The party needs a leader who understands the difficulties facing ordinary people. I am yet to see anyone obviously equal to that challenge

If this were a poker game, Thursday lunchtime was the point when players were finally forced to show their cards. Was Wes Streeting holding all the aces, as his people relentlessly claimed, or a pair of fours and a lot of empty bluster? Did Andy Burnham even have any cards, if he couldn’t name an MP willing to surrender their seat for him? (At the 11th hour, Makerfield MP Josh Simons did the honours). Would Angela Rayner – late to the table, after scraping together £40,000 in accidentally underpaid stamp duty in order to play – scoop the jackpot by default? Or does the house, in the shape of a prime minister stubbornly refusing to budge, ultimately always win?

But in the end Streeting simply kicked the table over, scattering poker chips in all directions. His resignation from cabinet, in a blistering statement that noticeably failed to confirm he had the numbers to trigger a formal contest, was a frustrated last attempt to break the stalemate by taking what he called “personalities” – including possibly his own – and “petty factionalism” out of a revolt against Keir Starmer in which both are surgically embedded. Since the outcome is unclear at the time of writing, for now let’s leave aside the issue of whether Starmer even has the authority to do a reshuffle and focus on one question: why does Britain need a Labour party in 2026?

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

In antiquity, women were considered the more sexual sex – hornier, more libidinous and lust-fuelled than men. Why did that perception change?

All across the world, you will probably have read, people are having less sex. In Britain and the US, in France and Australia, frequency of sex has been on the decline (although Denmark appears to be bucking the trend). In 2018, the US magazine the Atlantic declared a “sex recession”, while last December the Telegraph ran a piece headlined “Sex is dying out. This is why it matters”.

As an ancient historian with a particular interest in the history of sex, this drought is fascinating to me – not least because some of the articles I have read seem keen to hark back to the historical period I spend most of my time researching. “Sex should be more wild and plentiful than it has been since ancient Greece,” reported the Telegraph. But antiquity was no bastion of sexual freedom – especially for women.

We were locked in a box in a lorry for 12 hours. I’ve never been so terrified

I escaped from my home, Soran, in the Erbil area of northern Iraq, in 2011 when I was 19 years old. My life was in danger – powerful people had made threats to kill me. I had been told that the UK was a secure place for refugees. I decided to try to get there and hoped the government would grant me protection.

I travelled by lorry across Europe and arrived in October of that year. I claimed asylum and felt lucky to be in a peaceful country. When I arrived, David Cameron was prime minister. Since then, there have been five others. I didn’t really distinguish between them, though – they all caused me a lot of stress.

Glenn Murcutt pioneered architecture that was sensitive to its environment, and accomodating to changing temperatures and wildlife

The house teaches you things, Lynne Eastaway says. Today, a choir of cicadas fill the scrub with a rhythm that rises and falls. On other days, there may be visits from birds, goannas, echidnas, wombats, wallabies and kangaroos.

“The bush ends, and the house begins,” she says. “You’re not the centre; you’re just part of it. That’s the thing you learn.

From Nike Mind, with its pre-game benefits, to recovery shoes from Hoka, bulbous sporty footwear is moving into fashionable circles. Will we see it beyond the jogging track this summer?

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When the much-hyped Nike Mind shoes were released in January, I bought a pair. I was grabbed by the idea that the orange nodules on the sole could, supposedly, focus the mind. The futuristic look of the shoe also appeals. If walking on knobbly things took a bit of getting used to, it was worth it – if only for that irresistible fashion smugness of having something rare. In the last week, I have been stopped in the street and asked where I got the shoes. It turns out they are now out of stock and have sold for over £300 on resale site Goat.

The Mind is part of a wider trend in “exercise slides”, a pre-game shoe designed to ground you ahead of your chosen activity. Nike claim that the 22 nodules on the sole stimulate the mechanoreceptors on your feet, engaging the sensory area of your brain, meaning focus is heightened. Meanwhile, recovery slides made by brands such as Hoka and Oofos use cushioned soles and a shape that cradles the foot to helpfight foot fatigue after a lot of exercise. The Mind are worn by footballers including Erling Haaland and Reece James, runner Keely Hodgkinson and basketball players Victor Wembanyama and A’ja Wilson, while ballerina Francesca Hayward namechecks Hoka’s slides as part of her daily routine.

It’s been 12 years since Claire time-travelled through a magic stone into the arms of hot Scot Jamie and left fans light-headed. As Outlander comes to a close, we look back at TV’s steamiest journey – scandalous resurrections and all

It all started with a vase. “I’d never lived anywhere long enough to justify having such a simple thing,” said the second world war nurse Claire Randall in the narration, as she eyed one through a shop window on her honeymoon in Inverness. “At that moment, I wanted nothing so much in all the world as to have a vase of my very own.” Did she buy it and live happily ever after with lovely professor husband, Frank? Did she heck! Instead, Claire found a magic stone circle, fell through time to the 18th century, fell in love with flaming hot Scot Jamie Fraser and embarked on TV’s wildest journey.

Twelve years have passed since the adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books gave us the time-travel bonkbuster we didn’t know we needed. You can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief for its stars, Caitríona Balfe and Sam Heughan, whose chemistry has sizzled admirably across eight long seasons (it took 17 months to film the first one after Covid). As it limps towards its finale this week, the end is long overdue – but it is a bittersweet farewell to a wonderfully ludicrous show.

Greater Manchester mayor would need to win Makerfield seat before launching campaign for Labour leadership

Andy Burnham now has a potential route back to parliament and a chance to become Labour’s next leader after an MP said he would trigger a byelection by standing down from his seat.

The move ended days of speculation about whether Burnham could secure a possible path back into Westminster, and underlined the increasingly precarious nature of Keir Starmer’s premiership.

We look at the stances on key issues of Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband

Wes Streeting’s resignation as health secretary, and the resignation of former minister Josh Simons as an MP to clear a path for Andy Burnham to return to parliament, has brought the prospect of a Labour leadership race one step closer, even if he has not triggered a contest himself.

Almost every critic of Keir Starmer has accused the prime minister of not being sufficiently “bold” in his policy choices. But what would his possible replacements actually do differently?

A return to Westminster for Andy Burnham is far from guaranteed, while Starmer could fight a leadership challenge and win

While Keir Starmer’s authority as prime minister feels terminally undermined after calls from MPs and departing ministers to step down, he remains inside No 10 – for now. So how, and when, might he be removed? Here are some possible scenarios.

China calls for ceasefire and opening of seaway, while Donald Trump says Xi feels ‘very similar’ about ending the war in Iran

• Trump in China – latest updates

Donald Trump has claimed that the US and China “feel very similar” about ending the war in Iran but offered no details about a possible breakthrough.

The US president was speaking alongside Xi Jinping of China at the Zhongnanhai garden in Beijing on the second and final day of the leaders’ summit.

Standards watchdog investigating money from crypto billionaire which Reform UK leader now says was ‘reward’ for Brexit

Nigel Farage bought a £1.4m property in cash shortly after receiving a £5m personal gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

The revelation came as the Reform UK leader appeared to change his line on the reason for the £5m gift, saying in an interview on Thursday that it was a “reward” for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years.

Although blood test reduces deaths by two for every 1,000 men screened, many could face unnecessary treatment

Screening for prostate cancer with a blood test can save men’s lives, but the “absolute benefit is small” and many men could face unnecessary treatment and medical complications, according to the most comprehensive study yet.

In a review that analysed six trials involving nearly 800,000 men, screening with the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test reduced prostate cancer deaths by two for every 1,000 men screened, meaning 500 men must be screened to prevent one death from the disease.

Research shows sick leave among patients prescribed GLP-1 injections over nine-month period reduced by 50%

Weight-loss drugs could halve sickness absence and significantly reduce the strain on the NHS, research suggests.

A UK study of patients who received GLP-1 jabs for nine months found sickness days fell by nearly half and sickness absence lasting five days or more fell by more than 50%. Analysis of the findings suggests expanding access could cut A&E attendance by obese patients by a quarter and free up nearly 10m GP appointments.

Exclusive: Contract changes mean Post Office outlets inside TG Jones stores would be easier to close, with up to 60 possibly affected

The owner of WH Smith’s former high street business is aiming to change contracts with the Post Office to make it easier to close outlets within its stores, increasing fears that communities will become “postal deserts”.

TG Jones operates 180 post offices and it is understood that as many as 60 could be closed under a restructuring plan by Modella, the private equity group that renamed the WH Smith high street chain as TG Jones after buying it last year.

Thames at Ham designated as one of 13 new swimming areas across England to be monitored for water quality

The first designated bathing water area on the River Thames in London will welcome swimmers for the official start of the bathing season on Friday as one of 13 new monitored swimming areas across England.

The Thames at Ham, in south-west London, has been designated as a new river bathing water area after campaigners gathered evidence to show thousands of people use the river for swimming throughout the year.

Canvey Island foreshore, Essex

East Beach at West Bay, Bridport, Dorset

Falcon Meadow, Bungay, Suffolk

Granville Parade Beach, Sandgate, Kent

Little Shore, Amble, Northumberland

New Brighton Beach (east), Merseyside

Newton and Noss Creeks, Devon

Pangbourne Meadow, Berkshire

Queen Elizabeth Gardens, Salisbury, Wiltshire

River Dee at Sandy Lane, Chester, Cheshire

River Fowey in Lostwithiel, Cornwall

River Swale in Richmond, Yorkshire

River Thames at Ham and Kingston, Greater London

Philip Morris claimed it wanted to end cigarette sales, but experts and campaigners say new promotions seem designed to attract younger consumers

Anti-tobacco campaigners have condemned a global advertising campaign for Marlboro by Philip Morris International (PMI), saying the company is being duplicitous in claiming it wants to end cigarette sales.

The “I AM Marlboro” campaign – which experts on the tobacco industry said appeared designed to attract young people – includes billboards, TV ads and online content.

Researchers say risk comes from ‘other factors, including genetic predisposition to mental health conditions’

Taking antidepressants during pregnancy does not increase the risk of children going on to develop autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to an analysis of more than half a million pregnancies.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Hong Kong and published in the Lancet Psychiatry, analysed data from 37 existing studies that included 600,000 pregnant women who had taken antidepressants, and 25 million women who had no antidepressant use during their pregnancies.

Butterfly Conservation poll is open until 7 June with choice of 60 species from small tortoiseshells to purple emperors

Will it be the rapidly disappearing former garden favourite, the small tortoiseshell? Or the poet John Masefield’s “oakwood haunting thing”, the charismatic purple emperor? Or perhaps the brimstone, the ultimate harbinger of spring?

The question of which is Britain’s favourite butterfly is being put to a popular vote for the first time. The charity Butterfly Conservation is running the poll, which runs until 7 June, giving people the chance to choose their favourite from the 60 species that fly around Britain every summer.

Many European motoring manufacturers are in retreat with plants to off–load – while China’s industry is on the march

Chinese carmaker Xpeng is on the hunt for a factory in Europe. Volkswagen is aiming to reduce the number of its factories. It seems like it should have been the perfect set-up for a deal.

Yet there was one problem with the plant on offer, according to Elvis Cheng, Xpeng’s managing director of north-eastern Europe: “It’s a little bit, I would say, old.”

News will come as a shock to staff, especially at Cranfield, but the institutions’ bosses say intention is growth

The announcement that King’s College London is to absorb Cranfield University came as a surprise but not a shock to England’s higher education leaders, who have been braced for sudden announcements about job cuts and course closures.

But for staff and students at both institutions the news will have come as a shock, particularly at Cranfield, the smaller, highly focused postgraduate technology and management college that has its own airport.

China’s leader raised the ancient Greek historian Thucydides when he met the US president in Beijing

• Trump-Xi China summit – follow live

A messy war in the Middle East. Tensions in Taiwan. When the leaders of the world’s two superpowers met in Beijing this week, these were the flashpoints everyone expected they would talk about.

Instead, Chinese leader Xi Jinping threw another, ancient war, into the mix.

Best known as Nurse Phyllis in the TV hit, the actor is a peerless interpreter of Caryl Churchill and is starring in Alexander Zeldin’s ‘Shakespearean’ play about dementia. She looks back on a career of unconventional choices

‘Every part is an education,” says Linda Bassett. “That’s the glory of being an actor. You learn about human feelings and frailty and rottenness. The writer puts their soul on the page, and you inhabit that. I’ve always felt I was a writer’s actor.”

She’s not wrong. Never showy, Bassett’s understated magic has enhanced plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Wallace Shawn, Ayub Khan Din and, notably, Caryl Churchill, of whom she is a peerless interpreter.

Bond Place and Desmond Crescent have been named in honour of the 007 franchise after some scenes were shot nearby in the 90s – why stop there?

James Bond fans have endured a rough few years. Ever since No Time to Die walloped off Daniel Craig, we’ve been stuck in a weird kind of limbo. There will eventually be a new James Bond film, directed by Denis Villeneuve, the most exciting director in the franchise’s history. But we don’t know when it will come out, or who will play Bond, or if 007 under Amazon will even be recognisable.

In summary, we need something tangible to ground our anxieties. What we need is to pack up our things and head to north Swindon, to the site of the former Motorola manufacturing facility, where a new housing estate has just named a bunch of roads after James Bond.

It was just a creepy picture on the internet. Now it’s the year’s freakiest film. Its 20-year-old auteur Kane Parsons and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve take us through the terrifying labyrinth

Chiwetel Ejiofor has been on a lot of movie sets, but Backrooms was something different: a 30,000 sq ft labyrinth of apparently random corridors and chambers, all carpeted, fluorescent lit and decorated in the same sickly yellow wallpaper. It was so big that people were getting lost in it, says Ejiofor: “Especially on those first days. As you try to navigate your way around and you’re like: ‘I’m sure it’s this door, I’m sure that’s the way.’” He’s laughing at the recollection. “And you find yourself just back in the wrong corner of the whole studio and you’re like: ‘Get me some help!’”

This is kind of the point of Backrooms – the movie and the online phenomenon that spawned it. It’s a concept that takes some unpacking, but as the premise for a buzzy A24 horror freakout, you could summarise it as something like “The Blair Witch Project meets Severance” or “The Shining set in an infinite Travelodge”or maybe “the exact opposite of a Wes Anderson movie”. Comparisons fall short, partly because the Backrooms concept feels as if it’s come from another world – a parallel dimension, even. Ejiofor concurs: “There was stuff that we were doing by the end of the film that I was just like: ‘This is among the most bizarre things I have ever been involved in.’”

A battered economy, huge numbers of casualties and very little territorial gain – it’s no wonder even stalwart Putin supporters are showing signs of disquiet

• Rajan Menon is professor emeritus of international relations at Powell School, City University of New York

On 9 May, Russia held its iconic annual Victory Day parade to honour the sacrifices of its soldiers and civilians during its four-year war against Nazi Germany. When the president, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, he didn’t anticipate a fight that would last longer than the Red Army’s epic struggle against the Wehrmacht. But his war drags on. Worse, it’s failing and threatening his grip on power.

Despite Putin’s boasts about Russian troops advancing on every front, even pro-war military bloggers are criticising military mismanagement. Some say the momentum favours Ukraine and at least one warns that Russia could lose. With the frontline stalled, an estimated 1.3 million Russian troops dead or wounded, and ordinary Russians under increasing economic pressure, the war Putin believed would produce his crowning achievement may prove to be his undoing.

Rajan Menon is professor emeritus of international relations at Powell School, City University of New York, and senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies

Rejoining the EU, massive tax reform, scrapping the pension triple lock – a new leader must summon a sense of emergency and deal with the big issues

Labour is in the deepest trouble. A juicy leadership drama ignites all Westminster-watchers, another spellbinding live-action theatre of rising and falling stars, duels, betrayals of trust, new alliances and old ones broken.

Some would pull back from this vortex. Is regicide absolutely necessary when “stability” is what people and markets say they want and vox pops groan, “Not another one!” After less than two years, with worse turmoil ahead from the Trump war, now, really?

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

The Iran war is the bigger story – but the bond market is primed to deliver a kick if extreme positions arise from a formal race

It is a mistake to think every twitch in the price of UK government debt is caused by the latest instalment in the great Labour leadership meltdown. Waiting for Wes is not the only drama in town for your average bond vigilante. Resolution – or not – to the Iran conflict is still the bigger story.

Those vigilantes will not be ignoring events in Westminster, obviously. It’s just that there is not yet much to chew on in terms of what it means for fixed-income investors’ daily diet of expectations for inflation, interest rates, growth, borrowing and so on.

Everything was in place for a move against the PM but for a moment Labour seemed to have forgotten the final act

Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. The sun rose in the west. Hailstones the size of footballs battered the pavements from cloudless skies. Dogs miaowed and cats barked. Political journalists positioned outside Downing Street were in a frenzy of madness.

The BBC political editor, Chris Mason, ran down Whitehall, accosting strangers, demanding to know if they were going to resign. If not now, then when? Sky News’s Beth Rigby confronted Robert Peston of ITV live on air insisting he was mounting a leadership challenge. It was that kind of day.

Israel’s response to recent New York Times reporting detailing the horrific sexual violence inflicted on detainees seeks to silence those who assert the basic fact of Palestinian humanity

What’s most shocking about the latest accounts of sexual torture of Palestinians in Israeli custody is not just their inherent horror. It is that despite so much evidence being so visible for so long, the machinery of abuse and denial continues to deepen.

Nicholas Kristof’s recent reporting on the issue in the New York Times brought important public attention to the issue. But abuses in Israeli custody have long been reported by former detainees, lawyers, doctors and journalists, and documented by human rights organizations. Since October 2023, this body of evidence has revealed a horrific reality: Israel’s prison system has been transformed into a criminal network of torture camps.

Yuli Novak is the executive director of B’Tselem

There is legitimate scrutiny of antisemitism on the left, but at the same time, rightwing media outlets offend with impunity. That makes no sense

The media’s message appears to have cut through. At the crucial rally against antisemitism in London on Sunday, Zack Polanski, the Jewish leader of the Green party of England and Wales, was not invited to speak, on the grounds that he had not done enough to root out antisemitism from the party. But Nigel Farage was invited, on the grounds that his party, Reform UK, has “expressed very broad support for the fight against antisemitism”. More than two thousand Jews saw things differently and signed a petition arguing that the invitation to Farage “fundamentally undermines” the message of solidarity in defence of Jewish safety and dignity. I agree with them.

Antisemitism must be stamped out everywhere. “Never again” means zero tolerance for this age-old hate, wherever it occurs and whoever voices it. It is indeed a problem on the left, and I’ve often found myself in dispute with those who downplay or minimise it.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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

Prisoners have a right to communicate with the media about their cases. Yet after 41 years in jail, Bamber has been banned

A few weeks ago I wrote a lengthy email to Jeremy Bamber, who has been in prison for nearly 41 years after being convicted of murdering five family members. Bamber has always protested his innocence, and the late Guardian prison correspondent Eric Allison and I have frequently written about Bamber and the White House Farm murders in the Guardian over the years.

In the email, I asked about aspects of his case as I often do, chatted about a football match I’d been to with my younger daughter at the weekend, mentioned that I’d been out for lunch with a forensics expert, and said we had an amazing blossom tree across the road that had just come into full bloom. I also emailed a photo of the blossom tree.

Simon Hattenstone is a features writer for the Guardian

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 prospect of a contest exposes a deeper truth: the party’s problems go far beyond Keir Starmer

In politics, opportunities for supreme power are rare and fleeting. Yet rather than making challengers to Sir Keir Starmer more ruthless, this truth seems to have made them more cautious. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, resigned from the cabinet but did not launch a leadership bid. Rather than provoke a contest, Mr Streeting’s message to Sir Keir was that since his authority was gone, his duty was to depart and enable an orderly transition rather than cling to office.

If the Labour leadership were truly up for grabs, winning it would require opportunism, a feel for elite collapse and a willingness to defy both the party establishment and orthodoxy. Those who successfully seize the crown – Lloyd George, Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson – recognise their moment and act decisively. These leaders were also not subject to the Labour party rulebook.

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 new government in Budapest has already made an impact in Brussels. At home, the new prime minister is so far doing and saying the right things

The transformative impact of Péter Magyar’s historic election victory over Viktor Orbán is already being felt in Brussels. On Monday, two days after Mr Magyar was sworn in as Hungary’s new prime minister, his new pro-EU government lifted the veto which for over a year has prevented the EU imposing sanctions on violent Israeli settlers. This followed a similar breakthrough on a long-delayed £78bn loan to Ukraine, which Mr Orbán had also blocked. At a critical geopolitical moment, the end of an era in Budapest is freeing the EU to act in defence of its interests and values.

Mr Magyar, who inherits a struggling economy stifled by years of cronyism and corruption, will hope and expect that the benefits of rapprochement cut both ways. In total, around £17bn of EU development funds to Hungary remain off-limits, following Mr Orbán’s refusal to address multiple transgressions of EU law. Agreement on the disbursement of around £10bn needs to be reached by the end of August.

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.

Former Europe minister Denis MacShane says Sir Keir Starmer could be more effective as foreign secretary than prime minister. Plus letters from Bernie Evans, Keith Flett, Alec Hamilton and Douglas Currie

There is general agreement that, whatever his problems with domestic politics, Sir Keir Starmer has handled his international diplomatic duties as prime minister with aplomb. He joined with all other European leaders in rejecting the Donald Trump-Benjamin Netanyahu war on Iran. He stood with Canada against Trump’s Anschluss politics of saying it should be joined with the US, and with Denmark against Trump’s attempted grab of Greenland.

After years of Tory governments’ neglect of defence, Britain is sending a clear message to Vladimir Putin that his 1930s-style invasion and takeover of Ukraine will be resisted. Starmer has good relations with social democratic and socialist leaders in Europe, and Labour is again playing a role in the Party of European Socialists and the Socialist International following years of neglect after Labour left office in 2010.

By deleting photos from our phones, we can ease demand for data storage and the huge amount of electricity it uses, writes Gill Davidson, while Robert Harrison suggests the waste heat from datacentres could be repurposed

Increasing energy usage by datacentres is a concerning issue, as is the associated environmental cost (Datacentres using 6% of electricity supply in UK and US, research says, 13 May).

Datacentres use up huge and rapidly increasing amounts of electricity, and data storage is responsible for more carbon emissions than the commercial airline industry. This is to say nothing of the contribution to land and water use, e-waste, supply chain issues, refrigerant gas leaks etc.

Dr Gareth James of the Association of Surgeons in Primary Care says the commonly quoted decline in vasectomy numbers needs careful interpretation

Tim Burrows is absolutely right to highlight the importance of vasectomy, the anxiety many men feel about it, and the continuing imbalance in contraceptive responsibility between men and women (My first thought after having a vasectomy: why aren’t more British men having them?, 11 May). However, the commonly quoted decline in vasectomy numbers needs careful interpretation.

NHS Digital figures do not capture the full picture, because they largely exclude NHS vasectomies performed in community and primary care settings, where a substantial proportion of procedures now take place.

Academic freedom would be compromised by a planned deal between Cambridge University and Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry, warns Jemimah Steinfeld

Your report (Cambridge University seeks deal with Saudi defence ministry despite rights concerns, 11 May) should be a lightning rod for anyone who cares about academic freedom in this country. According to it, Cambridge’s leadership has approved a proposal by the university’s Judge business school to form a “memorandum of understanding” with Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry.

While this has yet to be formalised, the idea itself is repugnant. The Saudi government is among the most repressive in the world. Last year – a bumper year for executions there – a journalist was among those killed simply for reporting. Scores more remain behind bars all for speaking out about abuses. It is hard to see how any deal with the petrol state would not come at a cost to us. Even if an agreement is fleshed out to state academic freedom would be protected, self-censorship has a terrible habit of creeping in when money is on the line.

Guardiola can claim 17th City trophy, Arteta weighs up another Arsenal reshuffle and Brentford’s European dreams could edge closer

A measure of Pep Guardiola’s greatness is to be found in Saturday’s FA Cup final being a 24th visit to Wembley leading Manchester City. As this born winner could depart in the close season, the meeting with Chelsea may be a third-last outing in charge, in which he seeks the opposite result to the 2021 Champions League final. Yet Chelsea are now in a state of flux – Calum McFarlane is in a second caretaker spell of the season, following Liam Rosenior’s sacking last month, having also filled in when Enzo Maresca walked out on 1 January. This points to a City triumph and the 17th major trophy of Guardiola’s reign. But this is football, so who knows? Jamie Jackson

FA Cup final: Chelsea v Manchester City, Saturday 3pm (all times BST)

Aston Villa v Liverpool, Friday 8pm

Manchester United v Nottingham Forest, Sunday 12.30pm

Brentford v Crystal Palace, Sunday 3pm

Everton v Sunderland, Sunday 3pm

Wolves v Fulham, Sunday 3pm

• American world No 1 among those shooting 3-under 67s

• Rory McIlroy finishes on four-over after four straight bogeys

It was gridlock on the opening day of the US PGA, where the leaderboard was backed up like Philly traffic. By the time it was all over, seven men were tied in the lead on three-under par, and another 42 were within three shots of them. Altogether a third of the field was within easy reach of the lead. It was record for a major championship, and they have been playing them since 1860. There are 16 major winners spread among them, including, ominously for everyone else, that man Scottie Scheffler. All the talk before the tournament was that it would be a turkey shoot, but it turned out to be one long tailback. The only thing missing was the traffic police.

Actually they had one of them, too, or something near enough. A rules official on the first tee gave the 27-year-old South African Garrick Higgo a two-shot penalty for arriving 30 seconds late from the practice green. He still shot a 69. The really odd thing was that in a field where even a man who dropped two shots because he missed his tee time managed to end the day in contention, a couple of the biggest names in the game wound up all but out of it.

• Two-cap veteran picked on bench against France

• Forward had contract but returned to dentistry career

Dentist and lecturer Liz Crake has been named on the bench for England’s grand slam decider against France on Sunday as Kelsey Clifford has been ruled out with injury.

Crake, who has two caps, was called into the squad after Hannah Botterman was ruled out of the entire Six Nations with an ankle issue. Second-choice loosehead prop Clifford picked up a leg injury against Italy last weekend and so Mackenzie Carson will start and the head coach, John Mitchell, who said he has had been forced into 20 player changes across the tournament because of pregnancy and injury, is having to test his side’s depth.

Crake, 31, did have a contract with England in the 2024-25 season but has had to turn back to dentistry for this campaign. She is not the only part-time professional player to compete for the Red Roses during this Six Nations. Christiana Balogun, who works as a recruitment consultant, came off of the bench against Italy because of an injury to Maddie Feaunati.

The Rugby Football Union has 32 full-time contracts in place for Red Roses players. Those who are not contracted get paid for the days they are in camp and a matchday fee.

The captain Meg Jones said: “The players [Crake and Balogun] are full of resilience, the way they are able to come in and switch on and switch off based on their other circumstances as well. It’s definitely probably one of those things that you take for granted when you’ve been in it [professionalism] for so long.

• Hearing over spying allegations on or before Tuesday

• Fans warned before booking travel and accommodation

The English Football League has indicated Southampton could be kicked out of the playoffs and that the date of the final may be delayed if the club are found guilty of breaching regulations.

Southampton have been charged by the EFL for allegedly spying on Middlesbrough’s training within 72 hours of their semi-final first-leg meeting and for not acting “with the utmost good faith”.

Gary Lineker called it possibly the worst VAR decision he has seen. Celtic’s win against Motherwell is another reason to ditch the system

This moment was inevitable. One when observers from Gorgie to Guadalajara ponder how Scottish football got itself into such a tangle with the video assistant referee system. Sadly for Hearts, the incident in question may prove fatal in their push to make history. Sadly for Celtic, it will be a key reference point in the event of a successful title defence.

Gary Lineker played for Tottenham in a 1-1 draw at Tynecastle in 1990, which has never appeared to fuel a lasting affection for Hearts. Lineker is untainted by the Old Firm’s suffocating tribalism. He passed the neutrality test with flying colours. Lineker used social media to amplify the cries of disgust as Celtic were awarded a late, late penalty to win at Motherwell. “This might be the worst VAR decision I’ve seen (and there’s a lot of competition),” Lineker said. “Extraordinary given the significance.”

• Australia striker to leave after six and a half years

• Katie McCabe to leave Arsenal at end of campaign

Sam Kerr will leave Chelsea this summer when her contract expires, the club have announced, ending her six-and-a-half-year spell in west London.

The Australia striker is Chelsea’s leading goalscorer in the Women’s Super League with 64 goals and has scored 115 times for the Londoners in all competitions, during an era of remarkable success for both her and the club.

• Former Real Madrid manager likely to be offered job

• Reece James fit to face Manchester City in FA Cup final

Chelsea’s players believe Xabi Alonso is the ideal candidate to become their next head coach. Talks with the Spaniard’s camp are moving in the right direction and the feeling in the dressing room is that the former Real Madrid and Bayer Leverkusen head coach is the man to get the team back on track.

No agreement is in place and Chelsea are keeping an open mind as they work to appoint a successor to Liam Rosenior, who was sacked last month after 106 days. Alonso is the frontrunner but others on the shortlist include Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola, Fulham’s Marco Silva, Crystal Palace’s Oliver Glasner and the former Flamengo manager Filipe Luís. Cesc Fàbregas has indicated that he wants to stay at Como.

In this exclusive book extract, Rob Draper and Jonathan Northcroft reveal the remarkable process which led to Thomas Tuchel’s appointment as England manager

In 2024, when the Football Association was tasked with finding Gareth Southgate’s successor, Mark Bullingham hired two external data companies who built a profile of what successful international managers looked like then tailored it to mesh with England’s player base.

The top 50 coaches in the world were matched against the criteria and a shortlist emerged. “I joked with the team afterwards, because it came up with a list you and I could have come up with in the pub in 10 minutes,” Bullingham, the FA’s chief executive, says.

• New season will kick off on 9 September

• League arranges record nine international games

The 2026 NFL season will kick off with a Super Bowl rematch. Mike Macdonald, Sam Darnold and the Seattle Seahawks will face off against Mike Vrabel, Drake Maye and the New England Patriots after raising their championship banner on 9 September in the first of the season’s 272 games.

The Seahawks dominated the Patriots in a 29-13 victory in February that secured the franchise’s second NFL title.

You can see the full schedule for 2026 here.

Charity says calls to its Childline service about online sexual abuse and exploitation have risen 36% in a year

Children reported a rise in online blackmail attempts involving sexual images in the UK last year, according to a leading charity.

The NSPCC said contacts with its Childline service relating to online sexual abuse and exploitation rose by 36% last year, driven by an increase in cases related to online blackmail.

Condemnation after Kyiv bears brunt of massive Russian attack wave; warning over military drones too close to Ukrainian nuclear plants. What we know on day 1,542

Exhibition of Melsonby hoard in York challenges ideas about life in northern Britain 2,000 years ago

Iron age objects that tell a dramatic story of female power and that dispel the myth that northern Britain was a left-behind backwater have gone on display for the first time.

The objects exhibited in York are from the Melsonby hoard, the largest trove of iron age metalwork ever found in the UK, which experts say could alter our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago.

Far-right Jewish marchers call for Palestinian villages to ‘burn’ as they storm through Muslim quarter of Old City

Israeli nationalists chanted “death to the Arabs”, “may your villages burn” and “Gaza is a graveyard” in a state-sponsored march through Jerusalem to mark the anniversary of the city’s capture and annexation.

The annual assertion of Jewish control over Palestinian East Jerusalem has grown more extreme in recent years, and Thursday’s event culminated with the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, unfurling an Israeli flag in front of the al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest Islamic site in the city.

Visit comes after US-Cuba relations deteriorated significantly, and as the island nation declared it had ‘absolutely no fuel’ because of US blockade

CIA director John Ratcliffe met Cuban officials in Havana on Thursday as a way to improve dialogue between the US and the communist-run island, the Cuban government said.

The meeting took place “in a context marked by the complexity of bilateral relations, with the aim of contributing to the political dialogue between both nations”, a statement said.

In this week’s newsletter: The public stranding of a young humpback exposes tensions between animal rights activism and other choices around biodiversity

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Timmy the whale is lost at sea, presumed dead.

In normal circumstances, the loss of a young humpback whale would be a sad yet unremarkable part of the circle of life. Dead whales help sustain thousands of marine species – and are part of the global carbon cycle.

Smuggled in syringes: how Nairobi became a nexus for the black market in giant harvester ants

Don’t reach for the bug spray: scientists find insects may feel pain after crickets nurse sore antennae

Labour must fulfil promise to introduce clean air act, charities urge

Murlough Nature Reserve, Dundrum, County Down: Its arrival signals the start of summer, and another cycle of its extraordinary breeding method

Sheltered from the Irish Sea by the towering white foredunes of Murlough beach, I follow a trail through the heather and scrub. In the distance, the Mourne mountains slip in and out of view, already charred by this year’s wildfires. My attention turns to the season’s happier signs: sand martins chittering overhead; the scratchy cries of a whitethroat deep in the gorse; a meadow pipit stuttering into song flight. And now, the chant that clinches summer’s arrival.

I follow the cuckoo’s call and find him perched in a stunted sycamore. Through binoculars, I meet his orange eye. As he leans into his song, his jaunty tail and drooping wings make a fin for the long torpedo of his body – the ideal form for a life lived on the move.

Study of samples from seven winters suggests neurotoxic metal coming from wood itself rather than old paint

Wood heating is reintroducing lead into the air of local communities and homes, a systematic investigation by academics has found.

Overwhelming evidence of lead’s neurotoxicity meant the metal was banned as an additive in petrol more than 25 years ago. The research by academics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst began by analysing samples of particle pollution from five suburban and rural towns in the north-east US. They looked for tiny particles of potassium that are given off when wood is burned and also particles containing lead.

When the birds started nesting on her land at Useless Bay, Chile, Cecilia Durán Gafo decided she would protect them from people and predators

Five pairs of rubbery feet carry velvet-sheathed black-and-white bodies towards the rope line separating the king penguins from the dozen or so visitors, who look on in awe. As these emissaries shuffle over, a hundred of their cohorts parade on a nearby bank, splashing around in the water and regurgitating food into their chicks’ open beaks.

The king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus) makes its home almost exclusively on islands in the Southern Ocean. But it has been coming to this wind-battered bay in southern Chile’s Tierra del Fuego region for hundreds of years, probably because its shallow shores offer protection from marine predators and humans.

King Charles visits Golders Green to show support as commissioner says counter-terrorism team leading 11 investigations

Counter-terrorism officers in London have launched 11 investigations and arrested 35 people after “a sustained period of attack” upon the Jewish community, the head of the UK’s biggest police force has disclosed.

In one of his starkest comments on antisemitism in the UK Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner, told MPs in a letter: “British Jews are not currently safe in their capital city.”

Health officials say close contacts being offered antibiotics as a precaution after cases discovered in Reading

A young person has died and two others are being treated after an outbreak of meningitis in Berkshire, health officials have said.

It follows a major outbreak in Kent, linked to a Canterbury nightclub, that killed two people and left more than a dozen needing hospital treatment in March.

Council of Europe members plan to change interpretation of ECHR to make it easier to deport refused asylum seekers

Keir Starmer’s government has been accused of trying to water down legal protections for torture victims as ministers from 46 countries including the UK prepare to make it easier to deport refused asylum seekers and foreign criminals.

Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, is expected to agree a “political declaration” on Friday with other members of the Council of Europe, which oversees the European convention on human rights (ECHR).

Details of case in which group deny abusing girls for several years restricted amid dispute with media over transparency

Six men have gone on trial at Bristol crown court accused of grooming and sexually assaulting vulnerable teenage girls in the city.

They were allegedly part of a large group of men who abused girls over several years. All six men deny the charges against them, which involved “multiple complainants”.

Wale won a parliamentary ballot 26 votes to 22 and as PM is expected to strengthen ties with traditional allies Australia and the United States

Solomon Islands parliament on Friday elected opposition leader Matthew Wale as prime minister, after incumbent Jeremiah Manele was ousted from power last week in a no-confidence vote, ushering in a change that analysts say will be closely watched by Australia and the US.

Wale defeated Peter Shanel Agovaka by 26 votes to 22 in a ballot of the country’s members of parliament, governor general David Tiva Kapu, told a news conference.

Revelation seen as serious blow to candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading rightwing presidential hopeful

Flávio Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading rightwing presidential hopeful, has been caught on tape asking a banker accused of corruption for $26.8m (£20m) to fund a film about his father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The leaked voice memos and text messages were published on Wednesday by the Intercept Brasil, and later acknowledged by Flávio Bolsonaro, a far-right senator who is tied in polls with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of October’s election.

Young, mostly Roma, members of the Sugo Tambura band realised their dream on Saturday by performing the Roma hymn at Hungary's parliament. The new prime minister, Péter Magyar, kept the promise he made to the children when he visited their village on the campaign trail. Roma rights campaigners have seized the moment, calling on the new government to ensure that the symbolism translates into real change

Doctor in Brandenburg state allegedly committed the crimes, including child rape, between 2013 and 2025

German prosecutors have charged a paediatrician with 130 counts of sexual abuse, including the rape of children, most of them in his care, in a case that has caused shock and prompted clinics to step up safeguards.

The 46-year-old doctor, whose name has not been released, has been in custody since November after a mother suspected her child had been assaulted and notified authorities. The doctor worked in clinics in Brandenburg state, surrounding Berlin.

Veteran broadcaster accuses channel of ‘clear violations’ of Ofcom’s due impartiality rules

• UK politics live – latest updates

The former Sky News political editor Adam Boulton has said GB News should lose its broadcasting licence as he accused Britain’s media regulator of failing in its duty to protect impartial television news.

Boulton, who was Sky News’s political editor for 25 years after the channel launched in 1989, said he believed it was too late to revoke GB News’s broadcasting rights, despite bringing a partisan brand of coverage to British television since its debut in 2021.

Nine-person jury to consider whether AI firm bilked world’s richest person and unjustly enriched themselves

Closing arguments began on Thursday in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, bringing the weeks-long courtroom battle between the two tech moguls nearer to a decision. A nine-person jury is set to deliberate and return a verdict on whether they believe the AI firm and Altman are liable in the case.

The trial, which began last month in an Oakland, California, federal courthouse, has gripped Silicon Valley and featured some of the tech industry’s biggest names as witnesses. Attorneys for both sides have presented testimony and documents that have exposed Musk and Altman’s private dealings, as well as provided a window into the contentious history of OpenAI.

Shares in Spire Healthcare jump after approach from Toscafund, founded by City figure known as ‘the Rottweiler’

The board of Britain’s largest private hospital operator has backed a buyout proposal worth £1bn from its second biggest shareholder, a hedge fund manager known as “the Rottweiler”, sending its shares soaring by nearly 50%.

Spire Healthcare, which owns the Claremont hospital in Sheffield and St Anthony’s hospital in south London, said it had received a non-binding proposal worth 250p a share from funds advised by the activist investor Toscafund Asset Management.

Britain’s largest carmaker says sales also hit by competition in China as it publishes financial results

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Jaguar Land Rover’s annual profits have slumped by more than 99% as it counted the cost of US tariffs and a cyber-attack that disrupted its factories for months.

Britain’s largest carmaker made only £14m in profit before tax and exceptional items in the year to March, down from £2.5bn the year before, according to financial results published on Thursday.

This fascinating novel about 18th-century privateer Alexander Selkirk, abandoned on a tiny island in the South Pacific, becomes a revelatory meditation on humanity

It’s hard to think of many superficial affinities between Frank O’Hara, the queer poet and art critic whose urbane voice is synonymous with 60s Manhattan, and Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century Scottish privateer whose marooning on a tiny island in the South Pacific would eventually inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet, curiously, it is a line from O’Hara’s poem Mayakovsky that Francesca de Tores refits for Selkirk’s mouth at the opening of her new novel, Cast Away.

Selkirk insists that he is cast upon the island “only by the catastrophe of my personality” – “which is a sobering thing, even for a man used to being sober”. And while the O’Hara of Mayakovsky is famously content to wait “for the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern”, Selkirk – newly and utterly alone on “a stony blemish in the ocean”, 400 miles off the coast of Chile – spends his first three days and nights on the island blind drunk on the cask of flip left behind with him as a courtesy from his erstwhile crewmates, raging at his fate. This act of unexpected transhistorical ventriloquism is a suitably strange beginning to a surprisingly uncanny novel.

Cannes film festival: Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi returns to France with this intriguing middleweight meta-drama featuring a cameo from Catherine Deneuve

Asghar Farhadi is the Iranian auteur whose film-making style has always shown the high European influences of Antonioni and Haneke. He has in fact made two films in Europe: The Past in France and Everybody Knows in Spain.

Now he returns to France and the French language for this diverting, middleweight meta-drama about betrayal and about a supposed link between voyeurism and creativity: do writers spy on the characters they have brought to life?

After 40 years of stardom, the cult of Kylie comes to our screens in a Beckham-style Netflix show, while the Duffer brothers bring us Stranger Things set in a spooky care home. Plus: new Bluey!

Phil Dunning’s cracking comedy is back with more hijinks. Plus: Fred Sirieix plays Cupid in a new series of First Dates. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Three
More endearingly lo-fi hijinks at Keith’s World of Carpets as Phil Dunning’s Middlesbrough-set LGBTQ+ comedy returns. The gang are throwing a coming-out party for Stewart but after Keith busts out his terrifying homebrew (“fermented for 37 years”), everything gets a bit psychedelic. So the timing isn’t great for Dickie (Dunning) when his ex turns up. The show never quite manages to be uproarious, but expect to snigger happily throughout. Phil Harrison

Cannes film festival: Hanns Zischler stars as Thomas Mann on his 1949 tour of Germany, contending with political barbs, personal tragedy and his daughter, played by an extraordinary Hüller

Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain. It is directed and co-written by the Polish film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski and shot in lustrous monochrome by Lukasz Zal; it is a film about exile and betrayal, the impossibility of going home and of reconciling an artist’s children to their secondary importance.

The setting is 1949 and the celebrated German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann – who fled the Nazis before the war for California exile and US citizenship – has returned home, first visiting Frankfurt (now in West Germany) to receive an award named after Goethe, whose birthplace this is. It is Goethe’s enlightened civilised wisdom and apolitical artistry Mann will pointedly evoke in his many elaborate speeches.

This gave a young Cruise entry into the A-list, as the brilliant, courageous rule-breaking pilot, frenemy of Val Kilmer and in love with Kelly McGillis

‘This gives me a hard-on”; “Don’t tease me”; “I want some BUTTS!” The comedy takes on sexual identity in Top Gun have become so widespread after Quentin Tarantino’s monologue on the subject that it would be revisionist now to claim that this film was 100% heterosexual. But maybe the joke arose from cinephiles’ civilian naivety about what military life and language have always been like in reality.

In the glory days of the Reagan administration, producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer optioned a magazine article about the US Navy Fighter Weapons School in San Diego, California; this trained an elite corps of pilots in dogfight confrontations with the enemy, with the sword-of-honour first prize being nicknamed “Top Gun”. Tony Scott was appointed to direct and 23-year-old Tom Cruise broke through into the A-list as Lt Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a brilliant pilot whose dad flew in ’Nam and who infuriates yet entrances the uptight high-ups with his instinctive, courageous, rule-shattering brilliance. One cigar-smoking commanding officer almost does nothing in the film but bark “God-DAMMIT, Maverick!” as a junior officer reports Maverick’s latest piece of aerial cheek.

Ensemble Modern/Gruber/Giunta/Amarcord
(Ensemble Modern Media)
From Hindemith’s jazz-age energy to Schoenberg’s existential angst, and Kurt Weill’s biting satire to Korngold’s neo-Romanticism, this lively recording is a perfect example of the kind of music the Nazis couldn’t abide.

If this live recording from Ensemble Modern and HK Gruber represents an eclectic snapshot of musical Germany between 1920 and 1933, it’s also a perfect example of the kind of thing the Nazis couldn’t abide. “Too modern, too jazzy, too Jewish,” they cried. No surprise then that all four composers ultimately wound up in the United States.

Premiered in 1922, Hindemith’s Kammermusik No 1 was condemned by one critic as having “a lewdness and frivolity only possible for a very special kind of composer”. Gruber embraces its neo-classical spikiness and jazz-age energy in a performance of almost cartoonish glee. Korngold, as epitomised by his 1920 music for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, is Hindemith’s polar opposite. In a lively reading, Gruber leavens the composer’s Viennese neo-Romanticism with a pinch of acerbic wit.

(Ourness)
Seething with righteous anger and moshpit-ready tracks, the Australian artist’s genre-hopping but cohesive LP makes a case for the durability of the form

Last September, Genesis Owusu road-tested material from his then-untitled third album at three intimate gigs at Sydney Opera House. Performing in the round for adoring fans, he radiated the confidence of an artist sharing music he deeply believes in. What made the new songs so arresting were the contrasts – snarling punk intermingling with neosoul and dexterous hip-hop – all grounded in Kofi Owusu-Ansah’s magnetic charisma. Even then, months before the album’s release, it was clear the next era of the Ghanaian Australian artist would be something special.

Now titled Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge, Genesis Owusu’s third album arrives with significant expectation after its predecessors – 2021’s Smiling With No Teeth and 2023’s Struggler – rode waves of acclaim and went on to win the Aria album of the year. Following the dense symbolism of those records, with their vivid imagery of black dogs and the unkillable roach, Genesis Owusu has made clear his latest exists “very much on planet Earth in the 2020s”.

A wannabe folk singer’s humdrum life as a shrimp catcher is upended by the arrival of a mysterious American stranger in the Booker-listed tale

Seascraper opens with Thomas Flett rising at five in the morning, eating a cooked breakfast made by his mother and pulling on his oilskins. Thomas is 20, though the ache in his bones makes him feel considerably older – a symptom of the hard physical labour of his job. That job is shanking: dredging the seashore for shrimps at low tide using a horsedrawn cart. Thomas does the same work that his grandfather did decades before him and men from the north-west of England have been doing for 500 years. But his heart is no longer in it: the pay is poor and the work is solitary and dull. He dreams of being a folk singer, playing to audiences in pub backrooms and parlours, and, unbeknown to his mother, has been working on some songs.

Benjamin Wood’s novel, which spans two days, brims with atmosphere and detail; you can practically smell the fish guts and seaweed as Thomas stands on the beach and picks over the morning’s haul. The audiobook is narrated by Wood, whose gentle and evocative delivery underlines Thomas’s hard-bitten existence and his quiet longing for a different future.

Bamberg Symphony/Hrůša
(Deutsche Grammophon)
The first appearance of these distinctive works on the Deutsche Grammophon label is a red-letter day

Written in exile between 1942 and 1953, all but one of Bohuslav Martinů’s six symphonies were commissioned or premiered by US orchestras, yet each exudes the vigorous spirit of the composer’s Czechia homeland. Too often neglected, their first appearance on Deutsche Grammophon is a red-letter day for these distinctive, eminently likable works.

The Bamberg Symphony was founded in 1946 by musicians driven out of Bohemia and Moravia. The music is thus deeply embedded in their DNA and Jakub Hrůša knows just how to draw it out. Martinů’s idiosyncratic sound world incorporates orchestral piano and bristling percussion, while his neo-classical pastoralism is regularly subverted by a bustling rhythmic energy. Tempos accordingly are brisk but never rushed, while crisp, crunchy textures are clean and meticulously detailed.

It was the birthplace of the liberal tradition, but also the incubator for Nazism – what can this historic city tell us about democracy?

‘Weimar is Germany in a nutshell,” 1990s president Roman Herzog once quipped: “a town in which not only culture and thought were at home but also philistinism and barbarism.” The small city (population 65,000) sits at the heart of the nation and acts as a shrine to its sons Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche. In 1919 the country’s first democratic constitution was promulgated in its national theatre. It was chosen as the site of Germany’s rebirth precisely because its aura of refined culture contrasted so sharply with the “Prussian militarism” of Berlin. From 1919-1925 it hosted the Bauhaus School, led by Walter Gropius, placing it at the forefront of art and design.

Yet, starting in the mid-1920s, Weimar, which was also then the state capital of Thuringia, became pivotal in the rise of the Nazi party and its first, regional, experiments in government. After 1933 it competed with Bayreuth for recognition as the “spiritual home of Nazism”.

This moving work about an irascible woman in her 70s who conducts her most intimate relationships through letters has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize

Epistolary novels were once all the rage, from the epic Clarissa to the lurid fun of Dracula. They don’t come along very often now, perhaps because they can be tricky to do well: all those gaps and omissions, the need for a flawless command of tone and voice, the problem of creating movement within an unusually hermetic form. But every now and then a book appears that’s a breakout success. The 2000s saw two epistolary smash hits in We Need to Talk about Kevin and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (boy, are those different reading experiences), while in the 2010s there was Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

Now we have Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent. It’s been one of those word-of-mouth sensations that puts a spring back into publishers’ steps, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, now shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction. It’s easy to see why, given that it’s such an immensely enjoyable read.

Modernist poet whose work is considered hard to grasp but rewarding for the reader who persists

The poetry of JH Prynne, who has died aged 89, has been called opaque, hermetic, impenetrable, forbidding even, and at times it was all of these. But it also sang. To read his Kitchen Poems (1968), The White Stones (1969) or The Oval Window (1983) is to encounter a writer for whom sound and sense were never separable.

As Robert Potts wrote in the Guardian: “Prynne is hard-going, off-putting and much disliked by many more traditional writers; he is also, when one gets into him, so good that he changes the way you think and feel.”

To a light led sole in pit of, this by slap-up barter
of an arm rest cap, on stirrup trade in
crawled to many bodies, uncounted. Talon up
crude oil-for-food, incarnadine incarcerate, get
foremost a track rocket, rapacious in heavy
investment insert tool this way up.

And so, then, the
magnetic influence of Venus sweeps its
shiver into the heart/brain or hypothalamus,
we are still here, I look steadily at nothing.
“The gradient of the decrease may be de-
termined by the spread in intrinsic lumin-
osities” – the ethereal language of love in
brilliant suspense between us and the
hesitant arc. Yet I need it too and keep
one hand in my pocket & one in yours,
waiting for the first snow of the year.

Radical hope and rage combine in this tale of ecological precarity and resistance among sex workers on a brothel island

‘Yes, you will leave this place,” the chorus of child protagonists in a community of sex workers say at the start of Tahmima Anam’s incantatory and fiery new novel of female defiance, Uprising. “This story will save your life,” we were told three times in Deepa Anappara’s 2020 debut, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, also featuring precarious children dwelling in the margins. What is the distance between imagination and action, lived realities and dreams? How can solidarities be forged in such circumstances? Uprising holds within its pages some answers and a deep conviction – for a better life, a more just world – and then reaches out and fights for it.

As a journalist, Anam visited the infamous “floating brothel” Banishanta in Bangladesh; her new novel, set on an isolated island “at the end of the country, in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea”, fictionalises the island’s community and ecological precarity. Here, a generation of daughters grow up watching their mothers trapped in sex work – “we knew that the work was something that was paid for in money, and also in bodies” – and wish a different life for themselves. The women are controlled by the cruel Amma, who was once herself sold into sex trafficking. The victim becomes the perpetrator – and the children are discerning enough to know that their mothers are “not here because they had done something bad, but because something bad had been done to them”. The first lesson of the island? No one is coming to save you – and living here changes you, as inexorably as the rising tides.

Why are Nintendo releasing a straight-up remake of the space-flight shooter – with many of its original limitations – rather than a fresh new take?

The Nintendo 64 was not my first video game console, but it was my formative one. Getting to grips with 3D movement in Super Mario 64 with that weird three-pronged controller is one of my most visceral childhood memories; the long, long wait for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the background noise to a huge chunk of my youth. But back in the 1990s (in the UK at least), it felt as if nobody had an N64. When everybody had a PlayStation instead, I felt I was the only kid in my whole city who cared more about Banjo-Kazooie than Crash Bandicoot.

If even Zelda seemed comparatively niche in Europe in the 90s, Lylat Wars (known elsewhere as Star Fox 64) was a real deep cut. It’s a 1997 space-flight shooter starring Fox McCloud and his squad of animal pilots laser-blasting across different planets in nimble crafts called Arwings. I played this game to absolute death in 1998, when I got it for my birthday alongside the fabled Rumble Pak, which made your controller vibrate and shudder whenever something cool was happening on screen (fun fact: Lylat Wars was the first console game to feature controller rumble). But I really hadn’t thought about it much since. Then, last week, Nintendo announced a Switch 2 remake.

Previously prohibited use of websites such as Omoggle that connect a streamer to a stranger’s video feed now allowed

Last week, at 4am, 19-year-old Sammy Amz was scrolling through X when something caught his eye: a popular Twitch streamer was competing in a 1v1 “mog-off” with a stranger, and losing.

The next day he opened the Omoggle gaming website and began to play. Quickly he matched with another user – green dots appeared on their faces onscreen, as the website began to compare their measurements: canthal tilt, palpebral fissure ratio, nose-to-face width ratio and so on.

PS5, Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Annapurna Interactive
The nostalgic antics of a trio of tenacious teens make for silly yet undeniably enjoyable gameplay, framed by a playlist of bona fide bangers

The older we get, the more we tend to romanticise our teenage years. As bills pile up, we yearn for the simple days of drinking cider in parks. We often tend to forget the bad parts: the frustrating lack of autonomy, the unrequited crushes and the doofuses you’re forced to tolerate in the playground. But after four hours spent hanging out with the pretentious teens in Mixtape, I felt pretty relieved to be in my 30s.

Set in a nondescript town in northern California, Mixtape follows the exploits of tenacious trio Rockford, Slater and Cassandra as they head to a legendary party on their last day of high school. With Rockford about to leave her friends to move to the big city, she wants to immortalise the gang’s time together in musical form. Every song on a carefully curated mixtape triggers a totally tubular flashback to one of their shared memories.

For anyone needing a break from binging The Pitt, you can always put in your own shifts as a hospital manager, surgeon, paramedic and of course as a demonic morgue assistant

Like the rest of the western world, our household is currently binging medical drama The Pitt, revelling in its visceral depiction of life in a modern emergency department. So far the series has yet to inspire a video game tie-in (though there has been an amusing parody), but fans wishing to try their hand at tense medical (mal)practice, should not despair. Here are eight of the best hospital games spanning more than 40 years of gruesome interactive surgery. Squirt some hand sanitiser and come this way.

Lyric Hammersmith, London
The dissolute aristocrats from 1895 remain sharply funny, and bitingly relevant, in this flamboyant new spin

Oscar Wilde’s comedy was billed as a “play of modern life” when it premiered at the Haymarket theatre in London in 1895. It is just as modern now in its central, chiming theme: the clandestine corruptions of outwardly squeaky-clean members of parliament.

Sir Robert Chiltern (Chiké Okonkwo) is the apparently upstanding minister and “ideal husband” to Lady Chiltern (Tamara Lawrance) but his past bears the illicit selling of a cabinet secret to a baron. This threatens to ruin him if he does not appease the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley (Aurora Perrineau).

Linbury theatre, Royal Opera House, London
The first UK visit for the company showcases the dancers’ elegance and versatility across three pieces of varying impact

This small Oklahoman dance company, making its first visit to the UK, has been going for 70 years. For the last three decades its artistic director has been the Italian Marcello Angelini, who clearly sets standards high for his very finessed set of dancers (which includes Edward Truelove from England and a Scot, James Lachlan Murray).

That’s demonstrated especially in the opening piece of this triple bill, Classical Symphony by Yuri Possokhov, a Ukrainian choreographer now resident at San Francisco Ballet. Set to Prokofiev, Possokhov’s neoclassical dance has a bit of flex to it, a cheeky rock of the hips or other off-piste details, but always prioritises grace. For lead couple Nao Ota and Jun Masuda, it’s tricky, technical choreography, which they pull off with an absolute ease. The steps come in a long continuous flurry, but everything is neatly articulated with breezy elegance.

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Dawn Steele stars in Ron Ferguson’s warm-hearted tale of a town whose fortunes are tied to those of its coal mine and local team

Black diamonds are what they used to dig up from the Fife coalfields. The Blue Brazil is the unlikely nickname of Cowdenbeath football club. Together, in the 1993 book by Ron Ferguson, they represent the bittersweet hopes of a downtrodden town: the coal that brought work, fatal accidents and unemployment; the team that brought moments of joy and a litany of loss. You would call it a triumph of the underdog, except this team never triumphs.

“Some things are more important than winning,” is the catchphrase of the ex-miner and diehard Cowdenbeath fan (Barrie Hunter) who haunts this warm-hearted adaptation by Gary McNair, first aired as an audio drama in 2021. More important, the playwright would argue, is a sense of community, of shared experience, of learning not to be defeated by pit closures, job losses, relegation and death. It is about “how to lose and keep going with hope”.

Royal Opera House, London
As the central couple, SeokJong Baek and Aigul Akhmetshina are dramatically persuasive and expressive in this revival of Richard Jones’s staging that works hard to make Saint-Saëns’ often dramatically inert opera zing

“Who wants to hear Samson et Dalila?” asked George Bernard Shaw in a masterfully scathing review of Saint-Saëns’ opera in its 1893 UK premiere. “I respectfully suggest, nobody.” Samson et Dalila’s fortunes since suggest an alternative answer. But the piece remains an odd hybrid of opera and oratorio, held together by the best of its music and the talents of the two principal singers.

On the headline-act front, the Royal Opera’s first revival of Richard Jones’s 2022 production is a triumph. South Korean tenor SeokJong Baek returns as Samson, the role with which he made his acclaimed Covent Garden debut. Where dramatic chemistry with Elīna Garanča, the 2022 Dalila, was evidently in short supply, this revival boasts a role debut from the ever-astonishing young mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina. Fresh from a winning streak of Carmens, Akhmetshina exudes dramatic self-possession and physical ease, her seductive intensity the ideal foil for the tortured awkwardness of Baek’s hero.

There was wind, there was fire, there was Goodrem’s remarkable upper-range – resulting in a refreshingly self-assured offering from Australia

• ‘Sung by a silver robot from 1984!’ The 11 biggest bangers in Eurovision 2026

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Standing before a glistening crescent moon and adorned in more than 7,000 Swarovski crystals, Australia’s 2026 Eurovision hopeful Delta Goodrem delivered a powerful performance on the 70th anniversary of the global song contest – and became the first Australian act to qualify for the grand final since 2023.

Heading into the competition as an early favourite behind Eurovision heavy-hitters Denmark and Finland, Goodrem delivered a note-perfect rendition of her power-ballad entry, Eclipse. The track is impressive if a little formulaic – and of the 35 countries competing, 15 are represented by solo female performers, so Goodrem needed to find a way to stand out in a crowded field.

Export’s performances scandalised Austria in the 1960s, but are now recognised for exposing the objectification of the female body

Valie Export, the Austrian performance artist and film-maker who inverted the male gaze in ways that were provocative, shocking and often outrageously fun, has died aged 85.

The artist’s own foundation announced on Thursday evening that Export died in Vienna earlier the same day, three days before her 86th birthday.

The £20,000 award for writers aged 39 or under goes to Joy Is My Middle Name, a collection about navigating race, addiction and womanhood

A debut poetry collection with themes including race, addiction and womanhood has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut collection Joy Is My Middle Name. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

Speaking at the Royal Institution, the author and screenwriter linked falling shared reading rates to poverty, housing insecurity and social media

Frank Cottrell-Boyce has urged policymakers to treat children’s reading as a “right” rather than a parental duty, warning that Britain is failing to understand the emotional and social value of reading, as new research shows a sharp decline in daily shared reading at home.

Speaking at the Royal Institution in his final laureate lecture, The Kids Are Not Alright, the children’s laureate linked falling shared reading rates to poverty, housing insecurity and social media.

From Hadrian’s Wall to the locations of Happy Valley and Hot Fuzz, readers share their top discoveries

• Tell us about your favourite UK coast walk – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

“So this is where Officer Nick Angel [Simon Pegg] chased that swan.” As a fan of Hot Fuzz, I was excited to explore the cathedral city of Wells in Somerset, where much of the film was shot. This charming, compact and walkable city is awash with medieval architecture and magnificent buildings, such as the gothic cathedral, with one of the oldest working clocks in the UK (late 14th century) and the Bishop’s Palace and Gardens. Within easy reach of the Mendip Hills, Cheddar Gorge and the Wookey Hole Caves, Wells makes for a low-key alternative to tourist-soaked Bath.
Alison

From a converted art deco hotel in Glasgow to a brutalist apartment in London’s Barbican

Our reviewer braved Peak District downpours to see which brollies – from budget to mini to windproof – stayed standing

• 10 stylish and practical ways to look good in wet weather

We Britons have loved brollies since about the turn of the 19th century. Previously an aristocratic luxury, today they’re a broad tent covering tight budgets and expensive tastes alike. You’ll see them sprout like mushrooms whenever rain hits the high street.

Most decent umbrellas will keep you dry(ish), but peek closer and you’ll find that not all are the same. Some have a stronger, smoother mechanisms; others are lighter and more comfortable to hold. The best stand out for thoughtful details: from polished wooden handles to gleaming tips, a brolly’s aesthetic finish can often be a clue to how long it will last.

Best umbrella overall:
London Undercover Classic

Best budget umbrella:
Doppler Zero 99

Agonising over what to buy the three-year-old in your life? Our writer enlisted a panel of mini testers to round up the best of the best

• The best gifts for two-year-olds

Three-year-olds are a unique breed. Growing in confidence and independence daily, they’re no longer toddlers, but they’re still a way off starting school. With both of my children, I’ve found three a funny yet challenging age. My youngest is three and is now determined to do everything by herself, despite not quite being able to, resulting in frequent tantrums. She’s forming new friendships and is full of curiosity and wonder at the world (we get extremely detailed and lengthy descriptions of the tadpoles living in her classroom).

Three-year-olds are into just about everything, with the confidence of someone much older – especially anything you put out of reach (my three-year-old just successfully opened several wrapped presents that weren’t for her) – but too much choice can be overwhelming for them.

Camping season has arrived, but which mattress is worth packing? Our expert rigorously tested 27 to find the best for durability and comfort

• The best camping chairs

Whether you love sleeping under the stars or only do so under duress, a decent camping mattress will at least help ensure you are well-rested and better equipped to handle the wider thrills and spills of outdoor living.

The days when your only choice was between a foam roll mat or a leaky airbed and foot pump are long gone. From self-inflating mattresses to lightweight sleeping pads and insulated airbeds, the comfort and portability of sleeping mats have dramatically improved. But with so many types of camping mattresses available, costing from tens to hundreds of pounds, it can be difficult to know where to start.

Best camping mattress overall:
Therm-a-Rest NeoLoft

Best budget camping mattress:
Decathlon Simond MT500 XL inflatable trekking mattress

From rinsing wool in a colander to deep cleaning your washing machine, here are 15 expert tips to help your clothes last and last

• How to make your leather last a lifetime

It’s a common problem: you buy something new and start wearing and washing it regularly, only to find that it has developed a slightly grey tinge or faded colours after just a few months. Most clothes aren’t fragile, but they’re not indestructible either – and the way we wear, wash and store them makes more of a difference than we think.

Looking after your clothes properly can mean they last longer, hold their shape and don’t need replacing nearly as often, which is better for both your bank balance and the planet. And while investing in well-made pieces is important, what you do afterwards matters just as much.

Bring a taste of Thailand into your home with sweet, creamy, sticky coconut rice served with fragrant mango

Known as khao niao mamuang, this sweet, creamy coconut rice with ripe mango is one of Thailand’s most beloved desserts. The rice used is sweet glutinous rice, which is sometimes labelled sticky rice – a short-grain variety that turns tender, glossy and slightly chewy when steamed. Folded through warm coconut milk and served with slices of fragrant mango, it’s a simple but beautiful pudding. Don’t forget the salt, though; it is essential to balance the richness. Serve warm or at room temperature.

From James Bond’s breakfasts to the kimchi fried rice in Crying in H Mart, a book’s food can often linger longer in our memories than its characters or storylines

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

When I first had the idea for my debut novel, The Underdog, which came out last week, I knew it had to include food. After all, the received wisdom is to write about what you know and, after almost two decades’ worth of recipes, features and restaurant reviews, it’s surely my specialist subject. Though a grumpy terrier threatens to steal the limelight, the book’s (ostensible) main character, Katy, is a newly qualified pastry chef who goes from turning out heritage duck egg and black garlic mayo sourdough sandwiches in a painfully pretentious London cafe, to making cheese scones with foraged sea buckthorn jam on the west coast of Scotland. Her journey also involves a Michelin-starred restaurant and a bespoke baking business (as well as a couple of disastrous run-ins with bitchy critics, including on a television gameshow involving Sue Perkins and a chocolate souffle challenge).

I had an absolute blast writing the book, and the food sections were definitely the most fun – thinking about what a starred restaurant might serve with a salted chocolate tart, say (Fergus Henderson’s recipe is here, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t pair it with a beetroot sorbet and walnut crumb), or what a critic might order for lunch at Margot Henderson’s Rochelle Canteen (bitter greens, like our own Rachel Roddy’s, for a start). In fact, from the glistening, bronzed hunk of pork with salsa verde and pressed potatoes set in front of the UK’s most feared culinary taste-maker, to the merguez and chip baguette Katy eats on the pavement after kidnapping a dog she doesn’t even like, the food is the real star.

Perhaps the non-alcoholic alternative for wine drinkers should not be a wine at all, but a different sip altogether? We slurp through some likely candidates …

After my positive pregnancy test eight years ago, the first thing I did was buy an industrial quantity of the non-alcoholic aperitivo Crodino, which is something of a negroni dupe for bitters hounds. There are plenty of really good, alcohol-free cocktail options nowadays, and beer drinkers, too, are amply catered for in the non-alcoholic department – but what of wine?

I may sound like an old fart, but for me, at 41, the pleasure of drinking wine is more about a sense of occasion than the stuff’s mind-altering qualities. (Collagen and social inhibition, I have discovered, wane in tandem.) So the challenge for wine drinkers who aren’t drinking is to find a proxy to sip and enjoy in the same way. Something that comes in a wine bottle. Something you drink from a glass with a stem. Something that works with food. Something that isn’t Shloer.

A deliciously rustic, risotto-style pasta using seasonal spring veg and finished with butter, parmesan and lemon zest

I am in more or less the same position as with last week’s recipe, only this time the pods contain broad beans, which are slightly easier to read than peas. This is because the pods are longer and become softer and floppier as they age, so you can see and feel if the beans inside are large and hard, which, like peas, is because their sugar has turned to starch, and which makes them more suited to longer cooking. The other thing about broad beans is their opaque jackets, which thicken as the beans age and get more bitter, but they can be removed by picking them off with a nail, or by dunking the beans in hot water for a minute, then in cold water and squeezing the jackets off and across the worktop. Even older, larger beans can be enjoyed raw or lightly cooked; they are brighter, too, like green tiddlywinks.

As well as dealing with pods, I have been reading about broad beans in recipe books and stories, looking out in particular for references to how they are consumed in spring, which in Italy is often alongside young sheep’s cheese – a great combination, as is broad beans and lancashire cheese. It turns out, though, that the mentions I have enjoyed most are to be found in England, and in George Eliot’s Adam Bede. One instance is when Adam, having walked past the leafy walls of scarlet beans, late peas and bushy filberts, strides over a “superfluity of broad beans” in Mrs Poyser’s garden; another when he eats cold broad beans out of a large dish with his pocket knife, and finds a flavour that he would not exchange for the finest pineapple.

There are so many causes here that aren’t up to him, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Rather than trying to change him, change the goal

• Read more Leading questions

I am in a relationship with a lovely man who I first dated when we were 19 and 20 years old respectively. Now in our mid-50s, we have been together for three years. We laugh a lot and enjoy doing lots of things together – his enthusiasm for travel matches mine.

The issue is he sleeps a lot – at least 10 hours a night but could be 12 hours. He could easily stay in bed until 1pm on any day off. This means when we are on one of our frequent trips away, we rarely get to do things together in the morning – a time I love. I’ve addressed it with him and he sometimes makes the effort, but then reverts back. We don’t live together and only see each other one day a week, so time is precious and I often end up waiting around for him to get up.

Mark is frustrated that Lucinda’s open-door policy allows mosquitoes into their flat. You decide who needs to get a handle on this issue

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

Closing them doesn’t take a huge amount of work; it takes seconds and stops heat and insects getting in

Keeping them open feels more relaxed and homey – plus, it’s better for the cat

Female home owners report feeling stuck between men’s contradictory expectations – they are told to be independent, but not assume the breadwinner role

When Tiffany Tate put the wheels in motion to buy her first home, it felt like a win – until a date’s response stopped her cold.

“If you buy that house, what’s a guy going to do for you?” he said. It was just after their first date, and just before what would be their last.

A tiny bird with a giant ego, Crispin was a remarkable singer – especially if you told him how talented, intelligent and gracious he was

I was around four years old when my parents bought me Crispin, my first pet. A handsome yellow canary, Crispin was bad-tempered and behaved like an alpha male. He would spend hours preening. I thought he was enchanting.

A gentle female canary, Mariflor, arrived soon after. She became Crispin’s other half and the mother of their chicks, Maribel and Quintin. Having a canary family compensated for my lack of siblings and extended family. It gave me a sense of responsibility and filled my life with joy.

We had booked a cruise for him and his carers, but we had a string of problems when we tried to change names

In November 2024, I booked a cruise for my wife, myself and our severely disabled son for this July. I’d booked well in advance to ensure an accessible cabin for my son. At home, he needs round-the-clock care from a rota of eight carers, so we made extra bookings for three to accompany him.

Because the care team has other commitments, I couldn’t confirm their names at the time of booking and was told to do so by this April, when the balance had to be paid.

If you are looking for a new account, there are some good rates around, but also pitfalls to watch out for

Earning as much as 7% on your savings sounds great – but what’s the catch? The top-paying accounts often come with strings attached, which could mean your money is not working as hard as you thought.

That’s important because there is a lot of cash sitting in fixed-rate savings accounts that are about to reach the end of their term. The total amount in accounts maturing between April and June is £90bn, according to the savings app Spring – and that money will need to find a new home.

Haringey council’s penalty seems extortionate – especially when other authorities charge lower amounts

I read your story about a man fined £500 for dropping a cigarette butt on the pavement.

I have been issued with a £500 fixed-penalty notice (FPN) by Haringey council for putting a butt in a refuse sack awaiting collection on the street.

Criminals exploit confusion or anxiety over new IHT rules by offering a ‘safe haven’ for savings pots

The caller pitches a great deal. Shift the moneysaved in your pension and reinvest it in a scheme overseas where you can avoid it being caught under next year’s changes to the UK’s inheritance tax (IHT) system.

From April next year, any money left in a defined contribution pension after your death, which is most workplace and all private pensions, will be pulled into the IHT net.

Pioneering and controversial geneticist who was one of the first to sequence the human genome, in part by using his own DNA

At the international BioVision conference in Lyon in February 2001, the geneticist Craig Venter performed a remarkable piece of scientific barnstorming. Human beings possess far fewer genes than science had ever realised, he announced. We have about 30,000, far lower than previous estimates of 100,000.

Such lack of heritable material showed people are not prisoners of their genes but are shaped primarily by environmental influences, he added. “We simply do not have enough genes for this idea of biological determinism to be right,” said Venter, who has died aged 79. “The wonderful diversity of the human species is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are critical.”

Rather than bribery, or hiding carrots under ketchup, the key may be to expose foetuses to healthy flavours

It is an age-old battle with small children that most parents will recognise: please, please, eat your vegetables.

Some will read them books with titles such as The Boy Who Loved Broccoli. Others have been known to smother veg in tomato ketchup, or mix avocado and fruit with Greek yoghurt and call it icecream. Or resort to plain bribery.

Social media is awash with clips of people paying to be ‘bathed’ in sound. But what’s the science behind the practice?

• Read more in the Antiviral series

I, for one, am partial to a bath: what’s not to love about a dim room, candles and nary an electronic device in sight?

But a wellness trend that has emerged in recent years makes soaking in tepid water seem quaint: increasingly, people are paying to be “bathed” in sound.

Long considered an important milestone in one’s fitness journey, pull-ups build upper body strength and look impressive in the gym

The pull-up has long been seen as an important fitness metric. From 1966 to 2013, public middle and high school students in the US were required to do pull-ups as part of the presidential fitness test (an evaluation Donald Trump has considered reinstating). US Marine Corps members were long required to perform pull-ups as part of their regular physical fitness test, and prospective UK Royal Marines must complete a minimum of three to four pull-ups before they are eligible to join.

There is no definitive data on how many adults can perform a proper pull-up, but two things are clear: they are very difficult and look extremely cool.

Lat pulldowns.

Bent-over dumbbell rows.

Single-arm dumbbell rows.

Wide upright rows.

Shoulder shrugs.

Designer suggests decision to stage show in Los Angeles is part of strategy to deepen label’s cinema presence

Like Christian Dior, the founder of the house he now leads, fashion designer Jonathan Anderson’s ambition is to be not just a Parisian couturier but a Hollywood power player. “We think of Dior as this romantic character, but he was also a very savvy businessman,” said Anderson before a blockbuster catwalk show in Los Angeles. Stage Fright, the Hitchcock caper-noir for which Dior dressed Marlene Dietrich, was the show’s origin story. “There is all this amazing correspondence between Dior, Dietrich and Hitchcock, which shows how he navigated the money that it cost to make that film. I think we underestimate how much negotiation Dior did with studio executives. He was very smart in that way.”

Anderson, 41, who was born in Northern Ireland but since being appointed to Dior splits his time between London and Paris, has his own Hollywood side hustle as the costume designer for Luca Guadagnino’s films, and is set on reinvigorating Dior’s relationship with the film industry.

Zeal for ‘the Hamptons of England’ has rubbed off on sales, with luxury British fashion brand back to a full-year profit

• Business live – latest updates

The luxury fashion brand Burberry has said a new £2,000 handbag named after the Cotswolds has bolstered sales, as the English region becomes increasingly popular with wealthy Americans.

Joshua Schulman, the company’s chief executive, said its tote bags – which mix leather and the signature Burberry check – had helped drive its best performance in bag sales since 2023.

In an unexpected turn of events, brooches have escaped from Granny’s jewellery box, climbed out the window and gone clubbing

I have arrived in my brooch era about two decades ahead of schedule. I had brooches earmarked for a later life stage, accessories that would chime with The Archers, gardening, possibly solving the odd crime in the village, that sort of thing.

But in an unexpected turn of events, I am already the correct age to wear a brooch. Not because I’m old, but because brooches have changed. They have cast off their church fete vibe and become cool. Zendaya wore a diamond serpent brooch pinned to the back of her white jacket to last year’s Met Gala. At a press conference before the recent Mexico City premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2, Meryl Streep added no fewer than six brooches to the lapel of her pillarbox red Dolce & Gabbana suit. Pedro Pascal wore a silk Chanel camellia the size of a sunflower to the Oscars. The brooch has escaped from Granny’s jewellery box, climbed out the window and gone clubbing.

Co-founder of Gap whose tastes helped establish the template for the clothing brand’s affordable ‘preppy’ look

The first branch of Gap was a single small storefront selling men’s denim and vinyl discs at 1850 Ocean Avenue, in the classy Inglewood neighbourhood of San Francisco, the city which, at the time of the store’s opening, 1969, was at the centre of hippy and other youth cultures. The founding story is that a middle-aged real-estate developer, Donald Fisher, couldn’t find Levi jeans in his size – with a 31in inseam – in the city, and set up the store to supply Levi’s piled wall-high in all cuts and sizes. But much of what the world now thinks of as Gap actually came from his wife, Doris Fisher, who has died aged 94.

The Fishers invested their life savings in the $63,000 start-up cost of the store, which Donald wanted to call Pants and Discs. The night before they had to instruct the signwriter what to paint on its fascia, Doris came up with “The Generation Gap” (referring to the divide between their age group and the then-young baby boomers), then shortening it to “The Gap”; although her style choices for Gap clothes often diminished rather than accentuated age and gender differences.

There are few places where history can be felt more powerfully than these pathways, walked by explorer, author and TV presenter Nicholas Crane

How often do you look down and wonder who created the path your feet are following? Or ask the cause of its curves and dips? Formed over thousands of years, paths form an “internet of feet” – a web of bridleways and hollow ways, drove roads and ridgeways, coffin tracks, pilgrimage trails and city pavements. Whether you’re hiking a National Trail or pottering along a National Trust footpath, there’s a good chance you’re following ancestral steps.

It’s thoughts like these that led me on a journey to track the evolution of British paths for my book, The Path More Travelled. Eleven thousand years ago ice age hunter-gatherers arrived from Europe’s heartlands, moving through the wilderness along broad “routeways”, that later widened to tracks when horses and then wheels were adopted in the bronze age. For more than 2,000 years, traffic moved no faster than the speed of a horse, until the internal combustion engine drove pedestrians off the road just over a century ago.

Improve your mountain skills by day and party by night at the Arc’teryx Alpine Academy in Chamonix

After a day spent hiking across the Col d’Entrèves glacier, a sugar hit is required. I descend on the cable car and join the queue at the ice-cream counter. Above me, surrounded by jagged peaks, looms the huge white figure of Mont Blanc, serene and pure against a brilliant blue sky. Although it’s late afternoon, people are still heading up the mountain, and there are two clear groups. On one side are the tourists, who are about to be lifted into unfamiliar frozen realms at 3,375 metres (11,072ft), hoping to grab a picture and return. Mixed among them are the weathered faces of mountain experts: hikers confidently heading for a high-altitude hut, or climbers with coils of rope.

How many of those tourists, I wonder, are wishing they could be mountaineers, secretly regretting the twists of fate that kept them away from that path? But all is not lost. The aspiring adventurer, no matter what age or background, can begin the journey to competence in the mountains. The annual mountain festival I am attending aims to facilitate that by offering the chance to gain hands-on experience with experts.

The island of Samsø offers tranquil walks, biking, birding, distillery and pottery tours, and locally sourced fare – including citrusy ants

‘We have lammerullepøllse – lamb rolled sausage – today,” says Daniel Hesseldal-Haines, chef at Det Lille Sommerhotel on the Danish island of Samsø. “It tastes better than the translation sounds. And,” he gestures towards a woman sitting by the window, “the lamb is from Camilla’s farm.”

Camilla gives us a friendly wave, and my eyes fix upon her sweater, featuring row upon row of colourful motifs. Think Fair Isle but less orderly: each stripe holds a different design. “Oh, I made this,” she says. “It’s hønsestrik – chicken knitting. You can use it to tell your story – so this one is about hiking,” she adds, pointing to each section: “These are my footprints, this is my tent, my coffee flask …”

From B&Bs and cabins to fincas and family hotels, these rural boltholes make ideal bases for exploring the region’s mountains, trails and historic towns and villages

For centuries, outsiders have been lured to the radiant hills and valleys of Andalucía, not least the Moors of north Africa who left such an impact on the land and culture. More recently, an influx of northern European aficionados has fostered a string of seductive, small-scale guesthouses to join some idiosyncratic Spanish-owned properties. These are idyllic, tranquil settings in which to de-stress and recharge, hike, ride, cycle, cook, swim or simply stargaze – the rural skies here are blissfully free of light pollution. Nor are cultural highlights ever far away, whether in Granada, Córdoba or Seville.

You may think you know when someone’s trying to deceive you, but there’s a clever trick very few people are aware of – one that has eluded AI and Traitors contestants alike

Can you tell if someone is lying?

Close your eyes. You’re already twice as good as you were before.

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

Welcome to the Thursday news quiz, where curiosity is in full bloom thanks to our illustration by Anaïs Mims. Even the most carefully arranged facts can contain a hint of uncertainty, so beware the rogue question marks popping up among the petals of knowledge. Fifteen questions on topical news, pop culture and general knowledge await. There are no prizes, but we always enjoy hearing how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 247

The answers to today’s pronunciation puzzles

Earlier today I set you these two word puzzles. Here they are again with solutions.

1: Pronounced the same, spelt differently.

(Second option) (Switch back and forth)

(Suitable) (Commandeer)

(Satisfied) (Components)

(Conference attendee) (Assign)

(Price reduction) (Disregard)

(Way in) (Enrapture)

(Incorrect) (Disabled)

(60 seconds) (Tiny)

(In attendance) (Give)

(Fruit and vegetables) (Generate)

(Deny) (Rubbish)

(Distress) (Surprise victory)

Alternate

Appropriate

Content

Delegate

Discount

Entrance

Invalid

Minute

Present

Produce

Refuse

Upset

Horticulturalists express alarm after award-winning Matt Keightley launches app that can automate designs

With glasses of champagne sipped among the peonies, Chelsea flower show is generally a friendly and genteel occasion. But this year, the secateurs have been drawn as gardeners clash over the use of AI in designing the exhibits.

Matt Keightley, an award-winning designer who has created gardens for figures including Prince Harry, is using artificial intelligence to design his garden for the prestigious show, held at the Royal Hospital gardens in Chelsea, London, next week.

Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continues and is deepening divisions across Lebanon. Supporters of Hezbollah call the group “the resistance” and see the conflict as existential. Despite agreeing to a ceasefire, Israel still occupies parts of southern Lebanon and insists Hezbollah must disarm for there to be peace—a view shared by many Lebanese. With communities split over Hezbollah’s future, The Guardian travels across Lebanon to find out how the conflict is widening divisions and affecting life across the country.

Filmgoers born after 1997 are reviving cinemas’ hopes of survival. They tell us about the social experience where ‘there’s absolutely no commitment to chat’

People born between 1997 and 2012 are now more frequent cinemagoers than some older age groups, according to a US-based survey by Fandango, with 87% having seen at least one film in a cinema in the last 12 months compared with 58% of baby boomers.

With this in mind we asked young people about why they love the cinema.

Defying criticisms of ‘slop’ and ‘theft’, the growing culture of AI-powered creativity is attracting interest from Hollywood

In a former hemstitching workshop where artisans sewed pleats for Stockholm’s 19th-century bourgeoisie, a distinctly 21st-century craft is taking root: AI film-making.

One day last week, an actor, director and composer squeezed into a tiny studio booth to record a voiceover for their next AI release. Critics disparage AI movies as “automated slop” or cheating, and fume at what they claim to be industrial-scale copyright theft. But this had a distinctly homespun feel, the little team fussing over a monologue by a poetic Scottish gorilla inhabiting a transhumanist cyberpunk universe. It was a bit like recording the Archers, one of them joked.

Find out how we compiled our list of the 100 best novels published in English – and nominate your favourites

• See 100-41 on the list here

This week, we reveal our list of the 100 greatest novels published in English, as voted for by authors and critics around the world. We polled 172 authors, critics and academics for their top 10 novels of all time, published in English, and asked them to rank their choices in order of preference. We scored the titles according to how often they were voted for, and then added a weighting based on individual rankings to produce the overall list of 100 greatest books.

What would be at the top of your list? Which authors do you think should be there? What are your favourite novels of all time?

If you have been affected by the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship, we would like to hear from you

Twenty Britons from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak continue to be offered practical and emotional support as they isolate at a UK hospital.

Along with the 20 British nationals, a German who is a UK resident, and a Japanese passenger, were taken to Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral on Sunday after the MV Hondius docked in Tenerife.

We’d like to hear how you’re adapting your expenditure as the cost of living rises amid the conflict in the Middle East

Rising prices and economic uncertainty linked to the conflict in the Middle East are putting pressure on household budgets across the world.

The International Monetary Fund has warned the conflict is pushing up the cost of energy and food, increasing borrowing costs and weighing on economic growth. Surveys suggest millions of households are already making changes to cope – cutting back, dipping into savings or taking on debt.

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The King Charles III England Coast Path, which launches officially this year, is opening up miles of previously inaccessible coastal terrain to walkers in England. We’d love to hear about your favourite coastal walks all around the UK, from the White Cliffs of Dover to the Western Isles of Scotland.

The best tip of the week, chosen by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet wins a £200 voucher to stay at a Coolstays property – the company has more than 3,000 worldwide. The best tips will appear in the Guardian Travel section and website.

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