Rapid scientific progress has given us the tools to stop time more convincingly than ever – but lurking behind these claims is the same fear of ageing

Andrea holds a PhD in literature and works for a non-profit in Dallas. She’s in her late 40s and tells me that the pressure to remain youthful in her city is palpable. Almost completely irresistible.

“You don’t know what it’s like here,” she said. “Everyone has a facelift if they can afford one and everyone has had some work done. I’m a feminist to the core, but if I had the money, I would get a deep-plane facelift in a heartbeat. I’m saving up to get my neck done.”

The US government has been forced to pay billions in refunds to companies that were hit by Donald Trump’s ‘liberation day’ tariffs. The US has paid out $81bn (£61bn) this fiscal year after the supreme court ruled the tariffs were illegal. Lucy Hough speaks to Chris Michael, an international editor for Guardian US

The striker is driven by a sense of destiny but to be remembered as an all-time great outside England requires big-game performances

Five days to win the Ballon d’Or. The way to do it: outshine Lionel Messi in Atlanta, then see off Kylian Mbappé or Lamine Yamal on Sunday. For Harry Kane, nothing will come without a fight. The England captain was doubted when he was a kid, back when the youth coaches at Tottenham wondered if it was worth keeping him, and he faces another seismic battle against Argentina on Wednesday.

This could be the crowning moment of Kane’s career. The Bayern Munich striker has enjoyed the season of his life, with more domestic trophies in the bag and 73 goals in 64 appearances for club and country. There are more steps to take, though. The chance to lead England into a first World Cup final abroad is within reach. All Kane has to do to is outperform the greatest footballer of all time.

Badenoch’s ideological purge gathers pace as moderates are cast out and the Tories edge ever closer to political extinction

You have to hand it to Kemi Badenoch. She doesn’t take any prisoners. While the rest of us have been trying to survive a heatwave and are wondering if air-con may be needed for future summers, the Tory leader has taken a more hardline approach to climate change. Call it Schrödinger’s climate change. It’s both happening and not happening at the same time.

Kemi is just about sane enough not to be an out-and-out denier. She leaves that to Reform. Mind you, no one would put it past her to suggest the scientists have got it wrong if the temperature drops for a few days. But her view is that while climate change may be real, there’s no point in trying to do anything about it.

The Piano director shares her memories of the actor on set – and the last time she saw him in hospital

• Sam Neill’s final interview and his life in pictures

• ‘A true gentleman’: actors, directors and leaders pay tribute to Sam Neill

• Neill interviewed in 2023, 2024 and 2026

Sam. So effortlessly handsome, and that rare thing in New Zealand and Australia: a movie star.

My hands actually shook when I met him at a cafe in Vulcan Lane, Auckland, to discuss rehearsals. He had arrived, we all had, to start pre-production on The Piano. He was to play the repressed and violent Stewart, the one who would chop off his wife’s finger. Who but Sam could play that part, could surprise with that part?

Click here to submit a picture for publication in these online galleries and/or on the Guardian letters page

Detectives examining whether hatred of Widdecombe’s strong views or of Reform party were factors in killing described as a ‘targeted attack’

The police investigation into the death of Ann Widdecombe is examining whether a leftwing or single-issue cause may lie behind her killing, the Guardian has learned.

Among issues detectives are investigating are whether a hatred of Widdecombe’s strong views, such as on homosexuality, was a factor. They are also examining whether extreme hostility to the Reform UK party played a role.

Exclusive: Work and pensions secretary signals possible reform to welfare as ministers await key reviews

Labour must stop “simply writing a cheque” for health and disability benefit claimants and will provide more job support instead, the work and pensions secretary has said.

Pat McFadden said the government was preparing to launch a renewed effort at welfare reform with a focus on encouraging more people with health conditions to get into work and off benefits.

Midnight to 6am block on some apps is latest stage of Labour’s bid to protect young people from online harms

Sixteen and 17-year-olds are to be encouraged to observe a midnight social media curfew, in the latest stage of Labour’s bid “to protect the next generation” from online harms, including poor sleep caused by night-time scrolling.

From next spring, Britain’s oldest children will be urged to refrain from using certain apps with a midnight to 6am block being switched on by default. But the curfew will not be mandatory and can be overridden. The move is an extension of the under-16 social media ban announced last month, which included restrictions on platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.

US president says he will knock out all Iran’s power plants and bridges next week in bid to force Tehran to agree to a deal

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has threatened to expand US strikes on Iran next week to target power plants and bridges if Tehran does not agree to a deal amid a continuing dispute over the strait of Hormuz.

“Next week it gets really bad for them because next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges,” the US president said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. “We’re going to knock out all their power plants. We’re going to knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”

Vulnerable people more at risk as research finds only half of local authority plans require cooling strategies

England risks constructing a new generation of “death trap” buildings that can fatally overheat unless the government tightens standards and prioritises climate safeguards, planning experts have said.

Fears are growing about the plight of vulnerable people in heatwaves, with research this week suggesting that 2,700 people had died in the May and June heatwaves in England and Wales. Yet only about half of local plans being drawn up by councils and local authorities require new buildings to have a cooling or ventilation strategy to prevent overheating, according to findings from the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA).

PM-in-waiting says bill is major step towards securing accountability families had fought for, in rare moment of Labour unity

Andy Burnham has hailed a power shift from the state to the people as MPs finally passed the stalled Hillsborough law, a rare moment of Labour unity with the bill set to be a key legacy of Keir Starmer’s government.

In his first intervention in the Commons since returning as an MP, Burnham said the bill was a significant step towards securing the accountability the Hillsborough families had fought for – but should never have had to do.

Ukraine attacks deter Russian shipping in Sea of Azov; loudest cheers for Kyiv’s troops at Bastille Day parade in Paris. What we know on day 1,603

The Russian army has executed hundreds of Ukrainian PoW since 2022 under a deliberate policy, Kyiv says, with the exact number of victims unknown. A Ukrainian intelligence official told Agence France-Presse they have tracked “more than 900 military personnel” killed in “more than 340” incidents since 2022. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they added this might represent 25%-40% of such cases. Under the Geneva conventions, soldiers are considered PoW – and afforded protection – from the moment they issue a clear surrender.

A UN report from June cited 129 verified executions of Ukrainian prisoners of war, with the organisation sounding the alarm last year over a “marked increase” in cases. Andriy Atamantchuk from the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said that to date Kyiv has opened 116 investigations into the killings of 306 Ukrainian servicemen since 2022. “This stems from a Russian policy that has effectively encouraged and enabled such crimes, with commanders then issuing orders to that effect,” he said. The accusations are rejected by Moscow and Agence France-Presse said Russian authorities did not reply to an AFP request for comment.

Russia’s transport ministry admitted it may have to divert cargo ⁠away from the Sea of Azov as Ukraine continued to pound Russian shipping there. The commander of Ukraine’s drone forces said on Tuesday that Ukraine had hit “116 vessels over the past nine days”, including several tankers and cargo ships, in the Azov sea. He said the aim was to damage Russia’s “shadow fleet” and to limit Russia’s petrol supplies to Moscow-controlled Crimea.

Ukraine’s ⁠military said it ​struck two Russian ⁠oil refineries in ⁠the ​Bashkortostan ‌and Krasnodar ‌regions, causing fires at ​the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat ⁠complex as ​well as ​the ​Afipsky ​oil ‌refinery. Russian ​authorities confirmed a fire at the Afipsky refinery in Russia’s ​southern Krasnodar region, ‌and at Salavat in the Urals region of Bashkortostan.

Sevastopol, one of the largest cities in ⁠Russian-controlled Crimea, was limiting power supplies after Ukrainian attacks, local authorities ⁠said on Tuesday. Crimea ⁠has ​already introduced restrictions on gasoline usage because of fuel shortages caused ⁠by Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries and logistics infrastructure. Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor ⁠of Sevastopol, said electricity would ​be supplied for ‌two hours, followed ‌by six-hour outages.

Ukraine’s air defences managed to shoot down five out of eight ballistic missiles that Russia fired overnight into Tuesday – an increased interception rate – along with 108 out of 135 drones, the Ukrainian air force said. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, said Russian attacks still damaged 16 sites in the capital, including a school and a business, while city officials reported ⁠several fires. Zelenskyy said Russian attacks injured ‌seven people in Ukraine’s ‌eastern Kharkiv region and three in the northern Chernihiv region. He called on European allies to pass their latest sanctions package this week.

Kyrgyzstan’s government on Tuesday indefinitely banned exports of ⁠gasoline, diesel fuel and oil in response to fuel shortages in Russia, from which ⁠the Central Asian ⁠country ​sources the vast majority of its fuel needs. Kyrgyzstan has appealed to ‌neighbours for help in making up for Russian fuel supplies, and sought diesel and jet fuel from Belarus and China.

Ukrainian troops marched down the Champs-Élysées as part of the Bastille Day parade in Paris. Kyiv’s troops got the biggest cheers of the day from crowds on the tree-lined avenue. Ukrainian co-pilots trained in France were on board two French Mirage 2000B fighter jets that flew over. Zelenskyy watched as guest of honour alongside Emmanuel Macron, the French president.

Ukraine’s prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, formally resigned in parliament on Tuesday as part of a government reshuffle previously announced by Zelenskyy. The parliament is expected to vote for a replacement on Thursday. Opposition lawmakers have called for Zelenskyy to further explain the overhaul of his government.

Author Wendy Jones highlighted the trend in an Instagram post: ‘What is going on here?’

Nine of the 10 bestselling fiction paperbacks in the UK this week have one thing in common: a woman is murdered.

The novels, which appear on this week’s Sunday Times bestseller list, include The Secret of Secrets, The Divorce, The Names, The Family Friend, The Widow, The Impossible Fortune, The Hallmarked Man, My Husband’s Wife and Boleyn Traitor.

Let this be a lesson for everyone foolish enough to cast Spain as underdogs. How they enjoyed dishing it out here, reducing France to passengers and surely guaranteeing nobody will make the same mistake twice. They will be favourites to win Sunday’s final, whether that turns out to be a rerun against England or a time-bending meeting of Lamine Yamal and Lionel Messi, and those minded to back against Luis de la Fuente’s side will need a mightily compelling reason.

France never came close to finding one. Kylian Mbappé had one last go in added time, shooting harmlessly over, and his forlorn expression upon glancing up to check the clock said more than enough. He knew the game was up but, in truth, that had barely been in question since midway through the first half. Spain smothered France but outplayed them too, picking their moments to penetrate and adding a beautifully worked goal from the rampaging Pedro Porro.

Afghanistan is seeing a resurgence in underage brides and mothers as desperate families sell their children in order to eat

Sima* is 18, but has already given birth four times. Her youngest is a newborn, the eldest is four. Sitting with her children in their mud-brick room in Badghis province, Sima says: “After the Taliban entered the country, I had just finished the sixth grade and was supposed to start the seventh. But two months later, my father pressured me immensely to marry my cousin. After being beaten by my father several times, I was forced to accept.”

At 13, Sima became a bride inside the compound where she still lives, and where she has given birth to her children. One child died of pneumonia aged one. She does all the housework: fetching water, tending the cows, baking naan in a tandoor. All the while, her children cling to her legs, crying.

EV owners were sent hefty PCNs but say some signs in private car parks fail to warn of fees to park and recharge car

Does refuelling your car class as parking? The answer appears to be yes if it’s an electric vehicle. Guardian Money has been contacted by several readers who were fined after charging their cars away from home.

The motorists report being caught out by signs that fail to make clear that charging points are subject to parking tariffs or to store opening times. Also, they have found some chargers being advertised as available for use when it would be a breach of the car park’s terms and conditions to use them.

Postwar rules limit state collection of intelligence and prosecution of illegal operatives, but the government of Sanae Takaichi is beefing up its capabilities

• Japan admits growing need to counter espionage after Russian ‘den of spies’ report

After eight decades as arguably the most welcoming environment for foreign spies in the democratic world, Japan – where espionage is technically not illegal in many cases – is racing to build its own spying and counterintelligence capabilities.

Reports that Japan has become a hub for Russian operatives procuring technology for the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine come as Tokyo undergoes its biggest postwar rethink of its security services.

In the UK, these scams have become an epidemic, rising 147% between January and March, compared with the same time last year. Why are they suddenly so common? And what can you do if you’re charged thousands for a quick, easy job?

Sarah was alone in her flat with her three-month-old baby when a man put a card machine in her face and demanded she pay £2,209. A few hours earlier Sarah, 30, had been for a walk with her daughter when it dawned on her that she had left her keys at home. She did what most people would do in the same situation: search Google for a nearby locksmith. “I had a screaming baby, so I needed someone to quickly let me in,” she says.

Sarah came across a seemingly legitimate company, near the top of the search results, which was sponsored. The company’s website said prices started at £45 and claimed they had received “4,500-plus five-star reviews and counting”, so she called them. When the locksmith arrived, Sarah says, he “seemed pleasant and relatively quiet” at first. After examining her lock, however, he told her it was a high-security one and the only way to get inside was to drill it open. He broke his way in and changed the lock before delivering another blow: he had accidentally damaged the internal mechanism, which also needed replacing. After Sarah got inside and placed her baby on a changing mat, the locksmith told her the price: £2,209.

As a teenager I declined a painful operation to straighten my spinal curvature, and it was a decision I sometimes regretted. But through daily stretching and exercise, my relationship with my body was transformed

I was 13 when a spinal surgeon gave me unsolicited career advice. “Scoliosis won’t ruin your life,” he said, peering over his spectacles, “unless you want to do bikini modelling.” As a young teenager, I hadn’t thought much about job prospects, let alone modelling, but his words stung. It also curdled my situation into a lose-lose scenario: either have a painful operation to fuse metal rods with my spine, or endure a lifetime with an abnormally twisted back.

Until this point, I’d perceived my spinal curvature in terms of the inward experience: pain. Now, I became aware of an external dimension: a disfigurement. Something to be hidden. This did me no favours as a teenager in the age of Instagram. While I declined the operation due to the risks and the extended leave from school, the surgeon’s blithe remark burdened me with shame.

Treasury says shoppers will get a ‘fairer deal’ as new rules for BNPL credit are introduced on Wednesday

Millions of shoppers will enjoy more rights and protections from Wednesday as new rules for “buy now, pay later” take effect in the UK.

The government said it was delivering on its commitment to end the buy now, pay later “wild west”.

In the follow-up to the Booker-shortlisted Burnt Sugar, a woman seeks liberation from her controlling relationships

Avni Doshi’s second novel is narrated by an unnamed woman in the suburban US who is shocked to hear her husband announce that he is leaving her. She isn’t in love with him, exactly, but she sees their marriage as a structure or “container” for her existence. Formerly a novelist, her writing has stalled since having children. Her husband controls their finances, and won’t tell her why the credit card keeps failing. She suspects he’s been sleeping around.

In the aftermath of his departure she tries to isolate herself, not only from her ex, but also from her own family, whose well-meaning interference becomes another kind of domination. She’s a practising astrologist – the “first house” of the title refers both to the couple’s home and to the astrological division of the heavens that has a bearing on the body, physical appearance and early life experience: foundations for a self. This self is exposed by abandonment. The First House, as a whole, is the story of its excoriation: a harsh, occasionally bitterly funny rejection of the narrator’s personhood and relationships as they stand. Marriage, she states, requires “a terrible fear of consequences”; “if either person in a couple stopped being afraid, it would certainly break apart”. Her parents bully her. Her cousin tries to set her up with other men. Her daughter just wants a phone. Relationships, like devices, promise connection and deliver alienation. “The tight, airless room of a marriage only created the conditions for us to realise we were alone, always alone.”

Not a ‘cake person’? Loaded with fruit and whipped cream, these luxurious pastries are sure to hit your sweet spot

Strawberry, or any berry, shortcakes are the perfect dessert to make for those in your life who are not cake people. I’m married to a “not cake” person, so I would know. For me, the contrast between the salty, slightly warm shortcake (which is more like a biscuit), whipped cream and macerated fresh fruit is perfection, and hits enough of the sweet spots still to feel like a dessert without actually being cakey. But, first, the cardenal, a truly elegant, light-as-a-feather cake that’s made with alternating rings of genoise sponge and meringue all sandwiched with whipped cream. Though the building blocks are simple – meringue, sponge and cream – when combined, they turn into something really special.

A catamaran service from Dover to Boulogne is the perfect start to a trip exploring the Pas-de-Calais and marshes of Saint-Omer by bike, boat and kayak

“It’s all about tuning into the culture of the sea,” helmsman Chris O’Brien tells me, scanning the rippling cobalt horizon from the wheel of a catamaran. “People find the water, and the meditative experience of sailing, healing.” Meditative isn’t a word that usually comes to mind when talking about cross-Channel ferries on a bank holiday weekend, but this is no ordinary ferry.

Launched last year, SailLink operates a largely wind-powered (engines are only used when necessary) service from Dover to Boulogne up to five times a week between April and mid-September, with a new Shoreham to Fécamp route due to start trials later this year.

The mural in a Birmingham suburb is so popular that the shop’s owner is opening two hours early to meet demand

On a busy junction in Quinton, a suburb of Birmingham, England football stars Jude Bellingham and Morgan Rogers are peering out from the side of a fish and chip shop, tucking into the local delicacy: orange chips.

The huge lifelike image was pasted on the wall on Friday afternoon by a local guerilla artist seeking to foster West Midlands pride, both for the area’s footballing stars and for its distinctive neon battered chips.

He was elected mayor of Istanbul in 2019, and had announced his candidacy for the 2028 presidential elections. But Ekrem İmamoğlu is now behind bars, and his trial, on charges including fraud and organised crime, could take 12 years

• This piece first appeared in the Dial

There’s a Turkish saying, “Silivri soğuktur”: Silivri is cold. You’ll hear it from journalists, politicians and activists after they say something critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. The kind of comments that could send them to the notorious prison complex in Silivri, where it would take months before they saw a judge.

For decades, Silivri was considered a “sayfiye yeri”, a place for cottages, country and summer houses. All around the complex are small family-run farms and villas with private pools, protected by watchdogs. Construction of the Marmara Prison complex began in 2005 and lasted three years. It contains eight closed correctional institutions and an open prison where the court is located. It is Europe’s largest prison complex.

• Coach warns his team they still need to improve

• Mbappé says France were lacking ‘tactically, technically’

A delighted Luis de la Fuente warned that Spain were peaking at the right time after comfortably beating France 2-0 and progressing to their first World Cup final since 2010.

Spain completely outplayed their highly fancied opponents, scoring in each half through Mikel Oyarzabal’s penalty and a well-worked Pedro Porro goal. It is a far cry from their grim goalless draw with Cape Verde in the group stage. De la Fuente, who has coached them to the European Championship title, believes they have timed their run perfectly to the tournament’s business end and a showdown against England or Argentina.

• Falklands conflict adds ‘emotional’ edge to semi-final

• Manager has ‘no problem’ with Bellingham after outburst

Thomas Tuchel believes England will face an Argentina team “fuelled by history” in their World Cup semi-final in Atlanta on Wednesday. It will be the sixth time that the nations have met at the tournament with the previous three coming after the Falklands war of 1982.

The most controversial game was in the 1986 quarter-finals when Diego Maradona scored his “Hand of God” goal and Argentina won 2-1 en route to the title. Argentina triumphed on penalties in the last 16 in 1998 when David Beckham was sent off. Beckham gained a measure of revenge four years later when he scored from the penalty spot for a 1-0 group-stage victory. England won 3-1 at the group phase in 1962 and 1-0 in the quarter-finals in 1966, when they went on to become champions.

The Messi arc reaches a decisive point in Atlanta – passage to a third final or an exit to test the limits of Argentina’s love for their unassuming athlete-genius

Wednesday night, Atlanta Stadium, 101 games down, three left to play, and finally it makes sense. Bring on The Countdown, that moment just before kick-off in every one of those quietly fascinating World Cup matches where suddenly the world’s most excited man is bellowing over the PA system in a state of outraged, crowing transport, like the last voice you’ll ever hear before the American century explodes in a ball of inanity, fried chicken and porn.

“NAYYYN!! EEEIGHYYT!! SEEEVEERRN!! …” the world’s most excited man shouts, prelude to some cautious rolling possession, maybe an early back-pass, and an agreeable reminder that the game itself will not be stage managed. You want quiet bathos? This World Cup will deliver the greatest goddam quiet bathos the galaxy has ever seen.

Decades after the Falklands war and Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal, the fixture is once again being discussed as far more than a game

When Argentina’s national football team burst into the dressing room after beating Switzerland 3-1, they celebrated by singing The Fourth Star, the country’s unofficial World Cup anthem.

“For Malvinas, for Diego,” Lionel Messi and his teammates chanted, invoking both the Falkland Islands – known as Islas Malvinas in Argentina – and their football legend Diego Maradona.

Mexico 1986, France 1998, Japan 2002 … this is a match that transcends, with Argentina’s head coach Lionel Scaloni calling for the focus to be on football, not the Falklands

After confirmation that match 102, one of the World Cup semi-finals, would be England v Argentina, the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas conflict was mentioned at Lionel Scaloni’s press conference. “No, no, no,” the Argentina head coach tut-tutted emphatically. “This is just a football match. Let’s not look for other stuff. It’s a football game against a great team, with a great manager who I admire. But it’s a football match. End of.”

The Argentina midfielder Rodrigo De Paul concurred: “We understand it’s a football game that transcends; it brings back memories of what Diego did. We sing songs about our Malvinas heroes, mainly to remember them, but we have to understand that it’s a football match and that the Malvinas have to be discussed elsewhere. What happened was an atrocity and we always remember the fallen, but what we want is to win this match to get to the final.”

Despite Anthropic’s claims, Claude is no more likely to achieve sentience than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane

For centuries, humans have been fascinated by the prospect of creating artificial beings in our own image. Of developing synthetic minds and artificial bodies that not only think but also feel, and are both intelligent and conscious. For the vast majority of this time, this prospect seemed very distant; a topic for science fiction and philosophy, not for the here and now. But over the past few years, the rapid rise of AI – and especially of language models – has changed everything.

Last week, the frontier AI firm Anthropic published new research on its language model, Claude, in which the researchers claimed to find signs of consciousness emerging within its inner workings. They didn’t claim that Claude is actually conscious in the same way that humans are, but the findings certainly upped the ante on the possibility of consciousness arising in AI.

Anil Seth is professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and co-director of the Sussex centre for consciousness science. He is the author of Being You

Around the world, climate-sceptic parties are exploiting floods and fires to make political capital. Without urgent changes, this deadly spiral will continue

Recent unprecedented heatwaves in the UK may have killed thousands of people. Children are suffering in overheating schools. NHS trusts are straining under record-breaking demand. This all comes after climate extremes have even affected national security, with three of Britain’s five worst harvests coming since 2020, impairing food security.

This is what life looks like in the “adaptation gap”.

Laurie Laybourn is executive director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative

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.

Paid-for political access and threadbare regulations have helped to embed the US tech firm in the NHS – and beyond. But there is a way to free ourselves

Andy Burnham faces a lot of big decisions. But one of the incoming prime minister’s biggest early tests is what he does about the world’s “scariest company” – Palantir. The US defence and surveillance tech behemoth has a swathe of British public contracts, including, most controversially, a £330m deal with the NHS. It’s pretty clear what many of Burnham’s new parliamentary colleagues want him to do: the science, innovation and technology committee says the government should ditch Palantir and its “clear mismatch with UK values”.

Peter Thiel and Alex Karp’s company is not without British backers. The Times and the Telegraph have been enthusiastic supporters. In the Financial Times last month former Conservative party adviser Camilla Cavendish accused Palantir’s critics of putting politics over progress: “To me, what matters is what works.”

Peter Geoghegan runs the investigative website Democracy for Sale

Bellingham has transcended the hostility he has faced from press and pundits to become the emotional and symbolic focal point of the team

Months before the World Cup, the familiar chorus of antipathy that had followed Jude Bellingham almost since his emergence on the international stage grew louder. A number of writers, pundits and former professionals questioned whether one of England’s most gifted footballers might prove detrimental to the squad’s harmony. The clearest expression of these arguments appeared in a Daily Mail article in November 2025 beneath one of the most ignominious headlines in English footballing history: “Leave Jude at home.”

Amid a wave of criticism directed at Bellingham, Ian Wright felt compelled to defend him on an episode of Stick to Football. Once clipped, his remarks spread rapidly across football’s social media ecosystem and beyond, both because of Wright’s candour, and for placing the hostility directed at Bellingham within a historical tradition of policing Black men’s behaviour. “Someone like Jude, for some reason, frightens these people,” Wright said, before adding: “It’s something you’re taught as a Black man … to keep your head down and be, for want of a better word, a humble fucking slave.”

Calum Jacobs is the author of A New Formation: How Black Footballers Shaped the Modern Game and the founder of CARICOM magazine

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.

World Cup victory for England next week could raise expectations the likely new prime minister can’t live up to

Andy Burnham yesterday got himself clear of the magic number – the 323 Labour MPs who had to support him to make any leadership challenge mathematically impossible. Half a week had gone by in limbo, his endorsements standing at 322, everyone knowing he was the next prime minister, nobody able to call it anything more than “likely”. What were those last MPs waiting for? Maybe they were just in it for the atmospherics.

You can’t run a coronation like a slam dunk; it needs choreographed suspense, a sense of ceremony. In an ideal world, the last names would have arrived in the form of a wax-sealed letter, carried by a horse or a bird.

Spruiking your billionaire-coded masculinity is now an invitation to feminine mockery. Real social power doesn’t come from trinkets or trophies

Consider yourself forewarned, lads; while Reuters has catalogued the toys in the “luxury playbook” being marketed to new squillionaires, social media suggests there’s a new status symbol for the aspirational “alpha male”. And it’s not a Birkin-for-boys – even if Erling Haaland is wearing one.

We are in a moment where traditional status symbols have been upended by a reluctance to imbue objects – or relationships – with their heritage prestige. As a feminist, I propose, with pride, that women are to blame.

The government’s worthy attempt to give cohabiting partners marriage-like rights fails to protect women who have chosen financial independence

Andy Burnham will walk into No 10 on 20 July to a bulging in-tray of policies, proposals – and problems. One he may be less aware of is a ticking political timebomb launched by David Lammy in his role as justice secretary, which could affect millions of people who have chosen not to marry.

Under Lammy’s proposal, couples who have lived together for three years, or who have a child together, would automatically acquire marriage-like legal obligations they never agreed to, meaning either partner could ask a court to make financial orders if the relationship ends.

Ruth Deech is a cross-bench peer and former law lecturer

Lady Hallett exposed waste and secrecy. Hillsborough campaigners showed why public bodies must be honest before and after catastrophe strikes

The Covid-19 inquiry’s procurement report and the Hillsborough law are not accidental companions. The same movement of bereaved families, many of the same lawyers and the same ideas connect them. In both cases the movement for justice was driven by ordinary people who refused to let institutions control the account of their own failures. That they both arrived within hours of each other meant that it was a good day for justice.

The inquiry chair, Heather Hallett, found that Britain entered Covid dangerously unprepared, leaving health and care workers without adequate protection and that £10bn of PPE spending was then wasted because of the flawed purchasing arrangements. The result of those failures were avoidable infections and deaths: families such as Naomi Fulop’s believe that inadequate protective equipment allowed the deadly virus to take the lives of vulnerable loved ones.

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.

Donald Trump’s tariff threat recasts Brazil’s attempt to protect its democracy as unfair commercial practice – and gives Bolsonarism a Washington stage

Last June, Brazil’s supreme court responded to the online lies that helped fuel Jair Bolsonaro’s failed far-right coup attempt in 2023. It ruled that social media platforms could be held liable for some users’ posts, forcing firms such as Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to remove hate speech and anti-democratic content. A month later, Donald Trump proposed a 25% tariff on Brazilian imports, complaining that the judges had made US tech firms take down “political” material.

At a hearing held at the US International Trade Commission last week, an extraordinary platform was given to Mr Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio. He is the opposition candidate running to be president in this year’s election while his father serves a 27-year prison sentence. His message to Washington was that the US’s problem with his country’s unfair trade practices was down to the president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who has clashed with Mr Trump.

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Peers, former ambassadors and senior lawyers say Israel must be held to account for its actions in the Gaza and the West Bank

Pippa Crerar’s focus on action is right (Burnham’s apology over Gaza marks ‘reset moment’ as Labour seeks to win back progressive voters, 9 July). May we add one element: the law. Two years ago, the international court of justice advised that the 1967 occupation of Palestine is unlawful. Keir Starmer worked to uphold international law on Ukraine. Rightly, he recognised the state of Palestine alongside Israel, and confirmed that the occupation is unlawful. Consequences should follow, but we still await the government’s assessment of the ICJ opinion. Steps to end the occupation are needed. No state that values the decisions of UN bodies should prolong it.

Our country needs a rules-based international order. The UK relies on due process for the conduct of international affairs. It is in the UK’s interest to challenge the “might is right” fallacy. The rule of law helps keep us safe, when made effective – domestically and internationally. Lord Denning observed that “the rules of international law … do form part of our English law”. The two are intertwined.

Absurdly high expectations for the new prime minister will only lead to anger and resentment, writes Colin Montgomery – we new a new political ballgame

It’s not the hope that kills you, in either football or politics; it’s unrealistic expectations (It’s the hope that kills you – so fingers crossed for Andy Burnham, 14 July).

When it comes to football, writing as a Scot, I know that all too well. Despite us never making it past a World Cup group stage, expectations were high this time, born of the giddy qualification drama of our spectacular Hampden win against Denmark. Then reality hit hard.

Caroline Cerny, Prof Sir Ian Gilmore and Katharine Jenner welcome the ethics watchdog’s recommendations to improve transparency around lobbying

From tobacco and alcohol to unhealthy food, there is extensive evidence that companies whose profits depend on the sale of harmful products have repeatedly sought to influence the policies designed to protect public health.

Research from around the world has documented efforts to deny, dilute and delay measures aimed at reducing harm, while promoting approaches that are more favourable to commercial interests. Too often, that lobbying takes place behind closed doors with no opportunity for scrutiny.

Prof Craig Jackson responds to an article by Polly Hudson on the benefits of not forgiving or forgetting

Polly Hudson’s article extols the benefits of grievances, mostly for retaining her sanity and self-esteem (Don’t tell me it’s wrong to hold a grudge. I’m making the world a better place, one petty boycott at a time, 5 July).

Holding grudges can be an elegant art form, but it is also a sign of the amount of self-regard one has. The commitment required can be a marathon effort, involving extra work, mileage, expense, inconvenience and “missing out” – all in the name of valuing one’s own “worth”. It is tiring, but even more so for others caught up in it. It can also be futile if the target is never aware.

• Slovenian wins stage 10 on Bastille Day to go further clear

• Evenepoel finishes second, 32 seconds behind Slovenian

Tadej Pogacar extended his lead in the Tour de France with another imperious solo victory on the 10th stage to Le Lioran, in the Massif Central. The Slovenian now leads the Tour by more than a three and a half minutes from longtime rival Jonas Vingegaard, who wilted and lost more time to the other podium contenders.

Over a stage with seven categorised climbs, including the first category Puy Mary Pas de Peyrol and Col de Pertus in the final hour of racing, Pogacar again asserted himself over the peloton with a trademark attack on the penultimate climb.

The Open marks end of the short sweep that began with the Masters, but big names can see benefit of extending its run

Perhaps it is not the when but instead the where. Golf’s majors in present form feel far too condensed, too brief. Jon Rahm, a two‑time winner on the biggest stages, has more interest in the fact that three out of four take place in the US than their position on the calendar.

“I think it would be good for golf,” Rahm said on the proposition of an “international” major. “If you could have more golf elsewhere, I think it would be fine. As a major, you need to have that commercial value as well. I understand it. I wouldn’t know the logistics of that. I don’t know who can decide what a new major becomes or is now a major.

• England 258 lost against India 262-4 by six wickets

• All-rounders share century stand to secure victory

A recent ascent to No 1 in the men’s T20 international rankings saved one half of Brendon McCullum’s job as England head coach and yet half of that half – one-day international cricket – continues to be a struggle.

A six-wicket defeat by India in the series opener at Edgbaston was England’s 13th ODI loss since McCullum took charge of the white‑ball teams at the start of last year. Just six wins have come in this time – including three against lowly West Indies – and they have now slipped to eighth in the world overall.

• Midfielder signs from Aston Villa for about £35m

• Villa to have Visit Rwanda as front-of-shirt sponsor

Manchester United have confirmed the signing of Youri Tielemans for about £35m on a five-year deal, with the midfielder stating he wants to help “push for the biggest trophies”.

The 29-year-old will join from Aston Villa and follows United’s recruitment of another midfielder, Andrey Santos, who is 22, from Chelsea for £48m plus a possible £2m in add-ons on Monday.

• Fee for forward could be as high as £850,000

• The 26-year-old has one year remaining on contract

Chelsea are closing in on a deal to sign the France forward Melvine Malard from Manchester United for a fee that would be a club-record sale.

It is understood the transfer fee could be as high as approximately £850,000, although some sources have suggested the deal will be closer to £750,000. The discussions are understood to be at the final stage and the move is expected to go through.

• Test on Saturday arrives in wake of football showdown

• Flanker keen to show series win last year was no fluke

For better or worse England have chosen an interesting week to be in Argentina. Before the World Cup semi-final in Atlanta there is widespread optimism that fútbol is coming home and Steve Borthwick’s players are located right in the mixer in downtown Buenos Aires.

There is certainly a great deal more public anticipation in the air than there is for the rugby Test in Santiago del Estero on Saturday. The competitive rivalry between the two countries, however, burns brightly regardless of the shape of the ball, and English players unfamiliar with fervent Argentinian crowds are being advised to brace themselves for what is coming.

Emerging stars need a leg up from media and marketing teams to ensure they get the recognition they deserve

By any measure it is a remarkable achievement. While many have fantasised about how it might feel to score a try for the All Blacks, no one in history has now lived that dream more frequently than Will Jordan. At the weekend the New Zealand wing took his tally to 50 tries in only 56 appearances, overhauling Doug Howlett’s all-time national men’s record of 49 in 62 Tests.

Perhaps the biggest compliment to pay Jordan is how relatively easy he makes it all look. Where others blow hot and cold, the 28-year-old glides around like a smooth, top-of-the-range sports car. A devastating little surge of electric acceleration here, exquisite running lines, world-class anticipation, deceptive pace … by the time defenders finally work out what he is doing it is usually too late.

Exclusive: Lewisham council’s move marks first step in Greens’ plan to create a corridor of sanctuary boroughs across London

A Green-led London council is planning to ban its officials from working with the Home Office on immigration raids, after uncovering evidence suggesting government officials wanted to use environmental health data to target restaurant workers.

Councillors on the Lewisham borough council are due to vote next week on a motion that would review its systems with a view to ending any cooperation with the government’s attempts to deport people without the right to remain in the UK.

Fire broke out last Thursday in the southeastern province of Almería, which is home to many foreign residents

Seven Britons are among 12 foreign nationals killed in wildfires in southern Spain, authorities said.

Officials said 12 of the 13 victims were foreign nationals after completing postmortem examinations after the fires that swept through Andalusia.

Officials set up traps and electric fences after 14 break-ins recored in one town in two weeks, amid fears of a repeat offender

Authorities are searching for a bear that sneaked into the home of an elderly couple and raided their fridge amid concerns it may be behind 14 break-ins across a Japanese town in the past fortnight.

On Monday evening, Mitsuo Matsubara, 87, was confronted by a large Asiatic black bear when he went to investigate a noise in his kitchen. His fridge was open, and food was strewn across the floor. His wife called the police.

Beijing may be using Youlin Chen’s knowledge to devise ways of staging nuclear tests without detection, advocates for his release from spying charges suggest

An American seismologist has been detained in China on espionage charges since 2024, his family has revealed, saying Donald Trump’s direct appeal for the scientist’s release to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, went unanswered.

Youlin Chen – who has researched how to detect underground nuclear tests using seismological data – was detained on 5 November 2024, according to a statement from the NGO Global Reach, which is working with his family to secure his freedom.

Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, stands by reporting, saying ministers who sued ‘imposed an extremely strained meaning on what was a solid ​story’

Bloomberg News and one of its reporters have been ordered to pay S$460,000 (US$355,734) in damages after an article it published was found to have defamed two Singapore government ministers, the city-state’s high court said in a judgment released on Tuesday.

Bloomberg and the reporter, Low De Wei, are liable to jointly pay S$230,000 to each minister, comprising S$170,000 in general damages and S$60,000 in aggravated damages, ⁠the judgment said.

Campaigners criticise C of E for failing to show moral leadership as one of country’s biggest landowners

The Church of England has voted against plans to restore 30% of its land for nature, with campaigners criticising its failure to show moral leadership.

The C of E owns about 42,500 hectares (105,000 acres) of land, making it one of England’s biggest landowners. Currently just 3.5% of its land is used for nature restoration.

Exclusive: Analysis of nearly 2,500 articles finds almost three-quarters made no reference to global heating

Most of the UK media stories about the record-breaking heatwave that struck in June failed to mention the climate crisis, analysis has found.

Nearly 2,500 articles about the extreme heat – when temperatures topped 37C, a record for the time of year – appeared in the UK’s nine main national daily media publications. But nearly three-quarters of them – about 72% – left out any mention of global heating or the climate, according to the analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

El Niño climate phenomenon heating waters off Mexico but incidents with humans remain a rarity

California is set to see one of its sharkiest summers in a decade, with large numbers of juvenile great whites already on a reverse vacation from the warm waters of Mexico to cooler pastures along the western United States.

The marine predator has become more common along the west coast in recent years, with stories of surfers seeing underwater behemoths closer to shore and scientists saying swimmers and ocean-lovers alike are probably already sharing their favorite beaches with great whites, whether they know it or not.

Policy to create youth clubs and health centres aims to tackle surplus of school spaces created by falling pupil numbers

Classrooms left empty by falling numbers of pupils could soon be converted into youth clubs or health centres, as part of a pilot scheme to be announced this week.

In the pilot a group of local authorities in England will be given £3.1m by the Department for Education to fund their initial plans for repurposing empty school buildings or unused facilities into community assets, with the first conversions expected to be up and running next year.

Government to launch campaign to help people cope with events such as weather emergencies or cyber-attacks

The British public should begin taking “small but important steps” to secure and protect water, power supplies and basic phone signal in case of further severe weather emergencies, national crises or cyber-attacks, Downing Street has said.

Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister, told MPs “the risks we face from climate change cannot be underestimated”, and warned of the “significant and prolonged disruption to essential services” extreme weather events could cause.

Exclusive: Analysis offers ‘smoking gun evidence’ that overturns previous assumption that bronze age individual was male

The Upton Lovell Shaman, a bronze age individual who has been depicted in museum exhibits as a bearded spiritual leader and metalworker, was female, an ancient DNA analysis has revealed.

The 4,000-year-old skeleton, along with the extensive collection of stone axes, metalworking tools and the remains of an elaborate ceremonial cloak found in the grave, is viewed as among the most significant bronze age burials in Britain.

We Go Way Back opens at the Francis Crick Institute on 16 July

Alistair Burt will bring diplomatic clout to complex cases involving human rights violations and arbitrary detention

The Foreign Office has appointed a special envoy for British citizens detained overseas, a new role to deal with “complex consular cases” such as that of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian dual national who was imprisoned in Tehran for six years.

Alistair Burt, the former Conservative Middle East minister, has taken on the role, fulfilling a pledge by David Lammy when he was shadow foreign secretary.

Lindsey Graham’s younger sister appointed by South Carolina’s governor three days after senator’s death

• Darline Graham Nordone: Lindsey Graham’s sister and interim US senator

Darline Graham, the sister of the late Republican senator Lindsey Graham, was sworn in to temporarily fill his Senate seat on Tuesday, just three days after his sudden death.

Graham was appointed by Henry McMaster, South Carolina’s governor, to fill the remainder of her brother’s current term.

Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett appear before House lawmakers in rare testimony to ask for more protection

Supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett told House lawmakers that a sharp rise in threats against her and other justices is increasingly affecting her personal and family lives.

Barrett and fellow supreme court justice Elena Kagan made the case for increased security in rare House testimony to discuss the court’s budget request. The last time a sitting justice answered questions on Capitol Hill was 2019.

Svetlana Grković says she grabbed her husband’s legs while he was ‘outside up to his chest’ for two minutes

• Ryanair passenger almost sucked out of window during flight

• Ryanair has axed family seating policy – but kids’ fees add up

A woman who saved her husband from being completely sucked out of a Ryanair plane mid-flight has said she thought as she held on to his legs: “If we die, we die together.”

Ljubisa Karović was sucked out headfirst on the flight on Friday after an engine failure resulted in parts smashing the acrylic window.

One social media user described the opening of its first outlet in Monterrey as ‘like the dog teaching a duck to fly’

A US chain’s plan to sell its version of Mexican food to Mexicans with a first branch south of the border has prompted bemusement, skepticism and anger among local people.

Chipotle Mexican Grill, known for its customisable burritos, tacos and bowls, has more than 4,000 locations worldwide and announced on Tuesday that it was expanding into Mexico in what it described as a significant milestone.

Watchdog says about 1,700 people were affected during a price surge triggered by the Middle East crisis

Heating oil customers whose deliveries were cancelled when the war in the Middle East caused a price surge are to receive compensation of up to £350 each following an investigation by the UK competition watchdog.

As the crisis unfolded, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was investigating heating oil suppliers after complaints that existing orders were being scrapped, with customers offered new deliveries at a significantly higher price.

Andrew Bailey warns that US will not be able to achieve its ambitions alone

The Bank of England governor has called for international cooperation to tackle growing AI threats, warning that the US and Trump administration would not be able to achieve their ambitions alone.

Andrew Bailey’s comments come weeks after the US president, Donald Trump, temporarily banned foreigners from using Anthropic’s powerful Claude Mythos model.

Recent strikes have sent oil prices climbing again, with average gas price per gallon up by $0.70 compared with 2025

Inflation cooled to an annual rate of 3.5% in June as the brief US-Iran ceasefire, which has since ended, brought energy prices down, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The consumer price index (CPI), which measures a basket of goods and services, has been elevated since the start of the war, largely because of higher energy prices. After mostly staying under 3% since mid-2024, CPI reached a three-year high of 4.2% in May – up from 2.4% in February. Month-over-month, CPI fell 0.8% in June, the largest one-month decrease since April 2020.

Group of major publishers accuses the tech giant of ‘one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history’

A group of major publishers have filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally using millions of copyrighted books to help build its Gemini artificial intelligence models, in “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history”.

The case, filed in federal court in New York, has been brought by three publishers – Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier – and bestselling American author Scott Turow.

Their scandalous work was once banned. Now it’s in museums. The photographer talks about a lifetime defying conformity – and their ‘very active’ sex life

The peaceful Swedish city of Örebro is not where you might expect to find Del LaGrace Volcano, the US photographer known for their subversive images depicting LGBTQ+ communities, drag kings and sexual desire. Yet this is the place they have called home for the last two decades, having moved with their ex-partner, Matilda Wurm, an associate professor at the city’s university. Now, their days are punctuated by walks around a nearby forest and trips to the local outdoor swimming pool with the pair’s two children. It is a far cry from the life they Volcano previously had in London, where they lived in squats, attended S&M fetish parties and documented lesbian cruising culture.

“I do miss it. I think London will always be my city,” Volcano tells me when they pick me up from my hotel in Örebro’s (virtually empty) city centre. Halfway between Stockholm and Gothenburg, the former trading hub known for is medieval castle is “not a queer city”, the photographer admits. Most of their neighbours don’t even know they are queer. Volcano, 68, is intersex and calls themself a “hermaphrodyke” – but these days they “pass as apparently a little old man”, they say with a grimace.

Sixty years after its first staging, performance artist MPA is restaging the provocative piece in Los Angeles

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, a traveling retrospective on view at Los Angeles’s The Broad museum, features black and white footage of Ono’s 1964 Carnegie Hall performance of Cut Piece projected on to one of its walls. It was a landmark event in performance art history, in which the artist, aged 31, sat motionless on the stage as strangers took turns with a pair of scissors to cut away pieces of her clothing. As an emblem of the Fluxus artistic tradition, Cut Piece “relies on the audience’s actions to complete the performance”, says Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at The Broad. This is precisely the work’s inherent risk: it leaves the artist’s body totally vulnerable to the viewer’s unpredictable whims. Consequently, as Ono herself told the art historian Ina Blom in a 1992 interview, “It is a frightening piece to perform.”

The tension in the footage is palpable, particularly as Ono struggles to retain her composure while a young man snips away at the straps of her undergarments. But as Loyer points out, “Looking at documentation of Cut Piece in the gallery, we are a step removed.” In order to convey the full impact of the piece, the museum is staging Cut Piece live twice at the Redcat theater on 17 and 18 July to be performed by the Los Angeles based artist MPA.

More candid confessions from the tabloid star and her exes. Plus: unflappable paramedics deal with the aftermath of a bonfire accident. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Documentaries
Part two of Katie Price’s rollercoaster life story. After an eye-popping account of her time in the Playboy mansion, Price recalls finding out she was going to become a single mum and the public judgment that came with it. Gareth Gates also sits down to speak about their fling – “I was on cloud nine!” – and what happened when Price later sold their story to the press. Then we reach the I’m a Celebrity stint, where Price met a pop star called Peter Andre. Hollie Richardson

This series about a conwoman fleeing for her life is packed with explosions and preposterous coincidences. It’s bunkum with bells on – but who can resist it in this heat?

Luciana “Lucky” Armstrong (Anya Taylor‑Joy) is on the run, scampering across the US in her fashionably rumpled sateen blouson and prompting much fist-shaking from the hapless feds on her tail. “Lucky!” they bellow, cheeks puffing in disbelief as the incorrigible grifter bounds across the roofs of parked lorries, wriggles out of an exploding car, scams a sobbing gran and sets fire to a goon’s cowboy boots. “Lucky?! Stop!” But, no, too late, she’s off again; capering, conning and smirking her way through the Apple TV crime thriller that bears her pointedly ambiguous nickname.

Based on Marissa Stapley’s bestselling novel, the story follows thus: after her boyfriend has made off with the proceeds of their multimillion-dollar heist, our penniless protagonist finds herself pursued by the FBI and a ruthless crime boss determined to relieve the duo of their ill-gotten spoils.

No film-maker shows more day-drinking than Hong Sang-soo, and this study of an actor returning from a career break is the same again – as mysteriously addictive as ever

It will not surprise fans of the prolific lo-fi Korean master Hong Sang-soo that his new film in black-and-white – which might be described as “experimental” by those who don’t quite realise that they all look like this – features long scenes, shot from a single, static camera position, featuring a conversation in a restaurant. Nor will they be surprised that one of these scenes contains a sudden, unobtrusive zoom-in to a closer position, for no obvious reason.

It will not be startling for them that the film features someone playing a female screen star of a certain age philosophically pondering her career and life-choices (a key Hong trope). And it certainly won’t be a shock that the film has a character ordering a beer or two before the sun is technically over the yardarm. There is no one in the movies, or in any of the arts, or any aspect of public life, anywhere in the world, who is more utterly dedicated to day-drinking than Hong Sang-soo.

This tale of a 50-year-old assassin going rogue – and having to confess all to her best mate – is so much fun. The chemistry between its leads is a thing of beauty

The bone-deep magnificence of Hannah Waddingham is such that she could, I suspect, talk most of us into a burning car should she wish to. So selling viewers on the delightfully ludicrous premise of the comedy caper Ride or Die is but the work of a moment. Waddingham plays Whiptail, a deadly assassin for the last 20-odd years whose work has recently become more attention-grabbing than her bosses like. Octavia Spencer (who occupies god-tier comedy status in my heart for her tiny part as Tracy Morgan’s nemesis in 30 Rock alone) is her best friend Debbie. Debbie knows Whiptail as Judith, a forensic accountant, and has no idea that behind the woman she depends on for laughs, emotional support and notes on the latest book club book she hasn’t read is a trained killer.

Debbie is married to David (Jamie Parker), a politician, and is the gentle power behind his throne. His personal and professional life have been shaped and smoothed by her for the past 25 years, and he is now on course to be the next prime minister.

After the Guardian’s music critics chose their best of the half-year, we asked you for your picks – from Brian Jackson and Arlo Parks to Maya Hawke, Flea and more

• The best albums of 2026 so far
• ‘I saw it seven times in the cinema’: readers’ favourite films of 2026 so far

The album is a fun, punchy dance record that will definitely be the soundtrack of my summer. It’s propulsive, full of queer joy, cheeky lyricism, and relatable insecurities as they ruminate on “being past their prime” as pop stars in their early 30s. It will undoubtedly be an amazing live show and is a testament to the importance of artists taking breaks, going out and living and resting before coming back with new things to say and experiences to detail. Jane Tytla, New England, US

Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, London
The veteran band may not have much new material to show for the past decade or so but this brutal, melodious mayhem still inspires catharsis

Since re-forming in 2010, System of a Down (SOAD) have existed in some weird limbo, playing numerous big-ticket tours but releasing only two new songs, with mooted further new material conspicuous by its absence amid grumbling of impasses and creative conflicts.

Tonight offers scant clues this deadlock has eased – certainly, there are no new songs – but SOAD don’t play like they’re retreading familiar material simply for filthy lucre. Viscerally heavy, they give everything a metal band should, including a guitar hero, Daron Malakian, who leads chants of: “Pull Oasis out of your ass!” and provokes a circle-pit that stretches from stage to exit; a bassist, Shavo Odadjian, gurning with unparalleled panache; and a frontman, Serj Tankian, who growls, croons, gets operatic and – at least once tonight – meows.

(Interscope)
Despite their goth-coded attempts at emotional turbulence, the saccharine songs of Abrams’ third album feel adolescent in their melodrama

Gracie Abrams’ third album is a full-blown crime scene. Across 16 songs, the US songwriter catalogues slip knots, blades, bullets, knives, more knives, ghosts, cages, drugs, car crashes, blood, burial, flaming tyres, choking, burning houses, sinking ships, drowning, more blood, bloody knees and even more knives. It’s called Daughter from Hell to acknowledge how much the 26-year-old frayed her parents’ nerves as a reckless teen, part of a wider theme about working out when to blame others for her pain, and when to accept responsibility. Clearly, there’s a lot of poetic licence involved in dramatising these mature revelations, but the dissonance between Abrams’ goth-coded emotional turbulence and the music’s insistent, quivering prettiness is the real uncrackable case on this bloodless record.

In one way, Abrams has had an outsized influence on pop. Her early bedroom songs inspired Olivia Rodrigo to write Drivers License, which kickstarted the former Disney star’s dazzlingly quick and continuing act of self-redefinition. Mostly, though, Abrams is the sum of her influences: you needn’t listen hard to clock Lorde’s vocal harmonies, Phoebe Bridgers’ intimacy or the tightly packed storytelling of Taylor Swift, who had Abrams support on the Eras tour. In Swift she also shares a producer in the National’s Aaron Dessner, a collaborator in Bon Iver (his jump-scare falsetto appears on two songs here, and he plays all over the record), and certainly a sound in Folklore’s pearlescent acoustics, injected with a whisper of stomp-clap vigour. That mix of melodrama and songs sung like secrets means Abrams’ audience skews young: her music carries the sensation of being the only person in the world grappling with huge emotions, as life often feels in adolescence. For anyone older, her music can feel a little starter pack.

Food writer and music enthusiast Ruby Tandoh details a tender picture of the existential threat to the lute. Plus, a joyous celebration of the great outdoors with Caitlin Moran and Adam Frost

This indie “audio magazine” brings together documentaries of all stripes, the common thread being a sense of experimentation. The third issue features food writer Ruby Tandoh detailing a quietly beautiful portrait of the lute, an instrument on the brink of extinction, while Jess Shane revisits a groundbreaking experiment that gave children the tools to turn their reality into poignant poetry. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Skipping between London, Shanghai and Hong Kong, this tale of family migration, politics and food has plenty of flavour and fire

Amber Fan, the 22-year-old protagonist of Kit Fan’s heartfelt and elegiac second novel, is ready to say goodbye. Goodbye to her parents, who are booked on the midnight flight from London to Hong Kong, there to enjoy their sunset years having sold the family restaurant in London’s Chinatown. And goodbye to the old Chinatown that they and their generation of hard-working Hong Kong émigrés represent, the Chinatown of peking duck, red lanterns, rude waiters and sticky tables. She loves them both, in their way, but she has her own plans for the future.

The story begins in late 2001, not long after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, as Amber prepares to open her own restaurant – an east meets west “fine fusion restaurant” called Luna. It is, she notes, “the worst possible time to open a restaurant”. Global markets are in meltdown and the old Cantonese-style joints of Chinatown, often established by those who, like Amber’s parents, fled Hong Kong for Britain in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, are closing down and selling up, usually to cash-rich mainland Chinese investors. Everyone agrees that it is the end of an era.

Therapy brings childhood trauma to light in this ambitious tale of family rupture – a smash hit in Italy that fails to live up to its hype

A son leaves home for university and goes on to pay fortnightly visits to his parents for 20 years, dreading every encounter because of the oppressive control exerted by his father and the self-effacing passivity of his mother. Then one day, he changes his phone number and cuts off all contact. Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary is written from the perspective of this son, 10 years after the rupture. The intervening decade has been, he says, the happiest period of his life.

The Anniversary has won Italy’s top literary prize and sold in the hundreds of thousands. It’s been lauded for shattering taboos, revealing families to be breakable structures and sons capable of defying their parents – even in Italy, where a Godfather-like idea of the absolute nature of family loyalty still pervades political and civic life. I came to it expecting some of the lurid revelation found in Knausgård or Houellebecq. What I found was something much simpler and quieter, exposing truths I thought we already knew: fathers can be oppressive and patriarchal; mothers can be occluded and powerless; children can be damaged, and therapists can help. Therapy aside, this was all material I recognised from neorealist Italian fiction of a much earlier era. Natalia Ginzburg, for example, showed vividly how totalitarianism seeped into the family through its patriarchal fathers, with mothers becoming hollow and timid in their wake.

Essays by the great and the good address the legacy of Brexit, but ignore the nationalist elephant in the room

This massive collection of essays by 43 different authors, including seven lords, four baronesses, one dame and three knights of the realm, may be the nearest we will ever get to a semi-official reflection on the causes and consequences of Brexit. Its editor, Sir Anthony Seldon, is honorary historian at 10 Downing Street and has written definitive works on successive 21st-century British administrations.

Yet the phrase “English nationalism” appears precisely once in its 600 pages – in a glancing reference to the line taken by the Daily Mail during the referendum campaign of 2016. Strikingly, while there is a fine essay by Aileen McHarg called On Scotland, there is none called On England. There is no attempt to provide even a broad overview of the tensions, contradictions and anxieties within the part of the UK where Brexit was won: non-metropolitan England. For much of the political and intellectual establishment, it seems, Englishness is still the condition that dare not speak its name.

PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2; Marimittu Games
A soft puzzle game makes a sharp point about the over-optimised future ahead

In the far future, on a planet that is not Earth, AI is in charge. This entity is no Skynet-esque killer robot but a machine that cares for humanity. Manifesting most visibly as cute droids, the technology is pervasive – embedded in everything from the design of the sleek architecture to the gorgeous, mostly sunny artificial weather. The so-called Optimization System has but one responsibility: ensuring the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

In less skilled hands this game might have felt like an undergraduate seminar on the limits of utilitarianism. But Japanese studio Marumittu Games elegantly marries its philosophical concerns with smart design choices. You play as a young, unnamed Facilitator tasked with tending to both the city’s bots and its human residents. Each morning you wake up, sleepily loping off to the bathroom before sitting down for an exquisitely rendered breakfast, and then embark on your day’s work. Like everything else in this near-future scenario, labour is designed to cause as little frustration as possible, amounting to simple maths brain teasers on a grid – nothing too taxing, but enough to keep you engaged.

Introducing a new sadistic psychopath and a corrupt secret society of Gotham grandees would mean Harvey Dent takes a backseat to Victor Zsasz and the Court of Owls

Matt Reeves’ The Batman was a strange beast from the beginning. Perhaps not comic-book weird in the usual sense – no cosmic portals or rubber nipples here – but strange all the same. This was a Gotham where Bruce Wayne seemed to have been styled by the ghost of Kurt Cobain, the Riddler appeared to have escaped from a David Fincher evidence locker, and the whole city looked as if it had been left to soak overnight in rainwater and civic corruption. The expectation was that Reeves would begin rolling back the bizarre in part two, perhaps leaving us with a more orthodox Batverse populated with mobsters and corrupt lawyers. Sebastian Stan seemed central to this, with rumours suggesting he would portray Harvey Dent/Two-Face, perhaps alongside Scarlett Johansson as his wife, Gilda.

In the last week, however, there have been suggestions that the sequel might just be priming itself for something a fair bit freakier. Hollywood industry veteran Jeff Sneider is reporting that the main antagonist this time around could be the Court of Owls, a sinister secret society of Gotham grandees who look at first glance like a murder-bird upgrade on the League of Shadows, but are really something nastier: the city’s masked, devious ruling class, living out of secret rooms and exploiting a property portfolio that probably goes back to the Pilgrims.

PS5, PC, Xbox Series X/S; Ubisoft Singapore/Ubisoft
Ubisoft has removed all the boring parts of pirate life from its fantasy RPG, creating something more focused and fun

Edward Kenway isn’t your dad’s Assassin’s Creed protagonist. Neither sworn to ancient oaths nor given a noble destiny, he’s just a guy who likes coin, dislikes rules, and whose gold-chasing, rule-dodging lifestyle sees him embroiled in an ancient war between Templars and assassins quite by accident. After he’s shipwrecked with a man named Walpole who turns out to be a Templar, Edward assumes Walpole’s identity in the hopes of securing the bounty he mentioned.

Edward wears life lightly. The world around him is violent and chaotic, and those in his vicinity are more obsessed with double-crossings than a Mission:Impossible movie writers’ room. Ed just smiles, undeterred by it all, and gets on with plundering. It’s all just fun and games to him, and he is set on conquering the Caribbean on his own terms. He is a brilliant extension of the player, in that way, and that’s what this remake of the 2013 pirate-themed Assassin’s Creed does so well: the sense of freedom.

Sony’s announcement spells the end of a whole ecosystem built by superfan collectors – and signals a troubling shift in the industry

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Sony’s decision last week to quietly announce the end of physical games production for the PlayStation in 2028 is one of the most perfect PR disasters in recent gaming history – and considering what has been happening with Xbox, that’s saying something.

First, there was the timing. Sony posted the news of its decision on the PlayStation blog, less than a week after admitting that it would be deleting 550 movies from the digital libraries of PlayStation owners due to the end of a licensing deal – thereby perfectly illustrating the dangers of purchasing digital products. (Surprise! You never actually owned them!) The move is in stark contrast with the company’s stance on this very issue back in 2013. When Microsoft was attempting to push Xbox One as a digital-first console with strict controls on the sharing and reselling of its games, Sony brilliantly mocked its rival with a short video on how easy it was to lend physical games to pals on the PS4. Oh dear.

Bush theatre, London
Francesca Amewudah-Rivers is a phenomenal presence in this queer thriller that leaves a little too much unexplained

This strange and alluring two-hander was first performed in this theatre’s smaller studio space two years ago. It is a dark romance between two women, one in a long-term relationship with a man and the other experimenting with women. Both are tormented, in different ways.

Nadi Kemp-Sayfi returns as Ivy while the abundantly talented Francesca Amewudah-Rivers takes the role of Ash. She is taut, sexy and disturbed. The play sits in and around Amewudah-Rivers, such a phenomenal presence that she eclipses everything else.

The Kneebone Cadillac is about a sport in which community is fostered yet collisions are encouraged. Actors, audiences and drivers explain the rush

Lexi Crosbie was five days old when she went to her first ever banger race. “I grew up around the track,” the 14-year-old says. At nine, her racer dad gave her a chance at the Micro F2s, the junior league, and Crosbie has been racing ever since. “You’re so filled with adrenaline,” she says of the motorsport. “It’s the best feeling ever.”

This month, Crosbie went to her local Cornish track, United Downs Raceway (also known as St Day), for a different kind of event. The Kneebone Cadillac, Carl Grose’s raucous play about a banger racer and her family, is set and performed on the track. For Crosbie, it was her first ever theatre show. “I really enjoyed it,” she says. “My whole family did.” Director Kyla Goodey has loved seeing how many racers have come along, when theatre isn’t part of their regular lives. “It’s been a bridging of worlds,” she says. “That’s exactly what we wanted.”

Southwark Playhouse Borough, London
A lesser-known selection from the composer and lyricist’s archive is full of heart and humour, swinging between cabaret blues and pop bangers

How do you measure a year? Love is one answer, according to Jonathan Larson’s Rent, but what about songs? This tribute, which ran off-Broadway last year, reveals the industriousness of the composer and lyricist, who died aged 35 in 1996. But it also highlights the calibre of his wealth of lesser-known material, written for obscure cabarets, cut from his musicals or otherwise unused, these spare parts stored in a Library of Congress archive. A selection of 18 songs make up a pleasingly eclectic revue conceived by Jennifer Ashley Tepper.

Take the opener, Greene Street, written as a 23-year-old newcomer to New York. With propulsive piano, it’s a huge crush of a song, in awe of the city while the sun bursts through on a snowy day. Larson puts a positively bucolic spin on this SoHo address (whose name “don’t mean money, honey!”) as the new arrival, also green by nature, receives a wink from a stranger amid the urban anonymity. There’s the hint of a jingle or theme tune but it’s irresistible, blissfully shared by the cast of five.

Nottingham Playhouse
The camaraderie and eccentricities of some model railway enthusiasts make for an endearing group portrait in William Ivory’s well-gauged comedy

Before the play begins, a tiny LNER InterCity zips in front of us. Our eyes follow it from one side of the stage to the other. Miniatures fascinate, and the train reminds us of the appeal.

It means that when we meet the old boys of the Market Deeping model railway club, celebrating a second victory in Stamford’s regional exhibition, we are sympathetic to their niche hobby. Yes, it may be eccentric to spend years perfecting an OO scale motive power depot, but look at the detail and gasp!

The legendary composer warned theaters could soon meet the same fate as Hollywood’s ‘empty soundstages’

Andrew Lloyd Webber has spoken out about the precarious state of Broadway in the wake of the early closing of his revival Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

“Broadway is more than a street or a collection of buildings. It is an idea – and one of the greatest cultural ideas America has given us,” the composer wrote in a lengthy X thread on Tuesday morning.

Mission: Impossible star to appear in a pre-game show that will also feature Robbie Williams and Jennifer Hudson

A wide array of performers, from actor Tom Cruise to streamer IShowSpeed, will help close out the World Cup, Fifa announced on Tuesday.

Soccer’s governing body released the lineup for the closing ceremony, which will take place 90 minutes before Sunday’s final. The show is meant to “celebrate the 48 teams’ unforgettable journey” through 16 host cities across three countries, Fifa said in a statement.

Pop star, whose parents are Kosovan Albanian, expresses admiration for demonstrations, which are entering their sixth week

Albania’s “flamingo revolution” has won its most prominent supporter yet after the pop star Dua Lipa expressed admiration for the protest movement against a Trump family-backed resort in the Balkan state.

As demonstrations against the €1.6bn (£1.36bn) real estate project entered a sixth week, the London-born singer, who was partially raised in Pristina, home to her Kosovan Albanian émigré parents, described the civic unrest as “inspiring”.

Project a Black Planet: Film, a new season of screenings at the Barbican in London exemplifies how the movement was an act of solidarity, resistance and fierce creativity

Algiers, 1969. What had, for seven years, been the metropolis of a newly independent country became, over the course of 12 days in July, the cosmopolitan centre of an entire continent. That summer, Algeria played host to the first Pan-African Cultural festival (Panaf) and the capital’s streets were transformed into a vista of energising performers, flanked by placards announcing each country’s delegation: Ethiopia, Liberia, Mali.

Picture an Olympics-style opening ceremony, then discard it, for the images captured in William Klein’s documentary of the event, The Pan-African Festival of Algiers, hint at the very dissolving of barriers between spectacle and spectator – an act that brings to life a quote, shown on screen, from Guinea’s first president Sékou Touré: “We must make this revolution with the people … and the songs will come.”

When is it OK to go shirtless? What time can you start drinking on holiday? And can you ask a stranger to apply your sunscreen? Experts explain the behaviour that’s hot this summer – and what’s really, really not

Summer means a loosening of rules and norms. Eating with your fingers is suddenly encouraged, near-nakedness is everywhere and a 6am airport pint is unremarkable. It’s a hot, sticky recipe for social chaos and – if you share my view on showing off ungroomed feet – possibly the end times of human civilisation. Here, then, is everything you need to know about summer etiquette.

They’re cheaper and greener than air conditioning, but which evaporative cooler impressed us most?

• The best fans to keep you cool, tested
• Dyson HushJet Mini Cool fan review

Air coolers should not be confused with air conditioning. An air cooler can lower your room temperature by a couple of degrees, while aircon can lower it by tens of degrees. So it’s important to manage your expectations. But air coolers are much more energy efficient: they use a fraction of the electricity of aircon.

Evaporative air coolers work by pulling warm air through water-soaked pads. The water evaporates, which uses energy, so the process cools the air. So while it’s not fridge-cold like aircon, the air is cooling – like a sea breeze taking the edge off summer heat.

Best air cooler overall:
Swan Nordic air cooler – currently out of stock

Best portable air cooler:
Morphy Richards Flexi Freeze

The Filter’s authority on camping and the outdoors, Sian Lewis, will be answering all your questions on Wednesday 15 July from 1200 BST. Whether it’s about finding the perfect stove for baked beans or the best campsite ever, nothing is too detailed or too silly to ask

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Sundowners in nature, kids – and adults – unplugged from screens, escaping everyday life: camping is one of life’s unparalleled joys. Want to know what to look for in a sleeping mat, the best place to pitch a tent – or what to do when it all goes wrong? Outdoors journalist Sian Lewis has walked hundreds of miles and braved all weathers to test everything from tents to camping chairs to hiking sandals.

Post your questions below in the comments and she will answer as many as she can at 1200 BST on Wednesday 15 July.

A lantern for night strolls, lace-free shoes and a microscope for mini beasts … parents on their top camping tips and must-pack gear, as well as what to leave at home

• The best camping mattresses

I have wholehearted respect for parents who recoil from any notion of family camping. Camping with kids is no picnic. In fact, it sets out from where a good picnic leaves off, venturing from the brevity and civility of a blanket on the grass into the uncertain – and certainly precarious – waters of soggy towels, tangled guyropes, cramped quarters and midnight meltdowns.

And yet a great many of us voyage these waters regardless, ardently asserting (to ourselves as much as others) that camping is good for the soul, for the imagination, and for instilling a foundational appreciation of the great outdoors.

There’s no getting away from it: these are all ultra-processed, but which sponges are the life of the party and which are too sweet for comfort?

• The best (and worst) supermarket dark chocolate

Some of these taste tests – for instance, the oven chips one from last summer – surprise me with their overall quality and minimal processing. But others, such as today’s party cakes, sit firmly in the ultra-processed category, and often make contradictory claims, “handmade” and “carefully selected high-quality ingredients” being just two.

I want my children to enjoy treats without food anxiety, but we also owe it both to ourselves and to them to know what we’re actually eating. Unusually, the price of today’s cakes didn’t reflect processing levels. While more expensive products are often less processed, even the premium cakes included an array of emulsifiers (including mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, polyglycerol esters and sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate), preservatives, stabilisers, synthetic raising agents such as diphosphates, and glucose-fructose syrup, a heavily processed industrial sweetener linked to metabolic concerns. I’ve listed the number of additives in each product, excluding natural colours and flavourings, pectin, citric acid, carbonates and bicarbonate of soda, beeswax and glucose syrup. I also scored the cakes based on their appearance, taste, texture, value, certifications, animal welfare considerations and total sugar content (which varied greatly).

Electric models are selling out fast, so keep cool like the fashion crowd with an old-school concertina hand fan

• How to sleep in a heatwave

You must have noticed that portable fans are everywhere right now: on sweaty commutes, in stuffy meetings, and at shadeless sporting events. As the hot weather continues, neck fans, handheld electronic fans, and fans that spritz water are selling out fast.

But even if you can get your hands on one, they come with drawbacks: electric designs consume energy; they can run out of battery. And most are made from plastic, with concerns over how many poor-quality models will end up in landfill once the summer’s over.

This often underrated but hugely versatile vegetable can be cooked in copious delicious ways. Here are two of them

Courgettes are an early summer delight, when, such is their appeal and versatility, you often can’t move for them in my kitchen. Even so, I am not entirely sure they get the full recognition they deserve in the UK, not least because we grow some marvellous varieties here. I use courgettes in everything from raw salads (very thinly sliced courgettes tossed in salt and lemon) to slow-cooked, crisp-fried (the flowers are especially good stuffed with cheese or meat, then deep-fried) or lightly charred on a barbecue, which brings out a wonderful sweetness; you can even bake them into a deliciously moist cake. Can you show me a more versatile vegetable?

Jerk aubergines, lentil-stuffed courgette, griddled pineapple with maple syrup … Meat-free doesn’t need to mean treat-free when it comes to barbecue season

I’ve recently turned vegan. How do I have a great barbecue?
Nia, by email
Happily, most vegetables benefit from a bit of barbecue action, but the key is not to get too carried away, says Genevieve Taylor, author of How to BBQ: “There’s a real leaning for people to overdo barbecues, but you should approach it just as you would any meal, with one central star and a few sides. After all, there’s no other meal where you’d be expected to eat a chop, a sausage, a kebab and a chicken wing.” Not a meal you’d find Nia devouring, sure, but you get the general idea.

Shaun McAnuff, author of Original Flava: Easy Caribbean, would be inclined kick things off with tostones. “They’re a bit like crisps,” he says. “Boil green plantain, which are more dense and not as sweet as yellow ones, then peel and cut into thick circles.” Smash those flat with the bottom of a mug, then barbecue until nice and crisp and serve with guacamole or salsa. Alternatively, grab some aubergines, Taylor says: “They’re such a sponge for smoky flavours.” Slice lengthways, brush with oil, season and grill until soft. “Spread a filling, such as walnut paté with spices, herbs and pomegranate molasses, over the slices and roll up.” Those would be nice at room temperature, which also helps with getting ahead.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

This colourful platter makes a simple shared meal feel like a special occasion

There’s something festive about bringing a whole roast feta to the table, and even more so when it’s thickly covered in toasted pine nuts. Tenderstem broccoli is a real treat in this dish, and my top tip is to blanch the spears in boiling water before you roast them – it really improves their texture. Crunchy, lemon-dressed radishes and spring onions add freshness, making this a lovely dish for a meze with friends.

A growing supplements market may be trying to capitalise on this claim, but the truth is we still don’t know what a truly healthy gut microbiome really looks like

The idea comes from a 2018 study involving more than 10,000 people in the US, UK and Australia. Participants submitted stool samples and reported what they typically ate. Researchers analysed the microbes in those samples and found that people who consumed more than 30 different plant foods a week tended to have a more diverse gut microbiome than those who ate fewer than 10.

But that doesn’t mean 30 is a magic number. Whether you eat 25 plants a week or 30 is probably less important than some would have you believe.

The Guardian’s Saturday magazine is interested in hearing from couples, partners and former lovers to talk about their sex lives

How often do you have sex? The Guardian is looking for couples to talk honestly – and completely anonymously – about what they get up to in the bedroom for the Saturday magazine’s much-loved This is How We Do It column.

The idea behind the column is to provide a counterpoint to the airbrushed, exaggerated stories about sex we see on TV and in the media. We want to publish un-sensationalised interviews with real couples, so we are particularly keen to hear from you if you have hit a roadblock in your sexual life. How do you navigate intimacy when your partner wants sex more than you do? Or after an affair? Or when you are not feeling spectacular about your body?

We’re looking for couples of all ages and sexualities. We would not publish your names or where you live.

If you’re having trouble using the form click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here.

Rick and Rachel are non-monogamous – but they both know this arrangement may not work forever

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

I’ve tried knowing and not knowing, and I find both difficult. In an ideal world, we’d go looking for sex together

You and your husband need to have a frank discussion and decide whether you want to negotiate the next stage of life together or apart

I’m 55 and, after being a dutiful wife for 30 years, my sex drive declined after a traumatic hysterectomy eight years ago. My husband was patient and kind throughout. I love him dearly, but sex was never really the same afterwards, which I attribute to the surgery.

I’ve now been through menopause and suddenly find my libido returning. However, my husband no longer desires me due to weight gain. He can’t maintain an erection for long, and is very critical of my sexual performance. He’s seen a doctor, but nothing came of it, and he refuses couples counselling.

From Hollywood movies to confessional memoirs, three-person relationships are everywhere. But is it really possible to keep everyone satisfied? Happy trios, bruised couples and rejected lovers tell all

Priscilla can pinpoint the moment she realised that her throuple was falling apart. Her fiancee, Kiara, had started kissing their shared girlfriend, Olivia, in a way that went on for just a little too long. One night, after the three of them had gone out for a romantic dinner in Savannah, Georgia, where they live, Olivia and Kiara started kissing in the front seats of the family car and it seemed as if they were never going to stop. About 10 minutes in, Priscilla tried to reach out and touch her fiancee’s shoulder, but her seat belt was buckled. Unbuckling and leaning forward felt intrusive. And, anyway, Kiara and Olivia seemed to have forgotten all about her. Watching the kiss unfold, squashed into the back with all the baby seats and toys, Priscilla thought about how by rights it was her turn to sit up front. She was always in the back seat. She felt a flicker of something competitive. “I worried, am I desired less than her?” she recalls now. “Will I be replaced?”

In the early days, Priscilla felt giddy with the excitement of being in a throuple. She and Kiara had been together for eight years, and adding a third person to their relationship felt like a way of exploring non‑monogamy without losing one another, because every new romantic experience would be shared. Olivia was an old friend, so Priscilla and Kiara’s children were comfortable with her. When the kids were in bed, they would walk to the beach holding hands as a three, to watch the sunset. At night, they would curl up to sleep together, and form a kind of cuddle chain. Priscilla would cuddle Olivia, and Olivia would cuddle Kiara.

We booked the £1,070-a-week retreat because of the facilities, but when we got there they were a round-trip away

Last month’s tale of a winter break spoiled because easyJet Holidays had neglected to state that the hotel’s heated pool and spa incurred hefty charges was discordant music to another reader’s ears. He writes:

We returned last month from an easyJet Holidays break at a “wellness retreat” with prominently advertised spa facilities, which turned out not to have any spa facilities whatsoever. We had booked a £1,070 week at the Vasia Sea Retreat in Sissi, Crete, because I wanted access to a gym at least twice a day as rehabilitation from a serious knee injury, and my wife was keen for pool and pilates classes.

Snappy performance, long battery life, great keyboard and excellent new haptic touchpad make the best of Windows 11

Microsoft’s Surface laptop for consumers is back, faster and with longer battery life and a hefty price increase because of the high cost of memory and chips.

The Surface Laptop 8 is a straight replacement for the seventh edition from 2024, which was the first of Microsoft’s new generation of ARM-based, Qualcomm-powered PCs designed to better rival Apple’s MacBook Air and other thin and light machines.

Only when Guardian Money contacted the company did it discover the cash was wages owed to its staff

In May, our supplier, Yorkshire Water, made a surprise payment of more than £3,500 into my partner’s bank account.

We assumed that it was an error and we would be told to repay it.

Fraudsters create false articles that appear to be from publishers such as the Guardian to share on social media

The Guardian article looks interesting. It says the billionaire Jim Ratcliffe has stormed out of a BBC interview after presenter Laura Kuenssberg revealed details of his personal financial affairs – and now the episode has been removed from iPlayer.

Among the detail in the piece is that Ratcliffe has been using an online investment platform to make money. The report says although the site has been kept secret, other people have used it too, and they have made a fortune. There is a link to the site where you can trade cryptocurrency, stocks and shares.

Analysis of 12 indicators including asthma, obesity and vaccination finds child health is ‘national embarrassment’

Children in the UK will grow up to be one of the unhealthiest generations in decades, with child health outcomes having declined or stalled completely across all areas, a group of leading paediatricians has said.

Reduced vaccination rates alongside rising hospital admissions for asthma and mental health disorders are all contributing factors to the UK’s record on children’s health, which should be seen as a “national embarrassment”, their analysis has found.

Doing a split may look impressive, but experts caution it should not be done without practice and it may not be for everyone

On Love Island USA’s recent eighth season, contestant Kenzie Annis quickly distinguished herself with her ability to perform the splits, abruptly deploying the maneuver in fits of both delight and rage.

Seeing the splits on TV shows such as Love Island and RuPaul’s Drag Race can make people “want to take on that challenge and to push themselves to new heights”, said Ramoni Overton, a yoga instructor and YouTuber based in Los Angeles.

Ministers consider bringing e-cigarette laws in line with tobacco as data shows 20% of teenagers have tried vaping

Vapes could be sold in plain packaging as part of a range of proposals to stop them being marketed to children.

The UK-wide plans also include limiting device colours to white, black or grey, and keeping vapes out of sight in shops, according to the Department of Health and Social Care.

Not everyone experiences heat the same way, and studies show aggression, violence and road rage increase on hotter days

Recently, my husband and I embarked on what should have been a pleasant spring errand: a stroll to the local farmer’s market. But a passing heatwave had made it unseasonably hot outside. I cut him off on the sidewalk and he snapped at me, so I snapped at him for snapping at me. We spent the rest of the excursion in sweaty, stony silence. When we were almost home, he said, miserably: “I’m sorry! It’s just so hot.”

Our grouchiness was not simply a weakness of spirit. “Heat doesn’t just affect your body,” said Dr Susan Albers, clinical psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic. “It affects your mood too.”

For many watching their team beat Norway at a south London nightclub the look was as important as the game

The Carpet Shop nightclub in Peckham, south London, is ordinarily packed with rowdy crowds at the weekend. But Saturday night’s liveliness was not congregated around the DJ on the dancefloor, the crowd was at the sold-out venue for England’s victorious quarter-final game at the 2026 World Cup, and the young spectators were there for the fashion as much as they were for the football.

Luke Grandon and Mattia Guarnera, both 27, are “massive” football fans, and their love for the game is expressed in their outfits. “I have a massive collection of vintage football shirts,” said Guarnera, wearing a white polo shirt with “LOVE” printed on the back from a limited-edition World Cup-themed collaboration between Lyle & Scott and the British artist Reuben Dangoor.

The discomfort is no reason to give up sun protection, and is not uncommon – not everyone tolerates every formula well

No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. For instance, when you responsibly apply sunscreen to your exposed skin, it sometimes stings.

“Complaints of sunscreen stinging are not uncommon,” says Dr Aditi Senthilnathan, board certified dermatologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “We also hear about sunscreen causing burning or stinging around the eyes after sweating.”

With the singer sporting an array of ties on stage, fans have been customising, repurposing and even creating whole garments from the office neckwear staple

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When Harry Styles kicked off his Together, Together tour in Amsterdam in May, he bounded on to the stage in navy pleated trousers and a blue shirt, topped off with a colourful floral printed tie from Celine.

Four days later, Styles paused mid-set at the same stadium to take in the crowd. “There’s a lot of ties in the audience tonight. I see you queens, I see you,” he said.

Maria Grazia Chiuri returns to city of birth with haute couture inspired by kimono shapes and draping the body

“This is a cultural problem, and a political problem,” said Maria Grazia Chiuri before her first haute couture catwalk show for Fendi.

The problem, as the designer sees it, is Italy’s unwillingness to acknowledge fashion’s role in culture by giving it space in museums. To challenge this, Chiuri has bookended her Rome catwalk event with two fashion exhibitions in the city.

Would walking buddies convince reluctant children that hiking can be fun? A group trip with an Enid Blyton vibe proved a hit with the whole family

“I’m not going to wake her up,” I hiss at my 12-year-old son who’s standing half naked in a dark corridor of a Victorian house. “Please, Mum. She said we could come at any time! I don’t want to get Lyme disease,” he begs.

This is not the kind of drama I was expecting when I signed up to a family walking holiday in Exmoor. A few meltdowns about an extra mile or a blister perhaps, but not a night mission to one of the guides to request a tick removal.

The warm, gentle conditions I was hoping for turned out to be ferociously windy. The anchor couldn’t hold our boat in place. And then my mum got trapped in the cabin …

It started so well. A catamaran full of loved ones floating into the azure, taking pics, feeling glam, anticipating the sun sinking over the yardarm. I’d been reunited with my sister and family, who live in Australia, for the first time in three years, after Covid. Her husband, a fearless Australian giant, had got into sailing and offered to take me and my then 77-year-old mum, along with their three teens, out in the south of France for my sister’s 50th birthday. I knew sailing could get rough – my dad capsized us at the mouth of the River Dart when I was little – but it’s not every day you get such a generous invitation. How could I resist?

It was October. I was manifesting warm, gentle conditions, but instead the wind blew ferociously and stubbornly the wrong way. Before we knew it, we were charging up mountainous waves, then crashing into the void beyond. Our captain calmly steered while I sat below, feeling as if I was in a disaster movie, at which point I realised I hadn’t even located the lifejackets.

Flights were cancelled and we were told we’d be staying in Iceland for the night. But the hotel had no idea we were coming and people started screaming when I fell down, hard, on the ice

A couple of days before I was due to take a trip to New York with my mum in February, the city was hit with the worst blizzard it had seen in years. Unsurprisingly, our flight was cancelled. Our travel agent managed to reschedule the holiday for later in the week – our journey out would now connect in Reykjavík, Iceland. The holiday was rescued … or so we thought.

The flight to Iceland went without a hitch until the final moments, when the pilot informed us that a mini-blizzard was passing over Keflavík international airport and we would have to redirect to a domestic airport 15 minutes away. We still had hope that we could make our connection, but after several hours on the tarmac that hope died.

These cool, cheap bars in old abandoned buildings became popular in the 2000s – and then tourists moved in. I went hunting for the bohemian spirit of the originals

‘Many ruin bars seem to be just tourist traps now,” says artist István, standing outside Instant-Fogas complex, which calls itself Europe’s biggest ruin pub, but looks more like a mammoth nightclub with several dancefloors.

“These bars were a hot topic 20 years ago, but many have become really commercial now,’ says István. “Ruin bars being expensive actually ruins their purpose. I’m a student, I like beers that are under 1,000 forints [about £2.50], and the big commercial ruin bars are typically much more expensive.”

It might sound brutal, but this is exactly the kind of damage plants are built to recover from – and thrive on

The problem
Trailing plants tend to grow long and bare. A pothos or tradescantia that started full and lush can become a few sad vines with all the leaves clustered at the ends, trailing toward the floor with nothing in the middle. The instinct is to leave the plant alone and hope it fills out on its own. It rarely does. Yet the fix – cutting off healthy growth – feels counterintuitive and slightly brutal.

The hack
Pinching out means removing the growing tip of a stem, just after a node. This redirects the plant’s energy, prompting it to activate and produce new shoots. The result, in theory, is a bushier, fuller plant rather than a few straggly vines.

As people yearn for connection, one-day choirs are popping up around the world - and spreading ‘collective effervescence’

We met in a former synagogue, a vast room with hardwood floors where the sound could echo freely. All were strangers, many former choir nerds, united by a love for group singing. Our goal was to learn and perform, in a single day, a classic of our time: a song from the Hannah Montana movie.

The event, near downtown Los Angeles, was a one-day choir hosted by the Gaia Music Collective – a three-hour gathering where more than 100 people rehearsed a choral arrangement of the song and sang it three times, with ourselves as the only audience.

Phil Yates had never cut anyone’s hair before he decided to retrain at the age of 60. Yet inside the dissatisfied executive a ‘rocking barber’ was waiting to emerge

Phil Yates was nervous about telling his dad he wanted to be a barber. “Get a trade! Don’t leave a job unless you’ve got another job lined up!” were his mantras. Therefore, he says: “I was expecting the worst.” But when Yates plucked up the courage to tell him: “I’m kicking marketing down the road. I want to do this,” his dad replied: “That’s fantastic. Life’s so short.”

Yates was 60. Did parental approval really matter? “It almost made me cry,” he says. His father, a fishmonger turned factory worker, had lived on the streets as a child. “It was huge for him to drop the whole thing about being safe and secure and say: ‘Go and do what you really want.’”

Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?

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

From a seventysomething standup comedian to the founder of a highly successful spice business, seven people reveal why it’s never too late to embark on the life of your dreams

Many of us feel stuck in a job we dislike and midlife is a common time to reassess what you are going to do with the rest of your years, especially when finances require us to work into older age. How can you make a change, follow your dreams and finally do what you always wanted? Late bloomers share the secrets to having a stunning second act.

Aiden is an unforgettable young caregiver in Walthamstow, east London, who has been looking after his mum for over half his life. Every few weeks, Aiden and other young carers get a rare night off thanks to tenacious council worker Satvinder, who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough. This film joins them as they reclaim a few hours of their teenage lives back.

Is Mum OK? is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them. There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class.

Covert footage obtained by the Guardian shows how crime networks are using front souvenir shops to hide a booming wildlife trade targeted at a new influx of Chinese tourists

The shop is dark and deserted. Though the door is open, there is clearly no expectation of any customers walking in off the street. Visits are likely by appointment and from a specific clientele. This shop is part of an organised crime network. What is being sold is highly illegal and incredibly unethical.

Anyone wandering in would see large bags of specialist tea, local coffee, trinkets and cigarettes on the shelves. But the photographs of wild animals adorning the walls offer a clue to what is truly for sale here.

UK support group says more women are seeking help for experiences that one mother calls ‘lifelong punishment’

“I never thought I would have to report my child to the police. And I would never have thought it would be for something so unthinkable,” said Lucy*, who was sexually assaulted in her sleep by her son, then in his early 20s, in their family home.

He was convicted and given a community order but Lucy said she felt left to suffer in silence.

Indonesia’s government is grappling with how to manage waste at Bantar Gebang – Jakarta’s largest landfill – which supports the livelihood of thousands of waste pickers

On the outskirts of Jakarta, huge rolling peaks of rubbish stretch across more than 100 hectares (247 acres), towering over nearby villages. Each day a convoy of trucks plough in and dump more garbage into one of Asia’s largest landfills.

Here, thousands of people live on the fringe of the site and make their income picking through the waste and salvaging scraps for resale. The work is dangerous – earlier this year seven people died after one of the massive trash mounds caved in, burying them alive.

Ahead of Andy Burnham taking over from Keir Starmer, we’d like to hear what qualities, values and priorities people want to see in the next prime minister

Andy Burnham is to become the next prime minister after winning the backing of 349 of the party’s MPs to replace Keir Starmer.

In a recent op-ed in The Times, Burnham wrote: “Doing politics differently means levelling with the public, engaging them in decisions and ensuring more social value in return for increased government spending.”

We want to hear from those working or living at sea, including maritime workers, sailors, port staff and family about how the situation is affecting their work

The conflict in the Middle East continues to disrupt shipping across the region, including in the strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s busiest maritime routes.

Donald Trump has once again threatened to take control of the strait of Hormuz, as he announced the reimposition of a naval blockade on Iran and demanded a 20% tariff on all cargoes shipped through the key maritime passage.

How long did you have to wait? Perhaps you are in a queue now. Tell us your experience

The EU has rejected calls to suspend its biometric border checks despite warnings from airports, airlines and ports that the system could lead to long queues and delays during the peak summer holiday season. MPs in the UK have also warned of potential disruption at the Port of Dover as holiday traffic builds.

We would like to speak to people who have been affected by the new system. Tell us about your experience – has the new system worked well or have you experienced delays? How long did you have to wait? What did you do to pass the time? Or maybe you are in a queue now? Tell us your experience.

Prediction markets have grown rapidly in popularity in recent years, particularly in the US. We’d like to hear confidentially from people in the UK who have used them

We’d like to find out more about how people in the UK are using prediction markets and what has attracted them to these platforms.

Prediction markets allow people to buy and sell contracts based on the outcome of future events, such as sporting tournaments, elections and financial markets. They have become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly in the US.

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Robin Bernstein’s debut book Mapalakata takes us to the edge of the South African frontier to tell a story inspired by folk tales and historical artefacts