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

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

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

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

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

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

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research shows generations of children in England will grow up homeless unless government addresses council housing debt, charity says

It would take more than a century to clear the social housing waiting lists in England at the government’s current speed of delivering new social homes, research by Shelter has shown.

The housing charity found that more than 1.3m households are on a waiting list for a social home, but only 12,198 were built by councils, housing associations or private developers across England last year. This equates to an average of 110 households waiting for every new social home delivered, and it would take 119 years to clear the waiting lists if building continued at the same rate.

The justice secretary said he spoke to the US vice president after he blamed mass immigration for Nowak’s murder

Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf said that UK police are “institutionally racist”, claiming that there is “structural anti-white prejudice”.

When asked by Laura Kuenssberg if he thinks the police are institutionally racist, he said: “I think the correct answer to that has to be yes given literally on their website it tells people not to treat people the same – to not be colour-blind.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Committee calls for apology from government amid reports navy’s hunter-killer submarines are all docked

A parliamentary committee that scrutinises public spending has made scathing comments about the impact of delays in the publication of the government’s defence investment plan (Dip).

The plan, originally expected last autumn, has been repeatedly postponed amid warnings that the military faces a huge funding gap over the next four years. It is due to be published before a Nato summit early next month.

UK lagging behind rivals on tourism growth because of travel costs and lack of joined-up planning, says CEO Sean Doyle

The cost of travel to and around the UK is keeping millions of tourists away and slowing economic growth, the boss of British Airways said, as he urged a rethink of aviation taxes.

The airline’s chief executive, Sean Doyle, said the UK had some of the highest aviation taxes in the world and was falling behind countries such as Japan, France and Germany in boosting its inbound tourism.

After a death in Dublin with echoes of George Floyd, people of colour sense rising hostility

When Kembetia Bissa fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo and moved to Ireland in 2003 he found not only sanctuary but beauty, friendship and a home.

The asylum seeker settled in Bandon, west Cork, and found work as a landscaper. He opened an African dance school with Congolese drumming and taught local people the rhythms of his homeland. “It was very positive, very welcoming. I felt like I was in my own country,” Bissa, 55, said this week in Dublin.

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25th over: New Zealand 77-6 (Conway 26, Phillips 9) Conway, facing Tongue, decides that he may as well come to the party. First he steers a four to gully’s right, then he tries to leave a lifter, reacts too late, pats it to Harry Brook at second slip – and is dropped as Brook can only tip it over the bar.

24th over: New Zealand 71-6 (Conway 20, Phillips 9) Robinson continues, moving the ball both ways. Phillips finds the boundary in no time – but only off the inside edge. And again, with his first shot of some authority, punched past cover. “You need to be playing Twenty20 here,” says Stuart Broad, and Phillips, unlike the rest of the Kiwis, seems to agree. He’s been there five minutes and has already made more runs than Latham, O’Rourke, Ravindra and Mitchell put together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s June essentials

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

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

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

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

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

Kreuzberg campaigners win court ruling against €2m fence aimed at shutting out drug dealers

The “hollow” in Görlitzer Park was heaving with revellers who had gathered in reaction to a court ruling against Berlin’s mayor who wanted to lock it up at night. “Görli is our garden,” said Monika, a retired psychiatric nurse who lives nearby and had joined the crowds on Monday night for a beer and a bop on the popular deep bowl-shaped meadow in the Kreuzberg district.

“Görli is where we socialise and where my daughter grew up,” she said, using the affectionate nickname for the centrally located green space covering 14 hectares (35 acres).

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

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Don, 74, Farnham

Occupation Retired IT project manager

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

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

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

The cartoon favourite and Mattel toy He-Man battles Skeletor on the big screen, and Garsington continues its run of excellent early operas

Masters of the Universe
Out now
Swords and sorcery seem to be having a little bit of a moment, with the excellent Deathstalker remake a couple of months ago. Now Nicholas Galitzine flexes his muscles as the 1980s Mattel hero He-Man, with Jared Leto vamping as the evil Skeletor.

Erupcja
Out now
Pete Ohs directed, produced, shot, edited and co-wrote this lo-fi hipster movie about Bethany (Charli xcx) and Rob (Will Madden), a young couple on holiday in Warsaw who reconnect with an old friend when a volcanic eruption prompts Bethany to re-evaluate what she wants from her life.

Scary Movie
Out now
Before the concept pole-vaulted over the shark with the laugh-free binfires that were Date Movie, Epic Movie and Disaster Movie, the first Scary Movie films had a certain something: lewd, crude, but with some undeniable knockout gags. Now the original talents are back for a “rebooquel” parodying the likes of Terrifier 3, Ma and M3gan.

Enzo
Out now
Robin Campillo (120 Beats Per Minute) returns to co-write and direct the final film from his friend Laurent Cantet, who died aged 63 after starting to make this tale of a teenager (Eloy Pohu) from a rich family who pursues an unexpected future, training as a mason and falling for a Ukrainian builder (Maksym Slivinskyi). Catherine Bray

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

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

Javier Bardem is at his menacing best in a wild remake of the psychological thriller, and the jazz sax maven surprises with raw country rock spirituality. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

Bellingham will have been happy to take the armband, O’Reilly is a midfield option but Stones looks a weak link

England may as well pack their bags and go home if Harry Kane picks up an injury. The captain laboured through Euro 2024, leaving some to wonder if his international career was winding down, but there is no doubting his importance before the World Cup. It had to be Kane calming the nerves as England warmed up with a win over New Zealand in testing conditions in Tampa.

Teams must be prepared for challenging travel and a cauldron of heat but will also encounter fantastic fans and a beautiful football culture

This World Cup will be incomparable to anything we have seen before. Why? The pure scope of the tournament: 104 matches in three different countries played across 16 venues in three different time zones.

If you have not travelled around the United States, it is hard to imagine just how vast this country is. The land mass of England could fit comfortably into the state of Georgia. Imagine a World Cup being played across Europe. Imagine having to playing a game in Siberia and then your next match in the Algarve. Fifa has done its best to minimise it, but travelling around America, Canada and Mexico will be intense. Fun, for sure, but it will be taxing for fans who are already being squeezed by high ticket prices.

Spain manager on the values behind the nation’s coaching culture, the joy of teaching and Lamine Yamal’s otherworldly talents

On the ground floor of the Spanish football federation’s headquarters in Las Rozas are two classrooms covered with photos of everyone who has played for la selección. More than 800 men are there, frames spilling into the corridor, but the coach who leads them to the World Cup is not. Luis de la Fuente’s international playing career took him only as far as the under-21s so his picture is missing, which is a pity – “I used to have hair like this,” he claims, hands recreating flowing locks – but he knows this place well. This is where he taught; it is also, he says, where he learned, his pupils not alone in going on to big things.

The 2024 European Championship-winning coach settles into a sofa in a small room on the floor above. His squad named, these are the final days before flying to Chattanooga. Days of excitement and to “judge the load” as players clock in: 20 on the first day, Pedro Porro the next and Yéremy Pino the day after, then Mikel Merino and finally those who played in the Champions League final. Days to take it all in – “I’m so happy to be going to a World Cup” – and to take pride too.

With this summer’s tournament nearly upon us, Guardian readers share their mixed emotions - unease and apathy, but also excitement and optimism

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The 2026 World Cup is nearly upon us. Across 39 days beginning Thursday, 104 matches will be played throughout the United States, Mexico and Canada until a champion is crowned 19 July in New Jersey.

Amid the quadrennial excitement around the world’s biggest sporting event, there has also been intense controversy and scrutiny. Ticket prices, transport costs, climate threats and security concerns have left fans with mixed emotions.

Graham Arnold’s team have overcome adversity on and off the pitch, but may benefit from the pressure being off them in a tough group

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

Italian will start his first grand slam final as the underdog but has shown he knows how to beat No 2 seed on clay

At almost the exact time Flavio Cobolli and Matteo Arnaldi had been scheduled to take to Court Philippe-Chatrier on Friday and contest the match of their lives, they could instead be located in the bowels of the stadium, their faces a picture of misery inside the interview room at Roland Garros.

If not for the seriousness of the situation, with Arnaldi forced to withdraw from his first grand slam semi-final due to a virus, it would have been a comical sight. Somebody behind the scenes was not exactly of sound mind when they decided it was a good idea for Cobolli to sit next to an individual with a viral illness two days before his first grand slam final.

Charity worker’s unsparing book explains how the game created support networks and ‘beautiful friendships’

The Bishopton Ladies goalkeeper and Street Soccer charity coordinator Sarah Rhind is emphatic about how integral football has been to her survival. “I can wholeheartedly say that without it I wouldn’t be in the position that I’m in now – if I was even lucky enough to still be here,” she says. “There’s been different times in my life where football showed up and was really a platform that saved me.”

The 42-year-old is speaking in Glasgow after the publication of her autobiography, Scars Under The Jersey. The book details Rhind’s battle with heroin addiction, which took her into the darkest places, her recovery and the role football played in it, with Rhind going on to earn promotion to the Scottish top flight with Hamilton Academical in 2021.

Sullivan hoped football would legitimise him but claims about historical conduct have led to his resignation from West Ham

• Sullivan steps down at West Ham to fight claims about private life

When David Sullivan was growing up in a council house in Cardiff, he dreamed of becoming a professional footballer. Short and squat, he would never be a player, but later in life the fortune he built through the pornography industry and the property world gave him a route into the sport. The only problem, Sullivan discovered, was finding a club willing to roll out the welcome carpet for him and his business partners, David and Ralph Gold.

They were fans of West Ham United and bought a stake in the east London club in 1991, only to find entry to the boardroom closed. “We had no contact with the board,” the late David Gold wrote in his autobiography. “They simply did not want David Sullivan and the Golds at their football club.”

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

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

• Workers found coins and note from 1964 under a statue

• Writer urged them to back horse with Christmassy name

A construction site manager is cashing in after placing a bet on the winner of Saturday’s Derby horse race at Epsom, after he was encouraged to do so by a note found under a statue in a 1960s time capsule.

Josh Smalls, site manager on the restoration project at Crystal Palace Park in south London, said the note and four old coins were discovered by a colleague underneath the giant bust of Sir Joseph Paxton, the Victorian designer of the Crystal Palace.

• Mercedes driver goes 0.043 quicker than Red Bull rival

• Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton third, George Russell sixth

The margins were as tiny as ever beneath the looming walls of Monte Carlo but, with the verve and fearlessness of youth, Kimi Antonelli had the edge to claim pole for the Monaco Grand Prix. That in so doing the 19-year-old saw off concerted efforts by Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, with 11 titles between them, on the toughest single-lap challenge of the year only served to emphasise the talent of the tousled-haired teen.

In a gripping qualifying session, Antonelli had to be flawless to edge out the Red Bull of Verstappen into second and Hamilton’s Ferrari into third. With overtaking, as ever, all but impossible on the streets of the principality, Saturday is the key part of the weekend in Monaco and qualifying was pleasingly dramatic and intense.

• Bath 24-22 Leicester

• Bath will host Exeter, Leicester to visit Northampton

Bath-Leicester is about as earthy a rivalry as it gets, and, boy, in this era of free-flowing, almost surreal, rugby, here we had a proper throwback to times past. Brutal. And with this hardest of wins, Bath, the champions, have chiselled out the right to play at home in Saturday’s semi-final.

You think Bath-Leicester is earthy? Prepare for next week, when Northampton host Leicester (earthiest of them all?) and Bath will take on Exeter. Two semis, two derbies. Forget about the razzmatazz. This is why most of us fell in love with rugby.

• Russian, 19, beats world No 114 6-3, 6-2 for first slam title

• Maja Chwalinska fails to emulate Emma Raducanu’s feats

Twenty minutes into the first grand slam final of her young career, it looked as if Mirra Andreeva’s head was already in danger of exiting Court Philippe-Chatrier. Between the weight of the occasion, the tough windy conditions and a resourceful opponent seemingly built to cause her maximum anguish, the 19-year-old looked hindered by tension.

Her reaction to the pressure underlined the work the Russian has put into addressing her emotional vulnerabilities. Andreeva maintained her composure, coolly problem-solving and then flourishing after a tense start as she ended the qualifier Maja Chwalinska’s historic run with a 6-3, 6-2 victory.

England’s heaviest defeat for decades does not signal the end for Sarina Wiegman’s European champions

It was a tough night for Sarina Wiegman and her charges at the Estadi Mallorca Son Moix. England’s biggest loss since a 6-2 defeat by Germany in the Euro 2009 final and their first loss in a qualifier since 2002 shattered their ambition of securing top spot in their 2027 World Cup group and automatic qualification for the finals in Brazil.

The 4-0 scoreline was bruising, but the performance against Spain even more so and there was no sugar-coating by Wiegman. Her England side “didn’t play good enough”, “couldn’t get into another gear” and “hardly got into the 18 yard box”.

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

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

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

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

The US president brags about ending wars but look at Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Lebanon to see what his casual disregard for diplomacy and obsession with instant results have achieved

There are visionary statesmen and high-minded negotiators, pragmatic mediators and professional diplomats – and then there are meddling fools. As ceasefires implode, vast numbers of civilians die or flee, and wars Donald Trump started, fuelled or pledged to resolve rage unchecked, there’s no doubt which category he belongs to. In baseball parlance, in Ukraine, Iran-Lebanon and Israel-Palestine, Trump is “0 for 3”. He boasted he alone could cut deals and bring peace. He’s delivered neither. In striking out, he mostly makes matters worse.

The heroic age of 19th-century diplomacy, typified by Prince Metternich’s great power-balancing “concert of Europe” and Benjamin Disraeli’s Balkan “peace with honour”, is history now. But it’s not that long since Nobel-winning peacemakers such as the UN chief Kofi Annan and the Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, or the US senator George Mitchell, who brokered Northern Ireland’s Good Friday agreement, were troubleshooting intractable conflicts the world over. Where are the successors to Desmond Tutu, Andrei Sakharov or Yitzhak Rabin when you need them?

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

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

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

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

Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist

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

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

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

A wonderful thing happened on a visit to the new V&A East: a very public, taxpayer-funded soundtrack of my life

This is surreal. I’m standing in the new home of one of Britain’s most historically august cultural institutions, and it looks and feels for all the world like a silent disco.

There is a middle-aged white woman to my right, staring intently ahead, swaying gently and bobbing her head as rhythmically as the giant headphones covering her ears will allow. Behind me there is a young black woman, her hair pulled back to give the headset and whatever she is listening to untrammelled passage. She is swaying, rising a bit, then falling: in the room but in a world of her own. Behind me, I see a muscular guy of mixed heritage; his ripped torso is still, his head of braided hair is not, and his face gently creases as he smiles about what he is hearing. My feet are planted, but I’m aware that I’m giddy, as if slightly drunk. There we are, imbibing different musical clips of different things in different bits of semi-darkened galleries, and yet it is a shared endeavour.

The history of gynaecology fuses innovation, authority and violation – and radical surgery is not the unavoidable answer to suffering

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Until just a few weeks ago, polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome was reduced to ovarian cysts, much to the frustration and confusion of many patients with this systemic endocrine condition. The struggles of people with endometriosis to access patient-centred and appropriate care continue in many countries.

These are examples of the despair many patients report when they try to access hormonal and reproductive healthcare, as described by the Australia Institute.

I love soccer. But absurd ticket prices and odious politics are keeping me away from the stadiums

Forgive me if I’m not excited for the World Cup. After a heartbreaking loss for my beloved Arsenal in the Champions League Final, I’d love a break from soccer. A respite from the drama and misery of the beautiful game would do a lot of good for my soul right now. But Fifa, the sport’s sprawling governing body, doesn’t have time for me to lick my wounds. They demand my wallet.

With the World Cup coming to North America, I have no chance of escaping the monstrous hype, even if I can’t even imagine affording the exorbitant ticket prices. Thousands of seats remain available for the US’s opening group stage match against Paraguay in Los Angeles, which was an unthinkable result when the competition was awarded to the US, Mexico and Canada.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Anger and distress at the treatment of the stabbed teenager is widely shared. But the online amplification of myths and grievances must be tackled

To learn of the last minutes of Henry Nowak’s life would be shocking and distressing under any circumstances. The stabbed teenager begged officers for help, as they handcuffed him before realising their mistake. To watch those final moments, on the police body-cam footage released this week, is all the more immediate, and unbearable. The outrage is widely shared. But the way it has been weaponised is alarming. His family’s wish is for his legacy to be a renewed effort to reduce knife crime, not increased antagonism along racial and religious lines. Instead, the unscrupulous are using the power of the footage and the speed of social media to spread myths about “two-tier policing” and turn trauma into political mobilisation.

Rightly, Hampshire’s chief constable has apologised. Three of the officers involved are being investigated, while a fourth has left the force. Policies are being reviewed. Vickrum Digwa will serve at least 20 years for murder before being eligible for parole. Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have met with the victim’s family.

A new national institution, the brainchild of revered artist Sir Quentin Blake, shows this overlooked artform is finally getting the recognition it deserves

“What is the use of a book … without pictures or conversation?” the heroine of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland complains. When you think of Alice, you probably imagine John Tenniel’s 19th-century engravings. Roald Dahl’s BFG is now synonymous with Sir Quentin Blake’s big-eared giant, and the much-loved Gruffalo owes as much to Axel Scheffler’s drawings as Julia Donaldson’s rhymes. And yet illustration nearly always plays second fiddle to words. Caught between fine art and publishing, it is often overlooked as a highly skilled craft in its own right.

Hopefully, this is about to change with the opening of the first permanent home for illustration in the UK, and the largest of its kind in the world. The centre is the brainchild of 93-year-old Sir Quentin Blake, who gives it his name and huge archive of 40,000 drawings. Many wonderful creations – crocodiles, birds, babies who transform into dragons – have sprung from Blake’s imagination. This museum, in a cleverly repurposed 17th-century former waterworks in London’s Clerkenwell, will celebrate the history and future of illustration in all its guises.

Population fears | Pure, cold rage | Protest arrests | Broom v leaf blower

Surely the old will be cared for by robots while watching endless pictures of kittens (The right is desperate for a solution to falling birthrates. Who’s going to tell them that the answer is immigration?, 31 May). As the population falls, there will be a glut of housing, which will become affordable, and so women will be able to have more children and the cycle will begin again, assuming that one or other of the megalomaniacs haven’t blown us all to smithereens first.
Mary Bolton
Chiswick, London

• Nigel Farage has called for “pure, cold rage” (Starmer urges calm as far right seeks to exploit Henry Nowak murder, 2 June). Strangely enough, this is precisely what I have felt since he and his cronies cheated me out of my EU membership back in 2016.
Shane Roberts
Easton, Bristol

Jules Robinson outlines the targeted support needed to prevent accidental deaths, and Sara Hazzard urges investment in rehabilitation and the physiotherapy workforce

Denis Campbell’s article (GPs in England too ‘overloaded’ to help older people at risk of falling, say MPs, 3 June) draws welcome attention to a severe but often overlooked health crisis. Research by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) shows that falls are the leading cause of accidental death in the UK, killing over 11,000 people a year, more than 9,000 of whom are aged 75 and over. And this crisis is getting worse, with a 12% increase in the rate of deaths over a single year.

Falls are preventable, and should not be regarded as just an inevitable part of ageing. The causes are varied and complex, so intervention must take into account a person’s living environment and access to networks of support as well as their physical and mental health. Such a detailed multifactorial assessment requires not just specialist expertise but far more time than is available within a short GP appointment. RoSPA is calling for equitable access to falls and fracture liaison services, removing the variation in treatment available depending on postcodes. Without such targeted support there is a real risk that fatal falls will continue to increase, taking the lives of vulnerable people in tragic accidents that could be prevented.
Jules Robinson
RoSPA

Joan McGavin shares a unique memory of the late poet, playwright and novelist

I was saddened to read your obituary for Maureen Duffy (3 June) but also interested to discover that her early 1980s novel Gor Saga had been reissued under the title First Born in 2024.

Duffy is the only writer I have heard give an all-night reading of their novel – here in Southampton – if I remember rightly under the aegis of David Benedictus, who was a resident writer in the city in the early 1980s.

Kathryn Monk says nutritious, naturally gluten-free food is widespread in cuisines of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America

Your article on the rising cost of gluten-free foods highlights a genuine problem (Gluten-free basics ‘now a luxury’ as price of a small branded loaf nears £4, 30 May). However, I was struck by how narrowly the discussion was framed.

Much of the article focuses on the affordability and availability of gluten-free versions of bread, biscuits, breakfast cereals and other wheat-based products. Yet for much of the world’s population, diets have traditionally been based on rice, maize, millet, cassava, pulses and other naturally gluten-free staples.

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

Armenians are going to the polls in an election that could cement the country’s shift towards Europe and away from its traditional alliance with Russia.

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

In his first visit to an EU country outside Italy, pope urges world leaders to stop dividing electorates and to respect ‘every human being’

More than a million people have filled the streets near one of Madrid’s main squares to join Pope Leo for an outdoor mass, likely to be the largest event of his week-long visit to Spain.

Throngs of people pressed along barriers near the landmark Plaza de Cibeles, waving flags and shouting “Long live the pope”, as Leo arrived in his white popemobile for the event. Some tossed flower petals as he arrived in the square.

A search for the suspects continues as victims are taken to nearby hospitals, police say

A shooting near a community festival in Toledo, Ohio, wounded at least 12 people on Saturday, with police saying a search for the suspects was ongoing.

Two of the wounded were in a critical condition, Toledo deputy police chief Joe Heffernan said. He said it appeared there were at least two people firing weapons who were “probably shooting at each other”.

Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of 1990s leader Alberto, is vying with a congressman to become country’s ninth president in a decade

Peruvians go to the polls on Sunday in an election runoff that pits a perennial rightwing candidate, Keiko Fujimori, against a leftist congressman, Roberto Sánchez. Amid rising crime, chronic political instability, corruption scandals and voter apathy, they are vying to become Peru’s ninth president in a decade.

Fujimori, who is the daughter of the late president Alberto Fujimori, won 17% of the vote in the first round in April. Sánchez, a former trade and tourism minister, took 12 % of the vote, edging out Rafael López Aliaga, an ultra-conservative former Lima mayor. The stage is set for a polarised left-right replay of the country’s last election in 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eighteen-year-old man arrested after car collides with cyclist Anthony Canty, who died in hospital four days later

A lottery winner has died after a suspected hit-and-run in Essex, police said.

Officers were called to the collision between a cyclist and a black Ford Ka in Tiptree at 6.30am on 21 May. The cyclist, a man in his 30s, was taken to hospital where he died four days later, Essex police said.

Former figures at regulator voice disquiet after series of provocative interviews by recently departed chair

Regulators are not generally known for courting controversy. When the day job involves making delicate, legally fraught decisions, they tend to be a circumspect bunch.

However, since stepping down as chair of Ofcom, one of Britain’s most scrutinised watchdogs, the Conservative peer Michael Grade has been doing his best to buck that stereotype. “I’m free of the shackles,” he recently said.

Brands such as Portmeirion in Stoke welcome £120m package but seek further support to avert fresh closures

On the floor of Portmeirion’s factory in Staffordshire, staff are hard at work as clays are moulded, glazed and fired – an intricate process requiring precision and specialist skills honed over years of practice – to manufacture the company’s array of tableware.

Portmeirion, a homeware brand founded in 1960 that employs 433 people, is based in Stoke-on-Trent, at the heart of British ceramics. The centuries-old craft is so integral to the area’s identity that the six federated towns that make up the Staffordshire city are known as the Potteries.

HMS Prince of Wales expected to set sail in the coming days, Ministry of Defence says

A technical issue has been detected on a UK navy flagship while docked in Norway after working with Nato and the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), the government has said.

Earlier this month, HMS Prince of Wales – one of Britain’s two flagship aircraft carriers built for £6.4bn – set sail for Nordic waters from Loch Long, in Argyll and Bute, to provide security in the Atlantic and High North regions.

Widow of French ex-president Jacques Chirac was a steely behind-the-scenes operator known for her charity work

Bernadette Chirac, the formidable widow of the former French president Jacques Chirac and a driving force behind his political rise, has died at the age of 93.

As France’s first lady for 12 years, Chirac was a steely behind-the-scenes operator in support of her husband, who served twice as prime minister, 18 years as mayor of Paris and two terms as president.

Unless a film is given ‘dragon seal’ approval from communist state officials, it will never be released in China

Class started at 9am. Assignments were doled out, ideas were pitched and scripts written, followed by a long day of shooting and editing. Twelve hours later, 20 aspiring and exhausted film-makers were sat in a crowded, makeshift studio, listening to their work being trashed.

“The content is still too poor,” the course director, Nan Xin, remarked, after watching a two-minute film about boys on the loose who harass a stray dog.

Donald Trump pardoned Stephen Buyer of Indiana, who served nearly two years in prison after conviction

As his administration promotes what it calls a crackdown on fraud in states run by Democrats, Donald Trump once again used the pardon power to excuse financial crimes committed by a Republican, granting a pardon this week to Stephen Buyer, a former Republican congressman from Indiana who served nearly two years in prison for making illegal stock trades based on inside information after he left office.

Buyer was sentenced to 22 months in prison in 2023 for trades made while working as a consultant and lobbyist. He was ordered to forfeit more than $350,000, representing the amount of the illegal gains, and pay a $10,000 fine. He was released in 2025.

Conditions that led to bloody prewar protests have been made worse, commentators say

Iran is already preparing for the perilous transition from wartime unity to a fractious peace marked by hyperinflation, a 10% contraction in the economy, power cuts and calls for a triumphalist government to end its unprecedented hunting down of dissent.

With peace not yet secured, the debates within the regime about Iran’s future are only just starting to emerge but its rulers are clearly thinking about how after surviving the war, they can survive the peace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are in for a long trade war.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The comedian travels the globe to get to the heart of the beautiful game. Plus, a thrilling encounter with tigers. Here’s what to watch this evening

10.30pm, BBC One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Atlantic)
After scrapping an album and starting anew, Lizzo still sounds lost amid these weak genre-hopping songs. Perhaps the zeitgeist has simply left her behind

Just over a year ago, Lizzo appeared on Saturday Night Live, announcing a new album called Love in Real Life in grandstanding style. Wielding an electric guitar, clad in a Trump-baiting T-shirt that read Tariffied, she performed its title track and two other new songs, Still Bad and Don’t Make Me Love U. As with her appearance earlier the same week on a late night talkshow – during which she ran into the audience to high-five fans who were yelling “we love you Lizzo!” – it looked very much like a defiant comeback, fit to drag her out of the controversy that erupted at the end of her hugely successful 2023 world tour. Three former backing dancers and a costume designer filed lawsuits against the singer alleging harassment and discrimination: damaging claims given how Lizzo’s songs have preached a message of inclusivity, body positivity and self-confidence. Some of the allegations were dismissed by a judge but others are ongoing; Lizzo has refused to settle out of court, saying: “I’m fighting the case because I know that it’s not true.”

But the Love in Real Life single, a pivot towards rock that owed a little to Tom Petty’s American Girls – or the Strokes’ American Girls-indebted Last Nite if you prefer – failed to make the charts, a far cry from the period between 2018 and 2022 when Lizzo’s singles seemed to go multi-platinum as a matter of course. The same fate befell Still Bad, a track much more in the vein of her big hits, prompting a rethink. The album was pulled, Lizzo apparently taking control of her own destiny – “I need to do shit my way”. A mixtape that returned her more-or-less to where she started, before pop stardom came calling – punchy hip-hop, albeit tricked out with guest appearances from Doja Cat and SZA – appeared in its place: My Face Hurts from Smiling received mixed reviews and underwhelming streaming figures.

From Off Campus to the Summer I Turned Pretty, it seems like Australian artists are everywhere right now – but what does the exposure actually mean?

Last month, a new Amazon Prime series, Off Campus, fought its way to the top of the streaming TV pile. Releasing its first season all at once, the glossy campus drama – set around an elite hockey team at a fictional US university – racked up 36 million viewers in its first 12 days, becoming the platform’s biggest debut among women aged 18 to 34.

Its star attraction is the sweet-and-steamy romance between music major Hannah (Ella Bright) and brooding hockey star Garrett (Belmont Cameli). But sharp-eared viewers noticed something else around the hot people doing hot things: a conspicuous run of Australian music, from heavyweights like AC/DC and The Kid Laroi to indie-pop favourites George Alice and Royel Otis, plus rising name Redd.

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

• Read about your choices here

***

100

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Ben Elton didn’t distract from the pain of moving my body, I found the perfect solution – the interactive smartphone game Zombies, Run!

At 56, I am running my first marathon, an old, fat, bald dad surrounded by millennials in body-hugging Lycra and smiles that look AI-generated. But I am ahead of them. For they are only competing for positions and personal bests, and I am being chased by zombies.

The black dog of depression hit me around the time of my last birthday. I didn’t feel I had achieved anything of note for an eternity. I used to work out but, for years, work kept getting in the way. I decided to kill two circling, carcass-sniffing vultures with one stone and run my first marathon.

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

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

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

Modern Art, London
The mathematically named new works of Along the River are disorienting, illusive and seem to offer a flash of the secret sequences that underpin the physical world

Why do we find things beautiful? More precisely, why do some paintings of coloured dots in rippling patterns inspire in me something like revelation? The idea that beauty is the feeling you get when encountering truth is unfashionable in the arts, but lingers in the sciences. The physicist Paul Dirac once proposed that it is more important that a formula is beautiful than that it can be proven: when a perfectly beautiful theory produces results that cannot be real, he argued, then we should not discard the theory but reconsider what is real.

Since the 1970s, Terry Winters has been rebuilding that bridge between art and science. Taking inspiration from disciplines including botany – his early paintings, particularly, evoke sprouting pods and tangled roots – engineering, computer modelling and cybernetics, his paintings might be understood as diagrammatic approximations of the patterns that govern everything from the division of cells to the constellation of stars. If every era has to renew its standards of beauty to reflect new understandings of how the world is constructed, then Winters comes as close to providing that model as any living painter.

Royal Court, London
Teenage girls discuss the horrors they have seen via their phones as Georgie Dettmer’s reckoning with internet culture is brutally realised by director Jess Edwards

Georgie Dettmer’s gaze is unflinching. Nothing is held back in Are You Watching?, her fury-filled interrogation of our twisted relationship with sex and violence, and the emotional distance we hide behind when we watch them both through a screen. This bluntness can feel unsubtle, but it’s also admirably unafraid.

Two teenage girls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) perch on a bunk bed, talking about the worst things they’ve ever seen. Across the rest of the traverse stage, those stories are smashed into sharp, rapid-fire scenes, flicked between as if scrolled through on a phone. Under Jess Edwards’ direction, the depths of the internet are hurled across the stage (by an excellent multi-rolling cast including Lucy McCormick and Maimuna Memon), while the two girls watch from the safety of their duvets.

Escher’s eye-popping visions enter the video dimension, Pan-Africanism pulls in the big names and agent provocateur Julio Le Parc hits the UK – all in your weekly dispatch

MC Escher
The great Dutch artist of eye-popping, brain-melting visual paradox gets a rich retrospective of his prints, with video, music and installations adding to the fun.
• Somerset House, London, until 6 September

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fake alien made by a Doctor Who sculptor, animal organs sourced from a butcher, an actual magician behind the camera … this outrageous story makes for a great watch

If you had to be interviewed on film, how would you hope to come across? Attractive, honest, a good egg? Or pathologically shifty, to the point that audiences want to throw their shoes at the screen? I found myself unlacing my Doc Martens this week, watching a documentary about the biggest hoax of the last century.

In 1995, a grainy film was released that purported to be of an autopsy conducted on a creature recovered from a crash site on military land in Roswell, New Mexico. The incident had long been hallowed in ufology, but no moving footage had ever been uncovered. You’ve seen it. Hazmat figures loom over a bulbous-headed humanoid, spreadeagled on the table. Its dead, oval eyes are black, mouth agape, belly distended. I saw the shocking footage again last night, or thought I did. It was actually my laptop screen going dark, after I fell asleep in front of Netflix.

Musician donates to USC to help create endowed chair to recognize Dr Joseph Sugerman, who treated her for years

Legendary singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks has given $3m to the University of Southern California’s medical school to recognize the physician who has helped care for her voice throughout much of her career.

The major donation supports the creation of an endowed chair in otolaryngology at USC’s Keck School of Medicine in honor of Dr Joseph Sugerman, an ear, nose and throat specialist from Beverly Hills who has treated the singer – along with other performers and patients – for many years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• International recipes inspired by the World Cup

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

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

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

• How to make your toothbrush last longer

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

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

Best electric toothbrush overall:
Laifen Wave Pro

Best budget electric toothbrush:
Odonta PowerPlus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Georgiou, beverage manager, Alta, London W1

The magic of easy-make ice-cream combined with the comfortingly familiar flavours of the classic Italian dessert

I can be a real creature of habit when it comes to ice-cream. You could present me with the most creative flavoured scoops in the fanciest gelato shop and I will unfailingly choose mint chocolate chip, pistachio or coffee – not at the same time, of course, I still have some sense. I recently came across a tiramisu ice-cream and my interest was piqued; it’s one of my favourite desserts. Here, I’ve turned it into a no-churn version for ease and added a mascarpone layer to stay true to the original dessert.

Restaurant dining is a terrific and expensive treat, so how can you be sure to get the best from every menu? Experts give their advice, from looking for the strangest dish to going easy on the booze

For many of us, going to a restaurant is a real treat, so you want to make the most of every mouthful. From starters to small plates, how can you ensure that you have the best possible dining experience? Restaurant critics share the insider secrets to ordering well when eating out.

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

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hundreds of people applied to adopt beagles from a breeding facility – but ‘these are not ordinary dogs’, says one rescue worker

In May, 1,500 beagles were released from Ridglan Farms, a breeding and bioresearch facility near Madison, Wisconsin.

The event made headlines. Soon, a deluge of tear-jerking videos followed, showing the lab beagles experiencing the outside world for the first time. Millions of people watched the dogs touching grass and instinctively paddling their paws at the sight of water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The best screen-free activities

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

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

A new survey reveals the average person in Britain will spend 41,000 hours flicking idly between news apps and social media – and, in all likelihood, getting increasingly miserable

Name: Doomscrolling.

Age: The term first emerged in 2018, but took off in 2020 (when the doom got especially heavy).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Amandaland actor on her statue phobia, what she’d like to say to her mum, and lusting after Keanu Reeves

Born in Dublin, Philippa Dunne, 44, trained at the Gaiety School of Acting and co-founded a comedy group called Diet of Worms. Her TV work includes Derry Girls and This Is Going to Hurt. Since 2016, she has played Anne Flynn in the BBC sitcom Motherland and its spin-off, Amandaland, now in its second series; her performance won her a Bafta nomination this year. She is married with a daughter and lives in London.

When were you happiest?
Any time I’m in rehearsals.

The country’s bears are one thing. Its tree roots are quite another. And then there is the gorse my wife tumbles into

I’m on a plane, in the middle seat between my wife – on the aisle – and a stranger who is occupied on her phone. I too am occupied, with work I should have finished before we left.

My wife, a nervous flyer, is in a restless mood. She snatches my laptop and begins typing. I wait, arms folded.

The carefree scene in the ancient Chinese city of Kashgar prompted the photographer to reflect of his own sources of happiness

Kuanglong Zhang lives in Shenzhen, in the south of China, and was visiting the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar when he took this photo. Close to the borders of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, it is ancient and landlocked; distinctly different from the modern port city he calls home. Zhang remembers being captivated by the unfamiliar streets and alleys. As he explored, he came across two brothers playing football after school.

“I used the telephoto lens on my phone to make the contrast between the children and the painted yellow buildings stronger, and the composition cleaner,” says Zhang, who is the 2025 Mobile Photography awards’ photographer of the year. “I set up the shot so they’d be on the left and right side of the frame to create a sense of visual balance, and, as both of them are facing left, it gave more space on that side so the image doesn’t feel cramped.”

The seven-month-old, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, was in his mother’s arms when soldiers fired on family in Hebron

Israeli troops killed a seven-month-old Palestinian baby in the occupied West Bank and injured his parents after opening fire on the family’s car, despite it having complied with an order to stop.

Soldiers opened fire on Friday on a car carrying the infant and his parents in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron. The seven-month-old, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, was critically injured, evacuated in critical condition to a hospital, where he later died.

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

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

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

A botched tumbler promotion on the anniversary of a pro-democracy massacre unleashed a boycott, police investigation and political firestorm

It was a PR nightmare: customers smashing Starbucks branded tumblers and mugs as fans deleted loyalty apps and cashed out prepaid balances. Amid the uproar, government ministries cut ties with the coffee chain and apology notices were pasted on Starbucks stores across South Korea.

The initial shock may have passed, but the anger remains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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