By standing behind support act Macklemore, who was removed from the tour for his vocal support of Palestine, these artists are demonstrating the self-sacrifice necessary to stand against those crushing free speech

In a statement about Macklemore being dropped from his US stadium tour for making pro-Palestinian comments, Ed Sheeran defended his own publicly apolitical stance: “If we only ever focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will ever change. There are different approaches to being an advocate for change.”

Every other musician involved with the tour – support acts Finneas (Billie Eilish’s brother), Danish band Lukas Graham and Irish songwriter Aaron Rowe, plus Sheeran’s Irish backing band, Beoga – has made their approach to advocating for change clear, pulling out of the remaining dates to protest against the censorship of Macklemore and to express support for the Palestinian people.

A new map of the world rescales the size of Africa and calls into question our perception of land, power and influence

This month, the UN passed a resolution, brought to the assembly by Togo, to phase out the traditional Mercator map of the globe and replace it with another that shows the real scale of territories. That’s right – when it comes to size, the map of the world we have all grown up with is not accurate. The main loser of land on the Mercator map is Africa, and the new “Equal Earth” map reflects its true proportions. I spoke to our west Africa correspondent Eromo Egbejule about his extensive reporting on the map changes, and why people feel so strongly about it.

Seeing the new map transposed over the old might make you feel oddly disoriented. Logically, there is absolutely no immediate tangible impact on one’s life that comes out of knowing that the entire top part of the northern hemisphere is so much smaller than you were led to believe. And yet, there is still something agitating about it, like you’ve been the subject of a lifelong trick, or at least a breach of trust.

A new report highlights the dangers experienced by those who seek to serve the public. People are being deterred and your democracy is suffering

There is a rising tide of abuse in our politics and I feel it every day. This week, the Electoral Commission warned that harassment and intimidation are changing how candidates campaign, what they feel able to do and whether they stand again. This is a threat to our democracy – and we cannot ignore it.

The figures are stark. Commission research into the May 2026 local and mayoral elections in England found that 55% of candidates said harassment or intimidation was a problem, up from 47% in 2025. Women, ethnic minority candidates and those with disabilities were most likely to encounter abuse. The experience was so unpleasant that a third considered not standing again.

Dawn Butler is Labour MP for Brent East

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.

Kansas are taking on Arizona State in the Union Jack Classic, with 60,000 and noisy fans expected at Wembley

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US student Linus Chen-Plotkin has analysed music by four canonical composers looking for patterns. Turns out Mozart’s music moves in the least predictable way

It’s a question that has taxed musical thinkers for centuries: just what is it about one composer’s music that makes it more distinctive than anyone else’s? Entire disciplines of academic thought, of music analysis and historical musicology, as well as the formation of classical music’s canon of “great” composers, have been given over to this single idea: can it be proved that Mozart, say, was measurably “better” than other composers?

Our instinctive feeling about the sensual magic of Mozart’s music is part of the equation, but accounting for precisely how his pieces can sustain a lifetime of listening, why their pleasures never seem to pall and are still capable of seeming to surprise us even when we know them inside out: that’s the million-dollar musicological question.

With tear gas, grenades and a new law, French authorities are targeting unlicensed music gatherings. Those in the rave scene explore the parallels with the UK in the 90s

When Spiral Tribe fled England in 1992, they left behind an indelible mark on rave history. The itinerant sound system collective are best known for their involvement with Castlemorton Common festival, an unlicensed free party drawing more than 30,000 people and lasting nearly a week. After a drawn-out and notoriously expensive trial for public order offences, Spiral Tribe were acquitted of all charges. They decided to drive their repurposed military caravans out of the UK and never look back.

Their documented history often stops there. But little known is the fact that they then kicked off “the biggest illegal underground movement that Europe had ever seen”, says Spiral Tribe associate Sebastian Vaughan, AKA electronic musician 69db.

Body found in pond in Suffolk village of Brantham, where Noah was last seen on Tuesday afternoon

Police searching for a three-year-old boy who went missing from a playground on the Suffolk-Essex border have found a body.

Noah Woods was last seen at 3pm on Tuesday in Merriam Close, Brantham, near Manningtree, before becoming separated from a relative.

HSBC director Nicholas Brandram, 44, was found unresponsive by emergency services on Tuesday evening

A senior city banker suspected of pushing a woman into the path of a moving bus in the “Putney pusher” case has been found dead.

Nicholas Brandram, 44, was discovered at his home in Chiswick, west London, on Tuesday.

Ivan Jennings, 46, sentenced to five years after pleading guilty to encouraging terrorism on social media

A rightwing extremist who discussed poisoning Jews and Muslims and called for the killing of migrants and minority communities has been jailed.

Ivan Jennings, 46, called for the murder of hundreds of people he labelled “subhumans”, saying it was “justified and actually needed”, in extreme far-right groups over a period of three months in 2024.

Men with heart, kidney or liver conditions more likely to be offered intervention compared with women, global analysis finds

Women with the same medical condition as men are less likely to be offered treatment such as surgery, a stent or a strong painkiller, research has found.

A review of global research found that for several health problems, including cardiovascular conditions, kidney disease and Parkinson’s, women were less likely to receive the same treatment as men, revealing the extent to which women have significantly unequal care.

Rights groups express support for directors of Guardian-produced film facing threats from Israeli ministers and far-right activists

• ‘They know the house they are bombing is full of children’: NAZA’s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence

Threats by the Israeli military, government ministers and far-right activists have intensified against the Oscar-winning Israeli directors of NAZA, a documentary about the country’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, as 43 local human rights organisations expressed their support for the pair.

NAZA, which was produced by the Guardian, is named for an acronym used euphemistically by Israel’s intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian between 2023 and 2025.

Exclusive: Party could take 40 seats if result replicated at next election, according to Labour-linked thinktank

The Green party is just four points behind Labour in urban constituencies, putting them within touching distance of taking as many as 40 seats if the result was replicated at the next election, according to new polling by a Labour-linked thinktank.

The survey by ThinkLabour, which has extensive links to Andy Burnham’s government, finds that urban voters have moved in large numbers towards Zack Polanski’s party since the 2024 general election. The research highlights the challenge Labour faces holding onto the Holborn and St Pancras seat in the face of a challenge from Polanski himself at next month’s byelection.

Key allies of PM issue warning as details emerge of his plan to give mayors powers to oversee water companies

Key allies of Andy Burnham have warned the prime minister not to back down over his promises to put water companies under public control, after details emerged about the prime minister’s plan to give mayors more oversight of the industry.

Mathew Lawrence and Mark McVitie, who helped provide an intellectual underpinning to Burnham’s project over the summer, have both warned that merely giving politicians oversight of key utilities rather than financial control will fall short of what the prime minister promised.

The British-American novelist and playwright who regularly appeared on current affairs shows will be remembered for her ‘warmth, humour and generosity’, says her husband

The British-American novelist, playwright and commentator Bonnie Greer has died aged 77.

In a statement, her husband David Hutchins said that she died on Tuesday evening following a brief illness.

Exclusive: Exhibition focusing on Finnish writer and artist’s illustrations will include original art from her first Moomins book

The Moomin books about lovable trolls with hippopotamus snouts who live in harmony with nature are a global publishing phenomenon, having sold up to 30m copies since the Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson wrote and illustrated them between 1945 and 1977.

Now previously unseen drawings of her eccentric characters will be among more than 100 exhibits in a major exhibition that is being staged in London 25 years after her death.

Register of British Slave Traders shows clergymen financed company that trafficked enslaved Africans on hundreds of voyages

Nearly 250 years after the abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano made the Christian case for reparative justice, the archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, visited the Ghanaian shore where he was enslaved as a boy.

After witnessing the dungeons beneath the chapel at Cape Coast Castle, once run by the Royal African Company (RAC), Mullally recommitted the Church of England to its “journey of repentance” for its role in slavery.

Dozens of Bank of England directors and founding subscribers invested in trafficking of enslaved Africans

The Bank of England and the British financial system were for centuries deeply involved in the enslavement and transatlantic trafficking of millions of African people, according to new research on Britain’s slavery history.

Research by historians compiling the Register of British Slave Traders has found that the scale of the financial system’s involvement in enslavement is greater than previously known or acknowledged. The Bank of England, the central bank owned by the government since nationalisation by Clement Attlee’s Labour administration in 1946, had dozens of financiers involved in its foundation who were also significant investors in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans.

Exclusive: New research identifies thousands who profited from trafficking enslaved Africans and traces some financial links to institutions still operating today

From Elizabeth I’s backing of early voyages to royal investment in trafficking companies, generations of monarchs were central to Britain’s slave trade

Enslaved African people were seared with hot metal brands bearing the royal crown, according to research by historians who have documented the monarchy’s centuries-long involvement in Britain’s slave trade.

The Register of British Slave Traders identifies thousands of people who invested in Britain’s trafficking of enslaved Africans, including kings and queens.

All four supporting acts for the upcoming dates of Ed Sheeran’s tour have withdrawn in solidarity with fellow opener Macklemore.

The American rapper was removed from Sheeran’s tour after comments made onstage in support of Palestine. Sheeran responded that venue owners – including Robert Kraft who owns the New England Patriots and its home stadium – had objected to Macklemore’s appearance on the tour. But after he had tried to negotiate with the venue owners ‘at length to build bridges’, ultimately the promoters made the decision to pull the plug. Artists who have pulled out include Finneas, Aaron Rowe and Beoga.

Lucy Hough speaks to Guardian assistant opinion editor Jason Okundaye – watch on YouTube

Rotherham has 46 online vacancies for every 1,000 young people but there are 288 in Cotswold district council area

Young people in Rotherham face a local jobs market with the fewest suitable opportunities in Britain, according to a report that warns stark regional divisions are fuelling a crisis in youth work.

As ministers push to combat rising youth unemployment, the analysis from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) showed young people faced a tougher challenge in some parts of the country to find work than in others.

Even as the ‘extremist’ AfD seeks further election gains in Germany, Europe’s leaders can learn from Sweden’s dangerous embrace with far-right ideology

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Europe’s focus turned nervously to Sweden on Sunday, after an explosive election in Germany just a week earlier placed a far-right party, officially classed as “extremist”, on the brink of power in a German state for the first time since the Nazi era. A party with neo-Nazi roots has been pulling the government’s strings in Sweden for the last four years – would the country’s general election put the far right formally in government? Or would enough Swedes opt for a gear change, having seen the Sweden Democrats’ hardline (some would say poisonous) agenda in action?

Votes were still being counted on Wednesday but it was immediately clear that the far-right Sweden Democrats had suffered a setback; their first loss of support among voters since it entered parliament for the first time 16 years ago. The party slipped from being the country’s second biggest party to its third.

She was born with an ultra-rare genetic disorder. After my decades working in film PR, I now face the biggest campaign of all: the fight for her life

My daughter Elsie has beautiful curls – blond like a little Botticelli cherub’s, hair that someone dark like me could only ever dream of. She laughs a lot, has a cheeky sense of humour and soaks in all the sounds around her – rustling leaves, the sea, a dog barking, children playing around a pool, me impersonating the alarm clock every morning, me impersonating monkeys. Indeed, me impersonating any animal.

Sound is important for Elsie because she has a visual impairment and, while we know she has some peripheral vision, is legally classed as blind. As a result, she uses her tongue to check her environment. When she’s excited it sticks out, tasting the air around her, licking anyone close, sensing space. And when she likes the taste of something she keeps her tongue out until you give her more. This is how we know she likes lollies.

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.

How often should you clean your cat’s litter box? Plus three other tips for peak cat cleanliness

Throughout history, people have revered cats. Ancient Egyptians worshipped feline deities. In Norse mythology, the Viking goddess Freya rode around in a sled pulled by two cats. And my father regularly takes his cat on walks around town in a little bubble backpack so she can see the sights.

As anyone who has lived with a cat knows, we serve them and not the other way around. This includes the messy and malodorous task of tending their litter box.

Theatre503, London
Lauryn Ajufo makes Tracey her own in a vibrant revival of Coel’s monologue, capturing the cruelty, confusion and comedy of adolescence

The self-flagellations of adolescence and its suddenly streaking hormones can make great fodder for comedy. Harry Enfield’s 13-year-old defined its comic pains for one generation. His Kevin is every bit matched by Michaela Coel’s exuberant and offensive Tracey. This revival of Coel’s 2012 debut proves her eternal relevance as a character: Black British and downtrodden, she is upstart, bully, trusty friend and a bewildered girl defined by class and race by her own schoolteacher. She is also horny and desperately infatuated with a white boy, Connor.

Beginning as a monologue performed by Coel herself, it is about friendship, sexual discovery and abuse, with Tracey telling us about everything from the girl in class who can lick her own vagina to her beautiful best friend with a controlling boyfriend 10 years her senior. The show went on to be adapted for the Channel 4 TV series Chewing Gum, which turned Coel’s one-woman polyphony into an ensemble of immensely colourful characters and fabulous comedy, but also lost some of its intensity and darkness.

At Theatre503, London, until 17 October

American jazz singer and songwriter who was inspired by the Delta blues and gospel sounds of her Mississippi childhood

Cassandra Wilson, the double Grammy-winning jazz vocalist and songwriter who has died aged 70, was described in 2001 by Time magazine as “America’s best singer”. Superlatives accompanied Wilson throughout her career; her vocal skills supported them.

Wilson’s ancestry was West African and European, and the Delta blues and gospel sounds she heard in her Mississippi childhood affected her deeply – but so did the guitar harmonies her father taught her, and the early instruction in classical piano she received from her music-teacher mother. Both her parents were Miles Davis and Motown admirers, too.

The Weapons director delivers a seat-edge thriller with a standout lead performance from Austin Abrams as an everyman navigating chaos

Typically horror fans react to blatant on-screen stupidity with vocal derision. Don’t go in there! Girl, get out of the house! Guys, ignore that distress signal! But genre aficionados may find themselves falling a little bit in love with Bryan (Austin Abrams), the hapless de facto hero of the new horror film Resident Evil. It’s not that Bryan is traditionally hunky, or even a caricatured version of a square-jawed warrior, like Bruce Campbell in his later Evil Dead outings. But Abrams is in possession of a Campbell-ish charm, even in the face of his character’s repeated blundering, as well as an everyman relatability that makes this wild carnival-ride movie play a little closer to the ground.

Bryan is a courier – a glorified Postmates driver, in his own estimation – who postpones the end of his shift to take one last night-time run, driving an important item from one hospital to another in a snowstorm without the proper tires or four-wheel drive. After all, the distance and urgency means double pay. When he hits a mysterious woman who emerges suddenly on to a slick road, he’s drawn into a hellish outbreak that will look familiar to fans of the Resident Evil video game series (or maybe the previous six-movie Milla Jovovich franchise, which apparently drifted afield from the games’ storylines).

In the Trusster’s latest appearance, she says Blair and Brown had a plot to dismantle civilisation and the Tories were part of the woke establishment

Some things you can set your watch by. Like every time small boats are in the news, the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, will manoeuvre himself in front of a camera to suggest that all male migrants are either murderers or rapists. Probably both.

But some things feel older than time itself. Like Liz Truss trying to persuade the world she was right all along. Most former prime ministers leave Downing Street relatively quietly. Lord Big Dave, the Maybot and even Boris nurse their grudges in private. Rishi lives in semi-retirement – almost a recluse – and only attends parliament when it suits him. Keir has been almost totally airbrushed out of history in a couple of months.

When my loved ones are on the move, I can’t rest until I know they’ve got from A to B safely. How I long for the ignorance of the olden days

I’ll call it compassionate surveillance. It’s what I do when I’m worried about a loved one who is on the move. I’m not sure it’s a good thing. Be they travelling by plane, train or automobile, I will keep tabs on them. I can’t help myself. If my daughters – who are highly competent grownups – make a long car journey, by means of some smartphone hocus-pocus I’ll know where they are. I should point out that this is done with consent: they know that I know where they are. In my mum’s case, this is less true, if only because she has long given up trying to make head or tail of location sharing and other such sorcery.

I cross my heart and hope to die when I swear to you that I only do this when they are in transit. Honestly, I never look up where they are on a night out or whatever. That would be weird – or weirder, anyway. But when they get in a car, I get the fear. The catastrophising begins. It’s a big world and their car is small. A million other cars, buses and lorries share the roads on which they are motoring. In this, as in all things, overthinking is calamitous. The more you think about what could go wrong, the more your imagination obliges with a steady stream of ghastly possibilities.

Countries have come together before to make international agreements in the face of existential threats

With many technological developments, from algorithm-driven social media to AI, many people assume there’s a degree of inevitability to their widespread adoption in society.

The argument goes something like this: once the ideas and means to produce the tech are known, then it is inevitable that its usage will spread and we’ll essentially be stuck with it. So therefore we need to accept this and adjust our lives to live with the tech and use it (or at least tolerate it).

Phil Heckels has turned his awful pet portraits into a full-time job. As a blueprint for success, embracing your lack of talent has obvious appeal

What do you get if you cross a complete lack of artistic talent with making lemonade out of life’s lemons? Phil Heckels, that’s what – or, rather, who. The former estate agent from West Sussex has turned being bad at drawing animals into a full-time job after posting a hilariously terrible portrait of his dog on social media. Friends started asking him to do awful pictures of their pets, word spread, and he’s now received more than 100,000 requests. His rules are that he only sees the photos immediately before he picks up his pen, he never restarts a drawing, and he doesn’t spend longer than 10 minutes on a creation. He also refuses to charge for his artworks – suggesting charity donations instead – but makes money through merchandise and books.

“I do get criticism sometimes that the portraits are getting too good,” Heckels said recently. “But people have been saying that since about my 12th portrait. You never have to wait too long for a real stinker to appear, though.”

Being a member felt like the right thing to do – and it was a boon during the pandemic. But oh, the emotional labour. I can never look at a turnip again

Last week, as summer gave way to pumpkin season, I found myself contemplating the final squash. Like the horror movie trope of the final girl staggering out of the woods after the massacre, this squash is the sole survivor. All her sister squashes had either been cooked and eaten or left to rot. Now, my killing days were almost over. There would be no sequel.

Or, to put it less dramatically: after six years, we have quit the local organic veg bag collective, which delivered to a nearby pickup point a bag of organic, local seasonal veg once a week. And as a result the mental load and emotional labour of having to contemplate and devise a use for various esoteric kinds of veg is finally, mercifully, over.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

The extraordinary success of the rebels, and Saudi counterstrikes, threaten economic havoc. But the country’s civilians are paying the highest price

Even in a region beset by turmoil and learning to expect the unexpected, the lightning advance of Yemen’s Houthis along the Red Sea coast has shocked observers. More than 100,000 people have been forced to flee in a country where immiseration and displacement have become routine and half the population depend on humanitarian aid. But outsiders are paying close attention, because by claiming thousands of kilometres in a matter of days, and seizing strategically important islands, the Iran-backed rebels now control the Bab al-Mandab strait – the other major regional energy chokepoint after the Hormuz strait.

The Iran war has forced Saudi Arabia to rely on moving oil via its east-west pipeline to Red Sea ports. Now drone strikes – blamed on an Iran-backed militia in Iraq – have shut the pipeline: on one estimate, a month-long closure could cut global crude supply by 120m barrels. The halt to shipping through the Bab al-Mandab strait could be much more protracted. Taking the oil north is a far slower and more expensive route to Asian markets, and does not preclude attacks by the Houthis, who are also targeting oil facilities.

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.

After a desperately tight race, voters rejected the prospect of the far right in government. A potential centre-left coalition needs to seize the moment

European progressives searching for reasons to be cheerful have been finding them hard to come by this autumn. In Germany, the dramatic rise of the Alternative für Deutschland party is threatening the liberal values that underpin the identity of the federal republic. In France, polls continue to point to a likely Marine Le Pen victory in a presidential election, which is months away. Across mainland Europe, centre-left parties are failing to muster an adequate response to nativist movements that have colonised swathes of the working-class support that they once relied on.

In such an ominous political landscape, the outcome of a cliffhanger Swedish election provides a much‑needed source of optimism – albeit one that comes with heavy caveats. Prior to last Sunday’s poll, the outgoing prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, was explicit that if his rightwing alliance won the largest number of seats, he would invite members of the far-right Sweden Democrats party (SD) to become ministers in the next government.

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

Readers are divided on whether the triple lock should stay or go

The article about whether the pensions triple lock should be ditched omits several key facts (‘Costing billions’: is the pensions triple lock a lifeline or simply unaffordable?, 12 September). The triple lock was introduced in 2010 to attempt to reinstate the value of the state pension relative to average earnings. The new state pension is just over £12,547 per annum, as your reporter says; older pensioners get a basic £9,615. Both are well below the European average, which is over €16,000 (about £13,800) per year. The UK median wage is above £39,000 a year. Moreover, the age at which the UK state pension becomes payable is among the highest in Europe.

The discussion on the affordability of the state pension seems to regard it as expenditure for no return. It is not. Pensioners spend money into their local economy, which generates tax revenues in the form of VAT and income tax from younger people who are dependent on pensioner money for their employment. Better-off pensioners pay income tax in the usual way. In fact, a pensioner with any income at all above the new state pension will pay tax on it as the personal tax free allowance is now £12,570, only £23 above their pension income.

Lars Janssen says self-driving vehicles would be a boon for him as he has an eye condition and can’t drive, in response to an article by Adrian Chiles. Plus letters from Richard Connell and Michael Fuller

Adrian Chiles (Driverless cars are taking us on a road to nowhere, 10 September) wants to know who asked for driverless cars. I did. I have an eye condition called nystagmus and will never be able to drive unless a “tech-bro willy-waver”, or anyone else, finds a cure. Fortunately, not every driver is as reckless as the ones Chiles despairs of, and the most careful of all may not even be human.

Waymo, Google’s sister company, says its cars have far fewer crashes causing injuries than human drivers. In July, the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that its cars had 68% fewer crashes per mile than human drivers.

Andrew Forsey urges the government to restore the link between free school meals and the holiday activities and food programme

There are 500,000 children growing up in poorer families who are confronted by a similarly cruel cliff edge to the one covered by your article (Chancellor urged to fix £100k childcare ‘cliff edge’ that prompts parents to cut work, 10 September). It is this group of children who, having recently become eligible for means-tested free school meals during term time, are disqualified from accessing the holiday activities and food (HAF) programme. While the government has rightly acknowledged the need for those children to receive extra help during term time, it has somehow reached the decision that this need does not extend into the school holidays.

HAF is a terrific programme providing nutritious meals, enriching activities and free childcare for many families. Since its introduction, eligibility for it has always been linked to the receipt of free school meals. But the government’s decision to break that link will result in working parents, earning as little as £7,500 a year, being unable to access this vital support. Any gains accruing to their children in term time risk being wiped out by this lack of support in the holidays.

Lucy Letby case | At one’s peak | Leaving the debate | Cut from the same cloth | End of the odyssey | A word’s worth

Re the Thirlwall report on the Lucy Letby case (Thirlwall report: what did it say about Lucy Letby case and what does it recommend?, 15 September), babies in neonatal intensive care units are saved by having consultant neonatologists (ie paediatricians who have undergone subspecialist training in neonatal medicine) doing rounds twice daily (in addition to being immediately available), trained neonatal nurses and appropriately resourced units – not by installing cameras on cots and insulin fridges.
Dr Chris Fitzpatrick
Retired consultant obstetrician; former CEO of Coombe hospital, Dublin, Ireland

• Following the introduction of a competitive element in the nominative determinism debate (Letters, 15 September), I’d like to advise everyone that I am at my peak.
Steve Munro
St Osyth, Essex

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Poor Joshua Zirkzee cannot get a game in the Carabao Cup. I am not sure he will get many minutes in the months to come.

Max Dowman continues to be good. Mikel Merino can similarities to a certain Lamine Yamal, which is high praise.

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Régis Le Bris: “I’m feeling really proud, for the players, the club … for our fans too. [We need to] play the game first, and we want to be brave, but not naive. [The fans are] really important, they connect to our style of play. When we press high, they get behind us.”

I mentioned in my preamble that Sunderland’s last European fixture came in Lisbon, 53 years ago. Well, here’s the Guardian match report from our archive …

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Anxious to sample some traditional Spanish culture while taking in a La Liga match years ago, Football Daily and some friends decamped to Gran Alicant. As we prepared to leave a quaint bodega (the Dick Turpin), where we’d been sampling the local hooch (Guinness), to travel to the nearby stadium, an elderly local resident with an unmistakable mackem accent informed us that the Elche home game to which we were heading was not being played until the following evening. It had fallen victim to Spanish TV’s infuriating habit of rescheduling random top-flight matches with little or no notice or consideration for Johnny-come-latelys who might have travelled from afar to watch them. We never did get to see Elche play in the flesh but did get to watch the current La Liga basement-dwellers give José Mourinho an almighty fright on TV on Tuesday night, as they went this close to snatching a point from Real Madrid.

I almost wish I was a West Ham fan. As an eternally suffering Spurs supporter, I find myself looking enviously towards the London Stadium these days. The Hammers are top of the table, banging in goal after goal (already 20 more than Spurs’ tally in the league). They score even when they lose and seem to have bought a proper No 9. My Spurs, meanwhile, continue the tradition of the last two years in style, sitting comfortably in 17th with 1,047 wingers on contract, and getting knocked out of one of the competitions they could ‘conceivably’ have won, the only competition they seem to be able to score goals in as well. In hindsight, West Ham made the right choice to go down. Hammers fans, you are welcome!” – Yannick Woudstra (and no others).

Hugh Fordham’s idea [Tuesday’s Football Daily letters] has some merit. But it reminded me of a pithy comment by Bill Nicholson. ‘Do you think he was interfering with play?’, he was asked. Nicholson responded: “If he’s not interfering with play, what’s he doing on the pitch?!’” – Harry McDonald.

In support of Hugh Fordham’s suggestion, I remember discussing the idea of interfering with play while on a training course for referees back in the 1960s. We were told that unless someone was ‘lying injured near the corner flag’ any player should be treated as being involved in play. Not a lot of room for subjectivity in those days. And obviously no thought of stopping play for the hypothetical injured player!” – Trevor Field.

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• World No 4 may snub World Tour Championship

• ‘I’m not comfortable playing in the Middle East’

Matt Fitzpatrick, the world No 4, has admitted to reservations over appearing at the DP World Tour’s end‑of‑season events in Abu Dhabi and Dubai because of the conflict in the Middle East.

The Englishman, who is due to defend the DP World Tour Championship title in Dubai, has accused the tour of being “very vague” over plans to retain or move the tournaments. In Fitzpatrick’s mind, it is a “no-brainer” to play elsewhere, but he believes his sentiment will not feature strongly in the thoughts of the tour’s hierarchy.

• All the latest updates from around the grounds

• Middlesex chair Sykes to resign | Email Tanya

Look away, and Cliff has another, a searing ball which spits and Leach gets an edge through to Bairstow. Somerset 86 for eight and floundering after a pretty catastrophic first 25 minutes.

Non rhythmic applause as Ben Cliff approaches his hat-trick, but no cigar this time.

Coventry have no points, Spurs have no goals and Villa have dipped again. But what does a bad start really mean?

By Opta Analyst

That optimism we feel at the start of a new season can be intoxicating. Whatever happened last season, there has been a whole summer to correct things. New signings, possibly a new manager, and new possibilities. What could go wrong? Oh, everything. Terrific. We’re only in mid-September, but that early optimism has melted away and been replaced by anxiety for some fans.

Coventry had every reason to look forward to the season, their first in the Premier League since 2001. They were coming off the back of a title-winning campaign in the Championship and were riding the crest of a wave. Now, though, they have fallen off their surfboard and are frantically trying to keep their heads above water as the ferocity of the top flight becomes increasingly apparent.

Plus: more costly (and beneficial) red cards and attacks with triple half-century of international goals

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“When did fans wearing replica kits become a thing?” asks Alex Ecob. “Older footage shows people in regular clothes and a few scarves/flags in the team colours. What kickstarted the trend? Did one club get there first?”

As the question suggests, this is a not a straightforward answer. Buckle up folks, as we veer wildly from copyright acts to academia, via multiple reports of unofficial kits, DIY jobs, cup-final special editions, youth strips, sew-on jobs and the like. But if we are to draw a line in the sand, and declare one date or one jersey as the first official, adult replica kit to be sold by a club to the general public (or at least those close enough to the club shop), then we probably have to give the gong to Leeds in 1973, although only children’s sizes were produced initially.

• Lions to play five fixtures in New Zealand in 2027

• Sky has held live rights for men’s Lions since 1997

The inaugural women’s British & Irish Lions tour of New Zealand next year is expected to be broadcast live on Sky Sports in a significant boost for the women’s game. Sky has held live rights for men’s Lions fixtures since the 1997 tour of South Africa, and the broadcaster is understood to be in advanced discussions about adding the women’s series to its portfolio.

The first women’s Lions will play three Tests against the Black Ferns and two tour matches next September, with Sky expected to broadcast all five fixtures.

Iran-backed militants have offered Trump administration assurances over safety of Red Sea shipping

Officials from the US met Houthi leaders over the weekend at the country’s embassy in Muscat, Oman, it has been confirmed, leading to the US decision not to intervene to help Saudi Arabia drive back a Houthi advance inside Yemen.

The Iran-backed militant group reassured the US that the ceasefire agreement between the two sides struck in 2025 still held and the movement had no intention of attacking US shipping in the Red Sea. Only Saudi-linked shipping was regarded as a target owing to its blockade of Yemen, the Houthis confirmed.

Fed committee votes unanimously to raise interest rate by a quarter-percentage point to a range of 3.75% to 4%

The US Federal Reserve voted to raise interest rates on Wednesday for the first time since 2023 as the central bank continues to fight to tamp down inflation.

The Fed’s open market committee voted unanimously to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-percentage point to a range of 3.75% to 4%. This is the first time the Fed has raised rates since July 2023 and potentially sets Kevin Warsh, the current Fed chair, on a collision course with Donald Trump.

Politicians from Solihull, Gateshead and Kent were in online group linked to balaclava-clad far-right agitators

At least five Reform UK councillors have been members of a Facebook group linked to the far-right group involved in the blockades of Dover and Portsmouth by masked men, according to anti-fascist campaigners.

Nigel Farage’s party has been wrestling with internal divisions over its position on the Patriot Platform group, whose activities have been condemned by Farage and across the political spectrum.

Safety crisis makes it more likely that governments will be spurred into action, says Yoshua Bengio

Concerns over AI safety are reaching a point where governments realise they must act to protect the public, similarly to in the Covid pandemic, according to one of the “godfathers” of the technology.

Yoshua Bengio said recent events, including a “swarm” of OpenAI agents hacking a startup and tech insider warnings of an existential threat, were cutting through – making government action more likely.

Writer and actor, 40, had long struggled with endometriosis before undergoing total hysterectomy at age 31

Lena Dunham has welcomed her first child with her husband, Luis Felber, via surrogate.

The 40-year-old writer and actor, known for her creation of and role in the HBO television series Girls, revealed her daughter’s birth in a Vogue op-ed published on Wednesday.

MSPs bring in strict environmental impact assessments and will delay decisions until national strategy is developed

Holyrood has voted to pause planning applications for all new AI datacentres for up to a year until the Scottish government has developed a national strategy.

On Wednesday, MSPs backed a Scottish Labour motion to halt new schemes for up to 12 months while rules on hyperscale datacentres are developed in what could be a blow to the British government’s AI strategy.

Exclusive: Plastic surfaces form hotspots with an increase of antibiotic-resistant genes, study finds

Microplastics act like a “Trojan horse” delivering pollutants, pesticides and bacteria through the soil, a five-year multinational research project has found.

The EU-funded project, which has so far resulted in 22 peer-reviewed studies, found microplastics in the soil of all 227 agricultural fields it tested across 11 European countries. The researchers said this poses a global threat, with healthy soils essential for life on Earth.

Global push will triple toxic e-waste annually in 25 years, filling enough shipping containers to circle globe six times

The ongoing campaign to build thousands of massive datacenters for AI will create a “tsunami” of discarded electronics, putting the world on a course to triple its annual generation of toxic e-waste in the next 25 years, a new report projects.

The electronic trash AI generates in the next 25 years could fill enough shipping containers to encircle the globe six times, it said. Yet, says the report by the non-profit environmental group Basel Action Network (BAN), there is no plan to deal with that waste – which typically contains toxins like lead, mercury, cadmium and forever chemicals, as well as valuable metals that are challenging to reclaim.

New owners apply for permission to extract oil in Horse Hill despite landmark ruling from supreme court in 2024

After years of trying to dig for oil in Surrey, the company behind the drilling project that was turned down in a landmark supreme court ruling has sold off the site for a fraction of the money it spent on it, and rebranded as a clean energy company.

Meanwhile, the new owners, who picked up the site for £1m, are applying, once again, for permission to dig.

Family of Jaysley Beck, 19, voice concern after two officers acquitted over handling of sexual assault before she killed herself

The family of a teenage soldier who killed herself after she was sexually assaulted fear the collapse of the trial of two officers accused of failing to investigate her case properly could discourage other young members of the armed forces from reporting attacks.

Relatives of Gunner Jaysley Beck, 19, said it felt like the end of a “long and sad” journey and expressed concern that during the trial a military witness described the assault as not being out of the ordinary.

Doorbell firm aims to replace WhatsApp or Facebook groups with platform where people can post about safety or lost pets

Amazon’s doorbell camera maker Ring is to launch its Neighbours community app in the UK in an attempt to supplant neighbourhood WhatsApp or Facebook groups.

The service is intended as a modern equivalent of a community message board, where neighbours can post about safety, community matters or lost pets.

TUC conference rings with praise for new No 10 team, but battles loom over workers’ rights and north sea drilling

Louise Haigh, the UK first secretary, got a standing ovation from trade union members in Brighton this week, as she acknowledged what she called “the necessity to be bolder in this second chance that we’ve been allowed”.

Haigh was the stand-in at the annual TUC congress for Andy Burnham, absent because of his father’s death.

Villagers in Piddington, Oxfordshire, hold symbolic referendum over plans to house more than 1,000 asylum seekers nearby

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Residents of an English village have voted to leave the UK in a symbolic referendum against plans to house more than 1,000 asylum seekers nearby.

The result of the poll in Piddington, Oxfordshire, was announced on Wednesday morning after 312 people voted on Tuesday. A total of 285 people were in favour of independence from the UK while 26 voted against. One ballot was spoiled.

Commission president says EU must ‘urgently reimagine our partnerships’ as she makes unprecedented offer

Canada has been invited to become the first “associate member” of the EU by the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.

In an unprecedented offer, von der Leyen said on Wednesday that the EU and Canada “see the world with the same eyes” through shared democratic values and common approaches to many big issues, from AI to climate breakdown, the Ukraine war and geopolitics.

Kardashian received the compensation she requested, lawyers said, after eight people were found guilty last year for their role in the robbery

A Paris court has awarded €1 to Kim Kardashian for having been the victim of an armed robbery in the French capital in 2016, the amount of compensation she had asked for, according to a lawyer involved in the case.

The court last year found eight people guilty for their roles in what Kardashian described as “the most terrifying experience of my life”. She and the stylist Simone Harouche, who was present during the robbery, expressed gratitude to the French justice system in a joint statement.

Researchers hope to shed light on conditions such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability and rare forms of dementia

Researchers have created mice with half-human brains in an effort to understand and develop new treatments for disorders such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability and rare forms of dementia.

The scientists transplanted lab-grown human brain cells into animals that were engineered to be born without a cortex or hippocampus. This made space for the human tissue to grow inside the rodents’ skulls.

German chancellor gets support from state leaders but further far-right gains this weekend could spell the end

Powerful German state leaders from Friedrich Merz’s party have rallied behind him as speculation builds that his days in office may be numbered.

The chancellor’s hold on power has looked increasingly shaky since a bombshell regional election result earlier this month in which the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party routed his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party in Saxony-Anhalt.

Ursula von der Leyen announces draft law to stop apps ‘depriving children of their childhood’

The EU will move forward with plans for an under 13s social media ban, the head of the European Commission has confirmed.

Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday that social media apps were “depriving children of their childhood” and big tech platforms needed to prove the safety of their products.

Latest attempt to secure future of Britain’s biggest car factory may be subject to UK weakening EV sales mandate

Nissan has said it will invest £170m to build a new SUV at its factory in Sunderland – but said the move was subject to the UK weakening its electric vehicle sales mandate.

The new hybrid model, the Kicks, is Nissan’s latest attempt to secure the future of the plant, which employs 6,000 people in Tyne and Wear and is Britain’s biggest car factory.

Entain, which also owns Coral and BetMGM, starts consultation process over customer care roles

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The Ladbrokes owner, Entain, has said it is preparing to cut 400 jobs, only weeks after the FTSE 100 business reported better than expected profit in its first half of the year.

The gambling group, which also owns Coral and BetMGM, has started a consultation process that could remove one in five of its 2,000 customer care jobs.

Model comes as part of £500m UK investment by firm’s new Abu Dhabi owner that will also fund new factory

McLaren is gearing up to build an SUV for the first time in its 63-year history, betting that the glamour of its all-conquering Formula One team can sell cars to wealthy fans who do not own its supercars.

The model, which does not yet have a name, comes as part of a £500m investment by McLaren’s new Abu Dhabi owner that will also create 1,000 jobs, adding to the existing workforce of 2,500 people.

A brush with mortality inspired sisters Sophia and Camilla Minden to create a death-themed event featuring live bands, wild swimming … and an ‘emoshpit’

Raised in the Lake District on “music, moss and macaroni cheese,” Sophia and Camilla Minden were mindful of death from a very early age. The sisters shared a bed and played in the woods behind their house, frequently bringing home injured and dying birds, frogs and a rat they named Adrian and fed pate and pork pie. “Everything we’d learned about their diet, we learned from Wind in the Willows,” admits Sophia. The creatures rarely survived, but the death of each one was respectfully honoured with a burial in the garden, words spoken, singing and a stone or flower placed on the grave.

What they didn’t expect was that little more than a decade later, they’d be planning Camilla’s own funeral. Diagnosed with late-stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma just after her 20th birthday, she was given an 80% chance of survival, but the other 20% made her investigate her local undertakers (“dated, impersonal and expensive”) and work out what she wanted at her funeral (“spag bol and quite a lot of Michael Jackson”). Navigating “shit wigs” and people’s awkwardness around the subject of dying, she says that she spent a lot of time “bargaining with God”, promising that if she made it through, she’d live life to the full and appreciate every single day.

The Sondering is at Rydal, Lake District, from 18-21 September

He risks his life for entertainment, but getting an anecdote out of him is a trickier matter. Happily, Cruise is no stranger to knuckling down and pulling off the impossible

By now, we’ve grown used to watching Tom Cruise excel at everything he does. Running in films? The best. Risking his life in action scenes so preposterously dangerous that audiences need to have their sphincters manually unclenched with a crowbar? Absolutely, none better. Singlehandedly ensuring that theatrical exhibition didn’t go extinct after Covid? The man deserves all the praise in the world for that.

But nobody is perfect. Live long enough and a few flaws will worm their way to the surface. This is as true for Tom Cruise as it is for anyone else. And while I realise that this might do me out of a cake this Christmas, the following really needs to be said: Tom Cruise isn’t very good at interviews.

With handheld camerawork, this unsentimental rite of passage film follows Mari, who tries to escape from a residential home in Estonia

This intriguing 1985 film from Estonia uses nonprofessionals and handheld camerawork, which brings faces looming up to the screen. It is directed by Leida Laius and Arvo Iho and based on the YA novel Stepmother by Estonian author Silvia Rannamaa. The Estonian title Naerata Ometi is translated here as Smile at Last; perhaps it should be Give Us a Smile as it is what a boorish, bullying guy tells a shy, unhappy young woman.

It is at one level a kind of coming-of-age story, but entirely without that genre’s usual, sentimental sense of something finally learned or gained from an emotional rite of passage – something finally to smile about, in fact. Actually, it is more of a mysterious parable, couched in the language of soap opera or photo-love story, depicting the Soviet state and its gruesome pretension to be caring or nurturing.

The show’s creator has gone, it’s been retooled as a conventional thriller and it feels like it’s starting to run out of ideas – even if it’s as slick and confident as ever

This is a new Slow Horses: season six is the first not to be guided by Will Smith, a writer whose previous work on The Thick of It and Veep explained why this espionage saga had an unusually sharp comic tongue. The absence of Smith’s drollery is discernible in a more straight-faced new story, but the bigger problem is one of a creative work naturally eroding over time. Slow Horses is now old.

It’s always been a difficult, delicate proposition. The staff of Slough House, a purgatorial spin-off of MI5 where misfits and screw-ups are given boring work when it would make more sense to just fire them, regularly outstrip supposedly elite spies despite being shambling losers. Leading the field agents is River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), who has the good looks of a spy hero and some of the skills, but is also a brittle, luckless and rather whiny wretch, who regularly has to be saved from ignominious death. The jokes have helped us suspend our disbelief that River and the rest haven’t yet been riddled with bullets, and the relocation of traditional spy thrills to decaying urban settings is still a tonic, but enjoying this conjuring trick gets harder every year.

Jack Reacher’s right-hand woman takes the lead in a show which requires you to think about nothing other than baddies being beaten up

Neagley. It’s pronounced “Neely” but after that, honestly, it’s very simple. Neagley is Frances Neagley, Jack Reacher’s friend and former colleague in Reacher (pronounced “Reacher”, though as rarely as possible for our guy is a man of big arms but few words). That’s the hit series starring Alan Ritchson and his arms as the eponymous hero, a monosyllabic meat-mountain around whom a bestselling series of crime novels by Lee Child has revolved for the last few decades.

Reacher is a former military police officer who now goes about breaking the heads and faces of those he deems deserving – “a sort of artisanal fascist”, as the novelist and devoted fan Paraic O’Donnell once matchlessly put it. Neagley was his right-hand woman in the days when he put together a special investigations unit to – uh, investigate special things, I guess? Details do not matter much in Reacher. The whole thing is designed to slide seamlessly out of your mind the minute the credits roll, leaving you restored and refreshed by an hour off from thinking about anything other than battered, groaning baddies. Sometimes the action pauses for a one-liner or a shot of Reacher’s bare bottom, but they’re quite restorative, too.

The actor makes her directing debut with a raw, fascinating film about her 2008 collaboration with the British dancer

In the way that wedding rehearsals can be more emotional than the big day – all the untidy feelings that will be tucked away for the cameras still on show – this documentary from Juliette Binoche feels raw and unguarded. It goes behind the scenes of Binoche’s collaboration with British dancer Akram Khan; their dance-theatre piece, a love story entitled In-I, premiered in London to mixed reviews in 2008. Now, all these years later, Binoche makes her directing debut with a film that is essentially a study of their artistic process. And it’s unexpectedly fascinating, watching two world-famous performers pushing themselves outside their comfort zones, exposed and vulnerable – particularly Binoche, who had never danced professionally before.

In-I in Motion is a film of two halves, ending with a performance on stage in front of an audience, the set designed by artist Anish Kapoor: a vast screen in murderous red. The first half is more interesting, shot fly-on-the-wall style during the months it took to create the piece in a studio. Binoche and Khan work with acting coach Susan Batson, who at one point thunders: “THIS IS FULL OF SHIT!” (never mind La Binoche’s Oscar). For some audiences, it will have a whiff of theatrical cringe; the endless stewing and fretting over how to achieve something truthful is ripe for spoof. But the pure intensity and focus is thrilling to watch.

Though the masked country singer has a No 1 album and duets with superstars under his belt, his demons and mental health caught up to him

Orville Peck was in the middle of a soundcheck when he found out that his idol Dolly Parton had died. It was late August and the masked, pseudonymous country singer was due to perform an intimate set at London’s Rough Trade East in half an hour. The news hit him like a truck. With no chance to process it, he decided to grieve in real time, on stage, before a roomful of fans.

“I’m a little bit of a mess right now,” Peck told the audience, perched on a stool with an acoustic guitar. “Dolly was my hero,” he continued, his voice cracking. “As a gay man coming into country music and feeling sort of alone, I think the thing that always felt comforting is, like, just knowing Dolly existed in country. It made me feel like I had a friend there.” He then launched into a rendition of Parton’s iconic hit I Will Always Love You.

(Parlophone)
On this new compilation of his mid-60s Davie Jones years, Bowie can’t distinguish himself from the era’s other bands – and ends up hedging his bets

In 1973, David Bowie released Pin Ups, a loving if slightly over-wrought collection of covers from the mid-60s: the moment when the previous driving forces of British pop, Merseybeat and the blues revival started giving way to something noticeably weirder, noisier and more expansive. In an accompanying promotional interview, he waxed lyrical about his memories of seeing the Pretty Things, the Who, the Creation and the nascent Pink Floyd “with dear old Syd” in impeccable mod lingo (“up the Windmill or the Elephant, get blocked, bust over to Richmond”) but tactfully neglected to mention that he was more than an amphetamine-fuelled fan: he’d wanted to be a participant, and had recorded a handful of mid-60s singles inspired by his idols.

That elision shows what a strained relationship Bowie had with his pre-fame material. For most of his career, he simply tried to ignore it, although it doggedly refused to go away: his former labels kept re-releasing it, usually in sleeves that attempted to fool the buyer that it was current. Then, in his 50s, he seemed to reconsider, revisiting his 60s oeuvre on Toy, a 2001 album that was rejected by his then-label EMI – a baffling decision, if you buy the posthumous rewriting of Bowie’s history that insists his Glastonbury performance in 2000 utterly reinvigorated his career and made him as revered as he was in his peak years.

Playing a sound rooted in 80s bands such as Witchfinder General and Pagan Altar, metal bands are once again gravitating towards dark folklore – but in a ‘Glastonbury crystal shop’ kind of way

Behind Tom Templar’s shoulder as we talk over video call is a poster for The Wicker Man, the 1973 cult folk-horror film set on a remote Scottish island, whose sunniness conceals – inevitably – a dark secret. It’s fitting, because Templar is the singer of Green Lung, the breakout British metal band who immerse themselves in British mythology. The forthcoming Necropolitan, their fourth album devoted to the folklore of the isles, takes its inspiration from the “Magnificent Seven” London cemeteries built in the 1830s and 40s, and from the Necropolis railway, which transported the dead out of the city. No generic demons here: this is metal in the spirit of Fairport Convention as much as Black Sabbath.

“My big thesis is that heavy metal has become a form of folk music in the past couple of decades,” says Templar. “They’re both riff-based, circling around similar tropes, and about reinventing what has gone before. Metal even feels like a folk movement, in the way it’s full of festivals no one else has heard of. There’s such a thriving ecosystem.” Green Lung have certainly been nourished by it: at this year’s Desertfest in London, their T-shirts felt like an unofficial uniform.

(Iliad/Capitol)
On his first album in seven years, Beck keeps the quality control extremely high as he surveys mid-50s malaise in the wake of divorce

The last time Beck released an album it was 2019 and the singer-songwriter found himself in a strange and unenviable position. In some quarters, the arrival of Hyperspace was eagerly anticipated precisely because his personal life was in turmoil. Nine months before its release, his 15-year marriage to actor Marissa Ribisi had ended in divorce, an experience he understandably described as heartbreaking. Unfortunately for him, there exists a pervasive argument that Beck’s greatest work is born out of misery.

His beloved 2002 album Sea Change featured a set of disconsolate acoustic songs written in the wake of a break-up with his long-term girlfriend Leigh Limon that Beck had initially thought were too personal for public consumption. They were certainly very different from the knowing, postmodern approach with which he’d made his name, but no matter: Sea Change went on to become a huge critical and commercial success. It wasn’t entirely clear what prompted the gloomy mood of 2014’s Morning Phase, but it very much seemed to be cut from similar musical and lyrical cloth. Some critics suggested it was the best album of his career; it subsequently won three Grammys, including album of the year. Given the circumstances, there was much pre-release speculation that Hyperspace would be a companion piece.

This story of Soviet agent and his MI6 handler in revolutionary Iran is a page-turning masterpiece

Ben Macintyre uses the acronym MICE to describe the reasons people betray their countries: Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego. In the set-piece that opens his latest work of true-espionage, we discover a new reason: erectile dysfunction.

Stressed, drinking too much, under constant surveillance, furious about the corruption of his colleagues and frustrated with his home life, the KGB’s Vladimir Kuzichkin is offering to betray the secrets of his homeland and its Iranian allies, if only a British doctor can help him have sex again.

The president’s former press secretary has learned all the right lessons, but how come it took him so long?

The most interesting chapter in Anthony Scaramucci’s All the Wrong Moves is the one where the hedge funder turned podcaster goes to work for Donald Trump. It’s summer 2017, and he’s been given the job of comms director, which he doesn’t know how to do, but he and Trump think it’ll work out because they’re both from New York. Or maybe he took it because he had “Potomac fever”, which afflicts Wall Street financiers who find themselves on the riverfront in Washington DC thinking they know how to run a country just because they’re “full of power and judgmental insight … about to fix everything”.

This appointment lasts only 11 days, not even enough time to be truly tainted by Trump’s first term, though it is enough time for Scaramucci to miss the birth of his son. The account is a mea culpa soup, with the author full of regrets for his hubris, his impulsivity, his “pride, egotism and asinine stupidity”, the fact that, despite the clear-sightedness bestowed by his humble beginnings, he’d come to assume the collective biases of the rich people he hung out with.

Part spoken-word poem, part journalistic meditation, this is an inventive, tender novel of a songwriter’s journey through love and loss in London

Tice Cin’s philosophical and poetic new novel about a young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer extends the preoccupations of her prizewinning debut, 2021’s Keeping the House. This intimately told sophomore novel, again a story of friendship, precarity and community, is at once an elegy, a spoken-word poem and a journalistic meditation, repeatedly asking readers: “So, are you listening?”

For our unnamed narrator, “hurts come in different shapes each time”: from the childhood scars of her father’s abandonment, to sexism in the creative scene and the difficulties of navigating short-lived flatshares on universal credit (“If you don’t know about being money dry, if you don’t know loss – you don’t get it. If you know, you know”). Her journey of personal discovery is mapped on to the contemporary travails of London’s wider working-class inner-city diaspora communities as she calculates her life by doorways, “walking past each one” without a roadmap for her personal and professional goals.

Twenty years in the writing, this paranormal epic of cold war espionage and family tragedy is a quantum leap in terms of ambition and moral seriousness

China Miéville’s epic new novel is presented as being “20 years in the making”. It is quite a testament to how extravagant – even Stakhanovite – his imagination is that during that period he also produced six novels (including The City & the City and The Book of Elsewhere, co-written with Keanu Reeves), two novellas, two series of graphic novels, a children’s book, a volume of short stories and two works of nonfiction, on the October Revolution and the Communist Manifesto.

It does not mean that these works were, as Graham Greene called The Third Man and Our Man in Havana, “entertainments” – Embassytown, to my mind, is the best translation of deconstructionist philosophy into science fiction – but certainly The Rouse is a quantum jump in terms of ambition, moral seriousness and stylistic bravado. It means that rather than classifying Miéville with “the new weird” or “speculative fantasy”, he ought to be compared to Roberto Bolaño or Mircea Cărtărescu. This new novel is equally maximalist, dense, disorienting and discomfiting, reflecting how surreal our reality seems to have become.

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 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.

Royal Opera House, London
This revival of Richard Jones and Antony McDonald’s 2022 staging has kept most of its excellent original cast Lisette Oropesa is imperious and gleaming as the enchantress Alcina

Handel, but make it fun. Perhaps that was Richard Jones’s brief for his production of Alcina, first seen here in 2022 and revived by Sarah Fahie, its original movement director. And of all Handel’s operas perhaps it’s this one, with its desert-island storyline of sorcery and sex – what happens on the island stays on the island – that invites this treatment.

Jones makes the “good guys” into members of a kind of puritan cult, so the tension between the moral world and the sensual, instinctive one is less of a gentle pull, more a tug of war. Alcina’s prisoners are transformed by a squirt of her eponymous perfume into birds and animals – a parrot, a mandrill, a King Charles spaniel, all wearing prosthetic heads so beautifully made that for the past year or two they have been in display cases in the Royal Opera House foyer. The animals are kept busy fawning over Alcina or moving Antony McDonald’s sets around: there’s a huge bed, a greenhouse and an enchanted forest on wheeled platforms, found behind the doors of what might be a hotel corridor. It’s a wide stage, and there’s often at least one singer running across it. Amid all this, the opera’s moments of warmth, insight and introspection risk getting lost or at least overshadowed. It’s brittle, but it is entertaining.

Almeida theatre, London
Josh O’Connor makes a powerful return to the stage as a New York violinist driven by dire straits to risk everything in the ring

Clifford Odets proved himself a contender during the Great Depression but has grown unfamiliar on this side of the Atlantic. Here is a rare outing for his 1937 drama, bolstered by the stage return of Josh O’Connor after a decade on screen. He plays Joe Bonaparte, a New York violinist who, after years of careful endeavour, dismisses a precarious career in music to turn a quick buck as a boxer – risking his precious hands in the process.

He is spurred on by a zealous manager, Tom, who even deploys his own lover, Lorna, to keep him satisfied. O’Connor transforms seamlessly as Bonaparte who hardens, bout by bout, with a resolve he deems fitting for the desperate 30s. His professional success and emotional spiral are observed by an anxious father, who irresistibly hymns music over money, and the ruthless gangster who has bought a stake in him.

Sadler’s Wells, London
Skill, craft and beauty infuse pieces including Lar Lubovitch’s Many Angels and Judith Jamison’s A Case of You

The Alvin Ailey company’s New Works programme might be seen in some circles as dated, and it’s true that it is neither cutting edge nor modishly contemporary. Yet it rests on more perennial qualities that underpin the company’s enduring appeal: skill, craft, beauty and humanity, and beneath them an artistic aim that can reach up towards the sublime, out towards the world, or in towards the heart.

Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye, new to the company but created in 2011 for Nederlands Dans Theater, tilts towards transcendence, being as spare, composed and unbound as the Bach music for solo violin it inhabits. The eight dancers repeatedly form a kind of visual chord – first a line, later a circle – which dissolves to let solos, duets and trios unspool. The counterpointed lines of movement remind you of the music: limbs stretch like strings, torsos curve and coil like the body of a violin, and the inflections of phrasing are somehow exact yet unfettered. It is a rare, spacious and beautiful composition.

The colourful and larger-than-life staging of the opera about an enchantress who transforms her lovers into beasts returns to the Royal Opera stage this week. We went behind the scenes on the final day of rehearsals

All photos: Tristram Kenton

• Alcina is at the Royal Opera House from 15 September to 3 October

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published when Dillard was 28, skyrocketed her to become one of the most prominent nonfiction writers of her generation

Annie Dillard, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, died aged 81 at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Tuesday.

Maggie Nelson, Dillard’s literary editor, confirmed her death to the New York Times.

Four openers and live band for Sheeran’s tour depart after removal of Macklemore over ‘free Palestine’ comments

All four supporting acts for upcoming dates of Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour have withdrawn in solidarity with fellow opening act Macklemore, as backlash grows against his removal from the tour over onstage comments in support of Palestine.

Finneas, the singer who was scheduled to open for Sheeran on six South American dates in November, withdrew from the tour on Tuesday afternoon, hours after Sheeran posted his own lengthy statement to Instagram explaining pressure from venue owners to remove Macklemore for pro-Palestine comments made during two shows at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium.

Passionate documentary maker won international acclaim for unsparing but poetic films exploring the impact of the Pinochet regime in Chile

Patricio Guzmán, the film-maker who chronicled Chile’s bloody 1970s political strife and its subsequent social and political turmoil in films such as The Battle of Chile and Nostalgia for the Light, has died aged 85. According to Chilean news outlet Emol, Guzmán died on Tuesday in Paris after a cardiorespiratory arrest.

Guzmán’s chief preoccupation throughout his career was the carnage unleashed by Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973 against Salvador Allende, Chile’s elected president. He later told the Guardian: “I’m a film-maker who was very marked by the ways of the dictator. It has remained with me for ever. I cannot leave it behind.” However, he resisted the idea that he was an activist, political film-maker, adding: “I’m not a sociologist. Neither am I a politician. I make films that are metaphorical and poetic; I interpret reality through my own personal way of looking.”

Poet in da Corner by Debris Stevenson revealed that acting in a theatre can have a lot in common with MCing in a club

By 2018 I was in my third or fourth year professionally as a grime MC and producer. I was 27 and didn’t have any aspirations in theatre. But Debris Stevenson, a good friend of mine, asked me to help her write one of the first drafts of a song in her play Poet in da Corner. I did that and then she invited me to a table reading session at the Royal Court to read the part of SS Vyper [a pirate radio DJ].

The theatre’s artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, said: “You read it so well you may as well be in the play!” I thought she was joking, but the next week I was in rehearsal.

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, with music by Jammz, is at the Yard theatre, London, until 17 October

As told to Lindesay Irvine

For years, my vitiligo controlled my life, and I was constantly trying to disguise it. But one day, I realised I could take a very different and extremely liberating approach

The microphone felt heavier than I expected. As I stood on stage at a London comedy club last December, I looked out at a room full of strangers sitting quietly, waiting for me to make them laugh. It felt nerve-racking and surreal. I had spent years hiding my vitiligo, hoping people wouldn’t notice it. Now I was about to joke about it in my set.

I was three years old when I developed my first patch of vitiligo on the back of my hand, which later spread to my arms, legs, face and other parts of my body. By the time I was six years old, 70% of me was covered. I was too young to understand what was happening.

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.

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.

Tired of squashed sarnies and spilt dressing? From stainless steel to insulated to plastic-free, here are the lunch boxes for kids and adults we rate the most

• The best water bottles

If packed lunches are a high-stakes game in your household (as they are in mine), the right lunch box is crucial. There’s nothing worse than opening the lunch you’ve been looking forward to since 8am to find yoghurt has leaked on to your sandwich and your cucumbers have dried out.

A lunch box may look like a simple bit of kit, but keeping food contained from kitchen to school dinner hall or workplace desk is a surprisingly demanding job. And the humble lunch box has come a long way from the simple plastic tubs that used to contain our clingfilm-wrapped, squashed sandwiches at school. Today, you can find bento boxes with multiple compartments, stainless steel containers, silicone pouches and leakproof designs promising to keep everything from yoghurt to salad dressing safely contained.

Whether it’s soft serve or sorbet, gelato or fro-yo, the Ninja Creami Scoop and Swirl is a faff-free way of making all your favourite frozen treats

• The best ice-cream makers for your home

For me, ice-cream isn’t only for summer. It’s my dessert of choice all year round, and a good ice-cream maker ensures it’s always readily available. When I put more than a dozen models through their paces earlier this year, one thing became clear: the most important feature in any machine is ease of use.

On that front, the Ninja Creami really scored highly for me. I’ve used the original NC300 model for a few years, and I like its simplicity and that it’s easy to clean. Nowadays, though, we expect our appliances to do a little more – and when it comes to ice-cream, the current craze is soft serve.

Prosecutors sought jail term for chief executive of Evett after insects not approved for consumption were on menu

A South Korean court has fined the operator of one of Seoul’s most celebrated restaurants and its chief executive for serving a dessert topped with ants, an insect not approved for consumption under local food safety law.

The operator of Evett, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in the affluent Gangnam district, was fined 10m won (£5,400) and its chief executive 15m won, Newsis reported.

The liquid from a jar of olives is naturally chock-full of savoury flavour, so why should it go to waste? It’s perfect for sprucing up a salad

Olive brine is a simple byproduct that has so much flavour, and it elevates a classic salade nicoise dressing while keeping things colourful, elegant and relatively simple.

Cooking at this time of year is all about low-effort, maximum-impact options. This savoury dish comes together quickly but looks striking, while the dessert showcases figs at their most flavoursome

The secret to late-summer/early autumn cooking is to keep things relatively low-effort, not least to assuage those back-to-work/school blues. And that rule applies across the board, whether you’re making a midweek meal, entertaining or serving up a long, slow Sunday lunch. The sauce for this pasta dish, for example, comes together while the pasta is cooking, while the semifreddo pudding makes the most of ripe figs when they are at their absolute best.

It’s probably not a good idea to freeze cooked risotto rice, but if you must, we have three experts who can tell you how to minimise the mush

I have tried various ways to reheat risotto after freezing, but it always turns into a gloopy, starchy, unappetising mess. What am I doing wrong?
Jill, by email
“Freezing risotto will be a bit of a disaster,” says Theo Randall, chef/patron at Theo Randall Cucina Italiana at the Intercontinental in London, “and it doesn’t really work.” The reason for this is that the cooked rice absorbs all the moisture while it’s defrosting, resulting in, well, Jill’s gloopy mess.

It’s also possible her risotto was overcooked to begin with, says Sue Quinn, author of Cheese Please. “Softer grains mean more leached starch, which leaves less leeway for further cooking without it going sticky and pasty.” Then there’s the question of reheating that defrosted rice for too long: “That can over-soften the already-cooked rice,” adds Quinn, so you have to do it “quickly and only until it’s piping hot”.

The reality, however, is that “freezing, thawing and reheating rice will make it squishier whatever you do”, Quinn says, but “if that’s the way Jill rolls”, her best bet is to get that defrosted risotto in the microwave, sprinkle it with a little water or stock, cover loosely, then reheat on high in one-minute intervals, stirring in between, until it’s hot all the way through. “To do this on the hob, put the defrosted risotto in a pan with a splash of hot stock or water, and stir gently over a medium heat for just long enough to distribute the heat.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

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.

Conversations are supposed to be two-sided – but all too often we come up against someone who’s passionately, exclusively in love with the sound of their own voice. Time to fight back …

When I was in my early teens, I was often invited round to a schoolfriend’s house for dinner. Her family struck me as wildly progressive: they were Danish and indulged in all sorts of “out-there” activities – fondues, candle-making and, most terrifying of all, the talking stick.

Before the meal was served, someone would retrieve the sacred broom handle and it would be passed around the table. You could speak only if you had possession of the stick. Despite it being the most stressful thing ever (it meant being in the spotlight, and then remembering to keep quiet the rest of the time), I now frequently yearn for a more convenient version of that stick.

For example, I met a friend recently who I see infrequently but keep up with via voice notes. No sooner had we sat down than he launched into a long discourse about his new marathon training food plan. He only broke the flow to order an omelette: “Four egg whites, two yolks, is that possible?” (We were in my local greasy spoon, so the request was greeted with mirth.) When we left, 90 minutes later, he finally had the grace to turn to me and ask: “And how are things with you?”
Walking home, I felt a mixture of disappointment and irritation. Had he always been so self-absorbed? So uninterested in anyone else? I couldn’t help wondering if our one-sided virtual updates had played a part in the problem.

There is a name for this type of egocentric behaviour – “conversational narcissism”. Although it was coined by the sociologist Charles Derber in his 1979 book The Pursuit of Attention, the term seems more relevant than ever. “WhatsApp communication and voice notes are really a series of monologues,” says Charlotte Fox Weber, a psychotherapist. “In face-to-face situations, people are forgetting how to pause naturally, to make space to hear and listen. And people are chatting on the phone – an activity that at least requires turn-taking in a defined way – much less often.”

A lot of our communication online can feel weirdly transactional, focused on logistics or niche WhatsApp groups. According to Tamu Thomas, a life coach and author, this has damaged the art of improvised conversation. “People have less capacity for meandering conversations that don’t have a purpose,” she says. “A good dialogue is a back-and-forth between two people discovering new things about each other, even if they have known each other for years. Because there are now so many different channels available to stay in touch, some people are confusing communication with connection.”

Knowledge is power, though. If you can recognise the five types of common conversation hogger, it will be much easier to handle them.

My son was inconsolable and the back seat was an absolute mess. After a few minutes of trying to clean up, a stranger emerged from a nearby house

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

Kids always get sick at the worst possible time. For instance: in the middle of a busy motorway, one hour into a three-hour trip.

My husband was away for work and I was driving our two small children to see him, when one vomited in the back seat. I pulled into a slipway just off the motorway to try to clean up as best I could. The kids were too young to be trusted to sit there safely right next to a busy road, so I had to leave them strapped into the car seats while I tried to mop up the vomit with wet wipes. My son was inconsolable and the car was an absolute mess.

A Tory twentysomething and a lifelong leftwinger agreed on the need for more housing stock, but did they concur on welfare and net zero?

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

Oliver, 22, London

Occupation Journalist for ConservativeHome

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.

The cost of living crisis hits students hard. Planning ahead and some self-discipline will help, alongside a sharp eye for a bargain and, if you’re eligible, a bursary

Like late-night study sessions and cramming into a student kitchen to cook up meals, being savvy with money has long been part of the university experience. But with the cost of living remaining high, students are more money-conscious than ever.

“It is one of the most difficult times to make ends meet as a student,” according to Tom Allingham, communications director at Save the Student (STS). He says soaring prices for essentials, such as food and energy bills, have “disproportionately affected” students, while maintenance loans (intended to help cover day-to-day costs) have failed to keep up with high rates of inflation.

With the budget looming, arguments rage over whether ministers should scrap a pledge popular with millions

There were fresh calls this week for the state pension “triple lock” to be ditched as debate rages over whether the UK can afford it.

The triple lock guarantees that the state pension goes up each year in line with inflation or wage increases or 2.5% – whichever is the highest.

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.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of painting on the gloss, but thanks to a range of fresh formats in sophisticated shades and textures, my head – and lips – have been turned

I’m deeply suspicious of people who never change their minds. To be so completely sure of anything as to be permanently entrenched in any position isn’t something I admire, which is why I shove an olive into my mouth every couple of years and hope it finally takes.

I do the same with lip gloss, with historically similar results. Fashion has, until recently, been on my side. Less sophisticated than lipstick, overshadowed by TikTok trending lip oils, less effortless cool-girl than tinted lip balm, gloss has barely had a look-in these past few years, but new formulas steal from other formats for a better user experience and, well, like everything eventually, lip gloss is back in vogue.

Experts don’t know exactly what causes dandruff, but if you’re seeing light flakes on your scalp, over-the-counter products can help

You spy a scatter of white flakes on your collar. Or you’ve got an itch that won’t quit, no matter how much you wash your hair. Dandruff isn’t glamorous, but it’s common: about half the world’s population has it.

An itchy, flaking scalp is rarely dangerous, but it can be annoying. Here’s what you need to know about what might be causing your flakes, what you can do about it, and when it’s time to get help.

The practice does increase blood flow to parts of the body but experts say this isn’t necessarily a health benefit: ‘A punch to the nose also increases blood flow’

• Read more in the Antiviral series

The world of wellness fads is a cyclical place. Everything comes back into fashion when a new generation of influencers decides to switch it up. Pretty much every current hype was popular in decades past, from extreme juicing to genital sunning and everything in between.

Gua sha is the ancient practice of scraping the skin to form mild bruises – called petechiae – which are thought to do a variety of helpful things for your body. The practice has been around in China for centuries and has spread through the wonders of social media to all corners of the globe.

Georgia O’Keeffe inspires the latest Calvin Klein while Michael Kors feels indebted to Alexander Calder

Calvin Klein has taken a highbrow turn in the two years since Veronica Leoni took charge. The Italian designer, a philosophy graduate who was schooled in the chic design studios of Jil Sander and Celine, has shifted away from jeans, boxer shorts and logos, stripping the brand to its minimalist bones: slip dresses and simple coats, slim skirts and crisp T-shirts.

Leoni called this the “discipline of removal”. Her muse this season was Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist who the brand’s namesake founder admired. Klein bought O’Keeffe’s painting Summer Days in 1983 for $1m, subsequently donating it to the Whitney Museum. A checked pattern taken from O’Keeffe’s distinctive capsule wardrobe of utilitarian chic appeared on this catwalk as a wrap coat, hardware-free with a fabric belt and no buttons.

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.

It’s the birthplace of the popular cheese, but the Barletta-Andria-Trani province in southern Italy has an array of local delicacies – from olive oil and yellow tomatoes to goat prosciutto

‘I don’t eat mozzarella outside Puglia,” says our friend Savio. “It’s not the same.” Savio is a very opinionated foodie, so I take his words with a pinch of good Puglian sea salt (see below). He was adamant about the superiority of the stretched-curd cheese from his home turf.

Puglia is also the birthplace of ingredient du jour burrata, which originated in Andria, a few miles from Savio’s home town of Barletta. Andria forms one part of the triangular Barletta-Andria-Trani (BAT) province, but despite the cheese connection and Barletta having miles of palm-backed, sandy beaches, it is often passed over for better-known parts of Puglia. So I asked Savio’s company, Unexpected Italy, an app that calls itself the antidote to overtourism, to organise a trip to the area.

Chefs in the east of the country are shunning imported produce for local ingredients, reinforcing how food is intertwined with a region and its people

‘It’s a magical place, and not just because of the hotel.” Standing outside the greenhouses at Högbo Brukshotell, two hours north of Stockholm, Stefan Johansson is talking about far more than hospitality. The former head chef, now responsible for sustainability at Högbo, has spent much of the past decade helping reshape the way this corner of Sweden grows, cooks and thinks about food.

The catalyst was disarmingly simple. Years ago, a journalist asked Johansson why he was cooking the food he was cooking. Like many ambitious Swedish chefs, Stefan trained in Stockholm’s top restaurants, where ingredients from around the world were only a phone call away. The question lingered long after the interview ended.

Chirag Bahri was working on board a tanker when six men seized it. For almost eight months, he and his colleagues were held captive, an experience that would change his life for ever

It was at noon on 8 May 2010 when the pirates came. Chirag Bahri remembers the exact time and date because it marked the start of the seven months and 20 days he was held hostage by a gang of Somali pirates. Bahri was 28 at the time, and working as second engineer on a chemical tanker, Marida Marguerite. It was his 12th journey through the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean. It had been a good job for a young man from landlocked Uttar Pradesh in India, and Bahri was about to be promoted. “But then, piracy,” he says.

The ship had been 120 miles off the coast of Oman, partway through a run taking benzene – a raw material used in petrochemicals – from Kandla Port in India to Antwerp in Belgium. The piracy problem in the Indian Ocean was well known; Somalis armed with AK-47s were setting out in fast skiffs and taking ships hostage. Yet commercial vessels, including the Marida Marguerite, remained undefended.

The rise of AI-generated tributes and bots for ‘talking’ to the dead has experts concerned more people will grieve in isolation

Tributes rolled in after the death of Dolly Parton last month. Jack White performed Jolene at a London gig. Kesha sang Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You), a single her mother wrote for the country music titan. Even Pitbull stopped his Madison Square Garden show to memorialize Parton and all the other “powerful women” in the crowd. But one of the strangest – and most viral – eulogies did not come from a celebrity. It did not even come from a person.

Run Jolene, at just under five minutes, is an earworm of a country song, containing all the cliches of the genre: twangy singer, banjo licks, corny lyrics. Those lyrics concern Jolene, the fictional romantic rival made infamous by Parton. “Somebody better warn Jolene / Dolly’s coming through those gates,” the voice croons. “Run Jolene / Girl you better move your feet.”

Once the preserve of the ultra-rich, supercars are finding new drivers through rentals, finance deals, influencer culture and the manosphere. But why would anyone want a 200mph vehicle?

‘The £600,000 Lamborghini; that was the first seizure of the operation,” says special chief inspector Geoff Tatman of the Metropolitan police, thinking back to the second weekend of August. “He was stopping at the red lights, revving his engine, waiting for the traffic to clear, then speeding. So on the third time we saw him do it, we stopped him and seized the vehicle.” The car has a top speed of 217mph (350kmh), but the limit on these London streets is 20mph. Over the same weekend, the Metropolitan police seized about 90 more cars with a combined value of more than £8m, an increase on last year’s tally of 72 cars. They were seized for various offences: driving without insurance, driving with incorrect licences or antisocial behaviour. Previously, the Met would have had to let such drivers off with a warning, but the law – section 59 of the Police Reform Act – was strengthened this year to enable the immediate confiscation of vehicles. The seized cars also included a Ferrari Monza worth about £3.4m (the driver only had a provisional UK licence). They were all put on display at Marble Arch, attracting a throng of camera-wielding onlookers (one attender did a seven-hour live blog of the occasion).

Many of the supercars apprehended by the Met in August bore Middle Eastern number plates. It has been a growing trend for car owners from the region to spend summer in London, bringing their cars with them (at a cost of £25,000 upwards). The orange Lamborghini that Tatman seized had Dubai plates. Most of the vehicle owners retrieved their cars the next day after paying fines and presenting the correct paperwork. The Lamborghini driver was subsequently seen driving respectfully and not revving his engine. Lessons were learned, although the question remains: why ship a 200mph car to London to drive in a 20mph zone?

There was a rat army in my flatshare, gnawing through pipes, carpets and even a bedroom door. That’s not to mention the mice ...

We should have known we were in trouble when we saw that the garden of our new place backed on to a Chinese restaurant in Hackney, London, with terrible reviews. Before long, the rats started coming in through the pipes. It was ratmageddon, and every day it got more harrowing. They trooped over our kitchen, like the world’s worst sequel to Ratatouille. They calmly walked into rooms while we were watching telly. They gnawed through all the carpets to try to get into our bedrooms.

There was no stopping them. After sniffing out the remnants of an old snack in my housemate Simon’s bin, a pack of rats got to work one night gnawing through the wood at the bottom of his bedroom door. Like a rodent military exercise, they spent eight hours whittling a hole large enough to get through. I lay next door, 100% freaked out, panicking they’d try to get into my room next. I didn’t sleep a wink. Fairly soon after this, one of the rats died under the floorboards so we got a bottle-fly infestation to boot. Naturally, our landlord did nothing about any of this.

Thousands of children in state care were evacuated when Russia invaded. Kyiv wants them back – but many resist

When he first arrived in his new home in a small village in the Italian Alps in March 2022, 15-year-old Denys* says he felt homesick and confused. He had been put on an overnight bus and relocated along with more than 100 other children from his orphanage in Berdiansk, in eastern Ukraine, which was one of the first areas to be invaded by Russian troops.

“Ukraine was all I knew,” says Denys. “I had never left it my whole life.”

Fire threatens Kalimantan’s rainforests. On the peatland frontlines, a group of local mothers is defending their community. Words and Photography: Garry Lotulung

Irma puts on her heavy rubber boots as she prepares for a volunteer firefighting shift in her village of Sungai Putri, on the Indonesian side of Borneo island.

Dressed in full safety gear she heads into fire zones on her motorbike, the air thick with toxic smoke.

Dismissed in Taiwan as simply propaganda, the Long Watch, or Jiaofeng, has proved a sensation across the strait with its references to real-life crises

After shaking off the people trailing her through a crowded market and emerging from a bathroom in disguise, the double agent appears to have escaped. But a sip of water on a plane eventually gets her. She is poisoned after Taiwan’s military intelligence service discovers that she has been working secretly for China.

The plot comes from a new Chinese spy drama co-produced by the Ministry of State Security. Since its premiere on 6 September, it has become a TV hit, with a fictionalised take on a subject rarely treated so directly: the modern history of tensions with Taiwan.

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.

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

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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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