As a career-spanning documentary hits cinemas and the band eye two nights at Knebworth, they revisit their path from pubs to stadiums – but how did they get through their crisis-filled 1990s?

When I ask Iron Maiden bassist and founder Steve Harris about the fact his band have lasted for more than half a century, he sounds bewildered, as if he’s put something down then forgotten where he’s left it. “It’s gone so quick. You go on tour for a few months and it seems to fly, but so much happens. Our whole career is an extension of that – for 50 years.”

He’s looking back on how he steered one of the most influential – and deeply idiosyncratic – British bands in history. Catapulted to the premier league of 80s metal on the back of galloping, theatrical, multi-platinum LPs including The Number of the Beast, Powerslave and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Iron Maiden not only survived the mid-90s slump that befell many metal bands, but got even more heavy and ambitious.

Some people are put off by myriad investment options. Here is a guide to the key decisions to help you choose

• ‘Savvy Squirrel’ ad campaign looks to push Britons towards investing

The UK government is keen to encourage people to invest. If you are thinking of dipping your toe into the stock market, an Isa is often the best way, as it lets you protect any gains from tax. Here’s how to get started.

Anas Sarwar speaks to the Guardian about why he thinks the polls are wrong and how he hopes to end the SNP’s near 20-year dominance at Holyrood

Anas Sarwar says he is certain he can pull off one of the greatest escape acts of modern British politics. It is 14 days until the Holyrood election, and the polls consistently show Scottish Labour is in a battle simply to come second, never mind win.

Those polls are wrong, Sarwar says, and in two weeks plans to prove it. Claiming to be “more than happy” with his party’s underdog status, the Scottish Labour leader insists the media are too obsessed by polling numbers.

We assembled a group of the continent’s leading thinkers to assess the threats: their warnings are stark, but the remedy is within reach

Caught between Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Donald Trump’s US and Xi Jinping’s China, Europe appears in a state of profound crisis, the narrative about its future often filled with fatalism. There is a paradox, however. Despite rising nationalism, the climate crisis and the economic slowdown, few would take issue with the claim that Europe still has a great deal going for it. Asked to choose where in the world they would want to live, there is a good chance that most Europeans would still pick Europe over other continents.

The news is not relentlessly negative either. While much of the political commentary in recent years has focused on the rise of far-right nationalism across the continent, its most prominent symbol, Hungary’s former autocrat Viktor Orbán, was ousted in a landslide election this month.

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
The glam set design, gleaming brass and Motown moves are knowingly retro, but Dean’s performance is immediate, vulnerable and natural – the work of a singular artist

When the stage’s cream curtains pull back, Olivia Dean and band are already in full flow. Hands reaching out to the audience in welcome, she shimmies behind a silver mic stand in a floor-length candyfloss-pink dress, her band side-stepping on curved, softly carpeted risers. The swinging, sighing soul-pop single Nice to Each Other is bright with optimism for an on-off relationship, while soft-focus camera footage makes a collage out of gleaming trumpets, glamorous backing singers and Dean’s beaming face. With the air of old-fashioned music TV, it is knowingly retro and deeply romantic – everything you’d expect from the 27-year-old singer who is breathing fresh air into British soul.

On this opening night of two sold-out arena shows in Glasgow, ahead of six nights at London’s O2, Dean breezes through two more of her biggest songs as if it’s no big deal. Lady Lady, about moving out and growing up, is bassy and rich, while So Easy (To Fall in Love) is free, flirty and radiant: “This is a song to remind you that you’re fab,” she crows, now dancing at the stage’s footlights.

The places up for grabs in Uefa’s competitions next season are a moveable feast, leaving plenty of intrigue right up to the final day

With the end of the season approaching, it’s time again to try to get your head around the ever more complex rules that determine whether your club may qualify for Europe. But there will definitely be eight English teams playing continental football next season, and maybe more. The bad news is that if you own a multi-club network you’re too late to place your shareholding in a blind trust. Sorry, but I don’t make the rules, just attempt to interpret them.

US president orders navy to ‘shoot and kill’ boats laying mines in Hormuz and claims ‘total control’ over the strait

• Trump claims US has total control over strait of Hormuz after Iran seizes two container ships

• Analysis: Trump may talk of regime infighting, but Iran seems united by strategy born of war

Here’s a snapshot of the latest Middle East news to bring you up to speed.

Donald Trump has ordered the US military to “shoot and kill” small Iranian boats that deploy mines in the strait of Hormuz and claimed that US minesweepers “are clearing the strait right now” amid the standoff over the key waterway. US special forces earlier boarded a stateless oil tanker in the Indian Ocean which the Pentagon claimed was carrying Iranian crude oil, ratcheting up the standoff with Tehran over the strait.

The US president also announced that a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon would be extended by three weeks. Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office alongside the participants in the meeting, said he hoped the two countries’ leaders would meet during the additional three-week cessation of hostilities.

Trump said the US had “hit about 75% of our targets” in Iran and that a deal had not yet been reached because Iran’s leadership was “in turmoil”.

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said there were no “hardliners” or “moderates” in Iran, responding to the Trump claim of internal division in Iran’s leadership. Separately, Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, said Iranian state institutions “continue to act with unity, purpose and discipline”.

The US offered up to $10m for information on the leader of a Tehran-backed Shia militia in Iraq. The US state department’s “rewards for justice” program alleged Hashim Finyan Rahim al-Saraji was the leader of the Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada (KSS) and that it was a terrorist group.

Israel’s killing of a Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, 43, in a strike has been met with international outrage as Lebanon’s prime minister described the attack as a “war crime”. Colleagues called it a sustained attack by Israeli forces and said rescuers attempting to dig her out of the rubble of a building were also targeted and prevented from providing life-saving assistance.

US journalist Shelly Kittleson, who was freed a week after being kidnapped in Baghdad late last month, has taken to social media to thank people for helping secure her release by the Iran-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah. “Thank you all so very, very much,” she said.

Italian sports officials say Italy is not interested in replacing Iran at the upcoming World Cup after a suggestion to that effect by a Trump administration official.

Pope Leo urged the US and Iran to return to talks to end the war and condemned capital punishment, calling for a new “culture of peace” to replace the recourse to violence.

In evidence to MPs, Cabinet Office top civil servant disputes that her department suggested vetting might not be needed

The Foreign Office refused to hand over a summary of Peter Mandelson’s security vetting to the civil servant tasked with compiling documents detailing his appointment as ambassador to the US, she has told a Commons committee.

Cat Little, the lead official in the Cabinet Office, had to instead get the document directly from UK Security Vetting (UKSV) after Olly Robbins, the subsequently-sacked Foreign Office head, refused to provide it.

MPs call for investigation into Essar Energy, owner of Stanlow refinery, which shifted loans from ‘Putin’s piggy bank’ VTB to Mauritius

Days after the first wave of Russian tanks surged over the border into Ukraine in March 2022, dockers at a port in northern England took a stand.

Appalled by Vladimir Putin’s brutality, workers at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire vowed never to unload any Russian oil destined for the nearby Stanlow refinery, a major hub for UK fuel supplies.

US president accuses UK of thinking it can ‘make an easy buck’ from US tech companies, weeks after warning that UK–US trade deal can be changed

Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on the UK if it does not drop its digital services tax on US social media firms.

The digital services tax, introduced in 2020, imposes a 2% levy on the revenues of several major US tech companies.

Recriminations continue over failure to bring in new laws allowing assisted dying for terminally ill people in England and Wales

Amid the failure of an attempt to bring in new laws allowing assisted dying for terminally ill people with less than six months to live, campaigners on both sides of the debate vented their anger and frustration with the opposing side.

Its supporters, including terminally ill people, blamed the failure of the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill, which passed in the House of Commons, on sabotage by a handful of unelected peers.

Duke of Sussex says US must ‘honour obligations’ as it persuaded Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons; US president retorts that Harry doesn’t speak for Britain. What we know on day 1,521

Donald Trump has said the Duke of Sussex “is not speaking for the UK” after Prince Harry told the US to honour its obligations in the Ukrainian conflict. “I think I am speaking for the UK more than Prince Harry … But I appreciate his advice very much,” said Trump, responding to the duke’s lengthy, impassioned speech at the Kyiv Security Forum on Thursday. Harry, an ex-serviceman, did not claim to be speaking for the UK. He said he was “not here as a politician” but as “a soldier who understands service” and a “humanitarian”.

Harry said: “The United States has a singular role in this story. Not only because of its power, but because when Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons, America was part of the assurance that Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders would be respected. This is a moment for American leadership, a moment for America, to show that it can honour its international treaty obligations – not out of charity but out of its own enduring role in global security and strategic stability.”

A Ukrainian MP has told how he flew a drone intercepter from thousands of kilometres away, throwing a spotlight on the effectiveness of Ukraine’s technology. Marian Zablotskiy said that in a “historic experiment … I piloted an FPV interceptor drone first from my office, then from right in front of the state border, and then from somewhere about 2,000km away from the drone itself – from abroad. I consider this breakthrough a decisive factor in finally stopping the Russian offensive.”

Ukrainian drone manufacturer Wild Hornets confirmed Zablotskiy’s involvement to Agence France-Presse and said it wanted the remote control system to “become the primary method of drone control”. Mykhailo Fedorov, the defence minister in Kyiv, said: “Ukraine is the first in the world to systematically scale up remote control of interceptor drones. Today, we have confirmed results – the downing of targets at distances of hundreds and thousands of kilometres.”

Nearly 40% of cancellations could be avoided, researchers say

About one in 10 operations in England are cancelled with less than 24 hours’ notice or postponed, according to research..

A study of elective surgery at 91 English NHS trusts found that 10% of operations were cancelled the day before the planned surgery date; while 9% were postponed when patients had their pre-op appointment.

Green groups say European Commission is ‘chief roadblock’ to its own plans, as report finds poor progress four years on

Harmful compounds in children’s nappies and toxic “forever chemicals” in everyday products are among 14 hazardous substance groups hit by lengthy delays to EU pollution controls, according to report findings described by scientists as “extremely frustrating”.

The European Commission sought to push broad categories of dangerous substances off the market with a “restrictions roadmap” in April 2022 that was hailed at the time as the largest-ever ban of toxic chemicals.

• Four seats are put on sale for $2,299,998.85 each

• Fifa doesn’t set offerings, but some go above $100,000

• Governing body takes 15% from both buyer and seller

Fifa’s resale site has four tickets on sale for the World Cup final for just under $2.3m each.

The $2,299,998.85 seats for the 19 July match at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, are located behind a goal in the lower deck of the arena.

Labour MPs are reportedly urging colleagues to demand Burnham’s return in order to position him as Starmer’s eventual successor

If Keir Starmer is looking for a saviour to keep him in No 10 after the May elections and the scandal of the Mandelson saga, there is an unlikely figure in the north-west who might help him – temporarily.

It has been the week where the prime minister seemed at his most isolated. But Labour MPs told the Guardian they were urging colleagues not to depose Starmer next month, and were instead preparing to demand that Andy Burnham return to parliament in order to succeed him before the next general election.

Washington’s focus on online retailer Coupang has led to accusations that the Trump administration is tying issues of national security to domestic corporate matters

When South Korea’s biggest online retailer revealed last year that a data breach had compromised tens of millions of customer accounts, it appeared to be a corporate crisis. But five months later the issue has grown into a diplomatic storm, threatening to further degrade relations between Seoul and the Trump administration.

Coupang – often described as South Korea’s answer to Amazon – is nominally a Korean company but operates from Seattle, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and is run by Korean-American billionaire Bom Kim. In November last year the company disclosed that a former employee had stolen an internal security key, enabling unauthorised access to data from 33.7 million users.

Retired grocer from Macclesfield is proof that running is not just a young person’s game after only starting his journey at the age of 57

At a time when running has never been more popular with generation Z, one man is proving that it is not just a young person’s game. The oldest athlete in this Sunday’s London Marathon is 88-year-old Harry Newton – whose remarkable running journey only started by chance when he was 57.

Since then Newton, a retired grocer from Macclesfield, has completed 31 marathons, including 21 at London and another by jogging 461 times around his garden during lockdown. And he has a simple message for nervous first timers this weekend. “Don’t try to run too quickly, and keep a steady pace,” he says. “And make sure your bowels are empty.”

Tensions around US negotiations may reflect mistake of assassinating more pragmatic and experienced figures

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has claimed that the infighting between moderates and hardliners in Iran’s leadership is so intense that Iranians have “no idea who their leader is”, but many experts questioned his analysis, saying, given the mass assassinations of senior commanders, the country had shown remarkable institutional cohesion.

Trump’s allegations of “CRAZY” splits in the Iranian leadership – the second outing for this argument in three days – is remarkable since he has previously said either he has little knowledge of the new Iranian leadership or that there has already been regime change.

The chances of that happening? Over 24 trillion to one

I have played the lottery since I was 18. I always felt I was going to win big one day. When my children were born, I started using regular numbers based on their birthdays and birth weights. In June 2018, I was doing a client’s colour at my hair salon in Talgarth in mid-Wales, where I live. While we waited for the colour to take, I got my lottery ticket and popped next door to the shop to check if I had won anything.

The shop was busy. It’s a small town, and as a hairdresser I knew everyone in the queue, so we started chatting away. The woman behind the till scanned my ticket. She said, “I’ll have to give you the ticket back. I can’t pay it.” The person from the Post Office counter said, “I can pay up to £50,000 if he wants to come here.” She replied, “No, it’s more than that.” Everyone in the queue was asking, “What’s he won?”

Six households move to a new street where they battle it out. Plus: it’s time to crown the winner of I’m a Celebrity South Africa. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, ITV1
It’s got a big-name host in Graham Norton, but in the early stages it’s hard to find the unique selling point of this new reality elimination contest. Six real households decamp to a village where they live at close quarters and gradually vote each other out. Everyone participating has clearly watched a lot of similar shows, so there’s much talk of “threats” and “gameplans” as the first family are, for no good reason, sent home. Jack Seale

The sun is out, and the sensible ones among us are already wearing hats and SPF. Not a hat person? Try a slogan cap. They work with almost anything

You’re never too old for a jelly, especially if it has the rather grownup tang of grapefruit and the earthy notes of bay leaf

You’re never too old for jelly, and I think we should all be eating more of it. Unmoulding a jelly and immediately giving it a good wobble is by far the best bit, and makes me giggle every time. Infusing the mixture with fresh bay leaves brings a grownup feel and gentle, earthy notes. While jelly and ice-cream is a classic combination, I love this just with some lightly whipped, unsweetened cream.

As the bodies pile up and he continues to blame everyone but himself, respect for the prime minister is draining steadily away

A good leader never asks their people to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. Hold others to the highest standards, by all means, but only if you have equally high expectations of yourself: otherwise you may command obedience in politics but never respect, and over time even that grudging compliance may come laced with contempt. And so it is, less than two years into power, for Keir Starmer.

Nobody in government emerges well from the story of Peter Mandelson’s journey to Washington, and that includes Olly Robbins, the Foreign Office mandarin sacked for not telling Downing Street that its chosen ambassador had set off fire alarms inside the vetting process. Robbins could arguably have saved himself by kicking this intensely political decision upstairs, albeit to a prime minister famous for not really doing politics: he could have just let Starmer choose between the public humiliation of telling the Americans that the man he wanted to send into their highly classified midst was a potential security risk, or the gamble of sending Mandelson anyway but with added guardrails.

Gaby Hinsliiff is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Thursday 30 April, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform UK – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here

The Cabinet Office permanent secretary’s 100 minutes before the foreign affairs committee will be required viewing

• UK politics live – latest updates

Here we go again. Some of the public may have had enough of the Peter Mandelson scandal by now, and would rather the focus returned to things such as the Iran war and the cost of living crisis. But Westminster has barely started on Mandy. Can’t get enough of him. This one will run and run.

You can almost hear the groans from No 10. By now it has finally dawned on everyone that Mandelson was never going to be a success as the US ambassador even if he hadn’t maintained close links with Jeffrey Epstein and leaked insider information to a bank.

With her four-letter-word riposte to a heckler, the home secretary played the victim and cynically puts the blame for her immigration plans on liberals

If all you know about Shabana Mahmood’s interview with the comedian Matt Forde, which was recorded live at a West End theatre on Monday, is that she said a heckler should “fuck right off”, then it’s worth listening to the heckle itself. Hell, knock yourself out and listen to the whole podcast. The accompanying blurb calls the home secretary “impassioned, thoughtful and hilarious”, which we’ll come back to, except to say there is nothing hilarious about this exchange.

The heckler accused Mahmood of “out-Reforming Reform” and confecting a “theatre of cruelty” with her new immigration policy ideas, before being removed by security.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

On Thursday 30 April join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss the threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform UK – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

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.

If Olly Robbins stood firm the government could have avoided this disastrous episode of bad political judgment that could cost the PM his job

• Richard Dearlove is the former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service

The restricted compartments of the UK’s national security infrastructure are clearly defined and closely controlled. To work across them requires “a developed vetting certificate”. The primary qualification for holding a “DV” is integrity, honesty and transparency in one’s personal and professional life. To lie about or hide potential vulnerabilities is an immediate disqualification. Staff who do not meet the DV requirements for whatever reason are barred from positions that demand DV clearance. There are no grey areas or soft edges.

The role of British ambassador in Washington is one of those posts. It sits across a number of highly classified compartments. It is no ordinary diplomatic job. The extensive security acreage of the special relationship includes, for example, the UK’s nuclear deterrent, the intelligence relationship, the UK-US alliance which ties together the National Security Agency and GCHQ by treaty, and other domains of great sensitivity. The ambassador has access to these even though their need to become involved in them in normal times is limited. The British staff that comes under the ambassador’s authority is extensive and stretches beyond those working in the embassy. The ambassador’s access to the US administration is also usually highly privileged, such is the nature of the special relationship.

Richard Dearlove is the former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service

Albert Manifold and his board refused to put a request from investor group on annual meeting agenda – leading to an investor revolt

BP has fresh faces in the boardroom and a rigged strategy: it’s pivoting back to oil and gas and away from its low-carbon assets in an attempt to improve a weak share price. One can agree or disagree with the approach. But it was a silly act of overreach for a newish chair to try to stifle debate on such matters.

That, in effect, was what Albert Manifold did when he excluded a resolution for Thursday’s annual meeting from Follow This, a Dutch investor group. The proposal itself cannot be described as explosive. It was pitched in investor-friendly terms and would merely have obliged BP to describe how it would protect shareholder value if demand for oil and gas falls. Nor is Follow This some two-bob outfit within the ranks of climate groups. It was claiming support from investors with $1tn under management.

Spain’s PM, Pedro Sánchez, hosted the inaugural meeting of the Global Progressive Mobilisation. Keir Starmer and other social democrats were notable by their absence

Can progressives push back the rising tide of authoritarianism? Thousands of people gathered in Barcelona this weekend in search of an answer. The occasion was the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilisation – an ambitious initiative backed by the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez – which drew an impressive cast: Brazil’s Lula, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, alongside many activists and civil society organisations. There was no shortage of targets in the discussion panels and speeches: Donald Trump, fascism, war, corporate power and Israel’s genocide.

What was striking, though, was who wasn’t there. Europe’s leaders were largely absent. That was inevitable, given that Spain stands alone as the only major European country governed by a meaningfully progressive administration. Keir Starmer’s failure to attend – even if his deputy, David Lammy, turned up – was hardly surprising. Indeed, the political distance between Starmer and a leader such as Sánchez is striking. Once little known beyond his own country, the Spanish PM’s outspoken opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and his unequivocal condemnation of the Iran war have won him respect among European publics and governments across the global south alike.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

From over-serious spoken word to meaningless steel skeletons and bleak military aesthetics, the 2026 shortlist is more notable for what’s missing. It can’t help but feel insular and elitist

What do you want from the Turner prize in 2026? Are you after wild, shocking, disturbing, era-defining cultural moments? Please, it’s not the 1990s. How about hard-edged, ultra-conceptual, high-minded aesthetic experimentation? Come on, we haven’t had that for decades. Maybe you expect some culture-war-mongering, super-identitarian, polemically explosive political invective? A bit 2022, I reckon.

No, the 2026 Turner prize is something else, something way more appropriate for the age: a bit timid, a bit fearful, a bit safe.

Tech can scale cyber-attacks and defences alike, raising questions about private power, public risk and the future of a shared internet

Anthropic announced its latest AI model, Claude Mythos, this month but said it would not be released publicly, because it turns computers into crime scenes. The company claimed that it could find previously unknown “zero-day” flaws, exploit them and, in principle, link these weaknesses in order to take over major operating systems and web browsers. Mythos did so autonomously, writing code and obtaining privileges. The implications are significant. It’s like a burglar being able to target any building, get inside, unlock every door and empty every safe.

The Silicon Valley company has so far named 40 organisations as partners under Project Glasswing to help mount a defence – asking them to “patch” vulnerabilities before hackers get a chance to exploit them. All are American, sitting at the heart of the US-led digital system. Anthropic shared Mythos with only Britain outside the US, allowing the AI Security Institute to test frontier models. After seeing it up close, British ministers warned: AI is about to make cyber-attacks much easier and faster, and most businesses are not ready. Banks in Europe are likely to test it next.

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.

The Tories’ flagship scheme has aided higher earners most. The latest analysis of its flaws should lead to a rethink

The results are in. The biggest winners from the Conservatives’ help to buy scheme were high-earners who were already likely to buy a house. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) examined who benefited from the policy, and concluded that the top 10% of earners received the largest cash benefit. Rather than helping people to buy, it more likely helped the already fortunate to accumulate wealth quicker (by helping them buy earlier, or more expensive properties). Of course, this distorted the market: pushing prices up in some areas, and largely increasing competition rather than supply.

That its flagship housing policy accelerated housing and wealth inequalities during a time when the government insisted deep cuts to public finances were needed is not just shocking – it underlines how deep the Tory project of redistribution went. In the 12 years to 2022-23, net spending by councils on housing, per person, was cut by 35%, while spending on planning and development was cut by a third – but clearly there was some cash to go around.

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

Readers respond to Alan Milburn’s finding that exam-focused schools are failing to prepare pupils for the real world

Alan Milburn is right to warn that an “exam-obsessed” school system is failing to prepare young people for adult life (‘Exam-obsessed’ schools leave pupils unready for work, Alan Milburn says, 20 April). The pendulum has swung too far from personal development towards a narrow fixation on measurable attainment. A broad educational purpose has been reduced to the accumulation of grades. This is not a failure of schools, but the product of an accountability system that overvalues what is easily measured. Attainment data is prioritised, while resilience, communication, collaboration and character are sidelined.

The result is a generation leaving education well qualified on paper but less able to apply those qualifications beyond school. This reflects decades of policymaking that has undervalued personal development, including the steady erosion of arts subjects that foster creativity and confidence. Young people have far more to offer than their exam certificates; policymakers’ fixation with the easily measurable is constraining schools from developing the interpersonal skills that matter most in an increasingly complex world.
Pete Crockett
Royal Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire

John Podmore calls for consistent leadership, clear accountability and purposeful regimes, while Enver Solomon says drugs flourish in conditions shaped by staff shortages and a lack of meaningful activity

Your leader on drugs in prisons (16 April) is right about the scale of the crisis, but wrong to suggest the chief inspector has only recently found his voice. Charlie Taylor has been consistent throughout: the prison system is failing by almost every meaningful measure.

This is not just about money or overcrowding. It is about leadership, culture and accountability. A system under pressure can still be well led; too often ours is not. The churn of secretaries of state has compounded this, while within the service “lacklustre” performance is too often absorbed rather than challenged – and, in some cases, still rewarded.

We should demand more public toilet facilities – and be sympathetic when we see someone of any gender or age ‘doing a Mandelson’, writes Doug Maughan

Let me reassure Melanie Jones (Letters, 21 April) that my sympathy for Peter Mandelson’s plight, when he was caught short late one evening, would extend to women in the same circumstance. If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. The serious side to this is that there are people who rarely venture from home owing to bladder problems. So, instead of criticising or sniggering, perhaps we should demand that basic toilet facilities are provided on more of our streets. And we should avoid having a fit of the vapours if, on rare occasions, we see someone (of any gender or age) going to the edge of the pavement and “doing a Mandelson” into a drain.
Doug Maughan
Dunblane, Stirling

• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

Responding to an article about a new staging of the controversial opera, Tony Palmer recalls an opening night that brought together Finland’s chief rabbi and a Palestinian official. Plus, letters by Ron Kirchem and Heather Parry

Your article on the current production of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer in Florence says the opera “has sparked accusations of antisemitism whenever and wherever it has been performed”, and refers to protests against previous productions (‘They said: You’re out of your mind’: Luca Guadagnino on directing controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer, 19 April).

I directed the 2001 production at Finnish National Opera, which was a huge success, playing to capacity houses over several weeks. No protests were anticipated and none happened. Indeed, on the opening night, 3 February 2001, the chief rabbi of Finland sat next to the representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (which had an office in Helsinki), together with the recent president of Finland and later winner of the Nobel peace prize, Martti Ahtisaari.

Spurs face must-win game at Wolves, Arsenal fight to keep title hopes alive and Chelsea step into a post-Rosenior world

Maybe it is a case of fourth time lucky for Nottingham Forest. Certainly Vítor Pereira – manager No 4 in the most chaotic of seasons – is doing something right. The Europa League semi-finalists are unbeaten in their last five Premier League games and will arrive at the Stadium of Light knowing victory would move them within touching distance of safety. Their visit should provide an interesting tactical challenge for Sunderland. Régis Le Bris’ side often excel on the counterattack but Forest are likely to sit deep and invite their hosts to unpick their packed defence while hoping to hurt them on the break. Le Bris will surely need Nordi Mukiele to advance with typical verve from right-back, while, in midfield, Noah Sadiki and Enzo Le Fée will be required to demonstrate precisely why they are being watched by several leading clubs. This Sunderland team often plays with real and refreshing personality. Can Forest subdue it? Louise Taylor

Sunderland v Nottingham Forest, Premier League, Friday 8pm (all times BST)

Fulham v Aston Villa, Premier League, Saturday 12.30pm

West Ham v Everton, Premier League, Saturday 3pm

Wolves v Tottenham, Premier League, Saturday 3pm

• Positive talks at City over the former Chelsea manager

• Guardiola called him ‘one of the best in the world’

Enzo Maresca is the leading candidate to take over at Manchester City as they prepare for the growing possibility of Pep Guardiola leaving at the end of the season.

Maresca has been out of work since departing Chelsea in January and it is understood there have been positive talks over him replacing his old mentor this summer. Guardiola has a year on his deal but City know they must be ready for the 55-year-old deciding this is the time to leave.

• Growth of digital platforms reflected in audience fall

• Promise of ‘exciting new project’ with partner YouTube

The BBC will take Football Focus off air this summer, bringing to an end a 52-year stint as the unofficial kick-off to the sporting weekend.

The national broadcaster said it had given “extensive consideration” to the decision to scrap the Saturday lunchtime programme, but the news will hardly come as a surprise as the changing nature of fans’ media consumption has left the venerable televison show quietly forgotten in the age of clips and livestreams.

• Pick-by-pick: all the selections from the first round

• Two quarterbacks go in Thursday’s first round

The story of the first round of the 2026 NFL draft surrounded a quarterback but it wasn’t No 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza.

As expected, the Las Vegas Raiders selected Mendoza with the first pick on Thursday after he led Indiana to the national title last season. But the shock of the night came when the Los Angeles Rams picked another quarterback, Alabama’s Ty Simpson, at No 13. The Rams current starting quarterback, Matthew Stafford, was named NFL MVP last season and Simpson was projected to be a second-round pick by many analysts. However, Stafford turned 38 in February and the Rams are starting to plan for life without him, although head coach Sean McVay insisted the veteran will remain the starter for the time being. “This is Matthew’s team,” said McVay.

As team look to salvage season, ‘crazy decision’ to take engine building in-house looks set to pay off and steer them back to the front of the grid

Driven hard, driven fast is very much the norm in Formula One, on and off track, but even by the sport’s own standards the development of Red Bull’s in-house engine project has been exceptional. As is what it has delivered.

Walking through the gleaming corridors of the team’s bespoke engine manufacturing department at their Milton Keynes headquarters, it is all but impossible to conceive that only four years ago the area where the buildings stand was just empty space peppered with rubble.

• Iranian’s 10-3 win sets up match against world No 1 Trump

• Former champion Neil Robertson beats Pang Janxu 10-6

Hossein Vafaei has claimed the Crucible must be respected and called it snooker’s answer to Wimbledon two years on from his scathing criticism of the world championship venue.

In 2024 the Iranian described the Crucible as “smelly” and compared the practice facilities to “like playing in a garage”. But after last month’s announcement that snooker’s showpiece will remain in Sheffield until at least 2045, Vafaei highlighted the importance of the Crucible to the sport.

• Firm insists it works only with licensed operators

• Sportradar has deals with Fifa, Uefa, MLB and NBA

The betting and data company Sportradar has relationships with hundreds of illegal gambling operators including several that appear to operate in Iran and Russian-occupied Crimea, a new report alleges.

A study compiled by the financial analysts Callisto Research claims to have identified more than 270 unlicensed betting companies offering a variety of services including sports betting, virtual gaming and crypto casinos that purport to be products of Sportradar, whose branding and tools are visible on many of their websites. Callisto Research is an activist research firm that has disclosed short selling Sportradar stock after releasing its report.

• Georgia players celebrated championship at White House

• President shakes hands of men, not women in video

• Former tennis star Navratilova leads criticism

A White House photo celebrating a champion women’s sports team has drawn backlash due to the positioning of Donald Trump and a group of men, who overshadowed the female athletes by lining up in front of them.

The University of Georgia women’s tennis team was one of several collegiate teams to visit the White House on Tuesday to mark a recent NCAA championship win. In a photo shared by press aide Margo Martin, Donald Trump and five Georgia staffers and coaches took up the front row of a stage setup, with 11 women standing in the background on a riser.

Technology minister tells Commons ‘de-identified’ information from UK Biobank advertised for sale on Alibaba

The confidential health records of half a million British volunteers have been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba, the UK government has confirmed.

The “de-identified” data, belonging to participants in the UK Biobank project, was found for sale on three separate listings last week. Ian Murray, the technology minister, told the Commons on Thursday that, after working with the Chinese government and Alibaba, the records had now been removed. It is not believed any sales were made.

Exclusive: Officials warn department will also lose access to database of 26,000 verified incidents due to cuts

The Foreign Office unit tracking potential breaches of international law by Israel in Gaza and more recently Lebanon has been closed because of cuts within the department, the Guardian can reveal.

The decision to shut the international humanitarian law cell follows a review by Olly Robbins, the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office dismissed last week by the prime minister over the Peter Mandelson scandal.

Seven-day-old Poppy Hope Lomas died after complications during home birth encouraged by midwives at Barnet hospital

A mother who lost her baby a week after an “unsafe” home birth that went against medical advice was failed by the NHS, an inquest has found.

Poppy Hope Lomas was seven days old when she died at University College hospital in London on 26 October 2022 after complications during a home birth that, according to her mother, was encouraged by midwives at Barnet hospital.

Hope Not Hate campaign identifies election hopefuls calling for a ‘white Britain’ and complaining of ‘kowtowing to the black community’

A Reform UK candidate who called for a “white Britain” and said Keir Starmer should be shot is among a number of contenders fuelling doubts about the party’s claim to have tightened up its vetting.

The past comments of Linda McFarlane and other political hopefuls have been unearthed ahead of the 7 May elections, including one who complained about “constant kowtowing to the black community” and others who endorsed the far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

The woman, who was visiting the Henbury meteorite crater near Alice Springs, was left feeling shaken by the ordeal

What started as a routine trip to the bathroom ended in horror after a long-drop toilet collapsed in the Northern Territory, stranding a tourist waist-deep in excrement for several hours before she was rescued by a tradesman.

The woman, who was visiting the Henbury meteorite crater about 120km south of Alice Springs with her partner and two children from Canberra, entered the long-drop toilet on Sunday afternoon and didn’t emerge for three hours.

In this week’s newsletter: Experts are predicting a stronger version of the weather pattern this year, which could supercharge extreme events and see temperature rises breach 1.5C

• Don’t get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Scientists and officials are keeping a close eye on conditions brewing in the Pacific Ocean that could spike temperatures and smash global heat records in the year ahead.

It’s still too early to get a definitive picture, but there are signs that a so-called super El Niño could develop this year, supercharging extreme weather events around the world. Some forecasts are suggesting it could become one of the strongest ever recorded.

Stern warning: one man’s mission to clear the rotting boats poisoning Cornwall’s creeks

On the trail with the hunters who believe shooting big game can save Africa’s wildlife

Who’d have thought a fossil-fuel shill like Trump would be the one to spark a green revolution? | George Monbiot

Are we heading for ‘super El Niño’ – and what could we expect?

What is supercharging global heat? – video explainer

Chance of El Niño forming in Pacific Ocean may push global temperatures to record highs in 2027

Study of fossilised beaks shows patterns of wear and suggests some ancient species were up to 19 metres long

Giant “kraken-like” octopuses that used powerful beaks to crunch through bones of prey were among the most formidable predators of the Cretaceous oceans, according to research.

Analysis of dozens of newly identified fossils reveals that some ancient octopus species reached up to 19 metres in length, meaning they would have rivalled – and possibly even preyed upon – apex predators such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs.

More than 50% of voters at first AGM under new leadership oppose plans to scrap climate reporting

BP’s board has suffered a triple climate rebellion in its first shareholder meeting since appointing new leadership to steer the embattled oil company.

More than 50% of shareholders voting at the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) came out against its plans to scrap its existing climate reporting, and its resolution to replace in-person annual shareholder meetings – a lightning rod for climate protest in recent years – with online-only events.

Climate experts and advocates warn House and Senate bills will protect polluters at the cost of the climate

Republican lawmakers are attempting to shield big oil from having to pay for its contributions to the climate crisis, alarming environmental advocates.

New House and Senate bills, led by Harriet Hageman, a Wyoming representative, and Ted Cruz, a Texas senator, respectively, would give oil and gas companies broad legal immunity from policies and lawsuits aimed at holding the industry accountable for damages caused by its emissions.

Brand, who will be tried in October over allegations of rape and sexual assault, tells podcast he slept with 16-year-old when he was 30

Russell Brand said he had “exploitative” consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl at the height of his fame.

The comedian, actor and podcaster, 50, will be tried in the autumn over allegations of rape and sexual assault made against him by six women. Brand denies all the charges, which date from 1999 to 2009. Speaking about his past actions in an appearance on the YouTube show of the US journalist Megyn Kelly, Brand described himself “selfish” and an “exploiter of women”.

Woman raped by two men while a third filmed ordeal after she became separated from friends on night out

Three men have been found guilty of repeatedly raping a woman on Brighton beach in a “cynical, predatory and callous” attack after she became separated from her friends on a night out.

The woman was targeted by the men as she was incapacitated in the early hours of 4 October last year, the trial at Hove crown court was told.

Amid rising antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry, community and faith leaders stress the need for unity

Maurice Ostro, founder patron of the Faiths Forum for London, has been engaged in interfaith work for decades. For much of that time, he said, he was teased by good-natured people who insisted there was little need for it in the UK.

“People used to laugh at me for doing this work,” he said, but now, amid record-breaking incidents of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred, the jokes have stopped.

Force says it is ‘confident there was no offence’ and condemns ‘shameful’ behaviour by protesters

The investigation into reports of a rape outside a church in Epsom that led to widespread public disorder will close as police are “confident there was no offence”.

Surrey police received a report on Saturday 11 April that a woman had been raped near a church in the early hours of the morning after leaving Labyrinth nightclub in Epsom.

Foreign ministry says remarks of conservative podcast host Michael Savage that were shared by US president were ‘obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste’

India on Thursday criticised as inappropriate a post by Donald Trump in which he shared comments that called the South Asian country a “hellhole”.

The inflammatory post on Truth Social comes ahead of a planned visit next month to India by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who is seeking to ease recent tensions between the normally friendly powers.

Police allegedly found images on iCloud account of singer accused of killing 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez

A Los Angeles prosecutor said that the singer D4vd, who was charged this week in the killing of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, was in possession of a “significant amount of child pornography”.

Police allegedly found the images on the iCloud account of the 21-year-old singer, whose legal name is David Anthony Burke.

Forecasting service raises alarm over data from Paris airport used to settle Polymarket wagers on temperature

French police are investigating alleged tampering with national weather forecasting service equipment after a series of unusual temperature readings coincided with suspicious winning bets made on Polymarket.

Data from a Météo-France weather station at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport was used to settle bets between online gamblers on what the temperature would be in Paris for March and the first weeks of April.

Committee to Protect Journalists says Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was found innocent after 52 days in detention

• Middle East crisis – live updates

A Kuwaiti-American journalist, who had been detained in Kuwait, has been acquitted, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, who has previously worked for PBS, HuffPost, the New York Times, the BBC and Al Jazeera, was arrested on 3 March during a brief visit to Kuwait.

Meta said it would cut 10% of it employees while Microsoft will offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of workers

Meta and Microsoft are trimming their workforces by thousands as they make heavy investments in AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting their companies’ productivity needs.

Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut some 10% of its personnel – just under 8,000 employees– to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago. The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles. The same day, Microsoft announced to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its American workforce of roughly 125,000.

Consumer confidence hit its lowest level since October 2023 this month, with surveys showing the cost pressures companies are facing

Confidence in the UK economy has fallen sharply amid the mounting economic fallout from the Iran war, surveys show, as businesses prepare to raise their prices and consumers brace for a fresh cost of living shock.

Highlighting the knock-on effect of the Middle East crisis in Britain, several closely watched surveys of business activity and consumer confidence blamed the US-Israeli war on Iran for a marked deterioration in the outlook in April.

Jim Taiclet spoke in earnings call as company expands contracts with the US government amid the Iran war

Lockheed Martin’s CEO has called the Trump administration a “golden opportunity” for the company as it expands its contracting work for the federal government amid the conflict in the Middle East.

In an earnings call on Thursday covering the first quarter of 2026, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet told investors that the company is well positioned “based on more available resources for us”.

HMRC is contacting 21-year-olds as part of a new awareness drive around lost child trust funds, with an average balance of £2,200

Rather than demanding money, HMRC is giving it away for once with a new campaign to reunite thousands of young Britons with forgotten savings accounts typically containing £2,200.

HM Revenue and Customs is contacting 21-year-olds as part of a new awareness drive around lost child trust funds (CTF) – the tax-free savings accounts set up for children born between September 2002 and January 2011.

The former Casualty actor wrote Driftwood – a family drama set against the backdrop of Trinidadian independence – as a private act after reconnecting with her roots. It was like solving a crossword, she says

More than two decades ago, the actor Martina Laird took a trip back to her past. As part of the ensemble on the TV drama Casualty, in which she played paramedic Comfort Jones, she was a household face with a rewarding job, yet she felt stuck in her life. “Things weren’t developing,” she remembers. “I went: ‘OK, there’s stuff to go and face in the past.’”

She travelled to St Kitts, where she was born, to look for the Black Caribbean mother from whom she had been separated at the age of three, when her white British father took her to live with his family in Trinidad. “It was a relatively privileged upbringing but there’s always questions. So I went to St Kitts and I met the family that I had not known was there. I thought that I could keep myself shielded and not let people in but that was not the case. It all had to just crack open. Afterwards, the world seemed to me beautifully upside down. Everything I knew to be feared was loved and everything that was down was up.”

Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac decided to wear earbuds so they could listen to music while acting in Beef – resulting in massive VFX costs. But they’re the tip of the iceberg when it comes to wild onset choices…

Come awards season, you probably wouldn’t think that the second season of Netflix’s Beef would be a contender for many visual-effects gongs. After all, while it is tight, tense and sublimely acted, it is ultimately a small ensemble piece grounded in some form of reality.

But you might be wrong, since it has emerged that VFX artists had to painstakingly paint out earbuds worn by Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan throughout the shoot. On a recent podcast appearance, the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, told Isaac and Mulligan that digitally erasing the earwigs, as they are known, “cost a fortune”.

Matthew Rhys stars in a genuinely creepy comedy horror from the maker of Parks & Rec. Plus, the woman who turned informant when her fiancé confessed that he’d killed a man

The four-part docuseries Hulk Hogan: Real American shows the almighty rise and bleak fall of a one-time wrestling hero who became closer friends with Donald Trump

It’s an interesting move that Netflix has taken recently, buying the rights to WWE programming while simultaneously commissioning documentaries about how fundamentally flawed its stars are. Nevertheless, after the success of its Vince McMahon series, it was only a matter of time before it made a series about wrestling’s biggest and most complicated star. And now it is here, in the form of Hulk Hogan: Real American.

Few wrestlers have risen quite as high or fallen quite as low as Hogan, born Terry Bollea. For a considerable stretch of time, Hogan was the WWE; a bundle of imminently marketable tricks and quirks that gave him the nod over all the other grunting men in pants who made up the sport.

Boozing, grumpy, brilliant TV private eyes never really went away, but now they’re sleuthing with renewed vigour. Why is the noir detective back with a vengeance – and is it a bad omen?

Lace up your gumshoes! Hard-boiled detectives are back on the scene, fedoras pulled low, cigarettes sparked up. Nicolas Cage is leading the charge in Prime Video’s Spider-Noir, a shadowy spin on Spider-Man that drops in May – available to stream in black-and-white for the diehards. It promises all the hard-edged hallmarks of a good film noir: fast-paced, slangy dialogue, femme fatales, and a heavy-drinking detective at its centre – albeit one with web shooters rather than a snub-nose revolver.

He’s not the only PI in the frame this year. Apple TV is adapting Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir series into a series starring Colin Firth, while a new NBC pilot promises Jake Johnson as a “cynical and heartbroken” sleuth. And Brad Bird’s animated noir, Ray Gunn, is finally hitting Netflix after almost 30 years in development.

Walkie-talkies, teen romance, hideous monsters … this animated series has everything that made the original series so lovable. It might go nowhere, but that’s not such a bad thing

Stranger Things takes us back to simpler times. The original Netflix series plonked us in a fantasy past where kids in small American towns rode bikes, chewed gum, listened to cassettes and played Dungeons and Dragons in their friend’s basement; or, if you weren’t American, it reminded you of movies you’d seen where that was the vibe. Either way, it was access to an era before the internet, 9/11, the banking crash, the pandemic and Trump, when life seemed easier.

The cartoon spin-off Tales from ’85 does something similar for Stranger Things itself. It rewinds to a happy, straightforward time, namely between seasons two and three. In that moment, the world of Hawkins, Indiana had been established, but we were yet to endure the show’s bumpy late period, when it got long and boring, then supersized itself and became breathtakingly spectacular, then lost control of the monster it had created and became both spectacular and boring at the same time.

Bahari/Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra/Rouvali
(Alpha)
In this all-Sibelilus disc, violinist Ava Bahari’s account of the Violin Concerto has heft and exuberance, while Rouvali’s dramatic nous suits the drama of the Four Legends of Lemminkäinen

Santtu-Matias Rouvali continues his Gothenburg SO Sibelius survey with this latest instalment pairing a bracing account of the Violin Concerto by Swedish violinist Ava Bahari with the proto-symphonic Lemminkäinen Suite.

Bahari is an enthralling storyteller, investing every phrase with musical intention. The opening Allegro moderato is a silvery toned tour de force supported by Rouvali and the Gothenburgers’ gossamer textures, yet there is plenty of heft and a suitable darkness to the collective sound when required. The slow movement is a lyrical oasis before conductor and soloist kick up their heels in a chuckling account of the exuberant finale.

With their sublime confection of heartbreak and dancefloor power, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have never sounded like anyone else. Thirty years since Walking Wounded, here’s the duo’s very best

Releasing a version of the Cole Porter standard – previously recorded by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald – as a debut single should have been an act of hubris. But Everything But the Girl’s (EBTG) version is fantastic, dolefully understated, effectively relocating the song to a grim bedsit in early 80s Britain.

Royal Festival Hall, London
Suzi Quatro, Mr Lordi and Alison Mosshart joined the Philharmonia in a setlist spanning Wagner and Metallica – with conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali flexing his rock-drummer skills

‘You’re in for a very loud evening,” warned Mark Ball, the Southbank Centre’s artistic director, to whoops of audience approval. True by classical music standards, but I doubt these were decibel levels to write home about for the rock and heavy metal regulars. And yes, this latest programme in Multitudes – the centre’s annual “orchestra-powered” multi-arts extravaganza – attracted a crowd in which band T-shirts, black lipstick and leather mingled with office wear, fleeces and everything in between.

The Philharmonia had swapped white tie and tails for further smatterings of leather jackets and band merch. Conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali reappeared after the interval wearing industrial quantities of eyeliner. Among other things, this concert was a reminder of just how spectacular a big orchestra can be. As I heard someone marvel after the first half: “You think, ‘where’s that sound coming from, then?’”

(Mercury)
All but repeating the formula of his breakout album, Kahan seems torn between whether success is sustainable or even repeatable on songs defiantly rooted in small-town life

Last week, Netflix released a feature-length documentary about Noah Kahan called Out of Body. Over its 90 minutes, we learn that the 29-year-old Stick Season singer-songwriter is a worrier – about his weight, his career, his parents – and prefers his home state of Vermont to his new home in Nashville. He is self-deprecating, likable and perhaps not someone you can make a 90-minute documentary about at this stage of their career without recourse to padding.

That someone has tried says a lot about Kahan’s vertiginous rise over the last three years, a firm rebuttal to the idea that the privations of lockdown had changed the face of pop: that listeners were now after glitzy escapism rather than the dressed-down, earnest introspection of the post-Ed Sheeran troubadours this newspaper dubbed “the ordinary boys”. In fact, a new wave of dressed-down introspection was about to become a thing: Myles Smith is playing arenas, Alex Warren’s single Ordinary spent 13 weeks at No 1; Teddy Swims’ I’ve Tried Everything Except Therapy spent more than two years in the UK album chart. And the biggest thing of all is Kahan, who used to introduce himself on stage as “the Jewish Ed Sheeran”, has a thing for the stomp-clap rhythms of Mumford & Sons and stirs a little heartland rock – Springsteen via Sam Fender – into his sound. He was catapulted to success by Stick Season in 2022: a sweet, sad shiver of autumnal wistfulness written from the perspective of someone left behind in their home town when their friends and ex-girlfriend head off to university. It sold 10m copies, the first of eight huge hits from an album of the same name.

A young woman’s dissociation from reality and her road to recovery are vividly rendered in this striking novel

Meet Ada, the anguished young narrator of 26-year-old Albertine Clarke’s radically strange and engrossing debut novel. Adrift in London, Ada occupies herself by swimming in her apartment’s basement pool and generally hiding from the world until she finds herself on the verge of a tumultuous mental collapse. If you’re allergic to the kind of novel in which characters exchange lines such as “I’m not real”, “Neither am I”, then it’s a case of diminishing returns. Otherwise, the book bears rich rewards.

The title refers to Ada’s father, an IT technician who is kicked out by Ada’s mother when he becomes obsessed with the gym – and much of the book explores how we create ourselves and others. Ada grows up surrounded by the marshy countryside near Norwich and early on experiences episodes of dissociation and ontological insecurity, including auditory and visual hallucinations. She imagines a voice on the radio saying her parents are getting divorced. The voice is “like a door swung open inside her head. Through it she could see a black tunnel, like a mine shaft, stretching down inside her.”

Thirteen years after her celebrated debut, the author returns with a bizarre, evocative work that merges science and the surreal

Romy Ash’s debut novel, Floundering, has sat on my bookshelf since the Sydney Morning Herald, where I worked as literary editor, named her as one of the best young Australian novelists in 2013 – the year she was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin literary award among others.

The Australian author Cate Kennedy wrote of the neglected young brothers in Floundering: “These boys are so real you will lie awake worrying about them” – words so true that I still feel anxious for them.

Dual timelines reveal the real reason a mother was forced to leave her daughter in the 80s, in this Nero prize-winning novel inspired by real-life events

The debut novel by Claire Lynch, which won the Nero Gold prize for fiction last month, unfolds across two timelines as it tells of family secrets and a bitter divorce. The first is set in 2022, when Heron, an older man, gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. He seems to be coping well until he climbs into a freezer at his local supermarket and has to be coaxed out by staff. Heron likes his routine and prefers to keep to himself. But he is also a practical man and so he enlists his only daughter, Maggie, to help him go through his house and sort out any paperwork.

Maggie is close to her dad who raised her alone after her mother, Dawn, deserted the family – or so Maggie has been told. But while sifting through Heron’s papers, she learns the real reason for her mother’s estrangement. The second timeline unfolds in 1982, when young mum Dawn falls in love with a schoolteacher named Hazel. Family court judges took a dim view of homosexuality in the 1980s, working under the belief that children would be damaged by being raised by same-sex parents. And so a devastated Dawn is separated from three-year-old Maggie as Heron is given full custody after their divorce.

From utilities to care homes, how capital’s most rapacious form yet is taking over the public realm

This is a dark tale. In its opening scene the author is in conversation with a textile artist in her workshop under the arches in Deptford – arguably one of the last neighbourhoods that credibly sustains London’s claim to be a city that supports creativity. Guardian journalist Hettie O’Brien listens to her talk about rising rents as the railway’s lands are sold to new, invisible owners. The arches have become assets to be traded, and as a result the artist will soon be forced to ply her own trade elsewhere. Behind this story, and many others, lies the hand of private equity. The vast profits reaped by investors, and the toll on society, are all described here in lucid and highly readable prose.

Private equity partnerships are groups of individual and institutional investors with deep pockets. O’Brien traces their rise following the era of deregulation inaugurated by Reagan and Thatcher, and details how Blackstone, the Qatar Investment Authority, Macquarie, KKR and others have bought undervalued assets using borrowed money to minimise their exposure to risk. What happens next is that costs, wages and investment in the future are frequently cut to the bone in the cause of exceptionally high returns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich
Vikki Stone’s freely adapted version of the once notorious seafaring broadcaster’s history is a terrrific premise for delivering a string of 60s hits

A pirate radio station is a clever subject for a jukebox musical. And there’s none more famous than Radio Caroline, whose revolutionary broadcasts from a boat off the Essex coast launched a culture war with the British government.

Writer Vikki Stone has partly fictionalised the story of that ship, with characters only tangentially based on the people – record-spinner Tony Blackburn, Irish businessman Ronan O’Rahilly – it made famous. Instead we have Robbie, a young man struggling to make his way until his love of pop lands him a DJ job, and his childhood sweetheart Caroline, supporting his dreams until she finds herself losing him to the boat of the same name.

At New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich, until 2 May. Then touring until 20 June

Jermyn Street theatre, London
Deft production follows six friends as they morph from truth-blurting children into weary midlifers in effortless and capable performances

Read Virginia Woolf’s experimental 1931 novel, The Waves, and the challenges of stage adaptation hit you like thundering surf. There’s its form: a patchwork of six friends’ highly lyrical inner monologues spanning childhood to middle age (no helpful dialogue or action in sight); a linchpin character – seventh friend, Percival – who doesn’t speak at all; and the small matter of replicating Woolf’s near-perfect expression of the human experience. But this deft production rises to meet them all.

Flora Wilson Brown’s adaptation appoints Rhoda (Ria Zmitrowicz) – an anxious introvert who feels forever on the outside of life – as chief narrator, using her lens to focus the group’s disparate voices. Zmitrowicz is more than up to it, bringing sensitive introspection and wry observation amid the chattering rush of parties and babies and loss.

Woolf’s most beautiful and revealing lines are woven into a naturalistic script that is by turns relatable, moving and extremely funny. “How can people bump into me on the tube […] and they don’t seem to know?” asks a grieving Susan. Meanwhile, the boys’ discovery of masturbation makes it “quite impossible to sleep” because “it is brilliant”. Crucially, the script introduces dialogue, letting the group’s decades-long connection grow before our eyes.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
With dizzying surround sound and thousands of LED baubles, this was a synaesthetic feast from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

There was birdsong in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer. In the hall itself, hanging from the ceiling, were ropes and ropes displaying many thousands of walnut-sized LEDs, lined in huge blocks above the heads of the players and front half of the audience, promising to light the place up as if it were Harrods in December. This was Echoes of Hill and Horizon, an unlikely and delightful coming together of technology and English pastoral music at this year’s Multitudes festival.

Just over an hour of Vaughan Williams, Warlock and Elgar was played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – who don’t usually play this stuff, but who drew on their experience in the earlier music that inspired it. Their agile playing, at once lean and sonorous, was filtered through the dozens of speakers that make up the QEH’s hidden surround-sound system, which occasionally blunted the orchestral blend but allowed for intriguing spatial effects or cathedral-like reverb.

Charlotte MacInnes, who is suing Wilson for defamation, says social media post from Ramona Agruma-Wilson featuring animated character Dory, made her feel ‘awful’

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

A rising star who is suing Rebel Wilson says she felt mocked by the Hollywood actor’s wife appearing to reference her testimony in a social media post.

Charlotte MacInnes launched defamation proceedings against the Pitch Perfect star over social media posts that claimed she had made a sexual harassment complaint and retracted it to further her career.

The fitness chain Better has replaced real musicians’ tracks with cover versions, causing dismay among punters and instructors who say the change is killing the energy

“I want you to make me feel like I’m the only girl in the world.” The voice sounds like Rihanna, but it is thinner and less emotive, and the original song’s groove bassline has been replaced by a generic backbeat.

This is a cover song produced by the Power Music app. Some gym-goers will never hear the real Rihanna, or any other well-known artist, again, because GLL – the social enterprise that owns and operates Better and its 250 leisure centres across England, Wales and Northern Ireland – decided to cancel its music licence and instead play royalty-free songs from the Power Music app from 1 March.

Ireland and Spain will also not broadcast Eurovision after decision to boycott live event over Israel’s participation

National broadcasters in Ireland, Spain and Slovenia will not air the Eurovision song contest this year, after they decided to boycott the event over Israel’s participation.

Having announced it would not submit a national entry, the Slovenian broadcaster RTV confirmed on Thursday it would implement a broadcasting blackout of the world’s largest live music event and instead show a series of films about Palestine.

The Parks and Recreation actor on working with Martin Scorsese, chatting about cinema with the pope and delivering calzones to stoners

The way your face changes in the Severance elevator is incredible. Are you thinking about anything in particular when you do it? Lott49
We worked on that for a long time, trying to figure out what specifically happens in the elevator. We must have tried 100 times before we landed on it. Eventually, Ben [Stiller, the director] suggested a subtle fluttering of my eyelids as my character goes through the shift between his “innie” and “outie” personas.

How intimidating was it working on The Aviator? PatHobby
I was pretty freaked out at first. But once you’re there, you realise these are just regular people who happen to be actors figuring out a scene. Everyone was extremely kind and generous to me and made me feel comfortable straight away.

From cycling in the Cinque Terre to sipping espresso at a secret spot overlooking the Colosseum, here are some of your Italian highlights

• Tell us about great beach bars and restaurants in Europe – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

When we visited Venice, we stayed in Padua. It’s half an hour to Venezia Mestre (Venice’s mainland suburb), trains are frequent and cheap, as long as you avoid expresses, and easy to book if you have the Trenitalia app. You’ll find accommodation and restaurants significantly cheaper if you are based in Padua and day trip into Venice, and Padua is worth exploring in its own right. There are also trains to Vicenza, Verona, Bologna and Bassano del Grappa – we found it the perfect base for a public transport trip in north-east Italy.
Fergal O’Shea

From a country cottage with double-height bookshelves to a new-build flat in London with ‘period’ panelling hiding tech

Want to recreate the lustre of days spent in the sun with none of the damage? Try these expert-approved formulas

• The best IPL and laser hair removal devices tested

The wise among us would never forgo our safe-sun protocol, but there’s no denying that many of us feel happier and healthier with a tan. The irresistible lure of sunkissed skin has long been a summer staple – and from tanning waters to wipes, instant tans to gradual tanning moisturisers, there are now more ways than ever to get a faux glow.

There’s also been a growing demand for multitasking beauty products, so the newest fake tan formulas often add skincare benefits alongside the bronze. Self-tans infused with hyaluronic acid, niacinamide and vitamin C hydrate, nourish and protect much like your usual body cream or facial serum.

Best fake tan overall:
Bare by Vogue Williams clear tan water

Best budget fake tan:
Boots Glow tanning milk

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

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

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

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

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

• The best hair dryers, tested

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

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

Best hair straighteners overall:
GHD Chronos Max

Best budget hair straighteners:
Remington Shine Therapy S8500

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

• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

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

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

Nearly every European country has its own fruit brandy. Some are a bit agricultural so here’s a taste of the best

“I’ve had people burst into tears tasting these – it takes them straight back to a moment in their past.” I have come to visit Barney Wilczak, an unusually soulful spirits producer, at Capreolus Distillery near Cirencester. We are surrounded by stainless-steel vats of his eau-de-vie, the clear, fragrant brandy that he distills from apples, gooseberries, cherries, pears, plums, raspberries, grapes, quince and various other fruits grown within a 35-mile radius of this sunny English hilltop.

I say “distillery”, which might make you imagine something vaguely industrial, but we are in fact in his dad’s garage, while the still itself is in the shed. But the liquids? My goodness. Each 60-litre container represents around 4,000kg of fruit, all picked within a day of ripeness, wild-fermented over months into fruit wine, then triple-distilled to exacting specifications that vary fruit by fruit and batch by batch. Obsessive doesn’t cover it. When Wilczak made his first batch of raspberry eau-de-vie, he reckons he hand-graded 2m raspberries, rejecting any with even the slightest imperfection.

This soft, whey‑born staple slips effortlessly from savoury suppers to indulgent celebratory desserts while keeping its cool, milky charm

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

My record for making ricotta and lemon ring cake is three minutes and 42 seconds. That doesn’t include heating the oven or baking, or finding a recipe, which is in my head. It does include getting out the utensils (bowl, spatula, grater, scale, ring tin) and the ingredients (ricotta, olive oil, flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, lemons), then speed-mixing everything in one bowl, scraping the batter into the tin and getting the tin in the oven via a discus throw. The timer is stopped as the oven door is closed. This is not relaxing cooking, it is entertaining cooking. And it is gratifying, having proved my partner wrong when he said it would take me at least five minutes.

I was disappointed, then, to find myself on terrible form the other day, when a chocolate-chip version of the same ring cake took me five minutes and 19 seconds. In my defence, I had difficulty getting the glass bowl out of an impractical stack, and we had run out of chocolate chips, which meant I had to find a knife and chop up a bar instead. Even so, it was an absymal performance. There was some consolation in the cake itself, which is not only the quickest, but one of the best cakes I know. The ricotta adds creamy depth and the olive oil provides fat, and together they make for a tender, moist, everyday cake that is best eaten warm, when the bits of chocolate are still hot enough to be little pools.

Some desserts never go out of fashion – even medieval ones – and, with its nutty, spiced almond and dried fruit filling, this treacle tart-alike is one of them

It wasn’t that dessert trolleys were banned in Italy during Covid, but guidelines from the Instituto Superiore di Sanità (national institute of health) were so (necessarily) rigorous around these “potential vehicles of the virus” that most places banished them to storerooms. Happily, many restaurants have since retrieved them from their long stay, so they glide or rattle between tables once more, or sit parked in an admirable position. This isn’t my first time mentioning the dessert trolley at La Torricella here in Testaccio, having written about its fabulous puff pastry and cream millefoglie in the past. But another dessert that might catch your eye as you enter the restaurant and look right at the cloth-covered trolley parked under the bar is what owner Augusto refers to as torta medievale, because of its spiced almond and dried fruit filling. It’s an unassuming but extremely good thing.

The torta medievale also reminds me of a favourite among favourites: treacle tart, which is, of course, made with golden syrup, whose story began in 1881 when the Scottish businessman Abram Lyle set up a sugar refinery in London. The process involved extracting juice from sugar cane, then boiling down this juice and moulding it into sugar loaves, which could then be grated as required. One of the byproducts of this process was a bitter, molasses-brown treacle, which was initially sold as animal feed, but later, thanks to the work of the chemist, further refined into a viscous, sweet syrup nicknamed “Goldie”, which was stored in barrels and distributed to staff and friends. Over time, though, seeing its popularity, the partially inverted refined syrup was given the name golden syrup and packaged in tins that remain so familiar: dark green with a dead gold lion swarmed by bees. It’s an image from Samson’s Riddle in the book of Judges, in which Samson, returning to the lion he has killed, finds that bees have created a honeycomb in the carcass, which also gives rise to the words on the tin, “out of the strong came forth sweetness”, and reminds one of Lyle’s strong faith.

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

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

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

Being on dating apps can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack – so Dr Jennie Young devised a technique to burn it down and find better matches

It was 2023, and Dr Jennie Young was sick of online dating. She was looking for a partner, and instead all she found in the apps were inappropriately sexual come-ons and conversations that went nowhere. It felt like looking for a needle in a big, rancid haystack. So one day, frustrated and totally out of ideas, she Googled “how do you actually find a needle in a haystack?”

The answer: burn it down.

You can’t infer people never liked you because they haven’t reached out, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. The question is whether you can tolerate this asymmetry

• Read more Leading questions

I’m a 43–year-old man. Well-educated, with a healthy social skill level. I’ve always been surrounded by friends. Always invited to parties and events, both happy and sad, without effort on my part. Last year I moved from the city to a country farm and I came to the realisation that I had been the one maintaining contact. I was the one initiating every time, and when I stopped, they all went away. We’re not talking just one friend either. I’m talking full-on loss of an entire social circle.

It’s been a rough year, socially and emotionally speaking. My partner has borne the brunt of it, being my only contact and social outlet. I just don’t understand it. If I had been an atrocious person then people wouldn’t have interacted with me like they did, seemingly voluntarily and happily. I was invited to every wedding, engagement, birthday, hiking trip, you name it. I was made to feel welcome and wanted. As long as, it turns out, I was the one sending the first message, making the first call.

Steven uses a mousse to prevent his hair thinning, but Mabel thinks it’s risky for their cat and dog. Whose argument contains a strand of truth?

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

The mousse he uses puts our animals at risk. I would like him to switch treatments

I’m really careful with the cream and always keep it away from our pets. Plus, it works

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

• Tell us: do you use AI for fitness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 1980s band are being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year – but why does singer Sade Adu’s pared-back look still resonate in 2026?

Earlier this month it was announced that Sade, the British group fronted by Sade Adu that found fame in the 80s and 90s, would be inducted into the 2026 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And although the music is indisputably worthy of such a distinction, if there were a similar accolade for style, Adu would have been inducted a long time ago.

With her scraped-back hair, red lipstick, hoop earrings and penchant for simple black dresses or denim and polo necks, she has become the last word in understated – but somehow unattainable – style.

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

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the 1980s ‘the Antwerp Six’ put Flanders on the fashion map. Now a major new exhibition celebrates the designers’ legacy and provides the perfect excuse to visit Belgium’s vibrant second city

You know you’re in a city that takes its fashion seriously when even the Virgin Mary is dressed head to toe in couture. A short walk from Antwerp’s old town, with its ornate medieval guild houses and cobblestone streets, is the baroque church of St Andrews. Like many of the city’s Catholic churches, it has beautiful stained glass windows, an exuberantly carved wooden pulpit and more artworks by Flemish masters than you can shake an incense stick at. But we’re here to pay homage to an art form of a different kind.

In a quiet chapel, an elegant 16th-century wooden statue of the Madonna is clothed not in her usual blue cloak, but a dress of pale gauzy fabric, trimmed with a collar of white pigeon feathers, custom made by renowned Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester. It’s a bold statement but one that’s entirely in-keeping with a city where a love of fashion seems woven into the fabric of everyday life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Marches, Shropshire: Recently I had wondered how long this great lime would stay standing. The next day, I had my answer

How quickly something that defines a landscape for centuries becomes the absence that redefines it – so it is with ancient trees. The trunk snapped like a carrot at the roots and crashed, its bony branches splintered. Now it lies like a shipwreck stranded in an open field, its hulk of twigs an animal pelt stilled.

A day before, looking at its 300-year-old architecture of mostly dead wood yet so vividly alive, admiring its form and persistence through years and trouble, standing alone with spring coursing through the land and its timbers, I wondered how long, in tree time, it had left.

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

It is time for the Thursday news quiz, where you must cling on to knowledge with both hands – even if, thanks to our quirky illustration by Anaïs Mims, they seem to have curled themselves into question marks. Like our primate friend above, you may find yourself swinging wildly between certainty and guesswork. Fifteen questions on the week’s news and culture await. There are no prizes, but we always enjoy hearing how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 244

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

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

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

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

Name: The psychic generation.

Age: You tell me.

World’s worst nuclear disaster leaves mixed legacy of nature’s resilience amid serious contamination, as wars increase lobbying for energy supply

Forty years on from the world’s worst nuclear disaster, Chornobyl is still contaminated with almost half the caesium-137 that exploded from the Unit 4 reactor in 1986, as well other hazards such as plutonium, tritium and americium. But according to some experts, the long-term effects on nature may be less than if the area had been left to humans, resulting in unexpected consequences in an environment left to its own devices.

The reminder of the protracted fallout from Chornobyl was made ahead of Sunday’s anniversary, which coincides with renewed lobbying for nuclear power and a rise in fears about atomic brinkmanship due to the oil crisis and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

All signs point to a record-low performance for Labour in May in what will be a moment of high jeopardy for Keir Starmer

Labour is on track for its worst local election performance, data analysed by the Guardian shows, in a blow that will pile further pressure on Keir Starmer’s leadership.

Barring a drastic change in fortunes, Labour’s vote-share could fall to historic lows across elections for councils in England and devolved parliaments in Wales and Scotland on 7 May, with big gains for Reform, the Greens and nationalist parties, according to recent polling.

Half of the most important buildings in the UK are churches and, even when congregations fall away, they are vital community hubs. But many, including beloved St Tyfrydog’s in Wales, which closed in 2020, are decaying. Can they be saved?

There is a sign on the gate leading through the circular stone wall that surrounds St Tyfrydog’s church on Anglesey (Ynys Môn). Services, in Welsh and English, are held on the first and third Sunday of the month, at 2.15pm, it says. But this is no longer the case: the last service was held here on 22 November 2020.

There was a decent turnout that day, to say goodbye to this little medieval church, parts of which date from about 1400 (there has been a church on the site since 450). The problem was that, before then, apart from on big occasions such as Christmas and the harvest festival, the congregation was tiny; five or six people, sometimes just three.

We want to hear from you about the rise of child skincare trends

Children as young as two are appearing in TikTok videos demonstrating their skincare routines, a Guardian investigation has found, raising concerns about the beauty industry’s reach. Dermatologists say children do not need multi-step skincare and warn the trend may be fuelling anxiety about appearance from an early age.

We want to hear from parents of children of primary school children or younger. Have your children asked for skincare products or felt pressure to follow routines they’ve seen online or heard about from friends? Have you noticed changes in how they think about their appearance? Do you have concerns?

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

Companies are increasingly using AI in their hiring processes – including conducting job interviews themselves. With this in mind, we would like to hear your experience of job interviews that were conducted partially or wholly by AI.

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

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

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

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

We’d like to hear from people who are in a throuple or who used to be in one, and what their relationship was like

The Guardian’s Saturday magazine is looking for throuples to talk honestly about the experience of love and commitment.

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

Wake up to the top stories and what they mean – free to your inbox every weekday morning at 7am

Scroll less, understand more: sign up to receive our news email each weekday for clarity on the top stories in the UK and across the world.

Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you

Get smart, sustainable shopping advice from the Filter team straight to your inbox, every Sunday

The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.

A weekly email from our star chefs featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideas

Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from our star chefs, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent.

Sign up below to start receiving the best of our culinary journalism in one mouth-watering weekly email.

Upgrade your space today, with eight emails packed with tips to brighten up your home - whatever your budget

Embrace your space: the Guardian’s House to Home newsletter is bursting with tips and tricks to help you boost your bedroom and give your living room some love.

Sign up any time, and get eight emails direct to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world