From his claim of being ‘de-banked’ to a disturbing detail about a rape survivor’s story being used to fundraise, this film puts big questions to the co-founder of the English Defence League. But it is frustratingly hard to get answers

You can’t say it would be a huge surprise if a leading figure of the British far right turned out to be a fraudster: that whole strand of politics is, after all, a con job preying on angry citizens who are daft enough to believe that immigrants, and not the rapaciously greedy super-rich, are somehow the cause of the nation’s problems. If people will fall for that, fleecing them out of their money is not a big leap.

Tommy Robinson, co-founder of the English Defence League and now an influencer, independent documentary-maker and international flag-shaggers’ guru, was convicted of mortgage fraud in 2014, but what about 2026? Is he a scam artist juicing idiots for cash? Robinson, real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is undeniably a talented harvester of donations from his fans, whether it’s in person at his rallies or via the internet: in a video posted online, he admits to “continually ask[ing] you, the people, to support us”, and in another he boasts of having once convinced his admirers to hand over £350,000 in the space of two weeks. If you try to avoid seeing or hearing about Robinson, the amount of money he generates may shock you.

Tommy Robinson: Where’s the Money Gone? is on Channel 4 now.

Leader of the opposition rehashes last week’s questions as she comes up short against a PM who preaches consensus politics

The case of the dog that didn’t bark in the night. Sometimes prime minister’s questions are as notable for the topics that the leader of the opposition doesn’t ask about as for the ones she does. So you have to assume Kemi Badenoch now realises she was on the wrong side of public opinion on the weekend’s protests and the government’s decision to impose sanctions on Israeli illegal settlements.

I guess it’s hard to be too vocal when you fundamentally agree with the rioters. And maybe she has noticed that many of her own party are a little queasy about Palestinian land being seized and people being killed. And no reaction from the US about the sanctions.

The stories of teenagers abused by gangs of men around the UK are incredibly harrowing. But it is the countless failures of the authorities that will leave you completely incensed

When 13-year-old Christine first saw the “boy” who had moved from the group chat she was in into her private messages, she was shocked. “Oh my gosh,” she remembers thinking. “That’s a grown man.” When she told him how old she was, he – 23 – said it didn’t change anything. He still wanted to be with her. Lonely at school, after a move precipitated by the end of her mother’s relationship with Christine’s father, she took the apparent affection offered.

The rest of the women contributing to Britain’s Forgotten Girls – a harrowing hour-long documentary about the sexual and criminal exploitation of young girls over the last 20 years by drug gangs acting with virtual impunity – have similar stories to tell. The approach by the gangs happens at 12, 13, 14. Grooming follows. Then the game is switched. Rape or sexual assault occurs (“I was so scared, so scared,” says Annie, who was 14 when “all aspect of choice just got taken away from me” by the three older boys who had befriended her) and, through threatened and actual violence – perhaps supplemented by blackmail or by the lack of anywhere else for the child to turn – continues for years thereafter. The details are few and horrifying. A number of them mention having to go to school as if nothing had happened the night after an inaugural gang-rape. Your mind can hardly take it in.

As weight loss drugs have risen all around the world, it has reshaped users’ relationships for better and for worse

As GLP-1 use continues to rise in the US and the UK, people’s bodies are being reshaped – as are their relationships.

“Relationships tend to develop a sense of equilibrium and predictability over time,” says Dr Lindsey Berisha, a licensed clinical psychologist who has worked with clients using GLP-1s for over 10 years. “When one partner undergoes a significant change, it can shift that equilibrium, and even positive change can create uncertainty for both partners.”

US president often brings up al-Qaida attack that struck his home town New York City almost 25 years ago

Donald Trump often brings up September 11, the devastating al-Qaida attack that struck his home town New York City almost 25 years ago.

His recollections of that day have repeatedly included exaggerations and falsehoods – including this week, when he shared an anecdote at a White House event commemorating the attacks that appears to be untrue.

The screwball French comedy is back as a film that actually works, thanks to putting Andréa and Noémie at the heart of chaotic events and bringing all the old faces back

At last: a beloved-TV-show-to-film-spinoff that doesn’t suck! The original French series is a screwball-speed office comedy about a boutique Parisian talent agency, and was a ratings and critical success in its homeland when it started back in 2015. Its acquisition by Netflix grew the audience internationally and spawned a stable full of remakes across Europe and Asia. In the meantime, several members of the original French cast have become proper stars in their own right, especially Camille Cottin and Laure Calamy, and this sequel, set five years on, is smart to put these two at the heart of the latest instalment. And of course, there are the obligatory turns from properly famous actors playing themselves, including Laetitia Casta, Vincent Macaigne, Laurent Lafitte and some guy named George Clooney, best known these days for appearances on vaporettos in the Venice lagoon.

Like many great sitcoms, this one always understood that failure, rather than success, keeps the wider narrative arc more interesting and relatable. So the last episode of the series left the gang at talent agency ASK (which stood for Agence Samuel Kerr, after the founder, who died in the first episode), dispersed to new gigs and careers; the band, in effect, broke up. Five years on, the stars have aligned to bring them all back together to work on Andréa (Cottin) and Noémie’s (Calamy) new film project, so the title Call My Agent! The Movie works on more than one level.

Spiritual leaders stress diversity of views within Jewish community and warn against inaction on settler violence

• ‘It’s a good start’: prominent Israelis welcome UK sanctions

Prominent British rabbis have backed Ed Miliband’s sanctions on Israeli settlements, warning that the time for inaction on settler violence must come to an end.

The intervention comes after the UK’s chief rabbi, the spiritual leader of mainstream Orthodox Jews in the UK, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, described UK sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories as a “dark day for British Jews” and warned they could embolden people who “use hatred as a weapon against Jews”.

Scotland Yard confirms it is investigating allegations broadcast by Channel 4 News after undercover sting

The financial scandal around Reform UK has deepened as police expanded their investigation into allegations of illegal foreign donations and the elections watchdog said it was considering regulatory steps.

Police confirmed on Wednesday they would broaden their inquiries into Reform after Channel 4 News broadcast an undercover sting by a group called Verbatim, in which a reporter posed as a foreign donor seeking to fund Reform.

Brothers, arrested in Miami in July on UK rape and sex trafficking charges, to remain in custody in Florida

A US judge denied the bail request of the controversial social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate on Wednesday, ordering the brothers to remain behind bars as they fight extradition to the United Kingdom.

The Tate brothers, prominent figures in the so-called “manosphere”, were arrested in Miami on 18 July after British prosecutors filed new charges against them and sought their extradition to the UK. Those charges included criminal charges of rape and sex trafficking. British prosecutors previously charged the brothers with rape, human trafficking and sexual assault. The Tates, who are dual British-US citizens, have repeatedly denied the accusations against them.

Sagal Abdi-Wali, who came from Somalia in the 1990s, likely to face Zack Polanski in Holborn and St Pancras contest

A former child refugee who became the leader of Camden council has been selected to be the Labour candidate for the byelection in Holborn and St Pancras.

Sagal Abdi-Wali, who came to the UK from Somalia as a child in the 1990s and was elected leader of Camden council in May, was chosen by Labour members to contest the north London seat vacated by Keir Starmer.

Joshua Cammidge, 31, arrested after investigation led by counter-terrorism policing London

A man has been charged with offences related to national security as part of an ongoing investigation led by counter-terrorism policing (CTP) London, according to the Metropolitan police.

Joshua Cammidge, 31, was arrested at an address in Swindon on Friday 4 September by CTP London officers, supported by officers from Wiltshire police. Searches were also carried out at a different address in Swindon. He was further arrested and detained the following day, being charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service and intending to commit or engage in conduct to prepare an act of sabotage.

• Reform councillor said he urged activists to stand down

• ECB checks on young players’ welfare

A group of masked agitators gathered outside a four-star hotel in Portsmouth after reports a group of asylum seekers had been taken there, when it was in fact Pakistan’s under-19 cricket team on a tour.

George Madgwick, a Reform councillor called to the hotel to mediate between staff and the assembled crowd, said it was a “massively unfortunate incident”.

After their record-breaking feats last year in the Champions League, Arsenal are at it again. But having been delayed along with hundreds of travelling supporters by travel chaos on Tuesday, Mikel Arteta’s side had to bide their time against Napoli until Martin Ødegaard continued his rich vein of goalscoring with the crucial strike 15 minutes from full time.

Perhaps it was the fact that, at Uefa’s insistence, they were forced to wear red shorts for the first time since a Premier League game against Watford in 2022 that Arsenal were not quite at their flowing best here and missed a hatful of chances.

Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba announces decision to pull out in post on X, citing tensions over ‘Harry-Meghan nonsense’

Uganda is withdrawing from the Duke of Sussex’s Invictus Games, the country’s military chief has said, out of respect for King Charles amid division over the “Harry-Meghan nonsense”.

Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of the Ugandan president, made the surprise announcement in a post on X on Wednesday.

Analysis of two skeletons reveals tooth wear and traces of psychoactive substance in what may be earliest known evidence for human drug taking

What may be the earliest known evidence for human drug taking has been traced to ancient Indonesian foragers who sucked on mind-altering nuts as long as 25,000 years ago.

Analysis of two exceptionally rare skeletons from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi revealed dramatic tooth wear and traces of a psychoactive substance in the individuals’ remaining teeth, suggesting they routinely sucked on hard, abrasive betel nuts.

Our global panel of writers reflect on the great legacy of the American feminist and civil rights activist, who died last week aged 92

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.

From hours stuck on planes awaiting takeoff, to sleeping the night on the floor at Heathrow. Here are some travellers’ experiences

More than 2,000 flights have been cancelled after an air traffic control system failure that has thrown airports across the UK into chaos. Nats, the air traffic control provider, fixed the problem within hours on Tuesday, but hundreds of thousands of passengers were hit by further delays and cancellations on Wednesday.

Martin Rolfe, the chief executive of Nats, has been given a week to report back on the reasons for the technical failure.

The foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, is facing a backlash over the government’s sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank after the chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said the safety of British Jews could be at risk. Miliband has rejected the warnings, emphasising that ministers can confront the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government while also fighting antisemitism. US president Donald Trump, however, has failed to comment on the UK government’s action.  Lucy Hough speaks to diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour

Alarming warnings from industry insiders increase pressure for curbs on artificial superintelligence

Does artificial superintelligence really pose a risk greater than nuclear weapons? Is there a significant chance of “a Chornobyl-sized catastrophe”. Might there even be a greater than 10% chance that AI could “kill all humans” in the next decade?

These warnings were issued over the past 48 hours on both sides of the Atlantic about the potential impact of a technology that most people still think of as a more talkative search engine.

Venice film festival: Edoardo De Angelis’s claustrophobic drama brings a raging mother up from Naples for the holidays, with a capon. What could possibly not go wrong?

If there were a Golden Lion award for the most Italian film in Venice competition it would go to Edoardo De Angelis’s squawking domestic spat of a picture which contains an imperious matriarch, a pained Catholic priest, an argumentative family, and food, so much food. Bowls are stirred and pans are brandished. Pots are seen rattling angrily on the stove. The festival organisers like to deploy a little judicious home cooking when it comes to the selection and De Angelis is already a favoured guest, having opened the 2023 event with his war drama Comandante. But I fear they may have miscalculated with this one. It’s overdone, on the turn and too liberally salted with tears. It’s liable to provoke the occasional stab of heartburn.

At the head of the table sits the incorrigible Angela (Vanessa Scalera). She’s up from Naples (where she was presumably once a girl from the backstreets, begging in rags) to supervise Christmas Eve dinner at her son’s book-lined apartment in Milan. Angela’s a relic of the old world, breezily unreconstructed and openly disgusted by the woke state of her grandchildren. “One’s a gay dancer and the other’s a vegetarian,” she scoffs. They in turn are perturbed by the fact that she has brought in a live chicken to be cooked as the main course. Who’s going to catch it? Who’s going to kill it? What even is this creature, exactly? “It’s not a hen, it’s a capon,” sighs middle-aged Anto (Lino Musella), who dearly wishes his mother had never come at all. She’s a beautiful woman, he says, but she smells.

‘The black cloud emerged from a grate in the street. I guess something underground was on fire. It was hilariously cinematic – just one of those eerie, spontaneous things that happen in a city’

This image was taken in 2011 or 2012, just after I had moved to Los Angeles. I was downtown, an area I don’t go to that much, walking around with my camera. Some black smoke started to emerge from a grate in the street – I guess something underground was on fire. It was hilariously cinematic, as if some sort of devil was going to appear. It was really just one of those eerie, spontaneous things that happen in a city. There is a very powerful feeling of surrender when I am photographing. I have to submit to the authority of ignorance when I’m out there.

I grew up in San Jose, which is a sprawling American suburb – there’s no city about it. I came to LA because I was depressed where I lived, and I had just met my future wife, who didn’t want to live in San Jose either. LA is not really a city, it’s hundreds of places. You can drive 15 minutes and be in a completely different environment – the beach, the mountains. There’s a weird sentience to the city, if you let it take you. I get an inexplicable desire to just get in the car and go.

The idea of a room that you use only occasionally for sit-down meals has gone out of fashion. Now people have found better ways to use the space

Name: Dining rooms.

Age: Ancient Romans took meals in a room called a triclinium.

The mood at the Reform conference was volatile and brittle. But the forces massing further to the right of the party are testament to its impact

For much of the time since Nigel Farage resumed the Reform UK leadership two long years ago, his party has been an island of relative stability in the increasingly rough sea of British politics. While other parties plunged queasily in the polls, messily purged dissidents, argued publicly about their direction and changed leaders, Farage dominated Reform UK and gave impregnably self-assured interviews. The party’s popularity moved steadily upwards, comfortably above that of all the others.

It is a paradox that a new party with wildly expectant members, not many experienced politicians and few properly worked-out policies became the pole around which the country’s political debate revolved, and yet this seemed to do no harm to Reform’s chances of winning the next general election. As with rising rightwing populist parties across the world, Reform’s tendency to make it up as it went along appeared to be not a weakness but, for many voters, much of its appeal.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

The UK drew immense wealth from our country. But was the slavery that underpinned the empire ever lawful? We deserve a fair hearing

• Jamaican delegates arrive in UK to hand slavery reparations petition to King Charles

On 6 September 1781, the Zong slave ship set out on the final leg of its voyage to Black River, Jamaica. Four hundred and forty two enslaved Africans were on board – twice the number of people the ship could safely accommodate.

Twelve weeks later, 132 enslaved people were murdered by the ship’s crew by being pushed overboard to their deaths. The crew’s justification was the ship had insufficient water supplies to keep everyone alive for the rest of the voyage – a claim later proved false in the British courts.

It now seems the 2024 attack on World Central Kitchen workers was a deliberate IDF tactic. The protections of the Geneva conventions have become paper thin

• José Andrés is the founder of the food aid charity World Central Kitchen

In times of war, the hard and vital work of supplying food, water and medicine has been protected by international agreements for almost 80 years. Yet those protections have been systematically and repeatedly ignored in the two most bloody wars of recent years: Ukraine and Gaza.

Russia has attacked healthcare targets in Ukraine more than 3,200 times since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to the World Health Organization: about twice a day on average. That includes many “double-tap” attacks on the same target in quick succession, which are especially lethal for first responders.

José Andrés is the founder of the food aid charity World Central Kitchen, and a Michelin-starred chef

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For five decades, this enterprising venue – which is now shutting up shop – broadened the horizons of British theatre

London’s Gate theatre, not to be confused with its Dublin namesake, is no more. A combination of factors, including rising costs, declining funding and its move in 2022 from its original home in Notting Hill Gate, means that it will cease trading next month. But it is worth celebrating its achievement over five decades. It has been an astonishing nursery of talent and has always stood for a defiant internationalism. “I sometimes think,” I once wrote, “that one learns more about world drama at the Gate than at any other London theatre.”

That was the dream of its founder, Lou Stein, who in 1979 took a tiny room over the Prince Albert pub and turned it into a 56-seat theatre that kicked off with Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. You climbed the pub’s well-worn stairs and found yourself in a space that embraced the world. Not only that. In 1982 Stein launched an offshoot above another pub, the Latchmere in Battersea, where I still recall Susannah York as the Amazonian protagonist of Kleist’s Penthesilea.

CEOs may like to get up at the crack of dawn and go for a run, but I prefer optimising my life with lie-ins, trashy films, swearing and coffee

This evening I’m going to tuck my five-year-old into bed and read her a chapter from one of her princess books, followed by a summary of research recently presented at the annual congress of the European Society of Cardiology. Once upon a time, I’ll tell her, there was a scientist called Dr Nawon Lee who authored a study that found having a weekend lie-in may be very good for you and can protect against high blood pressure. Our accomplished protagonist Dr Lee said: “People should not feel lazy or guilty for sleeping a little longer on the weekend.” And the moral of this story, dear child, is that you should try not to wake your mothers up at 6am every day.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure that all the peer-reviewed science in the world will convince my early riser to have a weekend lie-in. Still, as a big fan of sleep and someone who has never once felt guilty for hitting the snooze button, I have to say I feel vindicated by this new study. CEOs can get up at 4am and run 10 miles before eating five foraged mushrooms if they want to, but I’m going to protect my heart health by sleeping in, any opportunity I can get, thank you very much.

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When you smile, the world smiles back. Not at me it doesn’t – because even when I’m smiling, I exude gloom

I want to change my face. I’m not talking cosmetic surgery, although if chubby cheeks could be surgically de-chubbed I’d have to consider it. Surgery can’t help me – if only it were that simple. What I seek to change is the expression on my face, my whole disposition, the face I present to the world. Mine’s all wrong, insomuch as I look as if there’s something wrong. Very often I’ll be asked what the matter is.

“Nothing,” I say.

Far-right parties, Maga ideology and Kremlin money are conniving to suffocate liberal idealism for another generation

Not all that long ago, Europe was a beacon of liberal idealism. One memoir recalls it as an era “comfortably saturated with confidence in the unfailing and binding power of tolerance and conciliation”. The economic system seemed obviously preferable to barbarous alternatives. “People honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity,” the author added.

Those words could describe the spirit of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. They were written in the 1930s by Stefan Zweig, reflecting on the optimism of late 19th-century Vienna from the perspective of a Jewish émigré whose world had been destroyed by murderous nationalism. Zweig took his own life in 1942. He never saw fascism defeated. He couldn’t have imagined a renaissance of liberalism in the second half of the 20th century so complete as to attain a pitch of complacency rivalling the one he remembered from his childhood.

The architects of Brexit know it has failed. That presents Andy Burnham with an opportunity to set a bolder new agenda

Modesty is not a trait commonly associated with Nigel Farage. Something else must explain the Reform UK leader’s reluctance to talk about what is undoubtedly his biggest achievement.

Few individuals can boast of having influenced British politics as drastically as Mr Farage, with his record of campaigning for Brexit before that word was even coined. He will for ever be associated with the demand for emancipation from Brussels, but is rarely heard celebrating its completion. It barely earned a mention in speeches at his party’s annual conference last week. The simple reason is that none of the promises made about the benefits of life outside the EU have been fulfilled. Leaving made the country poorer, and voters know it.

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The US president seized a nation’s natural wealth in a modern-day version of gunboat diplomacy to feed his ego – not to lower Americans’ fuel bills

Imperialism does not require a flag to be planted or a governor dispatched. It can be a powerful nation deciding who governs a smaller, weaker country, and on what terms and for whose benefit its resources will be developed. Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, putting his deputy – Delcy Rodríguez – in his place as president, and then her signing a deal handing a fifth of the country’s proven oil reserves to the US, amount to a modern version of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy. Regime change supplied America’s commercial concession.

This won’t bother Mr Trump. But it should. The US president has oversold his neocolonial spoils. The additional production Venezuela is supposed to bring online might bring down oil prices eventually, but not anytime soon. Crucially, what Mr Trump calls “the biggest oil deal in history” won’t cause the price at the pump to fall before November’s midterms. When so many American voters are struggling to pay energy bills, it’s hard to see how unrealised Orinoco Belt riches are going to help Republican candidates.

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

Readers respond to the loan of the Bayeux tapestry

I enjoyed your photograph of Andy Burnham, Macron and King Charles admiring the Bayeux tapestry and the king’s comment about the “entente amicale” between France and the UK (Bayeux tapestry loan symbolises ‘entente amicale’ between France and UK, says King Charles, 2 September). I also enjoyed Burnham’s wry reference to a tapestry that “shows a new leader emerging from a northern territory, travelling to the south of England in search of the crown. Something clearly that couldn’t happen today.”

There is a certain irony, however, in there being, I gather, 93 penises portrayed in the tapestry, and six women – three known and three anonymous. Yet all the beautiful and exquisitely observed needlework was done by women. Observation, detail and creativity – significant and often unremarked.

Readers respond to an editorial calling for Andy Burnham to relieve pressure on arts funding in English schools

Your editorial on the decline of music and drama in state schools (4 September) is right to highlight what has been lost. Education should enable young people to enjoy learning as well as achieve.

Michael Gove’s reforms, rooted in a dewy-eyed vision of a mythical golden age of education that never existed, diminished arts subjects in which many students found success. The EBacc prioritised academic subjects and measurable outcomes; the arts were squeezed from timetables.

The reported targeting of student activists in Serbia is an example of increased misuse, with serious consequences for the commercial spyware industry

The targeting of Serbian activists with advanced spyware (Report, 4 September) is the latest warning in a mounting record of abuse that makes the systemic and foreseeable risks of the commercial spyware industry increasingly impossible to ignore. Investors who aren’t paying attention are leaving their portfolios exposed to growing financial, reputational and human rights risks.

Despite industry assurances that its technology is intended only for investigating terrorists and criminals, spyware has repeatedly been linked to the targeting of journalists, activists, elected officials, opposition leaders, lawyers, judges, academics and civil society. The fallout for the companies involved has been serious: costly litigation, criminal complaints, crippling sanctions, judicial investigations, tightening export restrictions, executives being convicted, severe reputational damage and, in some cases, financial collapse.

Double talk | Tilting the scale | Far-right protests | Names in lights

I was interested to read your article regarding “vertical drinking” (Curbs on vertical drinking in Soho pubs to go ahead as Khan criticises council’s ‘breathtaking arrogance’, 8 September). When I was a lad we used to call this “drinking”. It’s a bit like “wild swimming”. Again, in my day, we used to call this “swimming”. Whatever next? Eyeball reading? Horizontal sleeping? Mobile walking? Audible talking?
Joe Hyde
Bilsborrow, Lancashire

• Re your report (UN votes to adopt new world map that shows Africa’s true scale, 4 September), it’s good to see the UN catching up with the Guardian, which uses an equal-area world map in the “The week that was” feature in Saturday’s paper. Many of us in geography classrooms have been using Equal Earth maps, such as the Peters projection, for years.
Dave Weight
Former secondary school geography teacher, Leeds

It was the time and place for Alexis Mac Allister to do his talking on the pitch and the disgruntled Liverpool midfielder did not disappoint. “Very sad” over Liverpool’s refusal to offer him a contract extension, while Dominik Szoboszlai and Ryan Gravenberch were getting theirs, Mac Allister made Anfield very happy with a match-winning display against Atlético Madrid.

The Argentina international, one of five World Cup finalists involved in a finely-poised, absorbing contest, vented his frustration in the best possible way with an immaculate 20-yard strike that extended Diego Simeone’s winless sequence against English opposition in the Champions League group phase to 11 matches. Mac Allister’s moment also gave Andoni Iraola the perfect start to life in the Champions League, and there were several contributions for the Liverpool head coach to savour. From Alexander Isak’s relentless pressing to Florian Wirtz’s consistent creativity, Liverpool rose to one of their toughest tests of the competition.

• Rybakina into semis after 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 victory

• Coco Gauff battles back to beat Mirra Andreeva

Elena Rybakina will become the No 1 woman in the world for the first time after orchestrating a supreme recovery to reach the semi-finals of the US Open with a 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 win over the Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen.

By becoming just the 30th player in the history of the WTA to reach the No 1 ranking, Rybakina ends Aryna Sabalenka’s extended spell at the top. The Belarusian has held the position for 99 successive weeks, the sixth-longest consecutive reign in history, and 107 weeks in total.

• Fast bowler learned wobble seam from Ollie Robinson

• Pakistan’s Saud Shakeel knew little about debutant

England’s four-man seam attack once again demonstrated its collective threat in bundling Pakistan out for 133 at Edgbaston. Josh Tongue highlighted the work the quartet have done together beyond ­matchdays by experimenting with a wobble seam delivery that he has honed with assistance from Ollie Robinson – work that brought immediate reward.

“I’ve spoken to Robbo quite a bit about it,” said Tongue, who took four wickets, with the other six equally shared between Robinson and Jofra Archer. “Obviously he’s unbelievable at that and he’s showed that throughout the series. So I’ve been speaking to him quite a bit during the last couple of Tests and I tried a couple of things in training the other day. That was the first time I’d bowled it in the game and it got me a wicket, so I’ll be using it again. I want to get more skills under my belt.”

Where’s the fun in doing it the easy way? Chelsea remain chaotic at the back but can drag their opponents into horrible places. It helps, mind you, to have some assistance from the referee. Jarred Gillett and Cole Palmer? They made for a killer combination as Chelsea swerved embarrassment and treated Stamford Bridge to one of life’s rarities: a classic in the third round of the Carabao Cup.

Gillett, a referee who always seem to be guessing when he makes key calls, was the villain as far as Leeds were concerned. They had just gone 2-0 up when Gillett altered the flow of the tie by pointing to the spot after Pep Chavarría made the most of slight contact from Daniel James. The subsequent conversion from Palmer was inevitable and from there so was the comeback from Chelsea, who rattled through four goals in 12 minutes before eventually reaching the last 16 by winning 6-3.

• Critics view Fernandes job as move to shore up position

• Fifa says change is designed to make sport ‘truly global’

Gianni Infantino has separated Fifa’s management of the Caribbean countries from the rest of Concacaf in a move widely regarded by his opponents as an attempt to split the alliance to remove him from office.

Concacaf covers North and Central America as well as the Caribbean and was previously managed as one bloc. But the Guardian has learned that the former Switzerland midfielder Gelson Fernandes, an Infantino loyalist, has been appointed as the director of member associations for the Caribbean, in addition to his position looking after Fifa’s African members.

A $150,000 prize in Budapest has the record-breaking Scot buzzing but the middle-distance star insists he’s no longer chasing paydays

The richest event in track and field history launches in Budapest this weekend, and the prospect of walking away with $150,000 at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship has got Josh Kerr ready to rumble again, on and off the track.

Some critics have noted that the Scot has run only five times in 2026 – compared with Amy Hunt’s 43 races – and has had to rely on a wild card from World Athletics to even compete in Budapest.

• Young British rider squeezes out Meeus and Cort Nielsen

• Mas moves step closer to landing first Grand Tour victory

Matthew Brennan claimed a fifth Vuelta a España stage victory on Wednesday as the young British rider edged a bunch sprint in Seville to win the 17th stage. The 21-year-old Grand Tour debutant crossed the finish line ahead of Jordi Meeus and Magnus Cort Nielsen.

The general classification leader, Enric Mas, moved one step closer to claiming a first Grand Tour victory as he maintained his 2min 6sec lead on Felix Gall, with four-time Vuelta winner Primoz Roglic a further four seconds behind.

• ‘I would predict that you’ll see some guys leave’

• LIV bankruptcy will invalidate deals with players

Rory McIlroy believes traditional tours will soon have “decisions to make” as a player exodus from LIV Golf edges closer. LIV filing for bankruptcy in the United States on Tuesday means its deals with several high-profile golfers will soon be invalid, leaving them free to negotiate a route back to the PGA and DP World Tours.

When asked whether remaining with LIV in its planned, far-less lucrative form would hold appeal, McIlroy was characteristically candid. “I’m not in their shoes but LIV at the start looked a lot more attractive than what LIV 2.0 might be from a financial standpoint,” said the Masters champion.

The new season kicks off on Wednesday night. Our writers have their say on the MVP, rookies to watch and the disasters waiting to happen

Quarterbacks living under center. The NFL has developed into a shotgun league, where most quarterbacks take the majority of their snaps three to seven yards away from the center. But the increase in efficiency when it comes to snaps taken right behind the center should have coaches directing their quarterbacks to do more of it. Matthew Stafford, Caleb Williams, and Sam Darnold led the way in 2025, and others will follow. DF

Both nights of the convention are slated to end with speeches from Donald Trump

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Stefany Shaheen, the daughter of a longtime New Hampshire senator and former governor, has won the Democratic nomination in the race for Chris Pappas’s former House seat.

Stefany Shaheen’s mother Jeanne Shaheen is a former governor who has represented New Hampshire in the Senate since 2009. The younger Shaheen’s family ties to the Democratic establishment – and accusations of nepotism – became a point of attack by her opponent in the primary race.

Europe’s royals and global political figures attend ceremony that brings 13 days of national mourning to a close

Norway has observed a minute’s silence as it takes leave of King Harald V in a series of ceremonies, bringing to a close 13 days of ​national mourning that followed the popular monarch’s death last month at the age of 89.

Tens of thousands of people lined the streets of Oslo and foreign heads of state and government converged on the Norwegian capital for the funeral of the late king, a light-touch and unassuming reformer who ruled for more than three decades.

Oil price rises above $100 a barrel as Tehran responds to US attacks that sunk five Iranian tankers

Tehran has said it attacked 10 ships around the strait of Hormuz after the US sunk five Iranian tankers, as escalating strikes between the two countries sent the oil price above $100 a barrel for the first time since July.

The attacks were the sharpest flare-up of strikes in weeks, as the two sides struggled to break a deadlock in the six-month-long war. Fighting in recent weeks has largely revolved around who controls the strait of Hormuz, as Iran attempts to close off the waterway and Washington enforces a blockade of Iranian ports.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, about physicist Lev Landau, stars Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has refused to speak out against Putin’s war

The director of a controversial new Russian film has said “everyone pays for his own choice” when asked about his lead’s refusal to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, which premiered at the Venice film festival on Wednesday, Greek-Russian star conductor Teodor Currentzis plays the eponymously nicknamed protagonist, Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist Lev Landau.

Exclusive: State government delayed releasing major report into the health of the koala population for more than 12 months

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The Victorian government sat on a report for more than 12 months that found the state’s koala population was in chronically poor health.

The review of the state’s koala populations, led by state science agency the Arthur Rylah Institute in conjunction with scientists from major universities, was completed for the Victorian government in June 2025.

In the first project of its kind, scientists are trying to answer if the future of Alaska’s streams and tundra may depend not on survival of the fittest but on how species adapt together

On Alaska’s North Slope, scientists tread carefully across clumps of tussock grasses toward a fast-flowing stream draining the imposing Brooks Range of ice and snow. Near Galbraith Creek, they string out a mist net for white-crowned sparrows. The birds have recently arrived from southerly latitudes, intent on feasting on the insects that will soon descend on the tundra like storm clouds.

The Arctic summer is short-lived, and sparrows have only a few weeks to establish territories, find mates, lay eggs and raise their chicks on a steady diet of bugs. From every ensnared bird, the scientists collect blood, feather and faecal samples to see what they are eating and how that changes over the summer.

Galbraith Creek on Alaska’s North Slope

A total of six people apprehended as clean-up of rubbish stacked 10 metres high cost about £6m

Two men have been arrested after fly-tippers dumped a “mountain of illegal waste”, stacked 10 metres high, in Oxfordshire.

Hundreds of tonnes of rubbish appeared in a field between the River Cherwell and the A34 near Kidlington in November last year. The waste tip was so large that removing it could cost more than the local council’s annual budget, the area’s MP said.

Numbers of the exquisitely graceful species are falling amid loss of food supply and habitat

Few birds are quite as elegant as the blue crane. As I watched a pair feeding alongside a busy road in South Africa, against the rather incongruous backdrop of a herd of cows, I was struck by their sheer beauty. With a slender body, curved neck, long legs, elongated tail plumes and a subtle, dove-grey plumage, this bird really is the avian equivalent of a catwalk model.

But not all is well for the blue crane. It has the smallest global range of any of the world’s 15 crane species: apart from an isolated population in Namibia, almost all are found in South Africa, where it is celebrated as the national bird.

Officials say sighting a sign species – driven to extinction in state before reintroduction in 2011 – expanding its range

A gray wolf has recently been seen in California’s Mendocino national forest for the first time since the species returned to the state 15 years ago, state wildlife officials confirmed.

Officials in Lake county, which is about two hours north of San Francisco, said last week the California department of fish and wildlife (CDFW) had received reports of sightings in the forest in late August. The agency verified the presence of a wolf in the far north end of the county, county supervisor Brad Rasmussen said in a statement on social media.

CPS says charges relate to alleged sexual misconduct by the actor towards five women between 2007 and 2016

The actor and film-maker Noel Clarke has been ⁠charged ​with six sexual offences, including two counts of sexual assault, after allegations made by five women.

The charges against the former Doctor Who actor also include three counts of voyeurism and one count of exposure.

Bridget Phillipson to announce creation of unit which will make class a key part of its equalities agenda

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The government is putting class at the heart of its equalities agenda by creating a new unit that will make tackling white working-class inequality a priority.

The unit, which the minister for women and equalities, Bridget Phillipson, will announce on Wednesday, will sit within the Office for Equality and Opportunity and examine disparities linked to class and socioeconomic background across all ethnic groups.

Show depicting attack on UK and featuring Michael Gove and Nicola Sturgeon will ‘make people think’, minister says

A docudrama depicting a Russian attack on a Britain led by an unlikely pairing of Michael Gove and Nicola Sturgeon has been praised by the defence secretary, Wes Streeting, for writing “my spending review submission”.

The Wargame, due to be broadcast on Sky this month, features a string of former politicians advised by ex-securocrats, grappling with an unusually powerful Moscow, while highlighting limitations in the British military.

The Wargame airs on Sky One from 21 September

Podcast is now on YouTube site of Mike Graham, fired from TalkTV after racist post appeared on his Facebook page

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When Liz Truss launched her podcast last year, she declared it would bring a “counter-revolution” to take on the “deep state”, which, she said, “tried to destroy” her.

The revolution, however, has not yet arrived. Truss, whose stint as UK prime minister abruptly ended after her disastrous mini-budget crashed the economy, has so far failed to find a wide audience in her media career.

German chancellor attacks Alternative für Deutschland after far-right party’s win in Saxony-Anhalt election

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Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has accused the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) of seeking “ethnic cleansing” with its “remigration” drive, after the nativist party’s seismic weekend victory in a state election.

In his first public confrontation with the AfD since Sunday’s shock outcome in Saxony-Anhalt, Merz said at a raucous parliamentary debate that the far-right party would take an axe to one of the pillars of the German economy with a racist campaign of mass deportations.

Authorities and public bodies to be urged to buy goods and services from Europe, but without binding quotas

European authorities will be encouraged to buy more domestic goods and services when they spend public money under the EU latest effort to counter China’s economic might.

In a further “Buy European” plan, the European Commission published proposals on Wednesday for a sweeping overhaul of EU public procurement rules.

Shallah, Fatimah and Maahi are among hundreds of thousands of Afghan women and girls deported from Iran and Pakistan in the past year to a life of severe restrictions

It was a warm summer afternoon on 15 August 2021 when the Taliban entered Kabul and changed the lives of millions. Shallah*, then 16, watched the news at home on the Afghan TV channel Tolo news. She ran crying to the garden, to tell her mother that Afghanistan had fallen.

Her younger sister, Fatimah*, then 11, was at her cousin’s house, where her aunt told her the news. At the time, she says, she did not understand what a takeover meant, or who the Taliban were. Her elder sister, Maahi*, then 22, was well aware of the consequences and remembers her hands shaking at work as she read the news on her phone, on Facebook pages of Afghan news.

More than 30 properties ordered to evacuate after sinkhole grows to roughly 25-30ft deep and 30 by 60 feet wide

The city of Malibu, California, has ordered the evacuation of more than 30 properties after a large sinkhole opened on Tuesday.

Malibu officials declared a local emergency on Tuesday evening after a “large sinkhole” emerged near 31630 Sea Level Drive. The officials said the sinkhole was believed to have begun developing on Monday, and had grown to roughly 25-30ft deep and 30 by 60ft wide by Tuesday evening.

The passport-size iPhone Duo serves as the first big test for John Ternus, who took over for Tim Cook last week

Apple has unveiled the iPhone Duo, the company’s first foldable phone and the most significant change to the iPhone since the smartphone’s introduction in 2007.

The nearly $2,000 device takes inspiration from iPads’ wide screens and combines them with the portability and camera features of iPhones. When opened, it is the company’s largest phone display and thinnest phone. The Duo opens and closes like a passport to double its screen size.

New roles at Woking-based centre a welcome boost to ailing automotive industry

The British supercar manufacturer McLaren is to create 1,000 jobs in a welcome boost to the UK’s struggling automotive industry.

The carmaker is creating the jobs as part of a £450m investment in its technology centre in Woking, Surrey, near to the plant where it manufactures all of its vehicles.

Company behind ChatGPT says 10,000 of its AI systems cracked the Navier-Stokes problem in 88 hours

OpenAI claims to have solved a major mathematics problem that has stumped humans for nearly a century after spending millions of dollars on the artificial intelligence-led endeavour.

The company behind ChatGPT said it had cracked the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems published by the Clay Mathematics Institute to highlight some of the biggest unsolved puzzles in the field.

Facilities likely to employ 10,400 workers, compared with 40,000 in industry estimates, thinktank says

Datacentres in the UK will create just a quarter of the jobs predicted by the tech sector, while consuming vast amounts of energy, according to new research.

Environmental thinktank Verdant predicts that all the datacentres currently planned are likely to directly employ 10,400 workers – compared with the more than 40,000 cited in projections by the industry lobby group TechUK.

Period instruments are miles away from retro affectation, and as two Proms this week will show, can actually bring historical music up to the moment

Nostalgia. What a kick. And what a commercial boon for the music industry. Love the sound of 60s pop and 70s disco? You need the original synths if you’re a composer or producer. You listen to music on digital streams? Loser! Join the retro-future of vinyl enthusiasm, and feel the grooves under your fingers like your parents or grandparents used to. Or you can even make music physical again through the horrible medium of cassettes: all that plastic, all those tiny liner notes, all that high-speed dubbing.

Retro-futurists cherish what they claim is the extra warmth and sonic richness of vinyl, but there is no acoustic reason why vinyl is better. It is in fact objectively worse as a carrier of sonic information than any high-resolution stream of the same track, song or symphony. For cassette nostalgists, if it’s got that old-fashioned tape hiss, it sounds more “real”. We’re now looking for things to sound less clean. Because we distrust today’s technological utopia, we want signs that our music is less polished, less perfect, and thus more human.

First Direct Arena, Leeds
The titanic choruses and stormy metal riffs of latest album Sanctuary are the perfect foundation for Amy Lee’s astonishing, skyscraping vocal range

To watch Evanescence in concert is to be spellbound by founder Amy Lee’s astonishing voice. The Arkansas band’s gifted mezzo-soprano lends their music vocals that range from skyscraping and spectacular to haunting and devastating. She soon moves through the registers on the opener Sanctuary, setting the stage for a show during which her vocals seem to scale ever greater peaks, even when you are convinced that there are no octaves left to conquer. And she makes it look effortless, striding around the stage, headbanging and fist-pumping the air.

It’s standard promotional protocol for a band to lean on their new album on tour, but it still shows impressive faith in their audience that tonight Evanescence perform all but one song from Sanctuary, which is also the title of their sixth LP. Jordan Fish, formerly of Bring Me the Horizon, produced most of it and his metallic influence is clear: pummelling drums, titanic choruses and walls of stormy riffs make the band’s new material noticeably heavier than the gothic hard rock of their earlier years.

Andrew Garfield’s charisma can’t save Paul Greengrass’s grim and depressingly generic period piece

Hollywood loves giving young actors their own historical epic as much as audiences seem to dislike watching them. Timothée Chalamet and Chris Pine’s least remembered roles are in the medieval set films The King and Outlaw King (no relation), Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel made back only a third of its $100m budget and earlier this year, the Saudi-backed seventh-century drama Desert Warrior starring Anthony Mackie and Ben Kingsley quietly became one of the biggest flops of all time. Last week, it was reported that Scott blamed the failure of Gladiator II on Paul Mescal not being “masculine enough” in a logical leap which only makes sense if your barometer for masculinity is a man who throws hotel phones and yells at producers in storage closets.

On paper, The Uprising should be different: it’s a historical epic from a blue-chip director (the Bourne trilogy’s Paul Greengrass), a nuanced, introspective leading man (Andrew Garfield) and a milieu that uncomfortably chimes with the western world’s backslide into repressive authoritarianism (The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381). In reality, it is a disjointed slog through the mud with the emotional depth of a History Channel rerun.

In new film The Heart of the Beast, the A-lister’s bond with his loyal mutt proves crucial. In Spike Jonze’s new advert, Pitt is rather more subservient

Brad Pitt has a new movie out this month, The Heart of the Beast, about an emotionally damaged man who forms a life-saving bond with a dog. If that sounds familiar, maybe it is because you have seen The Call of the Wild. Or maybe it is because you have seen A Dog’s Way Home. Or maybe it is because you have seen Dog. Or, look, you get the idea.

But perhaps Brad Pitt knows that getting people to see something as unimaginative as The Heart of the Beast is an uphill struggle, because that would explain why he has just made an advert that looks and feels much more like the Brad Pitt dog movie that deserves to be made. In short, it is an advert where Brad Pitt gets loudly disparaged by a number of dogs for an extended period of time.

Venice film festival: Barbara Kopple returns with her third film investigating US workers’ rights – this time, undocumented ‘deliveristas’ and the attempts to unionise Amazon staff

Barbara Kopple’s documentary about app-based delivery workers is a stirring, defiant, battle-hardened affair, swinging between the fraught picket line and the still more hazardous New York City streets. It’s a new film that feels old in the best sense of the word; a hoarse battle cry that summons the ghosts of The Grapes of Wrath and the New Deal, Eugene Debs and Woody Guthrie. That America is long dead and buried, a casualty of changing times, but Kopple sees no reason why it should not rise again.

Union Town, tellingly, is the third part of a loose trilogy which serves as an ongoing audit of US workers’ rights. This began with 1976’s Harlan County, USA, which tackled a Kentucky miners’ strike, and continued through 1990’s American Dream, which covered a meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. Since then, however, the culture has shifted, atomised, with the big corporations increasingly reliant on a shadow economy of undocumented workers. Kopple’s “deliveristas” ferry packages for the likes of Amazon and DoorDash but they are technically third-party contractors. That means if, say, they happen to be injured in the line of duty, they cover the hospital bills and repairs to the bike. It also means that they are likely to be fired while they’re laid up in bed.

Venice film festival: The director’s bleak epic project about the scientist Lev Landau finally focuses on the genius maudit who inspired the series

How would it be if Christopher Nolan got sidetracked while making Oppenheimer, and decided to spend 20 years and millions of dollars of other people’s money reconstructing the Los Alamos HQ in all its minute detail, which would be the site of a gigantic immersive multimedia project, releasing epic and sexually explicit sidebar movies about … someone who worked in the commissary … or a scary incidental guy from the CIA … before finally getting round to the fundamental main-event movie with Cillian Murphy as the A-bomb’s father?

Perhaps it would be something like Ilya Krzhanovsky’s authentically mad, obsessively sexual, and spectacularly pessimistic epic project about the Soviet scientist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau, or “Dau”, whose work spanned the 1920s to the postwar and cold war eras, and whose notional endorsement of free love the DAU movies escalate into a dissolute sex addiction. Khrzhanovsky gives this a kind of classical Hellenic distinction by fictionalising a Greek background for our mysterious horny hero, whose indulgences coexist with his self-questioning obsession with his own genius and loneliness. It would be vulgar and irrelevant to wonder if Khrzhanovsky, like any artist, is in fact working on a self-portrait. But you surely can’t work on a (still unfinished) project like this without a strong personal connection.

Here, at all events, is the latest Dau iteration, a more conventionally conceived biopic about Lev Landau (although we don’t see him getting the Nobel – perhaps that’s a separate film). Apparently this is the feature that Khrzhanovsky originally envisioned before the creative Big Bang that created the Dau multimedia universe. His first offshoot picture DAU. Natasha (2020) was about two women who work in the canteen of Dau’s research institute, a place drenched in sexual tension and political paranoia and violence. The next film to come was the grisly epic DAU. Degeneration (2020), set in the late 60s with Dau himself – still here a peripheral character – on his deathbed.

Despite the city’s backdrop of deprivation and racism, vibrant nightclubs and daring artists thrived – but after No 1 success for the Real Thing, why was the scene ignored?

Months before the Real Thing’s You to Me Are Everything became a UK No 1 hit in 1976, lead singer Chris Amoo took the unreleased song to the Timepiece, a nightclub devoted to Black music tucked in between bars on Liverpool’s Fleet Street. His DJ friend Les Spaine stuck it on, and the empty dancefloor “just filled up, and nobody, not one person in that place, had heard the song before”, Amoo says with pride on a call from his home on the outskirts of Liverpool. “That’s when me and Les looked at each other and thought: you’ve got something there, brother.”

The track’s symphonic majesty and romantic vocals captured the hearts of millions, and it peaked in the charts during 1976’s summer heatwave. Fifty years later, Amoo is on tour with his fellow bandmate Dave Smith in celebration of its anniversary. But the Real Thing were just the most high-profile group from an underground funk and R&B scene which emerged in 1970s Liverpool, upheld by a generation, predominately from the Toxteth area south of the city centre, that embraced Black American culture.

Josh Baker is the journalist behind the BBC’s smash hit I’m Not a Monster. He’s back with his most extraordinary investigation yet – to solve the mystery of Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria 14 years ago

In 2012, the US marine turned freelance foreign correspondent Austin Tice disappeared in Syria. If he’s still alive, he’ll be the second-longest detained journalist in the world. That, says Josh Baker (speaking to me from Wales), was the podcast he thought he was making: “We thought we were looking for a missing person, and what we fell into was almost like a Bourne novel, utterly extraordinary. A world of espionage, spies, dictatorship.”

It’s also a story of American exceptionalism – the way the US saw itself in relation to the rest of the world. Moreover, “I don’t mean this in a crass way,” Baker says, “but through Austin’s story, we also learn a lot about the last 14 years of the civil war in Syria. We really go inside the regime’s industrial complex of disappearance and torture. As episode two begins, Assad is gone, and we enter into these facilities.”

Royal Albert Hall, London
Simon Rattle, guest conducting the period instrument ensemble, brought insights and detail to these three lesser known works by Schumann. Isabelle Faust was a spirited and graceful soloist in the Violin Concerto

Simon Rattle sure loves a challenge. This all-Schumann evening featured three “problem” works: the overture to a failed opera, a violin concerto deemed sufficiently disappointing that the composer’s executors ordered it locked away for a century, and a symphony written in the depths of depression. What’s more, he was conducting the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra in an acoustic hardly conducive to the soft-grained tones of period ensembles. In the event, we needn’t have worried, but you have to admire his pluck.

The overture to Genoveva got off to a moody start. Rattle and the Freiburgers drew the listener in by tapping into the musical storytelling – the quartet of horns was especially striking – rather than relying on sheer volume. Closer to Mendelssohn than Wagner, it must have felt old hat in 1848, but here came up bristling with romance and chivalry.

Larmer Tree Gardens, Wiltshire
Hitting 20, this festival has grown into a warm, genre-hopping powerhouse where fringe experimental acts are greeted as warmly as the star headliners

There is a celebratory feeling in the air at End of the Road festival this year as it turns 20. The piano stage has been turned into a giant birthday cake with candles on top, one man is dressed as a toilet to commemorate the porcelain anniversary, and Jarvis Cocker leads a spirited singalong of Happy Birthday while wishing for 20 more years.

Retaining a core identity while also expanding and evolving has been key to that longevity. While early days were centred more on alt-folk and Americana, EOTR is now a genre-hopping powerhouse, blending everything from pop fun to noisy experimentation via global grooves, and with an equal focus on the familiar and the unknown.

Beautifully written by her daughter, this is a funny and intimate eulogy to the 60s star of The Avengers who went on to specialise in fierce, complicated women

The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra? I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time. In an interview with Michael Parkinson, she observed how marriage was “all rather pagan, don’t you think? … A lot of women see it as security. Well, I’m not a woman who yearns for security.”

Taking over from Honor Blackman as the high-kicking Emma Peel in the 1960s spy series The Avengers, Rigg refused to play subordinate sidekick to Patrick Macnee’s Steed, turning her character into a beacon of female empowerment. When Rigg learned that not only was Macnee paid significantly more than she was, but the camera operator was too, she demanded a raise. She got it, but that didn’t stop the press from labelling her as a grasping diva. Fifty years later, she told Newsnight: “Equal pay. That’s what feminism means to me, only that.”

A refreshingly optimistic book that asks us to grasp the educational opportunities of AI, rather than shrink from them

In 1979, the government asked Wilfred Cockcroft, a now largely forgotten maths lecturer from the University of Hull, to write a report about a crisis in the teaching of his subject to children. It was wide-ranging and meticulous, and included a chapter on a technological innovation that was suddenly becoming available to the average consumer: the calculator.

Many parents and teachers feared that the gadget would undermine a basic skill and a pillar of education – one of the sacred three Rs – producing generations of dumbed-down drones who could reach for a device in their pockets to avoid the hard graft of arithmetic.

A journalist embarks on a wild goose chase that might – or might not – be informative about the male condition

Recovering from surgery at home in upstate New York in 2023, Jon Ronson awoke to a string of texts from his adult son about a weird evening he just had at a stranger’s castle in Connecticut. Having gone along with a friend who’d been invited to a party there, he arrived to find a few lost-looking young women with the sixtysomething host, Chris Mark, a steel heir filming a reality show about “101 princesses” whose first rule was “Never say no to King Chris”.

As a parent, Ronson is worried; as a reporter of more than 30 years on the cranks-and-crooks beat, he’s already on the clock. After trawling online whispers of sinister goings-on at the castle, he decides to pay a visit to Mark, who proudly shows off the stalactites and waterfall in his “cave-themed” bedroom before explaining how he picks up women on dating apps to “adapt” them to life as “princesses”. “The only girls that really work are drug addicts ... they don’t know what’s going on,” he says. Almost touchingly, Mark asks Ronson to sign an NDA, and the book describes Mark flooding his phone with threats when he declines.

The third in a loose American trilogy follows the epic journey of a formerly enslaved man in the aftermath of the civil war

But is not the story as good as the truth?” asks Tennyson Bouguereau, the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World. Tennyson, a formerly enslaved man in post-civil war America, recounts his life story in ways that call to mind the age-old debate about whether it’s better to get our history from novelists or historians. While historians might argue that there is no contest, the question hints knowingly at the novelist’s counter-argument. It sent me searching for a line from Barry’s 2008 Costa-award winning novel, The Secret Scripture, in which the narrator describes history as “a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth”.

In her Reith Lectures, Hilary Mantel suggested that history is “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it”, but I tend to think of it as more of a butterfly net. Historians chase after and capture the things they deem significant. They leave things out, often deliberately. Barry’s entire body of work is a prime example of fiction’s ability to fill history’s gaps, merging personal tragedies with national ones in ways that (dare I say) demonstrate the supremacy of the form – especially for those of us descended from people for whom history never cared one whit. I was therefore intrigued to learn that he had set out to write the story of a man like Tennyson. Barry’s earlier novels refracted Irish history through the lens of two fictional Irish families, the Dunnes and the McNultys. His first foray into this period of American history in Days Without End, for which he won his second Costa award, also followed one of the McNultys – Thomas McNulty flees the Irish famine for America, where he finds himself drawn into the genocidal work of clearing Native Americans off their land, and then, together with his lover and fellow soldier, John Cole, adopts a Lakota girl, Winona, whose family they have helped slaughter. Barry picked up Winona’s story in A Thousand Moons, published in 2020, which follows her fortunes as she, Thomas and John settle on the same farm outside Paris, Tennessee that is occupied by Tennyson and his twin sister Rosalee among others.

Once hailed as the future, even the likes of Google, Sony and Microsoft have struggled to make streaming games fun, fast or affordable

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In August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza.) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future.

Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later.

Historically a new Grand Theft Auto game inspired controversy around violence – but this time people are getting exercised about its romance

There was never any doubt that Grand Theft Auto VI’s extended look would elicit a viral reaction from the internet. Having won the Game Awards’ Most Anticipated award twice consecutively, Rockstar’s forthcoming crime opus is one of the most frothed-over games in recent memory, or indeed ever. It’s nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.

One aspect of the game has provoked an unexpectedly vehement response on social media: not violence, but romance. Protagonists Lucia and Jason are in love, you see, and as a player, part of your job is keeping their spark alive and their relationship strong, so that their criminal escapades are underpinned by a strong connection to one another. Holding hands, enjoying a date at the beach, spontaneously texting one another when apart – all of these interactions will strengthen their bond. You’ll be putting in a lot of work to ensure this couple thrives, which is why some people have come to believe that playing GTA VI counts as micro-cheating.

As one card recently sold for £12m, opportunistic thefts have surged – envelopes are being opened en route, costing small businesses thousands

Pokémon’s success over the last 30 years has seen it grow from a much-loved Game Boy classic, to a world-dominating brand with TV shows, spin-off games, toys and even a theme park. The trading card game is a huge part of that, with more than 85bn cards printed over its lifetime, and the appetite for them shows no signs of slowing down. Packs get snapped up after release so quickly it’s now almost impossible to find them in shops, and a booming resale market is driving the hobby into murky waters.

One card recently sold for an eye-watering £12m, and an increasing number of people have gotten into the collecting business on the hunt for huge profits, leading to a rise in thefts targeting card shops. More recently though, some small businesses have reported that their sales have been hit by thieves targeting envelopes within Royal Mail, leading to thousands in lost revenue.

As FromSoftware’s new multiplayer game The Duskbloods nears release, the legendary game director behind Dark Souls talks connection, pessimism and of course, feet

Since 2009’s Demon’s Souls, Japanese video game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has shown the world a different way to think about game design. His games defy convention with punishing fights, obscure rules, and unknowable, inhospitable worlds. The “Soulslike” genre – named after Demon’s Souls and its sequel Dark Souls – is now ubiquitous, influencing multimillion-sellers from God of War and Star Wars: Jedi to Hollow Knight. Miyazaki’s most recent success, 2022’s Elden Ring, which credited Game of Thrones author George RR Martin as a co-creator, sold over 30m copies and inspired Alex Garland to adapt it for the big screen at A24. It earned Miyazaki a spot on Time magazine’s “most influential” list, an accolade he shares with just one other game developer: Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyazaki is now 51 and has been FromSoftware’s president since 2014, elevated from game designer to CEO after the success of the Souls series. He has a cherubic face that could pass for 35. He rarely speaks publicly, and never on camera. When he does speak, he answers questions like one of his characters – softly, sadly, his head bowed, making eye-contact only when I am speaking. Outside the studio where we speak is the sprawl of Tokyo’s Shinjuku, an ever-changing maze where tourists get lost and pop-up stores appear and vanish without a trace. Today, a J-pop band performs in the square as the cicadas scream from the trees. A gilded statue of Malania, one of Elden Ring’s toughest bosses, looms over this dimly lit conference room inside From’s headquarters, a bonfire checkpoint away from the chaos.

Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London
This production has a talented cast and looks the part, but the characterisation is thin and the songs are often cloying

Much like Emerald Fennell’s film of Wuthering Heights, this musical version of another Brontë sister’s literary masterpiece is lovely to look at. Designer Morgan Large’s monochrome palette fashions the women in black corseted dresses with attractive ruffles and delicate mesh detailing. Behind them on a screen, a mist appears to roll over sketches of moorland, graves and barren trees. It’s winningly atmospheric. But also like Fennell’s film, there’s too little beneath the frills in an adaptation (music and lyrics by Paul Gordon, book and additional lyrics by John Caird) that struggles to tap into the substance of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel.

Though smart-mouthed and bolshie as a child (played commendably on press night by Emily-Rose Samuel), there’s scant sense of a strong-willed, independent thinker in Charlie Burn’s adult Jane, who under Caird and Megan McGinnis’s direction is as pure and polite as a fairytale princess. Nor is there anything dark or dangerous about Ashley Gilmour’s courteous, too-charming Rochester.

At Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London, until 24 October

Bolton Octagon
Thirty years on, Ayub Khan Din’s play about dual-heritage life in the 70s is revived for a tour with an exceptional cast

Thirty years ago a play opened at Birmingham Rep that might have been expected to have limited appeal. East Is East, the story of a mixed-race family from the north of England surviving 1970s Britain as the father tries to marry off two of his sons, was then turned into a film. It crossed cultures and became a Bafta-winning box-office hit, following the success of Ayub Khan Din’s play.

Bolton Octagon, 10 miles down the road from the story’s setting of Salford, celebrates the anniversary with a new production directed by Kash Arshad. In Arshad’s hands the script’s comedy is mined and brought to life by an exceptional cast, with Samantha Power as Ella, the matriarch of the Khan family, giving an award-worthy performance.

The uplifting, award-winning show about a girl ageing four times too fast electrified New York. As it hits the UK, co-creator Jeanine Tesori talks about being inspired by the Aids crisis and all her friends who died young

Jeanine Tesori is thinking about her mother back home in the US. “She’s 95,” says the composer, “and she’s not been well. But she would look in the mirror and be like, ‘I can’t believe I’m old.’ It’s always a surprise, always. There’s an interiority about ageing, especially as women. You stay playful and you stay curious, but the world has other ideas.”

Ageing – and growing up, which is not necessarily the same thing – are a central consideration in the musical that Tesori has been rehearsing. Kimberly Akimbo, which the composer developed with David Lindsay-Abaire from his play, follows a teenage girl with a rare genetic condition that causes her to age at four times the normal rate. Its London debut stars the 66-year-old Maria Friedman as Kimberly. “And she has such a bright young energy,” says Tesori as we chat in a rough-and-ready rehearsal room in London, “that she doesn’t have to do anything to play 16.”

Soho theatre, London
A dance teacher for toddlers dreams of bigger things in Julia Grogan’s frantic one-woman show

The mind of a performer, hungry for her big break, is cracked open in Julia Grogan’s one-woman follow-up to her drama Playfight. At first, her dream is in motion: Miss June (played by Grogan) is on a chat show, giving breezy answers about her Oscar nominations and being recognised by monks in Holland & Barrett. And then, with one question from the audience – “Any advice for people who want to be something?” – the stage warps back to reality. Actually, Miss June is a baby ballet teacher, with a class of toddlers ready to be taught turnouts and pliés.

But all her lusting after Daisy Edgar-Jones’s life may have paid off. Miss June has been offered a spot on a TV show, and you can bet she’s told everyone in the town she grew up in – where she still lives – about her good fortune.

At Soho theatre, London, until 26 September

Culture is part of how we rebuild communities – these awards by the Freelands foundation recognise organisations promoting creativity and opportunity at grassroots level

If politicians are serious about rebuilding our communities, they need to recognise that art and creativity are not the finishing touches. They are part of the foundations.

Andy Burnham recently said that culture is too often dismissed as a distraction, a “nice to have”. Yet, as he put it, “it’s about making sense of your own reality”.

The crowds wept and prayed, police used their song lyrics for briefings and a vicar gave a sermon about brotherly forgiveness. The directors of Don’t Look Back in Anger relive their wildest ride ever

On 4 July last year, Oasis were all set to start the first gig of their hugely anticipated comeback, 16 years since the band imploded after Liam Gallagher swung a guitar in the direction of brother Noel’s head backstage in Paris. However, just 20 minutes before showtime, there was no sign of the singer. Some 74,500 fans in Cardiff’s Principality Stadium were going crazy, while Noel was left impatiently pacing around the venue’s loading bay, presumably wondering if everything was about to fall apart again.

“Then the monitor I was watching all this on suddenly cut out,” says Will Lovelace, the director who was filming the comeback. “When it came back to life, suddenly Liam and Noel were there chatting. Then they walked out to this eruption.” Later, Noel is filmed expressing incredulity that his long-estranged younger sibling could “skip the final rehearsal, then just rock up, grab my hand, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ And off he goes, sounding like he’s 30 years younger. And I’m like, ‘You absolute mad cunt.’”

The European Prize for Urban Public Space’s shortlist highlights projects helping people cope with climate crisis

In the words of Joni Mitchell, the planners of many urban centres around the world “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”. The European Prize for Urban Public Space tries to show that cities don’t have to be locked in the automotive age for ever.

The prize’s latest shortlist, announced on Wednesday, highlights architectural projects that convert infrastructure for cars into spaces that help urban dwellers cope with the soaring temperatures of the climate crisis: roundabouts that have become splash pools, thoroughfares turned into green havens, and car parks into gardens.

Hungarian author who explored memory and history in his fiction and was nominated for a Nobel prize

The writer Péter Nádas, who has died aged 83, transformed the modern history of his native Hungary into epic fiction that rooted its upheavals and calamities in the minds, and bodies, of his all-too-human characters. “I’m not a historian,” he said. “I’m not an anthropologist, nor am I a sociologist. I work with the fates of individuals.”

Those individuals filled a series of books that, in their scope, depth and stylistic ambition, made Nádas a perennial contender for the Nobel prize in literature. Yet it would be his younger compatriot László Krasznahorkai, drawing on the senior writer’s example, who took that honour in 2025.

I’ve always cinched my outfits at the waist, but shifting to a looser silhouette has helped me keep my cool in more ways than one

This was the summer of the Great Untuck. The long hot summer of 2026 finally taught me to do what fashion has been nagging me about for years, which is to quit tucking in my shirts and T-shirts. To stop assuming that the top half of an outfit must be neatly cinched by the waistband of the skirt or trousers.

It wasn’t a style epiphany, to be fair. It was just too hot to do anything else. An extended run of hot weather at home changes how you dress. In the old-school type of British heatwave, which lasted about half a week, I was too giddy with excitement at not having to wear a cardigan to think more strategically. But this summer was different. And eventually I discovered what hot-climate cultures have always known, which is that loose, generously sized clothing that maximises sun protection while minimising skin contact is way more pleasant to wear in the heat than anything short and tight.

Sexual culture and wellbeing expert Alix Fox answered your questions about how to have a healthier, happier, hornier love life

Greygoose77 asks: Can electronic sex toys cause desensitisation?

Alix: Short answer: nope. But they can temporarily alter the threshold of stimulatory intensity that you require in order to get off. That has been covered more fully here.

Alix: Mate, I hear you. And I suspect you’re going to sigh with all the power of a wind tunnel when I tell you that unless you prioritise intimacy, it isn’t going to happen. You have to block in time for it – which will likely mean booting something else out of your diary. That can seem hard at first, when EVERYTHING feels important if not essential. But what’s harder is mourning a dwindling love life. Plus, having a sexy, silly, scrumptious time with a lover can be like a triple espresso when it comes to putting a pep in your step and soothing everyday stress. It may sound trite, but when intimacy functions as a therapeutic release, ‘doing it’ can actually help you get other things done.

To be clear, I’m talking about scheduling intimacy, not necessarily intercourse. Nobody should feel duty bound to engage in any particular physical act when the allotted date rolls round. You may find it helpful (and a welcome turn on) to write a ‘menu’ of different erotic ‘dishes’ you might like to choose from during a date night, ranging from more delicate flavours like having your hair washed for you or a bubble bath for two, to spicier exploits like taking turns to read from an explicit book. Dr Sara Nasserzadeh, author of Love by Design: 6 Ingredients to Build a Lifetime of Love, says “scheduled sexy time should feel like a restaurant reservation: sometimes you’ll fancy a lighter meal; other times, a richer dish. You may both pick different courses, or feel drawn to the same plate. The only criteria is that everyone comes away satisfied – which doesn’t always require orgasm, by the way.”

Christmas might be months away, but beauty Advent calendar waiting lists are filling up fast. From cult favourites to cruelty-free picks, here are the ones worth buying

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As I write, an ice-cream van has just parked outside my flat. It’s the middle of this year’s umpteenth heatwave, and I’m finally understanding the appeal of a cold shower. That can only mean one thing: it’s time to start testing the best beauty Advent calendars.

I wish I was joking, but many beauty brands and retailers have been curating their 2026 beauty Advent calendars since before last Christmas. And since these calendars offer a selection of high-end cosmetics, bestselling beauty staples and new launches at far less than their usual combined price, they’ve become a festive staple for beauty fanatics.

From loafers to lunch boxes to fancy stationery, these picks for kids, teens and grownups will bring that new-term energy, whatever your age

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Shiny shoes. Freshly sharpened pencils. New rucksack. Back-to-school season is here, and even for those of us no longer in full-time education, the energy of this time of year is undeniably one of fresh starts and renewed momentum.

A couple of well-chosen items, from a notebook to inspire ideas to a lunch box that might encourage you to bring in your own food, are often all it takes to feel a touch more pulled together after a languorous summer. So whether you’re looking for school kit or your own stuff, here’s our pick of the best back-to-the-grind products for kids, teens and grownups.

From space-saving storage to an affordable toastie maker, here’s how to set yourself up in halls without blowing the budget

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Clothes packed? Laptop at the ready? Flip Cup skills honed? As freshers’ week beckons, thousands of students are preparing for life away from home. But what do you actually need to bring with you, besides an eager mind and a broad tolerance of Jägermeister?

We’re here to help. Because student debt is big enough without spending on stuff you don’t need, we quizzed veterans (well, second- and third-year students) on what is and isn’t worth packing. We’ve also rounded up some of our best budget buys – from mattress toppers to toastie makers – rigorously tested by the Filter experts. These won’t break the bank and should last far beyond your first essay deadline.

From sustainable catch methods to the most pleasant texture and aroma, which tinned and jarred fish had our tester hooked and which left him reeling?

• The best supermarket anchovies, tasted and rated

Eaten straight from the tin, without seasoning, lemon, olive oil or mayonnaise, canned tuna is pretty gruelling stuff, not least because it’s pungent, mealy and hard to swallow. Testing tuna in this way demonstrates the overall poor quality of the product and why certain brands and species are revered for their superior texture and flavour. That said, a tuna mayo sandwich is one of my go-to lunches, so long as the fish is sustainably sourced (so as not to leave a bad taste in the mouth) and there’s enough pepper to balance out its flavour.

Skipjack is a fast-growing species with a softer, flakier texture and fishier flavour than some others. Albacore tuna, meanwhile, is a larger, slower-growing fish, which makes it more sensitive to overfishing. Its flesh is much paler and more delicately flavoured, with large, meaty flakes.

A simple, stripped-back soup that lets the freshest, sweetest corn and fluffy, floury potatoes do all the work

Today’s super-simple corn chowder is inspired by one I came across on NewEngland.com that relies on an old zero-waste trick; namely, scraping the spent cobs to release the pulp and sweetcorn “milk” still left on the cob. Like asparagus, corn is best eaten as fresh as can be, so look for whole ears with bright green husks. Keep in the fridge and, for the most flavourful soup, aim to cook them the same day.

In Ayurvedic cooking, bitter ingredients are celebrated for their ability to refresh and rebalance. Here, the elegance of tahini and the cleanliness of grapefruit do the heavy lifting

Bitterness has long had an image problem: is it delicious or disgusting? Here’s another contradiction: though bitterness seems as if it should sit alongside hot, pungent flavours such as mustard and horseradish, in reality it cools more than it builds. In Ayurvedic cooking, for instance, bitter ingredients are valued for their ability to refresh and rebalance, and those are qualities that run through both of today’s dishes, from the elegant bitterness of tahini in the panzanella to the clean bite of grapefruit in the dipping sauce for the farinata.

At one stage, on its way to becoming a smashing success, this plucky pumpkin was packing on 40lb a day

Name: Gladys.

Age: Gladys was germinated on 19 April and pollinated on 30 June.

It all depends on the variety of tomato and the dish you’re making, says our panel of experts

Why do recipes often say to deseed tomatoes? Isn’t that where the flavour is, especially since the seeds don’t make much difference to a sauce’s texture?
Catriona, by email
“It all depends on the variety of tomato,” says the Guardian’s Rachel Roddy, “because some are much seedier than others. Sicilian varieties that require little watering, for example, have loads of little bitter seeds, which do need flicking or sieving out.” If, however, Catriona had some vesuvio tomatoes destined for a salad, Jay Patel, co-founder of Italian restaurant Legare in London, wouldn’t bother: “Those are generally pretty meaty and don’t have many seeds, so I’d just slice and dress them generously with olive oil and salt, and you’ll have something pretty special.” And that’s the crux of the matter: as well as the type of tomato, the answer hinges on what you’re planning to do with them, too. “If you’re making a salad with watery winter tomatoes, say, there’s a purpose for those seeds,” Patel adds, “because they provide a lovely pop as well as acidity.”

The most common deseeding scenario is for pasta sauces, but even that comes with a caveat, Patel says: “If I’m going for a slow-cooked sauce, it’s tinned chopped tomatoes, seeds and all. But if I’m after a lighter, fresher tomato sauce, I’ll quickly blanch, peel and deseed fresh tomatoes myself.” Nick Molyviatis of Zylia in London, meanwhile, scoops out the seeds with a teaspoon or he grates his tomatoes instead – “the skin acts as a protector, a glove” – while Roddy’s “best defence against seeds” is a food mill: “Seeds don’t contain flavour as such, but the fleshy gel around them does, which is why a food mill is great,” she explains. “It presses the flavour from that and the skin, while at the same time separating them from the sauce base.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

He was the gorgeous furry tabby who made my day, even when he waltzed into my flat just to finish my takeaway. Now he’s a campus celeb, with a part-time job guarding the doors of the village shop

In 2022, when I moved into halls of residence at the University of Sheffield, my biggest concern was no longer having a furry friend to come home to, as I’d had a cat since I was 11 years old. Then I met Harold.

My first encounter with this gorgeous tabby was quite unusual. One day, in our 10-bed flat, a flurry of messages appeared on the group WhatsApp chat after my fellow roommates caught an intruder on the sofa, innocently munching on my leftover pizza.

A woman in the queue said she was happy to drive an hour, pick up the vacuum, then bring it to Mum’s house. I was worried – but how wrong I was!

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

For a 94-year-old woman, my mother is still very busy and active. So when a vacuum cleaner she liked the look of went on sale at a national electronics chain, Mum drove herself to the nearest store to buy it.

Unfortunately, the shop in her area had sold out by the time she got there. The sales assistant told her it was still available in another Melbourne store – but that store was an hour’s drive away. As active as she is, Mum pointed out that at her age she really could not manage a drive of that length. She asked the sales assistant if they could transfer the vacuum to this store and was flatly told no.

A part-time musician and an office manager disagreed on benefits and work-life balance, but ​where did they stand on community responsibility?

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

Henry, 33, Manchester

Occupation Waiter and musician

Alfredo Bravo had a job he loved and was determined never to be grounded by marriage and kids. Then a voice from the control tower changed everything

Alfredo Bravo had landed aeroplanes in a lot of sticky situations – as a bush pilot in Chilean Patagonia and as a commercial pilot in rural China – but it was a singular voice floating over the radio waves from air traffic control in Santiago, Chile, that set his heart aflutter, upended his concentration and reshuffled his life.

It was the 1990s and, although he was still young, Bravo had held pretty much every low-level flying gig possible. He had dumped plumes of orange chemicals on to forest fires and flown surveillance missions to detect illegal fireplaces polluting the already smoggy Santiago airspace. He had completed hundreds of flights with photo crews operating a big Hasselblad camera as they mapped tree farms, calculating the heights of trees in a forest owned by a timber company involved in a low-level guerrilla war with the Indigenous Mapuche. As a pilot for the company, Bravo was a conspicuous outsider who slept in the fields amid the Indigenous communities, and worked alone in the hangar. But Bravo had a pair of aces up his sleeve.

Transport for London has fined me and warned that if I don’t pay it will possibly destroy my car

I paid the £12.50 London Ulez charge on my Amex card within hours of driving through the zone. I was then fined £90 for non-payment. According to my card issuer, Transport for London (TfL) had failed to collect the £12.50.

TfL’s letter threatened a £180 fine, rising to £360, and possible destruction of my car, if I did not pay. My appeal was rejected.

Thefts spike during freshers’ week so make sure you choose a good lock and check your insurance

For hard-up students, a bike is a low-cost way to travel. But with cycle theft at an all-time high, experts are urging young people not to skimp on insurance and to buy a good lock.

Recent data from Aviva shows one in five (19%) of insurance claims involving student possessions relates to bicycles.

I arranged for my daughter to attend three sessions during the school holidays but the venue and one of the dates were changed

I booked my daughter for three sessions during the school summer holidays at The Gymnastics Academy. The reservation was made and paid for last November because of a promotional offer.

In June, I received emails from The Gymnastics Academy, confirming a session for a venue I had not booked. I was concerned my account had been hacked.

Longer battery life, faster chip, actually useful AI tools and better cameras keep quality Android ahead of competition

Google’s Pixel 11 continues to set the standard for what you should expect from the base model of a flagship phone with class-leading cameras, long software support and almost all the bells and whistles of its most expensive phones.

The regular Pixel 11 costs £879 (€999/$899/A$1,499) making it £80 or equivalent more expensive than last year’s model as the cost of RAMageddon continues to bite. It’s not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but it comes with 256GB of storage and is £200 less than the Pixel 11 Pro, matching rival Samsung’s Galaxy S26.

Screen: 6.3in 120Hz FHD+ OLED (422ppi)

Processor: Google Tensor G6

RAM: 12GB

Storage: 256 or 512GB

Operating system: Android 17

Camera: 48MP+ 13MP UW + 10.8MP 5x tele; 10.5MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 6E, UWB, NFC, Bluetooth 6 and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (1.5m for 30 minutes)

Dimensions: 152.8 x 72.0 x 8.6mm

Weight: 197g

Research finds temperature and amount of hot drinks consumed heightens possibility of developing disease

Drinking very hot tea and coffee triples the risk of developing cancer of the gullet, the world’s largest study of the link between them has found.

The findings show that people should let very hot cups of tea and coffee cool down until they are comfortable to drink, in order to reduce their risk of the disease, cancer experts said.

Key regions of the brain linked to movement, learning and emotions were affected and may lead to cognitive problems

Babies born to mothers with anaemia have smaller brains, particularly in key regions linked to movement, learning and the regulation of emotion, according to a study.

Researchers said the differences, first detected at the age of one, could lead to cognitive problems when children started school.

Who’s more likely to steal sweets from a child? According to science, it’s the rich. A study seemingly confirming our suspicions about the moral behaviour of the wealthy was one of the winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel prizes, which honour research that makes you laugh and then think. Science editor Ian Sample tells Madeleine Finlay what the researchers think could be behind the phenomenon, and they explore some of the other awards, including one for a surprising quality we look for in our friends and another for a biomechanical definition of kissing

New research shows turbulent flushes create toilet-generated aerosols that can transmit legionella, influenza and norovirus

Flushing toilets release particles into the “breathing zone” of adults and can remain suspended in the air for at least 20 seconds, a new study has found.

And closing the lid might not be enough to avoid a “plume” of potential pathogens.

From face tints and self-tan to summer scents, these lightweight buys saw me through multiple heatwaves

You’ll normally find me looking back on my favourite products of the past 12 months at year’s end. But this summer has been so freakishly hot and sweaty it has required its own toolkit and, by extension, its own list of exceptionally well-performing products that deserve rapturous commendation.

The first is Refy’s Skin Base (£30), a sheer face tint so thin and so lightweight it has been all I could bear to wear since July. It’s suitable for all skin types, but not at all appropriate for those who hate any hint of shine. While the texture is totally ungreasy, breathable and so comfortable as to be imperceptible, it does look unmistakably dewy, so avoid if you’re devoted to matte. Personally, I take the view that, in this heat, one might as well steer into the skid, but I am, admittedly, at an age when a juicier look works in my skin’s favour. Anyway, this is makeup that truly feels like absolutely nothing, and what it lacks in coverage can be made up with concealer where needed. Maximum points from me (I wear shade 140N).

When Phoebe Bridgers appeared at Venice international film festival with unshaven legs this weekend, it shouldn’t have made headlines – but did. What do young women make of the current expectations around depilation?

In 2026, female body hair feels as if it should be the least of anyone’s concerns. But although we may think we’ve come a long way since Julia Roberts’ unshaven underarm caused a furore at the 1999 London premiere of Notting Hill, depilation remains a staple of many women’s grooming routines – and when singer turned actor Phoebe Bridgers made her Venice film festival debut last weekend, her unshaven legs still made headlines.

Even so, her au naturel look may signal that attitudes are changing – particularly among younger generations. Vogue decreed that “rather than undermining the femininity of the look, unapologetic hair sharpened it”, and pictures of the 32-year-old’s hair-covered calves were generally praised by fans. But what do other gen Z and millennial women make of the decision to ditch the razor?

Despite Anna Wintour’s years-long redemption campaign on his behalf, the Dior designer’s controversial past got him booted as the 2027 Met Gala honoree

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it was dedicating its 2027 costume exhibition to designer John Galliano, vintage dealer Johnny Valencia figured it would be a red carpet for the ages. Celebrities would show up in full Marie Antoinette drag, or squeeze into tightly bound corsets showcasing hourglass figures, recreating the pageantry of Galliano’s over-the-top runway shows.

“There was a lot of excitement around this theme,” said Valencia, whose customers include the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna. “There had not been this much excitement since camp” – the institution’s fete of outrageous and questionable taste in 2019.

The ‘hip boost’ aims to create hourglass silhouette, much like Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand’s padded shorts

For decades shapewear has been used to compress and cinch. But now there is a sub-genre emerging. Rather than shrinking a silhouette, it aims to add inches.

This week M&S launched a bodysuit that features exaggerated padding at the hip allowing the wearer to create an hourglass shape, or at least the illusion of one.

A remote 18th-century chapel deep in Sami lands is the goal of the Präststigen, a 37-mile trail that traverses some of the country’s most spectacular scenery

I wasn’t exactly in “Sunday best”, but I had made some effort. Well, I’d changed my underwear for the first time in a couple of days and given myself a baby-wipe bath. Still, as we filed into the chapel at Alkavare, I felt more a member of an expedition than a congregation. We sat on the low wooden benches, waterproof jackets rustling and leather walking boots stamping on the flagstone floor to keep warm. Fortunately, the priest, Mogens Amstrup Jacobsen, appeared to be a “man of the Gore-Tex”, as well as a man of the cloth, as he unzipped his own black rain jacket to reveal his dog collar. As the service began, the Arctic wind whipped through cracks in the dry stone walls, insulated only with reindeer hair, and candles flickered in their brass sconces.

I had hiked to Alkavare following the Präststigen, or “Priests’ trail”, a 37-mile (60km) route from Kvikkjokk that could stake a claim as Europe’s wildest pilgrimage route, and certainly one of its most beautiful. The Präststigen follows the path that priests would once have taken to the chapel, built in 1788, to perform a service each summer, and today, on the last weekend in July, intrepid hikers and perseverant pilgrims can attend that same service.

Conservationists have helped Cantabrian brown bears claw their way back from the edge of extinction in the beautiful mountains of Asturias – and carefully controlled nature tourism allows visitors to see them

Once upon a time, in the woods outside Pola de Somiedo, lived a family of Cantabrian brown bears. The villagers reported sightings of a mother bear who had lost a leg to a hunter’s trap, her two cubs and two adult males, either of which might have been the father. In those days, at the end of the 1980s, they seemed to be the last of their kind in this part of Asturias. Meanwhile, the wider population dropped to about 60 bears across the surrounding Cantabrian mountain range that gave the species its name.

They have since clawed their way back from the edge of extinction here in northern Spain, and nature guide Luis Frechilla believes their numbers may now be upwards of 500 again. “They’re still classed as endangered,” he tells me, until the official count hits 1,000. But relative abundance makes them much easier to see today in Somiedo natural park – one of Spain’s first such protected areas, established in 1988.

On a self-drive break in search of Lake Saimaa’s autumn colours, we encountered blue skies, cosy lakeside cabins and saunas, great food – and lots of stubbornly green trees

I wasn’t sure what to expect from an autumn trip to Finland, my first ever to the country, but spending an afternoon sprawled on a deck chair beneath blazing blue skies certainly wasn’t part of it. After a morning walking beneath the leafy canopy at the Mustila Arboretum – the oldest, most extensive botanical garden in the country – and a lunchtime wine-tasting (more of which later), my friend Sara and I pitched up at the Sahanlahti resort, deep in the Finnish Lakeland, only to find sun-drenched scenery that felt far more Mediterranean than Nordic.

Sahanlahti was the second stop on a mid-September road trip from Helsinki to the shores of Lake Saimaa; a journey in search of ruska, the spectacular autumn colours that blaze for a few short weeks before the long Finnish winter sets in. However, on our opening drive east from the airport to the Radalla resort, set on Lake Urajärvi, most of the thousands of trees we drove past were resolutely green, with just the very tips of the leaves tinged with auburn, like a foliage balayage.

From the Renaissance treasures of Parma to offbeat creativity in Nantes, these cities offer world-class art, great food and a laid-back alternative to Europe’s hotspots

As dilemmas go, it’s an unusual one: saddle up a giant squid or board a submersible for a voyage to the bottom of the ocean. In the end, I find myself drawn to a fierce-looking merhorse and tentatively take the reins. High above, my daughter glides by on a flying fish, metallic fins flapping, while her Dad is battling stormy seas at the helm of a huge conch shell. A ride on the Carrousel des Mondes Marins (marine worlds carousel) – a three-storey steampunk merry-go-round inspired by Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – is one of the highlights of a visit to Nantes. A surreal fairground ride, a work of art and a homage to the city’s most famous son. It’s also a lot of fun.

Rob Pike was 17 when he and three of his closest friends were in a car that smashed into a tree and split in half. He explains how he coped with the devastation

After the car stopped rolling and came to rest on its side, Rob Pike remembers being “hyperfixated” on the rainwater pouring down his face. When he tried to wipe it away with his arm, he realised it wasn’t water. “I look at my arm and it is covered in blood. The next moment, it hit me: oh my gosh, we crashed.”

He was in the back seat next to his best friend, Daniel McCoy. “I look up to my left to see if Daniel’s OK. He’s probably about a foot away from my face and … he’s not OK. I’m looking at my dead best friend and I wish that wasn’t my last memory of him, seeing how broken he was.” They were 17.

For decades, I had been haunted by paruresis, an inability to urinate in public toilets. But that day of nakedness suddenly, surprisingly, led me to shed my inhibitions

For as long as I can remember, I’ve suffered from a condition called paruresis – also known as shy bladder syndrome. This means that, unless I’m alone in public toilets, I cannot pee, however badly I need to go. I developed tactics to deal with this, such as loitering outside the gents if I see someone going in, so that I can walk in as they walk out. But if someone follows me in, I find I’m just standing there, which I worry looks odd.

I’m a writer, so am often out and about meeting people in cafes, hotels and at events. My agricultural background means I also meet a lot of my interviewees on farms – but at least there I could pop behind a hedge if I needed to go, and be assured of privacy.

Dust and hard water can leave deposits that slow photosynthesis, but don’t believe everything you read about using acids to remove them

The problem
Dusty leaves are more than a cosmetic problem. A film of dust blocks light, which slows photosynthesis and dulls the plant. Hard water makes it worse, leaving chalky white mineral spots on the foliage that a damp cloth simply smears around.

The hack
The acids in white vinegar, or lemon juice, dissolve the mineral salts left behind by hard water – just wipe a very diluted solution over the leaves with a microfibre cloth.

Eyam Moor, Derbyshire: It’s a place that I treasure greatly, and now it has a change of ownership that is worth celebrating

Can a landscape sigh with relief? It felt that way, pushing through bilberry and cowberry hung with pearls of overnight rain that soaked my lower legs.

On the path, dry, dusty soil had reverted to reassuring gloop. I was thrilled, at one point, to step cautiously round a puddle. Overhead, a buzzard wheeled and a small gang of swallows skimmed across heather whose purple intensity was already fading, too soon it seemed to me. To the west, a kestrel was quartering the slopes of Wet Withens.

From Naomi Osaka’s NBA-inspired entrance to Dennis Rodman’s punk aesthetic, Black sportspeople have long used fashion to express identity, defiance and joy

When Long Wave lead writer Nesrine Malik asked me if I’d seen Japanese-Haitian tennis star Naomi Osaka’s incredible pre-match look, I began to wax lyrical about the kimono she donned at Wimbledon a couple of months ago. No, not that look – Nesrine was talking about the NBA-inspired hoodie she wore at the US Open, taking to the court head bowed and hands in pockets, with the theatre of a WWE wrestler. By the time I sat down to write, Osaka had worn another viral walk-on outfit.

The star isn’t the first to acquire as many headlines for her clothes as for her performance. Osaka draws on a long tradition of Black athletes giving crowds their money’s worth through playful and provocative fashion statements. I delved into the history of why so many Black communities have a culture of “presenting”, and how defiance through fashion has found a natural home in sport.

A year since his assassination, the movement Kirk started is reckoning with the void he left behind - and a revolution that eats its own

As Charlie Kirk’s family, friends and colleagues barreled through the sky to Utah, one staffer kept throwing up in her mouth. Each time she quietly swallowed. She did not want to add to the distress of the others sitting in deathly silence on the jet – especially Kirk’s 36-year-old wife, Erika. She was already a widow.

Those who work at Turning Point USA – the ultraconservative activist organization based in Phoenix, Arizona, that Charlie Kirk founded – believe deeply in a Christian God. Many also believe that Satan and his deputies vie for influence on Earth. Earlier that day, on 10 September 2025, those forces had seemingly persuaded an angry young man to hide on a roof at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was speaking to 3,000 people, with a loaded rifle.

Exclusive: Joyce Thomas, 78, describes her ‘nightmare’ hours before the deadline for her removal from country

A 78-year-old British widow facing deportation over from Sweden over Brexit has said she feels she is facing a “death sentence” just hours before she was due to be removed from the country.

“I just want this nightmare to go away before I die,” says Joyce Thomas. “It is dragging me down. I am really not the same person I was. This has taken years. I just feel sick,” she adds as she packs her bags.

We would like to hear from people travelling about how they have been affected by disruption caused by an air traffic control technical failure

Airports across the UK including Manchester, Birmingham and all those in London were hit by a system issue at air traffic control on Tuesday, which continued into Wednesday.

We would like to hear from people travelling about how they have been affected by disruption. What has the experience been like? Have you had to change or cancel your travel plans?

We want to hear from people under 30 about how you feel about the future and whether it’s changed the way you live your life, for better or worse

The future feels a little hard to plan for right now.

We’ve just lived through the hottest summer on record, global conflict looms large and AI has people wondering whether their job will still exist in five years – assuming they’ve got one in the first place.

We would particularly like to hear from people whose commute has been affected by others who keep Lime bikes or other ebikes in their private areas and gardens

Nearly half of Londoners aged 18-34 now use Lime bikes weekly, and the rental ebike company reported 16 million commuter journeys in 2024.

But are you a Lime bike or other ebike user who has experienced selfishness from other riders during the commuter rush? Specifically, have you recognised a problem with “Lime bike hoggers” – users who keep booked bikes in their private areas so that you can’t actually access it?

Are you dealing with subsidence or other issues caused by the hot weather?

During a dry spell, such as the successive heatwaves that affected some parts of the UK this year, houses built on clay-rich soil suffer as moisture is sucked away by trees and bushes. This causes the clay to shrink and foundations to drop, causing structural problems.

We would like to speak to homeowners who are dealing with damage to their homes which is likely to have been caused by this year’s extremely hot, dry weather.

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