The PM’s failure was being a spectator as Morgan McSweeney set about finding jobs for his mates

This is the end, beautiful friend. It is the tragedy of almost all prime ministers that they are the last person to realise the game is up. Their race is run. The backbenchers are the first to know. They spend time in their constituencies. They get it in the neck from voters who have had enough with whoever is in No 10. They are the ones who get told nothing seems to work any more and that the prime minister has to go.

Then come the cabinet ministers. They are more protected from the real world and may feel a residual sense of loyalty to the person who gave them a job. But even they are not immune to the tsunami of discontent.

Being hairless on top has never been in style, but r/bald members encourage one another in the face of insecurity

I was sitting in a cafe a few weeks ago when I overheard a rare bit of sunny talk about advances in medicine and technology when a woman said: “Nobody will be bald in the future.” The way she said it made me think of people in the 1950s imagining the 21st century as a world with flying cars, sassy robot maids and no wars; a world where everybody has hair on their heads is possible.

Bald has never exactly been in style, but these days, it feels like going bald is tougher than ever. It can feel lonely watching all those clumps fall out when you’re in the shower. Yes, there have been plenty of advances in hair restoration, and treatments have been proven to help some people avoid getting to the point where they need a doctor to surgically redistribute the follicles from the back to the front of their heads. But it won’t work for everybody, and people will still lose their hair as long as genetics and hormones have a say.

Part lesson, part lark, these 15-minute episodes are a total joy. They have such a deliriously light touch they will make you want to run outside and plunge your hands into the soil

This might sound like heresy to some, but I can comfortably assert that the reason I am not a skilled horticulturist is Gardeners’ World. When I was growing up, Gardeners’ World – appointment television as mandated by my father – felt like the longest, dullest 30 minutes of the week. When the theme tune came on, I could feel my life force draining away. How different things could have been if This is a Gardening Show had been around back then.

Hosted by Zach Galifianakis, there are moments when This Is a Gardening Show feels like the perfect programme. Part lesson, part lark and part warning, the series’six 15-minute episodes have such a deliriously light touch that it makes you want to run outside and plunge your hands into the soil.

We know what can cause loneliness, from online habits to other cultural shifts – but what makes us feel connected and cared for?

The rise of social media, disappearing third spaces, displeasure with dating apps: in 2026, there are plenty of possible culprits when it comes to loneliness.

But what makes people feel connected and cared for? Below are six stories about the gestures that made Guardian readers feel less lonely.

Inspired by David Attenborough’s Secret Garden? Try these easy, enjoyable tips to turn your outdoor space into a sanctuary for wildlife

• Gardening pros on the tools they can’t live without

It’s happening: spring’s stretching and greenness, vibrant and achingly alive. But the last thing your garden needs is to be tidied up in a rush, for soil to be cleared of debris, for rotten, grey, dead and dying bits to be whisked away. For it’s these bits that hold all the life.

So many small things – overwinter insects, larvae, pupae and eggs – are still sleeping or waiting for just a few more warmer days. In our attempt to spruce things up, we often whisk away their homes in hollow stems and under layers of autumn leaves, and then wonder where the birds have gone.

Iran’s goal is to maintain chokehold on the global economy, even as some say it could run out of oil storage by Sunday

• Middle East crisis – live updates
  

Donald Trump’s indefinite shelving of the plan to bomb Iran’s bridges and power stations on Tuesday night is being widely described as leaving the conflict in limbo, but that is anything but the truth.

Pakistan insists the prospect of talks in Islamabad has not evaporated, and positive messages are still being exchanged, but in the meantime the site of kinetic activity has switched from land to sea.

PM under increasing pressure over Mandelson vetting scandal as sources say ministers spoke up at tense meeting

Keir Starmer is looking increasingly isolated over his handling of the Peter Mandelson scandal with divisions emerging in cabinet over his decision to sack the Foreign Office civil servant Olly Robbins.

On another difficult day for the prime minister, the Guardian learned of concerns around the cabinet table, a senior minister refused to say the dismissal was fair and several mandarins called for him to be reinstated. One Labour MP called on Starmer to quit.

NHS struggling to cope with record numbers, which Cancer Research UK says puts progress on survival rates at risk

The number of people in the UK being diagnosed with cancer has reached a record high, with one person diagnosed every 80 seconds, a report reveals.

Cancer Research UK found that more than 403,000 people were being diagnosed with the disease each year, largely due to a growing and ageing population, as people are more likely to develop cancer as they get older.

Three-year deal includes funding for a riot squad to ‘disperse’ people trying to board small boats

The UK government has agreed to pay France another £660m to curb the number of asylum seekers travelling across the Channel, including plans to fund a riot squad to “contain and disperse” people trying to board small boats.

Under a three-year deal to be signed on Thursday by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, 1,100 enforcement, intelligence and military officers – an increase of 40% – will be employed to track down smuggling gangs and people seeking refuge.

Iranian forces seize two ships in critical waterway as Washington and Tehran maintain separate blockades

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Iranian forces have seized two ships in the strait of Hormuz as the US and Iran doubled down on imposing separate blockades of the shipping waterway.

The standoff over the strait – through which about 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied fossil gas passed through during peacetime – has raised doubts about whether stalled peace negotiations will resume.

• US special envoy Zampolli hopes for Italy involvement

• Doubts remain over Iran’s participation

An envoy to Donald Trump has asked Fifa to replace Iran with Italy in the upcoming World Cup, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.

The plan is an effort to repair ties between Trump and Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni after the two fell out amid the American president’s attacks against Pope Leo XIV over the Iran war, the FT reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Nine people in total arrested over alleged conspiracy concerning unspecified site connected to Jewish community

Two further arrests have been made in relation to an alleged conspiracy to commit arson at a site connected to the Jewish community, the Metropolitan police have said.

The latest arrests, made by counter-terrorism police investigating the alleged arson conspiracy, were of a man aged 19 and another aged 26. They were detained in Watford on Tuesday and remain in custody.

Janet Fordham died in crash after travelling to see man who claimed he would help to recover money from earlier scams

A British woman who was scammed out of up to £1m in a string of so-called romance frauds died in a road crash after travelling to west Africa to try to recoup some of her lost fortune, an inquest in Devon has heard.

Janet Fordham was cheated of her life savings and her home over a period of five years by fraudsters apparently based in the UK, Germany, the US and Ghana, the inquest in Exeter was told.

• Rosenior has taken charge of only 23 matches

• Calum McFarlane in interim charge for rest of season

Chelsea have sacked Liam Rosenior after a dreadful run of form saw the head coach lose the support of the dressing room. Rosenior has departed three months into a six-and-a-half-year deal and leaves with his side in danger of missing out on European football.

The Stamford Bridge hierarchy had hoped to give the 41-year-old time to implement his vision but their hand was forced after a dramatic slump left Chelsea seven points off the Champions League place and saw them lose five consecutive league games without scoring for the first time since 1912.

The campaign, fronted by a CGI squirrel, is part of government initiative to boost financial risk taking, amid fears UK growth is being stymied

• Nils Pratley: the ‘Savvy Squirrel looks a hit too tame’

City firms are pinning their hopes on a government-endorsed advertising blitz fronted by a finance “savvy” CGI squirrel to encourage cautious British savers to shift out of cash and start investing.

The long-awaited retail investment campaign, which will cost up to £50m, is part of the chancellor Rachel Reeves’ nationwide push to encourage more financial risk taking, amid fears risk-averse consumers are losing out and ultimately stymying UK growth.

Skincare videos are featuring children as young as two, Guardian analysis finds, prompting fears about the industry’s reach and lack of safeguards

• ‘An element of exploitation’: the world of TikTok child skincare influencers

Children as young as two are appearing in TikTok videos demonstrating their skincare routines, a Guardian investigation has found, raising concerns about the beauty industry’s reach and the lack of safeguards for child influencers.

The research found that 400 TikTok videos out of the 7,600 skincare-related posts analysed featured routines or advice presented by children believed to be under 13. At least 90 of these posts featured under-fives, including babies and toddlers.

The UN has officially designated Jakarta the world’s largest city, home to 42 million. We explore a day in the life of the ‘big durian’.

In December, the United Nations officially designated Jakarta the world’s largest city, hosting a staggering 42 million inhabitants. Michael Neilson speaks to several people who call the ‘big durian’ home – about the positives and the negatives – and how community and the city’s infamously dry humour get them through.

Drones minimise Russian manpower advantage on battlefield, says foreign minister; Moscow shies from Turkey push for Zelenskyy-Putin talks. What we know on day 1,520

Ukraine’s frontline position is “the strongest” it has been in a year due to superiority in drones and enhanced air defence, said Andriy Sybiha, the foreign minister. Agence France-Presse said its analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) showed Russian troops made almost no territorial gains across the frontline in March – the first time this had occurred in two and a half years.

“We have minimised the Russians’ advantage in manpower through the use of drones,” Sybiha added. “For us, the situation on the battlefield is about strengthening our negotiating position. We can shoot down up to 90% of the targets that strike our cities … [Ukraine’s] position on the battlefield is indeed the strongest, or the most solid, it has been over the past year.”

Turkey is trying to revive negotiations between Russia and Ukraine and bring together their leaders at the request of Kyiv, the office of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said on Wednesday. Erdogan told the Nato head, Mark Rutte in a meeting in Ankara that “we are working to revive negotiations and start talks at leaders’ level”.

Sybiha, the Ukrainian foreign minister, confirmed Ukraine is pushing for the face-to-face talks between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin. While Turkey was asked to facilitate, Ukraine would consider any venue outside Russia and Belarus. “We are … advocating for a meeting now to bring new momentum to diplomacy,” Sybiha said.

Russian news agencies quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying that Putin would only meet Zelenskyy “for the purpose of finalising agreements”. The Kremlin instead appealed for the US to again send Donald Trump’s delegates Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow. The pair have repeatedly listened to Putin’s maximalist demands, to which Witkoff has appeared pliant, and produced no outcomes while declining to visit Kyiv and hear Ukraine’s side. Peskov said Russia was ready for any new talks on a settlement to the war with US negotiators “even tomorrow”.

A woman and child were killed in the Russian oil refining city of Syzran, about 1,000km (621 miles) from the border with Ukraine, after a Ukrainian drone hit their apartment building, the regional governor said on Wednesday. Russian media reports said a Rosneft oil refinery is located on the same street as the damaged building.

Russian drones attacked infrastructure in the Black Sea port of Odesa damaging berths, warehouses, railway infrastructure, port operators’ facilities and a ship, Ukraine’s deputy PM Oleksiy Kuleba said on Wednesday. Preliminary reports said no one was hurt and the port was still operating.

Kuleba said a Russian drone attack at a sorting yard at the Zaporizhzhia-Live station in the southern Zaporizhzhia region killed an assistant train driver while the driver was hospitalised.

EU member states reached agreement on unblocking the urgently needed €90bn (£78bn) loan for Kyiv and a new package of sanctions against Moscow after Ukraine resumed pumping Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, prompting Budapest to lift its veto. Jon Henley writes that Cyprus, which holds the rotating EU presidency, said member states’ ambassadors had agreed to launch “written procedures” for the final approval of the loan and the sanctions package, with formal signoff on both due by Thursday afternoon.

Anthropic’s decision to restrict access to its powerful new model increases fears about the advanced technology

Anthropic has ruled out releasing its latest AI model, Mythos, to the public because of the threat it poses to global cybersecurity.

However, the US tech startup behind the Claude chatbot confirmed on Wednesday it was investigating a report that a group of people had gained unauthorised access to Mythos. The alleged incident has raised concerns over the pace of development and the ability of tech companies to keep their riskiest products out of the public domain. Here, we examine Mythos and its potential impact.

He launched a guitar band just as the world was moving on. But they still went stratospheric. Fray talks about uniting Manchester after the attacks – and writing his first single on a Fred Perry comp slip

Manchester has yet to erect a structure that hometown boys Courteeners cannot sell out. But tonight, a stadium band is squeezed into the narrowest of venues. At a heaving Night & Day cafe, disbelieving fans snap photos of their entry wristbands to a rare intimate show in honour of a new greatest hits collection. “Twenty years,” marvels frontman Liam Fray, contemplating his band’s lifespan. “You don’t get rid of us that easily.” For most of the audience there has barely been a Manchester without them.

Charlotte, 18, has seen Courteeners at their enormous Heaton Park shows. “All my friends like them,” she says. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham tells me he became a fan through his son. Paul, 56, has seen them more than 100 times. “There’s not many actual bands any more,” he says, which seems key to their appeal.

Pakistani capital in pandemic-style limbo as people work from home, public transport is closed and businesses shut

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Across Islamabad, there is lockdown. The streets of the Pakistani capital have been empty for days, shops have been shuttered and public transport closed down. Officials and office workers have been told to work from home, while labourers have found themselves deprived of work. The only visible figures are those in army and police uniforms lining the roads.

For many, it feels like a return to the pandemic. Yet the cause is not a virus but Islamabad’s status as the venue for US-Iran talks that hold the promise of an end to war in the Middle East, with stringent security measures imposed on the city as it awaits the two delegations.

The chemistry is sweet, the location beautiful and there’s a crime every week that’s not too difficult to wrap up neatly. It’s the traditional dance of the minor cop show

If all cop shows, celebrity travelogues and cooking competitions were to disappear overnight, the world of television would risk imploding. They are the load-bearing walls that sustain the whole structure. The sheer volume of these shows means that inevitably, there are tiny, specialised niches within each genre. Take Canadian crime drama Saint-Pierre, for example. Have you ever wondered what a slightly grittier Death in Paradise might look like? If so, you’re in luck.

Just to make things even more familiar, Death in Paradise alumna Joséphine Jobert can be found in Saint-Pierre, too, co-starring as deputy chief Geneviève “Arch” Archamboult, a Parisian cop who, for reasons which will eventually become clear, has been transplanted to the tiny north Atlantic French territory of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. She is joined by another mildly troubled blow-in, Allan Hawco’s Royal Newfoundland Constabulary inspector Donny “Fitz” Fitzpatrick, a detective who has been shunted into obscurity after digging a little too vigorously into the nefarious deeds of a politician on his previous beat. Perhaps inevitably in this context, he’s struggling with a difficult private life, which lends him a slightly dishevelled air. He’s also prone to sea sickness, which, given his new placement on a small island, is not ideal. Pretty much as we meet him, he’s hacking up his breakfast into a nearby rockpool. The locals are not sympathetic.

Light as a feather and bouncy as a marshmallow, cushioned shoes have gone from marathons to daily commutes

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Floaty foam-based footwear has been spotted on celebrities for years, from Aubrey Plaza in Hokas and Harry Styles in New Balance to Zendaya’s ongoing deal with On running shoes.

A desire for “practical functionality” has driven technical sportswear to street pavements, says streetwear reporter Lei Takanashi from the Business of Fashion in New York.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some great new paperbacks, from Booker-listed novels to reportage from Ukraine

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A survey of US adults reveals many of them think they have extraordinary powers of intuition – especially those in younger age groups

Name: The psychic generation.

Age: You tell me.

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The civil servant says he was pressured by No 10 to get Mandelson’s vetting done; the PM says he wasn’t informed. Who emerges most damaged?

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.

There’s nothing to make you feel old like finding out that something you used to do all the time is now completely beyond you

I decided to do some press-ups. They’re good for you, apparently. A calisthenic classic. This much I picked up in a doomscrolling session. Some algorithm somewhere must have decided I’d be open to the idea and, not for the first time, the algorithm was right.

I used to do lots of press-ups, perhaps 20 or 30, most days. I can recall how this started. It was 1985 and I was spending a gap year working for my dad’s scaffolding company. That I was the boss’s son didn’t stop my workmates from sharing with me their thoughts on my shortcomings. One such shortcoming was identified by a muscly scaffolder called Andy. “Your arms are puny,” he told me. “Do some press-ups,” Andy advised. So that’s what I did, and my arms bulked up a bit. Thank you, Andy.

The new ban in England should be welcomed. But teachers like me know that enforcement is time-consuming – and even, sometimes, dangerous

It seems unbelievable now, but a decade ago we were debating the potential positive merits of mobile phones in schools. Back then, some private school headteachers insisted these mini-computers were a “powerful resource” teachers should “harness” rather than fear. To counter what I can now only call a fantasy, in these pages I argued the opposite case. To introduce them into classrooms would widen the attainment gap between rich and poor students. It would also heap more pressure, I wrote, on children whose parents could not afford the eye-watering costs of the latest smartphone. Looking back, both the defence of phones in schools and my rebuttal of it appear painfully naive.

Phones have proved far worse than either side of the debate could have conceived. Schools know all too well the threat phones pose to pupils’ attention. But it’s more serious than just classroom disruption. Smartphones, and their symbiotic relationship with social media apps, have proved themselves the tobacco of our age. The government’s announcement on Monday that it would turn its existing guidance in England on phones in schools into a statutory ban sounds less like a bold intervention and more like a simple recognition of reality.

Ambition behind investing campaign is laudable, yet cutting stamp duty on share purchases, for example, would be much more savvy

• City firms bank on ‘savvy’ ad campaign to push Brits towards investing

Red squirrel characters have a history in the public information game. Older UK readers may recall Tufty, who taught children about road safety in the 1970s. His chum, Willy Weasel, regularly got knocked down by passing cars but clever Tufty always remembered to look both ways.

Now comes Savvy Squirrel, who, with backing from the chancellor and a multi-year lump of advertising spend from the financial services industry, will try “to drive a step-change in how investing is understood, discussed and adopted”, as the blurb puts it. In translation: don’t squirrel everything away in a boring cash Isa but try taking an investment risk or two if you value your long-term financial health.

It’s crucial to understanding how gender is affecting our ability to rally behind a shared ecological vision

Feminist influencer Liz Plank opens her groundbreaking book For the Love of Men with a bold statement: “There is no greater threat to humankind than our current definitions of masculinity.” She means it at several levels, from the most intimate: how male partners are the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US; to the most macro: how associating “eco-conscious behaviors with femininity and a repudiation of masculinity” is literally killing the planet. This Earth Day, it’s worth reflecting on why this is so and what can be done about it.

While it won’t come as news to most that, compared with women, men litter more, recycle less, and leave a bigger carbon footprint There’s something more extreme than simple thoughtlessness causing young men, in a form of anti-environmental protest known as “rolling coal”, to modify the diesel engines on their pickup trucks to deliberately belch large amounts of grey-black exhaust, and then run Priuses and bicyclists off the road.

Prominent Maga bros have suggested the 20-year-old son of the US president should be called up this year. Why does this seem so vanishingly unlikely?

It can’t be easy being the youngest son of a man who compares himself to the son of God. Rather a lot to live up to, isn’t there? Still, Barron Trump seems to be taking it in his stride. Rather than rebelling and becoming a socialist, the 20-year-old is shaping up to be just like dad: Barron is already worth $150m, according to a 2025 Forbes calculation. That’s largely from World Liberty Financial, a Trump family cryptocurrency company he co-founded. (Reportedly it’s Barron who got the president into crypto.)

Barron isn’t just trading alt-coins. The university student has also launched a yerba mate brand called Sollos. (Yerba mate is a caffeinated herbal tea from South America). And he’s been engaged with politics behind the scenes. Barron is widely credited for boosting his dad’s most recent election campaign by connecting him to manosphere influencers such as Adin Ross and Theo Von.

Female mayors have had notable successes in making transport in urban areas benefit everyone, not just a wealthy few

According to the UN 68% of the global population will be urban dwellers by mid-century. Urbanisation at this rate, unprecedented in modern times, means cities are facing an equally unprecedented convergence of crises, from a shortage of affordable housing to increased traffic congestion causing pollution, while reducing safety and liveability.

The consequences are exacerbated by the climate emergency bombarding many regions with severe heatwaves, rainfall, flooding and other extreme weather events. While everyone will feel the effects of these changes, the fallout from failing to cater for them is disproportionately felt by the most vulnerable groups.

The pontiff’s criticisms of Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran indicate a welcome resolve to follow in his predecessor’s footseps

One year after the death of Pope Francis, the Vatican this week hosted the premiere of a documentary tribute by Martin Scorsese. For a pontiff whose charisma and crowd-pleasing style helped cut through to a secular audience, marking the anniversary with the help of one of the world’s most famous film directors was a nice touch.

Francis’s successor, Leo XIV, is a far less flamboyant personality. In his inaugural year in St Peter’s chair, the first pope to come from the United States has generally taken a cautious, circumspect approach to his role. But it turns out that an aura of mildness and restraint makes him no less effective when criticising the posturing that passes for Christian piety in Donald Trump’s Washington.

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.

Whitehall has its flaws, but reform can only be successful in a climate of trust, not fear

The announcement of Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador ensures that 20 December 2024 will be recorded as a fateful day in Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership. Less remarked on, but relevant in hindsight, is a speech that the prime minister made earlier that month to launch a “plan for change”. Sir Keir set out ambitions to improve public services and lamented caution in the civil service. Whitehall, he said, was too often comfortable “in the tepid bath of managed decline”.

The prime minister was feeling thwarted by the machinery of government. In that context, it is easy to see how he might have been persuaded that Lord Mandelson would make a better emissary to the US than the long-serving professional diplomat in post at the time. Impatience with a slow-moving apparatus is conveyed also in the account given by Sir Olly Robbins, the former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, of a department under “constant pressure” to complete Lord Mandelson’s security vetting. The prime minister told the Commons on Wednesday that no such pressure existed.

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.

Responding to an article by Nils Pratley, Simon Oldridge writes that the climate risk would outweigh paltry returns from new licensing, while Alex Chapman says Britain’s projected demand is often overstated

I was surprised to read Nils Pratley’s recent column arguing for more North Sea gas (The UK needs more North Sea gas, not greater reliance on US imports, 14 April).

Nils rightly questions reliance on costly and highly polluting imported US liquefied natural gas, but I think the analysis gives insufficient weight to the scale and immediacy of the climate and nature crisis.

Oliver Goodhall wants to see a national vision to provide culture regardless of income, while Ian Flintoff speaks up for live theatre

A V&A everywhere. It’s not such a silly idea (Editorial, 17 April). Labour’s postwar conviction that good things should be available for everyone led to the founding not only of the Arts Council but also the NHS. Universal basic healthcare: a good idea, right? What about universal basic culture?

I can see a new era of cities thriving with agency to imagine and create the conditions in which more inclusive, diverse, devolved, responsive and self-driving culture emerges – regardless of income. The UK can be a global creative powerhouse. We know the way in which the economic arguments stack up for the creative industries. But we shouldn’t be trapped into setting out an exclusively economic argument.

Readers respond to the former civil servant’s testimony to MPs in the foreign affairs select committee

While watching Olly Robbins give evidence at the Commons foreign affairs committee (Olly Robbins’ account of Mandelson vetting piles pressure on Keir Starmer, 21 April), what I heard was that Robbins – who boasted of his quarter century as a civil servant and who had been appointed to one of the highest positions in government – felt unable to resist the pressure of an unspecified source he called “Downing Street” regarding perhaps the most important and far-reaching foreign post of all.

Robbins showed little will to discover the detail of Peter Mandelson’s failure to gain clearance and, incredibly and most unlike a civil servant, he decided not to keep a record of what he described as a “crucial” meeting. He also appeared to not distinguish between reporting the fact that there had been an issue with Mandelson’s clearance and explaining the details of the issue, which he correctly said should have remained confidential. But he then broke that principle by disclosing a specific element in the vetting, that the reservations about Mandelson did not involve links with Jeffrey Epstein.

Ruth Tanner sets out the wider environmental and economic ramifications of factory-farmed poultry in response to a letter on chicken feed

Prof Julian Wiseman’s letter (14 April) makes important distinctions on the diet of poultry, but misses our point. My claim was never that chickens cannot physically eat other things, but that the factory-farming business model cannot function without cheap imported soya. Modern, fast-growing broilers – the Ross 308 or Cobb 500 being the dominant commercial examples – were selectively bred over decades in an environment of cheap, abundant soya protein, and their genetics and feed system are now coadapted. Their rapid growth relies on the dense protein that soya bean meal provides. Soya underpins modern global poultry production. Reliance on it carries mounting environmental and economic risk, with soya linked to illegal deforestation.

Wiseman is correct that soya is the most complete plant protein. That is precisely the problem. UK soya bean production is negligible: soya doesn’t grow well here. To produce meat at scale, the UK imports more than 3m tonnes of soya annually – 68% comes from South America, with over 1m tonnes used for broiler chickens alone. These birds are also more prone to digestive stress from their unforgiving, rapid rate of growth. Mounting evidence shows slower-growing breeds, raised in less intensive systems, can thrive on a wider range of feeds and offer a more resilient and humane alternative.

While the novice coach was clearly not a good fit, the lesson here is that billionaire owners are not always right after all

Run Liam, run. Don’t look back. Wrench off the hazmat suit. Scoot past the security gates where the guards are already writhing and frothing at the mouth. And exit the compound for good, ice-white trainers pounding the dirt track, designer hoodie flapping.

For Liam Rosenior the urge now must be to put as much distance as possible between himself and what is, if not the strangest and most illiterate footballing project of all time, then surely the strangest and most illiterate yet. Welcome to BlueCo Chelsea, a place where blaming the manager for the on-field spectacle feels a bit like complaining that the scientists inside the Chernobyl nuclear plant still haven’t washed up the canteen coffee cups.

Manchester City lead the Premier League for the first time since the opening week so the title is now a riveting five-game shootout with Arsenal.

The Gunners were top for 200 consecutive days until Erling Haaland’s first-half goal ended the run and proved the difference against Burnley, who have gone straight back to the Championship.

Andoni Iraola may be on his farewell parade but it has not dimmed his passion as he edged Bournemouth one more point closer to what could yet be an extraordinary achievement in his final five weeks.

Billionaire Bill Foley has held ambitions to take this little club on the south coast to Europe since he took over in 2022 and Iraola has made what seemed a fanciful dream a distinct possibility as he prepares to hand over the reins to Marco Rose.

• Sky Sports declines offer to renew long-term contract

• Value of bilateral international cricket in decline

Cricket South Africa has yet to secure a UK television rights deal for England’s marquee Test series next winter with Sky Sports declining an offer to renew a long-term contract that expired last year.

Sky’s apparent reluctance to extend a relationship that began more than 30 years ago has left CSA searching for alternative broadcast partners so that the three Tests over Christmas and three one-day internationals in January are televised in the UK.

• Event director says £130m could be raised for good causes

• ‘You can lose the love, and we have to be mindful of that’

London Marathon organisers have revealed more details about plans to stage a two-day event next year which they say would be an “incredible celebration” that would raise more than £130m for charity and bring in £400m in social and economic benefits.

As the Guardian revealed last month, advanced talks are under way for the one-off event which would allow around 100,000 people to take part, nearly double the number running on Sunday.

• Seven-times champion wraps up 10-2 win over He Guoqiang

• Cue was ‘stuck under my bed in Ireland’

Ronnie O’Sullivan dusted off an old cue from under his bed in Ireland and duly rocketed into the second round of the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield after wrapping up a 10-2 win over He Guoqiang.

O’Sullivan required just 35 minutes to turn a 7-2 overnight advantage into another comfortable Crucible win, then revealed he had made the switch as he looks to gain momentum in his quest for a record-breaking eighth title at the venue.

• Former England captain plans to ride 500 miles in seven days

• 2003 World Cup winners among the fundraisers

The former England captain Lewis Moody has said he is “picking up the baton” left by Doddie Weir after announcing plans to lead a 500-mile, seven-day cycling challenge this summer to raise funds for the fight against motor neurone disease.

Moody will be joined by many of his fellow 2003 World Cup winners, including Jonny Wilkinson, Mike Tindall and Ben Kay, as well as his teenage sons on a journey from Newcastle to the Allianz Stadium in Twickenham, with all proceeds going to the My Name’5 Doddie Foundation.

• ‘Massive drop-off’ in successful prosecutions

• Police are ‘not getting the information in time’

One of the UK’s leading police officers in prosecuting online harms has said the ability to secure identifying information from the social media company X has become “significantly worse” over the past 12 months.

Mike Ankers, the deputy director of the UK Football Policing Unit (UKFPU), said there had been a “massive drop-off” in successful prosecutions in 2025, and that the Elon Musk-owned platform was “hiding behind” legal processes that delayed the identification of users posting hateful content online.

• World champion expects Dutch rival to fight for fifth crown

• ‘It would be a miss for the sport’ if he acts on dissatisfaction

Lando Norris has said he believes Max Verstappen will continue to race in Formula One but that it would be “a miss” for the sport if the four-time world champion did decide to leave owing to his dissatisfaction with the way this season’s new regulations have affected how drivers race.

Verstappen has been outspoken in his dislike of the new regulations and their focus on electrical energy management that now makes up almost 50% of the car’s power output. He has intimated he might leave the sport but, with the rules having been adjusted by the FIA in an effort to address concerns of all drivers this week, Norris felt the Dutchman would remain in F1.

Exit of John Phelan, navy’s top civilian official, comes a week after Pete Hegseth fired army’s top officer

The Pentagon announced on Wednesday that the navy’s top civilian official, John Phelan, the secretary of the navy, is leaving his job.

In a statement posted to social media, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, said Phelan was “departing the administration, effective immediately”.

Residents waking to find line has moved overnight and they are now in free-fire zone as army takes more territory

Israeli forces have been moving an agreed truce line in Gaza westwards over the six months since the ceasefire, expanding their zone of control and making the state of limbo ever more dangerous for Palestinians.

The “yellow line” agreed in the US-brokered ceasefire in October was supposed to be temporary pending further Israeli withdrawals, but the partially observed truce has stalled after its first phase amid disagreements over the disarming of Hamas, and continued Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

Agreement for urgently needed loan reached after Ukraine resumed pumping Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia

EU member states have reached agreement on unblocking an urgently needed €90bn (£78bn) loan for Kyiv and a new package of sanctions against Moscow after Ukraine resumed pumping Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, prompting Budapest to lift its veto.

Cyprus, which holds the bloc’s rotating presidency, said member states’ ambassadors had agreed to launch “written procedures” for the final approval of the loan and the sanctions package, with formal signoff on both due by Thursday afternoon.

Drug industry’s self-regulatory body criticises Theramex, producer of Evorel and Intrarosa, for ‘alarming’ breaches

One of the biggest producers of hormone replacement therapy has been censured by regulators for “systemic failures” that jeopardised patient safety.

Theramex, the UK producer of HRT drugs Evorel and Intrarosa, was found to have breached fundamental compliance standards including not updating crucial prescribing information – in some cases for several years – and not making it clear that a drug must not be used during pregnancy.

In feat hailed as milestone in robotics, Sony AI’s Ace wins three out of five matches played under official rules

An AI-powered robot has beaten elite players at table tennis in a significant achievement for a machine faced with human athletes in a real-world competitive sport.

Named Ace, the robotic system developed by Sony AI, won three out of five matches against elite players, but lost the two it played against professionals, clawing back only one game in the seven contests.

After his project got rejected in Sydney, a rubbish disposal magnate now hopes to build a $630m port and waste incinerator near a tourist gateway city

An Australian billionaire’s plan to burn rubbish for energy in Fiji amounts to “waste colonialism” and risks spoiling a “beach paradise”, villagers and the Pacific country’s UN ambassador have said.

Traditional landowner Inoke Tora boarded a bus to the capital, Suva, on Tuesday with a petition from villagers opposing the $630m waste-to-energy incinerator, which is forecast to consume 900,000 tonnes of non-recyclable rubbish each year.

Brussels will relax state aid rules to allow member countries to offer ‘targeted and temporary’ support

The EU will cut electricity taxes and provide consumers with fresh incentives to ditch fuel-burning cars and boilers, the European Commission has announced, as the energy crisis from the Iran war speeds a shift to a clean economy.

The plan, which foresees tweaking rules so that electricity is taxed less than oil and gas, aims to bring down bills while encouraging the move away from polluting devices that prolong reliance on foreign fuels.

As rising gold prices fuel environmental destruction, communities in the country’s biodiverse heartland are passing laws against mining

Mahogany trees tower above Herminio Mamani as he tends his cacao farm in Bolivia’s biodiverse north-west. A former president of El Ceibo, the country’s largest organic cacao co-operative, he says the agroforestry model used by its 1,300 members is vital not only to maintain the quality of the cacao they grow, which is used for chocolate and other products, but also for keeping gold mining at bay.

“We cacao producers would never kill an animal here,” he says, parrots squawking nearby. “The parcels [of land] can never be monocultures – all the crops grow together.”

Council proposal to use glyphosate to tidy up pavements criticised over potential harm to humans and wildlife

Cornwall is famed for its glorious gardens and verdant landscapes but a bitter row has broken out over a plan to tackle a less glamorous type of vegetation – roadside weeds.

The unitary authority has announced plans to use the controversial herbicide glyphosate to tidy up pavements and kerbsides, after largely phasing out its use over the last decade amid concerns about potential harm to humans and the peninsula’s rich ecosystems.

George Robertson says diplomatic tone from White House is at ‘historic low’ and two allies are likely to keep diverging

Britain’s high military dependence on the US is “no longer tenable” and the UK has to become increasingly independent of the special relationship with Washington, a former Nato chief has said.

George Robertson, who last week accused British leaders of a “corrosive complacency” towards defence, said on Wednesday that the traditional allies were diverging over values – and that even after Donald Trump leaves the White House, the separation was likely to continue.

Exclusive: Formby, an ally of Jeremy Corbyn who quit role in 2020, says Labour is now ‘in hock to corporate sponsors’

A former Labour general secretary has defected to the Green party, in the latest sign that allies of Jeremy Corbyn are moving in large numbers to Zack Polanski’s party.

Jennie Formby, who managed the Labour party from 2018 to 2020, told the Guardian she had signed up as a Green party member and intended to campaign for it before May’s local elections.

Christopher Trybus, of Swindon, also found not guilty of coercive and controlling behaviour towards Tarryn Baird

A man has been cleared of waging a campaign of domestic abuse and sexual violence on his wife, who went on to take her own life.

Christopher Trybus, 43, was charged with manslaughter, as well as with two counts of rape and coercive and controlling behaviour, but was found not guilty after a seven-week trial at Winchester crown court.

Serious Fraud Office investigation relates to firms allegedly submitting false invoices for work they failed to carry out

The UK’s Serious Fraud Office has arrested four people on suspicion of a home insulation scam that may have cost energy companies as much as £44m.

The SFO and the National Crime Agency said on Wednesday that the unnamed people were arrested in coordinated dawn raids across England on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud.

Lawyers for oligarch claim freezing of £5.3bn of assets ‘unfair and abusive’ amid row over use of funds for Ukraine

Roman Abramovich has gone to the European court of human rights (ECHR), claiming that a criminal investigation into his financial affairs by the Jersey authorities has breached his human rights, according to reports.

The former owner of Chelsea FC, who is under UK sanctions over his links to Vladimir Putin, is being investigated in Jersey over allegations of corruption and money laundering.

Police catch woman, 28, climbing colossal 16th-century statue of Neptune to touch its genitals as a dare

A tourist has been charged after allegedly climbing a colossal marble statue in Florence to touch its genitals for a pre-wedding prank.

Experts said the woman caused thousands of euros of damage to the Neptune fountain in Piazza della Signoria.

Autopsy of Celeste Rivas Hernandez finally released after law enforcement had requested it be sealed in November

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Celeste Rivas Hernandez, the 14-year-old girl whom the singer D4vd is charged with killing, died from penetrating injuries, according to an autopsy report released on Wednesday after a months-long delay.

The Los Angeles county medical examiner’s office had in December determined that her death was a homicide caused by multiple penetrating injuries. The office was unable to release the report as it was sealed by a judge at the request of law enforcement until prosecutors this week moved to lift the order.

As the United Nations recognises the transatlantic slave trade as a crime and calls for reparations, a growing ‘global diasporic movement’ is pushing for action

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Just under a month ago, a landmark vote was passed. The United Nations voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”. This was the culmination of a long journey and decades of work. But it is by no means the end.

I spoke to Ebony Riddell Bamber, director of the Scott Trust’s Legacies of Enslavement programme, about what the vote means, and the Guardian’s role in the global effort.

Figures fail to significantly buoy stock as firm admits ‘significant effort and hard work’ needed to achieve goals

Tesla reported its first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, disclosing some better-than-expected results but faltering in some key areas. The report failed to significantly buoy Tesla’s stock, which has limped along this year while its CEO, Elon Musk, has tried to sell the company’s new vision of humanoid robots and self-driving robotaxis. Its core car business has struggled in the face of competition from Chinese counterparts and backlash against his close involvement with the Trump administration.

“There remains significant effort and hard work to realize our mission of Amazing Abundance,” Tesla said in its report, while claiming that demand for its vehicles was rebounding.

Exclusive: Internal concerns over allowing US firm linked to ICE and Israeli military to process highly sensitive data

The Metropolitan police has held talks with Palantir that could lead to the London force buying the US spy-tech company’s AI technology to automate intelligence analysis for criminal investigations, the Guardian has learned.

Palantir, whose software is used by Donald Trump’s ICE immigration enforcement programme and the Israeli military, demonstrated its systems to senior officers in the intelligence division at the UK’s largest police force last month. Intelligence staff have been tasked with finding intelligence systems that AI could automate to increase productivity.

Amid growing congressional scrutiny of his conduct, Patel has claimed he has ‘never been intoxicated on the job’

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House judiciary Democrats have launched a formal inquiry into the alleged drinking habits of the FBI director, Kash Patel, demanding he complete a standardized alcohol abuse assessment and submit the results to Congress.

In a letter sent on Tuesday, led by Jamie Raskin, a Maryland representative, Democrats on the committee called on Patel to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (Audit) – a 10-question World Health Organization screening tool used to identify harmful patterns of drinking – along with a sworn statement attesting to his answers. Lawmakers also requested all security clearance questionnaires Patel has completed since taking the role.

Justin Sun alleges World Liberty Financial installed tools to prevent sale of his tokens after they became tradeable

The billionaire crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun on Tuesday sued World Liberty Financial, the digital currency venture co-founded by Donald Trump and his sons, alleging that World Liberty illegally froze his holdings of tokens issued by the company.

Sun, the largest investor in World Liberty, alleged in the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California, that the company secretly installed tools to prevent the sale of his tokens after they became tradeable in September 2025. The lawsuit also alleges that World Liberty threatened to “burn” – or permanently delete – his holdings, even while they were in Sun’s digital wallet.

Antony and Cleopatra? Exhausting. Lear? Magnificent but flawed. Hamlet? Limitless. For Shakespeare’s birthday, the Guardian’s former theatre critic ranks all the plays

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A commuter’s entrapment provides a taut, unnerving and rare example of an adaptation that holds close to the video game on which it is based

A glitch in the matrix, a rip in existence’s fragile fabric, and suddenly everything we knew about the world is snuffed out … or perhaps revealed to us for the first time. We see its arbitrariness, its cruelty, its vast indifference to the lab rats scurrying around frantically within it, heading for a death they cannot imagine. Genki Kawamura’s psychological mystery is inspired by the Japanese video game of the same name, and also by the repetitions of Groundhog Day and the vertiginous perspectives of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, with those corridors whose corners cannot be rounded without coming face-to-face with something horrible.

Kazunari Ninomiya plays a depressed young man on a crowded rush-hour Japanese subway train who one day sees a boorish commuter screaming at a young mother for not keeping her baby quiet. On alighting at the platform he takes a call from his ex-girlfriend – and that iPhone ringtone is very upsetting all by itself, guaranteed to have every audience member reflexively reaching for their own phone with guilty dread. She reveals that she is pregnant and something in the coincidence of these events unnerves the young man.

No indignity is too great for the leads of these darkly funny shows as they pursue a comeback at any cost

In the fifth and final season of sitcom Hacks, the legendary comedian Deborah Vance has once again been plunged into crisis. After leaving America’s number one late-night talkshow in a flurry of controversy, a vengeful non-compete clause is barring her from performing new material. Season four of the Emmy-winning comedy ended on a cliffhanger, with TMZ mistakenly reporting that Deborah (Jean Smart) had died. Freshly resurrected for season five, the prodigal mother of comedy worries that her lifetime of work will be defined by her premature late-night exit. To secure her legacy, she sets her sights on staging a major comeback show at Madison Square Garden – and she’ll stop at nothing to make it happen.

Not uncoincidentally, the final season of The Comeback begins on a similar note of desperation. Valerie Cherish – the high-cringe sitcom star played by a red-haired Lisa Kudrow – is handed a career lifeline when she scores the lead role in a new sitcom. There’s just one catch: the script has been written by AI, and this is a secret that Valerie is forbidden from sharing. It’s the type of toe-curling scenario that could only come from Kudrow and her collaborator, Michael Patrick King, who is back on form after terrorising the world with And Just Like That.

Cush Jumbo is excellent in Apple’s unsettling tale of police corruption. But the former Time Lord, whose death-stare is turned up to 11, is this show’s heart

’Ello, ’ello. What’s goin’ on ’ere, then? Criminal Record, is it? A second series, you say? Well, strike a light, guv, cos here it comes, nee-nawing through London’s perp-spattered streets with another investigational pea-souper. In the thick of it, once again, is DCI Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi), baring his lower teeth while glowering at us through the windscreen of his Skoda Malfeasance.

Not that Capaldi’s peerlessly unsettling presence is the Apple TV drama’s sole distinguishing feature, mind. There is its depiction of London as a city impervious to natural light, with conversations, interrogations and “roughings-up” conducted against a backdrop of faulty streetlights and flickering tower-block TV sets. There is its portrayal of systemic corruption, with everything from the CID’s dimpled glass doors to the foreheads of its junior plods slick with an oily sheen of venality. And there are the questions it poses re the nature of control, with DS June Lenker (the ever-excellent Cush Jumbo) tormented by notions of who is in charge, and who ought to be.

Three sportswomen undergo the various ordeals of competition in a spare, sometimes harrowing drama suffused with a chilly vérité detachedness

Here is a fascinatingly experimental debut feature from Italian film-maker Giulio Bertelli, son of fashion designer Miuccia Prada; a machine-tooled movie, intensely designed and controlled. It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

Bertelli’s film intuits the military roots of three Olympic sports: judo, fencing and shooting. These originally were considered the accomplishments of a soldier in a preindustrial age and shows how the lineaments and forms of violence still exist in these activities. (In fact the film is inspired by the grisly accidental death of the Soviet fencer Vladimir Smirnov in 1982.)

The British composer is once again missing from the Proms schedule – that’s our loss. Instead, here’s my pick of the brand new music you can catch at the summer festival

There may currently be no less fashionable music than the hyper-romantic symphonies and orchestral works of Arnold Bax. The British composer’s music featured in pretty well every Proms season throughout the 1930s and 40s and early 50s, yet he has been the rarest of visitors to the Royal Albert Hall since then. When was the last Bax symphony heard at the Proms, you ask? 2011! Far too long for a fan like me (and Ken Russell), and – well, perhaps not long enough for others.

Bax was born in 1883 in London to a family so wealthy that he was able to devote himself to the single-minded pursuit of his passions. He was a brilliant pianist and, as a composer, he could transform his creative and personal obsessions into every bar of his music. That meant the exoticism of Russia in his early years and, later, the romance and fantasy of the Celtic Twilight (Bax even assumed a pseudonym, Dermot O’Byrne, to write Irish-inspired poetry), and the landscapes of north-west Scotland. His romantic infatuations were just as intense and colourful.

Tracks by Rema, Burna Boy and more were streaming in the billions, but hits are drying up. Stars and analysts across the African music industry fret about how to change course

In 2016, Afrobeats – the catchall term for a range of contemporary dance music emerging from west Africa – began to seep into global pop culture, propelled by intercontinental collaborations such as Wizkid and Drake’s Come Closer. Olabode Otolorin, then a university student, would dispatch optimistic forecasts on the internet about the genre’s future. Nearly a decade on and now a campaign associate at Mavin Records, one of Africa’s leading labels, Otolorin has a more downbeat outlook on Afrobeats. “It is currently in a perilous state in terms of our exports,” he says.

Otolorin is not alone in this sentiment. Addressing the 200 or so fans gathered at a spruced-up warehouse in Lagos for a recent listening party for his new album, Clarity of Mind, Afrobeats stalwart Omah Lay made a startling but accurate observation. “Afrobeats is declining overseas – that’s a fact. The sound from 2020 to 2024 isn’t what it is today. I’ve been watching, learning and studying my idols, looking for a way to bring that energy back,” he said pensively.

As details of this year’s concert series are unveiled, here are some of the most exciting lineups – from a Bach recital by Notre-Dame’s organist to Thomas Adès conducting the National Youth Orchestra in his own ballet

If 19th-century repertoire thrives on scale and scope, baroque and early music is all about intimacy: the husk of bow on gut strings, the purity of an unaccompanied voice. It’s music that often struggles to find a place at the Proms, but clever choices make for an intriguing lineup this year.

The New Zealand composer burned pianos, sampled earthquakes and recorded Belfast’s peace walls. And at 86 is still invested in her life’s work: to appreciate the music in everyday sound

A broken upright piano, tilted like the sinking Titanic, stands part-buried in a garden at Glasgow’s Counterflows festival. Experimental composer Annea Lockwood swipes a hand across its exposed strings and beams at the metallic clang. “Great piano!” she says, inviting other musicians and the audience to make their own strange noises by scratching and tapping it with garden debris.

It’s one of many pianos Lockwood, 86, has buried, burned or drowned since the 1960s, exploring their changing sounds as they are destroyed – though she says “transformed”. A pioneer of field recordings, her work has ranged from “sound maps” of entire rivers to music made with the peace walls demarcating areas of mid-Troubles Belfast. As she revisits two significant works at Counterflows and prepares a new release of 1975’s World Rhythms, she takes me through her radical career from the very start.

This fable-like novella about technologies of illusion and a life-changing friendship in Mexico City is enchanting

The Shadow of the Object, the new novel from Mexican-American author Chloe Aridjis, opens with an eruption of violence: Flora, a fortysomething woman, is visiting her mother and stepfather in Mexico City for the first time in many years when one evening, as she is bidding them goodnight, Diego – the household’s beloved guard dog – springs up and sinks his teeth into her hand. This unexpected incident is an assault not only on Flora’s body, but also upon those delicate fictions that have, until now, shaped her life and swathed that body in an illusory sense of safety. The ageing alsatian, who had lived until the instant of the attack with “his inner life and ours mysteriously, harmoniously, aligned”, suddenly gazes up at the benevolent limb of his human benefactor and sees “an unsettling sight” indeed: “A hand out of context, unattached to a body … A hand gone rogue, no longer following orders from headquarters.”

Condemned to spend the rest of her vacation confined to the winding corridors of a private hospital in Mexico City, Flora is ambivalent. On the one hand, the environment is hardly stimulating – but on the other, “hospital stays offer a rare occasion to check out … as a patient you are absolved of most responsibility, nothing expected of you except to mend”. The hospital is life’s waiting room, and it is during a languid midnight stroll of its corridors that she meets Wilhelmina Blau, an elderly yet redoubtable German admitted with a bad case of pneumonia.

A tender but unflinching account of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, forgotten stars of the 1960s scene

Andy Warhol sent Paul a Brillo box. Fran Lebowitz called Peter “a genius about sex”. The ending of Susan Sontag’s second novel was inspired by a bunch of Peter’s photographs. Sontag dedicated two books to Paul, and went to bed with him. The two men’s long list of admirers in the second half of the 20th century included Cy Twombly, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Alex Katz. The question, then, as with any once celebrated artist largely ignored by the history books – who were they, and what happened?

In this intimate and vibrant double biography, the author and critic Andrew Durbin reveals how the painter and sculptor Paul Thek and the photographer Peter Hujar slipped from the centre of the New York creative scene to obscurity. It begins in 1954 (a few years before they met as soul-searching twentysomethings) and ends in 1975 (a decade before they died of Aids). It tells the story of friends and lovers who, together, matured as artists and men; exceptionally talented, charming, sometimes cruel. They pushed the possibilities of what a gay relationship looked like – “open, and unapologetic” – and helped to define the New York art scene’s “cool”.

From a haven for intellectuals fleeing Hitler to the HQ of the feared Abwehr, the changing fortunes of a Parisian icon

The word “hotel” is cognate with “hostel” and “hospital”, and for a few short years in the middle of the 20th century, one Paris establishment functioned as all three. Hôtel Lutetia sits on the city’s Left Bank and exudes a certain nonconformist swagger. Opened in 1910 and built in a style that bobbed between art nouveau and art deco, it soon attracted an artistic and bohemian crowd. Hemingway hung out there in the 1920s, as did Picasso, Matisse and André Gide. James Joyce, resident in the city for 20 years, wrote a chunk of Ulysses sitting at one of its tables.

In this outstanding book, which has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for nonfiction, Jane Rogoyska reports that by the mid-1930s the Lutetia had become headquarters to German political dissidents fleeing Hitler. “The Lutetia Crowd”, as the Nazis disdainfully dubbed them, comprised the intellectual cream of the Weimar Republic. Heinrich Mann, novelist brother of the more famous Thomas, was the head of the organising committee that worked to bring down the Nazi regime from a distance. To this end, fake tomato-seed packets were sent into Germany containing a diatribe against the Third Reich and The Communist Manifesto was rebound into classic literature and pumped into the Fatherland.

The bright young things of 1992’s Brightness Falls are now in their 60s in this verbose, clunky novel that seems more interested in lifestyle than inner lives

More than 40 years ago, Jay McInerney’s debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, captured the glamour and desperation of 1980s New York. The book’s spectacular success launched its author’s career, earning him comparisons to F Scott Fitzgerald, another midwesterner with a complicated relationship with the US’s fantasies of wealth and social mobility. In 1992, Brightness Falls introduced readers to a fresh cast of young New Yorkers, but was primarily focused on a central couple, Corrine and Russell. McInerney returned to these characters in two subsequent novels; See You on the Other Side completes the tetralogy.

The book opens at the start of 2020 with the bright young things now in their 60s, coping with erectile dysfunction and marital woes, and fretting about the job prospects of their twentysomething children. In addition to the eternal problem of ageing, Corrine and Russell are about to confront the events of that tumultuous year: the pandemic, protests for racial justice and a bitterly fought presidential election campaign. Russell is the book’s main character, although we spend time with Corrine and make excursions into the points of view of their daughter, Storey, an aspiring chef, and her biracial boyfriend, Mingus.

From mega hit Clair Obscur to the genius Blue Prince, the winners at this year’s event help me refocus on why games really matter

The 22nd Bafta game awards were on Friday, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took the biggest game prize. This makes it only the second game ever (after Baldur’s Gate 3) to win top prize at all five of the main awards shows: the Dice awards in Vegas; the Game awards in LA; the public-voted Golden Joysticks in the UK; the Game Developers Choice awards in San Francisco; and now London’s Baftas, the final event to celebrate the gaming output of 2025.

I’ll be honest: I was hoping for a different winner. Blue Prince, an eight-year project by the visual artist and former film-maker Tonda Ros, is the most extraordinary thing I played last year. It’s the game where you inherit a sprawling mansion that changes shape every day, and you must navigate its ever-shifting blueprint to find its secret room. I went so deep on this game that I was still playing it and thinking about it weeks after solving its initial mystery, piecing together bits of opaque lore from Reddit threads. I think it deserved at least one best game award (apart from ours).

The iconic game that came to define 8-bit programming still conjures flutters of nostalgia 40 years on – all thanks to a 15-year-old tea boy who worked a Saturday shift in a computer shop in Greater Manchester

If you were playing games on a home computer in the early 1980s, you knew about Chuckie Egg. No question. This simple-looking platform game had you wandering around a chicken shed, collecting eggs and avoiding the patrolling hens. But when you reached level eight, a large duck was suddenly let loose and would stalk the player like a feathery missile, completely changing the pace and tactics of the game. It was a boss battle before boss battles existed.

Everyone knew about Chuckie Egg because everyone could play it. Originally released on the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro and Dragon 32 in the autumn of 1983, it immediately topped the charts, encouraging its publisher, A&F Software, to begin porting it to as many machines as possible. Around 11 conversions followed, including the Commodore 64, Amstrad and Acorn Electron. I first played it on the BBC computer in my school library, but I also had it on my C64 and a friend played on his Speccy. Like Manic Miner, Bruce Lee and Skool Daze, it was woven into the tapestry of British 8-bit gaming culture.

I initially dismissed the Wind Waker’s cartoonish visuals as juvenile. But now I try to carry the game’s sense of joy into all aspects of my life

I had a complicated relationship with video games when I was a teenager. I had straightforwardly, wholeheartedly loved the Nintendo games that I’d grown up with, tumbling around primary-coloured dreamscapes in Super Mario 64 and having the time of my life. But as I grew into a pretentious young adult in the early 00s, I started to want more from games, and I wasn’t finding it. So many of them were mindless, or juvenile, or needlessly violent. So few seemed to have anything to say. I started to wonder whether games might really be a waste of time, like the judgy adults in my life kept telling me.

My response to this was to relentlessly intellectualise the games I played, in order to justify the time and attention I was expending on them. I mainlined highbrow gaming magazines and wrote grandiose blogs about serious adult themes in Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid and the ancient Fallout computer games. My childhood love of Nintendo, with its bright hues and unselfconscious approach to play, felt embarrassing. Then I switched on The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and had a realisation about the nature and importance of play that would shape my life.

Role-playing adventure and superhero comedy among big winners on a varied night in London

With 12 nominations, acclaimed role-playing adventure Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was expected to be the runaway success at the 2026 Bafta games awards, held in London on Friday evening.

And while it couldn’t quite match its nine wins at the Game Awards back in December, it was still the joint biggest winner on the night, taking best game and debut game as well as the performer in a leading role award for Jennifer English.

Swan theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon
Gatiss is part Hitler, part Scrooge, part Trump in Seán Linnen’s circus-like production for the RSC

Bertolt Brecht’s comic grotesque parable for Hitler’s rise to power has been compared to Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, and there is something distinctly Chaplinesque in Mark Gatiss’s cartoon gangster. He is initially tragicomic as Arturo Ui, with his tramp-like clothing, powdered face and melancholy eyes.

But he turns truly terrifying as Seán Linnen’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company takes us through his thuggish ascendancy, Gatiss proving his ability to transform in a way that renders him almost unrecognisable here: part Hitler (signature moustache and hair), part Scrooge and part ghoul. He gives Ui distinctive tics and a wavering accent that could be German, or American (mentioning no names).

Cosmic House, London
The video artist famous for his films charged with Black queer desire unleashes a kitsch, bombastic and rather glorious meditation on human connection

If you like grand designs, you should see the Cosmic House. Beginning in 1978, the postmodernist theorist Charles Jencks and garden designer Maggie Keswick transformed their family home into a vision of the cosmic order at the scale of a Victorian townhouse. A “solar stair” with 52 steps, to give you a flavour, spirals from a “black hole” at its base through four floors with discrete symbolic themes, while the kitchen remixes classical Indian architecture to make a pun about late summer. In a basement dedicated to sun worship is a 25-minute film by Isaac Julien that is likewise wildly excessive, unrepentantly intellectual, thoroughly kitsch and, if you’re prepared to meet it halfway, rather glorious.

Displayed on a single screen at the heart of a kaleidoscope of standing mirrors, the film features Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie as science-fiction deities who meander through a Renaissance palazzo, a modernist glass home, and the Cosmic House in the course of a conversation about the end of the world, the possibility of time travel and the nature of God. For reasons that are not immediately clear, they have meaningful encounters with cyborg starfish and conjure up gleaming spaceships. Firestorms leap across the surface of the sun and bioluminescent sea creatures waggle neon tentacles. If you are allergic to pretension, you can stop reading here because this is not the work of art for you.

Lightroom, London
This hour-long, 360-degree film may skip over some chapters of Bowie’s career, but what is here is irresistible – and thrillingly huge

For a decade now, the posthumous David Bowie industry has been in full, unremitting swing. There have been umpteen reissues, box sets, books, documentaries, exhibitions and an ever-expanding range of merchandise that occasionally makes you wonder if there’s anything on which that quote about not knowing where he’s going but promising it won’t be boring can’t be printed. After 10 years, the possibility that the public might be suffering from Bowie fatigue has been raised, but the appetite seems insatiable. Hence You’re Not Alone, an hour-long 360-degree film directed by Mark Grimmer – lead designer for the V&A’s blockbusting 2013 exhibition David Bowie Is – showing at London’s “immersive exhibition space” Lightroom.

A lot of what’s been produced since Bowie’s death is clearly aimed at diehard fans. You’re Not Alone sets itself a trickier task: keeping them onside while appealing to a younger audience, allegedly more resistant to Bowie’s allure than those who remember his imperial phases first-hand. You sense the desire to cater to the latter in the way it concentrates on Bowie’s biggest-streaming songs: you get a lot of Let’s Dance, but no mention of Ashes to Ashes or Sound and Vision.

Adaptation of Stephen Merchant’s 2019 film about WWE champ Saraya-Jade Bevis ‘will be an absolute blast’, says one of the film’s stars, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson

Stephen Merchant’s wrestling film Fighting With My Family has inspired a stage musical. The new adaptation of the 2019 biopic about Saraya-Jade Bevis AKA Paige, who became a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) champ, will feature a book and lyrics by Jon Brittain and music by Miranda Cooper and Nick Coler.

The film starred Florence Pugh as Bevis, who was born into a wrestling family in Norwich and became a WWE star in the US at 18 after a chaotic childhood. Written and directed by Merchant, it co-starred Dwayne Johnson in character as The Rock. Merchant said that when he was making the film he “always thought of it like a musical: a young woman from the ‘chorus line’ fighting to get her big break, surrounded by theatrical, larger-than-life characters and huge sweeping emotions”. Merchant said that he even approached each wrestling match in the film as if it was a new dance number, “building to a big show-stopping finale”. He added: “The team have captured the humour, grit and heart of the story in a way that feels both faithful to the film and completely fresh.”

‘The first resident that Emma – a social robot – was introduced to was called Peter. After that, Emma assumed they were all called Peter, which everyone found hilarious. Then she broke down’

One morning in July 2025, I arrived in the small, quiet town of Albershausen in south-west Germany. It has only around 4,000 inhabitants. I went to visit a care home where they were piloting a social robot named Emma. A group of residents sat in a circle while Emma stood in the middle. She’s the height of a toddler, with big googly eyes, and was wearing a red hat knitted for her by one of the careworkers. The first resident she was introduced to was called Peter and, after he introduced himself, Emma assumed they were all called Peter, which everyone found hilarious. Then Emma broke down suddenly and the illusion was shattered.

Later on, Emma was working again, and I found her in the dining room with Waltraud, the resident in this photo. It was a calmer, more focused moment. I decided to sit them across from one another at eye level, Waltraud facing Emma. There was a soft light in the room and they both seemed very present with one another. There are also paradoxes in the picture: the large windows showing the landscape outside, contrasting with the inside, which is ordered and clinical. In the middle you have an encounter between an elderly woman and a machine designed for companionship. They began speaking about picking flowers, about their favourite flowers – Waltraud is passionate about them, and Emma has an endless amount of knowledge due to her artificial intelligence. She can remember past conversations and recognise faces, too.

British singer and guitarist wrote and performed Traffic classics including Feelin’ Alright? before platinum-selling solo albums and work with Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac and more

Dave Mason, the co-founder of rock band Traffic who also collaborated with Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac and many other A-list musicians, has died aged 79.

A statement from his representative said he died peacefully on Sunday at his home in Gardnerville, Nevada, having settled in the US in 1969. “Dave Mason lived a remarkable life devoted to the music and the people he loved,” the statement added.

The US writers join four debut authors in demonstrating ‘the complexity and beauty of the female experience’, said chair of judges Julia Gillard

Acclaimed US novelists Susan Choi and Lily King are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, in a lineup dominated by debut authors and independent publishers.

The six titles contending for the £30,000 award range from a US campus love story to a coming of age tale set in 1960s Bradford, but are connected by their consideration of “the complexity and beauty of the female experience”, said the former prime minister of Australia and judging chair Julia Gillard.

To browse all books in the 2026 Women’s prize for fiction shortlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Mathieu Kassovitz, who is currently working on an AI-enabled film, also dismisses concerns over copyright

His hit film was a masterpiece capturing the gritty truth of the Paris suburbs, but the director of La Haine is now sold on an AI-generated future for cinema.

Mathieu Kassovitz has called the technology the “the last artistic tool we need” and dismissed concerns about AI stealing other artists’ intellectual property, telling the Guardian: “Fuck copyright.”

Isn’t running 26.2 miles difficult enough? Not for some. Whether it’s dressing up as a helicopter, a lobster or a pair of testicles, wearing a novelty outfit spurs many competitors on

Delusion. That’s the crucial prerequisite for running a marathon in fancy dress, according to the ultramarathon competitor and cancer survivor Jonathan Acott, who is attempting the fastest marathon dressed in a clanking suit of armour.

So that’s what it was when I decided to run this year’s London Marathon dressed as a badger. I’ve run a marathon once before, 19 years ago. I hated the suffering. I injured myself. And now I’m 51. Why was this a good idea?

Whether you want cordless designs or a budget buy, we’ve tested the top hair straighteners for every hair type

• The best hair dryers, tested

Straighteners are here to stay – but thankfully, heat styling has come a long way since GHD’s first ceramic straighteners ushered in an era of poker-straight hair in 2001. Today’s models feature adjustable heat settings and protective technology for hairstyling with minimal damage.

The looks you can achieve with a straightener have become more versatile as well: one twist of a modern, curved-edge straightener can create styles from ultra-smooth strands to structured ringlets and soft, beachy waves. There’s a wide range of styling possibilities with just one tool.

Best hair straighteners overall:
GHD Chronos Max

Best budget hair straighteners:
Remington Shine Therapy S8500

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basic they scrimp on? The designer talks feminist prints, wine gums and full-fat Coke with the Filter

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Anya Hindmarch founded her eponymous luxury accessories business in London in 1987, and she now has 15 stores worldwide. Her I’m Not A Plastic Bag and I Am A Plastic Bag projects ignited the debate over the use of plastic bags and contributed to the decision to charge for plastic bags in UK supermarkets. In 2021, her brand launched the Universal Bag, a collaboration with supermarkets to rethink the reusable shopping bag, and Return to Nature, a collection of bags that are intended to biodegrade at the end of their useful life.

Hindmarch opened the Village on Pont Street in London’s Chelsea in 2021, a community of neighbouring stores clustered around the Anya Cafe. That same year, Anya published her first book, the Sunday Times bestseller If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair.

Our writer has found a meal kit for every home cook, along with smart ways to make the most of leftovers. Plus, how to clean your mattress and vitamin C serums, tested

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Can I interest you in 23 sachets of soy sauce and half a kilo of golden linseed? If not, they’ll probably live quite happily in the back of my cupboard until a clear-out in 2032. The glut of organic potatoes, tomatoes, beetroot and aubergines I was left holding after my test to find the best recipe boxes and meal kits had a more limited shelf life.

Reduced waste is one of the top benefits of recipe box services, especially those that deliver only the exact measures of ingredients you need for the recipes you choose. But I tested nine of these services at once – including some that attempted to curry favour by sending me multiple boxes containing multiple recipes.

The best wedding guest dresses for every budget and dress code

The best rums: 10 tasty tipples for daiquiris, mai tais and mojitos – tested

‘Perfectly textured – moist, fluffy’: the best supermarket falafel, tasted and rated

Ready, set, ride! Everything you need to cycle with kids

The best secateurs to save you time and effort when pruning your garden, tested

The best hot brushes for a salon finish at home, tried and tested by our expert

The best vitamin C serums for every skin type and budget, tested

The best juicers for blitzing fruit and veg – tested

Wedding invites piling up? Whether you need town hall-ready or black-tie chic, we’ve got looks for every type of nuptial – and beyond

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Few social events are as fraught with sartorial anxieties as weddings. From the strict no-white-dresses rule (fair enough) to the semantics of black tie and the even murkier casual codes, dressing for someone else’s celebration can feel even more stressful than dressing for your own.

Weddings are rarely a one-size-fits-all kind of event, with a range of dress codes depending on the venue and formality levels. Summer weddings offer breathing room: florals, bright colours and lighter fabrics that shimmer under the sunlight feel perfectly at home. Town hall ceremonies suit classic tailoring, while country weddings embrace a more rustic romance. Casual weddings allow for a little more experimentation, with statement skirts and coordinated separates fair game. The trick is balance: show respect for the occasion, but rules and regulations are often outdated.

​The changing season brings a renewed appetite for bold, sunlit flavours​. Plus, my food highlights

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A combination of the warmer weather, dusting off my sunglasses and the impending release of my new book, MEDesque (out on Thursday!), has got me fully focused on sunshine food and Mediterranean flavours. OK, so I’m not quite in rosé-in-the-garden territory just yet, but it’s close. And I am counting down the days. At home, I am leaning heavily on recipes from the queen of all things Med, Claudia Roden, to get my fix. Big hitters such as her bean stew with chorizo and bacon and chicken traybake with olives and boiled lemon deliver on all fronts, and immediately transport me to my favourite region. And gone are cold, slow days spent labouring over a lasagne. Instead, I am gravitating towards lighter pasta dishes such as Georgia Levy’s broccoli and anchovy farfalle, Giorgio Locatelli’s pasta con le sarde (with sardines, anchovies, fennel, raisins and pine nuts) and Yotam Ottolenghi’s straccetti with red mullet, harissa and black olives – all effortless yet flavoursome. If you’re not quite ready to give up on wintry ragu and bolognese just yet, then Anna Tobias’s lamb shanks and orzo are a joy – it’s how many pasta dishes are cooked in the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa, where the pasta is stirred through the meat and absorbs all those juices and flavours. It’s my favourite way to eat pasta.

While I’m not quite ready to eat outdoors, I have started cooking outdoors, and last week I reawakened our wood oven. It was heated out of its winter slumber especially for Greek Orthodox Easter, because my yiayia (grandma) had requested kleftiko for Sunday lunch. Nothing screams summer and Med cooking as much as when I get that wood oven going, and not just for pizzas (although they do taste pretty elite when cooked outdoors). Nigel Slater’s pizette recipes are a great place to start if you are giving homemade pizza a go, and The Ultimate Wood-Fired Oven Cookbook, by Genevieve Taylor, was a bible when we first got acquainted with our new toy. I’m yet to dust off the barbecue, but that will undoubtedly be the next step, and I cannot wait for the smell of perfect pork souvlaki and charred, spiced adana kebabs to waft through the garden.

A blue cheese rind can be a bit funky even for cheese aficionados, but its intensity works wonders in a clever salad dressing

On a single crumb of cheese rind there are more than 10 billion microbes: that’s more microbial cells than there are people on Earth. Cheese rind is an intensified expression of the cheese, with a powerful flavour and highly concentrated community of good bacteria, yeast and mould. But it is misunderstood and underrated, and often removed and discarded. Though it can be intense, it’s almost always edible, unless it’s grown new mould or contains synthetic plastic, wax or cloth, which should be removed.

Like an apple or slice of bread, the skin, crust or rind add texture, flavour and nutrients to the eating experience. Sometimes, even I can’t stomach a really strong rind though, and another approach is necessary – like my blue cheese rind vinaigrette, where that pungent rind comes into its own, flavouring the dressing beautifully without overpowering it.

Malaysian home cooking is all about balance, and you will find that in abundance in a curried potato karipap pie and homely noodles in a punchy sambal

My late grandmother was a wedding cook in Malaysia. From her, I learned that Malay cooking is about kindness and balance; no single taste should dominate – it should never be too spicy or too sweet. She believed in celebrating rezeki, the blessing of being able to share food with others, and cooking her dishes has helped me to grieve her passing and shaped a branch of my identity rooted in hosting and sharing.

Experts share why you might sleep better with that special someone and how couples can find healthy sleep dynamics

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I don’t live with my partner, but when we sleep in the same bed, I doze off almost instantly. When I’m alone in my own bed, I toss and turn throughout the night.

Between talk of “sleep divorces” being key to a healthy relationship and boyfriends being embarrassing, it’s been hard to admit that I sleep much better with my partner.

Globally, the number of single people is on the rise. Rates of marriage and cohabitation are on the decline, and in some countries, even sex itself is down. In this new series we're on a journey around the world to find out why people seem to be coupling up less, and what could be causing this dating crisis. In this episode, we’re in the UK

Psychiatrist Amir Levine’s first book explored different types of attachment. In his follow-up, he explains how anyone can become more secure

Amir Levine has been quietly working towards a second book for 16 years. When Attached, which he co-wrote with Rachel Heller, was published in 2010, it brought the categories for how we behave in relationships – AKA attachment styles – into the public consciousness. According to attachment theory, you could be anxious (often resulting in social hypervigilance), avoidant (independent, suppressing difficult emotions), fearful-avoidant (craving closeness, but often retreating in fear) or secure. Knowing which you were and where significant others sat on this spectrum provided helpful insights for self-awareness and relationship harmony.

Since then, Levine has received countless emails from readers around the world either seeking his advice or telling him how the book changed their life. “I got an email from a woman from Iran,” he recalls. “She said that she realised she was with someone very avoidant. She was able to cut off from him and she found someone else who was secure.” Also, because she felt better equipped “to communicate her needs with this new partner, she reached an orgasm for the first time”. From all of these stories, as well as research into the neuroscience of attachment and neuroplasticity and working with therapy clients, Levine has now compiled the tools needed to help anyone become more secure.

Sol and João had a whirlwind romance and now have a baby on the way – which has changed their sexual connection for better and worse …
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

João has been turned on by the changes pregnancy has brought so far

Sol’s pregnancy has changed the way we have sex, but I’m also attracted to the changes

Kaf Okpattah reveals the language used by scammers, from ‘squares’ to ‘clicking’ and ‘mule herder’

Kaf Okpattah can speak the language of scammers. “Squares is one word which comes up a lot. That’s bank cards,” he says. “Fullz … that’s a person’s full financial information.”

In his new book, Scam Nation, he goes through more. “Clicking”, which means using stolen details to commit online crime; “addy”, which is used for the shipping address for fraudulently bought gear; and “mule herder”, meaning someone who recruits and manages people accepting stolen funds. Many of these are words he learned at school, he says.

Government has shaken up the way electricity is priced as British costs are among the highest in the world

• Electricity generators threatened with higher windfall taxes in bid to ensure stable prices

The second global energy crisis of this decade has reignited questions about Britain’s grid strategy, specifically: why does it continue to have one of the most expensive electricity markets in the world?

Despite the growing role of domestically generated renewable power, electricity wholesale prices in the UK have more than doubled since the war in Iran triggered a global squeeze on seaborne gas shipments from the Gulf.

Fraudsters are using the promise of fake roles to trick job-seekers out of money, personal information or both, and with the help of AI they are more convincing than ever. But there are ways to spot them

There were clues from the start that it was too good to be true. A headhunter emailed me with a job prospect – a journalist role with “a leading US technology and markets editorial team”. The opportunity, she said, was part of a confidential expansion and hadn’t been publicly posted.

My spidey-sense was tingling, but the timing was auspicious. I was on the lookout for new work as my maternity leave was coming to an end. Initially, the email seemed legitimate. When I Googled the sender, I found a headhunter with the same name and profile picture on LinkedIn, and the message was clearly tailored to me: It referenced several roles I’d previously held and identified my specific areas of expertise. “Your focus on the real-world impacts of AI, digital culture and the gig economy aligns perfectly with an internal, high-priority mandate I’m managing,” the headhunter wrote.

I was forced to lose all the £609 I had paid, although Booking.com couldn’t contact our host, either

A friend and I paid Booking.com for an apartment in Paris. The next day we received an email informing us our “request” had not been confirmed and advising us to contact the owner.

Our many attempts failed, and so did Booking.com’s. A call centre manager suggested we travel to Paris, knock on the door and contact Booking.com if nobody answered. Otherwise we would not get our booking refunded.

Knowing the difference between hunger and appetite, and understanding the sensory cues behind them, can help us make better decisions about what we eat

Imagine you’re in a meeting room when someone brings out the biscuits – a packet of Jammie Dodgers, perhaps, or a nice little plate of custard creams. Maybe you want one and maybe you don’t, but the chances are the people around you are all responding differently: someone will grab a couple straight away, someone else will eat one without seeming to notice, another will barely be aware the biscuits exist, and someone will spend the whole meeting wanting one but not taking it. Our appetites and responses to food vary wildly – but what’s going on behind the scenes to govern them? And has modern food somehow hijacked the process? Grab a biscuit (or don’t) and settle in.

“First, it’s important to distinguish between hunger and appetite,” says Giles Yeo, a professor of molecular neuroendocrinology at the University of Cambridge and the author of Why Calories Don’t Count. “Hunger is a feeling – it’s what happens in the run-up to you deciding you need to eat something. Appetite is everything that surrounds why we eat – including hunger, fullness and reward, or how you actually feel when you eat. Those three sensations all use completely different parts of the brain, but they all work together.”

Invoking a night imp might be ludicrous, but the superstitious and the sacred are often the same thing

• Sharing the load is a column about parenting children of all ages

I held my daughter up to better see the passing parade. She was still small enough to lift high with my hands and I watched her reaction from below, her joy, growing in the morning light. The colour and noise moved past. “You’re missing it,” I heard someone say. But I had never seen something as beautiful as that; it seemed perfect, her smile looking down at me.

My daughter appeared above me again the following morning, though something had changed. Her mouth, blood-streaked, opened to reveal a gap. She had lost her first tooth. We celebrated but I felt something else as well; it all changes from here. I wondered if it was grief.

Size does matter – as does diet – but your genes are the main driver of your cholesterol levels

Cholesterol, a fatty substance mostly made by the liver and used by the body to build cells and produce hormones, has become a heart-health bogeyman. There are several types, but high levels of LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. Often labelled “bad” cholesterol, LDL builds up over time on artery walls, narrowing them and restricting blood flow.

High LDL cholesterol is not confined to people who are overweight. “Genetics are the main driver of higher LDL cholesterol levels,” says Naveed Sattar, professor of cardiometabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow. “Diets have smaller effects and it’s not necessarily the total calories that count; it’s the amount of saturated fat.” (Found in cakes, biscuits, chocolate and many ultra-processed foods, saturated fat can raise LDL levels.) All of this means someone relatively lean can still have high cholesterol, either because of their genetic profile or dietary pattern.

Bottlenecks in the system and parents’ suspicions mean doctors expect another serious outbreak soon

By 10am on a spring day, the corridor of the clinic in the Transylvanian town of Săcele was already crowded with parents and children. They were all waiting to see Dr Mirela Csabai, one of just seven general practitioners serving a population of more than 30,000.

Most of the cases that morning were routine: colds, checkups, chronic conditions. The calm, however, is recent. In 2024, a measles epidemic tore through this community and left one unvaccinated toddler dead.

Thanks to Claudia Winkleman, leggings are now a sleek option if paired with a proper shoe and a smart top

Wait, what? Leggings are back? I seem to remember I confidently killed them off about 10 minutes ago. Sorry about that. Turns out that the global fashion industry is no match for the colossus of modern culture that is Claudia Winkleman. Queen Claudia made black leggings – usually paired with a fancy blouse, or a delicious peacoat, or a sharp thigh-grazing blazer – her Traitors uniform, and now everyone wants to wear them again.

To be clear, the comeback of leggings is not about what you wear to the gym. Fitness wear is still steering towards looser fits. Think yoga pants instead of leggings, waisted running shorts instead of cycling ones. Leggings are back, but as a sleek day-to-night option, to be worn with a proper shoe and a smart top.

These new lipsticks are so beautifully muted that even the colour-shy and faint-hearted will carry them off

I have always said there’s a perfect red lipstick for every colouring, but not necessarily one for every disposition. I’ve had cause to reconsider. The new sheer, barely-there reds take the boldest, most classic of makeup looks and make it muted and unselfconsciously wearable by even the faint-hearted.

Merit’s entire brand is about understated makeup for the aesthetically cool, time-poor woman. Naturally, they’ve made her the perfect no-effort red. The new Signature Lip Blush (£25), a soft, very comfortable lip balm with a natural matt finish, is probably Merit’s cleverest formula to date. And with Kitten Heel, a classic, sheer, tomatoey red, it manages to make bold colour look as subtle as a nude. It’s so pretty and face-brightening without pulling focus that even the colour-shy will feel inconspicuous.

Ex-Mattel boss behind Barbiemania pivots retailer towards more premium fashion after reopening UK stores

From the 80s through to the early noughties it was the go-to high street store for casual hoodies and jeans, before falling out of favour. Now almost 30 years after its heyday, Gap is hoping to turn things around. Key to its comeback strategy? A pivot to more premium fashion.

On Friday the retailer will unveil a collection with the luxury fashion designer Victoria Beckham. The collaboration is the next step in the luxification of Gap being led by Richard Dickson, who joined Gap Inc as its president and chief executive from Mattel, the US toymaker, in 2023.

Resurgence of 90s minimalism has caused an explosion in the popularity of denim, but can a pair ever be worth £800?

Denim mania is surging across the fashion spectrum. At one end is the luxury brand Alaia with an Aegean blue, comfortable yet flattering £800 pair. At the other is JW Anderson’s collaboration with the high street brand Uniqlo and a £34.90 price tag. Both are proving wildly popular.

Alaia’s line has only just launched, so there are no sales figures yet, but demand for its Japanese denim is such that customers are advised to reserve certain styles in store or call ahead before visiting. At Uniqlo, the straight cut are said to be the most popular, on the front row of the most recent fashion weeks, and routinely sell out online. Blame the resurgence of 90s minimalism.

To mark the anniversary there are dozens of events planned around Ashdown Forest (aka the Hundred Acre Wood) – and, of course, playing Pooh Sticks is always a good idea

Deep in a medieval hunting forest, amid 6,500 acres of heathland, a wooden bridge spans a tributary of the River Medway. Every single day, no matter the weather, people flock to stand on its slats and cheer on sticks as they float downstream.

I know this because on a frosty but sunny morning, (“a very long time ago now, about last Friday”, as children’s author AA Milne might have said), I stood with two such adults jumping up and down with delight as my little piece of oak stormed ahead and won the race.

Tucked away in a remote valley, these cosy off-grid cabins come with a wild-swimming pond, loads of wildlife and a farm where kids can run free

Holidaying as a single parent is a tricky balance. You want to ringfence the kind of extended one-on-one time that can be difficult to find during term time; but too much of that and you know you’ll drive each other a little crazy. Kids need other kids, and you could do with some adult company too. You also need a break. It’s a nice idea to pack the car with camping gear and head out into the wilderness, but it can be a lot of work – and you end up in a field, attempting to put up a tent, alone.

Friends of mine have suggested holiday parks, some of them with bars and restaurants and a daily schedule of kids’ activities. That all sounds a bit overstimulating. I’d been dreaming about sinking into a quiet landscape. But would there be enough to do?

The Highlands and Islands are rightly lauded for their superb seafood – but these days it’s not reserved for fine dining and can be found at the simplest waterside shacks and inns

The best oysters of my life arrive on a polystyrene tray, eaten elbow-to-elbow with strangers at a table littered with empty shells and damp paper napkins. We huddle beneath a tarpaulin, sheltering from the fine spray of rain rattling on the roof, the wind whipping around the hulking CalMac ferry moored metres away, and the beady-eyed scavenging gulls.

“Have you tried this? You have to,” says a woman who has driven from Glasgow just to eat here, pressing a rollmop herring into my hand. I take a bite, the thick skin giving way to sweet and salty flesh, juices running down my chin. Elegant dining this is not, but all the better for it. This is Oban Seafood Hut, tucked beside the ferry terminal for boats heading into the Sound of Mull. Diners shuffle around a shared table, listening for order numbers, with plates piled high with langoustines, crab and oysters. It’s cash only. In the back room, a team of women butter thick slices of soft white bread for crab sandwiches, wrapping them in clingfilm without ceremony, to be sold within minutes.

Holiday park firms say such bookings are on the rise because of impact of Iran war on aviation

Holiday companies have predicted a surge in bookings for UK summer breaks after a jump in interest from Britons fearful of flight cancellations linked to the Iran war.

Summer bookings are expected to rise in the coming weeks amid warnings of possible jet fuel shortages and resulting cancellations by airlines across Europe.

When I bumped into my former landlord it changed my perspective. After years of renting, it gave me the confidence to stand up for myself in an objectively unfair game

After 12 years of renting, I’ve known my fair share of landlords – although “known” is probably the wrong term. I don’t usually meet them in person and rarely speak to them directly, only communicating through a managing estate agent or, if I’m lucky, email. They often exist in my mind as frightening spectres of exploitation: mere initials on a contract, but with the unsettling power to displace me at short notice.

But that all changed one freezing night in March 2023, at a friend’s house party in Dalston, east London. On arrival, I stuffed cans of White Claw in to the small fridge and scanned the room. I ended up chatting to a man I had never met before, who introduced himself as a friend of the host’s new boyfriend. He was a little older than me, with a mop of unremarkable brown hair and a slightly awkward demeanour.

‘Overnighting’ water in a wide-mouthed container does get rid of chlorine, and your sensitive plants will thank you for it

The problem
Rainwater is the gold standard for houseplants, but not everyone has a garden, a water butt, or the inclination to collect it. For those relying on tap water, the question is how to make it as plant-friendly as possible. Chlorine is added to tap water as a disinfectant, and sensitive plants like calatheas, ferns and carnivorous varieties can show it in their leaf edges and general mood.

The hack
Plenty of plant owners leave jugs of tap water on the counter overnight, and the chlorine evaporates, leaving something softer and kinder for your roots. It costs nothing, requires no equipment and has been passed around plant communities for years.

In the summer of 1971, I left behind my comfortable family home with a tent, rations and a Women’s Weekly cutting of Princess Caroline of Monaco

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At 15 I proved the maxim: “Hire a teen while they still know everything.”

That summer of 1971, I judged the world and concluded that civilisation was meh, and surely doomed. So with the zeal of the truly clueless I resolved to try living off the land, and left behind my comfortable family home and smirking parents.

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I found Benny and his brother, Buster, when they were three months old. I was besotted with them both, but it was Benny, with his quirky ways and loving nature, who really stole my heart

I suppose you could say I got Benny from the shops. In 2006, he and his brother ambushed me outside a supermarket in Bahrain. They were trying to climb into the bags of shopping I was carrying to get at the food they could smell. Immediately smitten, I took them in.

It was the start of a 16-year relationship that saw Benny and Buster accompany me to Kenya, Qatar, back to Bahrain, then finally to Manchester. I used to say they had seen more countries than most people. I was an advertising creative director and followed the work where I could get it. It was an interesting but lonely life and my new pals, who were about three months old, immediately made a difference. I was besotted with them, but it was Benny, with his endearing quirks, who really stole my heart.

What is behind the surge in ufology? The recent spike can be traced to the top of the US government, which inspired me to start investigating ...

I never gave much thought to aliens beyond Star Wars. I put extraterrestrials and their flying saucers in a box marked “nonsense” long ago, along with political manifestos, loyalty cards, Black Friday, fairies, pixies, elves, ghosts and ghouls.

Then, in 2017, the New York Times published an article with the headline “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program”. Apparently, the US government had been chasing UFOs for years. These weren’t the ramblings of the kind of straw-chewing rancher you would see in a sci-fi film; the story was told by a military intelligence officer called Luis Elizondo. He claimed he ran a secret Pentagon programme called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which had found evidence that UFOs were flying around military bases, behaving in ways that defied the laws of physics.

Protests are growing against moves to change Japan’s ‘supreme law’, a document written by the US that is now being challenged by Iran war

It may be a toy, but Gohta Hashimoto’s lightsaber is symbolic of the battle he and his fellow protesters face as they attempt to derail moves by Japan’s government to change the country’s pacifist constitution for the first time in its 80-year history.

“I’ve been interested in the constitution for about a year, ever since the rise of far-right parties in Japan,” says Hashimoto, a 22-year-old university student. “I wanted to be part of a movement that keeps my country peaceful and protects the constitution.”

In his new book, Omer Bartov tracks how a liberatory strand of Zionism transformed into an extremist ideology that he sees as responsible for genocide in Gaza

Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, when asked to explain the apparent about-face that led him to advocate the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, quoted a beloved Israeli pop ballad. “What you can see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he had supposedly undergone since coming to power.

Although the 2005 Gaza disengagement was perhaps less a change of heart than one of strategy, as his senior adviser later admitted, the lyric became a byword of Israeli politics, an oft-cited reminder that perspective is everything.

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

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

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

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We’re particularly interested in talking to throuples living together under one roof, as well as throuples who are raising children as a unit of three parents. Is it easier to manage the chore rota and childcare when there are more adults in the room? Or more difficult?

We would like to hear your experience of job interviews that were conducted partially or wholly by AI

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