and vital profession, but also harm the NHS, and thus patient care? The NHS is desperately understaffed. This shows that he never had any plan to increase the number of posts and it was agreed under pressure. He is clearly not a statesman, and if he is only capable of responding in this childlike manner, he could have threatened to freeze their pay or any such lowly response, but not one that is harmful.

Anthony Lawton and Dr Felicity Mellor on the importance of humans who design systems and execute decisions taking responsibility for them

Your article on the Iran school bombing rightly challenges the reflex to blame artificial intelligence (AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying, 26 March). However, the deeper problem lies not in the technology but in the language now forming around it. To say that there was an “AI error” quietly removes the human subject from the sentence. Where once civilians were “dehoused” or “collateral damage”, responsibility is now displaced altogether: from people to systems.

This matters because moral accountability depends on clarity about who acts. However complex the chain of analysis and command, it remains human beings who design, authorise and execute these decisions. To obscure that fact is not a technical error but a civic one.

The creatures should not be kept or treated as pets, however tame or familiar they may appear, says Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital

As a specialist wildlife hospital, we would like to gently remind readers that hedgehogs are wild animals and should not be kept or treated as pets, however tame or familiar they may appear (The pet I’ll never forget: Harriet, the hedgehog in my airing cupboard, 23 March).

Healthy hedgehogs are best left in the wild, where they can behave naturally and remain independent. If you find a hedgehog that is clearly injured, unwell, orphaned, or active during the day and appearing to be in difficulty, it is important to contact a wildlife hospital for advice as soon as possible.

Readers respond to an article about people whose lives were wrecked by delusional thinking after they used AI tools

Your coverage of AI-associated delusions exposes a gap that training-level guardrails cannot close (Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion, 26 March). As someone who has worked in health systems across fragile and low-income contexts, I find it striking that AI companies have failed to adopt a safeguard that even the most underresourced clinic in the world already uses: screening patients before exposing them to risk.

The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 for depression and the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale are administered daily in settings with no electricity, limited staff, and patients who may never have seen a doctor. These tools take minutes. They are validated across dozens of languages and cultural contexts. They create a human checkpoint between vulnerability and harm.

From Algeria to Uzbekistan, our writers and contributors from around the world assess the state of the 48 nations to qualify for the World Cup

“There’s more talent and potential than in 2022,” Kylian Mbappé said ominously this week after France had beaten Brazil 2-1 despite having Dayot Upamecano sent off after 55 minutes. He may well be right. For the second game of this window, against Colombia, Didier Deschamps changed the entire starting XI but was still able to field an attack of Marcus Thuram, Désiré Doué, Rayan Cherki and Maghnes Akliouche. Doué scored two in a comfortable 3-1 victory. “I’m well aware that there are some very good players that I won’t be bringing because, in my opinion, there are even better ones,” Deschamps said. Marcus Christenson

• Midfielder failed to impress against Uruguay and Japan

• ‘He was excellent in camp but struggles on the pitch’

Thomas Tuchel says Phil Foden is not assured of a place in his England squad for the World Cup finals in the summer after watching him struggle in the Wembley friendlies against Uruguay and Japan.

Tuchel has appeared unconvinced by Foden since taking charge at the beginning of last year but the head coach gave him a big opportunity in the starting lineup in each of the games during this past international window. Tuchel played him in the No 10 role in the 1-1 draw against Uruguay and as one of the No 10s alongside Cole Palmer in an experimental 4-2-4 in the 1-0 defeat by Japan. In both matches, Foden could get little going.

Sonia Bompastor blasted refereeing in the Champions League as “not good enough” after she was shown two yellow cards and emotions boiled over following Katie McCabe’s hair pull on Alyssa Thompson in a frantic end to their two-legged quarter-final defeat by Arsenal.

The holders, Arsenal, progress despite the controversy, and will play the winner of Thursday night’s quarter-final between Lyon and Wolfsburg, with the German side taking a 1-0 lead into the second leg.

Roberto Baggio proposed an overhaul of talent pathway in 2011 but it was never acted on and the national team’s approach now is just not working

The decline of Italy’s footballing expectations can be read in the headlines that greeted their third consecutive failure to qualify for a men’s World Cup. When the Azzurri lost their playoff against Sweden in November 2017, La Gazzetta dello Sport defined it as “The End” and an “Apocalypse”. After defeat by North Macedonia in 2022, Il Corriere dello Sport saw a country sinking “Into Hell”.

On Wednesday both newspapers led coverage of elimination by Bosnia and Herzegovina with a simpler, perhaps sadder, “Tutti A Casa” – Everybody Go Home. What else is there left to say? Italians understood long ago that 2018 was not some aberration but the continuation of a trend, their team having failed to reach the tournament’s knockout stage in 2010 or 2014.

At 17, Cooper Lutkenhaus is the youngest world champion in track and field history – and potentially USA’s poster boy for LA28

Fire on the boards. Slack jaws off it. Last week, I was fortunate enough to be yards away from the 17-year-old American high school student Cooper Lutkenhaus when he powered away from a strong 800m field in Torun to become the youngest world champion in track and field history. But no sooner had the applause died down than the search for superlatives began.

“He’s like David Rudisha,” said Eliott Crestan, the Belgian who took world indoor championship silver behind Lutkenhaus. “In 10 or 20 years’ time, I’ll be able to say that I ran against him.”

• Woods focusing on his health and wellbeing after crash

• Florida judge grants his request to leave the US

Tiger Woods has turned down the opportunity to captain the United States at the 2027 Ryder Cup, the PGA of America has announced.

The former world No 1’s decision comes after he announced he would step away from golf for a period to focus on his health and wellbeing. Woods was charged with driving under the influence after being involved in a car accident last week.

After covering changes for matchgoing fans, Gavin Willacy assesses how coverage has transformed for fans at home

By No Helmets Required

Super League celebrated its 30th birthday in style at the weekend. The main party was at Headingley, where Leeds hosted Warrington in a repeat of one of the league’s original fixtures. As Sky Sports anchor Brian Carney welcomed guest after illustrious guest to reminisce about their past heroics, we were shown clips from three of the opening round of games from 1996. That’s because only three were televised. And that was one more than Sky normally showed, despite having spent £87m on the new competition. All seven Super League games were shown live last weekend.

We now consume the game on our phones rather than through hourly radio bulletins. Unless you had a satellite dish on your house in the mid-1990s, you couldn’t watch Super League’s launch. For the opening weekend, Sky sent the media circus to Paris, Oldham and Leeds. By all accounts, members of the press pack were well oiled. In 2026, Super League on Sky is just a well-oiled machine.

• Joyce gave birth in November and returned to pitch in March

• Bristol flanker hopes to be role model for next generation

Alisha Joyce returned to the rugby pitch in March just 123 days after giving birth and a week later was named in Wales’s squad for the Women’s Six Nations. The 28‑year‑old says she was “shocked” to get the call-up after welcoming her son, Ralphie, in November but adds it’s “cool” to be a role model for the next generation of players.

Joyce was the first Wales player to use the governing body’s new performance maternity programme. The back-row, who shares Ralphie with her wife and teammate Jasmine Joyce, has played only 30 minutes of rugby since returning last month in a game for Brython Thunder where she came off the bench.

Bespectacled young batter shone on England duty in Australia and is primed to make a splash in Division One

The daffodils were in suitable bloom in Cardiff, swathes of them, creeping from under the trees in Bute Park, yolky heads bobbing in the spring sunshine. A few hundred metres up the road, Glamorgan’s players were gathering at Sophia Gardens before their biggest season in years, back in Division One of the County Championship for the first time since 2005.

Their campaign last year was a slow burner but blossomed, a close-knit side playing confidently. Alongside a thousand runs each from Colin Ingram and Kiran Carlson were eye-catching performances from two talented then 21-year-olds, Ben Kellaway and Asa Tribe, who went on to be picked for the Lions tours in the winter. In their shellacking by Australia A in the unofficial Test, Tribe hit an unbeaten 129, which was enough to get him a namecheck from the England managing director, Rob Key, in pre-season media musings – the only non-capped player to be mentioned.

Michael O’Leary says UK’s reliance on Kuwait for jet fuel supply amid Iran war exposes it to possible shortages

The UK is the most vulnerable country in Europe to potential jet fuel shortages as the Iran war throttles supplies from the Gulf, the boss of Ryanair has said.

Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of the budget airline, said Britain would be the most exposed to jet fuel shortages because it relies on Kuwait for about 25% of its supply.

Speaking publicly for first time, Radio 2 breakfast show host said he ‘fully cooperated’ with police at the time

Scott Mills was sacked after “new information” came to light relating to his conduct, the BBC said on Wednesday.

The corporation confirmed in a statement that it was first made aware of a police investigation into historical allegations of sexual abuse in 2017, but terminated the radio presenter’s contract on Friday in accordance with its “culture and values”.

First fatal incident this year occurred hours after £16.2m ‘stop the boats’ deal agreed between Britain and France

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Two people have died and another is missing after trying to cross the Channel from France to the UK on Wednesday morning. It is the first fatal incident in the Channel this year.

The deaths occurred just hours after an interim £16.2m “stop the boats” deal was agreed between the UK and France which will be in place until May. Negotiations will continue for a longer-term deal to replace the previous three-year deal, which expired on Tuesday. According to reports, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is trying to secure a “payment by results” agreement to reduce small boat crossings.

Joani Reid MP reportedly swapped flirtatious messages with senior officer in charge of nuclear-armed submarine

A Royal Navy captain in charge of one of Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines stepped back from his duties over his relationship with the MP Joani Reid, whose husband faces allegations of spying for China.

The married senior officer was investigated by the navy last year over his contact with Reid after the messages, described as inappropriate, prompted an assessment of a potential blackmail risk, the Financial Times first reported.

Meteorologists issue yellow weather warning, with gusts of up to 90mph expected in some areas

The northern half of the UK is expected to face gale-force winds over the Easter weekend, with forecasters warning of possible travel disruption and power cuts, stemming from a “significant cold plunge from Canada into the North Atlantic”.

The Met Office issued a yellow weather warning for very strong winds in Scotland, Northern Ireland and parts of north Wales and northern England from 6pm on Saturday until midday on Sunday.

Experts say brutal March heat has left critical snowpack at record-low levels – and key basins in uncharted territory

Snow surveys taking place across the American west this week are offering a grim prognosis, after a historically warm winter and searing March temperatures left the critical snowpack at record-low levels across the region.

Experts warned that even as the heat begins to subside, the stunning pace of melt-off over the past month has left key basins in uncharted territory for the dry seasons ahead. Though there’s still potential for more snow in the forecast, experts said it will probably be too little too late.

The argument for transitioning to renewables seems stronger than ever – and yet, attacks mount on the carbon price scheme that underpins the EU’s success at cutting pollution

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On the one hand, experts say, Europe is better prepared for this energy crisis than the last. On the other, it is still waging a culture war against the most obvious path out.

Fuel prices have soared to ruinous levels since the Iran war left ships of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) stranded in the Gulf. The pain is most acute in Asia, but high energy prices are already causing panic in Europe. Shortages could hit the continent this month, oil company Shell warned last week. Donald Trump’s “go get your own oil” comments on Tuesday sent prices to their highest level since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran. They briefly dipped below $100-a-barrel on Wednesday amid hopes that the war may soon end.

The more than 100 bat species living in the Mozambican reserve’s labyrinth of caves play a key role in maintaining a fragile ecosysytem that benefits wildlife and people

• Words and photographs by Kang-Chun Cheng

After wriggling gingerly into a damp, cool cave, Raúl da Silva Armando Chomela waits for his eyes to adjust. Donning latex gloves, a helmet fitted with a headlamp, and a mask to protect his lungs from fine particles and bacteria, the molecular biologist from the Mozambican port city of Beira gazes into the shadowy recesses for signs of bats.

He has spent two years in these claustrophobic spaces studying the winged mammals and their excrement. “Guano is far more than just bat droppings,” he says. “If I had to describe it in one word, I’d say ‘ecosystem’.”

South Korea will delay the shutdown of coal-fired plants, while the Philippines also plans to boost the output of its coal-burning plants

Governments across Asia are ramping up their use of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, as they try to cover huge energy shortfalls triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran.

The move has triggered warnings from climate experts who point to coal’s devastating environmental impact, and say the energy crisis should be a wake up call for governments to invest in renewables, which can offer a more stable supply that is not exposed to price shocks.

Discussion on how to ease impact from Iran war coincides with Food and Drink Federation almost tripling forecast

Food inflation could hit 9% in the UK this year even if the strait of Hormuz opens within the next few weeks, figures suggest, as the Iran war pushes up energy prices.

The Food and Drink Federation (FDF), which represents 12,000 food and drink manufacturers, has predicted prices will rise by “at least” 9% by the end of 2026, almost tripling a forecast of 3.2% that was made before the Middle East conflict.

Prince tells privacy summit of ‘harrowing stories’ of how use of tech giants’ platforms led to ‘grave and irreversible harm’

The Duke of Sussex has welcomed two landmark lawsuits against major tech companies, declaring: “Finally, some truth and accountability has arrived.”

In a speech in Washington DC to the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) global summit on privacy, AI governance and cybersecurity law, Prince Harry said he had done a “deep dive into the tech-fuelled world in which my children – all our children – are growing up”.

Ye, who has called himself a Nazi, released a song called Heil Hitler and sold T-shirts bearing swastikas, is confirmed to play three nights at the London festival

The Jewish Leadership Council has condemned Wireless festival for booking Kanye West, also known as Ye, to headline all three nights of the forthcoming north London event in the wake of heightened attacks on the UK Jewish community, calling the organisers “deeply irresponsible”.

In a press statement on Wednesday 1 April, a spokesperson for London mayor Sadiq Khan said: “We are clear that the past comments and actions of this artist are offensive and wrong, and are simply not reflective of London’s values. This was a decision taken by the festival organizers and not one that City Hall is involved in.”

Three people arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson, say police investigating Golders Green incident

Counter-terrorism police have arrested two men and a boy in connection with a suspected arson attack last week on ambulances run by a Jewish charity in Golders Green, north London.

The three people – a 19-year-old man, a 20-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy – were all arrested early on Wednesday, the Metropolitan police said.

Lawyers for accused had argued names of family members should be suppressed due to fears for their mental and physical safety

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The alleged Bondi attacker has been denied a suppression order over his family member’s names and home and work addresses after a collective of media organisations won a challenge against the bid.

In the Downing Centre local court on Thursday, judge Hugh Donnelly decided to deny the request for a 40-year suppression order, ending an interim suppression order that was granted for Naveed Akram’s mother, brother and sister in early March which banned the publication of their names and addresses.

Some underscore Trump’s unprecedented court appearance as protesters defend 14th amendment right

About 250 demonstrators packed the steps of the supreme court on Wednesday, chanting in defense of birthright citizenship as Donald Trump himself watched from the public gallery in an unprecedented appearance.

Beija McCarter, an eighth grade US history teacher, and Noah Goldstein, a New Yorker who was also at last month’s trans rights rally, both arrived at the demonstration with little optimism about what the justices inside might decide.

Party, which has neo-Nazi roots, will hold ‘important ministerial posts within immigration’ if four-party coalition wins in September

The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has said that he will allow the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) into government for the first time – and give its members key ministerial posts – if his coalition wins the next general election.

Despite becoming Sweden’s second biggest political party after the Social Democrats in the last election, SD currently plays only a supporting role in the minority-run coalition.

Defence lawyer, former federal attorney general Christian Porter, says accused Jayson Joseph Michaels was ‘pretender full of big talk’

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A man accused of plotting a mass casualty terror attack targeting public buildings and places of worship believed his assault would be worse than the Bondi beach mass shootings, a court has heard.

Jayson Joseph Michaels detailed his alleged plan for a violent assault on Western Australia police headquarters, WA Parliament House and mosques in a diary, the Perth magistrates court was told during a failed bid for bail on Wednesday.

Elon Musk’s rocket company could go public as early as June, Bloomberg reports

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SpaceX has confidentially filed for an initial public offering on the US stock market, according to reports from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. The IPO is set to be one of the most closely watched and highly valued listings in market history.

Elon Musk’s company, which has become a dominant power in both space travel and satellite communications, could potentially seek a valuation upwards of $1.75tn. The confidential filing will give regulators a period to review and discuss the company’s financial disclosures before investors and the public are able to view them.

Group cuts costs as shares plunge while it grapples with impact of Iran war on property market

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One of Britain’s biggest housebuilders has said it will stop buying new land and hiring new staff, as it grapples with the impact of the Iran war on the property market.

The London-focused housebuilder Berkeley said it would cut costs as it warned that “geopolitical volatility” and reduced potential for interest rate cuts could weigh on the business.

Meg O’Neill’s memo comes as company tries to rebuild strategy amid oil shock of Iran war and after failed green pivot

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The new boss of BP has told staff that the oil company is operating in a world of “significant complexity” as it attempts to rebuild its strategy under a fresh leadership team.

In her first message to staff as BP’s chief executive, Meg O’Neill promised a “clear direction and consistency” after a tumultuous period for the 117-year-old fossil fuel company, in which it has pivoted away from a failing green strategy.

Company chaired by Trump ally Larry Ellison seeks to reassure investors that bet on AI infrastructure will pay off

Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs as the US technology company seeks to reassure investors that its bet on AI infrastructure will pay off.

The $420bn (£315bn) company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, started making employees redundant on Tuesday, with thousands of its 162,000-strong workforce expected to leave.

The German composer, born 341 years ago, dominates the classical charts and concert platforms, especially at this time of year. Here’s to his life-giving zombie music!

The musical world’s present for Easter is Bach, Bach and more Bach. These next two days alone, there are performances of his St Matthew Passion in every musical city you care to name, from London to Leipzig, Rome to Rotterdam. In the classical charts, from the “official” one to the, er, other official one, and Apple Music’s, one composer dominates more than any other, from Yunchan Lim’s Goldberg Variations to Raphaël Pichon’s St John Passion. Why?

Two descriptions of his music have particularly struck me this past week. Bach the zombie and Bach the meat-grinder. The phrases belong to the violinist James Ehnes and the Guardian’s Clive Paget, reviewing Pichon’s new recording. Meat-grinding is how Paget describes the St John Passion’s opening chorus; a fantastic expression of the viscera of human feeling that Bach exposes especially in Pichon’s drama-filled recording. Bach’s composition in this chorus is made of obsessive repetitions in the churning figuration of the strings; there are the wailing agonies of the dissonances in the woodwind lines before the voices of the chorus make their first shocking appearance, not so much singing as screaming their demands to Christ to witness his passion in its “glory” and its “humiliation”. The opening chorus, all eight minutes of it, makes a gigantic cross shape in musical time: the surging, relentless rhythms are the horizontal planes, the harmonies that sear through them are implacable verticalities. And that’s just the opening chorus. This is the darkness of the Passion story.

From action thrillers to sci-fi flicks, a deluge of recent releases are riddled with self-satisfied smarm

The new Hulu movie Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice has been marketed as a genre-mashing wild ride, with plenty of South by Southwest festival reactions and even genuine full reviews delighting in its supposed mixture of sci-fi, action, romance and buddy comedy. That’s a hell of a lot of genres. While watching it, I found myself wondering if the number of elements in play is supposed to distract from how its comedy has three deadening and similar modes. One involves characters being unexpectedly familiar with seemingly incongruous elements of pop culture: it opens with a scientist tinkering with his time-travel machine while singing along to Why Should I Worry?, a niche Billy Joel song from the old Disney cartoon Oliver & Company; later, there’s a long conversation about a bunch of criminal types’ deep familiarity with the TV show Gilmore Girls.

If that doesn’t sound funny enough, writer-director BenDavid Grabinski finds the flip side equally hilarious: people not knowing things. Gags include a guy who hasn’t heard of Winnie-the-Pooh, a guy who doesn’t know the proper name of chloroform, and a guy who doesn’t know what the word “comeuppance” means. These are all different guys. The third, even less sophisticated strain of comedy in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, are characters who fuckin’ swear. Talk about fuckin’ comedy! Sometimes their names even swear: one guy is nicknamed, get this, Dumbass Tony! In every detail of the movie, you can feel the heavy hand of the screenwriter, straining for irreverence, desperate to show that he’s made something that’s not like the other, regular screenplays out there.

This isn’t just a retelling of the infamous drug lord’s life. His son shares a traumatic coming-of-age story plagued by chaos and violence – and it is like being in The Sopranos

You’d be forgiven for thinking that we didn’t need another TV series about the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s life, and that it’s been milked for all its worth in popular culture. Escobar’s murderous Medellín cartel was most ruthless in the 1980s and 90s – but this century alone, the Colombian druglord and politician’s biography has inspired numerous books, Hollywood films, the Netflix series Narcos, and even the title of Kanye West’s 2016 album Life of Pablo. The new Spanish language series Dear Killer Nannies, however, manages to find a new and unexpected way into the life of an archetypal villain, which focuses very little on the bloodshed that has made his life so ripe for movies and television. In terms of genre, the show – co-created by Escobar’s son Juan Pablo Escobar – is far more coming-of-age than action.

Instead of following the usual beats that mark Escobar’s rise, fall and eventual death (during a shootout with Colombian special forces), our way into the story is seven-year-old Juan Pablo, also known as “Juampi”. Juampi is sweet, sensitive and soft around the edges in the way most boys are before being exposed to the ravages of patriarchy. We meet Juampi as his head bobs above the surface of a lake, beaming and soaking up the sun, when a speedboat zooms into frame, headed straight for him, causing him to panic. The boat swerves at the last minute, narrowly avoiding him. Enter: Juampi’s “nannies”. These are associates of his father, who double as childcare while he’s out of the country attending to cartel business. What could possibly go wrong in such an arrangement?

Diamonds might not be forever in a film centred around a massive, ticking bomb on a building site, which is equal parts violent and silly

There are some lively if borderline ridiculous shenanigans in this London heist thriller from screenwriter Ben Hopkins and director David Mackenzie, brazening out its innate silliness with chutzpah, heavily researched police and army lingo and athletic plot contortions. It’s a violent affair of double-cross and triple-cross that ups its narrative game in the final act for the massive reveal: a head-spinning story of diamonds, some fake … yet also … some real. And it also deploys the classic thriller moment, popularised by TV’s The Night Manager: the three-second bank transfer of millions of illicit dollars, which you can tensely monitor on your smartphone in real time. Oh my God, will the money go through OK? (You’ll need solid wifi or 5G.)

Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Major Will Tranter, a bomb disposal officer called in when what looks like a gigantic unexploded second world war device is discovered in a London building site, making a worrying ticking noise. The police are under the direction of the Met’s chief superintendent; this is a dull role with none of the juiciness of the guys’ parts, played deadpan by Gugu Mbatha-Raw. She shuts off the electricity in the whole area for fear of the bomb igniting power cables, then evacuates and cordons off the entire zone – not realising a crew of bank robbers is in there, led by Theo James and Sam Worthington, who are now able to work without fear of being discovered by some pesky member of the public as they tunnel through a wall into a safe-deposit vault from a neighbouring basement.

The great Shakespearean shares his passion project, there’s a sneak peek of Sam Ryder’s Jesus Christ Superstar and Back to the Future: The Musical hits reverse

When stages went dark during the Covid crisis, all sorts of impromptu performances popped up online. Patrick Stewart’s pandemic hobby was to recite one Shakespeare sonnet each day on social media – a project inspired by him reading one to his wife over dinner. Now, all 154 from the 1609 quarto are collected on Audible – including Stewart’s favourite, Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds). Almost four hours long, the recording includes his personal commentaries. Available from 7 April.

Inventive creature design, goopy practical effects and a metal guitar soundtrack make this reworking of a Roger Corman fantasy a treat for one’s inner child

A 1980s Roger Corman swords-and-sorcery movie gets a loving remake here, as strapping antihero Deathstalker attempts to break the spell of a cursed amulet in the Kingdom of Abraxeon, with sensational low-budget creature design and lashings of goopy practical special effects where you can really feel the splatter. Said kingdom is being laid waste by the Dreadites, minions of the evil sorcerer Nekromemnon.

You’ll know how you’ll feel about this film by your response to words such as “Dreadites” and “Nekromemnon”. For many (like me), there is wondrous pleasure to be found in the ludicrousness of this nomenclature – so perfectly on the nose and so stupidly appealing to one’s inner child. Everyone else please move along, this movie is very much an acquired taste.

The Lebanese singer’s patriotic song has returned repeatedly since 1976 to inspire hope amid catastrophe. But as it resurges during the US-Israeli war, some Lebanese are chafing against its optimism and nostalgia

When Leila Milki first heard Fairuz’s Bahebak Ya Lebnan, she experienced it as the song of Lebanese unity and resilience. Milki, a Lebanese-American singer-songwriter and pianist based in Los Angeles, has partly built her career on covering the catalogue of Fairuz, the 91-year-old Lebanese singer who has become a rare generation-uniting public figure in the small Mediterranean country. “I knew that, in terms of my parents’ generation and even my grandparents’ generation, the song was sort of this really cathartic, hopeful message of unity,” says Milki.

The old adage is that Lebanon and its people remain resilient in the face of tragedy, able to rebuild and be born again into a stronger, more stable nation. That was the message Fairuz conveyed with Bahebak Ya Lebnan, a song released 50 years ago that has since become the country’s de facto national anthem. “I love you Lebanon, my homeland, I love you / Your north, your south, your plains / I absolutely adore,” Fairuz sings in Arabic in the opening lines. When she released the song in 1976, it came against the backdrop of the early stages of a 15-year civil war, which resulted in the deaths of roughly 150,000 people, the mass exodus of nearly 1 million people and foreign occupation by Syria and Israel.

The guitarist made their name on dazzlingly knotty musicianship and collaboration with the likes of Bill Orcutt. So their new album is their most surprising: a startlingly beautiful reflection of love and self-acceptance

It’s 30 December 2023. Wendy Eisenberg is walking and cannot stop. At an all-night rave in Bushwick featuring Detroit house legend Theo Parrish the previous night, they became paralysed by anxiety, returned home, “threw up a lot” and then set off with no destination in mind. “I walked for that entire day,” Eisenberg says by video call from their Brooklyn home. “I couldn’t stop moving my legs. I felt like I needed to reauthor myself, and this was how I was going to do it.”

While out on their fevered walk, Eisenberg ran into an old friend. “She told me: ‘You seem like you’re having a kind of exorcism.’ Then she added: ‘Maybe just play some guitar?’” Thus diagnosed, Eisenberg went home immediately and began writing the music that became their sublime new self-titled album. “I remember reading how Cat Power wrote Moon Pix in 10 hours, in a dream state,” says Eisenberg. Many of these songs were written in a similar state, across three or four months after that “strange, mystical moment”.

M Gessen explores the wild truth about their cousin, who keeps kidnapping his own child. Plus: will the world of porn really be Screwed By AI?

“Anyone’s first cousin could be plotting murder …” New York Times columnist M Gessen is the reporter and host of this leftfield five-parter released under the NYT/Serial Productions banner, with shades of its previous series such as We Were Three and S-Town. A braggart with a problematic habit of kidnapping his own son, M’s “idiot” cousin Allen is charged with ordering a hit on his ex-wife, Priscilla. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Radicalised by the inventiveness of groups such as the Harlem Renaissance, the LA-based musician is determined to reclaim the radical possibilities of culture in an age of institutional and algorithmic exploitation

‘For many years, I’ve called myself a surrealist blues poet,” says Aja Monet in her warm, deep voice. Sitting in a London cafe, the Los Angeles-based artist looks striking, with her blue braids woven up in an intricate style. She was up late uploading the final master recordings for her new album, The Color of Rain, which she says was heavily influenced by her reading around how “surrealism was a real intentional device that artists used in response to the rise of fascism throughout history”.

High-minded and yet invested in the cut-and-thrust of our lives today, it’s a typical comment from Monet. With themes around love, resistance and the absurdity of our current times, her performance, poetry and music offers a balm for the suffering and abuse meted out by establishment power. Already in 2026, her second poetry book Florida Water was nominated for an award by the foundational US civil rights organisation the NAACP, and she performed alongside Stevie Wonder at Time magazine’s event celebrating Martin Luther King Day.

John Lanchester, Patmeena Sabit and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I find it hard to read contemporary fiction while I’m in the middle of writing a novel, so I use the time after finishing as an opportunity to catch up. I hugely enjoyed two British novels, Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt, about friendship and business, and The New Life by Tom Crewe, about gay life in the 1890s. European fiction: Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is a funny novel about going on a road trip with a deranged parent; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is about the horrible life of digital nomads; Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk is an unclassifiable, riveting sort-of mystery.

While informative, the book struggles to identify what strategies can change racist systems held hostage by the political right and centre

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It’s not straightforward, trying to assess a book written by someone whose stature and reputation loom large over the text. I have not read any books by the American academic and anti-racist writer Ibram X Kendi before, but I had absorbed his ideas and interventions into American racial discourse over the years, as well as the controversies. And so I was curious about his latest – and his first since the “anti-woke” backlash.

I tried reading it as a stand-alone text, rather than another chapter in Kendi’s history. Every book deserves to be judged on its own terms. And Chain of Ideas is a huge piece of research that clearly builds on the many years Kendi has spent writing on racism and his experience as a public figure. But does it rise to the occasion? I attempt to answer this below.

This debut about female friendship and environmental fragility set after the 2004 tsunami in Thailand is strong on grief, but the storytelling remains uneven

The underlying themes of this debut novel could hardly be more relevant. Marissa is working as a travel writer without leaving her desk, coining gleaming descriptions of untouched beaches for tourists. But as she does so, her mind runs on darker paths. She is living in New York while it braces for Hurricane Sandy, and as the wind rises she remembers being caught up in the horrors of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand. She grieves for the beauty of the ocean that she knew then, and the fate of her beloved friend Arielle.

Loss, love, environmental fragility, female friendship: I was ready to plunge into the waves of this novel, to swim with its currents of grief and longing. But while I found myself at times drawn in to the narrative, at others I was distanced by Menon’s style, which is deliberately fragmented but also disappointingly uneven.

A new biography puts Baldwin’s sexuality – and the men he loved – front and centre

Today, James Baldwin’s legacy seems assured, but this wasn’t always the case. His critical reputation, already on the wane in his lifetime, declined after his death in 1987. On the publication of the Library of America’s Collected Essays and Early Novels & Stories a decade later, Michael Anderson, writing in the New York Times, complained of his “intellectual flaccidity”. He also dismissed The Fire Next Time – Baldwin’s searing 1963 essay diptych on the US’s legacy of racial injustice – as an overly emotional “period piece”. If such a verdict was out of touch then, six years after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, it seems, now, pitifully shortsighted.

An inflection point in the Baldwin revival arrived in the form of Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016), which juxtaposes footage of modern-day protest and racist police violence with clips of Baldwin’s civil rights-era speech­making. It’s an effective technique, capturing Baldwin’s prescience as well as reasserting his rightful place as a key witness to that bloody era (“witness” was Baldwin’s preferred name for the writer-spokesperson-celebrity mantle he had assumed by the mid-60s; a title that captures something of its moral obligation and frustrating passivity).

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.

From an interactive session of Sex With Friends to improvised Robot Karaoke, the Friday Live celebration of play and performance amid the museum’s venerable halls was a reminder of gaming’s cultural clout

In the grand entrance of the Victoria & Albert Museum, beneath a looming dome with ancient statues visible through nearby arches, a programmer/DJ is busy live-coding a glitchy electronic music set. Either side of her, large LED displays show streams of code and strobing pixellated images as the bass pounds. She’s part of a group named London Live Coding, an experimental collective that makes music by writing and manipulating audio programs. It is loud, disorientating and brilliant, and I can’t help wondering what Queen Victoria and her husband would have made of it.

The set is part of the museum’s long-running Friday Late evening series, a collaboration with the London Games Festival. It showcased a range of independent video games and immersive interactive experiences, focusing on the link between play and performance. Visitors were given a map and left to wander the halls, corridors and galleries looking for installations. You could play the Bafta-winning comedy game Thank Goodness You’re Here! on a giant screen beneath a 13th-century spiral staircase. You could wander down the darkened Prince Consort’s gallery and find groups of giggling pals playing the hilarious erotic physics puzzler Sex With Friends, in which ragdoll-like characters have to be guided into (consensual) sexual encounters – much to the amusement of spectators.

Retail sims aren’t my thing, but the tactile, nostalgic pleasures of hit indie title Retro Rewind have me yearning for the era of physical media, smoking indoors and uncomplicated geopolitics

It’s early doors, but 2026 may be the biggest bin fire of a year in my lifetime. Wars starting, then ending, then starting again in the course of a week. People running their cars on hopes and dreams because a tank of petrol costs more than the vehicle. Manospheric morons making millions. Several depressing celebrity deaths before I’ve so much as eaten my first Creme Egg of the year.

I had no idea that the antidote to my anxiety and rage would be a cheap little title, made by two French blokes, in what I usually regard as the most turgid gaming genre. Retro Rewind is the moment’s indie darling, selling more than 100,000 copies on Steam in a week. In it, you run a video rental shop in the 90s. You need to buy videos. Display them well. Drop flyers. Serve your customers. Buy more stuff. It’s no different from any other retail sim out there, and I normally shun them because I play video games to escape the boring world of work and into an exciting one of dragons, aliens, and being brilliant at sports.

As physical media makes an unlikely comebac​k​ among younger gamers, the humble VHS emerges as an unexpected archive of gaming’s messy, magical evolution​ that I saw first time around

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As I am nostalgic and of a certain age, I recently bought a VHS video recorder, just for the retrospective thrill of it; then I won a 32-inch CRT television at an auction in Shepton Mallet. Partly, this was to play a few old videos I had found in my loft, including one of me appearing in a 1990s youth TV show talking about sexism and Tomb Raider. (I was against the sexism, to be clear). But it was also because I wanted a new way of spending my money on fragile video-game nostalgia.

The rise of the games industry in the 1980s and 90s coincided with the explosion of the home-video business, and the two crossed paths in lots of interesting ways. There are the obvious treasures I want to get hold of: VHS copies of Street Fighter: The Movie and the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, naturally, as well as early games-inspired hits such as The Last Starfighter, The Wizard and WarGames. I rented most of these from my local video shop in the 80s – which, like many others, also sold computer games by the budget publisher Mastertronic, another interesting (at least to me) crossover between these two entertainment formats.

Harold Pinter theatre, London
Young stars perfectly encapsulate the uncompromising nature of first love in Robert Icke’s production

Has the conveyor belt from screen-to-stage celebrity turned full circle when a star from a hit TV series steps on to the West End stage in a production that runs contemporaneously with an adaptation of that same TV series? Sadie Sink, better known to Stranger Things fans as Max Mayfield, performed her West End debut while a prequel to the Duffer Brothers’ series played up the road, at the Phoenix theatre.

It may seem like the Netflixification of the West End, but Sink began life as a theatre actor – and earned a Tony nomination in the US for John Proctor is the Villain, currently at the Royal Court for its London run.

King’s Head theatre, London
The media tycoon comes up against union boss Brenda Dean in Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s docudrama about the 80s Wapping dispute

A teacher in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys says that “there is no period so remote as the recent past”, suggesting that such events are caught between the fallible memories of those involved and the ignorance of those not yet taught about them at school.

That problem was visible at In the Print, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s docudrama about the 1986-87 stand-off between Rupert Murdoch, aiming to reform newspaper production, and Brenda Dean, general secretary of the print union Sogat (the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades). Theatregoers ranged from Lord Kinnock – Labour party leader at the time depicted – to viewers barely born when Murdoch’s News of the World ceased publication in 2011.

London Coliseum
Superbly cast, the dancer brings stratospheric levels of charisma to a rather pedestrian show driven by Cyndi Lauper’s songs

Johannes Radebe (AKA Jojo from Strictly) is a born performer. He is utterly magnetic on stage, and when he’s dancing you can’t take your eyes off him. The role of the drag queen Lola in Kinky Boots could have been written for Radebe, whose entrances alone are a thing to behold – rising from a trapdoor, say, draped in a floor-length crimson gown and wearing a curly blond wig, part Diana Ross, part Whitney Houston. The musical is based on the 2005 film inspired by the real-life story of a troubled Northampton shoe factory that switches to making thigh-high boots for drag queens. It’s a riot of feathers and sparkle, with designers Robert Jones and Tom Rogers going all out on the costumes.

The foil to Lola’s otherworldly glamour is the everyman character Charlie Price (usually played by 2010 X Factor winner Matt Cardle, but due to illness, by understudy Liam Doyle on the night I watch). Charlie is likable, directionless, pulled back home from London by the death of his father to reluctantly take over the ailing family business. A chance encounter with Lola and her friends leads to a mad scheme to save the factory, and a bit of culture clash comedy. Kinky Boots approaches gender and sexuality in a warm, good-humoured way, and lightly explores themes of fathers and sons, expectations and acceptance.

Whitechapel Galery, London
The Turner prize-winner has spent her career exploring organic forms, with often beautiful results – but the most recent work obscures it with what looks remarkably like rubbish

Sometimes the seed of an idea can grow into something monumental. In Veronica Ryan’s case, kernels and pods have grown into a whole career filled with organic forms bursting to life with stories and symbolism.

It’s an approach that has served her well, winning her the Turner prize in 2022. And now the Montserrat-born British artist is being given the full retrospective treatment, with a show taking viewers from her early experiments in lead to more recent sculptures made of twine, bandages and plastic.

‘I was on a scrubby bit of land with Wu-Tang Clan when Method Man said, “Let me show you a trick.” And he put his cap strap over his eye, pulled it back and made the face’

I got into photography when I was about 15. My mate’s grandad died and he left behind a Praktica camera that we played with. I quickly caught the bug. In 1994, during my second year of university, I was a huge fan of Wu-Tang Clan and one day, I heard that they were going to their record label office in Putney, London. So I went along, too. I saw a coach outside and I could soon hear them, arguing and being rabble-rousers. As soon as I came around the corner, I started photographing them on the street. They were giving me such energy but what really made it come together was the fact that Popa Wu was travelling with them. He was older and something of a mentor to them. It was one of those moments when I realised that if you don’t dare, you don’t win – so I asked him if I could get on the coach and travel with them and shoot them. And he let me.

This was Wu-Tang Clan’s first time out of the US. They were these wild, urban kids from New York who had a genius talent for storytelling. On the coach, they were listening to some really deep soul music – Stax Records stuff. It was the only mixtape they could all agree on. It was way beyond the sort of soul I knew. That music has always stayed with me.

Drummer with Pentangle, the folk-rock group who found fame in the 1960s with their fusion of jazz, blues and traditional songs

On 27 May 1967, a bravely original band called Pentangle made their first major appearance, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. They were not a typical folk group, although they included the folk scene’s acoustic guitar heroes Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, along with the singer Jacqui McShee.

But they were not a typical jazz band either, despite playing lengthy improvisations and including the jazz and blues exponents Danny Thompson on bass and Terry Cox on drums. Instead, they presented a subtle and often complex fusion of jazz, traditional styles, new songs and blues.

From medieval church wall paintings to Liam Gallagher’s viral X post, charity has catalogued more than 6,600 pieces

Some of the UK’s smallest public murals are on bollards in Shrewsbury while one of the biggest is on a 1960s 16-storey block of flats in Gosport.

Perhaps the funniest though is in Cardiff. Ahead of last summer’s Oasis concerts it was a straightforward copy of Liam Gallagher’s viral post on X declaring: “Because Cardiff is the bollox.”

The philosophy was embraced by film noir, the French New Wave and modern hitmen questioning life’s purpose. Now dust off your turtlenecks, for Sirāt and a new version of Albert Camus’ The Stranger look set to make ennui on-trend again

“For it all to be consummated, to feel less alone, I had only to wish for a big crowd on the day of my execution, and for them to greet me with cries of hate.” The lacerating signoff of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger isn’t a collection of words you’ll see appearing as life advice in some influencer’s Instagram caption any time soon. In the age of vapid social media self-help, François Ozon’s new film adaptation of the existentialist masterpiece rears up like a great monolith. Eighty-four years after the novel was published, that’s rather unexpected; as far as IP goes, L’Étranger (The Stranger) was probably some way behind Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs on the film industry’s revival list. Does this mean that existentialism is suddenly back in vogue? Or is the film just a farewell tour for every angsty student’s favourite source of tattoo quotes?

It should be said that Ozon’s version is a big improvement on Luchino Visconti’s ill-conceived 1967 stab at Camus’s novel, Lo Straniero (the only other direct adaptation). Filmed in serenely aloof silvery monochrome, the new film is a tasteful but pointed interpretation. Newcomer Benjamin Voisin is superb in the lead as antihero Meursault, who is famously unmoved by his mother’s death and says the sun’s glare is what makes him shoot an Arab. This Meursault is hard-edged in his nonconformism, coming across at times like a sociopathic, colonial-era Patrick Bateman, next to the book’s sleepily acquiescent figure. And Ozon is on politically strident form, recentring the story on colonial power relations from the prologue onwards – which features a chirpy newsreel-style propaganda film about Algiers’ “smooth blend of Occident and Orient”.

Content creators love the built-in camera; sceptics call them ‘pervert glasses’. Do we really need any more hi-tech wearables, even with a voice assistant that sounds like Judi Dench?

Lately, I’ve been hearing Judi Dench’s voice in my head. She tells me tomorrow’s forecast, when to turn right, that there’s been another message in my group chat. Day or night, Dame Judi is eager to assist. When I ask the eight-time Academy Award nominee what I’m looking at, she answers: a residential area, a person in a pub, daffodils. “They are a bright yellow colour and are often associated with spring.”

This isn’t a delusion. This is, apparently, progress. I am test-driving Meta’s smartglasses and Dench voices its integrated AI assistant: “Here to chat, answer questions, create images and provide advice and inspiration,” said “Judi” when I selected her over the actors John Cena and Kristen Bell. “Shall we begin?”

Nevermind the trends, want to know how to dress for actual spring weather? Then read on

It all came to a head, as matters of getting dressed so often do, over black tights. I had wanted to wear my silver skirt, you see. It was a rare blue-sky day and the sunshine was making me crave reflective surfaces to maximise the light. Anyway, you know how it is when you just get a yen to wear something. So I pulled out said silver skirt and then realised I didn’t want to wear the black opaque tights I wear with it in winter, but it wasn’t anywhere near warm enough to wear it with bare legs as I do in summer. I was completely stumped. And it made me realise: I need a refresher course in what to wear at this time of year. Spring has sprung, but I have forgotten how to hop to it.

So here we have it: your pocket primer on how to dress for spring. I’m talking about the spring that happens every year, an actual real-world meteorological phenomenon, not about the fashion trends of this particular moment. The lengthening days, daylight commuting, the juicy greens and yellows of the landscape, the maverick unpredictability of rain. Whether zebra stripes are the new leopard does not concern us today. We don’t need fashion to provide the newness when newness is in abundance in the world. So we can flick back through the pages to remind ourselves of spring’s fashion classics.

Unlucky in love? Maybe ditch the apps. This new twist on Victorian-era ‘flirtation cards’ could spark your next meet-cute

• How do romance novelists celebrate love?

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Tired of swiping, singles are attending flirting parties and even dating-oriented run clubs in hopes of meeting their future partner in real life.

But even those lack the romanticism of a true meet-cute. The Brooklyn-based stationery brand No Particular Order is offering a more serendipitous option: its new acquaintance cards that encourage more spontaneous connections.

For some, it’s a meat thermometer or a knife, for others a roasting tin, a reliable peeler or, yes, a teapot (gravy, anyone?). Let the cooking perfection begin

Crispy roast potatoes, golden yorkshire puddings and perfectly cooked meat (or a vegetarian centrepiece) – there’s nothing like a good roast dinner. But making a roast can be quite a balancing act in the kitchen. There’s a fine art to juggling all the elements: you want to make sure nothing is over- or under-cooked, and that everything is still warm when you come to serve it.

To refine your techniques and help you feel like a pro in the kitchen, we asked top chefs from around the UK about the cooking equipment they rely on to make the perfect roast. Featuring life-changing peelers, roasting tins that make the crispiest potatoes and a temperature probe to help you cook to perfection, these are their recommendations.

Spring has officially sprung, but your March favourites tell us you’ve still got one cosily socked foot in bed

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March claims to be spring – and some of it even reckons it’s British summertime – but even the sunniest days are “summer in the sunshine, winter in the shade”. Judging by the products you loved most, you haven’t decided whether to emerge from hibernation yet, either.

Pillows and bed socks accounted for a quarter of all your favourite things this month, and your fashion must-have was a snuggly hoodie. But your enthusiasm for a glow-up eye cream and a legendary hot brush suggests you’re harbouring an itch to get out.

With an egg-cellent roster on offer, which chocolate treats are the most moreish and which aren’t worth shelling out on?

• The best novelty hot cross buns

At the age of 45, my Easter egg hunt is about seeking out quality, transparency and flavour, rather than just finding the most eggs. Then again, I haven’t been on one for about 35 years, and my tastes have since changed, as has the market. Beyond those foil-wrapped novelties of yesteryear, there’s now a genuinely impressive selection of thoughtfully made, handcrafted chocolate eggs aimed at those with a more mature palate.

As with all chocolate, certifications matter: Fairtrade guarantees a minimum price, fairer working rights and investment in climate resilience, while the Rainforest Alliance focuses on environmental standards and farm sustainability. The quality and processing of the chocolate is also important. Most eggs contain the likes of invert sugar syrup, soya lecithin and E471, so rather than highlight every additive, I’ve instead flagged products with minimal processing, as well as those that use palm oil. I haven’t marked down for high sugar content – it is Easter, after all – but I have included the percentage of sugar.

This hearty, slow-cooked soup is a celebration of all things Welsh, and its versatility makes it a year-round favourite

Cawl is Wales’ gift to the world of thrifty, slow-cooked broths and, like all great peasant dishes, it’s seasonal, versatile and immensely practical. A few years ago, Food & Drink Wales invited me to create two food sustainability toolkits, one for hospitality and one for the public, with both celebrating Welsh produce and recipes. This led me to explore Wales’ national dishes and discover cawl (or lobscows, the northern Welsh name for the dish) properly for the first time. Inspired by Welsh culinary legends Dudley Newbery and Tomos Parry’s recipes, it’s the perfect way to turn lamb leftovers, or even just a bone, into a hearty meal.

A moist bake with a deep carrot and cinnamon flavour, plus a showstopper of crisp meringue, strawberry and chocolate fudge sauce

Carrot cake is heaven at any time of year, but especially around Easter. Thanks to a generous glug of olive oil and heaps of finely shredded carrots, this single-layer version stays moist for days. A supple crumb, deep carrot flavour, a halo of cinnamon: it’s as close to divinity as I’ll ever get. For something more unexpected, meanwhile, I love this Neapolitan-inspired pavlova: a crisp, strawberry meringue piled with bittersweet fudge sauce, tangy vanilla cream cheese whip and bright strawberry compote. It’s impressive yet simple, and a raucous pleasure to devour communally with spoons.

Our specialists weigh in on the sauce’s best uses, suggesting dressings, dips and more

My wife adores roast lamb with mint sauce. However, after an online purchasing blunder, my larder now contains six jars. How can I make use of them apart from serving roast lamb every Sunday from now until the crack of doom?
John, by email
As is so often the case, it all starts with a shift in mindset. “When you see a jar of sauce, there’s a real tendency to think, ‘I must use this as a sauce,’” says Kate Young, author of Dinner at Mine? Start treating that surplus mint sauce as an ingredient instead, however, and your life will be a whole lot easier. “If John is planning on using chopped fresh mint with, say, meat, cheese or veg, then consider how you might use mint sauce in its place,” Young adds. Case in point: pea and mint soup, says Sally Abé of the recently opened Teal by Sally Abé in east London. “Stir in the mint sauce at the end of the cooking, then blitz with the peas.”

Obvious, maybe, but it’s also worth pointing out that mint sauce has a decent shelf life, so John can be nice and relaxed in how he chooses to use the fruits of his shopping blunder. That said, sausage rolls are always a good idea, especially if you’re feeding a gang over Easter. Young says: “Put some finely chopped onion through lamb mince, then add big spoonfuls of the sauce.” Fry a bit of the mix before nestling it in pastry, mind: “You want to be sure the mint is really coming through.” (Likewise, any lamb meatball will be greatly improved by the addition of the green stuff.)

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

This Easter feast is steeped in the flavours and traditions of the Middle East

Whenever I’m asked about my favourite dish to serve to friends and family, in most cases I’d say slow-cooked lamb at the centre of the table. After a long, slow cook, the meat becomes tender and rich, and the spices melt into every bite. Served with flatbreads, tahini, fresh herbs and sharp pickles, it invites everyone to build their own perfect mouthful. Across the Middle East and Mediterranean, lamb symbolises generosity and celebration, especially at Easter, when roasting it remains an adored tradition.

When Merlin came to live with me, his only job was to clear the weeds from my fields. But his calm, affectionate nature has made him a vital part of my therapy practice

Merlin the sheep came to me by chance four years ago. A friend of mine had a lamb she was bottle-feeding, but she couldn’t look after it any more so she asked me if I could take care of it. I live in Moortown, Leeds, and rent about three hectares (seven acres) of land in Eccup, a small village nearby, where I’ve kept horses for about 13 years. I needed some help clearing the weeds that the horses wouldn’t eat and sheep seemed like the best solution because they’ll eat anything – so I said yes.

The lamb was called Bambi and when I came to collect her, my friend offered me another lamb, Merlin. Shortly after, Bambi died and it was just Merlin left. It wasn’t long until he started to show his special powers.

Emigrating to be with your partner sounds wildly romantic, but what happens when the person is right and the place very much isn’t?

I met my wife in Queensland in 2001. She’s from Bern, but was in Australia to study marine science. She needed help collecting fish for her project, and had heard that I was handy with a spear gun. We hit it off straight away, and began our romance on semi‑deserted islands near the Great Barrier Reef.

We went on to make a life together. My wife liked Australia and eventually got citizenship, but after we had our first son she wanted to be near her family.

The singers and sisters on growing up in west London, finding fame in the 90s and relaunching their music as a duo

Born in Canada, Natalie and Nicole Appleton are singers best known as members of the group All Saints. Raised between Ontario, London and New York, the sisters joined the band in 1996 alongside Shaznay Lewis and Melanie Blatt. After the success of their self-titled 1997 debut and a string of hits including the chart-topping singles Never Ever and Pure Shores, All Saints split in 2001. The sisters released music together as Appleton in 2002, and have since reunited with All Saints for three albums. Appleton’s new single, Falling Into You, is out now.

Sandra and Roy are adapting to sex as new parents, from postpartum pain to acting fast when they have a private moment
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Sex was a reminder that I’m still me. That this identity still exists, which is really important because you do lose it a bit, especially in the early weeks of becoming a mother

Only way to avoid missing a flight because of EES rules: squeeze everything into a cabin bag and skip luggage check-in

Travellers to the EU risk missing their flights because bag drop-off times don’t allow for the long queues to get through a new security system.

My family of four missed our easyJet flight home from Málaga because, although we followed advice from the airport and arrived three hours before departure, the bag drop-off didn’t open until two hours before.

Calls for tougher laws as network stretching from Caribbean to Georgia generates riches for offshore tycoons by appearing to prey on the vulnerable

Immaculately groomed and beaming from ear to ear, Andres Markou looks every inch the golden boy of the gambling sector. The youthful boss of MyStake, a fast-growing digital casino, has been pictured shaking hands with the Brazilian football legend Ronaldinho over a lucrative branding partnership.

Elsewhere, he can be seen collecting industry awards, or offering “visionary” insights to interviewers. There is only one hurdle blocking Markou’s ascent to the very top of his trade: he does not exist.

Snappy performance, high-quality screen, best-in-class keyboard and trackpad show cheaper can still be great

Apple’s brand new entry-level laptop is powered by the chip from an iPhone and offers more than just the essential MacBook experience for a great price, putting the PC industry on notice.

The MacBook Neo is the first of its kind from Apple. A 13in laptop that runs on an A18 Pro chip and brings the starting price for a brand new MacBook down to £599 (€699/$599/A$899) – £500 or the equivalent less than the MacBook Air.

From council tax to water, broadband to stamps, the annual round of price rises starts on 1 April … and that’s before any fallout from Iran war

• UK savers told to act now before Easter Sunday cash Isa deadline

Britons will typically see more than £200 added to their household bills this year as “awful April” price increases kick in.

The annual rises are particularly unwelcome as the financial turmoil caused by the Middle East conflict has pushed up mortgage rates, fuel prices and energy bills for rural households.

One of the fastest-growing fitness trends is also one of the most divisive. To its fans, it promises a stronger, healthier body; to its critics, it’s another way to make women feel insecure. Time to sort fact from fiction

I have noticed something new in my London neighbourhood. Amid the sea of nail salons, vape shops and purveyors of fried chicken, sleek, opaque-fronted premises are popping up everywhere. There are several within 15 minutes of my home.

At weekends, you can spot clusters of devotees heading to these mysterious, vaguely aspirational temples of self-care, AKA reformer pilates studios. Many of these devotees conform to an aesthetic popularised on TikTok via hashtags such as #pilatesprincess. There is definitely a uniform: pink athleisure, Rhode phone cases and oversized pastel-coloured Stanley tumblers, jokingly referenced on Instagram as “emotional support” bottles. It is a trend that prompted New York magazine to run an article under the headline “Why Pilates Keeps Pissing People Off”: the workout has become inseparable from a very strict idea of womanhood.

Claims of benefits have been amplified by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. How does the evidence actually stack up?

• Read more in the Antiviral series

Influencers are telling their audiences that injectable peptides are the “glow up potion” they need for everything from clearing up hormonal acne, thickening hair, relieving back pain and even treating chronic UTIs.

These peptides, intended for research purposes (as some influencers do point out) and not approved for human use, are being increasingly sold through unregulated online channels.

‘Zombie filler’, or using cadaver tissue that’s been sterilized and branded as Alloclae, is the latest cosmetic surgery rage. Is it safe?

The residential block at 655 Park Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is so storied it has its own Wikipedia entry. It has housed luminaries from bestselling romance author Danielle Steel to esteemed yachtsmen and the 20th-century heir William Kissam Vanderbilt II. A more recent resident, on the ground floor, is Alpha Male Plastic Surgery, a clinic offering a broad menu of elective procedures catering to the needs of the modern man.

On a coffee table in the waiting room, fanned-out brochures tout facelifts, non-surgical penile implants, and Tesamorelin – an FDA-approved peptide injection targeting stubborn visceral belly fat. Flatscreen monitors mounted behind the front desk shuffle through ads for a “Full Male Model Makeover”, proprietary procedures like BodyBanking® and the 360 TorsoTuck®, and for the gym rat who habitually skips leg day, even “Amazing New Calves”.

When Ubokobong Amanam lost his fingers in an accident he teamed up with his brother John, a special effects artist, to design a prosthetic that suited him – now they run a thriving business

On a humid morning in Uyo, Nigeria, Ubokobong Amanam shows off the lifelike prosthetic where his fingers once were. The skin bears tiny wrinkles, and the nails are naturally shaped. Seven years ago, he was badly injured in a firework accident. Doctors could save him, but not his fingers.

The prosthetics available at the time were clumsy, poorly fitted and designed for bodies nothing like his.

Doctors warn viral off-label use lacks evidence, with unknown long-term risks and possible systemic absorption

Vaginal estrogen cream is prescribed to ease genital dryness, irritation and discomfort that results from the loss of estrogen during menopause.

The name tells you exactly where to put it. Yet a new trend has been making the rounds on social media. People are calling vaginal estrogen cream the new “filler” for the face and other body parts, claiming it can smooth wrinkles, reduce dryness and sagginess and plump up the skin.

Armani revamps a favourite, Clarins adds a tint to its serum and a new base from Carisa Janes will suit anyone who hates powders

Three very big hitters have new foundations: one risky reformulation of a cult classic; one addition to a wildly popular skincare franchise; and one to launch a new brand from a beauty legend.

Let’s start with Armani’s Luminous Silk (£49 for 30ml), loved by many for its buildable, versatile coverage, and perhaps the most worn bridal foundation of all time. While I’m not against a reformulation in principle (technology, regulations and ingredients move on, and that’s all for the better), Armani does seem to have reformulated here for little discernible reason beyond Google Analytics.

Prepare for bouclé jackets, quilted chain-link bags galore and an outfit formula that is proving to be consumer catnip

Just six months after Matthieu Blazy unveiled his debut collection for Chanel, and a week after it landed in stores, excitement over the new designer has reached fever pitch. There have been queues outside shops, grapples at the tills and dozens of social media posts bragging about purchases. Now, Blazy’s Chanel effect is coming for the high street. Prepare for bouclé jackets and quilted chain-link bags galore.

“It is a good sign that it has become immediately a reference point for the high street,” says Mario Ortelli, a managing partner at the luxury advisory firm Ortelli & Co. “When a new product and new creative direction is successful it is copied by the high street. If not, it means it is not relevant or is only relevant for a niche set of consumers.”

Show draws almost entirely from collection of Lancashire schoolteacher Peter Smithson, a fan since he was 10

Peter Smithson’s wife, Belise, has never minded when he receives a corset from Japan or a pair of fur-trimmed knickers and they are not for her.

“No, she’s never seen it as strange,” said Smithson, a chemistry teacher and Vivienne Westwood supercollector. “She has never judged it. She gets it. She knows it is part and parcel of who I am.”

With its never-ending street theatre and labyrinthine medina, this timeless city swallows you whole – and reveals new secrets with each visit

The rising sun sets fire to the snow-covered caps of the Atlas mountains. Within moments, the shadowy gorges are gleaming with warm terracotta hues. I turn my back on north Africa’s highest peaks and look north where Marrakech – nicknamed the Red City – rests like a jagged ruby amid the jade swathes of palms and the silvery sheen of olive groves.

Swinging 800 metres (2,625ft) above the stony desert in a giant wicker basket, I try to imagine what this scene would have looked like when camel trains trooped this way, loaded with salt, spices and enslaved humans bound for Marrakech’s souks.

It’s a quintessentially Welsh experience of castles, cockles and cawl when you explore the south-west of the country by train, bus and a new footpath opening this week

Sit on the left when you catch the train from Swansea to Carmarthen, and you can watch huge sandy estuaries unspool outside the window. There’s a curlew standing by the water, an egret-haunted pool in the wetlands, and a boardwalk along the foreshore, part of the 870-mile Wales Coast Path. It has been a six-hour, four-train journey to get here from Essex, but I’ll soon be on foot.

Carmarthenshire has picturesque railways, a network of buses, and some epic long-distance paths, so it makes for an ideal car-free break. The 13-mile Tywi Valley Path (officially opening in time for Easter) will link Abergwili near Carmarthen and Ffairfach near Llandeilo, helping walkers and cyclists access some lovely scenery. I’m visiting just before Saint David’s Day, and there are daffodils everywhere. Carmarthenshire offers a quintessentially Welsh experience, packed with castles, cockles and cawl (stew).

Beyond the Belgian capital’s more obvious sights lies a thriving district known for its classic Belgian cuisine, alternative art scene and gigantic flea market

The Brusseleir dialect that’s still spoken in much of the Marolles dates back to the middle ages, a symbol of the independence of this proudly working-class neighbourhood in central Brussels. Located between the Palace of Justice and Halle Gate, it’s always been an inclusive refuge for immigrants from Europe and north Africa. The must-see Brussels tourist attractions of the Grand-Place central square and Mannekin-Pis statue are within walking distance, but the Marolles offers a very different experience: fashion, antiques and bric-a-brac shopping; alternative creative centres and provocative graffiti; characteristic estaminets (hybrid pub, cafe, bistros) specialising in hearty local dishes; and artisan breweries.

Join the Famous Five in Dorset, relive Springwatch in the Peak District … our selection of Easter treats will keep all the family entertained

Spring has arrived at Wicken Fen, one of Europe’s most important wetlands, and with it the first summer migrants. Chiffchaffs are usually the earliest, with their rhythmic song ringing out across the fens. Then, if the weather is mild, blackcaps and willow warblers might join them. Listen closely, especially early morning or at dusk, for the foghorn-like calls of the booming bittern across the reedbeds. There’s a pushchair- and wheelchair-friendly boardwalk around Sedge Fen, and wheelchair-accessible wildlife hides. Look out for the electric blue flash of a kingfisher, and male marsh harriers performing their dramatic sky-dancing flights as the breeding season gets under way, before the cuckoos arrive in late April.
From £10 adults, £5 children (under-5s free), nationaltrust.org.uk

I had grown up dreading introductions, with the inevitable mangling of my name. Suddenly, in India, we were both getting the respect we deserved

I had five names on the day of my Hindu naming ceremony, but my given name was Priti, a name that came to shape me.

Like most children with “unconventional” names, I dreaded the first day of each school year. I would squirm in my chair as my new teacher worked their way through the class register, and my stomach would drop as they attempted to say my full name: Priti Ubhayakar. I would be sitting there thinking: “If the first name doesn’t get you, the last name will.”

Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: These early spring bloomers are a favourite of mine, a model of nature’s generosity, yet so often ignored

The drier days of March are always marked by the hum of dutiful grass-cutting on our urban Midlands housing estate, and so I know I will have to look to the gutters and pavements to spot my favourite spring flower. Sure enough, the first one I see is blooming in a crack beside a crumbling wall on the busy main road. I can’t help but let out a joyful shout, leaning down to cradle its fierce lion head in my fingers. Hello, dandelion, how I’ve missed you!

Perhaps it’s being a wheelchair user, closer to the ground than most, that has given me a special place in my heart for them, or perhaps it’s because I’ve always felt like a weed myself, inconvenient and growing in the wrong place. Either way, I have long been kindred spirits with keen-eyed toddlers who love to carry them in their fists. I’ve often joked that my bridal bouquet will be dandelions, please. I can honestly think of no finer flower. Why? Because there is no better example of nature’s generosity than a dandelion.

The Kirkwall branch of Tesco meant to buy 380kg of fruit. Instead, it placed an order for 380 boxes – each containing 100 pieces

Name: Banana bonanza.

Age: A few days old – and getting riper by the minute.

Language experts say you should learn in the right order and shift to a growth mindset

If there’s one thing guaranteed to make a pop-culture character look cool and sophisticated, it’s being multilingual. Think James Bond, Yasmin from Industry or Scrooge McDuck.

Learning a new language not only makes you look cool – it also allows you to familiarize yourself with another culture, connect with new people and enjoy a wider variety of art and media. And it’s good for your brain. Studies have shown that learning a new language is associated with improved concentration, stronger communication skills, a more powerful memory and greater creativity.

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

Within the lunar dirt is a type of helium so rare on Earth that a palm-sized container is estimated to be worth millions

In the silent vacuum of space, five autonomous robots churn through the lunar surface, digging up a loose layer of rock and dust and leaving rows of uniform tracks in their wake.

Stopping only to recharge at a central solar power station, the car-sized machines process the lunar dirt internally to extract a type of helium so rare on Earth that a palm-sized container is estimated to be worth millions. Once processed, the precious resource is loaded into a launcher and ejected back to Earth.

Rightwing parties are using parliamentary queries, legal traps and policing to target NGOs and stifle dissent

• Revealed: Five EU governments found to ‘consistently’ dismantle rule of law

Pauline Voss, the deputy editor of Nius, a fast-growing rightwing media outlet whose ambition is to be Germany’s Fox News, believes progressive civil society groups in Germany are engaged in a coordinated campaign to “act against their own population”.

That may be why, according to research this year by the progressive pressure group Campact, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) filed 295 parliamentary queries targeting left-leaning NGOs last year – more than twice as many as in 2024.

He went from a Glasgow council estate to Hollywood fame. Now, in his directorial debut, the X-Men star is challenging stereotypes about his homeland via the remarkable tale of a real-life hip-hop hoax

It’s the final night of the Glasgow film festival and James McAvoy is a wee bit out of breath. His directorial debut, California Schemin’, is playing across all three screens at the Glasgow Film Theatre in the city centre, taking the festival’s prestige closing slot.

Usually, a big name would say a few words of introduction in the main cinema then bask in the glory. Not McAvoy. Getting in among it still comes naturally 25 years after he left this city to pursue a career that has blazed from his award-winning Cyrano de Bergerac in the West End of London to playing Professor X, the founder of the X-Men, in the blockbuster Hollywood franchise.

Do you agree with the guidance? Have you been limiting screen time for your child? How is that going?

Children under five should spend no more than an hour a day on screens and under-twos should not be watching screens alone, according to UK government advice.

The guidance was developed by a panel led by the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, and the children’s health expert Prof Russell Viner.

We’d like to hear from volunteers who have experienced a charity closing

Across the UK, many small charities face increasing financial pressures, forcing some to shut their doors. When this happens, it can leave the people who relied on those services without support - and volunteers and communities trying to step in and keep things going.

We’d like to hear from volunteers who have experienced a charity closing. Have you or others tried to continue the work informally and what were the challenges of doing that? Did you try to keep it going - and what difficulties did you face? What happened to the people who depended on the service?

We would like to hear about your experiences of caring for elderly parents and how this has affected your life

In a recent Guardian opinion piece, Lucinda Holdforth described her experience of caring for her late mother, and her complicated feelings after she died.

It is a common human theme that good parents can never really rest for worrying about their children. But it seems to me that a reciprocal burden exists for good children. We are never entirely free from the psychic weight of our parents’ needs, love and ambitions for us in our youth, and increasingly we now find ourselves taking on guardian-style responsibilities for them during their prolonged old age.

I finally understood the accumulated heaviness of the burden I had carried about a year after my mother died. At 59, I was at last an orphan, which meant I could turn off my phone each night. I woke up one day with the most complete feeling of creative liberty and personhood I’d ever experienced. That feeling has not left me since.

We’d like to hear from people who are in a throuple or who used to be in one, and what their relationship was like

The Guardian’s Saturday magazine is looking for throuples to talk honestly about the experience of love and commitment.

We’re particularly interested in talking to throuples living together under one roof, as well as throuples who are raising children as a unit of three parents. Is it easier to manage the chore rota and childcare when there are more adults in the room? Or more difficult?

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