Expenditure is growing fast and consumer take-up accelerating. But alarm bells are sounding

The race is very much on. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which makes AI models as well as space rockets, announced last week it is seeking a $1.77tn (£1.31tn) valuation on the US stock market while Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude chatbot, said it had filed for an initial public offering. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is expected to follow.

This latest peak in the AI market comes amid a multitrillion-dollar spending spree on related infrastructure such as datacentres. Meanwhile, companies are attempting to deploy the technology in a way that makes investing in it worthwhile. Here’s a look at what stage the AI boom is at and six key charts that tell us how we got here.

Andrew Sparrow has been writing the Guardian’s daily political live blog for more than 15 years. How does he cope with the relentless psychodrama of British politics?

On Monday at 14:12 BST, the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow posted two sentences announcing one of the largest government document dumps in British political history:

The Cabinet Office has published the Mandelson files.
They are in three volumes.

Many people despair at the quality of governance in Britain at the moment, but in one respect we are living through a golden age; if you are interested in contemporary history, and learning about what actually happens at the heart of government, then you can now – sometimes – access the sort of information never available before …

Last month a minister compared [the documents being published today] to the evidence released as part of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. But the Chilcot inquiry took place in the era before WhatsApp, and it was publishing secret memos – intended for circulation within Whitehall. WhatsApp messages are a lot more personal; reading them is like being able to eavesdrop on a private conversation.”

An autism school in Wiltshire exemplifies what’s so different about education in a tailored environment, and the outcomes for children speak for themselves

In the old Wiltshire milltown of Calne, there is an autism specialist school called the Springfields Academy. About 250 children and young people between the age of four and 19 go there. Class sizes are no larger than 12. In each room, every child has their own dedicated table. There are no end of seating options, described by the headteacher, Nicola Whitcombe, as “wobble stools, wobble cushions, ball chairs, standing desks and booths”, with “pods” elsewhere for one-to-one teaching. And across a broad, multi-level curriculum based around personal development, every lesson follows the same basic structure. “From an autistic perspective,” she says, “that’s really important: ‘I know I’m going into the same thing, so therefore I feel safe.’”

Every year the school takes in a lot of primary school leavers who would find a mainstream secondary pretty much impossible. “If you’ve got five different lessons in a day, in five different classrooms with five different teachers, and this before we’ve talked about the corridors, and the smells, and where you have lunch – it’s overwhelming,” Whitcombe said. “So at our school, we have to get our environment right.” Over the past six years, no one who has been to Springfields has begun post-school life as a Neet (not in education, employment or training) – which is quite some achievement.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

From franchise hits to historical epics, joyous musicals to autobiographical family sagas: Steven Spielberg has done it all. As his latest sci-fi film Disclosure Day is released, film-makers, authors and Guardian critics reveal which of his movies means the most to them

Steven Spielberg is often described as the inventor of the “event movie” – or as the creator of our new age of IP supremacy, in which the genre property is more important than any above-the-title film star. But that isn’t quite it. He came of age in the American new wave era but in spirit belonged neither to that nor fully to Hollywood’s golden age studio system that preceded it.

In fact, he synthesised both into a directing style that was audacious and fluent. He availed himself of the subversiveness of the new wave, and yet was classically oriented, drawing upon his love of – and alienation from – the all-American suburb, making him the Edward Hopper or the Andrew Wyeth of the movies. Tellingly, it was François Truffaut, the most emollient and Hollywood-friendly of France’s Nouvelle Vague masters, whom Spielberg cast in a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Attempt to turn a stretch of the English-Scottish border into a commercial forest exposes threat to habitats from wealthy investors

On the English-Scottish border a small species of butterfly, the northern brown argus, has fended off one of the biggest investors in the UK.

Todrig, with its heath moorlands and hundreds of species of flora and fauna, represents an investment that could save Britain’s wealthiest families millions of pounds in inheritance tax.

Visitors flock to Book Arsenal in Ukraine’s capital as wartime writing takes centre stage

It was a literary festival, all right, but if your reference for such things is Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh, or Melbourne and Sydney, or New York and Washington DC, then at Kyiv Book Arsenal you might think you had slipped through a crack in the universe and landed in an alternative reality.

For a start, they were so young, the audience members. Dressed in their considerable best, they clutched their bags of books bought directly from publishers’ stalls and stopped to hug their friends – the festival providing the perfect opportunity for a people-watching passeggiata through its venue, the city’s vast 18th-century military arsenal.

Launches appear to mark the first such attack since April ceasefire; Tehran threatened Israel with ‘painful’ response after strikes on southern Beirut

• Full report: Iran launches missiles at Israel

Donald Trump also aggressively pushed back against claims that he broke a key campaign promise to keep the US out of new foreign conflicts.

“Well, well, first of all, I didn’t guarantee no war,” Trump said during the Meet the Press interview. “Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?”

Without it the ‘true scale’ of former Harrods owner’s alleged network will stay hidden, says survivors’ group

Survivors of abuse perpetrated by the former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed are calling for a full trafficking investigation to be launched, arguing that without it the “true scale” of the billionaire’s alleged network would remain hidden.

Survivors at No One Above (NOA), a collective founded by victims of abuse at the hands of Fayed, are calling for the Metropolitan police to broaden their investigation into the billionaire and make trafficking the main focus.

Exclusive: Practice that includes women fleeing abuse is ‘ripping at social fabric’ of towns in poorest parts of England

• ‘I was crying and shaking’: vulnerable people face ‘inhumane’ ultimatums from London councils

Vulnerable families including women fleeing abuse are being illegally “dumped” hundreds of miles away by London councils in a practice “ripping at the social fabric” of deprived towns, a Guardian investigation has found.

Against the backdrop of a deepening housing crisis, the number of homeless people forced out of London has doubled in the past two years.

Keir Starmer hosts Ukrainian, French and German leaders in Downing Street after Russia fires hypersonic weapons at Ukraine

Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the leaders of the UK, France and Germany discussed “the urgent need to scale up” Ukraine’s air defences and deep-strike capabilities in London on Sunday night, after Russia fired hypersonic weapons at Ukraine, Downing Street said.

The meeting of Ukraine’s staunchest allies in London came hours after a Russian drone strike damaged a storage centre for spent nuclear fuel nine miles from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant.

Call for ‘clear and truthful account’ comes amid questions about the Reform leader’s property spending

The Labour party has written to Nigel Farage urging him to stop “evading reasonable scrutiny” over the £5m personal gift he received from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

The letter coincides with approval of a planning application that reveals the Reform leader’s plans to transform a dilapidated Kent property into a luxury beachfront residence.

Exclusive: Dr David Wilson says former British police officer approached him as part of efforts to influence his work

The author of a Home Office-sponsored report on the Chinese state and organised crime in the UK was the target of failed honey traps and a suspected attempt to compromise him by a former British police officer, it is claimed.

Dr David Wilson, whose groundbreaking analysis was declassified in February, has told of multiple attempts to influence him or discredit his work as he sought to examine the policing challenges posed by the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and criminal gangs.

About 48 people rescued alive after vessel reportedly left Libya carrying about 60 passengers

Italian rescuers have recovered 10 bodies after a migrant boat capsized in waters off Malta, a coastguard statement said on Sunday.

The vessel, which had departed from Libya carrying about 60 people, overturned about 45 nautical miles east-south-east of Malta, the Italian coastguard said.

• Match against Ukraine abandoned after incident

• Danish FA say Eriksen ‘conscious’ after treatment

Denmark’s former Manchester United and Tottenham midfielder Christian Eriksen collapsed on the pitch in a match against Ukraine on Sunday, but was conscious as he was taken from the field by medics.

The incident happened during an end-of-season friendly between two sides who have not qualified for the World Cup. Eriksen, who suffered a cardiac arrest during a European Championship match in 2021, was quickly tended to by medics in Odense, while the referee abandoned the match early.

Paul Edwards ordered the publication before the birth of his son in 2007, but experienced pregnant pause before receiving it this week

When Paul Edwards ordered a parenting magazine in 2007, he was hoping that it would provide helpful advice and offers to help him navigate the stresses and challenges of bringing up children.

However the magazine never arrived – until now. The copy of Mother & Baby was delivered on Friday – 19 years after he ordered it – with his children now studying at university.

After decades of alienating working-class and rural voters from the Democratic party, it’s time the left bridges the divide

It was a warm morning in rural Virginia. I was cutting into a pile of downed logs – wild cherry, oak and black locust – left behind when a piece of land was cleared for a small house.

A young guy pulled up, stepped out of his truck and gave me a nod, the way people do out here. Chainsaws in hand, we quickly figured out we both knew the owner and had her permission to take the wood – me for our home and greenhouse, him for much the same. Then we got to it – work.

Our rigid eating habits date to the Industrial Revolution – it’s time to embrace culinary spontaneity

‘One of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought is that each of the three daily meals should be ‘balanced’.” So argues American food writer MFK Fisher in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. She goes on: “In the first place not all people need or want three meals each day. Many of them feel better with two or one and one-half, or five.”

Fisher wrote her book ostensibly as a guide on how to feed yourself pleasurably and nourishingly during a period of food shortages caused by war, but there is much in her insightful advice to inspire and provoke us today. More than 80 years later, threats to the sacred breakfast-lunch-dinner mode of eating can still make the news: “A nation of snackers: Britons no longer eat three meals a day”, gasped one recent headline in the Times. Deviations from the “standard” model are the subject of research by academics and health professionals, and food retailers commission studies in an attempt to understand (and shape?) when and how customers consume their food.

This year’s Tony awards have already seen wins for musicals Schmigadoon! and Cats: The Jellicle Ball

Christopher Gattelli, Schmigadoon!
Ellenore Scott, Ragtime
Ani Taj, The Rocky Horror Show
Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons, Cats: The Jellicle Ball – WINNER!
Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant, The Lost Boys

A decade after The Lonely City was first published, the writer reflects on what’s changed – and how the feelings that drove them to write their bestseller are key to understanding our turbulent politics

I first had the idea of writing a book about loneliness in 2012. I was 35 and had just moved to New York City when I became lost in a labyrinth of isolation and misery. A love affair had ended abruptly while I was still sky-high with expectation, buoyant with relief that I was finally entering settled coupledom. To have failed in this transition, to have been rejected and left alone, filled me with a shame that felt literally unspeakable.

So there I was: alone in the city, an exile condemned to watch the world go by. It was a humiliating and very frightening feeling. The pain was intensified, as a broken leg or even a broken heart would not have been, by the fact that my loneliness felt inadmissible, a thing that could not be said for fear of repelling other people. This was the most alarming aspect of the experience, in that the need for concealment further entrenched the isolation, so that loneliness grew ever more inescapable, a fortress of solitude whose bulwarks and ramparts would not stop growing.

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

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s June essentials

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

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

Stage and screen actor best known for playing Rupert Giles in the US television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Anthony Head found fame as half of the Gold Blend couple in commercials that captured the imagination of the British public in the late 1980s and 90s. They paved the way to success for him on US television in the supernatural horror series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), playing the “watcher” and mentor of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s title character.

As the prim English librarian Rupert Giles at Sunnydale high school, he is assigned to Buffy Summers, a cheerleader there, by the secret Watchers’ Council of Britain, which oversees slayers who use their superhuman skills to fight evil forces. Increasingly, he becomes a father figure to Buffy and her friends Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Xander (Nicholas Brendon). Together, he and those students form the core of a group known as the Scooby Gang (or Scoobies).

Holy Family Catholic primary school says enthusiastic response from parents has been biggest surprise

Schools banning pupils from having smartphones are commonplace. But what about a school where pupils ban teachers from using their smartphones, and then get their parents to join in?

And not just phones: at Holy Family Catholic primary school in west London teachers are also barred from using laptops, monitors or tablets during the school’s screen-free Mondays, after an idea that came from the pupils themselves.

Talk of witch-hunts and personality clashes was very publicly aired, when all we wanted to know was what the party actually stood for

Last weekend, Your Party officially split, with 250 members voting to start a second leftwing party, the Socialist Federation. Neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Zarah Sultana represent this new faction, with both remaining in Your Party.

While many of those members are part of “Grassroots Left”, Sultana’s faction of Your Party, she has no role in the new party, and is still technically a Your Party MP. Corbyn’s faction, “The Many”, has de facto had the reins of Your Party since he was elected its parliamentary leader by the executive committee in March. Two independent MPs who originally supported Your Party, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed, have quit, and two – Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan – remain.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Policy U-turns could define her stint at No 11 despite many sure-footed advances on devolved spending to help kickstart growth

An air of unreality settled on a Westminster conference room last week, as Rachel Reeves, upbeat in a powder pink power suit, gave a speech about boosting jobs and growth along the “OxCam corridor”.

“If we get this right, working together, this corridor will not just compete globally, it will lead globally. We can do that together!” she told the audience of investors, policymakers and entrepreneurs.

A rebellion is rising against the dull, highly optimised lives big tech wants for us. It’s not a second too soon

Has the optimisation rebellion begun? Something seemed to shift in the collective psyche recently when the world discovered the entrepreneur and podcaster Steven Bartlett’s reaction to having had “a couple of glasses of wine” on a school night.

Speaking with Chris Williamson (the Love Island alumnus turned “wisdom” podcaster, God help us), Bartlett had explained what happened when he decided to test the effects of drinking after a year of sobriety – a sombre catalogue of catastrophes recorded by his Whoop tracker (“#ad, #sponsor”). He slept less, ate poorly, skipped the gym and – prepare yourself – “podcasted worse”. “It ruined three days of my life,” he said, seemingly in earnest.

Ideas come more quickly, my thoughts roam freely and I’m reminded I am not the main form of life on the planet

I park my car near the trail head and leash up my labrador. Mist coils around the stringy trunks of the manna gums and I breathe in a lungful of cold, peppery air. With notebook in hand, I begin to walk.

I learn a lot by walking in the forest every day. It’s like catching up on the daily news but with a focus more ecological than political. I see which trees have fallen, what flowers have burst into bloom, which animals have been busy overnight, what weather is coming in. Most of all, surrounded by growing, breathing things that aren’t human, I learn that I am not the main form of life on the planet but just one note in a vibrant choir of living beings. Importantly, I learn this with my brain but also my heart, lungs, muscles and skin.

The first step is making scrolling a little harder by creating an obstacle, giving your rational brain time to catch up with your impulsive thumb

• The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work

In my clinic, a woman in her early 40s recently described something she called “brain lapse”. She is an academic and sharp as a blade, a voracious reader and someone who has held many tasks front of mind for many years. She told me that now, however, she finds herself struggling to follow a television drama. She loses the thread of conversations with her partner and states that she picks up her phone to check one thing (a single thing, she swears) and emerges 40 minutes later having watched a stranger assemble a complicated recipe from scratch and cried at a video of a dog reuniting with its family after a weather disaster. “I feel like my brain has been replaced with a knock-off,” she said. “It’s like I’m running on low-power mode all the time.”

She’s not alone. Across my practice, clients of all ages from teenagers to people in their mid-50s are reporting the same symptoms: reduced memory, shortened attention spans, reduced ability to concentrate. Nearly all of them trace the decline to the same source – the smartphone that lives in their pocket, their palm, their bedside table, their bathroom counter, sometimes even the toilet. The almost permanent fixture in the space between them and every moment of potential boredom.

Black women are two and a half times more likely to be murdered by men than white women are. This is a public health crisis

In April alone, at least half a dozen Black women were allegedly killed by their partners, including the high-profile cases of Cerina Fairfax, estranged wife of the former Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax, and Nancy Metayer Bowen, vice-mayor of Coral Springs, Florida. Shaneiqua Elkins survived a shooting by her husband, Shamar Elkins, that wounded her and killed seven of her children and one of their cousins in Shreveport, Louisiana.

These tragedies are shining a light on the killings of Black women and the systems that allow that violence to continue.

Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist

As Rosamund Pike found out recently on stage, many people now experience the arts simply as content to be documented for likes and shares

Have we lost the ability to surrender to a story? Surely, if there’s any narrative that deserves our undivided attention, it’s that of a crown court judge fighting the legal system’s approach to sexual violence against women, when she discovers her own son has been accused of rape. But as Rosamund Pike discovered last weekend, even such a visceral and emotionally demanding drama wasn’t enough to keep everyone in the room absorbed.

Pike made headlines when she walked back on stage at London’s Wyndham’s theatre after the curtain call for Inter Alia – not for a solo bow, but to remonstrate with an audience member for texting during the climax of her performance. “Maybe it was very important, and maybe you’re a doctor, and you’re saving someone’s life, and I hope you are,” she said. “But we do see these, we do feel them. I feel like I’ve got to hold you all, so when I feel that and see it, it’s hard.”

A drug for pancreatic cancer shows immense promise, but we shouldn’t forget research in the field is a story of small victories

It is unlikely that we will ever declare a final victory over cancer. Governments have often promised it: from Nixon’s 1971 “war on cancer” to the 2016 Obama‑Biden plan to fight and cure it “once and for all” and Sajid Javid’s 2022 “war on cancer” initiative in the UK. But framing it this way can obscure how real progress is made: not in stunning routs, but in stalling and turning back the advance of this terrible condition – often in simply giving people more time to live.

Several such breakthroughs, and a bigger one that could transform the treatment of multiple kinds of cancer over the next decade, emerged at last week’s American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. As the Guardian revealed, there is a new jab effective against head and neck cancers in some patients, and a new immunotherapy that could spare bladder cancer patients invasive and life-changing surgery. Most significantly, there is a new drug called daraxonrasib, which doubled survival time for pancreatic cancer patients in a recent clinical trial.

Mainstream politicians should remember that in the battle to defeat Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen, unity is strength

Less than a year before the most important French presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic, the phoney war is almost over. On 7 July, a court will decide whether to uphold Marine Le Pen’s appeal against a fraud conviction and a five-year ban from public office. Should she lose, her party’s 30‑year‑old president, Jordan Bardella, will be confirmed as Rassemblement National’s candidate and the frontrunner in the race.

Voters will need to wait considerably longer, however, for clarity over who will oppose the far right. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran leader of the radical-left party La France Insoumise (LFI), has already announced a fourth tilt at the presidency. But as Emmanuel Macron approaches the end of a second term blighted by unforced errors, multiple egos are jostling on the centre-left and the centre-right, amid a frantic weighing of the odds.

Savitri Hensman and Sarmad Ahmad Anwar respond to articles on the circumstances surrounding the death of Nowak

On the catastrophic mistreatment of Henry Nowak by police, important points are made in your editorial (The Guardian view on Henry Nowak and the far right: sinister exploitation of a disturbing case, 3 June) and in Jason Okundaye’s article (Henry Nowak was failed in the last moments of his life – and then again by Britain’s disgraceful political class, 3 June).

The key issue is that, in a scene where what had happened was not at first clear, officers did not act swiftly to check, and safeguard, the health of someone voicing extreme distress. In addition, it should not be assumed that what is statistically most common is the case in a particular instance.

Retired judge Hugh Howard says any review would have to include the Scottish sgian-dubh and swords worn by military personnel at service events

As a judge, I wrote a scenario for a recruitment exercise for a judicial appointments commission where candidates had to adjudicate between a Sikh boy who wanted to wear the kirpan and his Church of England faith school that wanted to exclude it (Sikhs wary of UK backlash as they condemn ‘moment of madness’, 2 June). It was based on my advice to a school that wanted to ban it. When I advised the school that it permitted cricket bats and balls and pointed dividers, all of which had been used as weapons, a compromise was reached enabling pupils to wear a swaddled kirpan under clothing. The Sikh community has condemned the illegal use of the kirpan. A Sikh would no more think of using it as a weapon than other faith group would think of using their religious symbols as weapons.

The suggested review of the wearing of the kirpan would presumably have to include the wearing of the sgian-dubh , which I wear when kilted, the swords worn by serving and retired military personnel at service events, or the short sword I wore when dressed as a Roman soldier at a Christian festival.

Readers respond to an article on the serious failings at the Nottingham university hospitals trust

I am writing as someone who has been personally affected by failings in maternity services at Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust. Zoe Williams (Midwives want to make childbirth miraculous – so what went so wrong in Nottingham?, 1 June) correctly acknowledges the affect of austerity on maternity services (I can attest to that, having worked in the public sector), but it in no way excuses the repeated failings that so many of us have endured.

Austerity is not the reason that midwives, health visitors and doctors failed to conduct routine care for my partner. Understaffing was evident, but it did not prevent routine wound inspections and the taking of samples to confirm suspected infections. What I saw again and again was an ingrained arrogance, an attitude of “we know better” and an utter unwillingness to listen or learn.

Teaching practical maths skills is tricky in an overstuffed curriculum, writes Myles McGinley, in response to an article by Simon Jenkins

Students and teachers alike are calling for a more relevant curriculum that includes vital skills like financial literacy (Sunak is right that our students need financial literacy – but that shouldn’t mean yet more maths, 29 May).

There is no binary choice between the academic study of maths and more specific knowledge of compound interest or inflation. A general anxiety around maths is a predictor for poor financial literacy, while having high levels of both maths and financial knowledge is associated with better financial behaviour than either one alone.

The England coach’s squad is based on picking players in their right positions, setting up a series of one-on-one battles

For Thomas Tuchel there is a fringe benefit to Anthony Gordon’s surprise move from Newcastle to Barcelona. “It is excellent,” the England manager said. “It is such a nice trip for me to watch matches. I can only encourage people to go to nice places.”’

Tuchel was in playful mood after England’s first World Cup warm-up match on Saturday – the 1-0 win over New Zealand in Tampa – even if he was not happy with aspects of the performance. It was wholly one-sided but, time and again, his team’s final action was uninspiring. Tuchel complained that his players lacked positional discipline and as a consequence the shape was too narrow, especially in the first half.

An easy ride through qualifying and a hard-to-read Africa Cup of Nations exit mean the Fennecs are an enigma

This article is part of the Guardian’s 2026 World Cup Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 48 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from three countries each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 11 June.

Lawrence Shankland says there is a ‘club feel’ in the camp after eight goals in two confidence- building friendly wins

Scotland arrived at Euro 2024 with more questions than answers swirling around their squad. The team were on a poor run of form, with umpteen players looking jaded. What happened next proved grisly.

While the level of Curaçao and Bolivia – plus the motivational levels of the latter – must be acknowledged, a Scottish side notching eight goals in back-to-back friendlies has altered grey areas for Steve Clarke. Scotland’s picture before Saturday’s World Cup opener against Haiti is now a clearer one. This time, they look far from jaded.

• Team are based in Tijuana with all group games in US

• Iran FA labels visa issues ‘political interference in sport’

Iran’s World Cup 2026 squad landed in Mexico on Sunday amid a bitter diplomatic row, after the United States refused to issue visas for some team support staff.

The Iran coach, Amir Ghalenoei, complained on arrival at Tijuana airport that “we should have been here last week because a 12-hour time difference needs two weeks of adjusting. Usually in these tournaments, before technical matters, ethical and human considerations must be respected – which I think for us it was not the case.”

From Christian Pulisic to Weston McKennie, many of the team’s biggest stars have been open about their faith, creating a new dynamic for a home World Cup

• World Cup newsletter | Daily podcast | Get the app

In the third episode of the interminable, nine-part Pulisic docuseries, its subject, Christian Pulisic, sits down at a dining table, pink orchids blooming behind him.

“It is what time?” a friend asks him, holding a camera in Pulisic’s face.

• No 2 seed beats Italian 6-1, 4-6, 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-1

• Wins his first major in his fourth final

Two weeks of nerves and tension across one of the most chaotic men’s grand slam tournaments in recent memory came to an appropriate conclusion as an excruciatingly tense five-set psychodrama ended with Alexander Zverev, the second seed, lifting his first grand slam title by holding off his own demons to close out a 6-1, 4-6, 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-1 win over Flavio Cobolli in the French Open final.

For so long Zverev had won at every other level: he had triumphed at Masters 1000 events and twice at the ATP Finals, and he earned an Olympic gold medal in Tokyo 2020. But he had lost in all three of his major finals. A grand slam, the biggest prize of all, had always evaded him.

• Hamilton avoids Monaco chaos to go second in standings

• Gasly angry after penalties cost him third; Russell downcast

Lewis Hamilton believes his first win for Ferrari is on the cards after a second-place finish at the Monaco Grand Prix, with the seven-time champion committed to chasing down the Formula One world championship leader, Kimi Antonelli, who won again in Monte Carlo.

After the race there was also a furious reaction from France’s Pierre Gasly, who crossed the line believing he had secured third and a place on the podium, only to find he had two penalties for speeding in the pit lane, dropping him to seventh.

The man of the match will not be judged on his comeback at Lord’s but on his ability to bowl spells when batters are set

By 1pm, the only play left under way at Lord’s was at the wrong side of the stands, where the lads and dads with nothing else to do were batting with umbrellas in front of bins. The Test they had paid to see was done before lunch. In the end, the whole match lasted only 996 balls, which made it the shortest game at Lord’s to include all 40 wickets falling in well over a century. Pakistan’s Hanif Mohammad batted about that many by himself against West Indies in Barbados back in 1958, and you didn’t have to strain to hear the grumbles of one or two older salts around the ground complaining that this latest generation do not know how to build an innings.

Emilio Gay was the only man who managed to stitch together as many as two hours batting in the middle and even he needed a lot of good fortune to do it. Still, the batters had more of a match than the spin bowlers on either side, who didn’t get to bowl a single over between them. The last time that this happened in England was a Test against West Indies at Headingley in 1988.

• Swiss star wins with third fastest time in history

• Hodgkinson targets world record after defeat

On a wild summer’s night in Stockholm, a woman ran the quickest 800m since the darkest days of the cold war. But, staggeringly, her name was not Keely Hodgkinson.

Britain’s 800m Olympic champion had promised she was in personal-best shape, and duly proved as good as her word. But she had no answer to the young Swiss star Audrey Werro, who swooped like lightning across a cloudless sky before crossing the line in 1min 53.98sec.

Fallout from declaring Benvenuto Cellini a non-runner at Epsom highlights perils of trying to micromanage racing

How long must Epsom wait to catch a break? The main elements were all in place for a feelgood running of the Derby on Saturday: a double-figure field, the major trial winners all in the lineup, and fresh incentives launched to encourage walk-up punters back to the infield. The weather gods, though, had other ideas.

Would Christmas Day have won on good-to-firm ground? Perhaps. Every horse has its chance, after all. But he was surely not a 7-1 shot had the rain not arrived, having finished only third in the Dante Stakes in May, when he ran on ground without “soft” in the description for the first time. As Ronan Whelan, Christmas Day’s rider, put it, the “stars aligned” for Aidan O’Brien’s fourth-string, who beat both James J Braddock, the third horse home on Saturday, and Pierre Bonnard, the seventh, on soft ground at Leopardstown in April. As things stand, though, it is hard to see him as anything more than a very average winner of the Derby, and his next race, which could be as soon as the Irish Derby later this month, will do more to establish his place in the three-year-old generation.

• Williams, 44, returns to tennis for first time since 2022

• ‘I don’t have anything to prove, everything is a gain’

Serena Williams has said her professional tennis return at the age of 44 is about “just having fun,” insisting winning is “not important” after earning 23 grand slam singles titles during a hugely successful career.

Williams will play doubles alongside the Canadian teenager Victoria Mboko at Queen’s Club in her first competitive outing since stepping away from tennis in 2022. Although she has committed to playing doubles in Berlin afterwards, her future beyond that remains uncertain. Meetings to determine the first batch of Wimbledon wildcards begin soon but when asked whether she intends to return to singles competition, Williams said: “I can’t say yeah, I can’t say no. Right now, no.”

• Gymnast says experience was one of scariest of her life

• 29-year-old says she will give more details at later date

Simone Biles suggested she came close to death after a medical emergency that left her in hospital.

“I’m not one to normally share things like this because I value privacy in today’s age, but almost dying wasn’t on my bingo card earlier this week,” Biles wrote in an Instagram story on Saturday. The story also showed a photo of her wrist encircled by several hospital bracelets.

• Premiership Women’s Rugby: Exeter 50-24 Sale

• Chiefs will play Saracens in playoff semi-final

Claudia Moloney-MacDonald is hitting her best form at just the right time for Exeter as her performance was pivotal in the hosts’ victory against Sale. The England international, who was a part of the Red Roses’ grand slam-winning Six Nations campaign, scored four tries to confirm the club’s Premiership Women’s Rugby semi-final against Saracens on 13 June.

Moloney-MacDonald, who scored two tries against Bristol last week, was impressive in open play and among her scoring frenzy was a sensational effort as she hunted down a kicked ball before it was about to roll out of play. Her try-tally also took her to 14 scores in the PWR this season.

Dan Lawrence became the first player to hit four Division One centuries this season, with his highest first-class score against Hampshire

Will Jacks is batting at No. 3 for Surrey in his first Championship outing this summer after a period with Mumbai Indians in the IPL. In England’s winter Ashes stumble down the stairs, Jacks collected 363 runs and took six wickets in his four games.

Burns prods obediently forward and the ball skits through the gate and sends the off stump tumbling

David Rush, who was arrested in May, stole millions from US government through ‘special access program’, officials say

A former executive intelligence agent who is accused of stealing more than $40m in gold bars from the CIA reportedly created a fake spy program to siphon money, the latest on his fraudulent activity, the Washington Post first reported.

David Rush, who was a senior-level employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for 17 years, was arrested in May after FBI agents discovered Rush had taken 303 bullion bars, each about 2.2lbs, dozens of luxury watches, and more than $2m in foreign currency from his government office.

The China-North Korea relationship has been strained by a fall in trade during the pandemic and Pyongyang’s increasing ties with Russia

Xi Jinping visits North Korea on Monday for a two-day trip, his first in nearly seven years, as China’s president looks to revitalise ties with his junior ally.

Xi is expected to meet North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in Pyongyang. North Korea is China’s only formal treaty ally but in recent years their relationship has been strained by a virtual freeze in trade during the Covid-19 pandemic and Pyongyang’s increasingly close relationship with Russia.

Local man had been accused of rape in months before murder but series of delays meant police had failed to summon him for questioning

Thousands of mourners have turned out for a silent march for a 11-year-old schoolgirl whose murder prompted widespread outrage when it emerged police had failed to question the suspected killer about previous child sexual abuse allegations.

The parents of the girl, who has been named only as Lyhanna, led the cortege on Sunday in the south-western village of Fleurance behind a banner reading “Never again”. Most of those who marched, including children, wore white shirts or T-shirts, many bearing a smiling portrait of the young victim.

Potential proposal would secure control of Diego Garcia base amid stalled UK plans to cede sovereignty of territory

Donald Trump is reportedly weighing a plan to buy the Chagos Islands from Mauritius amid stalled plans from the UK to cede sovereignty of the territory, the Telegraph first reported.

The White House did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on the report about the potential plan.

Danish follicle rebels go head to head in competition for best short-in-the-front, long-in-the-back cut

Business in the front, party in the back. A packed Danish crowd has celebrated the much-maligned but enduring mullet hairstyle, defined by very short hair at the front and longer hair at the back.

Denmark’s raucous 2026 Mullet Championship, presented on an outdoor stage in central Copenhagen, attracted 12 well-coiffed competitors and more than 1,000 spectators.

Marnie Lovejoy hopes to inspire other women to fish, protect England’s rivers and lift up the ‘beautiful’ grayling

With its iridescent pink scales and elegant dorsal fin, the grayling is known to anglers as the “lady of the stream”, yet the society fighting for its protection has never been led by a woman, until now.

Angling, and fly-fishing in particular, has always been a very male-dominated sport. The fly-fisher’s club in Mayfair, London, where anglers meet to lunch on dover sole and drink fine wine, did not allow women to cross the threshold even as guests until 2024.

Shaun Hancox has created scores of ponds for rewilding projects across Britain – and he says there’s a lot more to it than digging a hole

He is known as “the Picasso of ponds” but the tableaux being created by Shaun Hancox in a boggy field in Somerset currently looks more like a building site. An orange and black excavator is rhythmically removing lumpy clay soil and sculpting it into brown banks.

The result looks like a scar of bare earth on what was once green pasture – but the magic happens as soon as rain fills the newly created depressions. Plants seed swiftly, invertebrates and amphibians rapidly find the water, and life explodes.

Mette Frederiksen’s new government promises overhaul for people – and animals – in home of ultra-intensive farming

Like all new prime ministers, when Mette Frederiksen secured a third consecutive term as Denmark’s head of government this week, she promised her administration would take steps to “improve the everyday lives” of the country’s inhabitants.

Unlike most new prime ministers, however, she specified that her left-leaning coalition’s policy programme would be not just for “the people who are in Denmark and the ⁠generations to come” but also “for the animals”.

Despite health risks and environmental damage, the meat industry is working hard to safeguard its dominance

• Average person eats six times more chicken than in 1961, UN report finds

Should I tuck into a juicy steak or stick a tofu patty in a bun and call it a burger? Twenty years ago, that question was largely seen as a moral dilemma influenced by grim conditions in factory farms and slaughterhouses. Back then, animal rights activists were the loudest campaigners arguing for people to abstain from meat. They had limited success because vegetarians and vegans made up less than 5% of the population in rich countries – and the best fake meats were bland replicas of real flesh. The word flexitarian had not yet made it into the dictionary.

The debate has shifted sharply. The pollution from animal agriculture, which makes up 12-20% of planet-heating gas, is now part of public discourse around eating meat. A dramatic rise in rates of obesity and diseases linked to red meat have made health concerns part of individual decisions to eat less of it. Meanwhile, some plant-based alternatives have improved in texture and taste to the point where even meat lovers struggle to tell that they did not come from an animal.

One in five of the 1.92m patients on list wait longer than six weeks for tests such as CT and MRI scans, analysis shows

A record number of people are waiting for a diagnostic test on the NHS, triggering fears that delays in accessing CT and MRI scans could endanger patients’ health.

A total of 1.92 million patients in England are waiting to have a test to diagnose their illness such as by an ultrasound scan, assessment of their hearing, bone scan or various tests for cancer.

The diagnostic waiting list has grown by 500,000 since 2022.

It is 83% higher than before the Covid pandemic.

On current trends the waiting list will hit 2 million in March 2027.

Deputy PM says he spoke to US vice-president about post that blamed ‘mass invasion of migrants’ for teenager’s death

David Lammy has said he told the US vice-president, JD Vance, he was wrong to blame the murder of the British teenager Henry Nowak on mass migration.

The deputy prime minister said he spoke to Vance by phone on Saturday to tell him “our democratic process is working well” and that he was wrong in his commentary about the murder.

Comedian is doing first tour in more than 15 years and says many issues he talked about in 1980s are still alive today

Lenny Henry has said racism is “still at large” as he does his first standup tour in more than 15 years.

Henry, best known for The Lenny Henry Show, which ran from 1984 to 2005, said the things he used to talk about in the 1980s were still relevant now.

Retatrutide is designed to control appetite and blood sugar but also increase body’s energy expenditure, unlike other drugs

A new triple-action weekly jab for type 2 diabetes could significantly reduce blood sugar and body weight, according to phase 3 trial results.

Patients in the trial receiving weekly retatrutide injections for 40 weeks lost more than four times as much weight as those on placebo, while the average drop in long-term blood sugar (HbA1c) was more than twice that of the placebo.

The triple hormone drug mimics three gut hormones that help control your appetite, blood sugar and metabolism: GLP-1, GIP and glucagon. Unlike other diabetes medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy, which primarily target the GLP-1 pathway to suppress appetite, or Mounjaro, which contains GLP-1 plus GIP to control blood-sugar levels, retatrutide also engages the glucagon receptor, which helps increase energy expenditure.

Fired journalist accuses CBS News chief of interfering with report because it echoed what Trump said of the shooting

Fired CBS 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley has accused editorial management at his old network of interfering with a broadcast segment looking at an immigration officer’s killing of Minneapolis protester Renee Good in January.

The veteran broadcaster, who was recently dismissed from the show, said CBS News’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss had sent an email to his supervisor requesting changes be made soon before the airing of the segment in question.

Iata summit in Brazil hears top executives say although jet fuel shortages are unlikely, industry-wide profits will halve

• BA boss: ‘Costly aviation taxes and rail tickets stunting UK tourism growth’

Airlines will have to spend an extra $100bn on jet fuel this year, with fares “inevitably” rising to cover the bill after the war with Iran choked off oil supplies.

With jet fuel prices expected to be 70% higher across 2026, airlines body Iata said that collective industry profits worldwide would halve to $23bn. Some carriers would struggle to survive the fuel price shock caused by the closure of the strait of Hormuz in March, it said.

Exclusive: deal in 2020 had sought to stimulate local battery making but industry says it still cannot meet targets

The EU and UK car industries are urging the European Commission to adjust the Brexit trade deal and suspend, for a second time, tariffs on imports of electric vehicles.

They have expressed concerns that they will not be able to meet the conditions set for 1 January 2027 for tariff-free sales. This is because of strict rules of origin over what products can qualify for tariff-free trade under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement which has applied since 2021.

Voters to choose between pro-Russian opposition and incumbent Nikol Pashinyan, who is more closely aligned with the west

Armenians are awaiting the results of an election that could cement the country’s shift towards Europe and away from its traditional alliance with Russia.

Prime minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party entered the vote on Sunday as the favourite, ahead of three opposition candidates who advocate for closer ties with Moscow. Pashinyan’s main challenger, Samvel Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire who built much of his fortune in Russia, was forced to campaign from house arrest at his mansion outside Yerevan.

Elon Musk firm plans the biggest stock market launch in history – but experts have flagged potential downsides

It’s being billed as the biggest stock market launch in history. Shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX are poised to be released on 12 June with a valuation of $135 (£100.84). The company plans to sell 555.6m of them, which means it will raise $75bn from the sale.

On Friday, it was reported that up to a quarter of the shares could be reserved for individual investors, rather than funds and banks. This is a bigger share than is typically the case in a large initial public offering (IPO).

British vehicles will emit extra 17m tonnes of CO2 by 2030 due to loophole allowing sale of more PHEVs, data suggests

Campaigners have urged the government to resist calls to further water down electric car sale rules, as an analysis reveals that vehicles on UK roads will emit an extra 17m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030 mostly because of changes last year.

Parts of the car industry have urged ministers to review for a second time the rules that force manufacturers to sell increasing numbers of electric cars each year.

A long trade war looms. Trump’s scattershot protectionism, chaotic tariffs and belligerence against our natural allies guarantees that US trade policy will remain a hot mess

We are in for a long trade war.

In the months since “Liberation Day” last year, when Donald Trump let loose a volley of tariffs against imports from everywhere, countries have rushed to build new relationships in the hope of maybe circumventing the US to protect the global trading system.

Oil tankers may be stuck behind strait of Hormuz, but holding the Iata AGM in Brazil defies warnings of impending shortages

Nothing says jet fuel crisis, as one prospective attender put it, like flying everyone to Rio de Janeiro. Aviation leaders will converge in Brazil this weekend for the Iata AGM, the annual global airline summit, with the industry still, for the most part, looking resolutely skyward.

The oil tankers may still be stuck behind the strait of Hormuz as the conflict between the US, Israel and Iran flickers on, but for now, airlines continue to defy dire warnings of impending shortages which had stoked fears of a summer of chaos for European holidaymakers.

Museum hosts the collection of Steve Goldman, who buys records based on the sheer awfulness of the sleeve

“It is like the invasion of the bunny body snatchers,” says JT Thompson, the former lead singer of the 1970s US rock band Peter Rabbitt, as he looks at what is regarded as one of the world’s worst record covers.

The 1979 album Roadstar shows all five members of the California rock band with their faces morphed on to rabbit bodies, with Thompson emerging, like a terrible dream, smiling from a top hat.

The family of Olga R almost threw out the collection of 20 songs written by concentration camp prisoners after her death, before discovering its incredible history

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Even under conditions of extreme inhumanity, humanity has the capacity to find solace in creative expression.

In the concentration camps and ghettoes of Europe under the Nazi regime, music became a sanctuary, a way to preserve Jewish identity, process trauma and maintain a historical record. A small chapter of this vast record, which resurfaced in Sydney, represents one of the earliest printed collections of Holocaust songs.

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What if your best mate slept with your child? The stars of Alice and Steve, the new taboo-busting comedy about friends at war, open up about drug-taking, iffy sex – and why British jokes are so hard to understand

Alice and Steve, the new “wrongcom” starring Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement, starts like the story of a lifelong friendship between two 50ish exes. They went out for a short time, a million years ago, and ever since have been platonically inseparable. In one of the first scenes, Alice (Walker) tells Steve (Clement) that she loves him so much that if he were ever drowning, she’d hollow out her own mother’s body and use it as a canoe. Alice and Steve go to funerals, get drunk, talk frankly about their disappointments, devise ill-advised solutions, take cocaine but only once every epoch; all the stuff of a loving friendship is here.

But creator Sophie Goodhart also uses it to put every kind of relationship under the microscope. “It’s every stage of love Sophie is looking at,” says Walker. So it’s also about the doldrums of a long marriage, between Alice and Daniel (Joel Fry). And it’s about first love going exquisitely well for Dom, Alice and Daniel’s teenage son, until they take an edible and everything goes awry. Unavoidably, though, all the fireworks are around one love story – and how it puts paid to Alice and Steve’s relationship.

In this week’s newsletter: The unprecedented success of Backrooms and Obsession has made stars of their creators. For the good of cinema, however, they’d do well to look beyond the genre going forward

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Did you go to the cinema this week? If you did, that rumbling you felt wasn’t down to those spicy nachos you ate. Well, it might have been – but equally, you may just have been experiencing the tectonic shift suddenly under way in Hollywood. This was the week that two twentysomething YouTubers took over the box office with their horror films, upending all the industry rules and preconceptions in the process.

At the top of the tree sits Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old phenom whose debut film, Backrooms – an A24 psychological chiller based on his own webseries, and inspired by a “creepypasta” horror story shared across the internet – has grossed a scarcely fathomable $140m worldwide in its first week. Just beneath Parsons, though a shade older at 26, is Curry Baker, a YouTube comic whose supernatural horror movie, Obsession, has enjoyed an almost unheard of week-on-week-on-week rise in ticket sales, and is on course to be one of the most profitable films of all time, having been made for a tiddly $750,000. That the pair have nudged Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu – a far more expensive movie that was expected to squat atop the box office for much of May and June – into third place only underscores what an unlikely cinematic revolution this is.

The movie adaptation of Gary Owen’s acclaimed play Iphigenia in Splott, Effi o Blaenau, is released this month. Here, its director and crew explain why they relocated the film to a post-industrial mining town – and refused to make it in English

The one-woman play Iphigenia in Splott was first performed in 2015. Eleven years on, Gary Owen’s reworking of Greek tragedy, transplanted to working-class Splott in Cardiff, has earned its place as a modern classic. It reimagines the mythological heroine Iphigenia as Effie, a young woman filling her days drinking vodka out of a mug in her dressing gown. The play is about poverty and social inequality, closures and cuts, services scraped to the bone by austerity. Its most recent five-star Guardian review in 2022 advised: “Everyone should see this.”

One person who did was Leisa Gwenllian, a final-year drama student from north Wales. “I was on the front row with my mate,” says Gwenllian, 24, drinking mint tea in a London hotel. “I can remember thinking: wow! A Welsh woman with a strong Cardiff accent on the stage at the Lyric [in Hammersmith, London], that’s what it’s all about.” At the Oxford School of Drama, Gwenllian was mainly studying the classics alongside people with different accents and backgrounds from her own. “To see yourself on stage is really powerful.”

The hooded supervillain is a scientist, a sorcerer, a monarch and a mummy’s boy – Robert Downey Jr’s Doom should be all these things and more, radiating history, magic and the biggest ego

The problem with building the next stage of your superhero franchise around Doctor Doom is that nobody really knows if he is Marvel’s Darth Vader, or just the guy from those terrible 20th Century Fox films. We wouldn’t even be getting Doom in the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday if Marvel’s original post-Thanos masterplan had not collapsed when Jonathan Majors, who played Kang, was dropped from the franchise. And we don’t really know if the subsequent casting of Robert Downey Jr (previously Marvel’s Iron Man) in the role is some kind of ingenious masterstroke that will all make sense when we finally see the finished film, or just an expensive nostalgia panic button.

The stakes are so high here that the geekosphere is delving into every possible clue, no matter how fleeting, as to which version of Doom we might be getting in the film. Will this be a flamboyant, comics-accurate take on the Latverian dictator? Or will Marvel dip into the multiverse of convenience and deliver an iteration that is little more than Tony Stark in eastern Europe?

Tired, emotional and besieged by fans and enemies alike, by 1966 the Fab Four were ready to quit touring for good. A new collection of images by rock photographer Jim Marshall captures their last gigs

The Beatles played their last official concert on 29 August 1966, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Jim Marshall’s pictures capture the group at a pivotal moment, when they are already feeling nostalgia for what they are leaving behind.

Two months earlier, the Beatles had finished precording Revolver, a glittering collection of pop gems. The next day they boarded a plane to begin a global tour during which they would play nothing from it. They were not being perverse; it was simply that none of the songs lent themselves to live performance. On stage, they were a four-piece band. They could hardly play anything as complex as Eleanor Rigby or Tomorrow Never Knows to tens of thousands of fans.

Fans from across UK descend on Shacklewell Arms for intimate gig that leaves them wanting one more song

In the Shacklewell Arms in east London, the usual crowd of hipsters and indie music fans had been replaced by a throng dressed in leopard print, double denim and cowboy hats to pay tribute to the night’s headliner: Shania Twain.

“We thought we might have been scammed when we saw the ticket announcement,” said Jack, 28, who came with his sister Amy. “Why would she do a pub this small?”

The singer knows all the words to Grease and channels Kenny Rogers at karaoke. But which classic musician does he liken to Picasso?

The first song I fell in love with
When I saw Night Boat to Cairo by Madness on Top of the Pops as an 11-year-old, something happened to me on a molecular level. There was something about the way they moved.

The first single I bought
I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats, from Swales Music in Haverfordwest, a 15-mile bus trip from the little fishing village in west Wales I lived in when I was eight.

Full of handcrafted care and the rootsy soul of her country origins, this gently elated song is a reminder of what fans love about Swift … and the film series

Taylor Swift does not fear a challenge. She’s broken records then broken those records; taken Grammy snubs as a sign she just has to work harder; mounted probably the most physically exhausting tour of all time. But in writing a song for Toy Story’s cowgirl Jessie, she’s set herself a deranged task: how could anyone outdo Randy Newman’s devastating When She Loved Me, Jessie’s song about being abandoned by her owner, Emily, from Toy Story 2?

Newman’s songs for the Disney Pixar series are some of the greatest film soundtrack work of all time, and Swift knows it. In a post about her song, she acknowledged the “incomparable” Newman: “You created the Toy Story musical world, and we are lucky to get to live in it.” Her own ventures into soundtrack work have never had much staying power (beyond Zayn collab I Don’t Wanna Live Forever from Fifty Shades Darker).

After critics and authors picked their top 100 novels we asked for your favourites. From Uruguay to the Isle of Skye, more than 3,000 readers cast their votes. Here’s your list – topped by a new number 1

• Read about your choices here

***

100

Haunting the Black Air by Anthony Joseph; Selected Poems by Leontia Flynn; Sparrow on the Rooftop by Rachel Long; You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, edited by Jorie Graham; Melete by Jennifer Lee Tsai; Somebody Should Have Pressed Record by Galia Admoni

Haunting the Black Air by Anthony Joseph (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
Joseph’s follow-up to the TS Eliot prize-winning Sonnets for Albert sees his poetic approach become more radical. He pays homage to avant garde writers such as Will Alexander and Nathaniel Mackey, while exploring “Nostalgia, mostly grief, / a haunting sound – / the frequency of some / magnetic feeling.” That makes for challenging syntax on first reading the poems. Persist, and Joseph’s unabashed lyricism shines through, finding beauty on dancefloors, city streets and in Trinidadian landscapes: “the way music fills the room, how we embrace until / we become flare bright, light as the white refraction / of the sun upon the summit of hills.”

Selected Poems by Leontia Flynn (Carcanet, £14.99)
She was a Next Generation poet and Forward prize winner; it’s a shock to remember that Flynn has been publishing for more than 20 years, so fresh do her poems remain. This assembly is a glorious reintroduction to her mordant wit, imaginative image-making and unerring ability to puncture pretension. Letter to Friends from 2011 is a brilliant, Auden-esque dissection of the early 21st century, worth a library of political analyses: “daily threats brought to our Way of Life / by man-made imminent apocalypse / though neither really outweighs private grief”. There are pleasures on every page.

In her first novel for adults, the YA author explores the dark side of writers who fictionalise their children’s lives

Children’s writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged. And, as AS Byatt put it crisply when talking about her 2009 novel The Children’s Book: “Writing children’s books isn’t good for the writer’s own children.” Think of Christopher Milne, raging at having been Christopher Robin; Vivian Burnett, dragging Little Lord Fauntleroy behind him; Alastair Grahame, lying down on train tracks.

This is fertile material, as Byatt recognised, for a grown-up book. The American author Melissa Albert, herself a very successful children’s writer, has made it the theme of her first adult novel. The Children’s protagonist is Guinevere Sharpe, who as a grown woman is trapped by a very public version of her childhood. Her mother, Edith, a sort of JK Rowling/Enid Blyton composite, wrote an era-defining run of children’s portal fantasies called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as the named protagonists.

In her sharp and intellectual first novel, the author finds tragic comedy in socialism, inequality and the flawed ways we connect as the world burns

In her fiction debut, The Ruiners, Ellena Savage probes the awkward realities of white privilege, social mobility and a lack of ancestral connection. At first it seems that Savage has turned away from the experimental ambition of her successful memoir, Blueberries, but the novel gradually reveals itself to be craftier and more subversive than it appears. This anti-inheritance novel is in direct, playful conversation with one of its inspirations – Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – and, while knowledge of the coming-of-age novel isn’t essential, it’s delightful to see Savage tease the themes of the original in her surreal contemporary take.

Having failed to fulfil or even define her own ambition, 29-year-old Pip drifts aimlessly through her life. She is smart, funny and vaguely unhappy. In quick succession, her estranged father dies and leaves her an inheritance of $50,000 and she falls quickly, recklessly in love with Sasha, a brooding young writer who narrates the third part of the novel. With the inheritance Pip sees the opportunity to change her situation. She quits her job – “I’ve developed a rare blood disorder, I wrote. As such, I must cut my hospitality management career short. I hereby tender my resignation, effective immediately” – and marries Sasha, and together they spend the entirety of her small fortune on a rotting house on the remote (fictional) Greek island of Fokos. In the background, a trash volcano burns relentlessly and waste pirates fight to offload their illegal garbage on to the shores. But the move does little to improve their circumstances or resolve their unhappiness.

The Ruiners by Ellena Savage is out now (Summit Books, $34.99)

90s PlayStation fans, rejoice: California studio Toys for Bob is making Spyro: Realms Beyond, intended to ‘inspire love, joy and laughter’

As the gaming mascots of millennial childhood have been resuscitated one by one for a nostalgic audience, one has remained notably absent: 1990s PlayStation hero Spyro. A new game starring the purple dragon was announced at tonight’s Xbox Game Showcase – the first original title since 2008. Called Spyro: A Realm Beyond, it is being developed by studio Toys for Bob in California and will be released in spring 2027 on Xbox, PlayStation 5, PC and Nintendo Switch 2.

It features a freshly redesigned Spyro with his trademark quiff, voiced by Tom Kenny, the original star of the games. Unlike in the original Spyro titles, players will be able to take flight at any time. “[We’re] leaning into the true capabilities of being a dragon,” explains creative director Lou Studdert. “It’s really engaging … the player is making decisions how they fly. They are diving down to sustain speed. They are using fire-breath to light campfires, to create an updraft to get lift before flapping their wings.”

PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox; Yacht Club Games
This brilliant adventure creates a whole world from one character with a unique ability

You could mistake Mina the Hollower for something found on the liquid-crystal display of a Game Boy Color around the turn of the millennium. Like the pocketable Zelda and Pokémon games of the time, it presents a kind of snow-globe reality that you peer into from above, relying on imagination to decipher each two-colour clump of pixels into a tree, or a skeleton, or a cloaked mouse wielding a hammer twice her size.

This is Mina, our hero: she jumps, she moves at a clip, and she can delve downward into the soil or floorboards, tunnelling underfoot for a moment or two before popping back up, like an inflatable forcibly submerged in a swimming pool. This is her signature move, perfectly elastic in sensation – the way the released button springs back against your thumb! – and in application. The burrow-jump is an excavation tool, unearthing any treasure you happen to dig through, and a navigational one, used to hop over gaps, reach high-up spots and nose into tiny hidden spaces, where more treasure almost invariably awaits.

The PS5 era has been in some ways disappointing for Sony – on Tuesday, the company revealed a slate of games they hope will change that

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PlayStation’s future has looked a little uncertain these past few years. Although the PS5 has sold well and been very profitable, the brand is far from the runaway market leader it was in the PS2 days. Earlier this week, Game File dug into Sony’s most recent earnings reports to illustrate how PlayStation has been selling fewer and fewer of its own flagship games since a peak during the pandemic. About 54.1m copies of games either developed or published by Sony were sold in the 2018 financial year; in 2025, it sold 32.1m.

Sony has put out some great homegrown games since the PS5 was released in 2020, from Astro Bot to Ghost of Yōtei, but it has also had some expensive and very public failures and cancellations; PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who retired in 2024, placed big bets on live-service games and only a few panned out (hello, Helldivers). Sony also seems to have rolled back on releasing its single-player PS5 games on PC after a polite interval of time, suggesting it wants to preserve what advantage and exclusivity it has.

Launching in the UK this month, this new pint-sized console revives the motion-controlled video game boom of the 00s – with better, safer tech

For a wonderful moment in the noughties, video games became a truly universal pursuit. As I witnessed my controller-phobic aunt swing a Wii remote and nail a tennis serve, while my great-grandmother furrowed her brow over sudoku puzzles on her Nintendo DS, it seemed my long-derided hobby had finally gone mainstream. The Nintendo Wii flew off the shelves, inspiring a wave of competitors such as the Xbox Kinect camera that encouraged people to play games by moving their bodies. But the tide turned: outside of still-niche VR gaming and the odd controller-waggler on the Switch, motion-controlled gaming has barely been seen for more than a decade.

Now, 20 years later, a new console is aiming to get the whole family flailing in front of the TV once again: the Nex Playground. Launching in the UK later this month, the first thing that struck me about this family-friendly device is just how tiny it is. The size of two and a half Rubik’s Cubes taped together, this impressively unintrusive device swaps cumbersome controllers for camera-controlled minigames, putting you and your family directly in the game. Using a wide-angle lens and AI-powered tracking tech, the Nex Playground offers over 50 games that track players’ bodies as they leap, flail and dance about the living room. It’s not hard to see the appeal.

Kings Place, London
A clever programme brought a mounting sense of lost grip, from Errollyn Wallen voicing the shame of Hamlet’s Ophelia, to Schumann’s fraught love declaration, and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King

Shouts of “Rubbish!” famously greeted Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King at its 1969 Proms premiere. Over half a century later, the composer’s modernist monodrama – George III the “mad king” of the title – has lost none of its feral power. To be shocked is to be numbed; artistically it’s not actually very interesting. What Eight Songs achieves is far more insidious: it makes you feel. And in this fierce account from the Manchester Camerata, conductor John Andrews and soprano Rosie Middleton we felt it all: every desperate clutch for sanity, every hairpin bend of reason, every queasy realisation and glassy-eyed forgetting.

Clever programming let us build up to the Maxwell Davies – looming slowly towards us in a concert gradually losing its grip on reason and order. Ophelia railed and cringed in Errollyn Wallen’s Hamlet-setting By Gis and Saint Charity – a theatrical miniature that packs a punch in barely five minutes of music. Cries and whispers of “Shame” break through the text, uttered not just by the soprano (here the compelling Rebecca Hardwick, balancing hysteria with a horrible glee) but flung at her by the string quartet, who otherwise conspire and feed her delusional fantasies.

Chichester Festival theatre
This stage version of Ian McEwan’s devastating class novel shows inspiring touches and the cast play adeptly, yet the tale’s emotional sweep feels underpowered

Ian McEwan’s novel begins with a play. It is written by 13-year-old Briony Tallis, who has a gift for telling stories. It is perhaps appropriate that Briony’s tale – the one she is constructing through the course of McEwan’s novel – has been adapted for the stage itself now, although it is a hard act to follow the magnificence of the book and also Joe Wright’s celebrated film starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.

The plot reflects on the healing power of storytelling but also its potential to cause damage and destroy. It opens in 1935 in an aristocratic English country home, when one evening, after seeing the housekeeper’s son, Robbie (Jasper Talbot), having sex with her sister, Cecilia (Miriam Petche), she wrongly accuses him of raping her 15-year-old cousin Lola (Yanexi Enriquez). Briony lives with the guilt of that lie long after Robbie has been sent to prison and then the frontline of the second world war.

Wild Arts Summer Opera festival, Layer Marney Tower, Essex
A touring show was quite a challenge for the opera star’s first directorial gig, but dynamic singing, charismatic orchestral play and clever stage jokes pull it off brilliantly

‘Four boxes, six screens, four chairs and a tree”: the sum total of scenery for Wild Arts’ new English-language production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is modest by operatic standards. This staging needs to travel light, since it’s destined for performances in more than 20 arts centres, theatres, churches and gardens across the UK over the next three months. But leave pondering the logistics to the professionals – the miraculous thing about this bare-essentials Figaro is how well it works in situ. Particularly given that its director is entirely new to the role.

Danielle de Niese is not just any first-timer, of course. The Australian-born, Glyndebourne-dwelling star soprano made her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera aged 19 as Barbarina in Mozart’s opera, and in the decades since has sung the role of Susanna all over the world. Few directorial newbies could match such inside-out knowledge of this work and its characters.

National Portrait Gallery, London
The actor’s life in pictures, from mousey-haired teen to American icon to her shocking death at 36, beams with the charm that defined a century. But why aren’t we shown more of what lay behind the smile?

I wanted to hate the National Portrait Gallery’s new blockbuster show, Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait. It represents two things that really should be binned: anniversary exhibitions (it marks Monroe’s 100th birthday) and exhibitions of celebrity portraits. Anniversaries rarely signify anything other than the passing of time, which is an inevitable and uninteresting fact of life. As for exhibitions of celebrity photographs – they’re like anniversary shows, only with faces.

And yet … I didn’t quite hate this show, and the reason is Monroe herself. We first see her as Norma Jeane Baker, a regular-looking teenager with mousey brown hair, in a self-portrait taken in a photo booth in 1940. She then becomes the radiant, uncontainable, insanely glamorous film star, cheesecake pin-up and actor seen here in photographs, paintings, and excerpts from her films.

In March 1970, Paris announced an amateur photography competition C’était Paris en 1970 to create an archive of a city undergoing a proliferation of large-scale urban development projects. A grid system divided the city into 1,755 squares and a photographer was charged with documenting each square during May 1970. Some of the 91,655 photographs taken are on display at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris until 7 October 2026

Mama G wants to dedicate her book, The Proudest Bird in the World, to pair after chance Blackpool Pride encounter

A search is under way for two lesbian grandmothers who inspired a new children’s book after a chance encounter with a pantomime dame at Blackpool Pride.

The women, whose names are not known, attended a reading by the popular performer Mama G in 2021, complaining to her about the lack of diversity in young literature.

The Swiss director has staged court cases against Pussy Riot, mining companies in Congo and Gisèle Pelicot’s abusers. But after his invitation to Palantir founder Peter Thiel caused a row in Vienna, is Rau’s method eating itself?

Milo Rau, once the enfant terrible of continental European theatre, is a little less buoyant these days. The Swiss theatre-maker has done something he says he explicitly hates: he has cancelled a guest. “Yes, we hit a wall,” he says. “But at least it made the wall visible.”

In his capacity as the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen theatre festival, Rau, at the end of last month, first invited, then disinvited, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The Austrian weekly Falter called it a fiasco.

The director, screenwriter and stars of the 1976 classic film spoke about its making and parallels to the internet age at New York’s Tribeca film festival

It’s a half-century-old film so darkly prophetic and viscerally relevant that even its makers are still unpacking it.

“It’s a sense of being isolated, it’s about being lonely and not being able to communicate or connect,” said Taxi Driver’s director, Martin Scorsese, last night. “For me, that’s universal. It’s always going to speak to young people.”

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions comes up with an epic extraterrestrial playlist for Earth’s first contact from beyond the stars

• This week’s new question: Experts say we should use passkeys, but can a smartphone PIN really be safer than a password?

If an alien landed and asked you: “What is this thing you call music?” what would you play for them? And why? Heather, Kent

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

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

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

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

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

From spicy South African relish to Scottish tattie scones, food is an integral part of watching the beautiful game. Here’s how fans around the world fuel match day

• International recipes inspired by the World Cup

The biggest World Cup ever is surely going to mean the most ever watching parties around the world. With 48 countries competing, why not take inspiration from global cuisine to serve your friends and family something more adventurous than crisps and lager this summer?

Football, after all, is a sport of rituals – from fans wearing the same “lucky pants” to watch every game, to placing the name of an opposing team in the freezer – and that extends to eating and drinking, too. This doesn’t just mean booze; in nations where alcohol is prohibited, for example, tea and traditional sweets provide the social lubrication. South American fixtures are fiestas of churrasco (barbecues), chimichurri and a lot of cheering, while in regions where cafe culture thrives, baked goods and strong espresso are more commonly enjoyed during matches than half a cider and some pork scratchings – even at 3am.

Electric toothbrushes promise healthier teeth and gums and can transform your oral hygiene. We put 29 models to the test

• How to make your toothbrush last longer

If you grew up using a conventional toothbrush – essentially a stick with bristles on the end – you may be surprised to learn just how long the electric toothbrush has been around. The first was designed in the late 1930s, but that model was a long way from the sleek, feature-packed and Bluetooth-enabled beasts you can buy today.

There are now dozens of ultra-advanced versions on the market, but which ones are worth your cash? To help answer that question, my teeth have become figurative guinea pigs. Over the past 18 months, I’ve put 29 electric toothbrushes from the likes of Oral-B, Philips, Suri, Ordo, Silk’n and Foreo through their paces to separate the best from the rest. Here are my conclusions.

Best electric toothbrush overall:
Laifen Wave Pro

Best budget electric toothbrush:
Odonta PowerPlus

Summer is here, and your May favourites show you’re feeling the heat

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Our on-again, off-again relationship with summer finally went official in May, with temperatures soaring across much of the UK. Many of us sweltered in the heat, ordering fans to try to get a good night’s sleep during the unprecedented heatwave, and shade shelters to keep us out of the sun’s glare.

But we also couldn’t help embracing that summer feeling, with many of your May favourites reflecting a little more time spent outside. Many of you got back to nature and went camping, with some of your fellow readers’ top camping products making the list, such as an ingenious washing line and a flying disc. From comfy holiday sandals to a cult favourite K-beauty SPF, these were your favourite things in May.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basics they scrimp on? The former footballer talks Lego, Rich Tea biscuits and spending money on experiences with the Filter

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Karen Carney is England’s fourth most-capped football player, competing at four World Cups, four European Championships and the London Olympics before retiring in 2019. In 2022, she began leading a landmark government review into the Future of Women’s Football in the UK, the recommendations of which were successfully backed by the government in 2023.

She was part of the first all-female punditry team for ITV at the men’s World Cup 2022, led ITV’s coverage of the men’s Euros in 2024 and contributed analysis to the women’s Euros in 2025.

One of the best seats in Manchester, if not the entire north

I’m perched on a tall stool at a new Manchester bar, perusing a menu of fishy things and various aquatically adjacent items: Lindisfarne oysters, devilled eggs with brown crab and trout roe, hand-dived razor clams and scallop tartare with elderflower dressing. Bar Shrimp sits on New York Street, which feels weirdly fitting, because this place is much more “quietly sceney” New York than anything remotely “aren’t we edgy?” London. Glass-fronted, with discreet net curtains and a Tracey Emin-esque neon name sign, inside it’s draped, floor-to-ceiling, in red, just like in those red room scenes in Twin Peaks. Expect oversized, monogrammed ice cubes, nine types of mezcal and just as many amaros, as well as a menu featuring the likes of cuttlefish sandwiches and buffalo fried cod with blue cheese dressing.

Bar Shrimp is a dog whistle to 1980s kids such as myself, who grew up seeing New York in the likes of After Hours or Wall Street, or in something with James Spader being up to no good and drinking Japanese whiskey highballs. It’s a bar opened by three friends: chef Joseph Otway, sommelier Daniel Craig Martin and general manager Richard Cossins, who met while they were all working at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown, New York State. (Blue Hill, in case you didn’t know, is catnip to the aloof foodie crowd – its customers wouldn’t be seen dead at Noma because it’s far too accessible). But does Bar Shrimp make a terrific fuss about this hallowed connection? Nope. Are there nods to Saint Dan Barber dotted around the place, or even in Higher Ground, the Bar Shrimp team’s acclaimed neo-bistro next door? Nah. Does Bar Shrimp even mention that it and Higher Ground are supplied by Cinderwood Market Garden, their own working farm in Nantwich, Cheshire, and pretty much in the spirit of Barber’s Blue Hill mantra? Barely. The Shrimp boys are far too cool to namedrop.

This classic mince dish uses cheap cuts of meat, but is endlessly rich in flavour and can be prepared in many different and delicious ways

If I see the word keema on the menu, I’m sold. Literally translating to mince in Hindi and Urdu, as with many such everyday dishes that use inexpensive cuts of meat, it’s rarely much to look at, yet inevitably punches far above its weight in the flavour department. Prepared in many different and delicious ways, consider this basic recipe a good jumping-off point for further experimentation.

Prep 15 min
Cook 50 min
Serves 4

This endlessly adaptable salad is the perfect addition to your summer picnic basket

When I was growing up, picnicking was a favourite Sodha family pastime, but we did it in a very Indian way. The focus was never on the place: we never had to eat in a bucolic location to have a good time. Our understanding was that homemade food was the best and therefore should be eaten always and anywhere. The food came first; a view was a bonus. As such, even now, decades after leaving the family home, I am always thinking of a good meal for us to eat outdoors. This nutty, chewy freekeh with fennel, dill and tofu has shot up to the top of my favourites: robust, easy to assemble and, above all, delicious whether you eat it on the bank of a lake or in a service station car park.

A funky, fresh pre-batch to set your summer party alight

The rebujito is a classic Spanish cocktail that’s typically made with sherry and a lime/lemon soda. This lifts it up a notch, and also takes well to being batch-made for summer party drinking.

Steve Georgiou, beverage manager, Alta, London W1

Nicky and Dan share an outlook on life shaped by their experiences of loss – and it has ignited their sex lives
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

I thought: I’ve found someone else who wants to live every moment like it’s their last – he gets it

Samantha Ross was suspicious about Adam’s sweet disposition. Then a surprising act of kindness brought her guard down

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

It was the year 2000 and my belief in love was crushed. I’d been in a five-year relationship, only to find out my ex had cheated the entire time. In some small part, I saw it as my own fault – I’d always been attracted to proverbial bad boys. Adding to the angst of being betrayed, I’d been writing novels – mysteries set in the Australian wilderness – that kept being rejected.

I was not in a sunny place. And then I met Adam.

The internet is making everything into a ‘relationship gap’ by seizing on any difference between two dating humans

It started with the age gap. Can a 40-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman truly get along? That was once a question answered with a resounding “yes” by creepy English professors or moustached indie film-makers with a questionable grasp on the meaning of Lolita. Then came gen Z.

A cohort raised on the rigid moral boundaries of internet discourse – things are either good or bad, no in-between – decided that May-December relationships were either problematically one-sided or transactional in nature. Growing up in the fractured aftermath of #MeToo, where monstrous men were often much older than the women they victimized, probably contributed to that conclusion.

In many countries, dating seems to be on the decline, with many young people either dating less, or finding it harder to have meaningful relationships. In 2024, one in five of South Korea's 52 million citizens were living alone. In the third episode of our series, reporter Haeryun Kang is in Seoul on a journey to find out what’s stopping people from coupling up.

Buyers are ripped off after assuming online stores were genuine because they are recommended by an AI tool

You want to buy a new bag and so you ask ChatGPT for help. You have always liked Russell & Bromley so you ask ChatGPT what is popular there at the moment.

The artificial intelligence (AI) assistant gives you cross body, shoulder, casual and formal options with the prices listed beside them. You click through from the sources to what looks like the official Russell & Bromley site and buy your new bag, which is conveniently on sale.

Apps intended to replace branches have been hit by outages, as a poll finds most Britons want high street services

With its windows blanked out, a poster pinned to the door of the Staines branch of Lloyds Bank tells its customers they can do their “everyday banking with our mobile banking app”.

But not today. On Wednesday, when the Guardian visited Staines, they wouldn’t have got very far because the Lloyds group was battling an IT outage that left thousands of its customers unable to make payments or send money.

From a London houseboat with views of the River Thames to a property by a loch in the Inner Hebrides

Experts explain how small, regular sums can build wealth over time, from your 20s through to retirement

Thinking about investing? There are compelling reasons for moving at least some of your money away from standard savings accounts and into the stock market. There are also risks, but over the long term the rewards can be better.

Many people are put off by the idea that you need to be wealthy to start investing, or over a certain age. But even if you can only afford to set aside £50 a month, it is worth considering. And while there are important factors to consider before you start, it is rarely too early, or too late, to take the first step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to spend less time on your phone? We asked psychotherapists, professors and specialists for practical (and achievable) ways to cut down

• The best screen-free activities

Everywhere you look, people are glued to their smartphones. If you haven’t noticed this phenomenon, it’s likely because you, too, are glued to the little dopamine-deliverer.

In March, Meta and YouTube had to pay a combined $6m after a US court found that the tech companies’ platforms were designed to be addictive. Put such tempting apps in a device that’s carried everywhere, and that’s a recipe for compulsive behaviour.

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

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

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

A higher price does not necessarily mean better fabric, fairer pay for workers or greater sustainability. To guarantee you’re buying ethically, experts say, you need to dig a little deeper

Does paying more for a T-shirt mean that it’s more likely to be ethically made?

In short (sleeves): no. People who spend their time investigating fashion companies’ supply chains and employment practices seem united in the conclusion that money cannot necessarily buy us a clear conscience.

The sundress is back – here’s how to make it short but not (too) sweet

One sunny day recently, I looked around and realised that every woman in my vicinity was wearing the same dress. Not the same dress, exactly. But the same dress. A maxidress, colourful but in a tasteful sort of way. Floaty, probably with a tiered skirt. Wholesome and vaguely rustic, but also a bit fancy. You know the dress I mean, because if you have been at any outdoor event between 2019 and about last Thursday, you have had the same experience. The maxidress has colonised summer dressing, and it’s out of control.

So I am here to tell you that the maxidress must die. Ha! Not really, but also sort of yes, really. It started so well. When the maxi first landed, it beguiled us all. Floor-length, after all, was new fashion territory for anyone born after about 1965, so it felt fresh and exciting, plus you could go to a party in flat shoes and not have to shave your legs. Result! But somewhere down the line the maxidress has got a bit Motherland. It has become a garment that somehow represents the tense negotiation between prettiness and exhaustion that defines modern womanhood. A dress you wear for a holiday selfie that you retake 14 times before posting on Instagram with a joie-de-vivre caption.

Think self-tan is too much effort – or too risky? Not any more. The latest products are so simple to use you can just go with the glow

I can’t be without a facial self-tan in spring/summer. Keen to offload heavier coverage foundations that can slip, slide and suffocate in the sunshine, I reach for a subtle tanner as a warmer, lighter and, truly, easier base layer for makeup.

People wrongly imagine self-tan to be too effortful, fiddly and risky, and understandably wonder where to slot it into their skincare routine, but a new crop of facial self-tanners simplifies both these issues.

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

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

A week-long mountain trek with two young children felt like an ambitious undertaking – but they loved every minute

It’s said the 19th-century Parisian flâneur, intent on not rushing past the beauties of the street, would take a tortoise on a lead to set the pace. I thought about this as my donkey bent his head to another thistle and I turned my attention to the view, waiting for him to finish. Every way I looked, layers of mountains receded in deepening shades of eggshell blue. There were no sounds but the wind, the squeals of marmots and the giggles of my two young kids. I was extremely, uncomplicatedly happy.

Our donkeys were on loan from Burrotrek, a small outfit run by Swiss-born Denise Wirth. Twenty years ago, Denise spent four and a half months walking the Camino from Switzerland to Santiago de Compostela with two donkeys. She liked Spain, and she loved donkeys, so she settled on the idea of offering donkey treks in the Pyrenees. She has not looked back. For much of the year she is based where she settled, near Cadaqués, and offers a variety of self-guided itineraries through the vineyards in the foothills and along the Mediterranean coast, with trips lasting between a day and a week. But for the summer months, when temperatures soar, she relocates with her donkeys to Cal Jan de la Llosa in the province of Girona, a gorgeous ruin of a farm several miles up an unpaved track. From here, she lends her animals to people who, for whatever reason, have a romantic notion of what it might be like to take a donkey up a mountain.

From boat trips on Lake Garda to zip-wiring in Wales, you share your favourite family-friendly breaks in Europe

• Tell us about a glamorous seaside hotel that didn’t break the bank? The best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Lake Garda gave us one of the most memorable and unexpected family holidays yet. We hired a car and headed from Milan to Unesco-listed Peschiera del Garda and the family-focused apartment we found on Airbnb. A gentle 15-minute walk to the lakeside restaurants and gelaterias, this was the perfect base for exploring the beautiful town. Special mentions go to: Gelateria la Romana, with its wonderful ice-cream; the boat trip to Sirmione, an old town with thermal springs on a narrow peninsula; and, further up the lake, picturesque Malcesine and the cable car to the top of Monte Baldo to watch paragliders and to take in the amazing views.
Alex

Over one weekend, we hiked, swam, slept in a woodland cabin and camped on a hillside – while also supporting community-run projects

The children were asleep in the little tent behind us, wrapped in two sleeping bags, each with an extra helping of wool blankets. Earlier, all I could see were their little faces half-lit by torchlight as I read them a book about rivers to the sound of rain on canvas. They fell asleep as fast and thick as the fog pooling in the valley below.

My partner and I sat outside, huddled together under a waterproof coat, cheek to cheek, perched on our daughters’ foam swim vests because the ground was saturated. We were laughing. As parents, absurdity and beauty make for familiar bedfellows.

This word for outdoing or outshining others originated in the manosphere, but is now thoroughly mainstream. Why is it so popular – and should we be worried about slang that arises from toxic subcultures?

Until recently, if someone had said “mog” to me, I probably would have assumed they were talking about the children’s book cat created by the late great Judith Kerr. If asked about “mogging” or being “mogged,” I would have been completely baffled. But for many members of gen Z and gen Alpha (or anyone who is just a bit too online), the slang term, which means to outdo or outshine others, is everywhere.

Mogging’s origins are in the manosphere, where it began as a verb derived from the acronym “Amog” (alpha male of the group). In misogynistic forums in the 2010s, to “mog” came to mean to outdo someone in terms of sexual desirability. Mogging has been adopted by “looksmaxxing” influencers such as Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular, who encourage men to try to alter their looks – sometimes in extreme ways – to increase their “sexual market value”. Such an influencer might talk of “frame mogging” another person in a photo or video – a variation on mogging that specifically refers to being more muscular.

An ‘apolitical’ retired IT manager and a ‘far left’ biologist disagree over tackling global heating – but are they in harmony over truth and reconciliation?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Don, 74, Farnham

Occupation Retired IT project manager

The actor on becoming famous as a child, being an old soul, and caring for her dad in his final years

Born in Islington, London, in 1983, Natalie Cassidy is best known for playing Sonia Fowler in EastEnders. She joined the soap in 1993, and after leaving in 2007, she returned several times before making her final exit in April 2025. As well as theatre work, Cassidy has appeared in TV shows including Psychoville, Motherland and Boarders. She hosts the podcast Life With Nat and co-hosts Off the Telly. Natalie Cassidy: Caring Together is on BBC One and iPlayer now.

This was taken on the freezing cold set of EastEnders when I was 13. It was Sonia’s mum’s wedding, so they’d given her a trumpet to play at the ceremony. A genius idea from the writers, as the trumpet brought light and comedy to the role. Sadly, like most soap characters, she got downtrodden over the years. Humour has a tendency to fade after a long time on Albert Square.

More and more of our furry friends are getting their own living spaces, complete with soft furnishings and decorations. We asked some of the owners why

Lox is sprawled out on a green sofa, bathed in warm light from a standing lamp, framed art on the wall behind him.

This may sound like a relatively ordinary description of someone in their living room – except that Lox is a cat, not a human, and the “living room” he shares with another cat, Lottie, is a converted cupboard in a New York apartment.

Legal papers, expert investigations and social media posts tell story of how a 32-year-old Iraqi appeared to run ‘proxy’ campaign

On Monday, a slightly dishevelled Iraqi man, shackled and dressed in beige prison overalls, was ushered into a Manhattan courtroom.

Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, 32, pleaded not guilty to a series of terrorism-related offences, then gestured toward the judge and prosecutors. “I’m a prisoner of war. I’m not a threat,” he told them. “Children and women are being killed by your rockets.”

New film revives story of Taylor Parker, convicted in 2022 of cutting unborn daughter from womb of friend she killed

In an America so often saturated with brutal crime stories, it takes special circumstances to truly register shock.

But the story of Taylor Parker, now sitting on a Texas death row after being convicted of murdering her pregnant friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock in 2020 and cutting her unborn daughter Braxlynn from her womb, is horrific in part because it appears almost against nature itself.

From rising fuel, fertiliser and feed costs linked to the conflict in Iran to the impact of climate change, farmers around the world are facing a range of pressures. We want to hear how these challenges are affecting you

Farmers are facing rising costs for fuel, fertiliser and animal feed as a result of the conflict in Iran, adding to existing pressures on the industry.

The sector is also grappling with extreme weather after the UK’s hottest May day on record, alongside wider concerns about the impact of climate change. Europe also experienced record-breaking temperatures in late May and the UN has warned about the imminent return of El Niño – a powerful weather pattern that raises global temperatures and worsens some rainfall.

How has the search for work been for you? How many job applications have you made?

The number of young people not in work or education in Britain could rise to 1.25 million by the early 2030s without urgent government action, a landmark report has warned.

Alan Milburn, the leader of the review into why so many young people are economically inactive, said the UK risked opening up a “generational fault line” between young and old without urgent steps to overhaul schools, the health service, the welfare system and the jobs market.

Please let us know and we’d love to see your pictures too

Socks, trainers, sofas, cushions, the entire contents of your fridge - the list of things dogs will attempt to eat their way through is endless. And sometimes it gets weird. We want to hear from people who’ve witnessed their dog try to chew their way through the remarkable, the bizarre, the seemingly impossible – and lived to bark the tale! Pictures are a must.

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Tell us about your best coastal boltholes that won’t blow the budget – the top tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

Finding affordable hotel accommodation in Europe’s coastal hotspots in summer can be a challenge, especially if you’d rather not settle for a soulless budget chain or youth hostel. Whether it’s a grand old hotel on the French Riviera that oozes faded glamour or a charming guesthouse on the Amalfi coast, we’d love to hear about European seaside hotels that feel special without blowing the budget.

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

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