Peonies, padel rackets and a genuinely good low-alcohol wine … whatever your plans this bank holiday, we’ve rounded up our top spring essentials so you can make the most of it

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The weather may or may not play ball, but a spring bank holiday is a reason to kick back, get outside and get together with friends.

To help you make the most of the long weekend, we’ve rounded up some of our most-loved seasonal favourites. Whether it’s tools to spruce up your outdoor space, tipples to sip in the garden, a fake tan to jump-start your summer skin or fashion to take you from spring to summer, here are some of our favourite springtime products.

As she releases a clubby new album, Sweat, the former Sporty Spice answers your questions on her raver days, scouse cuisine and Sex Pistols covers

Your acid remix of Jessie Ware’s Free Yourself was a bit unexpected, I admit. Were you a hardcore raver back in the early 90s? Coopertapes
I absolutely was. I discovered raving on my first holiday without parents, just me and three of the girls I was at college with. This was the first environment I’d been in where I heard house music and everyone was dancing, and really expressing themselves. I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve found my people.” That’s where I got the bug. Then we’d also go to a club in Essex called Berwick Manor. I also remember going to the Cross, which was in King’s Cross. It was such a tiny little window of my late teens because the Spice Girls happened so quickly after it. I’d almost compartmentalised it and left it behind until I started DJing eight years ago.

Once the Spice Girls started and your schedule was much tighter, were you ever able to go out like that again? laurasnapes
Absolutely not. That was the thing, although all of my wildest dreams were coming true through being part of the Spice Girls, real life was put on hold. The schedule was brutal. There was very little time for socialising. Also, you remember those times in the 90s, right? The tabloid media and paparazzi were on you like a hawk. So we were terrified. Anything we ever did was usually published in a newspaper, so in our downtime we tried to keep it low key.

As revelations about Reform UK’s donors emerge, it’s clear that increasingly complex forms of patronage can’t be regulated effectively. We need a clean sweep

How do we know whether political funding is corrupt? Mostly, we don’t. A plutocrat delivers a sack of cash to a political party. A few weeks later, it announces a policy that happens to favour the donor’s business. Are the events linked? We might suspect it; we cannot prove it. But the suspicion itself is corrosive and demoralising.

The current funding system, perhaps more than any other factor, turns us away from politics, breeding disillusionment, alienation and cynicism. A survey by the Electoral Commission last year found that only 18% of respondents believed spending and funding are transparent. A government survey in December discovered that 87% of people are “concerned about the possibility of corruption” among politicians. A further survey concluded that political donors are believed to wield the most influence of any elite faction. Disillusionment with politics drives people into the arms of the extreme right. This is paradoxical, as it tends to be highly receptive to the ultra-rich.

I thought my mother was ashamed of my taboo profession. Then I realized our experiences were more similar than I thought

My first viral personal essay was titled: “In Defense of Casual Sex”.

It was 2008. I was 24, living in San Francisco, and working at the online magazine Salon. I was responding to a series of books about hookup culture, including one warning young women that they were ruining themselves for love and marriage by sleeping around.

Everyone is obsessed with the hit hospital drama – and the internet is abuzz with curious predictions and theories. Ghost medics, anyone?

It’s thrillingly intense. It’s obsessed with intubating. It’s occasionally infested with maggots or rats. And it has single-handedly made medical dramas cool again. With each episode covering an hour inside the hectic emergency room at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center (PTMC), awards-gobbling HBO Max hit The Pitt has become the most talked-about show on TV.

And where there’s a hit series, you’ll find an obsessive fandom. Fully invested devotees of The Pitt are busy spotting details, making predictions and hatching theories. As season two approaches midway, here are 10 for your thorough medical examination. Let’s go save some lives …

Echoes of Liz Truss as Badenoch blusters and blunders through series of short interviews, saving the worst for almost last

It was the sort of day that every politician dreads. One where you can’t not say and do something. The pressure to come up with the right words. The knowledge that even if you do find the right words, they still won’t be enough.

Nothing anyone can say can mitigate the horror of the latest antisemitic attacks in north London on Wednesday. You can promise more money for security. You can proscribe terrorist organisations. You can insist that this is not who we are as a country. But all that must sound hollow to British Jews. They’ve heard all this before and nothing has changed.

Keir Starmer pledges crackdown on protesters chanting or displaying antisemitic slogans as terror attack is assessed to be ‘highly likely’

Keir Starmer has pledged to crack down on those “venerating the murder of Jews” at protest marches as the UK terror threat level was raised to “severe” in the wake of the Golders Green attack.

The prime minister promised to do “everything in our power to stamp this hatred out” after meeting emergency workers and community leaders near the scene in north-west London where two Jewish men were stabbed on Wednesday.

Patient safety mechanism which gives patients the right to seek a second opinion having ‘lifesaving impact’, says health secretary

• ‘I am invoking Martha’s rule’: how a woman saved her father from near death in hospital

More than 500 people have received potentially life-saving care thanks to Martha’s rule, which gives hospital patients the right to seek a second opinion about their health.

They were moved to intensive care or a specialist unit after they, a loved one or a member of NHS staff triggered the patient safety mechanism, which the NHS in England began using in 2024.

Advice charity also helping thousands of tenants before Renters’ Rights Act comes into force on Friday

Solicitors say they have been inundated with requests to serve last-minute section 21 no-fault eviction notices before they are banned when the Renters’ Rights Act comes into force in England on Friday.

The legislation, which has been hailed as the biggest change to renting in a generation, bans no-fault evictions, limits rent increases and abolishes fixed-term tenancies.

Panama-flagged Panormitis turns away without unloading as Kyiv vows to treat carriers of ‘stolen’ grain the same as Russian oil tankers. What we know on day 1,528

Footage posted on social media by federal prosecutors includes captions claiming Cole Tomas Allen shot first

Federal prosecutors released footage Thursday of the moment officials say Cole Tomas Allen tried to storm last week’s White House Correspondents’ Association’s dinner in an alleged attempt to kill Donald Trump.

Amid questions about whether or not Allen fired his weapon before being subdued, Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in Washington DC, released edited security camera footage of the incident in a social media post.

Birdwatching no longer niche, old-fashioned pastime, says RSPB as research shows 47% increase in hobby since 2018

Birdwatching is the second fastest growing hobby for generation Z after jewellery making, according to a multiyear study of more than 24,000 people.

Almost 750,000 gen Zers (16 to 29-year-olds) in Britain regularly enjoy watching birds, a -1,088% increase since 2018, according to research by Fifty5Blue published by the RSPB.

For Seoul, what to call the North is difficult when you view it as a rebel-held region awaiting reunification

On a mild spring morning in central Seoul this week, a room of academics and lawyers gathered to debate a question: what should South Korea call North Korea?

The task sounds deceptively simple but the answer is far from straightforward, and has provided fodder for columnists in recent years. The answer could even have repercussions for South Korea’s constitutional position.

Senator Jack Reed says at hearing that defense secretary failed to give Trump accurate picture of war in Iran

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Pete Hegseth has failed to give Donald Trump an accurate picture of the war on Iran while resorting to “dangerously exaggerated” statements to create an inaccurate picture of a US military triumph, a senior Democrat told a Capitol Hill hearing on Thursday.

Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, told Hegseth, the defense secretary, that far from victory, US citizens were having to bear the cost of a war they did not support in the form of increased fuel prices.

Religious group ‘reviewing all available remedies’ after clips of young people rushing its buildings in ‘raids’ go viral

On any given day, Los Angeles’s Hollywood Boulevard teems with tourists and street performers clustered near the area’s many landmarks. But in recent months, the strip has been set abuzz for a new reason.

Throngs of mostly adolescent boys and young men have been rushing the Church of Scientology’s international headquarters on the famed street.

With PM on shaky ground as May elections approach, we take a look at who could take a run at the Labour leadership

As the May elections creep closer, the leadership speculation at Westminster grows more intense. Is Keir Starmer safe and, if so, for how long?

When will Angela Rayner’s tax affairs be resolved, and will she return to the cabinet? Who has Andy Burnham done a deal with to get back to Westminster, and would MPs support him if he did? Why has Wes Streeting gone so quiet?

The stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, north-west London, has become the latest in a series of antisemitic attacks. So is rising antisemitism now a national emergency? And is more security for the Jewish community really the answer? Helen Pidd is joined by columnist Rafael Behr

Rightwing justices in Louisiana v Callais led 6-3 vote to redraw congressional maps in blow to Voting Rights Act

The US supreme court issued a landmark ruling on Wednesday, Louisiana v Callais, relating to how states draft congressional maps under the key civil rights statute, the Voting Rights Act.

By a margin of 6-3, the rightwing justices who control America’s top court ordered Louisiana to redraw congressional maps that gave African Americans the chance to elect their candidates of choice proportionate to their population size. The majority dismissed this as an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander”.

You’re not imagining it. Smaller portions. Higher prices. Worse service.

It’s easy to blame inflation, but that’s not the full story.

Over the last few decades, a financial model has quietly taken over huge parts of everyday life. From restaurants and retailers to vets and care homes, many of the brands we rely on are no longer being run as long-term businesses, but as investments designed to generate fast returns.

In this video, Neelam Tailor breaks down how private equity actually works, why it’s grown so quickly, and how it can reshape the businesses you interact with every day.

Tahar Rahim and Izuka Hoyle are the prison guard and contract killer handcuffed together and on the run from a super evil crime syndicate. Cor, it’s silly stuff

So, well, Prisoner is stupid. It’s fun. But cor – is it stupid. By which I mean that if the new six-part action thriller about a prisoner and his escorting guard being handcuffed together and on the run was a person, you’d think – cor, they’re stupid, but unchallenging and pleasant enough company. Maybe I’ll stick around. Maybe I won’t. You would think something very much along those lines.

The Prisoner setup is simple. We first meet the prison guard, Amber (Izuka Hoyle, too good for the material but she is young, up and coming and there will be no harm done) as she says goodbye to her baby, leaves him with stay-at-home dad Olly (Finn Bennett, who’s been in some good stuff and should try that again) and rejoins her prison guarding team after six months’ maternity leave.

A new reboot of the 1999 horror hit will feature two of the original stars and the directing team as executive producers

The reboot of The Blair Witch Project will now boast those involved with the original as producers after they voiced their frustration.

The 1999 indie smash was made for $35,000 but made $248m, becoming one of the most profitable films ever made.

The German artist lived through Nazism and communism – and his horrific, shaming works, including a masturbating Hitler, forced his country to face its past. Yet in later life, he beautifully captured human frailty, portraying himself and his wife nude

Georg Baselitz was a living thread of history and his death robs us of the truth he knew when we need it more than ever. He was one of the only two people I have spoken to for whom Nazi Germany was a living memory: Baselitz was born in 1938, making him far too young to bear any personal guilt but old enough – seven when the Third Reich fell – to retain direct experience and images of it.

In his art, he cut those images up, gored and eviscerated them in paintings of uniformed young enthusiasts with blood spurting from mangled limbs or entire bodies fed through some hellish grinder and roughly remade. Into the woods they went, these ironically titled “Heroes”, chopping and being chopped in the guilty depths of the German forest.

My country has been under occupation, dogged by corruption and war. Yet even I’ve been bewildered by the way the US seems to be fracturing

• A version of this piece appeared in the Dial under the headline No Common Ground

In 2008, when I was a reporter for a leading Ukrainian TV station, I insisted on following Barack Obama’s campaign for US president. Few Ukrainian media outlets could afford to send a journalist to travel around the US to report on the election; even the newsrooms of those that could took some convincing.

As a media student in 2004, I had spent two months on the streets of Kyiv during the Orange Revolution, where people protested a stolen election and succeeded in defending their vote. The excitement of the fight for freedom and justice, combined with the energy of mass gatherings, was seductive. I recognised a similar momentum in the US during Obama’s campaign and wanted to see how things felt on the ground. As a Ukrainian, I could relate to Obama’s promises to restore respect for human rights and the rule of law, and his desire to mobilise people around the idea of “hope”. It also stood in contrast with what I knew of the US: I had studied foreign news reporting at the time of the US invasion of Iraq and the military’s crimes in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

Jews in Britain are facing a wave of hate spread by hostile states, and some homegrown. We can only tackle it by working together

Another week, another attack on British Jews; and rather than synagogues being petrol-bombed in the middle of the night, now it is ordinary Jews being stabbed in broad daylight. It’s been described as this country’s biggest national security emergency for almost a decade by the UK’s terrorism watchdog. Finding a solution will mean some hard questions, not just for government and police but for wider society too.

The immediate move is, of course, more policing and more funding for security. The first job of government is to protect its people, and this should be done without question. Prosecutions should be expedited through the courts, as they were with the riots that followed the Southport attack. But physical protection is, in a way, the easy part.

Dave Rich is director of policy at the Community Security Trust and the author of Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into Our World – and How You Can Change it

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

A different kind of stasis waits after the polls: a candidate gridlock where all Starmer’s potential successors are problematic in their own way

Westminster politics is currently consumed by the fact that the May elections are next week.

On Tuesday night Labour MPs voted down a Tory proposal that would have seen the prime minister referred to the privileges committee over his handling of the Mandelson scandal. Just 15 Labour MPs – mostly long-term critics of the PM – voted for the Tory motion; 53 did not vote, not all of whom abstained.

Morgan Jones is the co-editor of Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy

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

Share prices of United Utilities and Severn Trent show that investors seem keen to throw capital at the right firms

Thames Water, with occasional cameos by ugly little siblings Southern Water and South East Water, grabs most of the attention in the sector for obvious reasons. So it’s easy to overlook what’s happening further north. Short answer: the new era of higher bills and higher spending on water infrastructure will feel splendid if you’re United Utilities, licence-holder in north-west England, or Severn Trent, operating in the Midlands.

The former’s share price surged 11% on Thursday, the sort of thing that shouldn’t happen at a utility where success is meant to be defined in terms of dull predictability. And it’s definitely unusual to see a one-day valuation jump of that size when the company is issuing £800m-worth of new shares.

With the US blockade cutting off oil, the island’s healthcare has been wrecked, access to clean water lost and babies put at risk

Four months into Cuba’s deepening energy crisis, the consequences are no longer abstract: they are visible in the rhythm of daily life. Streets fall silent before night has fully set in. Hospitals scale back operations. Small businesses close due to a lack of supplies. At dawn, exhaustion shows on people’s faces after long nights without electricity.

But the most serious toll is measured not in inconvenience but in health.

John Terry’s journey into the internet pipeline is by no means an isolated case – what makes footballers so susceptible?

And so we ask ourselves: how did it come to this? Did we miss the signs? Were there red flags that went unheeded, cries for help that fell on closed ears, forks in the road not taken? Or ultimately, for all our best efforts, was it always going to end like this? Is it, in fact, possible that John Terry was a far-right sympathiser all along?

Yes, it’s been a chastening week for those who have been fighting Terry’s corner for more than a decade. Who steadfastly defended him against the racism charges, who accepted his explanation that he was simply repeating what Anton Ferdinand had been saying to him, who turned up at his trial in full kit, who lamented his failure to land the coaching jobs he so coveted, who right to the end just wanted to believe.

We are stuck in a deluge of meaningless content that threatens human creativity. Here’s a simple way to mitigate its harms

As the US midterm elections approach, voters are voicing concern about AI. According to an NBC News poll of registered voters, 57% believe the risks of AI outweigh the benefits. A rising political cohort is particularly concerned. A Pew Research poll showed that 61% of adults under 30 say more AI in society will make people worse at creative thinking. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that 74% of Americans think the government is not doing enough to regulate AI.

Can you blame them? The CEOs of the largest AI companies chose a curious tactic: scaring their prospective users into submission. “Use it or get left behind” is the narrative, buttressed by gleeful proclamations that AI will destroy whole industries and cultural institutions.

Policing and government policy are essential, but not sufficient to address rising hate crime against Jews

The stabbing of two men in north-west London on Wednesday by an attacker described as seeking anyone “visibly Jewish” would be horrifying under any circumstances. That it comes amid rising antisemitic crime in the area, in the UK and around the world makes it all the more frightening.

A community persecuted throughout history faces a fresh wave of hatred and abuse. Shock and grief are mixed with fear, with some British Jews asking whether they can be safe in the UK. This is the third attack in five weeks in the same part of Golders Green alone. Last October, two people were killed in an attack on a synagogue in Heaton Park, Manchester, on Yom Kippur. In December, two men were found guilty of plotting to infiltrate and open fire on a march against antisemitism in the same city. That month, a pair of gunmen killed 15 people at a Hanukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

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

By attacking the basic settlement between scientists and the state, the US president has proved that experts can’t avoid these fights

Donald Trump’s war on science has been vicious and hugely damaging, but it is worth noting that he has lost some of its biggest battles. Last year, Mr Trump demanded that US federal scientific and medical research funding be cut by about half. But the budget Congress passed in February actually delivered a slight increase in overall funding – although specific Trump targets such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were cut. He also continues to chip away at science in other ways such as dismissing the board overseeing the National Science Foundation this week.

Maga’s attacks on science have been nakedly political. Its defeats have been politics of a different sort, showing that the bipartisan pro-science consensus is still intact, and for the moment has the power to hold Mr Trump in check. Scientists themselves appear to be waking up to the potential of such politics. The organisation 314 Action, which supports Democratic scientists running for office, reported that more than 700 candidates – vying for local, congressional and gubernatorial positions – have sought its support ahead of the midterm elections this year, three times the usual number. Many gave the White House’s war on science as the reason for their political turn.

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

Jan Shapiro calls for a searching examination of the assumptions and culture that shape practice across the Send system. Plus Mary Smith sets readers and journalists a challenge based on her granddaughter’s revision sheet

Your report highlights the impact of the inadequate funding of special educational needs and disabilities provision (Schools forced to cut back on support for Send pupils in England, poll finds, 23 April). However, this moment should prompt not just concern about diminishing support, but a more fundamental examination of the system that produces these pressures in the first place.

I lead a school with a significantly higher-than-average proportion of disadvantaged pupils with Send. For us, inclusion is not an add-on but a commitment embedded in relationships and practice. The issue is not solely financial. It is also about approach, language, culture and what schools are incentivised to value. Without that foundation, increased funding alone will not deliver what our Send children need.

Prof Amy Dickman, Prof Adam Hart, Dr Dan Challender and Dr Dilys Roe say trophy hunting benefits lions and many other species by conserving more land in Africa than national parks do

The reason that trophy hunting bans have repeatedly stalled in parliament (Letters, 26 April) is because they are misinformed, hypocritical, ignore the rights and welfare of local communities, and would harm, not help, conservation.

Campaigners should decide if bans are about morality or conservation. If the former, the UK should ban domestic trophy hunting of red deer, for example, but this has never been suggested. If it is about conservation, ministers should recognise that trophy hunting is not a key threat to lions or any other species. Indeed, it benefits lions and other species by conserving more land in Africa than national parks do. Biodiversity is far more threatened by habitat loss, which bans are likely to amplify by reducing income for protected areas. Hunting areas are usually not viable for photo-tourism, which brings its own issues of environmental impact.

Readers respond to the news that people in the UK are spending fewer years in good health than a decade ago

A major cause of the fall in healthy life expectancy (People in UK spend fewer years in good health than a decade ago, study finds, 27 April) is austerity and the continued cuts to social and health spending. In our report Still Digging Deeper: The Impact of Austerity on Inequalities and Deprivation in the Coalfield Areas, which covers Scotland, England and Wales for the period 1984-2024, we highlight how public expenditure cuts since 1984 have disproportionately impacted coalfield areas of the UK.

Since 2010, austerity has been stepped up, and we have calculated that welfare reforms and benefit cuts amounted to £32.6bn over the period of 2010-21. Furthermore, in 2025-26 coalfield local authorities had a combined funding gap of £447m. These are areas where a significant proportion of the working-age population is affected by long-term sickness and experiences poverty.

Readers respond to Polly Hudson’s article decrying physical contact on meeting friends or strangers

I’ve just read Polly Hudson’s piece about shaking hands and I disagree (Teenagers are calling time on the handshake. I salute them, from a safe distance, theguardian.com, 26 April). A hand contact is an open gesture, a mark of trust. It is meant to transmit our humanity. Being human is about learning to connect with each other and that can mean leaving our comfort zone, making the first step – or proffering the first hand – towards a stranger. That first encounter may lead nowhere, or it may be the beginning of an enriching relationship. Either way, to deprive yourself of all those possibilities because of hygiene worries would be so sad. Polly, you could always carry hand sanitiser in your pocket, but please be discreet when using it.
Priscilla Packer
Les Ponts de Cé, France

• I can understand how Polly Hudson feels about greeting someone with physical contact. A handshake is not a hug, kiss or curtsey. It is a simple greeting, with the hand extended and a direct look at who you want to meet and converse with. The contact shows an appreciation for each other not shown by a fist or elbow bump. I find women I meet at work and socially are very comfortable with a handshake rather than any other greeting. It is true that the initial contact with someone defines the rest of the relationship, both good and bad.
James Tuson
Hertford

There was a sheepish look on Lucas Digne’s face and for the referee, João Pinheiro, it was a case of reviewing whether the ball was out of play and not if the Aston Villa defender had handled inside the box. Even Digne would not dispute that bit. Digne naively raised both hands after Omari Hutchinson refused to deem Morgan Gibbs-White’s cross a lost cause and Nottingham Forest were presented with a chance to strike the first blow in this Europa League semi-final.

Just how damaging might Digne’s moment of madness prove? Chris Wood punished Villa from 12 yards, his penalty flawless. Unai Emery tried to gesture for calm as Forest’s support went berserk and their players moseyed back towards their half but afterwards the Villa manager expressed his anger at Elliot Anderson escaping a red card for a poor first-half tackle on Ollie Watkins.

Eddie Howe is under pressure, Rayan needs protection at Bournemouth and John Stones returns to Everton with City

• Premier League top scorers: latest standings

The equation is simple. If Leeds beat relegated – and now managerless - Burnley at Elland Road on Friday they will reach 43 points and be extremely unlikely to meet the same fate as their opponents. Daniel Farke’s losing FA Cup semi-finalists are then scheduled to travel to Tottenham, but victory against Burnley, who they pipped to the Championship title last season, would settle nerves in West Yorkshire. Farke, though, does not necessarily expect a straightforward match. “There’s definitely no complacency,” he said, speaking before the news of Scott Parker’s departure. “I’ve got so much respect for Scott. I’d say there’s not one time this season Burnley were played off the field. They’re always very competitive, they’ve had many tight games.” As Mike Jackson takes caretaker charge at Turf Moor, Farke hopes another three points will persuade Leeds to extend his own contract. Louise Taylor

Leeds v Burnley, Friday 8pm (all times BST)

Brentford v West Ham, Saturday 3pm

Newcastle v Brighton, Saturday 3pm

Wolves v Sunderland, Saturday 3pm

Arsenal v Fulham, Saturday 5.30pm

Bournemouth v Crystal Palace, Sunday 2pm

Manchester United v Liverpool, Sunday 3.30pm

Keep this up and Crystal Palace’s European adventure could end in yet more silverware for Oliver Glasner. Four years ago it was Daichi Kamada who scored the winning goal for Glasner’s Eintracht Frankfurt in the first leg of their Europa League semi-final against West Ham on their way to lifting the trophy. The Japan midfielder again provided the crucial moment here before setting up the substitute Jørgen Strand Larsen to ensure Palace will head into next week’s second leg with a two-goal advantage.

With all his experience, Glasner will know that this tie is not over after a vibrant Shakhtar Donetsk side stuffed with attacking Brazilian flair caused them plenty of problems. Ismaïla Sarr’s opener after just 21 seconds was the fastest goal in Conference League history and the Senegal forward now has eight in 11 appearances so far in this competition.

• Jibril Rajoub refuses handshake at Fifa congress

• Infantino to seek third term as president

The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, confirmed his intention to stand for re-election for a third full term next year after an attempt to orchestrate a handshake between the Palestinian and Israeli delegates at congress backfired.

The Palestinian Football Federation president, Jibril Rajoub, refused to stand alongside Israel FA vice-president, Basim Sheikh Suliman, in an awkward moment towards the end of the 76th Fifa congress after both men had been called to the stage in Vancouver by Infantino.

Can LIV find new backers and what are the options for Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Lee Westwood and others?

Confirmation that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will cease funding the LIV Golf tour will have huge ramifications, for the future of the tour itself, the players and across golf’s traditional heartlands. Where does PIF’s withdrawal leave them all?

• ‘It needs to change,’ insists seven-time champion

• Lance Stroll labels rules ‘fundamentally flawed’

Lewis Hamilton believes Formula One drivers should have a “seat at the table” in discussion on directions the sport should take in future, to have an input alongside key stakeholders such as the teams and the FIA. Hamilton’s view was largely echoed across the paddock including by the current world champion, Lando Norris.

Hamilton was speaking before this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix where the rule changes implemented after driver dissatisfaction with this year’s new regulations are taking effect for the first time.

• Chinese hotshot electric as he races into 6-2 lead

• Higgins battles back to 4-4 against Murphy

Wu Yize took control of the world championship semi-final against Mark Allen as he reeled off the closing four frames to open up a 6-2 lead. After Thursday’s evening session had been interrupted by a power outage at the Crucible, the 22-year-old from China produced a clinical run to leave Allen watching on from his chair.

Earlier, with the Northern Irishman at the table looking to recover from going 2-0 down, the BBC’s TV and online broadcast went off air and screens above the table in the venue also showed no signal.

• American nearly lost leg after crash at Winter Games

• 41-year-old does not rule out return to racing

Lindsey Vonn says she is still recovering physically and emotionally from her crash at the Winter Olympics and does not know when, or if, she will race again.

The 41-year-old has undergone eight surgeries after suffering a complex left leg fracture – one that nearly led to a leg amputation – in the women’s downhill in February. She needs at least one more operation to repair a torn ACL in the same knee.

Parliamentary committee takes unusual step of declaring no confidence in executives at utility provider

MPs have accused the leadership of South East Water of incompetence over repeated water outages for tens of thousands of customers, and expressed no confidence in their ability to reform the company.

MPs from across the political spectrum said David Hinton, SEW’s chief executive, and the board of directors operated a culture of unaccountability at the company, which provides drinking water for 2.3 million customers in Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex.

Suu Kyi, 80, has been detained by the junta and her whereabouts unclear amid a deadly civil war triggered by the February 2021 coup

Myanmar’s former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is to be moved to house arrest, military-controlled media reported on Thursday, more than five years after her government was ousted in a coup.

Aung San Suu Kyi, 80, has been detained since the military took power in 2021, plunging the country into conflict and economic turmoil. Very little is known about the conditions in which she has been held.

Foil boarders were pursued by shark – likely a great white – off Santa Barbara before it lost interest and swam away

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Ron Takeda and Tavis Boise were a few miles off the coast of Santa Barbara when they noticed the large mass trailing behind them.

“Tavis, is it a dolphin?” asked Takeda as he stood on his foil board, a specialized form of surfing, propelling himself through the waves. Boise, who was filming their run, recognized the question as an ominous sign – the veteran surfers are familiar enough with dolphins that Takeda should have recognized one immediately.

Dozens handed life peerages in apparent concession, enabling their return to red benches

Dozens of hereditary peers whose seats have been abolished have had their lawmaking powers restored as Keir Starmer seeks to accelerate changes to the House of Lords.

It is understood that 15 Conservative hereditary peers, two Labour and nine crossbenchers have been handed life peerages, enabling their return to the red benches.

President says decision made ‘in honor of the king and queen’ as industry officials call deal ‘significant boost’

In a gesture of diplomatic friendliness after King Charles’s visit to the White House, Donald Trump said the US would be removing all tariffs on whisky imports.

“In Honor of the King and Queen of the United Kingdom, who have just left the White House, soon headed back to their wonderful Country, I will be removing the Tariffs and Restrictions on Whiskey having to do with Scotland’s ability to work with the Commonwealth of Kentucky on Whiskey and Bourbon,” Trump said in a post on social media.

A Canadian social enterprise hopes to help solve the urgent need for retrofits and shortage of skilled workers

John Mava was looking for work when a construction project started behind his house. When he visited the site and saw how different construction was in Canada compared with his native Nigeria, his interest was piqued.

“I said it would be great for me to have knowledge about this,” said Mava, who learned that in Canada, construction uses timber rather than bricks and has a focus on the environment.

Mid and West Wales fire and rescue service has been trying to extinguish fires in Elan valley since Sunday

Firefighters are struggling to control wildfires raging though the scenic Elan valley in mid-Wales for a fifth day.

The Mid and West Wales fire and rescue service has been working to extinguish fires in and around the Powys beauty spot since Sunday. It is not yet clear how much damage has been done to the valley, 80% of which is designated as sites of special scientific interest, raising fears for flora and fauna.

Elusive nightingale ‘doing well’ at Northward Hill, Kent, but experts cite concerns around loss of habitat

The dawn chorus at RSPB Northward Hill in Kent is a riot of sound: the melodic robin, the two-tone cuckoo, the whitethroat’s scratchy warble. Even the garbling geese and mooing cows from the neighbouring Thames marshes add to the symphony.

But in late April one energetic singer hogs the limelight. For a few weeks after arriving from West Africa, the nightingale spends the night – and early morning – in complex song. As it searches for a mate and marks its territory, its song is at times as sweet and tuneful as a soul singer, at others as frantic as a car alarm.

Moreangels Mbizah has blazed a trail in Zimbabwe as the first black African woman to found a conservation organisation in the country

The turning point for Moreangels Mbizah came in 2014. The conservation biologist was in Hwange national park in Zimbabwe, scanning the savannah to monitor the movements of lions for her zoology PhD research.

The GPS signal told her something was wrong. One of the lions had strayed into a nearby village, putting itself and the local community at risk. Mbizah and her team took off to try to herd it back into its habitat.

Coroner says none of the five civilians killed in incident in Belfast during Troubles should have been shot

British army soldiers “lost control” and used force that was “not reasonable” in the killing of five civilians in Northern Ireland in 1972, an inquest judge has ruled.

Four of the victims – two teenagers, a father of six and a Catholic priest – posed no risk when they were shot in the Springhill and Westrock areas of west Belfast on 9 July 1972, Mr Justice Scoffield said on Thursday.

Ross Davidson, who sang with group in 2018, was convicted of offences committed against six women

Musician Ross Davidson, a former singer for Spandau Ballet, has been jailed for 14 years for multiple rapes and sexual assaults.

Davidson, 38, was convicted across two trials of two counts of rape, an attempted rape, three sexual assaults and two charges of voyeurism, in offences committed against six women between August 2013 and December 2019.

Lambeth council candidates Saiqa Ali and Sabine Mairey understood to have been detained over social media posts

Two women standing as Green party candidates in the local elections have been arrested over alleged antisemitic social media posts.

The women, running in seats for Lambeth council, south London, were arrested by the Metropolitan police on Thursday morning.

Senior police officer warns of young people being drawn into violent extremism as Alfie Coleman found guilty

More and more young people are being drawn into the world of violent extremism, a senior police officer has warned after a young neo-Nazi caught in an undercover MI5 sting was convicted of planning a mass gun attack.

Alfie Coleman, a former supermarket worker from Great Notley in Essex, compiled a hate-list of colleagues and customers he branded with racial slurs or as “race traitors”. He wrote a “manifesto” in a diary and identified potential targets, including the “lord mayor of London” and a mosque.

President Lula’s veto of the bill was overturned by Brazil’s congress and senate, meaning it now awaits confirmation by supreme court

Brazil’s largely conservative congress has approved a bill reducing the prison sentence of the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted last year of attempting a coup.

The bill had initially been passed by congress in December, but President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vetoed it in January in a symbolic move marking three years since Bolsonaro supporters ransacked the capital, Brasília.

Researchers say results mark a ‘profound change in technology that will reshape medicine’

From George Clooney in ER to Noah Wyle in The Pitt, emergency department doctors have long been popular heroes. But will it soon be time to hang up the scrubs?

A groundbreaking Harvard study has found that AI systems outperformed human doctors in high-pressure emergency medicine triage, diagnosing more accurately in the potentially life and death moments when people are first rushed to hospital.

Vehicle was travelling through Juvisy-sur-Orge when it veered off the road into the river

Four people have been rescued from the Seine near Paris after a bus driven by a trainee driver collided with a parked vehicle before plunging into the river.

The bus was travelling through the town of Juvisy-sur-Orge, south-east of the French capital, on Thursday when it veered off the road into the Seine, prosecutors said.

Beijing urges Washington to ‘make the right choices’ on Taiwan to maintain ‘stability’ between the two powers

China’s foreign minister on Thursday urged the US to maintain “stability” between the two powers and warned that Taiwan posed the biggest risk, weeks ahead of President Donald Trump’s scheduled visit to Beijing.

In a call with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, foreign minister Wang Yi said that Beijing and Washington should “safeguard the hard-won stability” in China-US relations, China’s foreign ministry said.

Company details $111.2bn in revenue in first earnings report after announcement of Cook’s pending departure

Apple blew past Wall Street expectations in its first earnings report since it announced CEO Tim Cook would be stepping down.

Cook shared his thoughts about the leadership transition on Thursday, saying: “There’s no one on this planet I trust more to lead Apple into the future” than incoming CEO John Ternus. Asked by an investor what advice he has given Ternus, Cook said: “Never forget the north star for the company. You know, we’re about making the best products in the world that really enrich other people’s lives.”

The AI boom is worsening a global memory chip shortage, which Samsung predicts will continue into 2027

Samsung Electronics on Thursday reported record quarterly profit driven by a 49-fold jump in chip income, saying it expects a severe supply shortage to deepen next year as clients spend on AI, driving up prices of its memory chips.

A boom in the construction of AI datacentres has spurred Samsung and chipmaking peers to allocate production capacity to advanced chips that Nvidia uses in its so-called AI accelerators. Even so, chipmakers are struggling to meet demand while the move also squeezes the supply of conventional chips.

Trial continues after heated back-and-forth during OpenAI’s cross-examination of the Tesla CEO

Elon Musk’s court case against Sam Altman continued on Thursday, after a day of contentious exchanges during OpenAI’s cross-examination of the Tesla CEO. Musk faced more combative questioning throughout the morning, in a glimpse of what may await other prominent witnesses set to take the stand.

Witness testimony and evidence has revealed formerly private emails, text messages and diary entries surrounding the formation of OpenAI, giving a behind-the-scenes look at how the tech behemoth was created. Many of the tech industry’s most powerful players are named as witnesses and will give their accounts on the origins of Musk and Altman’s bitter feud. Altman will testify later in the trial, which will last three weeks.

Cryptocurrency ATMs also face ban, after public inquiry found Canada lacked anti-money-laundering strategy

Canada is to establish a new and powerful law enforcement agency to investigate financial crime, in stark contrast to the US, where weakened federal investigators have struggled to pursue fraudsters and the White House has pardoned convicted money launderers.

A bill to create the Financial Crimes Agency (FCA) completed its first reading in parliament this week. The legislation was introduced by the governing Liberals and with their parliamentary majority, the party is likely to move it through both levels of government quickly.

A timely exhibit at NYU celebrates the anti-fascist folk artist – despite the university’s recent suppression of campus protests

Bea Esteves Mendez knew as much about Woody Guthrie as most people her age – which is to say, she knew This Land is Your Land – when one of her professors put on a recording of All You Fascists last semester. It’s an upbeat folk anthem written at the height of the second world war that connects the forces of oppression abroad with those, like Jim Crow, that festered at home. “Well I’m a gonna tell you fascists, you may be surprised, people in this world are getting organized,” Guthrie sings, shouts, whoops and whistles in his distinctive Oklahoma twang. “You’re bound to lose. You fascists bound to lose.”

“It was our first time really sitting down to listen to a Woody Guthrie song, and we were like, ‘Wow,’” said Mendez, 19, a sophomore at New York University. “‘This could have been written today.’”

In 2022, Aneil Karia won an Academy Award for his short starring Riz Ahmed. Now, he’s skewering Reform-style parliamentary candidates with the help of Jack Lowden and an unlikely online platform

Some film-makers have unrealistic expectations for their work; Aneil Karia is not one of them. “I’m not deluded enough to think that it’s going to bring down the government,” he says of his new film, Vote Gavin Lyle – but you never know, it just might. A funny, clever, superbly acted, small-but-perfectly-formed satire, Vote Gavin Lyle stars Jack Lowden as a wannabe Reform-style parliamentary candidate for the fictional middle-England constituency of Fletcham and Wold. At just 16 minutes long, it absolutely skewers the far-right mindset; not the minority-bashing, flag-hoisting street thugs, but the cannier, well-spoken Farageists who dominate the tendency’s leadership.

Without wanting to give away the film’s final flourish, it’s fair to say that there’s an element of empathy, even sympathy for its central character. Karia says: “I don’t think it’s interesting or useful to look at these people – far-right politicians, councillors, prospective candidates, whoever – and just say what nasty bastards they are. I think what strikes me about them is they’re just as vulnerable and scared as the rest of us.

As the actor turns 86, we rate his greatest screen performances and ask which Godfather was the best of the trilogy

With greased-back hair, dainty spectacles and bristly chops, Pacino is a former Little League baseball coach turned locksmith. But – symbolism alert! – who holds the key to his clenched heart? One scene gives good cringe: over a would-be romantic dinner with a bank teller (Holly Hunter), he starts reminiscing about his great lost love, oblivious to his date’s escalating indignation.

A new trailer depicts a normal meet-cute before setting it on the one night a year when single people can legally have sex

For the most part, the trailer for the upcoming film One Night Only looks like the sweetest possible version of a romcom. A handsome, sensitive-looking man (played by Callum Turner) flirts relentlessly with a big-eyed oddball in a sexy dress (played by Monica Barbaro). They bump into each other, nudge each other, roll their eyes at each other. As a YouTube comment underneath the trailer (that has been liked more than 3,000 times) says: “Romantic comedies are back.”

However, tucked away in this adorable little trailer is a premise that might just be the most confusing in living memory. As Turner’s character walks lovelorn through the streets of New York City, his voiceover says: “Finding love is hard enough. Try doing it on the one night of the year single people are legally allowed to have sex.”

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is formidable in Netflix’s take on the thriller novel Denzel Washington turned into a noughties action movie. But it’s a great lesson in why shows don’t normally have a glum high-octane hero

Who doesn’t love a thriller in which a lone wolf takes down an all-powerful criminal network? Jack Reacher, Ethan Hunt, whatsisname from The Night Agent – however adverse the circumstances, these capable chaps will prevail. Hand-to-hand combat against a highly trained ninja henchman? No problem. Breaking into a phenomenally secure facility, stealing the valuable thing, then striding out again? Easy. Defeating a warehouse full of men with Kalashnikovs, armed only with sunglasses and string, all while rescuing a screaming female civilian? All in a day’s work.

These yarns are healthy, silly fun and we enjoy them. But, Netflix’s new six-parter Man on Fire asks, what if we kept the core idea but made it less silly and fun, more sad and serious? Wouldn’t that be even better? Well, it seems it wouldn’t be a complete disaster, but in this case it makes life more difficult for everyone, the viewer included.

Preposterous time-romp, starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery, is highly enjoyable if you’re prepared to meet it on its own terms

The sheer barking madness of this fantasy time-travel adventure from co-writer Gregory Widen and director Russell Mulcahy, now on re-release for its 40th anniversary, can best be described as Terry Gilliam meets James Cameron. The chiselled features of its Franco-American star Christopher Lambert – a kind of VHS Marlon Brando – are a minor source of diversion on their own and his Scottish accent has to be heard to be disbelieved. And Celia Imrie’s small role as the sexy but duplicitous 16th-century Scottish villager seals the deal on Highlander’s cult status.

Forty years on, this depends more than ever on appreciating its trace of deadpan black comedy. Highlander’s wacky story concerns Connor MacLeod, smoulderingly played by Lambert, a fiery young warrior in the Scottish Highlands in the 1530s, who appears to have been killed during a war with the opposing Fraser clan. But he comes back to life, leading the excitable community to think he’s possessed by the devil. Driven out of the village, his only ally is his great love Heather (Beatie Edney), but the couple are astonished to encounter what appears to be an effetely dressed Spanish nobleman, played by Sean Connery, who incidentally displays in this film some very useful horsemanship. He informs Connor that he is one of a secret race of immortals, a disclosure which Connor receives coldly: “You look like a woman, you stupid haggis!”

Paul Watkins/Alessio Bax
Signum Classics
Cellist Watkins’ career-long immersion in the composer pays dividends in his pairing with Alessio Bax’s unfussy virtuosity

As cellist of the Nash Ensemble and the Emerson Quartet, Paul Watkins has immersed himself in almost all the chamber music Beethoven wrote. Now he brings those years of experience to his first recording of the cello sonatas. He approached the pianist Alessio Bax for this project after hearing him play the Moonlight Sonata, and his instinct was good: their playing here seems to come from a shared impulse, unflaggingly eloquent without ever seeming to strive for effect.

Together these five sonatas span Beethoven’s composing life. The earliest two date from around the time of his first piano concertos, and they find Beethoven breaking new ground in the way he writes for cello and keyboard as equal duet partners. Both sonatas have slow, serious introductions leading into extended movements showcasing the virtuosity of the pianist, to which Bax rises with a light, crisp touch. The expansive third, Op 69, which Beethoven worked on alongside the Fifth Symphony, centres on a perky middle movement akin to a symphonic scherzo; it’s nicely weighted here, the momentum continuing through all the changes in texture. The final pair of sonatas harness Watkins’s full powers of expression, in particular No 5, the only one of all these to have a full-blown slow movement. It begins in reticent, almost hymn-like style and blooms into something deeply felt; Watkins and Bax handle its closing passages with tightly controlled restraint, then gently clear the air with the introduction to the wrangly little fugue of the finale. It’s all beautifully done.

The author reads her account of her time as a senior executive at Facebook with a mixture of dark humour and astonishment at the working culture in which she finds herself

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir documenting her seven years working at Facebook opens, unexpectedly, with a shark attack. The New Zealander was 13 years old and swimming in the sea when the shark bit her torso and shook her from side to side. She lived to tell the tale, but her near-death experience awakened in her a desire to leave the world better than she found it.

Wynn-Williams went on to take a job at Facebook’s public policy department in 2011, having seen the potential of the platform as a global meeting place. But what she found was a senior staff high on power and untroubled by ethical concerns such as privacy or the dissemination of hate speech and misinformation. All were resistant to political interference and dedicated to rapid expansion, no matter the consequences, claims that Meta has called out of date and false. The author also encountered a working culture where employees enjoyed perks but had to be available around the clock – a situation that led to her responding to emails while in labour.

Companies such as Chaotic Good are confecting social media buzz to promote Geese, Oklou and other indie darlings. Industry insiders reveal how widespread the practice is – even if no-one is sure it actually works

Did you get more fomo than usual from last year’s Glastonbury? Did you see a video of Overmono or Lorde or Self Esteem that made you seethe with jealousy? That may have been because more of your friends genuinely did attend the festival last year – or it could be because those acts, and 25 others including Fatboy Slim, Charli xcx and Doechii, paid a digital marketing agency that sent influencers and content creators to watch their sets and upload organic-looking clips to social media.

Take a quick look at Your Culture’s Instagram page and you’ll find that the boutique UK agency had a hand in disseminating some of 2025’s most viral live music moments: the Last Dinner Party’s raucous “medieval sleaze” album launch party; Chappell Roan’s headline set at Reading festival. If you saw video from Calum Scott’s surprise set at St Pancras International last year, or Alex Warren’s outside Warren Street, it’s likely because of Your Culture. An Instagram post from January boasts that the brand “worked with 55% of the nominees” of the most recent Brit awards.

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
From So Sick to Smack That, this double-headliner provides major millennial nostalgia – but goes to show how varied their respective careers were at their peak

For pop-R&B leaning millennials, the pairing of Ne-Yo and Akon on this co-headlining tour certainly has a heavy dose of nostalgia, which kicks in almost immediately with the smoke that billows around Ne-Yo’s black fedora and Michael Jackson-inspired moves. But there’s an undeniable magic beyond that, as the two artists pull from careers that produced eight UK No 1 singles and 410 weeks in the Top 40 between them in the mid-00s to early 10s.

Over the course of just under three hours, the duo take turns in the spotlight, the mood seesawing in line with each of them. Beginning with a snippet of Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel before segueing into his 2008 hit Miss Independent, Ne-Yo is smooth and suave in his vocals and dextrous choreography, an effective contrast to Akon’s all-out charisma and party-starter energy which arrives with classics like Smack That – the first time, of many, that the crowd fully loses it.

A miserable misogynist is on a quest for redemption in Toltz’s fourth novel, which fizzes with dynamic prose but struggles to engender empathy for its protagonist

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In his fourth novel, Steve Toltz – best known for the Booker prize-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole – takes on the story of one man’s loneliness to deliver a satirical and surprisingly moving ode to human connection. Much like his earlier works, this one is filled with con men, tall tales and black humour, making for a bitingly funny exploration of life’s misfortunes.

A Rising of the Lights opens with an absurd premise: two ne’er-do-well parents, in the middle of their divorce, roll dice to split up their twin children; one child will go with each parent. After winning him in this cruel game, Russell “Rusty” Wilson’s mother tells him they’ll be moving to Melbourne from Sydney – only to deem it “too much hassle”, circle the block and bring him right back to where they started. It’s an arresting opener that foreshadows the following 300 pages of Rusty’s life.

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A Rising of the Lights by Steve Toltz is out now in Australia (Penguin, $34.99)

Luke Kennard, Sophie Ratcliffe and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

This is a really good year for new fiction. I don’t think anyone writes about contemporary Englishness as astutely, mercilessly and affectionately as Claire Powell, and her latest novel, All In, puts her perfectly observed characters in the pressure cooker of an all-inclusive holiday. It’s a kind of meta-beach read, and I loved it.

The premise of this novel about a ballet dancer who baits love scammers into conversation is great – but the story feels overwritten and underfelt

Martina Hefter’s Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? has caused much argument in German literary circles. It won the country’s most influential fiction award in 2024, and quickly sold 80,000 copies. But critics were divided: Die Zeit compared the book’s seductive power to the love scammers it depicts, while Deutschlandfunk Kultur criticised its shallow characters and monotonous dialogue.

I was instantly drawn in by the premise: a feisty middle-aged dancer trolling romance scammers, only to connect with a Nigerian man on the other end of the phone. Juno is a ballet dancer whose obsessions with ageing, death and her body have crippled her personality. With her career waning and most of her time spent caring for her ailing husband, Jupiter, she yearns for meaning. But she’s depressed, full of unexamined anger and guilt. Everywhere, through her scathing lens, she sees decay and deception. Unable to sleep, she baits love scammers into conversation. “Go ahead and write to women who are dumb enough to fall for that,” she thinks. “The main thing is that I have a counterpart.”

This portrait of everyday life in an Istanbul neighbourhood buffeted by change has far wider relevance

Thankfully, the attack left only black eyes and bloodied faces. It was in Karagümrük, a tough neighbourhood in Istanbul’s old city, once known for mafia types and Turks on the hard right. But, as Suzy Hansen explains, it had been transformed by an influx of Syrian refugees – until the locals apparently decided they’d had enough, and came for them with sticks, baseball bats and knives for carving doner kebab.

So begins From Life Itself, in which Hansen traces a story that illuminates a politics of mass migration and nationalist backlash that has resonances far beyond Turkey. It is a more ambitious book than that, too. An American who lived in Istanbul and visited Karagümrük for more than a decade – during which Turkey’s enfeebled democracy came under ever more sustained assault – she hoped to convey “how ordinary people experience authoritarianism in the 21st century – how our era feels”.

Hitman developer IO Interactive’s pluralistic take on the British secret agent – his first video-game outing in almost 15 years – promises a Bond for all eras. Here’s what you need to know

If you want to tell the tale of a young James Bond, you first need to pick which James Bond he’s going to grow into. This was the task handed to Hitman developer IO Interactive, the studio taking digital custody of the spy in 007 First Light, Bond’s first video game in almost 15 years. So what’s it to be? Will their agent take baby steps towards Sean Connery’s gruff masculinity, or is he practising Roger Moore’s arched eyebrow in the bathroom mirror? That’s if he’s a “movie” Bond at all. For a generation of gamers, the character exists most vividly as a hand at the bottom of the screen in GoldenEye 007.

As it turns out, 007 First Light’s Bond, depicted by Patrick Gibson (cornering a specific market, having played the serial killer-to-be in the Dexter origins show) is an amalgam: the facial scar is an Ian Fleming detail, but the sweet-talking charm is straight from the Pierce Brosnan playbook, and the second you barge a goon into a bookcase you know someone’s been studying Casino Royale on a loop. Trying to devise a Bond for all fandoms could risk satisfying none, but in the demo we played, the performance works. Crucially, Gibson brings an outsider’s unease that’s all his own, anchored by the arrogance that’ll one day be weaponised by MI6.

PC; Grey Alien Games, Night Signal Entertainment
An innocent-looking charity shop find draws you into a compulsive world of demons, ogres and retro delights

For a while in the mid-1990s, meta horror movies were the genre everyone was talking about. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Scream, the Blair Witch Project – these films simultaneously examined and exploited genre conventions, seeking to scare audiences while also distancing them from the narrative action. You didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp in shock, you weren’t sure what was story or what was framing. Did that just happen or was it a dream sequence? You just had to go with it.

Now developers Grey Alien Games and Night Signal Entertainment have brought this multilayered approach to the card game solitaire, infusing a straightforward puzzler with a bloody gush of meta meaning and a dollop of nostalgia just for the self-reflexive hell of it. In Forbidden Solitaire, lead character Will Roberta picks up an old 1990s game called, yes, Forbidden Solitaire, in a charity shop vaguely recalling some internet myth about it being cursed. He discovers that the game is a sort of narrative card-battler set in a haunted dungeon filled with monsters and treasure – and then you, the player, are transported from his computer desktop into the game. So you’re both him and you.

Pragmata, Saros and Vampire Crawler bring together aesthetics, responsiveness and creative opportunities in joyous ways that can’t be defined, only experienced

Game feel is one of the most elusive concepts in the glossary of interactive entertainment, at once perfectly clear and difficult to define. Obviously, it refers to what a game feels like to play, but where does that feeling come from? How does it manifest? Or consider it from a different angle. When the chef Samin Nosrat started her career at the renowned Chez Panisse in California, she began to understand that what diners really responded to in their food were four key factors – salt, fat, acid and heat – and how these elements interacted. This idea formed the basis of her bestselling cookbook. It perhaps also inspired a video game audio director to once compare game feel to eating a potato chip: the salt and fat are part of it but so are the crunch and the sensation of the chip dissolving in your mouth (pdf). Game feel is a combination of elements – the responsiveness of the controls, the intuitiveness of the action, the aesthetics of the world and the creative opportunities they engender – all coming together in the right quantities.

I’m thinking about this a lot right now, because three games released in the last few days illustrate the idea of good game feel beautifully. The first is Pragmata, Capcom’s sci-fi action adventure in which you explore an abandoned colony base with the help of a child-like android, who lets you hack robotic enemies, lowering their defences before you blast them to pieces. The hacking mini-game takes place on a grid with nodes that add power-ups to your hack attack. As you progress, you add new types of nodes, as well as new weapons, and the interplay between these elements is complex, multifaceted and fun. This takes place in a linear world filled with hidden areas, so exploration is guided but discovery is possible. You run, jump and glide – it all feels seamless. It is joyous simply to be there.

Genki Kawamura’s eerie new film expands on a haunting video game that leaves players lost in endless subway tunnels. He explains how this makes viewers and players face their worst fears

Genki Kawamura is something of a polymath. A bestselling author, film-maker, script writer and producer – he is also a lifelong gamer who grew up playing and being inspired by the games of legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto. His latest project Exit 8, now in cinemas, is a fascinating adaptation of the Japanese horror game, developed by a lone coder based in Kyoto, operating under the name Kotake Create. “I was captivated by its game design and the beauty of its visuals,” says Kawamura. “At the same time, I watched many streamers play it. As I did, I realised that although the game is incredibly simple, each player creates their own story, and each streamer brings their own unique reactions. It felt like a device that could reveal something fundamental about human nature.”

The concept behind Exit 8 the game is simple. The player finds themselves trapped in an endlessly looping section of a Tokyo subway station. Viewing the narrow, brightly lit corridors in first-person, you pass the same posters, the same silent commuter, the same locked doors over and over again. The only way to escape is to spot anomalies each time you pass through – maybe the eyes on a poster start following you, maybe the commuter stops and smiles – at which point you have to double back the way you came. Complete eight runs without missing an anomaly and you get to leave through the eponymous way out. There’s no story, no reason for it at all. The mystery is part of the appeal.

Donmar Warehouse, London
Two couples, both of whom have lost sons, meet in Fran Kranz’s unflinching look at restorative justice

Fran Kranz’s 2021 film Mass, featuring two sets of parents whose sons have died in a high-school massacre, was originally written as a play. Restored as such, in Carrie Cracknell’s production, it takes place in the backroom of a church where their across-the-table encounter encapsulates a pained instance of restorative justice.

Gail (Lyndsey Marshal) and Jay (Adeel Akhtar) are the parents of Evan, one of 10 children murdered by the teenage shooter, Hayden, the son of Richard (Paul Hilton) and Linda (Monica Dolan), who then killed himself.

Royal Festival Hall, London
Featuring music that inspired the designer, this show brings together Le Gateau Chocolat, dancers in body stockings and a formal orchestra to mild effect

The small print tells us this show has no connection to the fashion house of McQueen, nor does it feature any of Alexander McQueen’s designs. You could think it’s a cynical attempt to get bums on seats for classical music, but it is created by McQueen’s longtime musical director, John Gosling, alongside Robert Ames, conductor of the London Contemporary Orchestra. The LCO plays music that inspired the designer, all run together like a DJ mix with theatrical lighting and multi-genre guest performers.

Far from “unnatural”, most of the harmonies here are as concordant as Classic FM, mostly film soundtracks (The Hours, The Piano, a couple of John Williams’) and tearjerkers (Dido’s Lament, Barber’s Adagio for Strings). The friction, however, is all in the combinations. For example: two dancers posturing in nude body stockings – one has hooves instead of hands and tights over her face – and then behind them, the cello section in formal white tie and tails. Hearing Handel cut with the Rolling Stones in a jaunty string arrangement, or a blast of Nirvana, feels like your GCSE music teacher trying to be cool, although the blaring siren of Armand Van Helden’s Witch Doktor is genuinely unsettling.

The Gloucestershire-based troupe, created 26 years ago by the late Nell Gifford and her husband Toti, is back with a new performance blending traditional skills with cutting-edge theatrics … and the dreaded Wheel of Death

‘Everything you see has been built by us,” Toti Gifford informs me with a sweep of his arms. I’m being shown around Fennells Farm in Gloucestershire, home to the much-loved Giffords Circus since 2014, with the company deep in rehearsals for its latest production, Waterfield. There’s an awful lot to see. The landscape is green and lush and scattered with livestock, with the site still functioning as a farm and brewery. The company headquarters sits inside a huge repurposed cattle shed and the farm is peppered with makeshift barns, all built by hand and rammed with props, paints and all manner of circus mementoes and mysteries (including, quite brilliantly, a human cannonball).

There’s a new winter venue and a restaurant and hotel under construction, with both scheduled to open over the next few years – the dreaded planning permission pending. The area surrounding the famous circus tent, topped with twinkling lights, has also been spruced up. Sick of wading through mud whenever it rained, Toti Gifford – who also runs a successful landscaping business – decided to dig up the field and replace it entirely with pebbles.

Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex
The late great land artist’s alfresco metal and concrete works are richly engaging and elemental – but the gallery material indoors lacks some heft

It pays to think big if you’re an artist. You know, zoom out and try to get away from the minutiae of life, the tedium of the everyday, and think on a bit more of a universal scale instead. Land artist Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was a master at it; at using her work to place the body, and wider humanity, in a global, cosmic context. Holt and the other land artists of her generation – people like Michael Heizer, Richard Long and her partner, Robert Smithson – wanted to break out of the restrictions of paint and canvas, stone and chisel, gallery and museum. Land, nature, the world itself, was the medium.

Goodwood is a fine setting for the biggest UK exhibition of her work to date – an expansive, lush estate in the middle of the rolling West Sussex countryside. There are two big sculptural installations placed around the grounds, Ventilation System and Hydra’s Head. In the first, a huge metallic mechanism pokes out of the vegetation around the main gallery; big tubular aluminium pipes, all interconnected, snaking their way around the place and back into the building.

Pop star was arrested in March after she was pulled over for driving erratically on US 101 in California

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Britney Spears was charged in California on Thursday with driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, authorities said.

The 44-year-old pop star was charged with a single misdemeanor count of driving under the combined influence of alcohol and at least one drug, the Ventura county district attorney’s office said.

Six dancers who made bold career pivots reflect on ballet’s transferable skills, what they miss about the stage – and what they were glad to leave behind

Lana Jones, midwife, former principal dancer at the Australian Ballet

The long-delayed film has fans dancing in the aisles and has taken more than $200m at the box office

On Wednesday evening, revelers gathered in the lobby of New York City’s Regal Union Square movie theater before filing into the night’s slate of Michael screenings. The King of Pop has become box office royalty after the film moonwalked into the biggest opening weekend for a biopic ever (even surpassing 2023’s Oppenheimer). Now, its success has resulted in even more attention worthy of Michael Jackson’s immense star-power, with videos circulating online of fans dancing in the aisles at screenings and a sequel likely in the works.

However, much like Jackson’s current polarizing force in culture, it’s all a tale of contrasts. The movie’s Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of a paltry 38%, compared with a 97% audience score is a rare chasm. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw was one of many who lambasted the Antoine Fuqua-directed film, saying it was “bland, bowdlerised and bad”, as well as “frustratingly shallow”.

Recruited to Magnum Photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1977, the veteran photographer, who has died aged 83, made defining images of grand and intimate Indian life for five decades

This underdiagnosed condition, which causes leg pain and swelling, affects one in 10 women, yet most doctors haven’t heard of it

The first thing Becca Gold noticed was her pants.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2023, her pants stopped fitting. Her legs became puffy, with a rippled texture and heavy ache. Within a year, the 32-year-old, Austin-based podcaster went up four pant sizes, gained 30lb and found herself in constant leg pain. She had always had a little bit of cellulite, she says, but while her upper body appeared mostly unchanged, now her legs seemed to belong to a “different person, overnight”.

It showcased the biggest stars of the day, including Stan Laurel, Harry Houdini, Morecambe and Wise and Shirley Bassey, before becoming a bingo hall, a church and a squat. It was almost turned into flats. What next for Manchester’s forgotten music hall?

It doesn’t look like much from the outside. An inelegant, industrial redbrick block; if you didn’t know, you might guess it’s a biscuit factory. Make that a former biscuit factory, because this is clearly somewhere that was rather than is: entrances are bricked up, drainpipes hang loose, shrubs sprout from crumbling masonry, pigeons come and go from holes in the roof. Pretty much everything within reach of a spray can has been reached; there are tags, Marvel characters, the perhaps surprising news that “God is dead and sheep killed him”.

You know those rocks, though, that look like any old rocks, but when you smash them open they have amazing, sparkling, coloured crystals inside? Amethyst and the like. Well, this building is a bit like them. If you took a wrecking ball to it (and it’s not inconceivable that this will happen), inside you’d find a splendid Edwardian galleried auditorium with gilded rococo plasterwork and plush red velvet seats … albeit covered in pigeon shit.

We put seven top pizza ovens – from gas to wood-fired to electric – through their paces to find the ones worth firing up at home

• The best (and worst) chef’s knives

If you’re passionate about pizza – and, let’s be honest, there aren’t many who aren’t – then at the top of your foodie gadget wishlist has to be a pizza oven. You’ll struggle to find many that won’t salivate at the thought of a light pillowy base, smothered in a rich tomato sauce, and topped with melting, oozy cheese.

Seven years ago, I tested my first pizza oven, the Gozney Roccbox, and since then, these appliances have moved from niche product to a must-have for family get-togethers and entertaining.

Best pizza oven overall:
Gozney Arc Lite

Best budget pizza oven:
ProCook outdoor pizza oven

Most suitcases look hardwearing, but which ones actually are? We dropped bestselling brands’ luggage from a ladder to find out …

• The best carry-on luggage

A suitcase is like the portrait in the traveller’s attic, accumulating more than its fair share of knocks and scrapes while we refresh ourselves on the road. We trundle them over cobbles, see them tumble from luggage racks on the train – and if we choose to fly, there’s a fair chance they’ll be mishandled before we reunite at the carousel.

For our testing, we pushed eight suitcases to the limit by dropping them on to a hard surface, as if they’d been fumbled by a baggage handler. Air travel is especially tough on suitcases, so you might get away with choosing a less-resilient case if you make the climate-conscious choice to travel by rail or sea.

Best suitcase overall:
Away the Large

Best budget suitcase:
Tripp Holiday 8 Large

I spent a month testing anti-consumption strategies, from cash stuffing to ditching Amazon Prime, to find the ones that genuinely cut my spending

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I’m pretty careful with money, I say as I trip over piles of Amazon Prime boxes. I’ve never really been the shopping type, I insist as I stare at drawers groaning with unworn Asos clothes. Look how much I care about the environment, I tell myself as I click “buy now” on yet another battery charger I bought to replace the one, two or five I’ve lost around the house somewhere.

You don’t have to be a shopaholic to be drowning in stuff. All it takes is an averagely mindless approach to impulse buying, until one day your home is heaving with a personal landfill of tat.

You told us your favourite subscriptions for cutting costs and reducing household waste. Plus, Anya Hindmarch’s shopping secrets and marathon essentials

• 33 easy plastic-free kitchen swaps

Whether they’re full of harmful chemicals or packaged in plastic, it’s no secret that many household cleaning products aren’t great for the planet. But “taking a more sustainable approach to washing and cleaning doesn’t have to be inconvenient”, said Hannah Rochell in her recent roundup of the best sustainable subscriptions. From vegan washing detergent in a natty recyclable tin to compostable scourers, her guide is full of delivery services that make greener living less effortful.

Her list wasn’t exhaustive, though, so we asked you for the subscription services you swear by for cutting costs, reducing household waste and making your life easier. (And no one has any commercial links to these companies – we always check.)

‘A cherry-cola colour and funky, acidic aroma’: the best supermarket balsamic vinegars, tasted and rated

The best fake tan for a sunkissed, streak-free glow – tested

Ditch power tools, build a hedgehog highway: how to create a nature-friendly garden

How I Shop with Anya Hindmarch: ‘I would label everything if I could’

The best hair straighteners for foolproof styling, tried and tested by our expert

What we inherit in the kitchen isn’t only a list of ingredients, but a living tradition – one that shifts with our lives, our fridges and the people we feed

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“Chicken, leek, flour, a few more ingredients.” That was it: my grandma’s WhatsApp response to me earnestly asking if she’d mind sharing her time-honoured chicken pie recipe. She wasn’t being obtuse – well, not deliberately. She had simply never before committed a dish that was second nature to paper, let alone an iPhone screen.

It wasn’t how she’d learned it and it wasn’t how I’d go on to learn it, either. I knew I’d have to make her chicken pie many times to get it even close to her standard, that I’d have to learn by watching as well as by asking, and that even then there’d be elements I’d miss. Such is the nature of a family dish – indeed, of any dish that has taken time, repetition and love to master, and for which, even then, perfection remains ephemeral. There is more to their method, meaning and flavour than can ever be confined to and conveyed by a recipe.

With ‘oeno-flation’ as it is, it’s hip to be square and branch out into less exclusive – and cheaper – varieties from often overlooked regions

The sommelier Honey Spencer, of Sune in east London, struck a real chord on Instagram earlier this year: “I’m so fucking sick of expensive wine,” she lamented. There followed an angry plaint about the “unrelenting rise” in the cost of bottles from “artisans making wine properly … and FORGET BURGUNDY”. In a difficult climate, this is “one of the hardest pills to swallow” for the restaurateur.

It’s not an easy swallow for the customer, either, given the mark-up on hard pills these days: according to UKHospitality, the price of wine has gone up 40% since 2020, which will surprise no one who has quietly wept into a £59 rioja.

Crab pasta done (mostly) the River Cafe way, with an ‘electric sauce’ of olive oil, red chilli, parsley, garlic and lemon

My copy of the River Cafe Cookbook is silver, having lost its original blue sleeve some years ago. Naked, the hardback cover is completely plain, so it is my handwriting of “River Cafe blue” along the metallic spine, even though there is little chance of mixing it up with the yellow softback River Cafe Cookbook Two or the emerald cover of River Cafe Cookbook Green.

Blue was first published in 1996, a sobering fact, because that’s the same year I enrolled at the Drama Centre London, as well as the year when Pierce Brosnan took on rogue agent Alec Trevelyan (played by Sean Bean) in GoldenEye. That was Brosnan’s debut as James Bond and Dame Judi Dench’s first appearance as M. Brosnan trained at Drama Centre between 1973 and 1976, which is why, when I bought the blue book in 1996, I had good reason to imagine my future career as looking a little like that of Pierce, or Judi, or both.

An intrepid way to save stale pitta bread by turning it into moreish and wonderfully seasoned snacks

Three years ago, I helped my friend, the chef Sam Webb, set up Babette, a street food stall at Newquay Boathouse. Webb and his team make everything from scratch and, wherever possible, using only local Cornish produce, from their hot honey (sourced from the Rescued Bee) to pitta with freshly milled flour from Cornish Golden Grains; he also grows his own produce with fellow restaurateur Matt Comley at Gannel Valley Gardens.

As you might expect, saving food waste is at the top of Webb’s agenda, which is how he came to create waste-saving pitta chips to serve with hummus. It’s a recipe I couldn’t resist, not least because they take minutes to cook. What makes Webb’s pitta chips unique is their wonderful seasoning of sumac, za’atar and sea salt just before serving.

This is a fairly common problem with decades-long friendship, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Do you respond to the person you knew, or the one you’re tired of knowing?

• Read more Leading questions

An old friend – we first met over 50 years ago – used to be kind, supportive and good company. But she has become a self-absorbed and petulant know-all. She is the centre of her own little world, and all her friends – me included – are expected to run around after her and cater to her needs.

She constantly brings up her health issues, disregarding the fact that other people in our friendship circle also have health worries. The label “narcissist” has been mentioned by some!

These negative comments about bodies and faces permeate society and could lead to some tough talks with friends

Hi Ugly,

How do I respond to my friends when they criticize their bodies, faces, skin?

Why is this column called ‘Ask Ugly’?

How should I be styling my pubic hair?

How do I deal with imperfection?

My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done

I had presumed I would love her instantly – but a traumatic birth led to devastating numbness

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was waiting for an overwhelming rush of love, but when I looked at my newborn baby what I felt was utter despair. No matter how much I smiled at her, crooned at her, fed, patted, caressed and changed her, I was absolutely numb.

I had yearned for her. Growing up in Italy, I was surrounded by images of perfect motherhood. Every rural crossroad has its tiny shrine to the Madonna and Child. I was certain by the end of my teens that I wanted to have at least one baby.

The actor and producer on being a teenage model, making My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the secret to long-lasting love

Born in Hollywood in 1956, Rita Wilson’s first role was in The Brady Bunch at the age of 15. She went on to appear in Frasier and The Good Wife, as well as romcom classics such as Sleepless in Seattle and Runaway Bride. She produced the highest‑grossing romcom of all time, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as well as Mamma Mia! and A Man Called Otto, which starred her husband, Tom Hanks, and son Truman. Alongside her career on screen, she has released music since 2012. Her sixth studio album, Sound of a Woman, is out on 1 May.

My mum took this photo of me in Hollywood. I’d just started high school and was joyful, open and optimistic.

Small top-tier Android is great to use, being fast, AI-loaded and with reasonable battery life, but falls short of rivals on camera

Samsung’s compact flagship phone hasn’t changed much in a year, but the S26 is still one of the best smaller handsets available as rivals grow larger and larger.

The S26 is the cheapest and smallest of this year’s top Samsungs, dwarfed by the top-of-the-line S26 Ultra in size and price. But like everything with a memory chip at the moment, the S26 has increased in price by £80 or the equivalent to £879 (€949/$899/A$1,349). At least it has double the starting storage.

The chancellor’s changes will come into force in April 2027, affecting everyone from savers to landlords and sole traders. Experts say to act now

Millions of people will be affected by a range of savings, investment and tax changes that take effect in just under a year’s time.

“April 2027 may feel some way off, but when it comes to financial planning, a year is not a long time,” says Jason Hollands at the wealth management firm Evelyn Partners.

Apple laptop sets new performance bar with more storage, new chips and plenty of options, but now has two-tier specs depending on processor

Apple’s Macs have been on a roll this year with the brand new budget MacBook Neo and a faster MacBook Air M5, but now it’s time for its workhorse MacBook Pro to be upgraded with the fastest, most powerful M-series chips.

The latest MacBook Pro comes in two screen sizes and a large range of chip and configuration options. The 14in version starts with the M5 chip costing £1,699 (€1,899/$1,699/A$2,699) and then jumps to the more powerful M5 Pro from £2,199 (€2,499/$2,199/A$3,499) before climbing further for the 16in version or the top M5 Max chip. A pricey machine for professional workloads.

It cheerily addressed letters to my late spouse, and threatened penalties if he terminated his contract

After my husband died suddenly, I discovered he had been paying £171 a month for our EE broadband and TV contract. EE initially offered me a monthly deal at £44.99 on the phone.

There followed two letters, one day apart, cheerily addressed to my late husband. The first stated that he would have to pay £1,007 to terminate his contract; the second giving a termination fee of £520. The letters told him he could take the contract with him when he moved house.

Data tool could help NHS prioritise who gets access to limited weight-loss medication, say scientists

A new tool that can shed light on who is most at risk of obesity-related diseases could help identify people who would benefit most from weight-loss medications, researchers have said.

Recent data suggests about two-thirds of adults in England are overweight or obese – a situation that has caused concern among health experts.

Madeleine Finlay sits down with co-host and Guardian science editor Ian Sample to talk through three eye-catching stories from the week, including the news that the number of years people in the UK are spending in good health has declined compared with a decade ago. Also on the agenda is the science, tech and nutrition behind two runners at this weekend’s London marathon breaking the two-hour threshold, and an answer to why some old houses feel particularly spooky

People in UK spend fewer years in good health than a decade ago, study finds

Spooky feelings in old houses may be caused by boiler sounds, study suggests

Report calls for tough action to combat ‘escalating and unsustainable burden’ of liver-related problems in Europe

Governments in Europe should impose much higher taxes on alcohol and unhealthy food to tackle the continent’s 284,000 deaths a year from liver disease, experts say.

Taxes on those products should rise sharply enough for the money raised to cover the huge costs they place on health services, the criminal justice system and social services.

Physical phone-blocking devices, powered by NFC wireless technology, are becoming a popular solution for doomscrolling. Brigid Delaney puts one to the test

Wake up, 100 messages from group chat overnight about something – what? another assassination attempt; a village destroyed in Lebanon; the football result in England; the weather in Iran being manipulated; the pesticides causing lung and bowel cancer, so everyone who eats salads is now at risk of cancer; meditate for 20 minutes, then fire up x.com, a place I thought I’d never want to revisit, with its carnival barkers and supplement salesman, and have you seen the Lego thing calling Trump a paedo?, you gotta see the Lego thing, and this is before my first coffee, yet x.com is the coffee and the tea, whatever Elon has done to the For You algorithm is evil genius, it’s like the global collective id, nasty and funny and addictive and compelling – like gawking at a car crash, like soaking in a hot bubble bath of anger, and memes, and geopolitical dramas, and Trump, Trump, Trump – soaking in Trump, and then, For Me (just as Elon promised).

So begins the circuit around my phone, that goes all day and night, around the tiny screen with its icons (when a born-again Christian once told me he had favourite icons, for a long time I thought he meant apps, not pictures of the Virgin Mary). I started to feel like I was in Canberra, on one of those enormous roundabouts, rotating between the icons – not Joseph, not Jesus, but X and WhatsApp and TikTok and even LinkedIn for Christ sakes – round and round from one app to the next, just checking, checking in case something is happening. I watched tiny videos and maybe, occasionally, got distracted by the novel I am meant to be writing, which is due on 31 July. But the novel is boring, just a static Word doc on a screen, it’s not giving; it’s taking hard work. So I spend six minutes with my novel, and then it’s time to go back to my phone, to circle the roundabout visiting all my icons again, like a demented Stations of the Cross, because I can’t focus, I just can’t focus on work right now when there is so much good scrolling to do …

Jennifer Rauchet, wife of Pete Hegseth, caused partisan uproar by supposedly wearing a bargain dress to the formal event – but what it says about our attitudes to fast fashion is more interesting

Although far less important than the political violence at the White House correspondent’s dinner in Washington over the weekend, the sartorial choices of the Maga administration are now getting airtime – and one dress is causing a particular furore.

It is being reported that Jennifer Rauchet, wife of the US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, wore what appeared to resemble a gown listed on Shein for $42 (and similar to another on Temu for half the price).

Get it right and leather trousers have the power to make you look just that tiny bit cooler than everyone else in the room

Leather trousers are not for the fainthearted. They come with … baggage? Mythology, perhaps, is a gentler way of putting it. Either way, you know what I mean. Leather trousers can be suggestive of pelvic-thrusting rock frontmen. Noisy motorbikes. They hint at midlife crisis or teenage rebellion. They are a lot.

But leather trousers – along with gym clothes in public and cancelling plans at the last minute – have been normalised in polite society. There is a new breed of leather trouser-wearer. You know who I mean: she looks as if she could be an architect, perhaps. She is chic and understated (neutral colours, not too much jewellery) and she’s wearing a nice pair of trousers that just happen to be leather, rather than wearing leather trousers in a let’s-get-the-shots-in kind of way. Again, if you know what I mean.

Body lotions containing exfoliating acids are infinitely more effective and less messy than granular scrubs

The onset of sunshine has caught my limbs by surprise. I went out in short sleeves last week and my neglected, greyish arms looked as if they were recently freed from a plaster cast. If you are to be a bride this spring, you may already be thinking about how best to restore what lies beneath the winter layers. The answer for us all is an exfoliating body lotion – an all-over moisturiser to even out upper arm bumps, slough off dead skin, smooth roughness and moisturise dry patches, ready for lighter clothing. There are several new ones that improve on predecessors.

I typically recommend Ameliorate to brides who’ve likely ringfenced some budget for pre-wedding skincare. Punchier than those on supermarket shelves, its clinically proven Transforming Body Lotion uses effective levels of lactic acid and urea to exfoliate without stinging or drying, plus glycerin and sweet almond oil to moisturise the newly uncovered skin beneath. Now Ameliorate makes a pearlised, lightly tinted version to provide additional cosmetic effects. The new Illuminating Glow (£24 for 300ml) adds a subtle, streak-free veil of golden tan to all areas and skin types that washes off easily with soap and water. It’s a fast and easy way to look immediately healthier while it simultaneously does the grunt work.

Show features pink denim and suit printed with headlines from Gabrielle Chanel’s time in resort town

Chanel’s honeymoon period with the new designer Matthieu Blazy is showing no signs of cooling. Blazy’s fifth catwalk show – on the Biarritz beachfront where the young milliner Gabrielle Chanel opened a couture house in 1915 – was an irresistibly seductive love letter to the enduring allure of the double-C logo.

The day before the show, sales assistants at the Biarritz boutique were holding up Chanel beach towels on the shop floor to create extra changing room space for shoppers impatient to buy jeans at €3,100 (£2,690) a pair. Blazy’s jeans are becoming a totem of the new Chanel, which, in aesthetic, although certainly not in price, marries high taste with an inclusive, democratic point of view.

The natural world is the headliner at these joyous gatherings, while the support acts include live music, immersive art and fire ceremonies

Winner of the UK’s best micro-festival in 2025, Between the Trees returns to Candleston Woods in the spectacular Merthyr Mawr national nature reserve (between Cardiff and Swansea) this year. Designed to reconnect people to the natural world, the programme features science and nature activities, folk music and storytelling. Workshops in the Eco Hub include micrographia sessions – exploring the world of insects on the reserve – and nature crafts. The Seren area has plenty of new talks and walks on offer, including stories of Welsh witches and forage-and-taste outings. With camping spots next to a wild beach and huge dunes, the site itself will ignite plenty of awe.
27-30 August, weekend tickets £195 adults, £50 children, betweenthetrees.co.uk

Gentle cycling is the perfect pace to enjoy the region’s sunflower fields and medieval towns – with gourmet food and fine wine along the way

As I cycle in golden light through the Loire’s vineyards, I have the sudden wish to wear a flowing floral dress, tuck a sunflower behind my ear and answer only to the name Delphine. Opulent chateaux, honeyed stone villages, blazing fields of sunflowers … the Loire is so ridiculously and relentlessly beautiful it’s no wonder artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Émile Vernon made it their home.

A short zip across to Paris on the Eurostar and then an hour south on the TGV to Saint-Pierre-des-Corps and it feels as if we’ve stepped into a live JMW Turner landscape (he toured the region in 1826).

From the Cambrian Mountains to Cardigan Bay, the 83-mile Teifi Valley Trail is a grassroots initiative designed to revive a once-thriving area

Up here, the river was a mere gurgle; a babbling babe finding its way into the world. A few sheep roamed, a kite wheeled and a spring-clean wind ruffled the tussocks on the barren hills and rippled the pools. It was a stark yet striking beginning. As we followed a brand new fingerpost, skirted Llyn Teifi – the river’s official source – and picked up the fledgling flow, there was a sense great things lay ahead, for us both.

The Teifi rises in Ceredigion’s Cambrian Mountains – the untramped “green desert of Wales” – and pours into Cardigan Bay 75 miles (120km) south-west. It’s one of the longest rivers wholly within Wales and, historically, one of its most significant: the beating heart of the country’s fishing and wool-weaving industries, 12th-century abbeys at either end, Wales’s oldest university en route.

Beyond the Tuscan capital, there are exquisite towns with Medici fortresses, stunning frescoes, Roman amphitheatres – and not a selfie stick in sight

First, it was Barcelona, Venice and Dubrovnik. Now, Florence has joined the most overtouristed destinations in the world: its 365,000 inhabitants shared their city last year with 4.6 million visitors. The director of the city’s Accademia gallery – home to Michelangelo’s David – talked in 2024 about “hit and run” tourism, describing visitors “on a quick in-and-out mission to take selfies … trampling the city without contributing anything”. Local author Margherita Calderoni describes Via Camillo Cavour, a street leading to the Duomo, as a “rancid soup” of chain restaurants and “shops selling plastic trinkets from who knows where”.

Although steps are being taken – the city council has introduced a ban on new short-term lets and is promoting sights in lesser-known neighbourhoods – tackling overtourism is a challenge. And other Tuscan cities, such as Siena and San Gimignano, are suffering too. But beyond these honeypots, Italy’s fifth-largest region is full of glories, with not a takeaway chain or selfie stick in sight. Here are six of my favourites.

Carol thinks Scandinavian-style sandwiches are unwieldy and messy, while Lucas wants to get the most from his fillings. You decide who’s the bread winner
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Food should not fall out while you eat a sandwich, and your hands shouldn’t be sticky with sauce

Two slices of bread feels a bit excessive. It’s too much bread compared with the filling

When I saw a woman with a facial difference like mine at a party, I crossed the room to speak to her. It led to one of the most joyous, exciting and transformative discussions, in which I connected with feelings I’d always ignored

At a fundraising event, I looked across the crowded room and saw a woman with a cleft – a gap in the lip (and sometimes the palate) where a baby’s face doesn’t fuse properly during pregnancy. She was standing on her own, and I beckoned her over to join the small group I was with. She politely declined and before I quite realised what I was doing, I was crossing the room to speak to her.

I too had been born with a cleft. I’d talked to doctors, my parents, my wife and other friends about it to varying degrees over the years, but as I walked towards her, I knew this was going to be the first time – in more than 60 years – that I was going to have a conversation about living with a cleft with someone who also has one. I was terrified I might offend her, but I said something like: “Isn’t it scary walking into a crowded room? Because it feels as if everyone is looking at us.”

What makes the best birthday cake? Well, it all depends on the recipient

What’s the best birthday cake?
Katie, by email
“My mum once made a cake with mini rolls made to look like cats with googly eyes and strawberry lace tails,” says Nicola Lamb, author of Sift and the Kitchen Projects newsletter. And that’s the whole point of a birthday cake, right? It should align with the recipient’s favourite thing: “That could even be a lasagne,” Lamb says. “I’m not at all prescriptive about what you stick a candle into.”

Of course, some cakes are a safer choice than others. Take the Victoria sponge: “I don’t think anyone is going to have a problem with a plush vanilla sponge, jam and cream job,” Lamb says. “If you want to lower the effort and feed a lot of people, bake the sponge in a brownie tray for a single-layer, low and wide cake, spread whipped cream stabilised with mascarpone over the top, dollop on some jam and you’re good to go.” That said, you could go for a vanilla or chocolate buttercream instead, which, Lamb adds, comes with the bonus of welcoming sprinkles.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

It promises to filter toxins, absorb odours, prevent mould and keep roots healthy, but does it deliver?

The problem
Once you have graduated from novice plant parent, how can you take your level of care to the next level, helping your houseplant not only survive but thrive? Is activated charcoal the answer? You will find it listed in terrarium recipes and soil amendments. It promises to filter toxins, absorb odours, prevent mould and keep roots healthy. The bag looks purposeful, and the price suggests it is doing something important. The question is whether any of that holds up in an ordinary pot on an ordinary windowsill.

The hack
Activated charcoal works by adsorption, trapping impurities on its porous surface. In a closed terrarium or bottle garden, where water recycles and there is no drainage, a charcoal layer can slow the buildup of gases and bacteria. But does that translate to standard houseplant pots?

A standoff between Gulf oil giants Saudi Arabia and the UAE could cause greater market volatility for years to come

The conflict in the Middle East has claimed Opec as the latest casualty of war. The United Arab Emirates’ shock exit from the oil cartel on Tuesday after 60 years is expected to weaken the alliance, which under the leadership of Saudi Arabia has helped to soothe volatility in the global oil market for decades.

Global oil prices reached the highest level in four years on Thursday, rising above $126 a barrel. But as the region grapples with the continuing conflict, a fresh war may be brewing in the international oil markets, which could lead to greater market volatility for years to come.

In 1980, two US airmen reported an extraordinary encounter near a military base in the east of England. What really happened?

In 1996, Nick Pope wrote his first book. Open Skies, Closed Minds was a semi-autobiographical examination of well-known UFO cases mixed with his own research. Pope worked at the UK Ministry of Defence for more than two decades, from 1985 to 2006. For three of those years – 1991 to 1994 – he worked on what was known colloquially in the department as “the UFO desk”. The desk’s official name, the Secretariat (Air Staff ) Sec (AS) 2a, was responsible for assessing the defence significance of reported UFO sightings.

To promote the book, Pope appeared on BBC Newsnight. The UK’s flagship news programme was famous for its adversarial interviews that left even the most formidable politicians and intellectuals looking like startled deer. Given the subject matter and the platform, this could have gone horribly wrong, but Pope held his own. “I wasn’t nervous, probably because I’d been media-trained by the MoD,” he says. “The irony was that when I was posted to the UFO desk, I occasionally had to go on television in my role as the department’s subject-matter expert and play down both the phenomena and the true extent of our interest and involvement in the subject.” His interrogator that night was Peter Snow. “What do you believe now that you didn’t believe five years ago?” Snow began.

HAYI has taken responsibility for a string of incidents targeting Jewish sites, but investigators say the latest claim may be opportunistic rather than state-backed

• Police treating stabbing of two men in Golders Green as terrorism

It took just over an hour after the horrific knife attack on two British Jewish people in Golders Green, north London, for an Iran-linked terror group, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI), to make a claim of responsibility on a Telegram channel.

Counter-terror police are aware of the initial posting – a brief statement accompanied by the group’s logo – put online at 12.23pm and a follow-up 40 minutes later showing a violent attack at a bus stop.

If you’ve changed your holiday plans, we’d like to hear from you

Rising fuel prices, aviation fuel prices, and changes to travel rules such as the new EU border system, EES, are causing some holidaymakers to reconsider their travel plans. Holiday companies have predicted an increase in bookings for UK summer breaks after a jump in interest from Britons fearful of flight cancellations linked to the Iran war.

Have you changed your summer holiday plans in light of recent world events? We’d like to hear from you.

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

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

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

As David Attenbourugh turns 100 years old, we would like to hear your memories over the years – including any encounters you’ve had with him in the wild

As David Attenborough turns 100 years old on 8 May, we would like to hear your memories of the great naturalist and broadcaster over the years – including any encounters you’ve had with him in the wild.

What is your standout memory of Attenborough? Have you ever met him? You can share your stories – and pictures – below.

The Guardian’s Saturday kids’ quiz is made up of questions submitted on behalf of children. Here’s how to submit one

Each week Molly Oldfield, host of the hit children’s podcast Everything Under the Sun hosts a quiz for the Guardian in which she answers the questions that kids have about the world around us. Like “how much bamboo can a giant panda eat?” “Do aliens exist?” or “Why is the sky blue?”

Do you have a child aged 3-13? Do they have a question they would like to share with the world? Please fill in the form below on their behalf and it could appear soon as part of the Guardian’s kids quiz.

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