​She faced racist bullying as a child – then pigeonholing as an artist. Now following up a hit debut album championed by the A-list, the Croydon singer-songwriter says she finally understands who she really is

In October 2017, Rachel Chinouriri had her first panic attack. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. She’d just landed her first major gig as a professional musician, supporting Celeste at the London members’ club Laylow. Out of nowhere, she began to spiral. “I don’t know what happened,” she says. “I just started having a mental breakdown.” Her manager told her to go home, try again next time. But that only made things worse. “I started feeling like I was wasting everyone’s time,” she says. “I started feeling ashamed.” It would be better, she decided, to go on stage and sing, “half crying”.

Tears were already a familiar response to Chinouriri’s performance anxiety: the first time she sang in front of her classmates at the Brit school – the performing arts institution that trained Adele, Amy Winehouse and more – she burst into sobs afterwards. A rather inconvenient habit for an aspiring pop star, but at least she front-loaded the humiliation at the start of her career. “That was a big milestone for me,” she says of the Celeste show. “The fact that I could stand up there completely embarrassed, with people looking at me like, ‘Don’t really know what’s up with this girl’, but I still got through it and everything was fine.” The experience taught her that the catastrophic scenarios in her head rarely come to pass. “I’d given myself this pressure of, ‘This is the music industry. If they think I’m rubbish, I’m never gonna perform again.’” Chinouriri rolls her eyes at herself.

Campaigners worry politicians will have moved on by time of elections in which Marine Le Pen is expected to challenge

As dozens of forest wildfires burned across France this week amid the summer’s fourth brutal heatwave and increasing air pollution, some wondered whether voters’ first-hand experience of the climate emergency would change the political debate ahead of next year’s presidential election.

The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, who cut short a tour of France on medical advice that at seven months pregnant she should avoid breathing smoke-filled air in the south-west near a huge wildfire in Gironde, said the political class still had its head in the sand.

The global assault on our freedoms is coming ever closer to home. Just look at the sinister prosecution of UK lawyer Rajiv Menon

No more resistance in the US. The era of human rights is over, and dissent is once more forbidden. This is what certain billionaires and their concierges want, and this is the model they’re also seeking to project across the world. If we fail to resist, if our new prime minister is as weak and suggestible as the last one, this is what we will get. In fact, we are halfway there already.

Why? Because successive governments in the UK have succumbed to a global campaign to cancel our fundamental freedoms, a campaign led by oligarchs and corporations, the media they own and the junktanks they fund. A campaign that has become definitional for the second Trump presidency.

Across the country, workers are fearful about the impact of AI on their livelihoods in an increasingly fragile labour market

On the tree-lined streets of Wuhan, where cars jostle for space with mopeds and cargo trucks, the malfunctioning of a new type of vehicle has recently been causing chaos on the city’s roads.

In March, several cars from a fleet of driverless taxis stopped abruptly in the streets. The “system malfunction” left distressed riders stranded for hours. The robotaxis, known as Apollo Go and powered by artificial intelligence (AI), were taken off Wuhan’s streets for months for investigations.

I worked with children for years, so the noise doesn’t bother me. You know you’ve done a good job if they’re quiet on the way home

I’ve been a bus driver for 25 years. Before that, I worked in engineering sales and was on the road a lot, but it became impractical once I had young children. I took my kids to soft play centres and I thought: “I could run a place like this.” I opened my own centre in a Victorian shopping arcade in Otley, West Yorkshire, in 1995. It was great as my daughters could come with me. Then, a customer told me about play buses – vehicles converted into soft play centres with slides, ball pits and climbing frames. I liked the idea.

I went to an exhibition to look at some and bought a doubledecker that had already been converted. My uncle drove it home, because I couldn’t. I had to learn quickly as it was parked outside my house. It had no power steering and a ratchet handbrake. I threw up during my first lesson because I was so scared, but driving it soon became second nature. I passed my test within six months.

A zero-waste shop set up by a district council provides plastic-free products at affordable prices in a country that gets through 164m sachets a day

Just after classes finish for the day in Malabon City, in the Philippines, a corner shop begins to fill. Mothers arrive with their children, handing over empty bottles to be refilled with soy sauce and cooking oil. Plastic tubs that previously held ice-cream or biscuits are weighed and filled with flour or sugar. The kids get some sweets and banana chips bagged in brown kraft paper.

This store, Tingi Tindahan, offers a different experience from other small independent shops in the country. It retains the accessibility of micro-retail, colloquially known as tingi, while reintroducing reuse and refill methods instead of selling products in sachets and plastic packaging that too quickly becomes discarded waste.

Hamas’s Ghazi Hamad tells Reuters that it will hand over arms to body established by Trump’s Board of Peace

• Trump claims agreement for ‘complete disarmament’ of Hamas in Gaza but support uncertain

• Saudi Arabia prepares sea and possible land offensive against Houthis

Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud has reported the mood in Gaza this morning following news of Hamas’s potential disarmament.

Palestinians have heard repeated statements about their fate in the three years since the current war began between Israel and Hamas, so last night’s announcement by Donald Trump wasn’t met with any particular joy or celebration. “There is scepticism and cautiousness among Palestinians,” Mahoud writes from Gaza City in the north of the Strip.

PM Pedro Sánchez expected to visit territory today as Italy demands Spain be suspended from the Schengen area amid concerns over fresh migration crisis

We are getting some more pictures from Ceuta, showing the people who arrived last night waiting in parts of the city with El Mundo reporting long queues at local supermarkets.

But also there are reports that some migrants are choosing to return to Morocco.

More than 100 firefighters remain at scene after Dunwich Heath blaze spread across 150 hectares and forced evacuations

Fire crews tackling a large wildfire burning for more than 24 hours near Britain’s biggest nuclear power station have said the situation is “stabilising”.

More than 100 firefighters have been battling the blaze in Dunwich Heath, near Leiston, on the Suffolk coast since Wednesday evening.

Both MPs have had the parliamentary whip restored following separate independent disciplinary processes

MPs Diane Abbott and Joani Reid have been readmitted into Labour and had the parliamentary whip restored, just under two weeks into Andy Burnham’s premiership.

The party confirmed that this followed separate independent disciplinary processes, although Labour said the leadership played no role in either decision.

• 143 of Fifa’s 211 members now stand against scheme

• Infantino’s role as president under increasing pressure

Fifa is facing calls for an urgent review of its governance after insisting that the planned World Cup sell-off will continue despite the threat of a boycott from all 55 European nations.

In a strongly worded statement issued on Friday morning the Asian Football Confederation backed Uefa and Concacaf’s opposition to the creation of a new commercial company, Fifa Forward Enterprise, saying it “cannot realistically achieve the necessary broad consensus and unity required to move forward”, and urging Fifa to “undertake an urgent review of its governance and decision-making framework”.

Rashad Sultanov, from London, suspected of conducting hostile surveillance and passing information to Revolutionary Guards

A British-Azerbaijani national has been arrested ⁠in Cyprus on suspicion of spying on a British airbase on the Mediterranean island and passing information to Iran’s ⁠Islamic Revolutionary Guard ⁠Corps, the Metropolitan police ​said.

Rashad Sultanov, 44, from Islington, north London, was arrested on 17 July by Cypriot authorities ⁠and is being held in custody as extradition proceedings continue, the police said in a statement on Friday.

Move will end six decades of production in area, as new CEO tries to simplify firm and cut debt

• Business live – latest updates

BP has put its North Sea oil and gas business up for sale as it looks to end six decades of production from the region.

The firm announced on Friday morning that it had launched a formal process to market its North Sea business for a potential sale. The move comes as BP’s new chief executive, Meg O’Neill, tries to simplify the company and cut its debt levels.

Rescuers say four bodies found in search for team caught in Broad Peak avalanche, after trackers showed rapid descent

The world-renowned Nepali mountaineer Nirmal Purja – a former British Special Forces member – is among 10 climbers caught in a deadly avalanche on Pakistan’s Broad Peak.

Rescuers on Friday said four bodies had been found and efforts were underway to retrieve them despite the harsh weather.

She Plays to Win face losing one of their female players after being told team must include a male

The UK’s only all-female chess team have been promoted to the game’s top tier – only to be told they will have to add a man to their squad.

She Plays to Win Lionesses A Team have fallen foul of a rule designed to boost female participation in the sport.

As parks turn brown and paddling pools go unfilled, exemptions mean sports pitches can stay lush – even in school holidays

After multiple punishing heatwaves, and no rain in parts for over a month, it seems the whole of the south of England is golden brown.

But by Hammersmith Bridge in Barnes, south-west London, there is the unmistakable scent of damp soil. The playing fields of St Paul’s school, where fees are up to £57,000 a year, are a bright, lush green.

For the first time in more than a decade, a government minister in India has resigned following pressure from a street protest movement. The demonstrations erupted after the chief justice compared unemployed youths to cockroaches.

For many young Indians, the remark became the tipping point after years of high unemployment and repeated exam paper leaks that had shattered the hopes of millions of job seekers. The Guardian spent a week embedded with protesters as they faced police crackdowns, arrests and intimidation, documenting an extraordinary week that culminated in the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation.

The Hacks lead was cast in meta-slasher sensation Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma for her ‘deranged physicality’ – but it’s a fitting role for an actor who has made a point of confronting shame and speaking her mind

‘God is good all the time,” laughs Hannah Einbinder. She’s fresh off a plane from Los Angeles and curled up barefoot in an armchair. This, she says, is “a crazy time in life. Starring in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in the midst of Hacks ending … it’s definitely an embarrassment of riches.”

Hacks is the HBO comedy that ended earlier this year; in May, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s queer meta-horror, became the breakout hit of this year’s Cannes film festival.

From Dervla Murphy’s Northern Ireland to Elena Ferrante’s Naples, readers share the stories that inspired them to travel
• Tell us about a trip to Europe’s lakes and mountains – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Inspired by Dervla Murphy’s A Place Apart

They promise clearer, younger-looking skin, but is your money better spent elsewhere? Dermatologists and experts weigh in

• How to build the perfect skincare routine

Countless faddy products have crossed my desk over the years I’ve been reviewing beauty tech, from app-connected toothbrushes to AI-powered hair dryers. Few, however, have held such sustained interest as LED face masks.

At first glance, I assumed these scary-looking, space-age skincare devices would fizzle out of favour as quickly as they appeared. Instead, they’ve become a staple in some people’s skincare routines, including my own.

Hidden gems can be unearthed, but you have to dig deep into the bargain bins of countless outdated Fifas, Wii Fits without the controllers and partially finished quizshow games

As an eternally optimistic charity shop fan, I hold on to the fantasy that one day I’ll walk into my local Oxfam and find a pristine copy of the Sega Saturn shooter Burning Rangers for £1.50. Or perhaps a box full of old Neo Geo carts for a quid each. Sadly, this is now unlikely. Charity shops have caught on to the fact that old video games – like old vinyl albums – are highly collectible, and so they’re putting the good stuff on eBay. That’s fine, it’s their job to raise money, not to provide opportunist swine like me with bargains. But what games can you find tucked away in your local branch of Barnardo’s? To find out I visited about 40 charity stores across the country. Here is what I discovered on the shelves … And please do share your own charity shop gaming finds in the comments!

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

Under Özgür Özel, the CHP became Turkey’s most popular party. Now his Yeni (New) movement is growing fast

In May this year, police in Ankara stormed the headquarters of the Republican People’s party (CHP), the oldest political party in Turkey. Officers used teargas to enforce a controversial appeal court decision that reinstated the CHP’s 77-year-old former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu – seen as less of a threat to the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP). CHP members aligned with Kılıçdaroğlu’s successor, Özgür Özel, placed furniture at the building’s entrance, creating a barrier to prevent police from entering. It didn’t work. Hours later, party members loyal to Özel were physically removed from the premises.

Entering the offices of Turkey’s leading opposition party in such a fashion was a spectacular act with historic consequences. Last Friday, Özel and 90 CHP deputies resigned from their party and declared the founding of the New (Yeni) party. The CHP had served as Turkey’s main opposition since 2002. But not any longer: with the exodus of members to the New party, the CHP is reduced to just 44 legislators in the 600-seat parliament, its third smallest party out of seven.

I wanted our last family games night to be the best fun we’ve ever had. Maybe we should have stuck with Mario Kart …

It is the end of an era for the Diamond family. For 20 years, there have been five of us living together. It has not been easy. Militant vegan daughters, sons who have inherited Scottish tempers, and a youngest child who attracts trouble like an industrial magnet, have meant our house has been conflict-laden at times. Throw in the fact that we are beset with all manner of mental health bobbins and chronic illnesses that resulted in two of our three kids almost dying in hospitals and you get a family that is combustible – but extremely close.

Through it all, we had games. They always brought us back together. Not just us all hunkering over Super Mario Kart like some kind of UN-mandated family therapy, but the conversations that happen when any of us spy another playing something new. Games are a cultural touchstone that helped us crack through the veneer of disagreements and distrust and remind us that we have more things in common than we sometimes feel.

The new PM is enjoying a honeymoon period but, longer-term, the Greens have the freedom to say whatever Labour won’t

Cackling happily into their pints, the two most powerful men in the country scoff their way through a selection of pub snacks.

Pork scratchings or scampi fries? Or maybe old-school peanuts? It’s hardly the toughest choice currently facing Andy Burnham and the chancellor, John Healey, so some may find this week’s made-to-go-viral Instagram reel of them gleefully ranking crisps a bit silly. (I’m writing this, laptop balanced on my knee, beside a hospital bed; right now I couldn’t care less whether the chancellor likes bacon fries.) But I do care, intensely, about a government that is promising once-in-a-generation reform of care for elderly people winning the public’s confidence for long enough to actually carry out that promise, and weirdly in 2026 that means chomping crisps on camera to establish your bona fides with people who’d scroll straight past conventional political content.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Honest Bob was rattled at the idea of joining cross-party talks on social care. Why bother behaving as a serious opposition?

When you’ve lost the trust of GB News, when you’re too deranged, too extreme and too outright mendacious for your biggest fan, then you know you are in trouble. You can almost sense the panic beginning to set in at Reform HQ.

No longer topping the opinion polls. A new prime minister resetting the dial, the public increasingly choosing optimism over grievance. A party mired in financial sleaze. A leader turning into a laughing stock in his head-to-head with a dustbin. It was never meant to be this way for Reform. They thought they were the winners.

Americans are dying younger than Europeans, despite being the wealthiest people on the planet. Wellness fads won’t change that

I’m just back from my home country, the United States. I always enjoy visiting, but every time I go between the US and my adopted home of Europe, I’m keenly aware of disparity in health: Americans live much shorter lives and spend more of their lifetime in poor health. This is despite Americans earning some of the highest salaries per capita in the world and spending twice as much as comparable countries on healthcare.

A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine of 74,000 adults found that even the wealthiest Americans had higher mortality rates than the wealthiest Europeans – and that the richest Americans had mortality rates comparable to the poorest residents of northern and western Europe. Across every wealth category, Americans were more likely to die younger than Europeans, suggesting that even wealth doesn’t insulate from larger factors that impact life expectancy.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

There is no point competing in isolation. There are so many benefits to be had, in manufacturing, healthcare, research and governance

• Zheng Zeguang is the Chinese ambassador to the UK

Artificial intelligence is widely regarded as one of the defining technologies of our time. Like the steam engine, the harnessing of electricity and the internet before it, it has the potential to transform how we work, live and interact.

But every technological revolution brings challenges as well as opportunities. As AI systems become more capable, people are asking legitimate questions. How can AI remain safe, accountable and under human control? How should its development be governed? How can its benefits be shared more widely?

You can’t blame his constituents in Clacton for their pessimism – because they have been let down for years

Under battered England flags, cynicism, pessimism and exhaustion stalk the streets of Clacton.

As the byelection called by Nigel Farage approaches, one young couple do not know which candidates are standing. Neither has ever voted. Living in Britain is “depressing”, says the woman in a black floral dress. “The cost of living these days is stupid,” says her partner, wearing a black and grey mechanic’s shirt and a black and red cap. They both work 40 or 50 hours a week, he says, yet “we’re still struggling to pay rent, food, electric, everything else”. They rarely get a day off, and time spent together is rarer still.

More young people live with parents as low wages, insecure work and unaffordable housing turn family support into another source of inequality

In Britain, young people are expected to become independent in their 20s. Yet the UK’s economic model increasingly denies them the means to do so. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), commissioned partly for the BBC, finds that the proportion of 25-year-olds living with their parents has risen from 25% in the 1990s to 42% today. The research says “co-residence” among those in their 20s and 30s has increased by more than a third over two decades. The rate in Britain remains well below Italy and Spain, where leaving home is frequently more about finding a partner than turning 18, going to university or starting work. But that is scant comfort: Britain appears to be slowly drifting towards a southern European experience without the family culture that makes this feel normal.

Young Britons struggle to move out of “the hotel of mum and dad” for obvious reasons. Employment for those aged 25 has fallen for both women and men. Real earnings have barely progressed beyond the level reached around two decades ago. Hardly a surprise, then, that home ownership at 25 has dropped from 43% in the mid-1980s to 15% today. As the IFS notes, the changing age, educational, ethnic or migrant composition of the population might have been expected to reduce rates of co-residence. Instead, the “declining affordability of housing” has driven them up. In short, young adults are not just opting for a cheaper domestic arrangement to save money. They are submitting to it because they have less control over their lives as the options narrow for housing and work.

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.

Saltburn’s alleged trickery caused outrage, but cricket’s moral code conceals a rich history of cheating and convenient national myth

One incident has dominated this week’s sporting headlines, garnering even more column inches than Gianni Infantino’s apparent desire to sell the football World Cup to the highest bidder. It occurred in a second XI cricket match last weekend between Saltburn and Norton in the North Yorkshire and South Durham League. A fielder at first slip was alleged to have clicked his fingers as the ball passed the batter’s bat, in an attempt to con the umpire into thinking that there had been an edge. The ball sank into the wicketkeeper’s gloves; bowler, keeper and fielder erupted in a full-throated appeal; and the umpire sent the disbelieving batter on his way for a duck.

There the matter might have ended, but these days even second XI matches are recorded and there was footage of the alleged finger-clicking. Over the past few days, this footage has been analysed in minute detail. One writer on The Athletic bathetically likened the interrogation of the video to the decoding of the Zapruder film of President John F Kennedy’s assassination. What precisely does it show? Could the sound have emanated from behind a grassy knoll at the Saltburn ground?

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

Readers on the prime minister’s attempt to put academic and technical education routes on an equal footing in England

I find the debate about the purported conflict between academic and technical education baffling and somewhat amusing (Burnham to tell schools in England to adapt teaching to local business needs, 28 July).

In the 1950s, I attended Northampton technical high school. I studied the sciences plus English, French and technical (engineering) drawing to GCE level. I also did hands-on workshops in woodwork, metalwork and leatherwork (Northampton being a traditional shoemaking town). At A-level, I passed physics, chemistry and double maths, and studied physics at Leeds University. I also sang in choirs.

Kendal Archer says it is the government’s responsibility to legislate and big agriculture’s responsibility not to cover our food in chemicals

I read your article (‘Forever chemicals’ linked to gut inflammation in children after early exposure, 24 July) on prenatal and early-life exposure to Pfas leading to higher levels of intestinal inflammation in children – and by extension colorectal cancer – with interest.

I’m a mum of two. Since my first pregnancy, I have grappled with the endless advice and contradictions on health. Should I use glass bottles of non-organic milk, or plastic bottles of organic milk. Organic broccoli wrapped in plastic, or plastic-free non-organic broccoli.

No government can credibly promise to end rough sleeping while one public institution keeps releasing people straight into it, writes Gary Teper

We should all applaud Andy Burnham’s commitment to end rough sleeping (‘It’s generations of decline’: can Andy Burnham really end rough sleeping?, 24 July). The ambition is right and overdue. But he set the same goal in Greater Manchester in 2017 and found, as anyone would, that you cannot clear people off the street faster than the system puts them there. Much of rough sleeping is manufactured upstream.

Take prison. In 2024-25, around 1,000 people a month left prison in England and Wales homeless and went on to sleep rough. Homelessness feeds reoffending, reoffending feeds custody, and release feeds the street. No government can credibly promise to end rough sleeping while one public institution keeps releasing people straight into it.

Desmond Whyms says a fundamental rethink of aid is necessary to ensure Britain can genuinely help countries improve their human and environmental outcomes in the long term

Halima Begum’s excellent article on the opportunities now facing our new prime minister (Andy Burnham could easily ignore the UK’s falling aid commitment. He would be wise not to, 23 July) sheds a harsh light on the UK’s recent performance in international development.

Labour’s amplification of earlier Tory cuts to the development budget is shortsighted, self-defeating and immoral, with even military leaders not supportive of it. It highlights the weakening of Britain’s soft power as well as resulting in a more unstable world.

• Updates from Friday’s live action around Glasgow

• Medal table | Campbell cooks up gold | Email Billy

Athletics: Melanie Woods leads from the start, with Noemi Alphonse and Eliza Ault-Connell following in her slipstream in a breakaway group. The Australian falls behind with 600m to go, with Alphonse sticking behind Woods as they go past the bell. Alphonse launches an attack on the final bend but Woods sees it off and crosses the line in a Games record – just like she did on Wednesday.

Athletics: Up next is the rerun of the women’s T54 1500m, with Scotland’s Melanie Woods trying to repeat her win in the controversial original race on Wednesday.

• Views on Matt Richardson aired after gold in team sprint

• One of three Australian cycling golds won on day seven

Leigh Hoffman has bid Matt Richardson good riddance after Australia’s gold medal in the team sprint on day one of the Commonwealth Games track cycling program.

Teammate Ryan Elliott also joked they had cleared Hoffman as their leader, checking his passport to make sure he will stay in the Australian program. While expressing sympathy for Richardson after a recent nasty race crash in Japan, his former teammates finally spoke freely about the shock defection.

• England 58-54 South Africa

• Lois Pearson scores 17 goals from 17 shots

England stormed back from a six-goal deficit at the end of the first quarter to book their place in the netball semi-finals with a 58-54 win over South Africa.

Anna Stembridge’s side went into the game knowing defeat would mean them failing to reach the last four of the competition for the first time since the sport was introduced to the Games in 1998.

• Former defender had had surgery on pulmonary nodule

• ‘The entire history of ⁠Milan is in ⁠tears,’ Serie A club says

The former Milan and Italy defender Franco Baresi, one of the most recognisable players of the ⁠golden era of Italian football in the 1980s and 1990s, has died at the age of 66.

“The entire history of ⁠AC Milan is in ⁠tears following the ​passing of Franco Baresi,” his former club said on Friday. “His example and integrity will be forever etched into the club’s DNA, just as his iconic No 6 shirt is.”

• Fifa’s 25-page sales deck makes case for World Cup plan

• Reference made to doubling global tournaments

Fifa’s sales pitch to persuade members to approve the sale of the World Cup’s commercial rights clearly states that its plans for financial growth will be achieved by staging more tournaments, having higher ticket prices and debt financing.

A 25-page sales deck titled “Fifa Forward Enterprise Member Materials”, that has been seen by the Guardian, makes the case for the creation of a new company to run Fifa’s commercial operations, 20% of which would be sold to Joshua Kushner, a US investor who is the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

German coach was almost unknown on arrival in Saudi Pro League in 2023 but clinched major titles and won over fans

Taking over a big, underachieving port city club with a loyal fanbase that is desperate for success should not faze Matthias Jaissle. Should he take the role vacated by Eddie Howe, the 38-year-old German will leave Jeddah as a hero and arrive in the north-east as one of the most successful coaches in the history of Asian football.

A decade younger than Howe, Jaissle has achieved plenty, not only surviving in a Saudi Pro League that chews through coaches at a rapid rate but emerging victorious. It also helps that Al-Ahli and Newcastle share the same Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) owners.

Dutch rider completed the set of Grand Tours by winning the Giro and is set on claiming a second title in France

French pulses were set racing by Pauline-Ferrand Prévot’s win in the 2025 Tour de France Femmes, but the pragmatic choice of favourite for this year’s race, which begins in Lausanne on Saturday, is Demi Vollering.

The 29-year old Dutch rider, leader of the FDJ United-Suez team and the first €1m athlete in women’s racing, combines outstanding results – this year she completed a grand slam of all three of Europe’s Grand Tours – with an outspoken personality.

Matt Ellis has transformed the club by spending £10m and they are now contenders to win a first Super League title

Matt Ellis is too young to remember the glory days of the club he has supported all his life and is now the proud custodian of, but he is reminded often enough to concede it serves as his greatest motivation to bankroll one of Super League’s sleeping giants.

For supporters of a certain age, Wakefield Trinity represent one of rugby league’s great names. In the 1960s they were league champions twice and Challenge Cup winners three times – but it is 60 years since they last won a major trophy. For younger fans like Ellis, Wakefield have been associated with one thing: mediocrity.

Exclusive: Electoral Commission urged to look into donations made by mother of convicted fraudster

• Revealed: George Cottrell transferred $2m to his mother days before her donations to Reform UK

Labour has accused Reform UK of being “up to its neck in sleaze” as it called on the Electoral Commission to urgently investigate substantial donations made to the party by the mother of a convicted fraudster.

Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s new chair, called on the commission to examine whether any rules had been broken, after revelations in the Guardian that George Cottrell transferred more than $2m to his mother in the days before her donations to the party in 2024.

The 80s star will no longer appear in role of Herod in London Palladium run, with manager saying decision is ‘in the best interests of my artist’

Boy George has pulled out of a forthcoming London production of Jesus Christ Superstar, days after he released a controversial song voicing support for Israel’s military action against Palestine.

The song, entitled עוד נרקוד alongside its English translation We Will Dance Again, addresses critics of Israel, whose military campaign has been been described as genocidal by a UN commission. “You say genocide, I say war / When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for,” read the lyrics. “Does it get ugly? You bet it does / When I know you wanna kill every last one of us.”

Scheme brought in up to 500 foreign-trained doctors a year and was seen as example of British ‘soft power’

The NHS has scrapped a longstanding scheme that let overseas doctors boost their skills in UK hospitals and was seen as an example of British “soft power”.

Senior doctors have criticised NHS England’s decision to axe the Medical Training Initiative, under which 400 to 500 foreign-trained doctors were given placements in Britain every year.

Strike on Terminal Autonomy plant appears to be first time in the war that Moscow has targeted a US company

A drone factory in Kyiv destroyed by a Russian ballistic missile on Friday was owned by a US corporation registered in Delaware, in what appears to be the first time Moscow has targeted a US company in the conflict.

Terminal Autonomy makes precision “deep-strike” drones with guidance systems that are resistant to Russian jamming signals, according to a person familiar with the company.

Fernando Alexandre’s push to digitise marking process deemed a failure with some students and parents contemplating legal action

Pressure is growing on Portugal’s education minister to resign amid student and teacher protests over his handling of this year’s national school exams.

Fernando Alexandre is accused of failing to take responsibility for what critics say is an unprecedented and chaotic school exam season affecting children aged 14 to 18, prompting student protesters to call for him “to be flunked”.

Analysis of samples collected from carcasses found traces of toxic chemical compound, says Kenya Wildlife Service

The recent deaths of 15 elephants near a park in southern Kenya in the past month were likely caused by the animals ingesting pesticides used on nearby tomato farms, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has said.

Erustus Kanga, the agency’s director general, told Citizen TV that analysis of samples collected from the carcasses had found traces of cyanide, a chemical compound used in farming as a predator control poison and a pest fumigant, which has also been used by poachers.

Boom in migrating moth sightings put down to hot weather, strong winds and food scarcity in Europe

He had just sat down to dinner in the garden when a speedy visitor whizzed by – a “grey lump with orange wings”, recalled Luke Burstow, from Sussex. It was a hummingbird hawk-moth, a flying insect that migrates to the UK from continental Europe and north Africa.

“I was like: ‘Wow!’,” said the software project manager. “I didn’t even know they existed.”

Raja is normally a celebration of the start of the monsoon, but in the eastern state of Odisha, the rains came so late the seeds were sown under clear skies

Kasturi Gamango and Pramila Sabar cannot contain their giggles as they explain one of the big attractions of the Raja festival, which they attended a few days earlier along with 20 other farmer families in Laxmipur, in Odisha’s Ganjam district.

“We do no work for three days during the festival,” they say. “Our husbands cook and clean while we enjoy our free time.”

Climate crisis affects not only the amount of rain that falls but where, with implications for land use and water security

Have you ever wondered how far a raindrop has travelled before it lands on you? It may have journeyed thousands of kilometres from the ocean, sea or lake it evaporated from – and now research shows raindrops are travelling even farther than they used to.

Warmer air can hold more water vapour, and that is changing not only how much rain we receive but also where it falls. Travis Aerenson, of the University of Wyoming, and his colleagues modelled atmospheric moisture movements in the US over more than three decades. Their research showed that in the southwestern and southern plains, moisture in the atmosphere travels 30 to 50 miles (50 to 80km) farther than it did 35 years ago, staying aloft for an extra two to four hours before falling as rain.

Price of average home now £277,542, up from £277,484 the previous month but lower than in May, says Nationwide

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Economic uncertainty dampened UK house price growth in July as prospective buyers remained cautious about interest rates during the Iran war in what should be the peak housebuying season.

House prices rose by only 0.1% in July from a month earlier, according to the lender Nationwide, while annual price growth slowed to 1.8% this month, down from 2.2% in June.

Official figures expose widening gap in road deaths and injuries between poor and wealthy postcodes

The number of children killed or injured crossing roads is almost five times higher in England’s most deprived areas than its wealthiest, official analysis suggests.

Department for Transport figures show a widening gap over the past 10 years in road casualties between those living in the poorest 10% of postcodes and the most affluent 10%.

CRS officers funded by UK tried to stop boarding of boat, on day four asylum seekers died trying to cross Channel

French riot police funded by UK taxpayers used teargas on asylum seekers in an attempt to stop them from boarding a boat in which three women were later found dead, a charity has claimed.

Footage and photographs seen by the Guardian show CS gas canisters being fired towards groups of people on Plage du Braek near Dunkirk at 4am on Thursday. At 6am, three women were found dead in a boat near the same beach.

Exclusive: ministers and police chiefs examining how cases involving US military personnel on UK soil are handled after Guardian revelations

The UK government and police chiefs are reviewing the process through which US military personnel accused of committing serious crimes on UK soil are avoiding the British justice system.

The effort, involving multiple government departments, is examining why UK police forces, which have primary responsibility for investigating such cases, have been ceding jurisdiction to US military investigators.

As the death toll rises to almost 1,500, and with a vaccine against the Bundibugyo strain potentially still months away, health workers face a battle to slow the outbreak

The latest numbers of confirmed cases of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has made this latest outbreak the fastest growing in the known history of the virus.

At 3,360 confirmed cases, the disease is now affecting people in five provinces in the east of the DRC, with 1,487 deaths recorded, representing an overall case fatality rate estimated at about 45%, according to Congolese health officials. Health responses to the outbreak have been badly hampered by conflict in many of the affected areas.

Andrés Felipe Valencia Barrientos found guilty of two counts of assault and not guilty of three of six counts of rape

A British musician and YouTube personality on trial for allegedly violently raping a fan in a Perth hotel has been acquitted of three sexual penetration charges.

But the jury found the rapper Yung Filly guilty of two assault offences related to his September 2024 encounter with a 20-year-old woman after a show.

Senators Warren and Van Hollen attack Republican ‘rubber stamps’ in Congress for surrendering authority to Trump

Senior Democrats accused Republicans in the US Congress of becoming “gelatinous blobs” who won’t stand up to Donald Trump and “rubber stamps” for his war on Iran.

Elizabeth Warren, a US senator for Massachusetts, and Chris Van Hollen, a US senator for Maryland, argued that the Republican-controlled Congress had surrendered its constitutional authority to the president.

Makers of unreleased $45m film Fortitude sue after hard drive stolen from streamer’s Los Angeles office

Netflix is being sued for $105m over the theft of a hard drive including an unreleased Nicolas Cage war movie.

The streamer’s Los Angeles office was the target of a theft involving a number of hard drives, one of which contained a copy of second world war spy thriller Fortitude.

Company says it discovered unauthorized access during ‘proactive review’ after rival OpenAI revealed rogue agent

Anthropic ⁠said on Thursday its AI Claude model hacked ⁠systems of ⁠three ​organizations during testing, days after rival OpenAI ⁠revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long ⁠hacking spree at AI ​firm Hugging ‌Face.

Claude gained ‌unauthorized access to the ‌systems during cybersecurity evaluations after a misconfiguration allowed the models to reach the internet from testing environments that ‌were supposed to be isolated, Anthropic said.

Both tech companies beat Wall Street predictions on revenue in their second quarters

Apple and Amazon both released their second quarter earnings on Thursday, a test of investor confidence in major tech companies amid growing concerns over exorbitant AI spending.

Apple revealed quarterly revenue of $109.4bn, beating Wall Street expectations of $108.65bn in revenue. It also reported $2.02 earnings per share, driven by sales of its marquee products such as iPhones and laptops.

Split vote comes as Iran war is rekindled and oil price climbs close to $90 a barrel

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• Only Middle East crisis is preventing drop in UK interest rates

The Bank of England has kept UK interest rates on hold as it warned that a further escalation in the Iran war could drive inflation above 4% next year, adding to cost of living pressures on households.

Against a volatile backdrop in the Middle East conflict, the Bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) voted by six to three to keep its key base rate at 3.75%.

Bank’s wariness about inflationary pressures from the conflict lie behind decision to hold steady at 3.75%

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There is a threat of high inflation coming to the UK but only from the conflict in the Middle East, which could keep oil prices high for much longer than was expected when Donald Trump first began attacking Iran.

It is the war that makes the difference between a benign outlook for inflation and one that puts it back on a rising trajectory, senior UK central bankers believe.

This bold family saga explores a search for healing and truth in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide

How to forgive the unforgivable? How to live in the aftermath of atrocity? Following 2016’s Small Country, French-Rwandan rapper and writer Gaël Faye takes on huge questions in his second novel, Jacaranda, which explores the seismic events of the Rwanda genocide and the aftershocks that continue to ripple through the generations.

Structurally bold, the story opens in summer 1994 with Milan, Faye’s then 12-year-old protagonist, enjoying an extended break from school. Milan’s father is white French and the family’s life in Versailles is the embodiment of first world ease – their holiday that year, as usual, spent sailing at the Île de Ré. Milan’s mother, though, is Rwandan. Venancia arrived in the 1970s, establishing a life for herself, a successful clothing boutique, a family. However, she cannot share the French ease, much less her thoughts on the disturbing reports from Rwanda now making the evening news.

The novelist on learning empathy from Charles Dickens, the playfulness of Irenosen Okojie and avoiding Jane Austen

My earliest reading memory
I was eight when I was given The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley, after being moved from my grand­mother’s care to live with my mother and her husband, who I barely knew. The story is about leaving one world, adapting to another. Surviving. It gave shape to unnamed feelings and developed my survival imagination: imagining beyond my circumstances.

My favourite book growing up
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I followed David’s journey from exclusion to belonging. Dickens vivifies his characters; you grow alongside them. The novel taught me empathy, and that some relationships sustain us while others must be left behind.

Hugh Grant gives a gleeful, career-best performance in A24’s terrifying horror, while Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun star in a fun post-apocalyptic love story

Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets) and Chloe East (The Fabelmans) play a pair of unworldly Mormon missionaries who arrive at the door of an avuncular Englishman hoping to make a new convert. That Englishman, however, is played by Hugh Grant – once a foppish romcom idol, now deep into his villain era – and what at first seems like a playful willingness to debate religion turns into something much more terrifying. With a script by A Quiet Place co-writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods to work with (the two also co-direct), Grant commands the screen with glee. It’s a career-best performance, with enough dark miracles to fully restore your faith in A24’s waning horror output.
Saturday 1 August, 9.35pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

From Audrey Hepburn to Pedro Pascal, cellists have become a movie shorthand for sensitivity, intensity and emotional depth. But why has Hollywood turned one orchestral instrument into a character in its own right?

There’s a throwaway line in 2012’s The Avengers, after a character’s death, when his partner is alluded to. “There was a cellist, I think,” muses Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark. It’s a spot of pathos amid the punch-ups – but also rather telling. Because when even a superhero blockbuster reaches for the cello, you know the instrument is carrying more than just a melody.

Earlier this month, a trailer dropped for the upcoming Pedro Pascal drama Behemoth!, in which he plays a celebrated cellist returning to Hollywood to score films. Real-life cellist and film composer Hildur Guðnadóttir says the instrument “is definitely having a moment right now. But it’s always been present.”

Ramy Youssef’s excellent show finally returns to UK terrestrial TV. Plus: a post-apocalyptic origin story. Here’s what to watch this evening

12.10am, Channel 4
Four years on from its release, the third season of Ramy Youssef’s great comedy drama about a deeply flawed Muslim American gets a UK terrestrial airing. The good news is that it has aged rather brilliantly: in particular, the second episode of this double bill featuring a disastrous Tinder date. Hannah J Davies

Jason Sudeikis’ football coach turns his hand to the women’s game. Plus, a wild new documentary from the maker of Tiger King – about exotic animal smuggling

Are we still in the mood for football with a side order of ripe American cheese? In the light of reservations about the recent World Cup (and, particularly, the final’s half-time show featuring Ted Lasso), it’s certainly up for debate. The premise of this fourth series is “back to basics” – which is the only way the show could conceivably still work as an underdog story. Ted (Jason Sudeikis) is in the US when he’s visited by Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) and Keeley (Juno Temple). Can he be persuaded to manage their second-tier women’s team, Lady Greyhounds? The excellent cast – which now also includes Sex Education star Tanya Reynolds – keep the ball rolling.
Apple TV, from Wednesday 5 August

(American Dogwood/Empire)
Beneath the Hollywood narrators, Pink Floyd-y interludes and accompanying comic books lies songwriting that proves the Tipsy singer’s breakout success was no fluke

It’s fair to say that if Shaboozey never released another note of music, his place in history would still be assured.

He wasn’t the only Black country-leaning artist brought to a wider audience by a guest appearance on Beyoncé’s 2024 album Cowboy Carter, but no one else capitalised on the exposure quite so remarkably. Released two weeks after his guest appearance on that album’s Spaghettii, his single A Bar Song (Tipsy) unexpectedly eclipsed Beyoncé’s success, becoming the biggest-selling country single of the year – more than 1.75bn streams and counting on Spotify – and for a time, the joint longest-running US No 1 of all time. He’s received three nominations at the Country Music awards, an event traditionally resistant to artists of colour. The accompanying album, Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, was by far the most successful sustained attempt to fuse hip-hop and country, two genres that have been warily circling each other for some time, spawning the occasional novelty hit such as Nelly and Tim McGraw’s Over and Over Again, the Ludacris-featuring 2010 remix of Jason Aldean’s Dirt Road, and Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road; the baleful, rap-influenced spectre of bro country; and the deep underground sub-genre of hick-hop, a hidden world of Maga politics, confederate flags and festivals held at Georgia mud holes. The album is still on the US chart, 112 weeks after its release.

(XL)
In the follow-up to her Kick series, Arca jumbles the building blocks of electronic music to create a beautiful, disorienting sound world

XXXXX, the new album by Venezuelan producer-vocalist Arca, is reportedly laden with meaning: a press release claims that “suspended between posthuman augmentation and raw emotion, XXXXX exposes the mainframe”. But the reason Arca, real name Alejandra Ghersi, has become such a star of electronic music – and a mainstream-adjacent one at that – is not because she lets philosophy postgrads in Berlin write her marketing copy: it’s because, for well over a decade, she has been putting out records like XXXXX, which seem to tap into the body’s most primal, feral frequencies better than nearly anyone else. That ability has resulted in recent callups to collaborate on Madonna’s Confessions II and remix pop singer Addison Rae, and she has amassed a large, loyal fanbase – uncommon for someone making such outre music.

The follow-up to her phenomenal Kick series – five albums, each highlighting a different side of Arca’s work – XXXXX sometimes channels the frenetic feel of Aphex Twin (as on Everything) and zeroes in on the wild, footwork-y high-tempo club music she made her name with (like on Fxck, a breathless and grimy rebuke to patriarchy). But it also delves more deeply into worlds the musician has previously skirted around. The sound of a tolling bell on Willow rings into a song that’s harsh and uncompromising; Raver jumbles the building blocks of classic mainstream EDM into a piece of beautiful, disorienting sound design.

(Melodies International)
With cuts from the producer’s Ariwa Sounds label between 1984 and the present day, this compilation hops from skulking proto-grime to dreamy lovers rock

In the late 1970s, Neil Fraser, AKA Mad Professor, and his wife moved into a house in Croydon. “The normal thing would be to put in some chairs, a table,” he said in a podcast last year. Instead, the legendary dub producer fitted his living room with a four-track mixing desk and his collection of homemade gear, thus marking the beginning of the studio and label Ariwa Sounds.

The early years of Ariwa were captured in a 1984 album, which was reissued by Melodies International in 2023. Now, the two labels reunite to document the sounds that followed. This double compilation isn’t an attempt at a greatest hits collection, nor a chronological history, but an insight into the label’s expansive output between 1984 and 2026, featuring big names like Sister Nancy, Horace Andy and Sandra Cross, plus a handful of deeper cuts.

John Tilbury
(Another Timbre, four CDs)
The great interpreter of Morton Feldman and a towering figure of experimental music signs off with four discs of intimate, revelatory recordings

Few have made a more significant contribution to the fields of contemporary, improvised and experimental music than John Tilbury. When, at 82, he decided to end his live appearances, Simon Reynell, founder of Another Timbre, asked if he might occasionally visit the pianist’s home in Deal, on the Kent coast, and record whatever happened to be on his mind. Eight years later, Tilbury has decided to hang up his hat for good, hence this four-disc set celebrating a unique artist and musical pioneer.

Morton Feldman admired the “swagger” of Tilbury and the British avant garde, and the pianist went on to become perhaps the US composer’s leading interpreter. His recording of Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety is authoritative, a masterclass in spontaneous phrasing and sonic sensitivity.

This stylish biography of the author traces his journey from left to right, and from ‘posh Lima’ to Cricklewood

“At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” Those words on the opening page of Conversation in the Cathedral announced the arrival of a writer who understood that national history could become the organising principle of fiction. At precisely the moment when Latin America was discovering the intoxicating possibilities of magical realism – a form whose exuberance had an elective affinity with revolutionary politics, collapsing the distinction between the marvellous and the possible – Mario Vargas Llosa plumped for old-fashioned realism instead.

It was a question of sensibility as much as politics, Gerald Martin suggests in this chatty yet coolly analytical biography. He traces the path of a novelist who began by dissecting oligarchy with surgical precision and ended happily dining among its ranks, completing one of literary history’s most spectacular political migrations – from the hard left to the hard right, over the course of half a century.

This journey of discovery from the US to Sicily tackles urgent themes, but is increasingly inward-looking

In Grace Paley’s short story A Conversation With My Father, a request is made of the Paley-like narrator. “I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” her father says, “the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov … Just recognisable people and then write down what happened to them next.” Her attempt, and its failure to impress him, is the action that powers the story. Valeria Luiselli’s fourth novel is propelled by a similar request, the daughter of the Luiselli-like narrator asking: “Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end?” It’s a problem Luiselli has addressed before. In her 2017 book-length essay about undocumented migrant children, Tell Me How It Ends, she writes that the difficulty in telling their story “is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end”.

Beginning Middle End charts the narrator’s efforts to corral life into a narrative. The father in Paley’s story would be similarly unimpressed. After a “slow, entangled” divorce, the narrator, a Mexican living in the United States, embarks on a European book tour with her 12-year-old daughter. She has a coil removed in Munich; her daughter loses a tooth in Prague; near Amsterdam they watch children learning to swim with their shoes on in case of floods. When summer comes, the pair fly to Catania in Sicily. The narrator’s grandmother grew up nearby. They stay in the apartment of a pianist who’s away on tour, with whom the narrator had a “brief and feverish encounter” the previous year.

In this disorienting book, a poet argues we have been looking at nature – and ourselves – the wrong way

The eastern breakwater of Granton harbour is almost 1km long, and swimmers can follow its crooked finger, heading straight out into the Firth of Forth, while benefiting from its reassuring presence. One Thursday lunchtime, I thought: why not, let’s give it a go, and headed for its tip. I felt cold, but, as I progressed, I seemed to grow strangely warmer. I did not notice the complaints from my body: the creeping numbness which proceeded from my fingers to my elbow, nor the coldness of my pee. Only by the time I exited the water, club footed and claw handed, did it hit me that I was hypothermic.

The irony of this reckless exercise was that in my swim bag there was a book by Melanie Challenger called Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World. It’s an ambitious examination of the wisdom of bodies, a rhizomatic guide not just to our own, but also all the living forms around us: from bacteria to chimps. Her case is that we have ignored or misread the agency and purpose of bodies to our detriment; in a way it is a plea to listen to them. I wish I had read it before my ill-advised swim.

Trinidad-born author and poet whose novel The Humming-Bird Tree is a classic of Caribbean literature

Ian McDonald, who has died aged 93, wrote only one novel, but it is considered a classic of Caribbean literature. The Humming-Bird Tree (1969), set in Trinidad in the late 1940s, tells the story of Alan, a young white boy, as he falls into friendship with his family’s yard-boy, Kaiser, who is of Indian extraction, and in love with Kaiser’s younger sister, Jaillin, who is also employed by Alan’s wealthy parents.

While Alan and Jaillin skirt around each other, trying to come to terms with the confusing feelings of their mutual attraction and the disapproval of Alan’s mother and father, wider emotional turmoil is at play in Trinidad, where the masses are beginning to throw off the yoke of British rule.

Deep underground the player joins a colony of ruthlessly exploited pit workers who could be taking on the bosses. How things play out will depend on you

It is rare for video games to feature industrial action as a key theme, but it does happen. There’s the shady Dockworker’s Union in Disco Elysium and the Orbital Workers Union in space adventure Tacoma; then there is Lynx, the evil union-bashing corp in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Soon we can add A Line Held Tight, a visual novel that puts workers’ rights – and workers’ lives – at the very centre of the narrative.

In the distant future, a colony of miners digs far beneath the surface of an isolated planet, searching for veins of some exotic ore, protected from the poisonous atmosphere within giant mech suits. But the working conditions are woeful and as a strike looms, an unpopular employee named the Canary must decide whether or not to stand with colleagues and fight against suppression. The player, of course, takes on the role of the Canary, navigating personal as well as political struggles in a world rendered in stark monochrome.

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5; Halo Studios/Xbox Game Studios
Halo’s modernised introduction to all that was great about the 00s’ first-person shooter is also a welcome return trip for those of us who were there at the time

This 25th-anniversary remake of Xbox’s most iconic shooter comes loaded with symbolism. It arrives at a time when Xbox’s whole gaming division (and indeed the games business as a whole) is in turmoil. It’s been made by Halo Studios, an outfit that has arguably never quite recaptured the magic conjured by Halo: Combat Evolved’s original developer Bungie, a studio now owned by rival Sony. It has been polished and prettified using Unreal Engine 5, making it look and feel more modern at the expense of visual uniqueness: Halo now looks similar to hundreds of other games made with those same tools, where Bungie’s 2001 original, made with a bespoke engine, still looks austerely distinctive. I never wanted to become this person, but: perhaps things were better in the old days?

I had my misgivings after the opening level, in which freshly defrosted supersoldier Master Chief fends off an alien attack on a disintegrating spaceship. Originally this was a masterclass in explosive action: you wake up, you look around (once a clever way to determine whether you needed to invert the controls), and you get right into it, firing gaming’s best pistol at chittering alien grunts who scatter from your bullets. Now it’s wrapped in needlessly expanded cutscenes and explanations. Where Halo Studios has made changes to Combat Evolved’s pacing, it really feels noticeable.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is out now

James Cameron’s high-octane film sequel is a blueprint for modern action space slashers

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It is difficult to believe that James Cameron’s Aliens was released into cinemas 40 years ago. The seminal space shooter took the original Alien – a tense slasher film with a tiny cast and one monster – and transformed it into an intergalactic war movie crammed with wry one-liners, massive guns and an actual boss battle finale. As a 14-year-old, I stood in line at the Tatton Gatley cinema, unsure if I’d be allowed in – I came out three hours later a changed person, my head filled with esoteric military slang and a deep fear of beeping motion detectors. For days afterwards, I slept with my duvet covering my mouth so that no facehuggers could get me. (I was a highly impressionable teenager.)

It’s little wonder that the film has had such a profound effect on video game design. Take the colonial marines, for example. Although the concept of the space soldier had been around in sci-fi novels since the 1930s, most notably in the works of EE “Doc” Smith and Robert Heinlein (the Starship Troopers), Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez and co, were the perfect 80s rendition, combining the witty banter of contemporary buddy cop flicks with awesome weaponry and hi-tech gadgets. Their influence is easy to spot in Doom, where the nameless marine fights ceaseless waves of hellish monsters using a mix of futuristic rifles and good old shotguns. It’s there too in the Halo series, the Spartan soldiers sporting the same armour and mega weapons, cruising about in very similar highly militarised starships and fighting recognisable hive-mind space beasts. Gears of War, Killzone and Marathon all borrow from the same set of costumes and deadly accessories.

An amnesiac loner arrives in a remote town for who knows what reason … this may sound familiar but this time we’re on a remote Scottish island and surprises lie in wait

A man washes up at the harbour of a small coastal village, his memories vague, an eerie sea fog rolling in all around him. As beginnings go, this couldn’t be more Silent Hill – an amnesiac loner drawn to a remote town for who knows what reason. But this time, we’re not in the Pacific Northwest of the original games or the Japan of last year’s excellent Silent Hill f. We’re on an island off the northern coast of Scotland, and it’s 1996. Lead character Simon Ordell knows this place, but isn’t sure how – and why does he have an IV cannula stuck in his hand?

Announced back in 2022, Townfall is the work of Glasgow-based studio Screen Burn, previously responsible for tense horror adventure titles Stories Untold and Observation. Like Silent Hill f, it moves the setting far out of Silent Hill itself: St Amelia is a fishing town, inspired by St Monans and dozens of other seafront towns the team visited and extensively photographed.

Almeida theatre, London
Rebecca Frecknall pulls off this notoriously difficult 1998 play, in which appalling cruelty and violence is balanced against human yearning for love and beauty

Sarah Kane was much berated for the graphic violence in her plays during her lifetime. But critics beware: if you choose to scold playwrights for too much blood-letting and grotesque acts of human cruelty, you would surely have to condemn the Greeks, the Grand Guignol and Shakespeare, too.

Perhaps it’s the in-yer-face nature of Kane’s gore that offends. Certainly in this 1998 play there is no flinching from horror, which comes through acts of sensational cruelty. “Death isn’t the worst thing they can do to you,” a character reflects, and his words illustrate themselves with the rapes, mutilations and beatings that follow.

Opera Holland Park, London
Liam Steel relocates Johann Strauss’s operetta to London 1929 to create the feel of a Noël Coward-style farce. Rebecca Bottone, Olivia Carrell and Clare Presland shine amid a strong cast.

Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus must have done more for champagne sales than any other operetta. A good production, however, demands plenty of onstage fizz too, but the bubbles start to rise rather late in the day in Opera Holland Park’s new staging.

Director and choreographer Liam Steel uses the Metropolitan Opera’s 2013 revamped English version with lyrics by Jeremy Sams and a new book by Douglas Carter Beane. His chosen setting, however, is London on New Year’s Eve 1929; cue references to the Sitwells and the Mitfords. In its determination to reflect the anything goes spirit of the age there’s even a cheeky reference to Winston Churchill’s supposed dalliance with Ivor Novello (how did he find it? “Musical,” goes the apocryphal tale.) The idea has legs, turning a 19th-century Viennese operetta into a louche Noël Coward farce with lines that are at times deliciously tart.

Royal Opera House, London
In what is officially her first solo show, the star principal marshals technically peerless performances from a tremendous company in finely chosen repertoire

Is there such a thing as being too perfect? Marianela Nuñez is certainly one of the most perfect ballerinas around. At 44, she still has superlative technique and absolute command. She can reel off a fiendish string of fouettés (as in tonight’s extract from Le Corsaire), whipping her leg in circles, and then come to a gentle standstill, the smoothest brakes you ever saw. It is absolutely frictionless; it is beauty and capability and egoless self-possession. And this might seem an unfair ask, but do we sometimes also need a little grit?

Timeless is Nuñez’s first solo show. Not truly solo, but she’s the star, it’s her choice of repertoire, and she does everything “just right”, paying tribute to the Royal Ballet, the company she joined at 16, and its choreographers: Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor. She also offers an amazing showcase of the company’s dancers and generously allows them to shine, so much so that Matthew Ball and Mayara Magri dancing the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet is an absolute highlight, Magri giddy as she watches her Romeo swoop manfully around the stage. Akane Takada and Calvin Richardson are tender in a duet from McGregor’s Infra, and Fumi Kaneko and Lukas B Braendsrød dance Wheeldon’s serene After the Rain – although they can’t fill the long phrases in the exquisite way Nuñez once did with Thiago Soares.

In a bold new production starring Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss, the NT is fusing Sophocles and Ingmar Bergman. So what can two stories written 23 centuries apart tell us about how we live today?

In around 420BC, Sophocles staged Electra, in which the title character avenges the murder of her father by her mother, Clytemnestra. In 1966, Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman premiered Persona, in which a psychiatric nurse, Alma, is caring for Elisabeth, an actor who has suffered a breakdown while playing Electra. These two dramas, written 23 centuries apart, are now sharing the stage in an alluring new National Theatre production.

In Electra/Persona, director Benedict Andrews has paired the stories before and after the interval, linked by a stunning coup de theatre at the end of the first half. “Persona is a pinnacle of modernist cinema and Bergman is a north star for me,” says Andrews. “I’ve long been fascinated by the impossibility – in a good way – of staging Persona, because it is so much about the camera and the silence and the closeup: the face as a terrain. And I was always fascinated by why Bergman chose to have Elisabeth break down while playing Electra, so I wanted to put them together. I think it’s become clear in rehearsal that the whole evening is one cycle of grief.”

German anatomist who devised a system of ‘plastination’ to preserve cadavers that were exhibited all over the world

The German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who has died aged 81 of a cerebral haemorrhage, following nearly two decades of living with Parkinson’s disease, was the creator of the international exhibition Body Worlds, which generated plaudits and revulsion in equal measure whenever and wherever it toured. Frequently accused of showmanship and self-aggrandisement, the theatrical Von Hagens, always seen wearing a black fedora, was known by some sections of the media as “Doctor Death” thanks to his use of a technique called “plastination”, which he had invented to preserve human corpses. Bodily fluids, fats and organs that usually decay after death were replaced with plastics, so tissues remained intact. The corpses could then be put on display, usually with the skin peeled away to reveal skeletons, organs and muscles.

Plastinated corpses remain flexible, meaning they can be manipulated into lifelike poses – a basketball player or a trapeze artist – or sliced into cross sections. But Von Hagens often trod a fine line between scientific exposition and the macabre. Other exhibits included a dead expectant woman with her foetus still in her uterus and a man who had deliberately killed himself by driving into a tree at the place his wife had died previously. Both had donated their bodies for plastination and were exhibited along with the objects that caused their deaths.

In 2006 the novel Man Gone Down made Thomas famous and won him a €100,000 prize. He expected to produce a follow-up within a year – but life had other plans

It should be some kind of happy ending when, after years of poverty and graft, an aspiring writer publishes their debut novel and it is greeted with acclaim and awards – but that’s not how it happened for Michael Thomas. His 2006 novel Man Gone Down seemed to augur the arrival of a powerful new literary voice, the beginning of a brilliant career. He featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, he won the €100,000 Dublin literary award – one of the most generous prizes in the book world – and he was promoted to assistant professor at Hunter College, New York, where he taught creative writing. But a follow-up would not arrive until now, 20 years later. Thomas’s new memoir, The Broken King, goes some way to explaining what happened in between. It also confirms his formidable talent.

The Broken King is an extraordinary read – deeply personal and intimate, but also expansive and free-ranging, taking in everything from TS Eliot (the title comes from Eliot’s poem Little Gidding) to James Baldwin, Brazilian football and the Rolling Stones. Thomas’s story runs through what he describes as a “perfect storm of conditions”: poverty, parental abandonment, racism, alcoholism, sexual violence, self-sabotage and mental illness. It would be tempting to classify it as some kind of misery memoir, but it is neither bleak nor generic – Thomas is simply too good a writer for that. Reviews in the US have been glowing: “Thomas has rendered beautifully an excruciating existence from which it is impossible to turn away,” raved the author Thomas Chatterton Williams in the New York Times.

Author of books behind forthcoming film starring Viola Davis and Idris Elba appears to have had disagreement with cast member Amandla Stenberg

Tomi Adeyemi, the author of Children of Blood and Bone, has spoken further on the difficult process behind adapting her novel for this big screen, calling it “the worst thing I have ever had to live through”.

In a five-minute video on TikTok, the author said she left the set of the Paramount production “hyperventilating and sobbing”, adding: “I never want to hear about this project again”.

The novelist suggested Wilson should have been ‘a wee bit more thoughtful and respectful’ towards a film-maker who may have helped boost her book sales

• Mary Beard on The Odyssey and how empires fall – Stateside with Kai and Carter

The off-screen drama surrounding Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster version of the Odyssey stepped up a gear overnight, as the novelist Joyce Carol Oates sought to defend the film-maker from an attack by classicist Emily Wilson.

Writing on X, Oates took issue with the style as well as the rhetoric of Wilson’s essay published earlier this week in the London Review of Books, in which the academic, who published a landmark translation of Homer’s epic poem in 2017, wrote that Nolan’s film lacked “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth” and had “nothing convincing to say”.

From the heart of the Peak District to the Kent Downs, houses with outside space to suit all ages

Minty fresh flavours are out, gold plated toothbrushes are in, and dental experts are sceptical

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First it came for handwash. Then deodorant. Now, the fancification trend has claimed its next victim: dental products. From £20 toothpastes to bottles of mouthwash that sound more like a perfume than a breath freshener, a new wave of oral care is blurring the lines between function and fashion.

Rather than being shoved in an old tumbler on the back of the shelf, today’s iterations of toothbrushes and pastes are at the forefront of social media sink shots, proudly displayed alongside a three-wick candle and curated pile of skincare.

Stop guessing and start probing with our writer’s pick of the top thermometers, including smart Bluetooth and leave-in models

• Readers’ favourite barbecue tips and tricks

While fewer of us are eating meat regularly – I refer you to the rise of “beef days” – if you’re going to cook it, it needs to be done properly. Overcooked beef with the texture of shoe leather, or undercooked poultry with a side of food poisoning, will put off even the most devoted carnivore.

A reliable meat thermometer solves both problems. It takes the guesswork out of cooking, helping you achieve melt-in-the-mouth steak and the best of any cut, with no special skills required.

Stick vacuums are a convenient alternative to corded designs, but which model wins for overall cleaning prowess? Our expert reveals all

• The best robot vacuums
• How to make your vacuum last longer

Choosing a cordless vacuum isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly. You’re likely to keep a vacuum cleaner for years, relying heavily on its ability to suck up dust, crumbs, mud, pet hair and any other dry spillages or sheddings that end up on your floor. Choosing the right model can be the difference between an effective cleaner that’s a delight to pull out of the cupboard and a dud that you dread having to unblock, detangle and clean after every use.

In this review, I took 16 of the leading cordless vacuum cleaners from a range of manufacturers and at various prices and inflicted the same cleaning tests on each one. That takes all the guesswork out of picking your next cleaner: I can tell you exactly which ones picked up the most mess.

Best cordless vacuum cleaner overall:
Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty IP3251

Here are our expert’s favourite running packs for everyday plods, all-out races and trail adventures

• The best running shoes for every runner

Runners can end up carrying a surprising amount of paraphernalia – phone, keys, jacket, maybe snacks (OK, definitely snacks) and water. If you dare to venture into the world of ultra marathons, that list grows even longer. While shorts and running tights have started packing in extra pockets to ease the burden, the best way to boost your mid-run storage is to invest in a running vest or hydration pack.

Like running backpacks, running vests range from minimal race-ready designs to big-volume options for trail-taming self-sufficiency. The best running vests give you the confidence to go further, knowing you’ve got everything you need to conquer your run. Over the years, I’ve relied on vests to help me through thousands of training miles, as well as dozens of marathons and ultras.

Best running vest overall:
The North Face Summit run vest 5l

Best budget running vest:
Harrier Kinder 10l

Forget soggy sandwiches! From pocket-size burners to charcoal cookers for a wonderfully smoky flavour, these stoves came top in our tests

• The best camping mattresses and sleeping mats

A reliable camping stove makes all the difference to food alfresco, allowing you to cook a stew in the evening and then warm up in the morning with a hot cup of coffee. The great thing about these stoves is that they’re essentially portable hobs, meaning anything you can cook on the stove at home can be whipped up in the great outdoors by sticking a pot or frying pan on top.

There’s a dizzying variety on offer, ranging from dinky ultralight burners that fit into your pocket to big stove-tops with multiple hobs, grills, wind protectors and a lid – the latter are like bringing along your cooker from home. Most run on gas, such as propane and butane, although I’ve also included charcoal options for traditional types. I’ve tested 20 of the best portable stoves, for everyone from ultralight wild campers to families who need to cook dinners for the masses.

Think giant sweet yorkshire pud filled with a lake of summer berry compote … that’s some brunch!

This pancake/yorkshire pudding hybrid is nothing if not fun. The edges crisp and puff up in the most dramatic way, making for a very impressive brunch centrepiece that makes a change from regular pancakes. Although delicious just with some icing sugar, I’ve filled this one with a quick fruit compote to make the most of summer berries. The juices soak into the base, making way for my favourite part of a yorkshire: the slightly soggy bottom.

Restaurant critic and award-winning author Jimi Famurewa visits the best London bakeries where family food traditions  meet contemporary British baking. First stop: Panadera in Soho, for a Filipino-inspired leche flan Danish. Then it’s south-east London and Bunhead, where the owner folds together the flavours of her Palestinian and British heritage into a chocolate, date and smoked salt bun. Finally, Farha in east London, a Middle Eastern-inspired cafe selling out of its banana brûlée.

Episode 1 of Feed with Jimi Famurewa — sampling the UK’s tastiest food trends

Making a meal anywhere but home can feel unnerving, but all you need is some forward planning and an essentials list

Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

Greetings from my parents’ kitchen in north Norfolk where, despite its familiarity, cooking takes on a less predictable dimension. By some measures their kitchen is well equipped – three toast racks, countless skewers, a three-egg poaching pan, many beer tankards, and a very noisy battery-operated pepper mill – but I’ll admit to missing my knives, my lemon juicer, and my salad spinner (my mother insists that one of the latter will never “clutter up” her cupboards, to which my riposte is, “An egg poaching pan?”). And that’s before all the ingredients that don’t make it into the hurried pre-holiday essentials shop, the indispensability of which only dawns on me in their absence – the rice wine vinegar, the maple syrup, the capers, the tahini.

All this is to say that cooking anywhere but your own kitchen can feel like a paradigm shift and demands a different approach. This could mean intricate planning or, in my case, it invariably sends me running to my archive of tried-and-tested recipes, will work regardless of what shops are nearby or what equipment is in the kitchen. These have seen me through summers in various kitchens that are not my own, from this very one in Norfolk to a scattering of Airbnbs in Europe. They require little more than a knife, a couple of pans, a wooden spoon and a heat source. A box grater and a whisk are handy, too. And, as your drinks columnist, it would be disingenuous to pretend that a decent corkscrew isn’t utterly vital. (For a sound list of real kitchen essentials, which don’t include three toast racks and a battery-operated pepper mill, I have always loved referring back to Laurie Colwin’s Low-Tech Person’s Batterie de Cuisine in her book of essays, Home Cooking.)

It is often the key secret ingredient in a lot of white wines, but the unsung hero of Sicily’s vineyards is taking its place in the sun

Depending on where you buy and drink wine, catarratto will be very familiar or very obscure. There was a time in the 2010s when I’d have put good money on it being the house white in half of Hackney’s restaurants, and if you’ve ever picked up a sub-£15 natural white wine at an independent bottle shop, catarratto will probably have featured. If, however, you buy wine from bigger retailers and have a taste for fruity, sun-soaked whites, chances are you’ve been drinking catarratto without even knowing it.

This is bonkers, given its prevalence. Catarratto is Sicily’s most widely planted white grape, accounting for roughly a third of the island’s vineyards; and, after sangiovese, it’s the second most planted grape in all of Italy. For decades, though, it was either destined for bulk wine, disappearing into tanks of anonymous, juicy table wines, or for use as a component of better-known Sicilian denominations such as fortified marsala or Etna bianco, where it plays a supporting role to other indigenous Sicilian grapes, such as grillo or carricante, respectively. It has about it a bit of a Quincy Jones quality: integral to the success of others before being recognised in its own right. Which it now really is, as modern producers make more complex catarrattos that really express their terroirs, be that volcanic, maritime or the rolling hills around Alcamo in the Sicilian north-west.

Daniella doesn’t want to go to bed early. Seamus says she shouldn’t offer the sofabed if she doesn’t want guests. Who has room for improvement?

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

It’s not that I don’t want him here, but he needs to understand that I am giving up my space to host him

It used be called playing the field, but now young people are claiming dating multiple people at once is intentional and growth-enhancing

Name: Roster dating.

Age: The term seems to be about a decade old; the practice is much older.

I was just 10 at the time but my siblings and I will never forget the sense of safety, comfort and warmth they offered

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

We were doing the groceries when a blood vessel burst in my mother’s brain. I was 10 years old and on a family holiday to France that very suddenly changed its tenor. In the following weeks Mum went through brain surgery, suffered a stroke and was placed in intensive care.

We had been staying in a gîte but moved to a small hotel closer to the hospital. It was a terrifying and stressful time, even as a young kid who knew things were serious – but didn’t understand quite how serious.

Will’s lack of self-worth is creating a barrier between him and Fi, but talking more could help them adjust to their mismatched libidos

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

I worry that Will sees me more as a mother figure than a sexual being

Whether it is SpaceX or a bank, getting the right facts about a firm can offer vital insights before you invest in it

When Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched on to the stock market, tens of thousands of Britons clamoured to buy a stake, putting the spotlight on DIY investing.

Going it alone and buying shares in individual companies can be rewarding, but also risky. Unless you have a huge amount of cash, you are likely to end up investing in far fewer companies than if you invested in a fund. This means you are more exposed to the ups and downs of those companies’ fortunes.

We told it of our 11pm arrival time but when we got there our room was no longer available as it had ‘overbooked’

I booked and paid for a room in the Travelodge London King’s Cross Royal Scot hotel six weeks in advance. It was for myself and my husband, who has heart disease and dementia.

I had called the hotel on the day of arrival to advise that we would be checking in at 11pm and was told that was fine.

Criminals send victims to a cloned site that collects login, personal and payment details

You have had a Spotify account for years and your credit card is linked for the monthly payments. When an email arrives telling you that your payment couldn’t be processed you are not surprised as the expiry date on the card is soon.

“We encountered an issue while processing your recent payment,” it says. “To keep your access active and avoid interruption, please review and update your information.”

I’m a self-employed driving instructor and I’m running out of cash to hire a replacement dual-control vehicle

My livelihood as a self-employed driving instructor is under threat owing to Nissan’s failure to repair my leased dual-control car.

It has been off the road awaiting a spare part for three months, and I’ve now been told it will take at least a further month to arrive.

Avoid espresso martinis and wear the right pyjamas: experts give tips on how to sleep when it’s hot outside

• Tell us: what impact have GLP-1s had on your relationships?

Getting a good night’s sleep when it’s hot out can feel impossible. Unfortunately, worrying about not being well-rested doesn’t help.

Experts say worrying about sleep in warm weather will inevitably make you feel worse. “When people cannot sleep because they are too hot, it often becomes both a physical and a mental challenge,” says Dr Shelby Harris, founder and director of NY Sleep and Psychology, and author of The Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia. “They may start watching the clock, worrying about how tired they will be the next day, or trying harder to force themselves to fall asleep.

Women and men exhibit different heart attack symptoms. Knowing these lesser-known factors can help save your life

A few months ago at work, when I rose from my seat and walked a few steps, something felt off. There was a strange pressure in my chest and rib cage, but I ignored it, took my water bottle from the kitchen and returned to my desk.

The next day it happened again. There was no pain and my breathing was fine. But whenever I stood up and took a few steps, the odd squeezing would return. I work at a hospital as a neurosurgery coordinator, and the wall was lined with posters about stroke and heart distress signs. I barely glanced at the pictures, having memorized them years ago.

The classic gym routine doesn’t isolate your stomach muscles as much as you might think, but here are five that will

If someone in a film or TV show wants a six-pack, chances are they’ll drop to the floor and start doing sit-ups. According to Dr Lee Brown, senior lecturer in strength and conditioning at the University of East London, that’s more Hollywood than science.

“It’s embedded in the archaic practices of boxing coaches and therefore everyone seems to follow it,” he says. “But they’re far from the best exercise for training your core.”

Stress, the cost of living, long working hours and even excessive exercise have all been touted as reasons the illness is rising among women in their 30s and 40s. What can be done to help them?

The “lightning strike” pain was like nothing Francine Jones had experienced before. “That is the only way I can describe it,” she says, of the stabbing in her torso that would occur every 10 minutes or so. “It was a really sharp, intense pain, as if someone was giving me an electric shock … it took my breath away.”

It had started in May with a strange pricking sensation under her bra. Then 10 large blisters, plus a host of smaller ones, formed in a band from her stomach to her back. They burned, “like someone was putting an iron on me. I don’t think I wore underwear for five or six weeks.” Showering, or even a cold flannel, would make her skin burn. Then came “the itch”, which lasted for five weeks and was so intense that she was lucky if she slept for four hours a night. “It was like something was crawling all over me all the time.” I can hear her wincing.

Not too long and not too short, culottes are the perfect length for summer 2026

Adding layers doesn’t have to leave you a hot mess – think sheer scarves and crochet with flashes of colour to elevate your look

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m in two minds about summer dressing. Part of me believes summer is about joy, sunshine and good times, and clothes should embrace all of that. This woman loves Pucci and owns not one but two silver kaftans. The other part of me believes summer should be uncomplicated, laid-back and earthy. This woman never checks in luggage and has worn the same black beach cover-up for so many years it’s too threadbare to cover anything much.

The thing is, either approach looks absurd if taken to extremes. Candy swirls, cherry prints and strawberry bag charms are delightful, but pile them too high and you look like a walking knickerbocker glory. And while white linen shirts and simple black sandals are chic, you risk looking a bit like you’re on a meditation retreat where the dress code is “wealthy disciple”. Know what I mean?

Fragrances with superior tones are cutting through the sugary, cheaper efforts that have been pervasive recently

After a lengthy sabbatical, I’m ready to let fig fragrances back into my life. There were years when I couldn’t get enough of lush, green Philosykos by Diptyque – a bona fide masterpiece and the greatest of all fig scents. Then a million sugary, inferior dupes sullied the whole category, cynically transporting it from the fruit groves of Turkey to the air freshener aisle at Halfords. With familiarity, grew contempt. But a new crop of figs is emerging to restore reputation and none are attempting to pass off as Diptyque.

Tom Ford’s recent Figue Erotique (£188 for 30ml), takes fig at various stages of its life cycle (sharp, nutty, green and unripe; rich, juicy, warm and sun-drenched; and finally sugary, creamy and ready to burst) and isolates each in its own accord. Bigger and bolder than most figs, with a sultry, musky sexiness that reads almost as humid, it may not be your most worn in a heatwave (reach for Chloé’s vivid, sparkling fig, Plage du Figuier (£115 for 50ml) then) but do give it a sniff when next you’re next at the shops – it’s a glorious scent for all seasons.

Are you stuck in a makeup rut? Or maybe just beginning to wear cosmetics? Here, experts reveal how to to find the right products for you

Makeup trends change over time – and so does our skin. How can you enhance what you have and refresh your look? Here, makeup artists share the fundamentals of applying cosmetics, at every age.

Small boats and kayaks connect the sparse communities and flourishing wildlife living on the thousands of islets on the Baltic coast

At 5am on Arkösund bay, it is so light it could be midday. I slip out of the pretty clapboard Arkösunds hotell, opened in 1895, as a small boat putters into the Baltic Sea, the sun sparkling on its calm waters. A wooden boardwalk invites me on to a string of tiny islets as geese arrow overhead and a mother swan coaxes her fluffy cygnets into a nook under a bridge.

I’m on Sweden’s east coast to explore the Östergötland archipelago, a sprawl of about 9,000 islands scattered across the Baltic Sea a few hours south of Stockholm. Quieter and less crowded than the better-known isles off Stockholm or Gothenburg, it covers several pockets of coastline and smaller archipelagos: Arkösund, Sankt Anna, Gryt and Tjust. The larger islands are flecked with traditional red timber summer houses, and are home to seals, sea birds, and dense, verdant forests of alder, cedar, oak and pine.

Ebikes with child seats – plus idyllic campsites and pit stops en route – turn a five-day ride on the car-free Véloscénic into a wonderful family holiday

“Are you mad?” says a fellow guest over dinner at our campsite. “I heard you’re here on a long-distance cycle ride with your toddlers.”

I am in Orne, a region in Normandy, with my sister Issy and our three-year-old sons, Sid and Ralph. The landscape folds around us in green-over-green – hedgerow, oak, mossy manor wall – then opens into meadows where Percheron horses graze, knee-deep in wildflowers. Deer leap from the bocage. Cidre and poiré have been pressed here since the middle ages. The villages are sandy stone, blue- and green-shuttered; roses against the boulangerie.

Horchata, the revered creamy drink made from tiger nuts, is still served in grand Valencian parlours – always accompanied by sugar-glazed pastries

It was a glimpse of an old couple sharing a tender moment in the bustling horchatería that drew me into one of Valencia’s most storied culinary traditions. As he sipped his milky horchata de chufa and a white crescent moon appeared on his coiffed moustache, they shared a soft laugh and she dabbed it away from his upper lip.

“There’s no fixed time to drink horchata,” the lady said. “As long we have at least one every day.”

Sagre – the historic local events that pop up in villages across the country in summer – are the perfect way to get a taste of regional cuisine and culture

I cannot remember a summer when at least one evening hasn’t been spent following signs to a local sagra. Not quite a food market and not quite a village fete, a sagra is like a village moving its kitchen outdoors for a few nights.

When I think back to those nights from childhood, the first image that comes to mind is of a woman’s hand closed into a fist above a pan of hot oil. Through a tight circle formed between her thumb and forefinger, she would squeeze soft lumps of batter, one small ball at a time, into the oil. In a few seconds, each soft mass would become a pittula, a small Salento fritter: swollen, uneven, golden, too hot to eat straight away but too good to wait for.

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

The Thursday quiz was all set to ask a question about Javier Milei’s improbable claim that US Democrats were financing an anti-Argentina campaign at the recent Fifa men’s World Cup. However, the quiz cannot work out how US lawmakers managed to ensure the Argentinian side had not a single effort on goal in 90 minutes during the final, which is really what did for them more than anything. Never mind, 15 questions have still been rustled up on topical news, popular culture and general knowledge. There are no prizes, but tell us how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 258

Writer Sarah Wilson argues we’re hurtling toward the same end as ancient Rome and the Mayan civilisation – but there’s plenty to fight for

In Sarah Wilson’s new book, one page is mostly blank. It’s intended as a reprieve, a neutral space “for you to stare at for a minute while your feelings catch up”.

You will need it. In I Eat the Stars, Wilson argues that the world as we know it is in collapse – and that we are too late to avoid the worst.

Liverpool: Paul McCartney’s latest album has brought tourists here, but there’s so much more to see than the sign

Earlier this year, Paul McCartney released an album called The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Among the unashamed nostalgia is a wistful track, Days We Left Behind, which evokes memories of his visits to the Mersey shore with George Harrison and friends. Young Paul was, it turns out, a keen birdwatcher.

Perhaps inevitably, the album has brought crowds of tourists to photograph the sign. The Speke end of the lane where they mostly gather is uninspiring, bounded by remnants of a demolished pub, a solar farm and an electricity substation.

Skincare-inspired regimes feel unnecessary – but giving your plants more attention is always a good thing

The problem
Plant care has had a glow-up. There is now an entire regime that’s been lifted straight from the bathroom cabinet: cleanse, hydrate, serum, tone. These beautifully boxed kits promise lush plants, make lovely gifts and look wonderful on a shelf, but the question is: does your monstera actually need a four-step routine?

The hack
The promise is that plants, like skin, thrive on a structured routine, and that investing in a multi-product care kit will reward you with glowing foliage.

Laughter, disbelief and outrage over video appearing to show Saltburn player tricking umpire into giving batters out

At the Saltburn over-60s ukulele club there was a unanimous reaction to news that the town’s cricket club were being compared to the Argentina football team: laughter. Then a spirited rendition of I Love to Boogie.

On the seafront, a litter-picking volunteer was looking forward to the Wednesday night quiz just to get the gossip. But she had her own view. “All I would say is it’s just not cricket, is it?”

Puppeteer best known for manipulating Zippy on the hit ITV series Rainbow and a stalwart of the Little Angel puppet theatre in London

The puppeteer Ronnie Le Drew, who has died aged 78, will be remembered for his long association with the irascible glove-puppet Zippy on ITV’s hit preschool series Rainbow. But to many in the British puppetry community, he was also an inspiring teacher, mentor and a generous on-stage colleague, as well as one of the country’s foremost marionettists.

Rainbow launched in 1972 as ITV’s answer to Sesame Street, and the following year Ronnie was asked to take over operating Zippy. Working with the voice actor Roy Skelton (also known as the voice of the Daleks and Cybermen in Doctor Who), Ronnie helped turn Zippy into the show’s unlikely star. Zippy was a moody, garrulous creature – his exact species was never defined, although Ronnie referred to him as “a unique” – who could only be silenced by forcibly zipping his mouth shut.

Carers tell of their struggles to get loved ones the support they need, and the emotional and financial toll caring takes on their own lives

Andy Burnham has vowed to fast-track the Casey Commission, an independent review of adult social care in England, with final recommendations expected to be released by summer 2027.

“I think social care in England is as unfair as American healthcare,” Burnham said in a speech outlining his pledge for reform on Wednesday. “The vulnerable pay with everything and it can completely leave them with nothing.”

We would like to hear your experiences of accessing, providing or relying on adult social care in England

Andy Burnham has said he is prepared to use his “political capital” to reform England’s adult social care system, with the new prime minister arguing that fixing social care is essential to easing pressure on the NHS.

Whether you receive care yourself, support a loved one, work in social care or are an unpaid carer, we want to understand what adult social care in England is really like for the people who rely on it every day.

We want to hear from people who have recently completed an apprenticeship or planning to go on one

The government has announced plans to reshape education for young people in England from the age of 14, with a greater focus on technical and vocational learning, alongside an ambition to create thousands more apprenticeships.

As part of plans to encourage more young people into apprenticeships, the work and pensions secretary, Pat McFadden, has announced a new bursary aimed at ensuring families are not financially worse off if their teenager starts an apprenticeship.

We want to hear how people are dealing with the very hot weather.

UK forecasters have predicted a fourth heatwave of the year, with temperatures forecast to reach as high as 35C by Wednesday, triggering heat health alerts.

Fire chiefs have also appealed to people to take care in parched parks and rural areas.

We would like to hear from people living near AI datacentres about their experiences and any concerns they might have

There are around 450 large data centres across the UK. These warehouses contain computing infrastructure that power cloud services and, increasingly, AI.

There is much debate about how datacentres affect their local areas, with concerns raised by nearby residents about land use, pollution, noise, and the “heat island effect”.

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