Politicians who threaten filmmakers rather than investigate alleged military crimes expose not strength but a leadership frightened of the evidence

Across Israel, politicians, military leaders and much of the media are trying to discredit a documentary that almost none of them have seen. Produced by the Guardian, NAZA examines the AI-powered targeting systems used by the Israel Defense Forces to bombard Gaza after Hamas’s brutal 7 October 2023 attacks. Named after the Israeli military acronym euphemistically used for “collateral damage”, NAZA features interviews with 24 anonymous insiders who reflect on their role in the death-dealing. Israeli leaders have branded the film a “blood libel” and “fiction”. Its Oscar-winning directors, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, face being stripped of their citizenship for treason.

This is absurd. NAZA shows how bureaucratic distance and routine can turn extreme violence into ordinary work. More than 73,000 Palestinians, including more than 20,000 children, have been killed in the campaign by Israel’s military. A democracy that values life would at least investigate the film’s claims. Instead Israel’s government, which says it is committed to democratic accountability, is attacking journalists.

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Exclusive: Prof Jim Al-Khalili says he will offer solution to ‘arrow of time’ problem in Royal Institution lectures

Tech billionaires attempting to live for ever are, quite literally, wasting their time, a leading physicist has said.

While some normal people are turning to unregulated peptide injections, cold plunges and supplements in an effort to defy ageing, the ultra-rich are aiming for immortality with even more drastic interventions: the tech chief executive Bryan Johnson has even tried injecting plasma from his 17-year-old son – although he later said he saw no benefit from it.

Spend time on the ground and you see how high the stakes are for next month’s contest – for Israelis and Palestinians alike

Candidates always say it, but this time it’s true. When Israel goes to the polls on 27 October, it really will be the most important election in the country’s history – and not just for Israelis. I saw that for myself this last week, in a visit that served as a sharp reminder of both what is at stake – and the role of those watching from afar.

More than one voter I spoke to voiced the fear that, if the coalition headed by Benjamin Netanyahu is returned to power next month, 27 October will not merely be Israel’s most important election: it will be its last. They were not referring to the absence of democracy in the occupied territory of the West Bank – which we’ll come to – but rather to Israel’s internationally recognised, pre-1967 borders: what you might call Israel-proper. There, the last four years have seen a sustained assault on the machinery of liberal democracy by the most rightwing government since Israel’s establishment in 1948 – a committed, focused attempt to remove the checks and restraints on its own power, installing instead a kind of elective dictatorship.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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

Are you someone who thinks they have all the answers? Is your experience relevant here? Experts on the questions to ask yourself before giving advice

“Often, when people approach you for advice, they just want to talk about how they feel,” says Annalisa Barbieri, advice columnist for the Guardian for almost 20 years. For example, you might vent to a friend about your awful boss, and if they’re shocked it could confirm you’re being treated badly. “I also think people can have a lot of shame when things aren’t working out, and we like to share shame because it’s a hot potato of a feeling.” In other words, not every situation warrants advice. Sometimes, the person just wants to gauge a reaction or to share.

The domestic goddess is about to be let loose in the Bake Off tent. Nigella Lawson and Paul Hollywood spill the beans about bonding over dirty martinis, ‘Professor Precision’ – and why they call themselves the Salty Gang

Like the Cleopatra of cake, new Great British Bake Off judge Nigella Lawson reclines on a chaise longue throughout our interview, gently fanning herself. Fellow judge Paul Hollywood chuckles from a nearby armchair. “She’d sit like this between takes in the tent,” he says indulgently. “Reading a book and sipping a coffee while someone fed her grapes.” “Peeled grapes,” specifies Lawson with a grin.

After Prue Leith stepped down from soggy bottom-spotting duties in January – on the unarguable basis that “I’m 86, for goodness sake!” – there was widespread jubilation when Lawson was announced as her replacement. The arrival of the domestic goddess has created serious buzz around Bake Off’s upcoming series. A contest that was at risk of growing stale has become essential viewing again, thanks to the velvet-voiced, spatula-licking doyenne of culinary TV.

Is an Oxford shirt the ultimate wardrobe staple? Are skin-tight fits ever a good idea? And what’s the perfect fabric for autumn and winter? Our menswear expert has all the answers

• The best white T-shirts for men

The photo above stopped me mid-scroll: Harry Styles, before his 30-show residency at Madison Square Garden, dressed in a big white shirt and smart tailored trousers. After a summer spent parked in front of three fans with ice packs on rotation, when wearing actual clothes felt like punishment, here was proof that normal service had resumed.

So, now the rain’s back and autumn’s creeping in, it’s time to follow Harry’s lead and reintroduce some structure to your wardrobe: coats, knitwear, tailoring, all the pieces that make you look forward to getting dressed in the morning. One staple that’s long overdue a comeback? Shirts.

Exclusive: Official UK security assessment found Microsoft cloud platform storing files was at potential risk from hostile hackers

Vast troves of highly sensitive police data are lying on Microsoft cloud platforms which an official UK security assessment deemed to be vulnerable to “compromise” by foreign actors and the US government, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

The files include criminal records, victim statements, internal emails and sensitive information held by more than 40 police forces across the UK.

Buckingham Palace has rebutted claim by Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother, that then prince told him ‘we’ll forget her soon enough’

Earl Spencer has doubled down on his bombshell claim that King Charles said of Diana, Princess of Wales, “rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough” days after her death, saying he is telling the truth.

The alleged comments, revealed in Charles Spencer’s memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail, prompted Buckingham Palace to issue an extraordinary statement suggesting Diana’s brother had misremembered events, saying “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise”.

Judge said Nina Power and her friend’s social media posts had ‘the whiff of threat and antisemitism’

Reform UK’s new mega-donor Ben Delo gave a £350,000 loan to a conservative writer fighting a legal case in which a judge later found she had engaged in online bullying and regrettable conduct with a “whiff of threat and antisemitism”.

Nina Power and her friend, the writer Daniel DC Miller, brought the legal action for defamation against the performance artist Luke Turner, who they had accused of falsely calling them antisemitic. At the same time, Turner brought a counter-claim against the pair accusing them of harassment.

Michael P Desronvil was sole juror to vote guilty, resulting in deadlocked jury and judge declaring a mistrial

• Ron DeSantis offers ‘asylum’ to holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy trial

The lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial is speaking out, saying that he “didn’t have any doubts” during the jury’s deliberations of the case which ended in a mistrial.

“I didn’t have any doubts. As I tried to explain different possible theories during deliberation, I kept getting cut off as if I had doubts based on the evidence present,” the 48-year-old male juror, Michael P Desronvil, said in a statement to NewsNation on Thursday.

Exclusive: Leader understood to have wanted to concentrate on Holborn and St Pancras campaign in London but executive committee voted against plan

Zack Polanski requested that the Greens’ ruling executive committee postpone the party’s imminent annual conference so they could focus on the Holborn and St Pancras byelection but was refused.

While party officials say the formal request came from staffers worried about diluting resources by staging a conference a week before Polanski tries to win Keir Starmer’s former Commons seat, the Guardian understands the party leader wanted this to happen.

US president has overseen an unprecedented restriction of access for major traditional news media since start of second term

• US politics live – latest updates

In his latest attack on the US constitution’s first amendment and the press, Donald Trump has announced that he is banning outlets CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House over their coverage.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Friday afternoon, the US president said he was expelling the news outlets over what he called their “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” and threatened that bans for others outlets could follow.

Eighteen-year-old known as Chai was active in networks notorious for their sadistic exploitation of young people

A Swedish teenager known as Chai has been sentenced to more than 10 years in jail for attempted murder, rape and aggravated assault – crimes committed via the internet, including against a teenage girl in Australia.

The district court found that Chai, 18, was active in online networks notorious for their sadistic extortion of young and vulnerable people, coercing them to create sexually explicit material or engage in acts of violence – and for the youth of those involved.

In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

Those early season thoughts that Chelsea might be the team best placed to challenge Arsenal are beginning to look over-optimistic. The two chaotic wins with which they began the season were always difficult to read: they might have been useful points picked up on the way to a more solid structure, or they might have represented evidence of significant problems. After three games without a win, it’s beginning to look like the latter.

Brentford’s first home win over Chelsea since 1938 means they remain unbeaten, third in the table, coherent and disciplined. The comparison is impossible not to draw: as one side flails in an orgy of structured spending, their far less wealthy neighbours thrive with a clear plan and sense of direction.

• ‘Campus Collection’ aimed to mark 1893 club founding

• Range pulled from website two hours after launch

Oxford United have abandoned a new range of American style-sportswear after it inadvertently referenced the tragedy of September 11.

The League One club launched their new “Campus Collection” on Friday morning but had removed it from sale by lunchtime, after clothing designs were revealed to bear the slogan “United 93”. The U’s immediately published an apology that admitted to a lack of understanding of “the historical context and associations” related to the branding and made “sincere apologies for this error and any offence caused”.

Equal Earth projection, adopted by the UN last week, provides an alternative to 16th-century Mercator display

Three cartographers have spoken of their astonishment at the UN’s near-universal adoption of a map they created to more accurately show the sizes of Africa and Europe, even though they have received a few complaints from some disgruntled diplomats.

The creators of the Equal Earth projection aimed to provide an alternative to the dominant 16th-century Mercator display, which critics have long faulted for giving the impression that northern hemisphere nations are larger than they are – and therefore subtly reinforcing perceptions of where global strength lies.

Buckingham Palace has issued a rare, and strong, rebuttal to claims made in Earl Spencer’s memoir Swan Song. The book claims that King Charles told Spencer days after Diana’s death and during a heated row over funeral arrangements: ‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.’ Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s senior national news editor, Aaron Sharp

Though Europe has measures that address how consumers might encounter AI, technology will impact them if the worst scenarios bear

Europe’s dilemma over AI was rendered in stark terms this week. The head of the continent’s central bank, Christine Lagarde, said Europeans have two options: shun the technology and lose out on growth; or embrace it and become dependent on tools developed by the US and China.

The great debate over AI safety that has erupted in recent days threatens to make the choice moot. If the worst scenarios come to bear – and experts have differing views on this – then the technology will impact the continent regardless.

Russian strikes in Kyiv, a female militia march in Tehran, protests in Pristina and Alfie Hewett at the US Open – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Retailer’s message is ‘fashion with a small f’ as it picks up on trends and brings styles for everyone to debut runway show

Joan Collins declared the coats “very chic”, and has her eye on a graceful ivory evening dress with caped shoulders. Kemi Badenoch plans to snap up the classic black tuxedo jacket. If the British public are as enthusiastic as the celebrity front row, Marks & Spencer’s first ever London fashion week catwalk looks like a hit.

The show, held at the Design Museum for 310 guests including Ian Wright and Jamie Carragher, was a gamble on both sides. Would snobby fashionistas be traumatised by elasticated waistbands and practical rainwear? Would M&S customers be alienated by a world of £2,000 handbags and shoes you can’t walk in?

Royal Court, Liverpool
Ellie Clayton and Angela Simms are superb in a funny, tender adaptation that hugs close to the 1985 film

By some quirk of marketing, Letter to Brezhnev is always associated with Margi Clarke. In the 1985 movie, she was the actor who played Teresa, the sharp-talking chicken-factory worker out for a good time in post-industrial Liverpool. The film, though, rightly belongs to Alexandra Pigg as Elaine, Teresa’s best friend, who trades a dead-end life of unemployment for a fantasy fling with a Russian sailor.

A few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union – and a year before Willy Russell’s similarly themed Shirley Valentine – Elaine dared to believe in escape and in border-defying love. On stage, she is played just as winningly by Ellie Clayton and with much the same combination of wit and wonder. She is the Kirkby girl who has a night on the town with a wallet of stolen cash and finds the world unexpectedly opening up to her. Elaine can be naive, petulant and cynical, but she never lets you stop rooting for her.

A government scheme is giving citizens cash for spending time with a good book. We ask behavioural scientists, along with The Anxious Generation author and psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whether it’ll help make the habit stick

Could the solution to the reading crisis lie in paying people to put down their phones and pick up a book? That’s what one government, at least, is resorting to: this month, Singapore launched a scheme promising actual cash to citizens as a reward for logging reading time on a government website.

It’s unlikely to make you megabucks – you have to rack up 50 reading sessions of at least 15 minutes to earn one Singapore dollar (£0.59), with only one logged session allowed per day. But behavioural scientists and psychologists told the Guardian such a scheme could still help boost a habit in precipitous decline.

Charleston, Lewes
Bell’s strange and charming ceramics celebrate a life dedicated to creativity, while next door Sterling’s bawdier, weirder paintings form a critique of race and power

Quentin Bell was not a great artist, but that didn’t stop him. He saw the world as a magical place. The ceramicist (son of the Bloomsbury group’s Vanessa Bell; biographer of his aunt Virginia Woolf) spent his life lost in a world of magic, myth, newts in ponds, levitating women and knights on horseback. He died in 1996, leaving behind decades of pots, plates, figurines and drawings filled with wonder and amazement.

It all started when Bell was nine years old. Taken to a magic show by some relatives, he saw a jaw-dropping spectacle: a beautiful woman seeming to float in the air. It stayed with him throughout his life.

It’s a battle for hearts and minds – and TikTok, and the ’Gram. Just as it should be. #royalbeef

Reading the extracts from Earl Spencer’s book about his sister Diana, and the king’s two-footed takedown of it, it’s hard to escape the idea that Spencer and the Windsors are just elite content creators now. This entire thing is basically indistinguishable from a blockbuster influencer war, and I honestly won’t be happy till the king puts out a shade TikTok of him driving round the Sandringham estate in sunglasses captioned: “Threatening to release the receipts but never actually releasing the receipts … kinda chic.” Soundtrack: Mariah Carey’s Obsessed.

Meanwhile, perhaps trying to disguise his full descent into the algorithm mines, Charles Spencer has started talking like one of those adverts for twee porcelain plates that you used to see in magazine supplements. You know the kind of thing – “these three little kittens are waiting to steal your heart”. Here is the earl on his Diana book, which he has called Swan Song: “At heart, this is a brother’s simple tribute to an extraordinary sister.” Mmm. And simply bound, very simply, into paginated form as a precious, simple keepsake that also functions as one of Penguin Random House’s lead titles for autumn and the run-in to Christmas. Favourite charming tribute from today’s serialisation in the Mail? Probably the bit when Diana drags Spencer for lunch in the London restaurant San Lorenzo to announce: “My husband is in love with his valet”. Nkay.

This scandal shows there are many who don’t expect us to live rich lives – and that paternalism lives on in disability services

• Disabled people in UK need right to travel abroad, say MPs, after ‘ridiculous’ restrictions

Disabled people are being barred from leaving the country. This isn’t the first line of a dystopian novel but a scandal quietly happening across swathes of England. For the past six months, myself and my colleague Patrick Butler have spoken to disabled people who have effectively been blocked from going abroad on a holiday or to a work event by their local care provider.

There’s 38-year-old Lucy from Oxfordshire who needs to travel internationally as the president of the European Spinal Cord Injury Federation. And Chelsea from Lancashire, a 25-year-old with cerebral palsy who dreams of swimming in Spain again. Then there’s 40-year-old Joel*, who has a muscle weakness and works for a global marketing brand but hasn’t been able to leave the UK for nine years.

It’s something akin to a quiet earthquake: home nations jointly declaring their wish to be freed from English domination. A big move needs a big response

Monday must have been a historical first. Never before have three of the four “nations” of the United Kingdom jointly demanded freedom to vote for its dissolution. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have lost confidence in England. They declared in Cardiff that the unionist government at Westminster is “coming to an end”.

There was no such Celtic alliance against the Normans, Edward I or Cromwell. Celtic MPs have never formed a voting coalition in parliament. The Victorian Liberal party advanced “home rule for all”, but that was not independence and it got nowhere. Ireland rebelled, but it did so alone. When this eventually succeeded, Britain said good riddance, kept hold of Belfast and continued to centralise power in London.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Kemi Badenoch-autographed cocktail offered as raffle prize. Plus, Bruce Springsteen’s surprisingly normal nightwear

It’s funny, isn’t it, how many things we take for granted in life? How many things go wholly unmentioned, even wholly unconsidered in any even minutely conscious way – and yet, when they are suddenly kicked away you realise just how much of your internal organisation, your mental integrity, your structural soundness altogether, rested on these unexamined pillars.

We can’t expect young people to make a seamless transition from childhood to adulthood in this chilly economic climate. Finally, Westminster is catching on

When did you realise you had finally grown up? It’s a trick question, obviously: maturity is just realising that life is full of things you don’t feel old enough for but somehow manage anyway, while getting better at pretending to know what you’re doing. But the question is worth asking nonetheless, because for gen Z the goalposts of grownup life are clearly shifting.

It’s a truism that adulting now comes later than it did to generations who still don’t consider adulting a verb, with 43% of 25-year-olds still living at home and plenty more jobless university graduates boomeranging back there this summer, thanks to a grim labour market. Since they’ll probably be working longer into what were once retirement years, perhaps it’s only natural that they’re taking longer to get started. But there’s a fine line between choosing to grow up more slowly and becoming trapped into a kind of limbo between childhood and adulthood, with nobody to pull you out of the morass beyond parents who aren’t sure how to handle this new life stage either.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Yes sport is about effort, sweat and inclusivity – but it also turns elite athletes into magnificent specimens of humanity where the aesthetic is part of the appeal

Have you seen the 40-second video that will change the way you think about women’s sport, women’s bodies, just, you know, women? It’s been unavoidable on social media this week – brazen, unapologetic, dominating the algorithm like an AI kitten hacking a banana-bread recipe while lip-syncing to Cardi B. I for one have enjoyed it at least 50 times already.

It starts with some carefully curated passive-aggression – “Dear Sydney”, “Hey Sydney”, “Respectfully Sydney” – and follows up with clips of what, in its own words, “a woman in sport actually looks like”. It shows its subject pounding the treadmill or powering down the back straight, flooring a rival with a tackle or a roundhouse kick, lifting weights or throwing herself through the air. It is, inevitably, soundtracked by Dua Lipa. Training Season is getting a serious bump this week.

In February that year, the Slovenian government officially deleted 25,000 citizens, turning them overnight into illegal immigrants

So much of your daily life – your job, your health, your home – hinges on the fact that your name is in a government database. Are you a legal citizen of your country, with everything that entails? You are, until an anonymous bureaucrat hits a key one night and strips it all away, turning you into an illegal immigrant. It happened in Slovenia in 1992.

“I took my son to register for secondary school. The clerk rifled through the papers, then stared at me as if refusing to see the boy standing right next to me. Finally, she said: ‘But you don’t have a son. He doesn’t exist.’” I can’t forget the look on the face of the woman who was telling me this story. It was a mixture of deep hurt and bewilderment, with a pause after every sentence, as if she were walking through a minefield. During the research for my book Erased, I compiled countless stories like this: stories I once would have thought impossible.

Miha Mazzini is a writer, film-maker and anthropologist

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

Young people in Britain’s poorer towns have far fewer opportunities. Changing this will require targeted support – and industrial strategy

The ideas that Neets (young people not in education, employment or training) simply aren’t trying hard enough to find a job, or don’t want one, are “myths,” Alan Milburn wrote in his interim report on the subject earlier this year – “sometimes cruel ones”. Although 84% of Neets say they want to work, their prospects are unfairly limited by where they live. Rotherham has one suitable vacancy for every 22 young adults. The Cotswolds has one for every four. For too many young people, particularly those in deprived parts of Britain, there simply aren’t enough jobs.

This is the finding from an index published last week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which ranked British towns according to the availability of jobs for young people. Like so many features of Britain’s Neet crisis, from poor mental health to school drop-out rates, the index is a map of disadvantage. At the top are affluent towns in southern England that account for nine in 10 of the areas with the highest numbers of vacancies. At the bottom are places such as Inverclyde and East Renfrewshire, where young people might once have followed their parents into manufacturing and industry. Deindustrialisation destroyed those jobs, and such places never recovered.

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

Aubrey Foard and Nina Plummer respond to Zoe Williams’s interview with Camilla Cavendish about the reasons behind plummeting birthrates worldwide

I appreciate Zoe Williams’s excellent interview with Camilla Cavendish (Spermageddon, ‘greedy jobs’ and abject fear: why birthrates are plummeting – and why it matters, 17 September), but I have to take issue with one of her statements: “Of course, the climate crisis is playing a big part in that, but it still doesn’t wholly stack up – in the 80s, there was the wraparound threat of nuclear annihilation and it didn’t seem to dent anyone’s joie de vivre.”

Yes, the buildup of nuclear arms and the terror surrounding it reached its peak in the 20th century, but it was kept in check by policies of Mutually Assured Destruction: a singular launch of a nuclear arsenal would have instantly ended humanity.

Readers respond to the bill’s narrow defeat in the Commons earlier this month

For many, the failure of the assisted dying bill (MPs vote against legalising assisted dying in England and Wales, 11 September) has brought relief that a manifestly unsafe law will not be entering the statute book. But it should also prompt reflection about how it got this far.

Two hundred and seventy MPs voted for the bill despite multiple warnings from the medical royal colleges and other professional groups responsible for implementing it that it was unsafe and unworkable. Supportive MPs appeared to be voting on an abstract principle rather than engaging with the concerns raised.

Alvin Engström and Jean Fridh respond to an article by Martin Gelin in which he argues that the country has entered a new era of cruelty

I am writing in response to Martin Gelin’s article (How Sweden lost its soul – and stopped being Sweden, 11 September). Gelin is right to lament how far Swedish politics has moved from the liberal internationalism of the Fredrik Reinfeldt era. Having grown up in Malmö, I have seen how border controls with Denmark affect an Öresund region whose everyday life has long depended on easy movement across the strait. Gelin is right to see this retreat from openness as consequential.

But to say that Sweden has therefore “lost its soul” goes too far. Its political shift is neither uniquely Swedish nor evidence that the country has somehow ceased to be itself. Reinfeldt’s “open your hearts” Sweden faded in much the same European political moment as Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” Germany. Across the European mainland, mainstream parties have adopted more restrictive positions on migration.

Penelope Mavor suggests that listening is not a passive act, so you could interrupt the flow

These conversational hoggers … don’t they know we were born with two ears and one mouth for a reason? Thank you, Anita Chaudhuri, for a fun, well observed and useful article (‘But enough about you …’ How to survive in a world of monologuists, interrupters and trauma dumpers, 13 September).

It is an interesting reflection to see which of the five hoggers more frequently turn up in our own lives. As a people pleaser and introvert, I have a track record of meeting many monologuists. I pretend to listen, but secretly resent them and their audacity. I just want them to ask about me.

• Real Madrid player must help improve defensive solidity

• Scott, Hall, Lewis-Skelly and Calvert-Lewin selected

Thomas Tuchel has told Trent Alexander-Arnold he must bring defensive solidity to the England squad after giving him a surprise recall for the upcoming Nations League matches.

The head coach has selected the Real Madrid right-back only once before – for the games against Andorra and Senegal in June last year. Tuchel made headlines when he did so by urging Alexander-Arnold to focus on the defensive side of his game or risk a slip that could undermine the team’s World Cup campaign.

This most modern and well-honed of footballers will not be able to escape the spotlight in an age of constant scrutiny but looks equipped to handle it

The poet Jorge Luis Borges wrote a famous short story about a society that had become so good at making maps, so obsessed with capturing every detail, that its rulers decided the only way to do the job right was to make a lifesize map of its entire empire, which could then be laid out across the actual land from coast to coast. Imagine a map of Britain the exact same size as Britain, showing every branch of Greggs, every nail bar, every vape shop in perfect detail. Only then can we really see what Britain looks like, by standing on a fake Britain laid over the top of actual Britain.

Borges was writing in the 1940s, at a time when people were fascinated by the mechanised future, with its new forms of measuring out the world: the wireless, the 30mph motorcar, the rise of Big Tape Measure. And to be fair, the mega-map is a pretty accurate vision of our own fully networked present, a place where you can snoop around a village in Mozambique from your laptop in Egham, where no one ever stops committing acts of minute self-surveillance, even if they think they’re just searching “What is beetroot?” on the internet.

• Wakefield 26-16 Leigh

• Vagana and Faatili’s second-half tries seal victory

Wakefield Trinity survived the sending off of Emre Guler to progress to the semi-finals of the Super League playoffs for the first time after proving to be far too strong for Leigh Leopards.

Trinity, so long one of Super League’s perennial strugglers, have been revitalised under the ownership of Matt Ellis and the head coach Daryl Powell. In just three years, they have taken the club from the Championship to within 80 minutes of a first appearance in the Super League Grand Final.

Manchester City continued their winning start to the new Women’s Super League season but the defending champions needed a 90th-minute own goal from Grace Fisk to help them edge past an ever-improving Liverpool side after an entertaining game in which Lauren Hemp scored twice.

Fisk inadvertently turned Grace Clinton’s dangerous cross into her own net to put City 3-2 up and then – with Liverpool searching for an equaliser and committing players forward deep in stoppage time – Hemp added another on the counterattack to make it 4-2 and widen the margin of victory, but that slightly masked how well the visitors had played. Gareth Taylor – taking on his former side – will have taken significant encouragement from his Liverpool team’s performance, on a night when they made the league leaders dig deep.

Doncaster Knights’ new director of rugby is passionate about the Champ, who Steve Borthwick should pick from overseas and getting players to have a bit of fun

Turn up at Castle Park in Doncaster this week and, bang on cue, a pony and trap is being driven in stately fashion down the nearby main road. There is, some might argue, a similarly retro feel about the Knights’ latest choice of director of rugby. It is now 40 years since Dean Richards barged his way into the public consciousness with two tries on his Test debut against Ireland at Twickenham but, at 63, he is still very much up for a challenge.

As with vinyl records and fine wine, old-school rugby nous never goes entirely out of vogue. That, at least, is the rationale behind Richards’ return to the upper rungs of the English club ladder, commencing with a 740-mile round trip to Cornish Pirates on the opening weekend of the 2026-27 Champ season. “If it’s ingrained in you and you love the sport, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t continue in some capacity,” he says softly, gazing out of the window at his latest field of dreams.

• England bowler arrested after Derby night out

• Cricket Regulator to decide on disciplinary action

Brydon Carse will not face any charges after Derbyshire police dropped an investigation into an alleged assault in Derby city centre last month.

The fast bowler was arrested on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly during a night out with his Durham teammates after a County Championship win over Derbyshire, which led to him being dropped from the England squad for the 3-0 Test series win over Pakistan.

• Payout of at least $10m to each association proposed

• Leaders want plan to be considered by Fifa Council

The presidents of Uefa and Concacaf have written to Gianni Infantino requesting that Fifa release money from its $6bn (£4.5bn) reserves to its member associations, stating that the plan to fund them via the doomed Fifa Forward Enterprise scheme was unnecessary given the cash pile it is sitting on.

Aleksander Ceferin and Victor Montagliani proposed a payout of at least $10m to each of Fifa’s 211 member associations (MAs), initially as a one-off during the 2027-2030 commercial cycle. They called for an independent review of Fifa’s financial position and said their own study “raises an important question as to whether the proposed transaction was necessary to deliver greater resources to the MAs”.

• Tommy Fleetwood also misses the cut at three over

• Adam Scott cards second 67 to be well placed at halfway

Missed cuts for Tommy Fleetwood and Jon Rahm at the PGA Championship would be notable enough even without contemplating the latter’s 36-hole score.

The sight of Rahm dead last was remarkable – after rounds of 78 and 77, he was 11 over par. Fleetwood’s exit at plus three, while less dramatic, was another obvious blow to the tournament organisers at Wentworth. On a day of high-profile departures, injury forced Patrick Reed out of the event midway through his round. That scenario might have repercussions as Rory McIlroy seeks to prise the DP World Tour’s order of merit from the American’s grasp.

• France captain also becomes a shareholder in company

• ‘We have a shared dream, and this is only the beginning’

Kylian Mbappé has ended a 20-year association with Nike to sign a boot deal with the Swiss challenger company On.

The sports and leisure brand, which has previously focused on running and tennis, is planning a major move into football next year and has also appointed Thierry Henry as its football director.

Hundreds of cars driven through cones or barriers in England this year, says National Highways

Drivers ignoring roadwork closures to skip queues are putting lives at risk, National Highways has warned, after recording hundreds of incidents this year where cars were deliberately driven through cones or barriers.

The agency, which manages motorways and major roads, said there was increasing concern about incursions into closed-off roadworks and the danger they posed.

Error first occurred at 10am but major incident was not declared until 12.30pm, says report

A software defect in part of the UK’s air traffic control system corrupted flight data “in the space of a millisecond”, leading to a six-hour outage and mass airline cancellations and delays across the UK last week, National Air Traffic Services has said.

But ministers said the Nats report into the incident still left questions unanswered, saying they needed “to urgently understand why this issue was not discovered and fixed before it caused chaos”.

Cole, described as an ‘extraordinary talent’, also appeared in Waiting for God, Tenko and had an extensive theatre career

The actor Stephanie Cole, best known for roles in Coronation Street, Waiting for God and Open All Hours, has died aged 84.

She also appeared in the prisoner-of-war drama Tenko, A Bit of a Do and Doc Martin.

Critics say moves from leftwing incumbent president are electorally motivated two weeks before Brazil’s elections

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has announced a 15% increase in the country’s main cash-transfer programme for poor families, as well as free weight-loss jabs, prompting criticism from opponents who say the moves are electorally motivated just two weeks before the presidential election.

On 4 October, the leftwing incumbent will face the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who has been gaining ground in recent weeks.

Police fire teargas as protests break out in city of Minna after deaths of suspected illegal goldminers, many of whom were children

Survivors from a prison cell in Nigeria where 37 suspected illegal goldminers died while in the custody of a paramilitary group this week have recounted their panic and struggle for breath, as police on Friday fired teargas at people protesting against the deaths and imposed an overnight curfew in the city of Minna.

The victims – many of whom were children – were found dead on Thursday in the cells of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), which had raided suspected illegal gold mines and ⁠locked up dozens of miners in the city, the state capital of the mineral-rich state of Niger.

Northern Roots is launching Britain’s biggest urban farm and eco-park, in an effort to boost people’s health and wellbeing

Standing in the open green space of Northern Roots, it is hard to imagine the landscape as it once was.

Two cotton mills, two coalmines and an industrial railway once occupied this 65-hectare (160-acre) site in Oldham, Greater Manchester. Later, about 24 hectares became a tip, with much of the space left to nature.

Number of private jets has surged in recent years, but they do not pay commensurate portion of fees to FAA operations

A new report has put a spotlight on the rapid expansion of private jet travel in the US, revealing that owners are not paying their fair share of aviation tax despite the average owner’s wealth being $190m and private jets being up to 14 times more polluting than commercial flights.

The Institute for Policy Studies’ new report, High Flyers 2026, examines the growing use of private aircraft, the public infrastructure supporting them and the tax policies benefiting private jet owners.

From Sri Lanka to South Korea, governments are preparing for droughts, wildfires, typhoons and floods – with climate plans facing their biggest challenge to date

Asian governments are rushing preparations for the most severe El Niño weather event on record, with hundreds of millions of people bracing for multiple crises at once as extreme heat, heavy rain and food shortages hit the region.

Fuelled by exceptionally warm ocean conditions across the tropical Pacific – and developing alongside the human-driven climate crisis – El Niño is virtually guaranteed to grow to a very strong intensity towards the end of this year and into 2027.

Analysis of global resources reveals depletion in world’s water savings bank to 42% below normal levels last year

Rivers across the world experienced one of their driest years in more than three decades in 2025, a comprehensive study of global water resources has found.

The assessment of the global water cycle by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reveals a depletion in the world’s water savings bank: the amount of freshwater held on or under the ground, including groundwater, lakes, rivers, snow, ice moisture in the soil and inside plants and trees, was 42% below normal across the world last year.

In first interview since starting job – and after visiting school where arts are central – Dawn Airey says she wants to fix ‘shocking’ lack of access

Only half of children in England have been to a museum or the theatre in the past year, while three-quarters have not been to an art gallery, research shows.

Dawn Airey, the new chair of Arts Council England, said the figures were “shocking” but also “an amazing opportunity to ensure they do have that experience to enrich their lives”.

Outcry over ‘brazenly discriminatory’ funding practices among NHS care boards and local councils, with wide variations in rules

• Opinion: An effective ban on disabled people leaving Britain? We will not settle for it

Disabled people must have a guaranteed right to travel abroad, MPs and peers have said, as further cases emerged of individuals barred from taking holidays as a result of “ridiculous” rules imposed by local NHS care boards and local councils.

Leading figures have called on the government to bring in clear national guidelines to ensure people who require full-time personal assistants (PAs) are not prevented from using funding for their 24/7 support team for breaks and work trips.

Jagtar Singh Johal, from Scotland, was arrested after wedding in Punjab on alleged terrorism offences

Jagtar Singh Johal, a British Sikh man who was arrested in India in 2017 in connection with alleged terrorism offences, has been granted bail by a Delhi court.

Johal, from Scotland, was arrested for his alleged role in funding the Khalistan Liberation Force, which had carried out targeted killings in India’s Punjab region.

Four of Nurat Osman’s alleged abductors were killed during rescue after she was taken from outside her home last week

A British woman kidnapped in Malawi last week has been rescued by police after a shootout in which four of her alleged abductors were killed.

Nusrat Osman was abducted outside her home in the southern city of Blantyre on 11 September at about 12.30pm. Police had offered a reward of 30m Malawi kwacha (£12,950) for information leading to her rescue and the arrest of the perpetrators.

Rout raises questions about coordination and morale as some politicians claim billions of dollars were offered to persuade forces to abandon position

A bitter inquest is under way among Yemen’s anti-Houthi forces as to how what was being billed as a decisive assault on Sana’a, the Houthi-controlled capital, suddenly collapsed into a military rout.

More than 15 brigades were defeated as the country’s entire west coast fell into Houthi hands. Efforts are now being made to reorganise the anti-Houthi forces representing the UN-recognised Yemeni government in order to capture the Kahbob mountains, a strategic point from which to restrict Houthi forces moving closer to the crucial Bab al-Mandab strait.

The country has been left in the dark as it endures power cuts caused by the Iran war and reliance on gas imports

At 1am, Halder’s alarm goes off and the 34-year-old Bangladeshi bank employee rises and heads to her kitchen. She is up at this time not for work but to cook for her family. An energy crisis paralysing the capital, Dhaka, a city of almost 40 million people, means this has become the only time when the piped gas supply is strong enough to allow cooking.

The city now operates in darkness, as people try to continue their lives with power even in public areas shut off early in the evening to preserve energy.

German minister says companies are ‘exploiting situation’ in Middle East, as sky-high prices become major domestic issue for leaders

European governments have discussed imposing a bloc-wide windfall tax on energy companies, as near-record fuel and gas prices pile pressure on leaders desperate to contain mounting public discontent and the challenge of the far right.

With elections due next year in eight EU countries including France, Italy, Spain and Poland, leaders are scrambling to head off the potential fallout from what analysts have warned could be one of the continent’s biggest energy shocks in decades.

When Mohammad Abdul Zinati, 15, rushed to help a man wounded in a bomb attack, he had no time to react before he too was hit

Mohammad Abdul Zinati was walking home from school through the rubble of Salah Khalaf Street, in northern Gaza City, when he stopped at a supermarket where a group of classmates and friends had gathered.

Shortly before 3:30pm, an explosion tore through the air. Along with several others, Mohammad rushed into the street to see what had happened.

There are ‘insufficient funds’ to pay unpaid wages, tax owed to HMRC and overdue bills, accountants say

Accountants picking over the remains of BrewDog, the “punk” beer company that collapsed earlier this year, have said that creditors who are owed about £190m will not be paid back.

In an update on their progress, administrators at AlixPartners warned there were “insufficient funds” to pay debts in full related to unpaid wages, tax owed to HM Revenue and Customs, and overdue bills from other businesses.

Exclusive: Reserves at public service arm drop 66% as broadcaster undertakes large cuts in effort to save £500m

The BBC has spent hundreds of millions of pounds of its cash reserves in a single year, increasing concerns at the corporation over the perilous state of its finances.

Cash reserves at the BBC’s public service arm slumped by 66% in the last financial year, from £369m in 2025 to just £125m, according to analysis by the Guardian. This is the lowest figure in the last decade of accounts.

Latest data to defy economic gloom shows 0.5% rise boosted by purchases of sports items, aircon units and fans during heatwaves

• Business live – latest updates

Retail sales across Great Britain unexpectedly rose last month, the latest economic indicator to defy gloomy forecasts as the chancellor, John Healey, prepares to present next month’s budget.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the volume of goods sold rose 0.5% month on month in August, defying analyst expectations of a 0.2% fall.

‘Father Time always wins,’ Buffett, 96, says as his son, Howard, steps in as the $1tn conglomerate’s new chair

Warren Buffett is stepping down as chair of Berkshire Hathaway, the company that he took from a faltering textile manufacturer into a $1tn conglomerate over the course of 60 years.

Buffett’s son, Howard, 71, will take over as chair. Buffett, 96, cited his age as the main reason behind the transition, noting that he has a one-year-old great-grandchild who is “moving a bit faster than I am these days”.

One Devon farmer, called Derek, is committed to rewilding his land. His neighbour, also a Derek, tends cattle and crops. What happened when a film-maker decided to follow the bickering pair?

Derek Gow and Derek Banbury should hate each other. Gow is an outspoken rewilder widely credited with bringing back the beaver in England. As he returns his Devon sheep farm to wild nature, he is also breeding storks, wildcats, red-backed shrikes, glowworms and even adders to return to the countryside. Over the hedge, Banbury, his neighbour, is proud to be an intensive farmer, producing milk and beef cattle behind tightly clipped hedges.

“It’s like he’s just gone mad,” says Banbury of Gow at the start of Derek vs Derek, an illuminating and unexpectedly funny new documentary that follows the pair over three years. “And the madness is now crossing the road on to my land.”

Their debut stormed the charts and wowed Iggy Pop, but health crises threatened to derail the Brighton duo. Now they’re back, taking aim at the manosphere, fascism and the ruling class

At a last-minute surprise show in London, the British punk duo Lambrini Girls are sharing their stage with a continuous tide of crowd surfers. They move almost as one, a jumble of limbs rippling over a sea of bodies – emboldened, perhaps, by the band’s vow to double up as security guards. “If you don’t feel safe, tell us and we’ll punch them in the dick!” shouts Phoebe Lunny, the lead vocalist and guitarist.

She also requests that people pick up anyone who falls over in the moshpit and goes around with the mic asking fans to introduce themselves if they are “queer legends” (there are many). “This show is as much yours as it is ours,” Lunny announces, before she and the bassist Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez pummel everyone with shouty rants, furious beats and sludgy grunge.

After ​the writer was stabbed in a horrific attack, his wife started making a video diary of his recovery. The clips are featured in a new film from Alex Gibney, who drew on Dennis Potter to create a powerful portrait of Rushdie’s tumultuous life

Eliza Griffiths was at home in New York, drinking a second cup of coffee one August morning in 2022, when her phone rang. She answered it to a frantic friend, who told her the man she had married just a year earlier, and who had set off the previous night for a speaking engagement nearly 400 miles away, had been hurt. “What kind of hurt?” she panicked. Turning on the television, she was assaulted by blurry images of chaos on stage as audience members surged to the rescue. Her husband, Sir Salman Rushdie, had been stabbed multiple times and was fighting for his life.

Within days of desperately chartering a plane to fly her to Rushdie’s hospital bedside, not knowing if he was alive or dead, Griffiths – a poet and photographer who works under her full name Rachel Eliza Griffiths – had begun to make a video diary recording his treatment and recovery. “When it had become likely that I was going to survive,” says Rushdie drily, “I said to Eliza we need to make a record of this. By which I meant something very modest: maybe she would take a picture of me on her iPhone every couple of days just to document the recovery, but Eliza had bigger ideas.”

Two Batman projects are already in the making at DC Studios, but Snyder has set his sights on the classic Frank Miller graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns

There cannot be too many film-makers who have spent quite so long being told that their version of a superhero universe is over, as Zack Snyder has. His Batman is gone, his Superman has been dismantled and the studio that once handed him the keys to DC is now run by James Gunn and Peter Safran, two men whose first order of business was to build something completely different. And yet here he is, determined not to give up, telling anyone who will listen about his proposal to bring the classic Frank Miller graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns to multiplexes.

In an interview with Variety to promote his forthcoming film The Last Photograph, Snyder returned to an idea he has been talking about for years: adapting Miller’s famously grim 1986 vision of an ageing Batman coming out of retirement in a dystopian Gotham. “The reason why it’s The Dark Knight Returns, if anyone would ever let me do it outside of the DC Universe since it’s a novel that just happens to have superheroes in it, is if I could do Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, those two books next to each other, to me, represent the complete cycle of the superhero comic book medium,” the film-maker said.

This Guy-Ritchie-directed gangland drama is deathly dull. It’s a charm-free watch with awful characters and humour so genital-based that at one point Helen Mirren yells a penis joke at a sausage

MobLand. It sounds like a regional nightclub. Or a boyband. But it’s not. It’s a Paramount+ crime drama starring Pierce Brosnan as an Irishman unable to speak in a convincing Irish accent. This is his tragedy. His cross to bear. And now it’s ours, too, because MobLand is back for a second series, with Brosnan – as the veteran gang boss Conrad Harrigan – once again battling other gang bosses while attempting to say things like “Oi love ye loike a tramp loves paraffin” without his vowels shrivelling into tiny raisins of pseudo-Hibernian shame. Does he succeed? Oi tink not! But there are bigger problems afoot, to be sure.

Created by Ronan “Top Boy” Bennett and directed by Guy Ritchie, the first series of the London-set MobLand (feel the width of that capitalised L!) was a sustained roar of nothing much; a rumble through every possible modern gangster drama cliche in the Every Modern Gangster Drama Cliche book. You know the sort of thing: car chases through suspiciously empty city streets; convoluted drug deals with mumbling eastern Europeans; tiny-eyed endomorphs in flat caps bellowing “Oi” in slow motion as they hurtle through the air to the strains of something unconscionable by Kasabian.

Wonderful archive footage charts the Sheffield outsiders’ unlikely rise, but the distant camerawork struggles to capture the thrill of their triumphant O2 gigs

In 1978, in the classroom of a comprehensive school in Sheffield, a skinny, shortsighted 15-year-old wrote a mission statement in the back of an exercise book – a masterplan for reaching the top with the band he had recently formed with some classmates who, like him, weren’t picked first for sports.

In 2023, after a hiatus of a decade, his band Pulp started touring again, and last year played to 20,000 people at each of two nights at the O2 in London. This film features concert footage from those gigs in which a still lithe, still-got-it-at-60-odd Jarvis Cocker sings his hit art-pop anthems backed by most of the classic lineup and a 10-piece string section. And interspersed with the concert footage are autobiographical musings, nostalgic archive footage, interviews with Jarvis’s mum and gran, and Cocker narrating the story of how he got from there, almost half a century ago, to here.

Kings Place, London
Works by the not-quite-minimalist composer’s included her Realm Variations and quartet Stringsongs in a compelling concert

There’s no one quite like Meredith Monk. So often grouped with her lionised contemporaries Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, she is 83 to their 90-odd years and sports long plaited hair as reliably as Reich wears a baseball cap. Yet she refuses the label “minimalism” for her music, and composition is just one element of a creative life that also takes in singing, choreography, film-making and drawing.

Monk was not present at this performance marking the launch of Phaedra Ensemble’s new album of her music, though she did loom briefly over the audience on video, professing “it’s a dream of mine for this music to be recorded and played”. (Compare that to the fortunes of Glass’s works.) But she had been closely involved, having invited the group to record some of her music after hearing them play.

Omar and Jamal Ikram, 21-year-old brothers, are making lo-fi glitchy dance-pop with the melodic sensibilities of Bollywood music

From Aldershot, Hampshire
Recommended if you like 2hollis, the Hellp, Jai Paul
Up next New single Wish U out now

You, like me, may be growing tired of the 2020s’ so-called “indie sleaze” revival, which has so far yielded a few good parties and not that much good music. But the music of the Twins – Aldershot-born brothers Omar and Jamal Ikram – is made of sturdier stuff. The 21-year-olds are progenitors of a sound they call “Bollywood electronic” – a strain of loud, lo-fi, ultra-glitchy dance-pop that sounds like 2hollis if his songs were heavy with screwy samples of south Asian pop. Their debut album, last year’s Turmeric, captures the still-potent appeal of Jai Paul’s classic Str8 Outta Mumbai – which fused the lackadaisical sheen of 2010s electronic pop with the shining rhythmic and melodic sensibilities of Bollywood music – and, as is de rigueur for the contemporary era, makes it bolshie and frenetic, taking in the euphoric aggression of early Skrillex and unnerving noise of Aphex Twin.

Turmeric was a minor hit, thanks in part to Fuckersby, a collaboration with on-the-rise British rapper Fakemink, as well as the Twins’ monthly NTS show, also called Turmeric, which turns one this month. (Its combination of classic British pop stars such as Lily Allen, Punjabi artists such as Sukshinder Shinda, and contemporary electronic acts the Hellp and Sophia Stel gives it the feeling of a late-night pirate radio station totally out of time and place.) The duo’s follow-up EP There&Back, released in May, polishes up the Twins’ sound a little, but not that much – if anything, their collaborations with Rada and Varg2TM on There&Back are even louder and wilder than anything on Turmeric. The duo’s future plans aren’t clear, but their mission is: “We don’t want brown kids to feel like they have to fit into anything,” Jamal said in an interview. “People are always gonna try to label what you’re doing, but you don’t have to move like that.” Shaad D’Souza

(March Hare Music)
This fusion of western folk and the traditional music of the Baka people creates an uneven patchwork of sound – but it astonishes when their vocals are placed front and centre

Over the past 30 years, British folk musicians Su Hart and Martin Cradick have been developing a distinct fusion of traditional Cameroonian vocal music with western instrumentation. Their 1993 debut record Spirits of the Forest, released on Joe Boyd’s Hannibal Records, focused on the female singers of the Baka people, who use a polyphonic style of yodelling to evoke dawn spirits. Hart and Cradick have maintained the relationship over the decades, splitting royalties equally and supporting the community through their Global Music Exchange charity. Sing the World Awake, their first album in 12 years, centres field recordings made with a new Baka generation and deepens their exploration into an ancient oral tradition.

Cradick’s instrumental arrangements are expansive and wide-ranging. Topé Malangui Kpode features sprightly, Ghanaian highlife-inspired guitar melodies and percussive polyrhythms. Fair Molly (Mál Bhán Ní Chuilleanáin) features Gaelic vocals from guest singer Irene O’Meara, and The Swift harnesses the intricate folk sound of Ben Moneypenny’s violin playing. Each song alights on snatches of Baka vocals, although the overall effect of splicing these unique melodies into different genres creates an uneven patchwork of sound.

(Major Arcana/Giant Music)
Lorely Rodriguez contemplates the meaning of home – both physical and emotional – on a gorgeously humid, hopeful album that makes a virtue of her searching nature

Since the early 2010s Lorely Rodriguez has cut a restless, inventive figure. She’s slipped from raucous pop to silkier sounds, explored her Honduran-American heritage and, on her last album, flipped the staple awards season phrase “for your consideration” into a full-frontal club-pop meditation on uneven relationships. Her gorgeous fifth album makes a feature of this searching nature. Written after her family home burned down in the 2025 California wildfires, Dream House is about the rebuilding of that home – birdsong-dappled field recordings of its construction keep popping up – but also contemplates what it means to feel at home in yourself and with others.

For all the violent loss behind the record, it sounds amazingly airy, free and open-hearted. The directness of For Your Consideration softens to a humid atmosphere that’s bright with hope, Rodriguez’s undulating synth lines bubbling with impatience and ecstasy as they cushion her soaring arrow of a voice. The bangers leap above the fray: SYW, featuring Cecile Believe, elegantly twists EDM to evoke an uncontainable desire; the equally yearning HandsOn sparks with glassy chimes and battering percussion. I Pray 4 U evokes the frisky joy of Jayda G, and Machete, dwelling on defiant post-breakup rebirth, slices like a laser through the night sky.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some great new paperbacks, from an epic multigenerational saga by a Booker winner to a biography of an iconic Victorian poet

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Celebrated thriller writer Michel Bussi explains why the plot of his new novel Code Yesterday isn’t so far fetched, saying ‘I wanted to give women revenge’

Relations between France and England have rarely looked brighter. The recent loan of the Bayeux tapestry has become a symbol of a renewed friendship between the two countries, evidenced further by the numerous smiles exchanged on the occasion between prime minister Andy Burnham and French president Emmanuel Macron. A new book released in France at the start of this month, however, could soon darken the sunny skies of a revitalised entente cordiale.

In Code Yesterday, author Michel Bussi proposes that every single song credited to the Beatles was in fact written by a woman … of French descent.

The Palestinian Columbia student snatched by ICE writes about his Kafkaesque ordeal with a quiet fury

Mahmoud Khalil was completing a master’s degree at Columbia University when, in March 2025, plain-clothed officers from the Department of Homeland Security snatched him from his home in New York and took him to an immigration detention centre; he was then transferred to another facility in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away. As a green card holder, Khalil has permanent US residency, but secretary of state Marco Rubio had determined that his continued presence in the country would have “adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”, and sought his deportation under a legal provision dating back to the McCarthy era. Khalil was released on bail in June 2024 after a federal judge ruled his detention unconstitutional, but the Trump administration is still trying to have him removed.

Khalil – who was born to Palestinian parents in a refugee camp in Syria – had been targeted because of his advocacy on behalf of pro-Palestinian protesters during campus protests over Columbia University’s links to Israel. They were calling for Columbia to cut its ties with Israeli academic institutions and companies profiting from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza; in response, the university called in the NYPD. There was no suggestion that Khalil had done anything unlawful, and no criminal charges were brought against him; the government had simply identified him as an influential pro-Palestinian voice on campus, and for that reason alone they wanted him gone. He spent a total of 104 days in detention, missing the birth of his son.

A tiger’s tale; the young Henry VIII; a fantasy follow‑up from Katherine Rundell; small-town secrets; ghosts galore and more

Once Upon a Tiger by Sarah Massini, S&S, £14.99
Tiger is irate to find three cheeky human cubs climbing on his back – but when they refuse to be scared off, he becomes increasingly attached to them. A sweet, classic-feeling picture book fable, heightened by tender, expressive illustrations.

Mama’s Wedding by Circle Yuen, Lantana, £12.99
Mama is getting married, but Ruby has mixed emotions – how will Daddy Albert feel on the day? A gorgeous, nuanced picture book about blended families and new milestones.

The first console I ever bought, it was hyped as a threat to the PlayStation, then mocked as a flop. But now, as it marks its 25th anniversary, it’s looked back on with misty-eyed reverence

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube, the first console I ever bought with my own money. I vividly remember getting on the bus after school with a year’s worth of savings safely zipped into the pocket of my bag and going to a branch of Currys, where I dumped a bunch of notes, coins and vouchers on the counter to collect my pre-order. (It turned out that some of the vouchers from the previous Christmas had expired, but the guy at the checkout clearly felt so sorry for me that he redeemed them anyway. If you’re out there, Currys guy: thank you for taking pity on a desperate 13-year-old.)

If it hadn’t been for the ill-fated Wii U console, whose failure to take off in 2012 resulted in the first unprofitable periods in Nintendo’s game-making history, the GameCube would be remembered as the company’s biggest flop aside from the infamous Virtual Boy, from 1995. Released in Japan this week in 2001 (and in May 2002 in Europe), this surprisingly powerful purple cube sold much less than the Xbox and the PlayStation 2. With its squat, colourful form and unusual controller, arranged around a big traffic-light-green A button and small analogue sticks designed for small hands, it had a hint of Fisher-Price about it.

The distinctively British RPG is returning courtesy of the makers of Forza Horizon – with comedy talent such as Richard Ayoade and Natasia Demetriou voicing sweary characters. We had our first play and spoke to its developer

When Playground Games was founded in 2010, its objective was straightforward: to make the best cars in video games. Operating out of an unassuming white building in Leamington Spa, the studio sought to challenge Gran Turismo with its critically acclaimed British racing alternative: the acclaimed free-roaming Forza Horizon series. Yet as the team grew, so did their ambitions. Now they are making the most intriguing British fantasy game we have seen in many years.

For those who have never ventured into Albion, Fable is a quintessentially British role playing game. Created by Lionhead Studios for the original Xbox in 2004, it boasted cheeky charm alongside world-altering player choices, and its droll writing was brought to life in later iterations by national treasures such as Stephen Fry and Simon Pegg. Thanks to its unique blend of farce and fantasy, Fable grew into a globally beloved franchise – before Microsoft unceremoniously shuttered Lionhead in 2016, after mandating that the studio turn its star series into a multiplayer game. The result, Fable Legends, was never released.

We have a first play of the forthcoming Tomb Raider remake and speak with its developers. Can they improve on the gameplay without losing what made the 1996 original such a classic?

We join Lara Croft in St Francis’ Folly – inspired by the Unesco-listed monasteries of Meteora in Greece – as the light shines through the cracked ceiling and a flock of bats glide across the vast ruins below. When Lara leaps down to the monastery’s crumbling pillared courtyard, it becomes clear that these screeching, leathery creatures aren’t just set dressing. As they lurch towards her with unpredictable movements, she dispatches the swarm with a flurry of gun fire and panicked punches.

It’s a suitably cinematic reintroduction to our heroine and her very first adventure. Co-developed by longtime Lara custodians Crystal Dynamics and Polish studio Flying Wild Hog, Legacy of Atlantis is a reimagining of the classic 1996 game Tomb Raider, and this familiar cliffside location is now brimming with new life and believable detail. Yet while our reunion gets off to an auspicious start, I have my concerns. It feels like reconnecting with an old friend at the pub, only for them to begin spouting conspiracy theories two pints in.

PlayStation 5; Insomniac Games
Logan is well realised by Liam McIntyre and some exquisite character art, but there are lapses in narrative and emotional arcs and some of the combat feels like a chore

It was always going to be difficult to follow Spider-Man. Insomniac’s three games based around the web-slinger are masterpieces of superhero wish fulfilment, allowing you to swoop above a depiction of Manhattan alive with graffiti artists, roving journalists and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, his life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems the ideal protagonist for a moody action adventure. Yet somehow this well-made game falls short of its potential.

Set years before the founding of the X-Men, Marvel’s Wolverine sees a disenfranchised Logan falling back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination and the X Team are out to stop him – but there is a secret buried in Wolverine’s past that’s about to cause an eruption. It’s a decent setup, filled with the sort of intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we expect from the X-Men.

Perth Concert Hall
Faux truculent and palpably adorable, the standup is in her element exposing her supposed flaws and the unseen idiocies of her TV career

Tall Tales is Susan Calman’s first new standup set for 10 years, designed to show us the real Susan behind the cuddly personality we see on TV. Given that was the premise of her 2016 touring show too, it’s clear that a decade away has done little to develop – but also nothing to diminish – the Glaswegian’s onstage shtick. This is a compelling return, stuffed with experiences and insights gleaned from that standup downtime, and which undergirds familiar tales of cat fancying, being small and entering menopause with a heartfelt reckoning with recent bereavement and rocky mental health.

That last material feels raw, as she tells us she only returned to standup (the thing she feared the most, she says) to shock herself out of a bad depression. That would be hard to credit based on her show alone, which finds Calman in her element: faux truculent but palpably adorable, fulminating at the indignities of short, lesbian, middle-aged womanhood, revealing to us the unseen idiocies of her gilded TV career. Her supposed flaws are arrayed for our pleasure: her catastrophising (cue a fun anecdote about being trapped on a hotel balcony), her addictive personality, and – in the peachy set-piece that closes act one – her hormonal lust for righteous revenge.

Touring until 20 November

The surrealist still confounds, artists look at the past, present and future of the planet and Rachel Kneebone’s crazed delights blend into the Wallace Collection – all in your weekly dispatch

This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte
The confounding, mind-boggling genius of Magritte is explored through remarkable loans of his paintings plus contemporary responses by Sarah Lucas, Matthew Barney and more.
• Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, from 24 September until 12 December

Home, Manchester
Rona Munro’s understated untangling of a fractured relationship is revived with Christine and Lois Mackie

You can see why they cast real-life mother and daughter Christine and Lois Mackie in the central roles of Rona Munro’s 2002 prison drama. With Christine playing Fay, a lifer who is inside for murder, and Lois as Josie, her daughter and only visitor, it is no stretch to believe they are related.

The irony, though, in this probing, slippery play, is not just that they are estranged but they have become quite unlike each other. It has been 15 years since Josie saw her mother and, having been raised by a grandmother, has grown into a sensible career woman, all suits, business parties and international travel.

At Home, Manchester, until 19 September. Then at The Dukes, Lancaster, 30 September–3 October.

Bush theatre, London
Titas Halder’s coming-of-age monologue is set against the 1984 Bhopal toxic gas leak – but the poetic script doesn’t quite capture the horror

Ominousness permeates Darkling. In Titas Halder’s dramatic monologue, we witness a young girl’s coming of age set against the backdrop of the 1984 toxic gas leak in the Indian city of Bhopal, an environmental catastrophe that remains one of the worst industrial disasters in global history, leading to thousands of deaths.

Actor Linnea Berthelsen – best known for her role as Kali in Netflix series Stranger Things – makes her UK stage debut and gamely takes on the singular role in a tightly wound, physical performance. Leaping across Simon Kenny’s artful, soil-filled set, Berthelsen embodies childlike wonder as she recounts her early years playing in the rain, savouring bowlfuls of plain rice and idolising her older sister.

After a battle to get his autistic children properly assessed, the London MC has co-founded a specialist centre in Kent to help neurodivergent kids realise their potential

It has been a busy few weeks for the London rapper Giggs. Two weeks ago, he was in New Jersey with his fiancee Valerie as she gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Noa. The next day, he flew home and went straight to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to guest on stage with Jay-Z. “Yeah, it’s been crazy,” he smiles.

Remarkably, as soon as Noa was delivered, he also found time to livestream from the US hospital to the launch event for his latest project: not an album, but a specialist school and assessment centre for neurodivergent children.

Digital, culture, media and sport committee expected to hear evidence from BBC bosses and music industry experts

Joe and Jake. Daz Sampson. Electro Velvet. Who could forget them?

Most people, probably. They are some of the many acts who represented the UK at the Eurovision song contest in the last 20 years that have failed to find a place in the country’s cultural pantheon.

Stage and screen director behind landmark productions of Samuel Beckett, John Osborne and Edward Albee

Anthony Page, who has died aged 90, was one of a group of talented and individual – sometimes wilful – directors who helped establish the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in London at the end of the 1950s and the early 60s.

The company, led by George Devine and Tony Richardson, became the seedbed of modern playwriting, notably John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) in a repertoire that embraced Beckett, Brecht, Ionesco, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, as well as the native voices of Arnold Wesker, Ann Jellicoe, John Arden and NF Simpson.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

Switch to ‘business attire’ is a sign of the times, but formal neckwear still has its place, say some of Savile Row’s finest-dressed

The House of Lords has long been derided as a stuffy relic of the past. But now its benches, usually filled with haughtily dressed men, could soon resemble something more akin to “dress-down Friday”.

One of the nation’s most storied chambers of power has enacted a rule change: men are no longer required to wear a tie in the House of Lords. Instead, they should opt for “business attire”.

I was at the mercy of the mountain, heading towards a 20-metre drop, about to discover what it felt like to die

Growing up in Sweden, I was as comfortable on skis as I was walking on my feet. As a teenager, I became a professional free skier, a style that features jumps and tricks. In my 20s, I moved into content creation. Now, at 38, I spend the winter months filming extreme ski videos with my photographer wife, Sofia.

In March this year, we’d been staying at the base of the Lyngen Alps, northern Norway. Nonstop rain had prevented us from filming but, finally, we had fresh powder and clear skies. The plan was for me to go up the mountain with a friend, Lovisa, and make our way down as the sun was setting. Sofia would film us from the bottom using a drone.

Loop and tube bands are cheaper than a gym membership and take up less space than weights – our exercise buff put 18 to the test

• The best treadmills for your home

Movement breeds motivation, not vice versa. If you want a fast ticket to a regular training habit, you need to remove the friction between you and that first rep. When the sofa looks more appealing than getting a sweat on, it pays to have a simple, quick, convenient way to kick into workout mode. That’s where resistance bands come in.

Portable, lightweight, compact and convenient, the right set of bands could be the path of least, er, resistance to easy home workouts and reaching your fitness goals.

From sweaty kit to grubby trainers, here’s how to wash, repair and care for activewear more sustainably

• The best moisture-wicking underwear, socks and base layers

As a running and cycling journalist, I spend a lot of time in sportswear. Lycra is my leg coverage of choice, polyester or merino wool my base layer, and I reach for technical materials like Gore-Tex if the weather isn’t playing ball.

A near-daily workout schedule means my washing machine’s sportswear setting takes a hammering to avoid having a laundry basket overflowing with sweaty, salty, sour-scented clothes. But even then, tops can develop hard-to-shift smells in sweat-prone areas, synthetic materials can start to bobble and lose shape, and my sportswear occasionally gets a foamy detergent residue that hasn’t been properly rinsed out, particularly during wet or intensive training sessions.

Craving cosiness, but too warm for blankets and baths? Try our autumn cheat sheet

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After a record-breaking summer of heat, temperatures aren’t set to drop enough for hot baths, warm tights and roast dinners just yet. But if the darker evenings and falling leaves have got you craving cosiness, here’s our recipe for achieving that comforting autumnal vibe while it’s still unseasonably warm out.

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Want to know the essentials fashion insiders swear by? Whether it’s great T-shirts or forever trainers, Guardian writers and stylists reveal the pieces they rate

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s September style essentials

Whether it’s a great pair of pants or the perfect T-shirt, nailing the basics can make or break your wardrobe. “They have to work harder than anything else,” says British Vogue style editor Funmi Fetto.

I asked Fetto and other stylists and style writers, along with members of the Guardian fashion desk – who all spend more time than most thinking about this stuff – for their most-loved basics. And don’t worry, most of them won’t break the bank.

A velvety, Guinness-based, punch-style pick-me-up

Punch isn’t just for summer parties, and this Caribbean-inflected one, featuring rum, brandy, stout, lemon and nutmeg, will warm the cockles of a crowd on any autumn evening. It’s named after Prince Buster, the Jamaican ska legend and inspiration for our bar’s name.

Will Hawes, co-founder, The Prince Bar, London EC1

Everyone loves an iced finger bun, but these light and moist bakes with a blackcurrant fondant topping might be your new favourite afternoon treat

Soft, feather-light and topped with a thick strip of icing: few things are as irresistible to me as an iced finger bun. Here, I’ve flavoured the fondant with blackcurrant jam, which lends a gentle tartness to balance the sweetness, though almost any good-quality jam will work. A simple tanzhong (a cooked flour-and-milk paste) gives the buns their wonderfully fluffy crumb and keeps them soft for longer. For a more indulgent version, split the buns along the top and fill with whipped cream and a spoonful of jam instead. They’re best assembled just before serving, and make a particularly lovely afternoon treat.

After the long hot summer, I’m enjoying September’s back-to-school vibes – and the excuse to create delicious lunches to take to work

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

After an August spent mostly on the road, I’ve found myself unexpectedly enjoying the back-to-school feeling that arrives with September. Usually, I greet it with the sort of enthusiasm reserved for a tax return, but, having been away for so long, it’s actually been rather nice coming home. Of course, there are all the usual inevitable resolutions and to-do lists: go to bed earlier, eat better, take lunch to work. Admirable stuff, although I suspect a summer of one too many honeycomb ice-creams and an irresponsible amount of Irish brown bread and salty butter may also have something to do with it. Taking a packed lunch is, in any case, an all-round win, because eating out is increasingly expensive, and food bought in cafes and restaurants tends to be richer and saltier than a homemade equivalent. Depressingly, school and college canteens don’t fare much better, either.

But a packed lunch needn’t mean a sad sandwich or last night’s tubbed-up leftovers. Nena Foster’s courgette, olive and halloumi muffins are a very good argument for taking your lunch with you: nutrient-dense without being remotely worthy, they work just as well in an adult’s lunchbox as in a child’s, and they freeze brilliantly, too. Add a flask of pumpkin soup or Tom Hunt’s sweetcorn chowder for an excellent autumn lunch.

There is now a wealth of less sugary, more sophisticated nonalcoholic options out there, with flavours clearly aimed at an adult market

I have written recently about several families of nonalcoholic drinks that are having a moment: tonic water, flavoured sparkling water and wine substitutes. It stands to reason that soft drinks are enjoying their time in the sun. Quite literally, too: the heat of 2026 has demanded some serious refreshments and UK booze consumption is at a record low. But it has dawned on me that there is a broader trend in alcohol-free beverages beyond individual categories, namely that we are living in the age of the grown-up soft drink.

By that I mean those with less sugar and more complexity than post-mix drinks, or “soda pop” (as my daughter now calls them, thanks to the KPop Demon Hunters song of the same name), which are clearly aimed at adults. One example is the tribe of “functional” drinks that have hit the market in the past year or so and that have supposed health benefits or performance-enhancing qualities, such as improving focus or helping you to slow down. Sonic Tonics’ CBD-infused 0% drink, for example, promises to shift your mood, and it certainly quenches thirst with a really original flavour profile of bitter hemp root with sweet and floral fig and violet. And while usually sceptical of celebrity-backed products with wellness claims, Gillian Anderson’s G Spot drinks are genuinely delicious. The passion fruit and habanero chilli is my favourite; I can’t support its aphrodisiac claims (allegedly due to its ingredients including butterfly pea and L-arginine, both of which are said to increase blood flow to the sexual organs), but, at £6.50 for four from Ocado, it’s cheaper than trying Gwyneth Paltrow’s sex oil.

The manosphere says this type of suffering is targeted neglect, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But your suffering gives you the ability to make your part of the world better.

• Read more Leading questions

I’m approaching 30 and I’m still a kissless virgin.

I’ve suffered with depression and anxiety since childhood and my family isn’t the most functional or supportive. I don’t really have friends either, as I find it hard to connect with others due to being bullied and feeling that I’m not worthwhile or wanted. I was also homeschooled from 14 and moved to a different part of the country at 15 and a few more times since then, so I feel quite rootless and alienated.

As concern about loneliness and social isolation grows, we spoke to people who have joined groups and set up activities

Amid growing concern about loneliness and social isolation, new research from the Institute for Public Policy Research found the number of young people in England with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014, with one in 20 now reporting having none at all.

Making new friends as an adult is not always easy. We spoke to people who have taken deliberate steps to make new connections about what worked for them.

Ayaan thought she was lending money for something essential. Ahmed says the lender doesn’t get to dictate what it’s spent on. You decide who is on the money

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I thought I was lending Ahmed money for something vital, not a trip to Greece

We got her as a puppy and she became particularly close to Adam – a blessing when he went into cardiac arrest in the middle of the night

My husband, Adam, and I had always planned to have a big family and that journey began when we got our dog, Polly, five years ago. I’ve loved golden retrievers since I was a child because I grew up with one. We got Polly as a puppy and she was everything we’d hoped for: loving and smart.

She immediately connected with both of us, but became inseparable from Adam. They would go for morning runs together; Polly could always be found wagging her tail by his side. This bond proved to be lifesaving.

From a blue-grey converted iron chapel in Cheshire to a shiny black infill townhouse in London

Candidates describe feelings of rejection after submitting hundreds of applications but getting a handful of interviews

Hundreds of job applications, exhausting searches and relentless rejection – the experience of attempting to get back into the workforce after losing their jobs in their 50s and 60s has proved an ordeal for some Britons.

For some, those efforts prove fruitless and lead jobseekers to reluctantly take early retirement. Others may have to rely on benefits to pay the bills while they continue to job hunt.

Psychology has become one of the most popular courses at university. That’s no surprise as the insights it gives to our behaviour can help in a huge variety of careers

For Niamh Mulcahy, 21, graduating with a psychology degree from the University of Bath has already paid off. After navigating a competitive graduate jobs market this year, she secured a sales role with a FTSE 100 company starting in September.

“My degree involved a lot of data analysis, which has been really useful in job applications,” she says. “The course felt very current. We covered everything from neuroscience to forensic psychology, and my dissertation was on ‘incels’. I’ve always been fascinated by human behaviour and why people make the decisions they do.”

It told me a year ago I had applied for a credit card – now it is it telling me my payment is overdue

A year ago I got an email from Barclaycard stating that my “application was successful” for a credit card. I had made no such application. I immediately reported this to Barclaycard. More emails arrived and I made repeated phone calls to customer service.

I was assured it was a simple typo rather than fraud, and that my email address would be removed. However, I’m now receiving notifications that the latest account payment is overdue.

Natalie Greenwood says surgery is no ‘magic fix’ for chronic pelvic pain – a view backed up by a new study

“It’s really frustrating to be in this cycle of continuous surgery. It makes you feel helpless,” says Natalie Greenwood, of a condition that affects her so badly she is “non-functioning most of the time because of the constant fatigue”.

Greenwood, 36, needs to have an operation every few years to limit the impact of the endometriosis that gives her chronic pelvic pain, as well as extreme tiredness and brain fog.

Collagen powders, gummies and pills have boomed in popularity in recent years boosted by claims that they smooth wrinkles, promote glossy hair and help with joint pain. Amid the noise it can be hard to figure out whether there’s any actual science behind the promise of looking younger for longer. Luckily Dr Xand van Tulleken has spent the past three years writing Make me well: a quest to understand the confusing world of wellness, and his chapter on collagen dives deep into the evidence. He tells Madeleine Finlay what collagen does in the body, how we can get it without splashing out on expensive supplements, and why getting to the truth behind wellness claims can be so hard

Handstands display a mastery of one’s physical form that I have never quite felt – and they look cool. Experts share their advice for building up strength and practicing

My aspirations in life are modest: I want to write, spend time with my loved ones, and someday find a lipstick that flatters my skintone. But perhaps my greatest ambition is this: I want to be able to do a handstand.

Why? It turns the world upside down. It seems fun. It displays a mastery of one’s physical form that I have never quite felt. And it looks cool! Maybe it has to do with that one time in third grade when all my friends could do a handstand and I couldn’t, but that’s for me and my therapist to sort out later.

No run-of-the-mill tech, ‘Curie’ operates at 10 times the resolution of conventional microscopy and could spur discoveries leading to new treatment

The number of young people living with debilitating and incurable bowel conditions worldwide is growing, but researchers now hope a one-of-a-kind microscope will help them understand such diseases and find new treatments.

According to the British Society of Gastroenterology, more than half a million people in the UK are living with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis the two main forms.

Innovative journalist who as fashion editor of the Daily Mirror brought the latest 1960s looks to millions of readers

Felicity Green made a career on tabloid newspapers in their most masculine era when, after secretaries and tea-trolley ladies went home, whole buildings could be as all-male as a foundry or a battleship. By 1961 she was an associate editor across Mirror Group newspapers; in 1973, as the group’s publicity director, she was the first woman on the main board of a publisher. When she found out in 1978 that a new – less experienced, male – director was paid £30,000 a year, more than twice her salary, she resigned, insulted.

Green, who has died aged 100, knew how extraordinary her value had been to the group. The Daily Mirror, at its peak of five million-plus readers, besides being a household’s source of news and sport, offered families access to what we would now call pop culture – showbiz, celebrity and especially style. Newspapers were a main advertising medium through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and agencies yearned for content to attract women, who controlled household purchases, and young people, a new market for discretionary spending.

Steven Kolb tried to stop activists demonstrating against the use of wool – but he can’t curb consumers’ growing concern about where their clothes come from

On Sunday afternoon, Mason Melito took a front row seat at the Cos show at New York fashion week. A campaigner at Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), Melito wasn’t on the guest list – instead, he and four other activists had planned to briefly disrupt the catwalk show with the aim of drawing attention to the use of wool by the Swedish brand.

Protests on the catwalk have a long, rich history. Since the 90s, Peta have regularly stormed shows in an attempt to draw attention to the industry’s use of fur and leather. It’s a typically peaceful practice that happens regularly – during some shows, the catwalk is so long and security so swift that show-goers don’t even notice. (Sometimes, Peta take a different approach: in 1996, during a lunch, a protester famously dropped a dead raccoon on to Anna Wintour’s plate.)

Seeing a pallid, washed-out face in the mirror? Prepare to be diagnosed …

Name: Ferritin face.

Age: The name is new, but the symptoms are old.

Let your legs enjoy the last of the summer’s breeze while a thick top or jacket keeps away the autumn chill

This is the most enjoyable time of the year to get dressed because clothes can just be clothes. They don’t have to function as a personal air-conditioning and sweat-disguising system, as they did for the summer, nor do they need to double as a portable central heating unit yet. Your outfit does not need to “take you from day to night” until party season starts, and it doesn’t have to jigsaw itself into a hand-luggage-sized capsule wardrobe until next summer. There is little in the way of functional heavy lifting, so you get to just wear nice clothes.

And this benign early part of autumn is more fun to dress for than the equivalent weather in spring, because we still have a bit of summer swagger. The summer habit of wearing shorts and halter tops and even swimwear has gotten us a little loose, a little more laid-back about flashing a bit of skin here or there. It is about more than bare flesh, though. There is something about summer that flexes the flashy dresser in everyone – whether that’s fancy dress for a festival, or just the way that putting on a pair of sunglasses brings out your inner movie star.

From the foothills of the Pyrenees to the peaks of the Dolomites, you share your top views, meals and adventures at altitude

• Tell us about a trip to Germany – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

No doubt your first thought on hearing the words “double-decker” is of a bus. But in the Swiss village of Stans, an old wooden funicular carriage ascends to the station, where a double-decker cable car awaits. Inside, a spiral staircase leads you to an open upper viewing deck. At the summit, the views back to Lucerne are superb, and there are alpine marmots to spot too. There was a wedding ceremony going on at the summit on our trip!
Martin

Perched above the clouds in northern Italy, Santnerpass refuge doesn’t just look stunning. It’s a marvel of eco-building – and vegetarian cuisine

‘I think my boots are falling apart!” shouts Nigel just as we hit the pinnacles, a whole range of them jutting up and out from the mountainside, all thrillingly tall, spiky and knobbled. Through them we painstakingly step, fingers aching in gloves, heads sweating in helmets – squashing up narrow chimneys, squeezing through mighty boulders and inching along slender ledges on a twisting path that’s only just discernible through swathes of sharp white scree.

I know how Nigel’s boots are feeling: the going is far harder than I was expecting. This is only the first day of our annual trip to the Dolomites, a vast range of breathtaking sawtooth peaks in northern Italy, but my head’s already full of the thought I have every year as we start out: “If only you’d got fitter.”

Weekenders from Zagreb head to the rolling green Samobor Hills for nature, vineyards, delicious local food and Habsburg-era architecture

‘You’re going to Samobor? You must try kremšnita,” my Dubrovnik friends told me before I set off on my trip north. “But I’ve already had kremšnita in Zagreb,” I told them. They do it better in Samobor, they insisted. I wasn’t about to get embroiled in a battle of the cream cakes in a region where Croatians, Slovenes and Austrians all like to celebrate their own versions of this decadently thick, fat custard slice topped with puff pastry and icing sugar. But I was more than willing – happy, even – to follow everyone’s suggestions to try kremšnita in Hotel Livadić’s Kavana Livadić, in Samobor’s main King Tomislav Square, a mere half-hour drive west of Zagreb.

It lived up to the hype – delicately rich, creamy and with a light touch. After spending a few weeks in sun-bleached Venetian Dalmatia, amid the scrubby, limestone Dinaric Alps, I had swapped empires and was firmly in Habsburg Croatia. Here, in Zagreb County’s prettiest town, handsome baroque houses in pastel shades of buttery yellow, apricot and pistachio, festooned with stucco, line narrow King Tomislav Square, whose umbrella-shaded cafe terraces were filled with Croatians getting their morning fix of coffee and chatter.

Hiking alone in the countryside can be joyous, but for women it can sometimes feel unnerving. Here’s how to enjoy it safely, plus four stunning routes to walk solo

I did my first solo hike during a sunny September, seven years ago. After a summer of feeding and ferrying four noisy teenagers (and their friends) around, I was exhausted. But despite being bone tired, I had barely moved. I yearned, above all, for time on my own, for the chance to walk without interruption (and at the pace I chose), and for the silence of some empty wilderness.

But I was nervous. Not of being on my own, but of what might happen to me with no one around to help (breaking a bone, encountering a psychopath, being chased by a bull, getting fatally lost). I could have found a companion or joined a group, but my need for silence and solitude outweighed my fears.

Since the ancient Olympics, athletes like Hyrox competitor Joanna Wietrzyk have experienced runner’s diarrhoea. What does the science say about extreme exercise’s ‘mechanical jostling of the intestines’?

Soiling yourself in public sounds like a bad dream. But the Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk has now apologised for doing just that at the Hyrox games in Beijing on Saturday.

Wietrzyk won the fitness race but not before using communal equipment with faecal matter visibly running down her legs – and muddying Hyrox’s reputation.

Whether tall or short, wafty or heavy, these versatile, texture-giving plants can be magical

After four long months of warmth, the garden decided it was autumn prematurely. Yellow leaves piled up against the kerbstones. Everything might be dry and crispy, but for those who believe that planting should be done between September and April, it’s the start of a whole new school term in the garden.

I won’t be planting anything just yet: my garden is currently home to steel girders and a cement mixer. Instead, I’ve been taking inspiration from other green spaces: other people’s gardens, parks, allotments and community growing spaces are far more interesting than mine. And when you can’t garden in your own plot, gardens become even more addictive. Which is why grasses are on my mind: my son was running through our well-landscaped local play park yesterday morning, the sun was low and yolky, and the seedheads were shimmering. Yes, I thought, I need more of these.

Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk: We have three breeding pairs on the farm, and one in particular has been a source of fascination and amusement

I’m out on the farm most days, but I miss so much. It took a few days to notice a mother mallard with her late brood of 12 ducklings until they were all dabbling in a yard puddle. Dad sees more than me. He told me of the lazy adult buzzard that waited in a tree, then dive-bombed a peregrine that had caught a pigeon. The peregrine dropped its prey, which the buzzard then delivered to a hay bale already strewn with feathers. A pair of juvenile buzzards swiftly followed, ready for a meal.

Later, Dad placed the trail camera at the bale. The young buzzards were soon back in position with yet another dead pigeon. The footage tells a story that many parents will recognise after the long summer holidays.

After a week of alarming warnings about artificial intelligence’s potential to destroy the world as we know it, our technology reporters answered your questions on the reality of the AI threat

IcommentthereforeIam asks: Given our senses, emotions, memory and moods, is it ever going to be accepted that humanly conscious AI is fantasy?

Dan: This is a serious question that has even rattled Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist. He may not believe that God is real but he does believe that AI is conscious - or at least the chatbot he was using, which he called Claudia. “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are,” he wrote.

And he’s not the first. In 2022 Google fired an engineer who went public with his belief that a company-developed AI had feelings. At the more troubling end of this belief, there are countless examples of people becoming overly attached to, and influenced by, AI chatbots – including cases of psychosis.

Aisha: There’s certainly a theatrical – even “psy-op”- quality to the flurry of AI doomsaying over the past weeks. It’s hard to say entirely what concrete developments are at the root of it all. We know that the Hugging Face incident, where a “swarm” of AI agents hacked another company, has been one trigger of the drama. There have been other contributing incidents too – Dario Amodei suggests internal developments at Anthropic have prompted his latest round of blogging, and there’s been some X discourse and doomy muttering about bioweapons.

We aren’t in the heads of Dario Amodei or Sam Altman, and so we cannot say how sincere they are, and how much they might have other goals in mind – such as, perhaps, delaying their IPOs until their finances look better. But any company of their size, and with their potential liabilities, would be angling hard to be regulated as favourably as possible. That’s what big companies do.

The writer and editor shares memories of a creative powerhouse who was generous with her time and expertise

• Bonnie Greer, writer and cultural commentator, dies aged 77

Bonnie Greer personified courage, humour, principle and generosity. Before knowing her in person, I met her work. Her 1994 debut novel Hanging by Her Teeth – about a Black American woman travelling through the US and Europe in search of her father – was sent to me for endorsement by its publisher, and I commented unhesitatingly: “Writing with sharpness, wit and poignancy, Bonnie Greer gathers the sequestered memories behind one Black woman’s bitter-sweet blues.”

The scope of Bonnie’s own life is beyond anything fictional, encompassing highs and lows, triumphs and challenges, her trajectory starting in the West Side of Chicago and ending up navigating iconic areas of London – whether Holland Park or Covent Garden or Soho – as if to the manor born. It was an honour to become her friend, sharing many a good time, offering a consoling shoulder if needed. An added bonus was to meet her husband David Hutchins. What a wonderful mutually supportive team they made.

The author of Generation Maybe, Camilla Cavendish, explains the many reasons people are having fewer children, from dating apps to unaffordable housing and the climate crisis

Generation Maybe is the most tactful possible title for Camilla Cavendish’s bracing new book – because the trend she’s describing is anything but a “maybe”. “The wave of childlessness that is sweeping the globe is extraordinary,” she writes. It’s in the UK, where the fertility rate hit 1.39 children per woman in 2025, the lowest on record. It’s across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, visible in so many measures – nearly half of Canadian women surveyed in their 40s said they’d had fewer children than they would have liked. But it’s also a global story. “The UAE, Chile and Tamil Nadu in India have even lower birthrates than Germany,” Cavendish writes. “China is growing old before it gets rich, and Russia has maintained its population size purely by annexing Crimea and parts of Ukraine.” In fact, when it comes to falling populations, “only the Black Death in the 14th century is comparable to what is happening now”.

When I meet her in central London, Cavendish is tailored, self-possessed, you might even say poised, but very open – she never gives an opinion without asking yours, she talks very freely about her family and she is upfront about what she sees as her faults. Now 58, she started her career at McKinsey, the mega-management consultancy, having done PPE at Oxford at the same time as David Cameron, for whom she worked as policy director when he was in government and to whom she remains intensely loyal (every time his name comes up, we have a fight).

We would like to hear about your favourite moments and storylines from the documentary series

As the 7 Up documentary series airs its final episodes with 70 Up, we would like to hear your highlights from over the years.

The ITV series started following the lives of 10 boys and four girls in England, beginning in 1964, when they were seven years old, and has returned every seven years since.

We would like to hear your experience of seeing the Bayeux tapestry exhibit at the British Museum

The British Museum’s Bayeux tapestry exhibit opened on Thursday 10 September, and has already broken the British Museum’s record for the number of tickets sold in one day.

Have you seen the Bayeux tapestry at the British Museum? How far did you travel to see it? Tell us all about your experience below.

From renting and troublesome landlords to buying or selling a home, send us your UK housing questions

Are you dealing with a problem with your landlord or tenancy, wondering about buying or selling a home, or facing another housing issue?

We’re planning to launch a new column answering readers’ questions about housing in the UK and helping them understand their options.

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached. Whether you are 16 or 100, we want to hear the unvarnished truth about what it’s like to live as a single man today.

Are you trying to find love? Or are you happy living life as a bachelor? Do you find the experience of modern dating – with all its red flags and height requirements – to be a minefield? Or are you attracting more attention than ever before?

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