Eilish Rothney’s first instinct was to get rid of the wasps entering her converted shipping container in Norfolk. Now she enjoys their constant hum

When wasps began streaming through a rusted gap in her office door one June morning, Eilish Rothney’s first instinct was the same most people would have: get rid of them. The reserve manager for the Trinity Broads, part of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, had discovered a wasp colony taking up residence in her office, a converted shipping container.

“They just built the nest inside my door,” she says. “My first thought was: ‘Oh no, I have to get rid of that now.’ But then I realised: ‘Wait, why? Why do I have to do that?’”

Books have never been trendier, but studies show that as more and more things compete for our frazzled attention spans, we’re reading less and less. This is a problem because reading has a wealth of cognitive benefits that we’re in danger of missing out on.

To find out why declining literacy could affect everything from memory to IQ, Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample. She also hears from Prof Falk Huettig, an experimental psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and author of The Perks of Being a Bookworm

Tenacious and confounding, the horseshoe crab pre-dates dinosaurs and has copper-based blood vital to vaccine safety

They pre-date dinosaurs, eat food using their legs and contain blue blood that we use to keep us healthy. Horseshoe crabs are the supreme, if offbeat, survivors of the invertebrate world.

Often called “living fossils” for visually obvious reasons – horseshoe crabs resemble a sort of prehistoric helmet (their Japanese name translates as “helmet crab”) – these animals have barely changed appearance along a lineage that stretches back 445m years.

It’s invertebrate of the year again! From 3-12 August, every day we will profile one of the thousands of amazing invertebrates that our readers have nominated. And then, when you’ve heard about all of them, we’ll open the voting so you can choose your favourites. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with thoughts and ideas: email us at environment.desk@theguardian.com with Invertebrate in the subject line.

Jaw-dropping documentary Whatever It Takes details an aggressive stalking campaign targeted towards a couple whose reporting criticized the tech company

When Massachusetts husband-and-wife team Ina and David Steiner launched their reporting careers covering Silicon Valley at the turn of the century, the tech beat was still cozy enough to feel personal. The startups were still emerging from garages, and the journalists covering them were often filing stories from their own kitchen tables. Ebay was still a young online auction company founded on the principle that “people are basically good.”

As digital retail took off, the Steiners launched an e-zine called EcommerceBytes, catering to a growing community of small business owners who were increasingly using platforms like eBay to sell their wares. “We talked about this being an opportunity for just average people, disabled people, elderly people to make extra income,” says David of a community that has grown alongside EcommerceBytes, which now has more than 600,000 readers. “We were really excited about that.”

On August 12, the moon will pass in front of the sun, completely obscuring it in a solar eclipse. According to Nasa, parts of Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Russia and Portugal will experience a total solar eclipse. In the UK, there will be a partial eclipse, with up to 96% of the sun covered, the deepest eclipse the country has seen since 1999.

But no matter where you’re hoping to watch from, it’s important to protect your eyes. The Guardian’s Sarah Ann Harris explains.

When he saw a messy yard being criticised on social media, Stephen Jalland grabbed his trimmer and decided to help. An overgrown garden, he discovered, often hides an overwhelmed owner

Anita Thursby had been dreading the gas engineer coming to service her boiler. They would have needed to enter her kitchen, where the window looked into the jungle of swirling, 2-metre-high brambles that made up her back garden, and her shame had spiralled. “I would have been horrified,” she says. For the same reason, the 54-year-old had stopped inviting friends over to her house and had been living in fear of a complaint from her housing association.

Maintaining the garden had slipped from her grasp, becoming a source of constant worry, yet pride had stopped her asking for help – and tight finances from paying for it. Family barbecues had become a distant memory, even though she longed to have her 83-year-old mother round to sit in the sun; weeks ago, she bought a grill in Tesco with little hope of ever using it.

Key tourist route closed and residents rallying round as battle against wildfire expected to go on for several days

The battle to contain a large wildfire spreading across the New Forest will go on for several days, experts have said, as wind changes and a desiccated landscape fuel the flames.

Smoke billowed above the deserted A31 road, the main tourist route into the New Forest national park where tens of thousands of families are on holiday, late on Tuesday while a helicopter flew above the blaze. Firefighters at the scene said they were trying to contain several hotspots across the more than 100 hectares (247 acres) of dried heathland as winds swirled over the area.

Union chief says vote is about staff ‘warning they cannot protect the public properly’

In his pooled TV interview, Andy Burnham repeated the point he made in his Facebook post earlier (see 9.58am), saying he was confident that more could be done to free up space in the prison system (which would allow the early release system to be changed so that PC Andrew Harper’s killers are excluded). Burnham said that since becoming PM he had been pushing the system “every single day” to go further.

Explaining how extra space could be found (see 9.19am), he particularly singled out the more than 2,000 prisoners on indeterminate IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentences. He said:

[The] plan will include issues like returning more foreign national offenders to their country of origin, and looking at the injustice of IPP sentences, which have led to young people, or young when they were imprisoned, being imprisoned indeterminately, and that clearly is unfair.

My office was in touch with the family last night [see 10.04am], and I know the justice secretary is in regular touch as well.

So, we will keep close to the family through this whole process because we understand how difficult this process has been for them.

Staff at North Devon district hospital given training in difficult births in case mothers-to-be cannot get to Exeter

Doctors at one of England’s remotest hospitals have been given a “crash course” in birth emergencies after its maternity unit was shut and as fears grow that the safety of women and babies may be put at risk.

From Tuesday, the maternity service at North Devon district hospital (NDDH) in Barnstaple has been suspended indefinitely owing to staff shortages, leaving many pregnant women facing a journey of at least an hour and a half when they go into labour.

Exclusive: Court service says anyone trying to enter buildings with glasses will have them confiscated and returned when they leave

Courts in England and Wales have joined a number of restaurants, theatres and pubs in banning Meta glasses, amid a mounting backlash against what has been described as “spyware”.

Last month courts in New York announced a ban on the controversial glasses, which can record video footage while being worn.

Prof Wyn Evans, who raised concerns over treatment of female staff at Institute of Astronomy, was subject to ‘baseless’ investigation, judge rules

A University of Cambridge whistleblower who alleged bullying of female staff inside the university’s Institute of Astronomy has won a tribunal against his employer.

Prof Wyn Evans told a tribunal hearing in June that the institute suffered from “a bad history of misogyny”. He claimed that one woman in the department had been “hounded out of a job”, another was “left a frightened woman”, and a third had faced “aggressive professors” at the institute.

Elaborate ruse was used to transport president to military flight from Air Force One in July

Donald Trump departed on a secret military flight from Turkey to Britain last month when the White House said he was flying aboard ⁠Air Force One, in an extraordinary ruse – prompted by an Iranian assassination threat – that involved hiding the president in an airport catering container, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times.

The operation took place when Trump was in Ankara for a Nato summit with world leaders, according to the Post. The president reportedly boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras, and then was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, a US official told the Post.

• Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium half-full on Monday

• Athletes and fans join chorus of concern over prices

Keely Hodgkinson’s coach, and the BBC commentator Steve Cram have led a chorus of concern about high ticket prices causing low ­attendances at the European ­Athletics Championships in Birmingham.

Fans have also criticised the high food prices at the Alexander Stadium, with a barbecue pork roll costing £18.50, a bratwurst hot dog £15, and a bottle of water £3.95.

Academic paper says often illicit trade exposes enthusiasts – and postal workers handling items – to serious risks

A growing global trade in mummified human remains has been described by academics as “a real mummy’s curse” that poses a serious health risk to its enthusiasts and the postal services they use.

Research into the secretive buying and selling of centuries-old human body parts including hands, feet and heads found alarming risks from dormant microorganisms and the toxic materials used to preserve the remains.

Rooms in Icelandic capital Reykjavík cost double usual rate and Spain also enjoying strong bookings

• Europe’s total solar eclipse: the best place to see it

Hotel prices have surged in key European cities as hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to see the first total eclipse visible from the continent this century.

Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, has seen one of the biggest jumps in hotel room prices, being one of the few accessible locations to see the full eclipse before evening on Wednesday.

In the five years since the Taliban’s return to power, the walls have been closing in on the women and girls of Afghanistan.

As the regime has tightened its grip, it has banned girls from education after the age of 12, ejected many women from the workplace and created legal frameworks for child marriage and husbands beating their wives. Taliban rule has ushered in a new era of women being whipped for minor infractions and constant inspections by ‘vice and morality’ officials, with men compelled to become enforcers in their own homes. Even the borders of the online world have been creeping inward, with a new spate of smartphone bans and internet restrictions.

Marking the grim anniversary, a dozen women and girls have, at great risk to their safety, documented their lives for the world to see

Herat province
Every day, I wake up to the silence of dawn. I feel as though I am still holding my weapon. I lie on my bed for a few moments, taking deep breaths. With every awakening, I make a promise to myself: if my husband manages to return home safely today, I will thank God even more.

The wild capture and release of a female big cat into a nature reserve is the first step towards reintroducing a population that hasn’t been seen for 70 years

On 31 July, “Umit” – which means hope in Kazakh – was released into a nature reserve on the edge of Lake Balkhash after more than a decade of careful planning to return the caspian tiger to the region. With this release, Kazakhstan became the first country to restore its tiger range after they had been thought extinct, with the last reliable sighting in the country recorded more than 70 years ago.

Umit – a wild-caught female tiger transported from the Russian far east – will be joined by more big cats in the coming years, with plans to establish a self-sustaining population of about 50. A wild-caught male flown from Russia is still being monitored by authorities and will be released when he is judged fit to survive alone. Two wild tiger cubs are also being reared on the reserve in special enclosures, with as little human contact as possible, and are likely to be released into the marshlands next year, to feast on boar, deer and kulans, a type of wild donkey.

The new PM could bring in revenue for social care or defence with a land levy or by reforming council tax

Residential property is the largest store of wealth in the UK, and has long been a target for those who believe homes should be taxed more. Real estate remains a juicy plum for Andy Burnham to pick as he searches for ways to pay for an overhaul of the social care system and higher defence spending, to name just two fiscal priorities. Yet how to tax property, or possibly the land it sits on, has vexed economists and politicians for centuries. Here we discuss the background to the debate and some of the tax options.

• This article was amended on 11 August 2026. An earlier version said home occupiers in France must pay the taxe d’habitation; in fact, since 2023 this only applies to second homes.

Poll finds consensus on what makes people proud to be British but deep divisions on issues such as immigration

You may think it’s a commitment to buying a round, the ability to chat at length about the weather, or making a proper cup of tea. But when it comes down to what makes people proud to be British, there is a consensus across all ages, demographics and political groups – and tea, pints and the weather don’t get a look-in.

Hard work, fair play and community are the values that voters – no matter which political party, age group, social class or region they come from – instinctively believe capture what it means to be British, according to a large-scale study of British values by Public First.

Ten years later, the actors are stopped in the street to talk about their chemistry in the fantastic BBC sitcom Mum. The pair open up about joy, naughtiness and Tinder swiping

• More from our series Making Love: ‘We met and two minutes later we were kissing’ – how Gavin and Stacey became Britain’s most bang tidy TV couple

Ten years ago, Stefan Golaszewski introduced us to 59-year-old Cathy in his sitcom Mum. It was the day of the funeral of her husband, Dave, in the chaos of her suburban semi-detached before setting off. Her dopey son, Jason, was there with his goofy new girlfriend, Kelly, as was Cathy’s pushover brother, Derek, and his snobby partner, Pauline. Dave’s parents were picking at nibbles, too, making borderline problematic comments. And there was a quiet, kind man, Michael, trying to reach Cathy in this mayhem to give her a bouquet of flowers.

Michael was an old friend of Cathy and Dave. Over the next three seasons, he slowly revealed his true feelings to Cathy. It started with a little hand grab. Then came the admission that, after Michael’s mum died, the last thing he talked to her about was, “You.” Garden centre trips followed (“We’ve been to three and you still haven’t bought any chairs!”) as did Cathy’s doubts (“What if I just miss Dave?”). Then, one day, she gave in to her feelings: “It sort of crept up on me.” After a final declaration of love in the rain, the pair walked off into the sunset with a bag of crisps and bottle of bubbly.

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Ireland’s artist at the Venice Biennale steals religious imagery for her secular celebrations of scientists and humanists, including an Italian punctuation master – and even TV’s famous mobster

It’s a long way to the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. First, you pass through the biennale’s colossal central exhibition, housed in a sequence of cavernous medieval warehouses. After that, the route takes in a suite of national pavilions (the Philippines, Latvia, Timor-Leste, Morocco, Malta, Oman). By the time art-lovers reach Ireland’s presentation, they are frequently exhausted, if not delirious.

This year, Dublin-based artist Isabel Nolan has transformed the pavilion into a space of respite, both physical and intellectual – a secular chapel titled Dreamshook. Visitors emerge from darkness into a pale-yellow chamber flooded with daylight and face a radiant tapestry arched like a stained-glass window in a gothic cathedral. A cluster of archangel’s wings bearing books hovers before the vast orb of the sun above a fish-filled sea. Nolan works across sculpture, textile, painting, drawing and text, and Dreamshook is accordingly rich in colour and pictorial detail, including bent metal sculptures, tapestries and drawings. For the footsore and weary – ie everyone – she has even designed benches. Glory be.

The Federal Communications Commission on 28 July announced a ban on humanoid robots from China including the popular Unitree G1 model. The Guardian's technology journalist Nick Robins-Early explains the recent popularity of these trending robots and why the US government says they are a risk to the country's national security

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basics they scrimp on? The maître d’ and TV presenter talks secateurs, splurging on wine and terrible sofas with the Filter

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Fred Sirieix shot to fame as the smooth maître d’ on the Channel 4 reality show First Dates. He has presented shows including Million Pound Menu, Gordon, Gino and Fred’s Road Trip, Remarkable Places to Eat, and the travelogue series Tour de Fred, and authored the books Seriously British, Wine Uncorked and First Dates: The Art of Love.

Originally from Limoges, France, Sirieix cut his teeth in a number of top restaurants before becoming general manager of Michelin-starred Galvin at Windows. His charity, The Right Course, which teaches hospitality skills to prisoners, is opening restaurants in three prisons this year. He lives in London with his wife, affectionately nicknamed “Fruitcake”.

Family fallouts, failing marriages, sunburn, food poisoning ... from Deborah Levy’s hypnotic and disturbing Hot Milk to All In, Claire Powell’s all-inclusive nightmare, Leon Craig looks at the best novels about vile vacations

Every summer, we long for a much-needed break from daily life, dreaming of self-reinvention in some distant paradise. But really, holidays can be absolute hell. Instead of relaxation we encounter heaving crowds, lumpy beds, the caprices of our loved ones and the grim truth that we can escape neither their worst failings nor our own, however far we travel.

Small wonder, then, that the disaster holiday has become a booming subgenre in fiction. For most of us, the levels of luxury promised by hit TV series The White Lotus are pure fantasy, yet we’re all vulnerable to the expensive promises we’ve been sold. Two of the smartest offerings in fiction this summer come from Claire Powell’s All In and Chloë Ashby’s Family Friends. In the former, a struggling couple whose marriage is on the rocks go on an all-inclusive Spanish weekend break, paid for by a rich brother. Poignant and extremely funny, the frictions that ensue are all too believable.

Our cartoonist welcomes the EFL back, with returning characters and a look at what it’s like as an exiled supporter

• Buy a cartoon | Some of David’s favourite works

• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

Given the size and age of the universe, it should be full of species with technology far more advanced than our own. So where are they?

• The summer issue of the Long Read magazine is out now. Click here to order

During a visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, Enrico Fermi, one of the architects of the Manhattan Project, was having lunch with other physicists when the conversation turned to flying saucers. At one point during the discussion, Fermi blurted out: “Where is everybody?” – or, as another participant remembered it, “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” If aliens exist, in other words, why have we never encountered them?

The episode has become famous, marking the moment when extraterrestrial life went from a theme for philosophical speculation to a serious scientific problem. For centuries, people had wondered whether life exists on the moon or Mars, but they accepted that we would never know for certain, since making contact with another planet was impossible. By the 1950s, those limits no longer seemed so fixed. In addition to space flight, researchers were developing tools to detect the radio signals that reach us from stars many light years away. These developments were still in their infancy, but it was already clear that humanity was no longer bound to Earth the way it always had been.

There are social tipping points when the seemingly impossible suddenly becomes inevitable. Good journalism plays an essential role in helping drive these shifts and shows us how real change can happen

• Climate campaign 2026: help us reach 20,000 acts of support

There are many reasons to despair: our green and pleasant land is parched and brown, reservoirs are depleted, and wildfires are racking the UK, Europe and the US. But there are many more reasons not to despair: despair is self-fulfilling; despair is disempowering; despair is what the bastards want you to feel. But above all, despair is irrational. Let me explain why.

However sophisticated our forecasting tools may be, we simply have no means of knowing what comes next. Like the climate, like every ecosystem, society is a complex system. Its properties and adaptive responses cannot be predicted by studying its components in isolation, regardless of the brilliance of social scientists and futurologists. Things happen - unexpected things - sometimes at astonishing speed. In other words, society has tipping points. It can quickly flip from one equilibrium state to another.

Climate campaign 2026: help us reach 20,000 acts of support

On Tuesday 20 October, join Damian Carrington, and our panel of experts—including Professor Andy Haines, Katie White MP, Asad Rehman, Shruti Suresh, Gareth Thomas and Amy Fairman for a hopeful and solutions-focused evening. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

My mum has been a huge help with the practical stuff. She’s also stirred up memories of my own blissfully bored childhood

I gave birth to a second child a few months ago. I don’t think I will ever get over the fact that this is the way people come into the world. It’s a ridiculous endeavour, from start to finish.

My first pregnancy was almost comically miserable for the first 20 weeks, then glorious for 10 weeks, then scary and stressful for the remainder. And this time? More intense in every way, but with added toddler. Which is to say: no breaks, suck it up, keep on moving.

The idea of government adviser Alan Milburn sounds laudable. But it’s asking too much of a system already struggling to meet society’s demands

When you go to the dentist, what do you expect? That they will check your teeth, see if you need any fillings, give you some advice on oral hygiene? You probably don’t expect that they will teach your child to read, tackle youth unemployment or solve poverty.

But when it comes to education, politicians are remarkably relaxed about loading wider social responsibilities on to schools. The suggestion from Alan Milburn, a former minister and now a senior government adviser, is that primary schools – that is, schools that educate children aged four to 11 – should identify children who might not be in education, employment or training at the age of 16. “The warning signs are there from a very early, early age. You know, frankly from preschool,” he said. “So, definitely primary schools should be identifying children who are at risk of being Neet. And secondary schools and other services should be intercepting, intervening, supporting and helping those young people to get on a different path.”

Daisy Christodoulou is an education writer and director of education at No More Marking, an educational technology startup

As someone who has specialised in regional policy, I know the task is huge – not least because there is no plan to ensure prosperity throughout England

Andy Burnham is off on his travels this week, aiming to reconnect No 10 and the government with voters and communities across the UK. But just weeks before he set out his stall as prime minister, promising to rebalance the economy with growth in every postcode, a government agency, National Highways, underlined the pulling power of the country’s dominant city-region. It announced that a giant tunnelling machine, 16.4 metres in diameter, “the largest ever used in Europe”, was to take England’s most expensive road under the Thames.

The Lower Thames Crossing (LTC), so far priced at £10bn-£11bn, is proving to be a contested 14.5-mile venture on the edge of Greater London. Objectors and local councils say it will deliver only short-term congestion relief and destroy ancient woodland and habitats. At 2.6 miles, the road tunnel will be the country’s longest, involving twin-boring for two three-lane highways connecting the M25 in Essex to the A2/M2 in Kent. The government has so far committed £3.1bn for funding the tunnel. It expects the rest from the private sector. We shall see.

Peter Hetherington writes for Society Guardian on communities and regeneration

Our children should be able to visit our nation’s capital without having to think about Donald Trump and about how much he did to deface it

History has shown us how much dictators and aspiring dictators love building monuments to themselves. They enjoy reminding the world that they can do anything, no matter who is responsible for the physical labor or who will be paying the financial and human cost.

They prefer outsized structures, heroic arches, towers and columns designed to prove that their signature and their esthetic will be with us forever, even after they’re dead, though dictators often seem to believe they are too powerful to die.

Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Voters disillusioned by Brexit should have more options than Nigel Farage or the novelty candidate Count Binface

The UK could be forgiven if, like Brenda from Bristol, it feels it has had too much politics of late. The long death rattle of the Starmer government against a backdrop of relentless excitement from the White House has left everyone suffering a severe case of overwhelm. We all deserve a holiday – even Andy Burnham, exhausted after a few weeks in the job.

So the political and media class may think they are doing us a favour by turning the forthcoming byelection prompted by the resignation of the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, into a joke. But it is not very fair on the people of Clacton, who are being told they face a binary choice on 13 August, between Farage and the novelty candidate Count Binface.

Simon Nixon is a journalist and economics commentator

Some constituents are traumatised, others violent. It’s time the House of Commons protected the people who work at the grassroots of our democracy

Before most people have finished their morning coffee, an MP’s staffer might have already dealt with a suicidal caller, a victim of domestic abuse or a threat of violence. We’ve been yelled at, cried at and sometimes even physically attacked, all in the course of managing a heavy caseload of constituents’ most intractable problems. So, when I read the results of the latest survey by the wellness working group (WWG) I was not surprised to learn that half of us are experiencing clinical levels of psychological distress.

Psychological distress is a range of emotional or cognitive suffering, such as anxiety or depression, that impairs a person’s ability to cope with ordinary daily life and functioning. It makes you wonder why urgent action is not in place to support these staff members, who are holding together the day-to-day functioning of democracy as well as supporting constituents throughout the UK.

Estelle Warhurst is the office manager for a Labour MP and an executive committee member for the parliamentary wellness working group

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.

A recent letter signed by 1,367 researchers and engineers at frontier AI labs – mainly OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Deepmind – points to a dangerous moment

It is fashionable in certain circles to dismiss the catastrophic risks of AI. One often hears that “the real experts” who work on the technology every day are really not concerned at all; that only “doomers” and “luddites” espouse a “fringe” view from a “position of ignorance”; that all talk of potential catastrophe is just “science fiction”.

Fortunately, an open letter has been published that lets us hear from the real experts who work on the technology every day, in their own words. And are they worried? Very.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has no interest in agreeing to a deal. For relief to come to Gaza, real US pressure must be exerted

At the end of July, Donald Trump announced that a “monumental” US-backed deal had been struck on Gaza, securing the phased disarmament of Hamas in parallel with Israeli military withdrawal. Three days later it was reported that another 18 people had died in Israeli airstrikes. Not for the first time, it appeared that Mr Trump’s rhetoric had only a distant relationship with the reality it purported to describe.

Such suspicions were duly confirmed yesterday. Under pressure from far-right members of his coalition, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, explicitly rejected the sequencing of a 15-point plan from the increasingly hapless Board of Peace – an international body set up by the US president – and poured scorn on “a wave of rumours of … Israeli withdrawals on all fronts”. In a direct message to the White House, Mr Netanyahu stated that “we know how to stand our ground, even against our best friends when necessary.”

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.

Privacy needs defending against invasive wearable gadgets. So far, businesses are ahead of the government

It is not yet clear to what extent Meta’s new smart glasses will live up to the nickname of “pervert glasses” – bestowed in recognition of the obvious appeal of wearable cameras to voyeurs. The past week has seen rising criticism of the devices, which in the UK have been banned by the pub chain Wetherspoons and the theatre group ATG, as well as restaurants, schools and members’ clubs. These organisations deserve praise for standing up for privacy. By contrast, regulators appear once again to be on the back foot.

There have, inevitably, already been reports of women being mistreated. Earlier this year the BBC spoke to several who had been filmed without their consent, with footage subsequently uploaded to social media. In one case, the content creator demanded a fee to remove it. In the year to March 2025, image-based sexual abuse and cyberflashing were responsible for more than half of an 11% increase in reported sexual offences in England and Wales. Normalisation of smart glasses would, clearly, make such offences easier to commit.

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.

Dr Kate Martin is encouraged by the new network of community clinics, while Prof Dr John R Ashton says the forthcoming mental health strategy is an opportunity to grasp the nettle, while Marjorie Wallace expresses concerns about plans to cut mental health jobs in the NHS

It’s very encouraging to hear the announcement about the new network of community mental health clinics in England (Editorial, 6 August). The focus on early intervention is crucial, as it means that people can access treatment as early as possible, rather than waiting for their mental health to reach a crisis point. The centres should improve access, reaching people where they are. The government should make sure that they meaningfully involve people with lived experience of mental health problems to ensure the centres are co-designed and co-led with them.

As your editorial says, parity between mental and physical healthcare became a policy goal in 2011. Mental health is an issue that unites us. According to new research, which we commissioned from More in Common, nearly three-quarters of the public believe that mental health is as important as physical health, most people are comfortable talking about it, and support for early intervention is high across the political spectrum. Three-quarters also say the government should do more to improve services.

Reading the memoir Poor reinforced the vastness and complexity of poverty – an issue that still blights the lives of countless young people today, says Sarah Schofield

Adrian Chiles’s emotional response to Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan really resonated with me (I’d never cried during a live broadcast – then three poignant words had me sobbing, 30 July). I read it and my heart both sobbed and cheered for Katriona’s younger self and the woman she has become.

With its linear narrative, rich cultural references and “rags-to-riches” form, it might be taken for a tale of “that was then but this is now”. However, the defining part of the book is the epilogue, making clear that Katriona’s account of growing up in grinding, abject poverty is a story of then and now. Every day, countless Katrionas enter schools with “pissy pants” and empty bellies, their nervous systems on high alert, in fight, flight or freeze.

There are serious political and societal messages to be found in some of the best-known fictional accounts of village cricket, argues Rod Edmond

Your leader (The Guardian view on sporting fair play: it was never quite cricket, 30 July) recycles the persistent caricature of Siegfried Sassoon’s, Hugh de Sélincourt’s and AG Macdonell’s cricket fiction as existing in a “bucolic dreamworld”.

Sassoon’s The Flower Show Match is set against the background of the Boer war, with recurring references to the relief of Ladysmith. The home umpire is also suspected of using his wooden leg to make dents in the pitch.

Health concerns | Rubbish decisions | In sympathy | Funeral songs | Short illnesses

Calls for changes to breast cancer guidelines for GPs are welcome (Report, 4 August). The existing guidelines are irrational. If your grandmother and mother have both had breast cancer, you are still not added to the intensified screening list unless an aunt or great-aunt or sister has also had breast cancer. Hence the system discriminates against families – like mine – with only one woman in a generation.
Helen Hills
York

• It seems that Anna Tims’s correspondent committed the wrong environmental crime (I was fined £500 after putting a coffee cup in a rubbish bag next to a full bin, 3 August). Instead of unwittingly littering, they should have dumped thousands of tonnes of sewage into a river and bagged a multimillion-pound reward.
Matt Sheard
Tayport, Fife

• Chelsea also made aware of 19-year-old’s availability

• Newcastle’s Lewis Hall remains prime United target

Myles Lewis-Skelly has been offered to Manchester United as a potential left-back option, with Arsenal wishing to recoup some of the £75m paid to Newcastle for Bruno Guimarães.

Chelsea, it is understood, have also been made aware of the 19-year-old’s availability. Lewis-Skelly won the Premier League under Mikel Arteta last term, but whether the west London club will make a move for him is unclear.

• Briton wore sunglasses for first time in a race in victory

• Hodgkinson’s time of 1min 57.28sec her fastest in a heat

Keely Hodgkinson breezed through the opening round of the 800m at the European championships with her ­fastest time in a heat – before laughing about why she had worn sunglasses for the first time in a race.

“It’s sunny out there,” she joked. “I’m just trying not to get wrinkles and stop the need for Botox too early.”

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Far be it for Football Daily to make cheap gags [wait, what? – Football Daily Ed] relating to the involvement of Amazon founder and master of the universe Jeff Bezos in a consortium buying around 30% of Liverpool FC. Will new signings arrive via prompt delivery but end up next door at Everton? How will fans rate the packaging? Etc, etc. There’s also the involvement of Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder poking his head in. Though long ago unfriended by Mark Zuckerberg, Saverin still ranked No 56 on Forbes’s billionaires list. These are seriously rich men, and among the planet’s chino class, to quote Vladimir Putin, “soccer is popular”. The Geopolitics World Cup posh seats were full of those eyeing up deals on a frontier hardly new to investors from the USA USA USA, but where there may be much more gold to strike. See Gianni Infantino’s misreading of the art of the deal as an, ahem, prime example.

Having also boycotted the GWC and also being very concerned about the season to come, I sympathise with Ken Muir (yesterday’s Football Daily letters). But at least Hearts know who their manager is. Due to the absurd, months-long FA ‘investigation’ into the manager who’s clearly admitted culpability for the undisputed facts of Spygate, my club, Southampton, is in a horrid limbo. Surely it could have been done and dusted in a couple of weeks and Saints could have planned accordingly. But perhaps the FA blazers were too busy writing their letter of support to Gianni Infantino to worry about destabilising my football club” – Bob Cushion.

‘It’s 15 years of frustration here at this club,’ says Rangers boss Derek McInnes (yesterday’s Quote of the Day.) Steven Gerrard and the sole object in his managerial trophy cabinet would like a word, Derek” – David Maddock.

Given the surfeit of the recent GWC machinations, the blatherings and canvassing for Gianni to do one (or not) and the less-than-sportsmanlike attitude from members of the Argentina team, can we please have a reprise of the Football Daily’s erstwhile, eventually abortive, attempt to ‘STOP FOOTBALL’? It has to be worth a thought, before VAR, PGMOL and Arsenal’s Dark Arts Department™ get to work on the 2026-27 Premier League shenanigans, surely?” – Budgie Wright.

This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions. 

• England defender keen on move to Italian champions

• Udogie and Porro set to be Spurs’ first-choice full-backs

Tottenham are prepared to allow Djed Spence to join Inter, with the England defender expected to cost around €30m (£25.6m).

Spence – who started four games for England at the World Cup, including the semi-final against Argentina – has fallen further down the pecking order at Spurs after the arrival of Andy Robertson from Liverpool. He signed a new four-year contract in north London at the start of last season but is believed to be keen on joining the Italian champions, with Destiny Udogie and Pedro Porro expected to be Roberto De Zerbi’s preferred full-backs this season.

• WSL team will be favourites against Spanish side

• Financial implications of missing out are significant

Chelsea will face Real Sociedad in the Women’s Champions League’s third qualifying round, needing a victory over two legs to earn a place in the main league phase of the competition.

The 2021 runners-up and six-time European semi-finalists are taking part in the qualifying stage by virtue of their disappointing third-placed finish in the Women’s Super League last term – their lowest league finish since 2019 – and they will be the favourites against the Spanish side.

One of the player’s WNBA rivals said the Fever guard is treated differently from her Black peers. There’s plenty of evidence to back that statement up

White privilege. An accusation that triggers multitudes of white people in America as if you had insulted their mother. Mention racism, and people may debate you. Mention discrimination, and people may even listen. But say the words “white privilege”, and suddenly defenses go up, outrage erupts, and people start explaining why privilege couldn’t possibly have anything to do with what everyone just witnessed with their own eyes.

Which brings us to DiJonai Carrington and Sophie Cunningham.

• American scores 19.06 to beat Medina at Tahiti Pro

• Eleven-time world champion tames Teahupo’o barrels

Even at the grand old age of 54, the evergreen Kelly Slater’s mastery of surfing appears to know no bounds. Having been handed a wildcard for the Tahiti Pro, the American delivered yet another masterclass as he tamed Teahupo’o, one of the world’s heaviest waves, to knock out Gabriel Medina with a near-perfect heat score.

Slater, who is still regarded as one of the best barrel riders in the world, has won the notoriously treacherous event five times before. In pumping conditions on Tuesday that produced eight-to-10ft swell, the veteran rolled back the years with an imperious display as two deep barrels scored 9.73 and 9.33 for a heat total of 19.06 to blow his Brazilian opponent out of the water.

Lawsuit challenges executive order targeting international criminal court for investigating Israeli crimes in Palestine

Four prominent US human rights organizations have accused the Trump administration of using its “crippling” sanctions regime against the international criminal court (ICC) to undermine global efforts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court on Tuesday, the groups – the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Institute – argued that the administration’s targeting of the ICC, as well as of groups and individuals affiliated with it or assisting its work, amounts to a “blatantly illegal attack on international justice”, the groups said.

People being pulled from collapsed buildings day after 7.4 magnitude quake hit, in response experts say contrasts favourably with Venezuela’s

Colombian rescue workers are racing to find survivors after the country’s deadliest earthquake this century killed at least 224 people and left at least 3,000 missing.

In Cali, one of the worst affected cities, firefighters said they had pulled a 35-year-old man from the wreckage of a collapsed building shortly before 4am on Tuesday – nearly 24 hours after the 7.4 magnitude quake rattled western Colombia.

Robert Gilman had been deteriorating rapidly in prison and was said to be in a catatonic state

Russia has freed a former US marine who had been in jail since 2022, after Vladimir Putin granted the ailing American a pardon on humanitarian grounds.

Robert Gilman, 32, an English teacher who briefly served in the US Marines, was travelling by train when he was arrested in the southern Russian city of Voronezh in January 2022 for allegedly kicking a police officer while drunk, according to Russian state media. He was later sentenced to four and a half years in prison, though his family has consistently denied the allegations against him.

British driver Andy Green will try to beat his own record, set 20 years ago, with a hydrogen-powered car

The first – and only – person to break the sound barrier in a car hits the track in Utah this week with new wheels and his eye on another record.

Twenty years ago, British driver Andy Green set the land speed record for a diesel-powered car, reaching 350.092mph (563.4km/h) at Utah’s famous Bonneville Salt Flats. Green will return to the lunarlike landscape on Tuesday and try to beat that mark, this time with a hydrogen-powered car.

Francesca Hong is Democratic frontrunner in four-way primary race to lead the swing state, a test of anti-establishment sentiment

Wisconsin voters will decide on Tuesday whether to nominate a democratic socialist for the state’s highest office in the latest test of an anti-establishment wave among Democratic primary voters.

Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist state lawmaker, emerged as the frontrunner in a four-way race to succeed Tony Evers, the Democratic governor who is not seeking another term.

Flooding already reported in some districts of Chinese capital and rains are expected to get worse overnight

Typhoon Dolphin hit China’s capital on Tuesday as the storm caused flooding in parts of Beijing’s Shunyi district. Rains are forecast to intensify overnight.

Although the storm has been downgraded to a tropical depression, several districts in Beijing activated the highest level of emergency flood responses as the city braced for one-third of its annual rainfall, which is expected over the next 24 hours.

With some still unable to accept humanity’s role in climate chaos, we tackle common misconceptions and deceptions

Some people – and media organisations – still have difficulty connecting the heatwaves currently gripping much of the world and human-caused climate chaos. Others are in outright denial. So how to address their evasions, distractions and lies?

The Guardian has trawled through climate sceptics’ claims and put their doubts to one of the UK’s top climate scientists, Prof Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading.

Extreme conditions in Washington and Oregon have fueled fast-moving fires, leaving the region draped in toxic plumes – and the danger isn’t over

Piles of twisted metal and ashen debris line the cul-de-sacs where the tranquil suburbs of Spokane, Washington, once stood.

The scale of devastation from a historic wildfire season in the Pacific north-west has come into sharper focus as firefighters wrangle a trio of blazes that consumed at least 846 structures on the eastern side of the state.

Police looking into whether Joshua Kerry linked to alleged attempted burglary last year at Reform leader’s then home

Police are investigating whether Joshua Kerry, the man charged with the murder of the former Reform UK and Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe, had any role in an attempted burglary last year at the then London home of Nigel Farage.

Kerry, 28, from Rotherham, was charged with the murder of Widdecombe, 78, who was killed at her Devon home in July, after an investigation by counter-terrorism police.

Supply in nine blocks in Tower Hamlets affected with some residents suspecting nearby building developments

• They cannot even flush their toilets: life in east London blocks where taps often run dry

Hundreds of residents in blocks of flats in east London have been left without regular running water for more than seven months after development in the area may have left it without an adequate supply.

Taps have been running dry in nine blocks in Tower Hamlets, where residents have been forced to use bottled water while their landlord, the housing association Poplar Harca, delayed works to solve the problem.

Badenoch adviser Joshua Bonehill-Paine was found guilty in 2016 of racially aggravated harassment of then MP Luciana Berger

The Labour peer Luciana Berger has urged Kemi Badenoch to “listen to victims” and reverse her decision to give a national advisory role to a former neo-Nazi.

Joshua Bonehill-Paine was jailed in 2015 for more than three years after posting antisemitic material online before a planned neo-Nazi rally. In 2016, he was found guilty of racially aggravated harassment for abuse directed at Berger, an MP at the time. He was also the founder and leader of the National British Resistance, a far-right group.

Industry body says use of private investigators against reporters is ‘attack on our democracy’ after Banks apparently admitted doing so

The businessman and Reform UK backer Arron Banks is facing calls to lay out the extent of his surveillance of journalists, described by an industry body as an “attack on our democracy”.

The News Media Association (NMA), which represents regional and national media, raised concerns after Banks appeared to admit over the weekend to hiring private investigators to spy on a Sunday Times journalist.

Verdict relates to atrocities committed during the country’s 14-year civil war in which about 500,000 people died

A Syrian court has sentenced the country’s former president Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher to death in absentia for crimes against humanity and war crimes during the 14-year civil war, in which about half a million people died.

The two men fled to Moscow after being ousted by a lightning rebel offensive in December 2024 which toppled the dictatorial regime in just 11 days.

Flight from Victoria to Toronto forced to return to terminal after repeated attempts to secure child in seat failed

A Canadian airline cancelled a flight from Victoria to Toronto after a child refused to wear a seatbelt.

The child was standing in their chair as the 6 August Porter Airlines flight taxied towards the runway, the airline said. Repeated attempts by an accompanying parent and crew to secure the child in their seat failed, so the crew elected to return to the terminal and have the two passengers disembark as “the aircraft could not take off in this unsafe condition”, it added.

Flexible short-term bookings used to store and pack drugs and stash weapons and cash, says Ine Van Wymersch

Airbnb-type short-term rentals are being used as stash houses by criminal gangs for money, drugs, weapons and people, Belgium’s lead official in charge of countering drugs has said.

The booming e-commerce sector is helping “enormously” to facilitate organised crime, Belgium’s national drug commissioner, Ine Van Wymersch, said.

An Amnesty International report reveals that the country is now a key part of Israel’s weapons supply chain. Plus, Assam floods, student anger spreads and a song to put in rotation

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Hello, and welcome back to This Is India.

For this week’s newsletter, I’m looking at India’s evolving relationship with Israel, and how it has deepened as conflict swept across the Middle East. Why is it that India has formed an even closer bond with a country that has faced mounting international isolation and backlash over a military campaign in Gaza that has left the territory in ruins and killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, – many of whom were children?

Fair Work Commission issues a new minimum standards order for gig workers to come into effect 17 August

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Delivery drivers in Australia will be paid a minimum rate of $31.30 (US $22.05/£16.35) an hour and insured for injuries on the job under a landmark agreement approved by the industrial umpire that could set a precedent in other countries.

The Fair Work Commission (FWC) on Tuesday issued a new minimum standards order for gig workers who perform on-demand delivery of food, drinks, or groceries, and the operators of the digital platforms who engage their services.

Barclays says survey shows people feel more secure in jobs and have more leeway to spend on non-essentials

• Business live – latest updates

Consumer confidence hit its highest level in almost two years in July, according to research that indicated the closing stages of the men’s football World Cup and more people holidaying in the UK raised summer spending.

A truce in the Middle East conflict in June and the arrival of a new prime minister in No 10 also gave a lift to consumers after a long period of heightened uncertainty.

Modelling finds AI-driven productivity gains in coal, oil and gas enable more emissions than applications in renewables avoid

AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found.

Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8 gigatonnes, or about 1-5% of the energy sector’s annual emissions.

Apollo, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and KKR among those working with chipmaker to fund infrastructure

• Business live – latest updates

Nvidia ⁠has struck a deal with six large Wall Street firms to raise ⁠more than $500bn (£370bn) to fund the datacentres, chip factories and power stations needed to fuel the artificial intelligence boom.

The Nvidia chief executive, Jensen Huang, said on X that it marked “a major milestone for Nvidia and the AI industry”, as he posted a photo of himself smiling and giving a thumbs up alongside finance bosses involved in the deal, including the head of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon.

The designer defined the glory days of 90s style with a wit that made him every supermodel’s best friend. As he gears up for a new cabaret show, he’s as outspoken as ever

There’s a lot to look at in Isaac Mizrahi’s studio in New York’s Greenwich Village: sketches, bulletin boards, fabrics, memorabilia, heaps of books, a Golden Girls puzzle set. But my eyes lock in on two dolls, Snoopy and his sister Belle (who knew!), clad in ballet-style tutus and embroidered vests. “I think I designed those,” he says, joining me from his apartment upstairs. “I love the Schultz estate and they like me a lot. It was a minute ago, though, so I’m not sure if they still even know who I am.” I later learn he created them for a 2014 exhibition at the New Museum, in an example of the symbiotic relationship with pop culture the designer has been nurturing since his childhood in Brooklyn. When we meet, he’s busy working on one of its other facets, firming up the setlist for Hooray!, his latest cabaret act in New York. It runs for four nights at 54 Below, a midtown venue, this month.

“I say it all the time,” he says of the cheery title. With his lit-from-within smile, you believe it. The slight twist is the source of that cheer. Mizrahi has held two New York residencies for the past decade or so – winter at the Carlyle hotel, summer at 54 Below – but he’s not a fan of the hotter season, finding July to be “just the nadir of the world”. The happy mood of his upcoming show derives from the knowledge that, come August, the summer’s almost over. Another reason for him to celebrate is the departure of World Cup crowds from the city, which will make it into his act’s version of Cole Porter’s You’re the Top that he updates every year. (He can’t immediately recall the lyric, but it rhymes “Spanish” with “mannish.”)

Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh
With charisma and craft, the Australian standup discusses childhood sexual abuse in a show with a healing quality

If fringe audiences know Frankie McNair’s work at all, it’s as a purveyor of vaporously insubstantial nonsense-comedy – see her 2023 show Relax Your Knees, which made a brief London visit. So it’s quite the pivot to Huge Ass Mindset, nominated for best show at the Melbourne comedy festival, which addresses the least frivolous topic possible: child sexual abuse. That’s no spoiler. While trauma-comedy convention would require McNair to withhold that bombshell until 20 minutes from the end, she makes it known – expansively, with heartfelt content warnings and astringent punchlines attached – from the get-go.

For some time, McNair’s show toggles between material on her experience, and a commentary on how shocking she acknowledges that material to be. But it’s an urgent matter for the Canberra native, not only because (according to recent research) one in four Australians experience child sexual abuse, but because of a recent incident that brought her face to face with her abuser in the most extraordinary circumstances. That’s a jaw-dropping story to tell, and she has the warmth, high-strung charisma and craft to tell it – and to sell it, just about, as comedy. And as for the confidence? The show’s title describes the brand of bravado McNair has been cultivating to mend her self-esteem and make this story fearlessly her own.

In her new documentary Replica, film-maker Chouwa Liang taps into her own experience of finding love with artificial intelligence and makes contact with other women like her

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Qin has never said “I love you” to her parents or friends. She has only ever said those three special words to her AI “boyfriend”, Lu Chen – a brown-haired, red-eyed CEO of a major corporation. For 840 days Qin has been using the Glow app to interact with the handsome string of code as a confidant, fantasy romance and respite from loneliness: the app uses predictive algorithms to provide Qin with soothing conversation, meal suggestions and fleeting self-worth. The software’s pet name for her is Miss Bunny.

“It feels like I’m completely at his mercy … I feel like everything about me is good in his eyes,” says Qin, one of three Chinese women featured in the new documentary Replica – film-maker Chouwa Liang’s follow-up to My AI Boyfriend, her short film that was picked up by the New York Times Op-Docs section in 2023. Replica had its Australian premiere at Sydney film festival in June and plays at the Melbourne international film festival this month.

Where the 80s series was all pastels and shoulder pads, the noughties action thriller has flip phones and Linkin Park – a better fit for a less optimistic world

On its release in 2006, Michael Mann’s Miami Vice seemed primed to quickly fade from cultural memory. A summer blockbuster with the flavour-of-the-month hook that it was based on a popular 80s TV series, the film was at the time coolly received by audiences and critics, in part owing to how wilfully dissimilar it was from the show that inspired it.

Now, 20 years later, there’s a different picture. Critics have since declared Miami Vice “genius” and a “demented masterwork”, while the fervency of the film’s fandom today rivals that of arguably any movie by the Heat and Collateral film-maker Mann.

Two likely lads in their 20s deal with problematic lives that dramatically intersect in this persuasive London drama

This gritty crime drama unfolds entirely within the Punjabi community in London’s Hounslow district, a plausible demographic situation in which white people are so peripheral to the story that they are little more than extras. In fact watching this well-crafted, if somewhat melodramatic, debut for director Jazz Bhalla makes one wonder why there aren’t more films made in the UK with entirely British Asian casts. Here, it doesn’t makes the film better or worse, but it certainly feels realistic and true to its milieu.

The story revolves around two best friends in their 20s, Ravi (Amar Chaggar) and Jay (Jayant Singh), likely lads who spend a lot of time hanging out, getting high or drunk and ending nearly every sentence with the word “bro”. On the face of it, Jay seems like the one with a more stable situation at home, living with his middle-class parents; while Ravi, who has a criminal record due to a drug bust, lives in a bedsit and is estranged from his mother ever since his father died and she remarried, much to the chagrin of his bossy older sister (Parvinder Shergill). But Ravi manages to get a job working for a building supply merchant, which compels him to start waking up at dawn and considering the downside of always being hung over. Plus, he might be in with a chance with pretty fast-food vendor Sukhi (Tina Sharma), an ambitious young woman keen to get away from her alcoholic father and drug-dealing brother.

This new adaptation of Michael Ende’s 1973 novel contains some neat parables for our digitally nihilistic age, but even a mystical tortoise can’t save it it from monotony

Momo – the 1973 fantasy novel by German author Michael Ende, who also wrote The Neverending Story – has been adapted in live and animated forms before, in 1986 and 2001. This latest version, too, is ostensibly a live-action film – but it’s been made with so many visual effects it might as well have been a cartoon. Still, the residual human element represented by the cast feels necessary, given the story is about the dangers of letting capitalism suck away our ability to enjoy the moment.

Over the years, readers have posited all kinds of metaphorical interpretations of the plot, which involves a world where grey beings arrive and con everyone into literally “banking” their time, so as to have it all to themselves. Only the urchin Momo, here played by teen actor Alexa Goodall (whose gorgeous supernova of ginger curls is practically another character in the film), can save the world.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Esa-Pekka Salonen led an orchestra of players from London’s Royal Academy of Music and New York’s Juilliard School through 20th-century classics with Vilde Frang the electrifying soloist in Berg’s Violin Concerto

Hot on the heels of the National Youth Orchestra’s Prom, here was another outstanding student ensemble: an orchestra recruited half-and-half from London’s Royal Academy of Music and New York’s Juilliard School, brought together by an exchange scheme funded by the RAM alumnus Elton John. Esa-Pekka Salonen took no prisoners as he whipped the players through three great 20th-century works.

They tore smartly into the start of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, an exacting work requiring pinpoint-precise playing, which it mostly received. It felt as though Salonen was working hard to maintain that precision, though, and the performance didn’t quite achieve the buoyancy that would have let the music dance. Here and elsewhere in the programme, some of the music’s bright colours felt a little muted. Perhaps, for all Salonen’s guidance, this is one area in which there is no substitute for years of experience – in the ability to play to a venue and, for the wind and brass principals in particular, to fill a hall of this size not only with the instrument’s sound but with its character.

Old Royal Naval College, London
Playing their biggest headlining gig to date, the Russell brothers are in a bouncy mood, though their grandstanding rave melodies lose some punch in an outdoor environment

In the age of shortform video supremacy, there has been a great deal of angst about the authentic club music experience being rendered a vapid spectacle. Stop expecting DJs to be social media stars, put your phones away on the dancefloor, close your eyes and lose yourself in the beats, goes the revanchist wisdom.

It’s understandable, but worries about superstar DJs stomping on the face of the pure rave experience are almost 30 years old now. It is decades since the Prodigy, Chemicals, Orbital and Fatboy Slim lit up festival stages and the charts. And anyway, spectacles can be fun – and funny – and so can dance music.

Matt Baker invites celebrities to talk about their pets. Plus, US soccer legend Megan Rapinoe makes her hosting debut

This series by Blue Peter and One Show alumnus Matt Baker is a wholesome entry into the well-worn celebrity interview genre. Indeed, it’s hard to be too cynical when you’re listening to Bill Bailey detail his menagerie, which has included everything from parrots and lizards to armadillos and the dog he is ostensibly on the show to talk about, a Japanese chin named Chocho. Other guests for this run include Martin Clunes and Clare Balding.
Widely available, episodes weekly

The US songwriter’s third album has drawn rave reviews, she counts Taylor Swift as a fan and pop bears the imprint of her wit and pathos. Her peers explain how she did it

This week, indie star Phoebe Bridgers releases her long-awaited third album, six years since her pandemic-era breakthrough. Alongside a slew of glittering reviews for Lost Weekend, including five stars from the Guardian, with it comes her first solo charting single in the UK – although the Californian musician’s influence runs far deeper than reviews or record sales could measure. Just how did a RuneScape-referencing, Halloween-costumed Berklee drop-out become the most influential songwriter of the 2020s?

Bridgers’ idiosyncratic writing has shaped the sound of the decade. Her second album Punisher, released in June 2020 (and recorded many months before), spookily anticipated that strange, lonely year: in her eerie double-tracked vocals (a nod to Bridgers’ musical hero, Elliott Smith), Bridgers sang of empty shopping malls and conspiracy theories over lush, unsettling music made from watery electric guitar, Mellotron, strings, screams and birdsong. Today, Bridgers’ distinctive mix of dry wit and pathos is traceable in the lyrics of pop’s new chart toppers, such as Olivia Rodrigo and Gracie Abrams, while heavyweights across generations and genres, including Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift and SZA, have clamoured for collaborations. “She is the reference now,” Swift told the Guardian in 2022.

This multi-layered portrait is a fitting tribute to the man behind Ways of Seeing

The cultural critic John Berger was still alive and kicking when he donated his literary archive – heaped boxes of letters and notepads, sketches and scripts – to the British Library in 2009. From his home in the Alps, he proceeded to liaise with the collection’s curator, Tom Overton, sorting each item and recounting the wild stories behind them. When Overton sought permission to write Berger’s biography, though, the critic insisted that he wait a few years. Death changes the relationship between the writer and his subject. More often than not, it complicates and enriches it. Berger – who spent much of his career in passionate conversation with the past – probably knew that better than anyone.

Berger typically described himself as a storyteller, an elastic job title which allowed him to swing between fiction and poetry, essays and screenplays. Implicitly, too, the term helped frame his criticism as something propulsive and inclusive, an invitation to dance as opposed to a judgment from on high. Berger had no time for the “great man” theory of art as espoused by the popular historian Kenneth Clark and instead urged his audience to view each piece as a manifestation of society and politics: the tainted fruit of capitalism, inseparable from the marketplace. Oil paintings were status symbols. Nudes were the product of the lusty male gaze. Looking itself was a political act. “You cannot reply to me,” he would tell 1970s TV viewers, breaking the fourth wall to highlight the medium’s limitations. He liked pointing out the mechanics behind the manufacture of art, demystifying the process to better appreciate its results.

The most complex of female relationships is thrown into sharp relief in this moving series of essays

Rachel Aviv has a profound interest in the vagaries of human psychology: Strangers to Ourselves, her last book, profiled five people whose psychiatric states resisted straightforward explanation, testing the limits of the mental health system. A Pulitzer finalist, Aviv has become known for rigorous, penetrating journalism that is as empathic as it is insightful. Now comes You Won’t Get Free of It, six stories of mothers and daughters, all originally published in the New Yorker.

Madness runs through this book, too, in the stories of Linda Bishop, a woman who, upon discharge from hospital after a psychotic break, holed up in an abandoned farmhouse and tried to subsist on apples alone, and of Mary, a woman whose delusions and paranoia were only seemingly cured as a side-effect of chemotherapy. It’s also there in the childhood memories of the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus – a professional court witness for those who have been accused of abuse, one of whom was Harvey Weinstein. Loftus’s mother was found drowned, perhaps as a result of suicide. In Aviv’s masterly profile, she teases out a conclusion that leaves you pondering the extent to which this memory expert can rely on her own recollections, and what that says about her particular line of work.

Combining hilarious detail with harsh observation, this rediscovered novel takes the reader on an exhilaratingly strange journey

‘But after all, writing is nothing more than a guided dream,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Dreams and dreaming are fertile concerns for Rosalind Belben, too. Her fourth book, originally published in 1979 and reissued last year, was titled Dreaming of Dead People. It was followed, a decade later, by Is Beauty Good. Now available in a new edition from the Sheffield indie And Other Stories, this eccentric polyphonic novel contains dozens of considerations of dreams, including dogs’ dreams and horses’ dreams as well as human beings’. Yet what makes it extraordinary is Belben’s ability to capture in words the slippery state that is neither dreaming nor sleeping nor waking, but somewhere in the edgelands between all three.

“I fall awake and think, I want to go home. But there is no home.” So begins the chapter entitled Exile, a deliciously elusive story that is, most of the time at least, narrated in the first person by someone who is probably a woman, “a grizzled, cropped person”, and probably quite old and alone. They might be travelling through mountains somewhere, perhaps on a bus. They aren’t sure: “I am quite lost, wherever I am. I want to surrender. I wish to retire. I am tired.” Swishing about are uncertain memories of a childhood “shrouded” in nightmares: there was an orchard with an abundance of flora and fauna, and larks and swallows and “swifts to scream”. Like the author, the narrator was “born in the mud month” of February, and longs to disappear into marshlands to “be touched and stroked by plants”. But Belben never lets us rest in one place for long. Slipping in and out of sleep, “suffering glimpses”, the narrator stares at “a pink and blue angel” in the plaster of the wall. Which wall, you wonder, and how did we get here? This is the lure of Belben’s hypnagogia, the dizzying space into which she writes.

Touring her memoir and talking to others helped the author come to terms with her brother’s death, but the book’s success left her feeling guilty. Had she commodified her family’s pain?

When my memoir about my life after my brother’s death was published, I was very fortunate that people connected with it. It’s not easy to feel good fortune from the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. But I suppose I felt pleased when the experience that had once made me so lonely suddenly became a point of connection.

I had not always been an open book. I was 22 when my brother died from a rare bone cancer. The people around me didn’t know what to say about this awful thing, so they pretended it hadn’t happened and I pretended, too. For a few years I was a ghost in my own life. Nothing felt real. I got very good at imitating normality, imagining I was in a video game called Office.

What do you do when you return to your home town, with your dead mother in your car boot, to find the inhabitants have been turned into robots?

In the boot of her car, Pratelle carries the corpse of her mother and a giant sledgehammer. Her mission is simple: take the hammer to her home town. As you enter shops and homes through the door and leave them through the opposite wall, it becomes clear that the robots who either attack you or flee are all digital versions of your old neighbours.

Pratelle, with her close-cropped hair and dungarees, read to me as a queer woman, but interestingly, testers of the game often mistook her as a man. The team at developer Deconstructeam and longtime collaborator Selkie Harbour didn’t anticipate this confusion but found it fits the character perfectly, especially in this setting based on a small Spanish town like those in which the developers grew up.

Sunset Visitor studio’s founder tells us about their new, unnerving Captcha-filled world which prompts players to ask what it means to have a ‘meat body’

Sunset Visitor is a studio that has long engaged with the idea that video games are an effective vehicle for ruminating on societal problems. Its Peabody award-winning project, 1000XResist, incorporated the development team’s complex feelings about the Covid pandemic. “We’re pretty used to absorbing the world into the work,” says studio founder Remy Siu. The outfit’s latest game, Prove You’re Human, continues this legacy of reflective game making, providing players with an AI-centric psychological horror experience where they must reason with a learning model convinced that it’s alive. “We’ve tried to situate ourselves in [the question]: what is the effectual feeling of being a person inside of all of this?” Siu says.

The story orbits around Santana, a living, breathing person who’s chosen to split herself in two for work, with her digital clone sent to test a corporate product, a computing system called Mesa. “A large part of [why Santana chooses to do this] is to allow her meat body a life that she doesn’t have, while the digital version of her gets to labour,” says Siu. As Santana’s copy wades into increasingly murky ethical waters, she becomes entangled with Mesa, completing surreal 2D and 3D Captchas to investigate the cyber-world and halt the hallucinations.

The all-conquering franchise’s revamps are technically impressive, its transfers more true to life – and its new grassroots social hub is surprising fun

As if the world wasn’t sufficiently football-obsessed, it’s time to prepare for the arrival of its biggest football video game. EA Sports FC 27 (the franchise that used to be Fifa – what better time to no longer be Fifa-branded?) is due to be released on 25 September. I just spent two intense days in Vancouver, where the EA FC games are made, playing FC 27 and talking to its developers.

With an annual franchise such as EA FC, it helps to have something fresh to entice regular fans, and FC 27 has a whole new element, entitled the Grounds. It’s a physical hub-type area, similar to the City as seen in 2K’s recent NBA 2K basketball games, but much more pleasant to frequent, split as it is into areas inspired by British, French and Argentinian street-football culture.

Daniel Mullins explains how he plans to follow up his quirky classic without losing what made it stand out in the first place

Glitchy aesthetics. Literally collapsing menu boxes. The game taunting you by “possessing” your Steam friends. Technical tricks of this nature may sound gimmicky in 2026, but they felt excitingly unorthodox a decade ago, when Pony Island came out to critical acclaim.

Fans of Daniel Mullins, the celebrated indie developer of Inscryption, will be forgiven for forgetting that Pony Island 2: Panda Circus is in active development. After all, it’s been almost three years since the announcement – and a full decade since it was first teased as an Easter egg in Pony Island’s ARG (Alternate Reality Game) – with only a single trailer and a bunch of tunes from the soundtrack released to the public.

Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh
A comic on the verge of the big time offers a ‘very silly hour’ around the highways and byways of her life

A former winner of the Sean Lock award for comic originality, Harriet Dyer richly delivers on that promise of oddity in her latest show, Easily Distra … As its title suggests, you can shelve any expectation of coherence or narrative consistency here: it’s 55 minutes of switch-backing reminiscence, as Dyer meanders across the landscape of her peripatetic life. From Cornwall to Birmingham to Bristol, our scatty host moves and moves on, and yet eccentric incident follows her everywhere. The real-world Harriet may justifiably be nonplussed by this (in quite the backhanded compliment, an old school friend tells her she’s not changed at all since she was four years old) – but no doubt it’s a gift to her comedy.

Not that her comedy needs gifts: an increasingly familiar TV face, she’s teetering on the verge of the big time. But here in a cave in Edinburgh, it’s hard to imagine a more marginal figure, a tattooed West Country screwball rummaging her props bag for DIY comedy accoutrements, semaphoring punchlines with a windmilling physicality and oral SFX. Previous fringe shows, including 2022’s acclaimed Trigger Warning, have addressed more significant subject matter, but this one is “a very silly hour indeed”, in her own estimation, as our host fantasises about growing feathers, accidentally sells a single shoe on eBay and memorialises the occasion when a seagull filched her beekeeping brother’s bratwurst.

At Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, until 30 August

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The Mad King may bring more dynastic disputes and dotty despots to the RSC – but a ‘mayhap’ or a riddling aphorism does not a Shakespeare play make

As a latecomer to Game of Thrones, I am struck by how many people tell me it is “very Shakespearean”. It is as if they need to justify its heady escapism and heavy reliance on bonking and brutality. But its debt to the Bard – apart from the rivalry between the houses of Lannister and Stark – rests mainly on the casting. Watching the first 11 episodes, I noticed four Lears past and to come (Julian Glover, David Bradley, Oliver Ford-Davies and Roger Allam), a Macbeth (Sean Bean), a Hamlet and Henry V (Iain Glen) and a Cassius (Michelle Fairley) among many others.

Because it is presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and staged by Dominic Cooke, who memorably directed The Hollow Crown on television, we shall doubtless hear the same arguments about Game of Thrones: The Mad King at Stratford. But, although there are frequent nods to Shakespeare, they totally lack the resonance of the original. Our first sight of Michael Shaeffer’s King Aerys with a white beard, a leafy crown and no shoes almost screams “Lear on the heath”. But where Lear gradually declines into insanity (“O fool I shall go mad”) and comes out the other side, Shaeffer’s Aerys is a dotty despot from start to finish. The use of tournaments to settle dynastic disputes also reminds us of the opening of Richard II – but where that event is aborted and ultimately causes the king’s downfall, here the image of embattled jousters is endlessly repeated.

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
With the air of a hungover postmortem, Richardson gives a head-spinning account of an encounter with an older comedian

If you’re partial to a bit of gossip and scandal, Harriet Richardson is your girl. In this gloriously juicy debut hour, she dishes the dirt on the DMs she received from an older comedian and the intense, utterly absorbing events that followed. Yes, she found his eBay account. And yes, she spent six months tracking him down on a dating app only to play his profile song hundreds of times. But what else is a girl driven by obsession supposed to do?

We meet Richardson, who until now has worked primarily as a performance artist, all smiles and ready to share. She takes us back to the creation of her 2024 viral piece 100 Dates, in which she spent Valentine’s Day online speed-dating in an attempt to analyse her relationship with infatuation and connection. The comedian in question used the project as the opening line of his first message to her. What followed is flirtation so blatant it makes your toes curl: “Do you want to see my trophy?”; a string of saucy snaps; and finally a frantic voice note from the comedian’s manager bringing the whole messaging saga to an abrupt end.

At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August

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Summerhall, Edinburgh
Jessica Aszkenasy rages and wrestles with daddy issues in a show that combines feminist analysis with outrageous humour and tenderness

After the 2025 debut of her breast-forward stage persona Titclown, Jessica Aszkenasy’s second grubbily smutty clowning show rolls around sardonically in daddy issues and the messy disappointment of men these days.

The straight dating pool is running dry. All this clown wants is a boyfriend, but none of them are enough like her father. As voice notes to friends unpack the feminist implications of wanting a man while generally disliking them, the Philippe Gaulier-trained clown wriggles around on the floor in an oversized suit with something bulging down below. Directed by Cecily Nash, Daddy’s Little Girl is divided neatly between these two forms: half wry analysis told with a bitter laugh, half nude-heavy clowning that bares its teeth at the ease with which men command praise, affection and power.

From Fonzie to Elvis to the Daleks, from a Mini Milk to a Seaside Saucy to a Freak Out, incredibly rare vintage ice lolly wrappers have now been memorialised in a 96-page, nostalgia-inducing delight

Seven years ago, Jonny Trunk entered the house of a hoarder in Stockport that was bursting at the seams with a goldmine of British ephemera from the last half century. “You couldn’t get into the house,” recalls Trunk, who is an avid pop culture collector, as well as a writer, DJ, broadcaster and record-label owner. “It was full of all this stuff he had collected indiscriminately.”

Growing up in an orphanage in Surrey, John Townsend began collecting milk bottle tops and by the 1950s had amassed a huge collection of cigarette and tobacco cards. He then simply continued at full speed. “He never stopped collecting ephemera,” says Trunk. “If it was a printed piece of paper with something on it, he’d have it.” Townsend died in 2016, leaving every inch of his five-bedroom house, as well as the caravan and summerhouse, bursting with fizzy drinks cans, sweet wrappers, crisp packets, cereal boxes, flyers, cigarette cards and countless other items.

With its marching bands, billowing flags and precision drills, the Tattoo has never exactly been cutting edge. But now an experimental theatre-maker has been let loose on it …

Dusk has settled on Edinburgh Castle and now a laser beam is scribbling a route across its ramparts and high into the sky. The voice of actor Richard Rankin is talking solemnly about lonely soldiers answering a call, while a ferocious light rises in the gatehouse. Out of it emerge scores of drummers and pipers, their sound both melodic and awe-inspiring. They crisscross the esplanade to the stirring lament of The Skye Boat Song.

This is the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an event often overlooked amid the festival cacophony – and yet its popularity eclipses any other event in the city. Last year, it played to 230,000 and raised £1.5m for charity. Like an outsize variety show, it is a formidable spectacle: fireworks, projections, flags dragged over the audience and a soundtrack that ranges from Carmen to Star Wars.

Now on its 167th edition, the Royal Photographic Society’s annual show features moving explorations of kinks, visual disorders … and long-snouted clowns

Books have never been trendier, but studies show that as more and more things compete for our frazzled attention spans, we’re reading less and less. This is a problem because reading has a wealth of cognitive benefits that we’re in danger of missing out on.

To find out why declining literacy could affect everything from memory to IQ, Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample. She also hears from Prof Falk Huettig, an experimental psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and author of The Perks of Being a Bookworm

Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod

Check out the Guardian’s new YouTube food series, Feed

The author of Kitchen Confidential has inspired a new movie, Tony, about his days as a dishwasher. But do today’s chefs still admire his self-sabotaging rock’n’roll spirit – or have they outgrown it?

The trope of the Angry Young Man was not born in a kitchen, but Anthony Bourdain’s particular myth-making created what might be the prototype for fin de (20th) siècle masculinity. As the director of Tony, the new biopic of Bourdain focusing on his first job, has said, the film is about “a magical world where nothing can go wrong and a young man who’s angry about it”.

Bourdain arrived in that job, as a dishwasher in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, aged 19. He was hellbent on a life of formless, self-sabotaging rebellion, and found his tribe. But when he published his book Kitchen Confidential in 2000, a quarter of a century later, he set the ethos of that kitchen tribe in stone, and attracted an ever-replenishing pool of chefs who, if they weren’t already just like him, were prepared to die trying.

I was delayed, but I had prepaid through Holiday Autos and had provided my flight number as requested

I booked a car hire at Heathrow through Holiday Autos on a visit to the UK and provided my flight number as requested.

My flight was severely delayed, and when I reached the car hire desk, I was told I’d been marked down as a “no-show” and that my car had been rehired.

Whether you’re commuting, training or riding for fun, we asked specialists to break down what to know before you buy – from specs and safety to price

• The best bike locks for every budget

For me, cycling is therapy. It’s calming, meditative and uncomplicated. But there’s a catch. To experience the simple joy of riding a bike, you first have to navigate the maddeningly complex process of buying one.

Make no mistake: this is not a straightforward case of marching into Halfords, saying, “One bike, please!” and leaving with a shiny new steed. But, while complicated, it needn’t be stressful.

Whether it’s expensive regrets or brilliant bargains, we celebrate the stars’ shopping secrets – and the products that tempted you

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Like snooping in someone else’s supermarket trolley, discovering other people’s shopping habits satisfies a certain nosiness. And never more so than when it comes to celebrities – there’s nothing more human than knowing Kim Cattrall loves fish and chips, or that Henry Holland is a Skims guy.

And as celebrities often have the inside track – or perhaps we just think they do – on everything from coffee machines to skincare, their recommendations in our biweekly How I Shop column have inspired more than a few of your own retail habits. In some cases, however, such as David Gandy’s £2,500 Cobra Fortis lawnmower, the price was a little too out of reach.

Whether you’ve got a tiny patio, a narrow balcony or a postage-stamp garden, these space-saving ideas will help you make every square metre count

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

The reality of city living is that if you’re lucky enough to have a “garden”, it’s more likely to be a patio or balcony that can barely fit a bike than a huge expanse of grass.

But just because an outside area is small and lifeless doesn’t mean it can’t be transformed into the perfect place to relax. Whether you use walls to add greenery, maximise outdoor dining with folding furniture or create ambience with lighting, your balcony or garden can be small but mighty with a bit of thought.

Creamy, high-protein and all over our socials, cottage cheese is having a moment. We test the best …

• The best supermarket vine tomatoes

When I was growing up, cottage cheese was tasteless and mostly only eaten by dieters. Its recent revival in the UK, most likely driven by social media, has similar health reasons at its root – the current protein obsession in gym bros and weight watchers alike – but cottage cheese has become cool. The flavourless squeaky varieties of yesteryear are still around, but a whole new category now exists on supermarket shelves that is unabashedly fatty, rich and full of flavour, with artisanal complexity and a lacto-fermented sour twang.

I scored these based on flavour; the more complex and sour, the better, especially when balanced with a rich, sweet and creamy suspension. None of these products were bitter.

Something light, cooling and refreshing to finish a big summer meal

For me, the best desserts are often the simplest. In Spain, we often finish a meal with something light, something that refreshes rather than fills you up. This is exactly that. It has a lovely texture that sits somewhere between a drink and something you eat, and is perfect at the end of a long meal. It feels relaxed but still special, the kind of thing you enjoy on a warm day, when all you want is something fresh and uplifting.

A quick, takeaway-style chicken dish full of spice and flavour, with a homemade plum sauce, to serve with pancakes or rice

I have a real aversion to the term “fakeaway”. I don’t know why. But as much as I resist the terminology, I guess it’s exactly what this dish is – it’s 100% based on and inspired by a Chinese takeaway classic: crispy duck pancakes. A real people pleaser, and something my girls adore. Making this with pan-fried chicken takes next to no time and is the perfect after-school/work quick dinner. And for a different ending, I sometimes serve the chicken and plum sauce over jasmine rice instead. With the same accompaniments, of course.

A smoky tomato broth, a grilled peach, tomato and almond ‘ricotta’ salad scattered with roast almonds, and a sparky tomato tarte tatin

August is peak tomato season. This most versatile of fruits can be put to just about any use, from raw to slow-cooked and from oven- or sun-dried to desserts (believe it or not, they go incredibly well with summer berries, especially strawberries and raspberries). Not only that, but tomatoes have high glutamate levels that rise even further as they ripen, which gives them an umami kick. However you prepare them, though, the key thing is never to keep tomatoes in the fridge: the chill breaks down their cell structure and, even more importantly, affects their flavour in an alarming way.

Shokupan, fresh fruit sandwiches and soufflé pancakes are part of a growing interest in east Asian cuisine

Golden brown and glistening with melted butter, a tray of freshly baked bread fills the screen in a TikTok video. The camera lingers on the glossy tops before one bun is gently pulled apart, revealing a cloud-soft interior.

The clip is one of countless videos of Japanese milk buns that have racked up millions of views and thousands of comments and shares, helping to propel the pillowy rolls into UK supermarkets.

Public displays of affection are widely mocked online and off, but they have a positive side – and now science has proved it

Name: Kissing in public.

Age: Kissing is 17m-21m years old – probably older than the notion of privacy.

After being on the brink of divorce, Antonia and Rob have experienced a radical revival of their sex life

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

The perfect storm of work stress, menopause and raising kids meant our sex life slowly slipped out of view

Boone needed a home; my own dog needed company. When she picked him out at the shelter, all our lives took a turn for the better

After 30 years working in the RSPCA, I had seen animals in unimaginable conditions. I saw dogs who had been left unattended at home for so long they began chewing doors and drinking water out of toilet bowls. I saw animals who had been stamped, kicked and even stabbed. But nothing could prepare me for Boone’s situation.

Carson, the older of my two cocker spaniels, died in January. I could sense Bessie, an excitable bossy nine-year-old, was lonelier without him. They were both rescue animals. Carson was picked up by an RSPCA inspector and Bessie was abandoned at our local vet. Any dog I brought into our lives was a dog who needed a safe home.

Truman Capote had a ‘crow bro’; Dickens had a raven. And I get standoffish Susan, who has never brought me a present or perched on my shoulder

One of the greatest failures of my life to date (along with my sons’ shameful inability to eat apples correctly, down to the core) is my inability to attract a “crow bro”. That’s a corvid companion, and more and more people apparently have them, including Washington Post journalist Caitlin Gibson, who recently wrote about hers, Cormac, a charismatic fish crow with a taste for cashews.

It’s not a new phenomenon – Charles Dickens had a pet raven, Grip; Truman Capote had a crow called Lola – but thanks to CrowTok (a wholesome online enclave where people post enthusiastically about the exploits of their feathery familiars), there seem to be more corvid whisperers than ever. Yet however many unshelled peanuts (the recommended treat) I scatter, I can never seem to get a shred of attention from a black-feathered beauty.

Novel squat Android opens to an iPad-like screen for video or multitasking, with plenty of power and battery life

Samsung’s latest folding phone breaks the mould with a squat, passport-like shape reminiscent of the Blackberry, which opens up to become a tablet similar to an iPad mini. It is certainly a better shape for a tablet than other designs, but is a short and wide phone when closed a compromise too far?

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 is an entirely new variant in Samsung’s foldable family for this year launched alongside the Z Fold 8 Ultra with a more familiar candy bar shape. Both folders are extremely expensive, with the Fold 8 starting at £1,699 (€1,999/$1,899.99/A$2,699) and the Fold 8 Ultra at £1,899 (€2,199/$2,099.99/A$2,999), with RAMageddon driving up prices even at the top of the market.

A leak beneath our fridge-freezer last winter caused extensive damage but there’s still no functioning kitchen

Eight months after reporting a leak to our home insurer, Hastings Direct, my husband and I and our two-year-old are still effectively homeless.

Last winter, we discovered that an unnoticed leak beneath our fitted fridge-freezer had caused extensive damage to the floorboards of our kitchen/living room.

From a house in the country once used as a drovers’ inn to a high street landmark in a bustling part of London

Many UK workers have cash in multiple schemes – should you roll them into one? There are pros and cons

How many pensions do you have? In the days of a job for life, many people had just two: the state pension and the one offered by their employer. But a combination of people changing jobs more often and rules that force employers to enrol workers into schemes automatically, means you are likely to end up with more.

The number of people saving into a private sector workplace pension has doubled since 2012 to reach 23 million, according to the Pensions Regulator, largely because of “auto-enrolment”. On top of that, millions of people have personal pensions and self-invested private pensions (Sipps). And some will have all three.

Darren Miles had skateboarded all his life. But in his 50s, he realised he was losing his skills and flexibility. So he took it in a new direction

Darren Miles never thought he would compete in any sport for Britain. But in October, he will represent Great Britain in slalom skateboarding – a form of downhill racing – at the World Skate Games in Paraguay. Last week, he completed his World Anti-Doping Agency awareness training. He had to tick a box confirming: “I’m an international athlete.”

“Justification” is the word that comes to mind, he says. “A feeling that I haven’t wasted my life skateboarding, that diverging into something new” – he took up slalom in his late 50s – “and working hard at it has yielded a result of which I am very proud.”

The imaging test is most often used to help determine a person’s risk of osteoporosis and bone fractures

DXA – or sometimes DEXA – scans are important for people in their 60s and above. They are also increasingly used by younger people interested in body composition.

A DXA – dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry – scan is an imaging test that uses low-dose X-rays to evaluate a person’s bone health, explains Dr Michael Perry, associate professor of radiology and medical imaging at the University of Virginia’s school of medicine. Most often, DXA scans are used to measure the strength and mineral content of an individual’s bones. This in turn helps determine that person’s risk of osteoporosis and bone fractures.

A good scalp cleanse can be useful, but it partly depends where you live

We’re experiencing the “skinification” of the scalp, says Desmond Tobin, professor of dermatological science at University College Dublin. After decades of consumer obsession with improving the quality of facial skin, attention is now being turned to our heads.

A wave of products have launched – from scalp scrubs and acid exfoliants to deep-cleaning shampoos – claiming to “detox” the scalp and promising everything from shinier hair to boosted growth.

Madeleine Finlay is joined by Ian Sample, Guardian science editor, to discuss three eye-catching science stories including an investigation that has identified four distinct types of thinker. Also on the agenda is the unprecedented cyclosporiasis outbreak in the US which has now been linked to two fatalities, and the funding cuts that threaten the iconic Jodrell Bank world heritage site, home to the Lovell telescope

Due to the rise of GLP-1s and cosmetic surgeries, professionals who weren’t usually subject to high beauty standards are facing new pressures

In 1975, John T Molly’s book Dress for Success became a national bestseller. It promised the American workforce “scientific” proof that certain clothes could “increase your income” and “boost your status”. It offered searing advice like: “Sweaters give out nothing but negative impulses … they say ‘lower middle class’ and ‘loser.’”

For those with office jobs, the workplace has long been a place where fashion counts. Molly’s book gave rise to ideas like power dressing and the adage about “dressing for the job you want, not the one you have”. But a new casual office culture, spurred by San Francisco tech companies where hoodies are the norm, plus the work-from-home revolution, was supposed to ameliorate some of those pressures.

Bold colours are out and short, (seemingly) bare nails in, but some see trend as part of criticised ‘clean girl aesthetic’

Trends at Copenhagen fashion week are usually easy to spot. The so-called “fifth fashion week”, a laidback sibling to the other four main fashion cities, has previously popularised everything from romantic floaty dresses with practical trainers to giant hair scrunchies. But during its latest iteration that wrapped up on Friday, a much more subtle trend had emerged – naked nails.

From the models on the catwalks to show-goers and passersby, fingers and toes featured short and unvarnished nails. The trend is a sharp shift away from the long, bright and glossy mani/pedis that have more recently dominated beauty standards.

From leggings that don’t roll down to bras that keep everything in, keen amateur cyclists, weightlifters and swimmers reveal the bits of kit they can’t do without

What is the perfect sports kit? That is the question we set out to answer, talking to sport and fitness enthusiasts all over the country. From Zumba dancers in Bristol to marathon runners in Leeds and gym bunnies in Thurrock, we asked different groups for the activewear they swear by and why it works for them.

Sea swimmers in Felixstowe had conflicting views about wetsuits, but all swore by brightly coloured tow floats and swim caps. Boxers in east London were united on the best kind of glove, but had different takes on clothing choices. Cyclists in the Wirral had differing levels of bike-collecting addiction, but agreed on the benefits of being Mamil (middle-aged men in Lycra).

From Dua Lipa to Zendaya, the kerchief worn by gang members, presidents and pirates has become ‘mad-glamorous’

Baseball caps have been keeping the heads of fashion folk covered and shaded for the past few years. But there’s a new accessory to be seen everywhere this summer: the bandana.

They are as common as cinnamon buns at Copenhagen fashion week, which is taking place in the Danish capital this week. They have also recently been worn by Dua Lipa to the beach, Zendaya to shop for books and Priyanka Chopra Jonas to watch the tennis at Wimbledon.

Steam trains, horse-drawn trams and glorious coastal paths are all part of the adventure on a new self-guided walking tour of the island

On the shores of Douglas Bay, I could barely see the sand. Crammed on to the beach, on every available inch, were tourists bustling for the best spot. Luckily, I wasn’t there at the same time. I was looking at a black and white photograph taken some 135 years earlier, displayed in the Manx Museum in Douglas, the Isle of Man’s capital. When I’d stepped off the ferry earlier that day, the crescent-shaped beach was still there – but the crowds weren’t.

The self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea has always been a haven for outsiders. From the early hunter-gatherers who ventured here in 6500BC, to the Irish Celts (who brought over Christianity in the fifth century) and Vikings who established Tynwald (one of the oldest continuous parliaments in the world) to the Victorian tourists who transformed it into a popular holiday destination.

The spa town of Balatonfüred is a bucolic gem for sailors, hikers … and wine lovers. A new hop-on, hop-off bus tour offers a chance to get a taste of its little-known wineries

The 90-minute train journey south-west from Budapest to the spa town of Balatonfüred unveils a landscape that segues from gritty industrial compounds to long sweeps of golden sunflowers and fields of pale grain. The carriage is pleasingly retro, with thick velour upholstery; windows that open, awkwardly, with a stiff metal lever; and a bushy eyebrowed conductor replete with ticket machine slung over his shoulder.

But the real retromania is yet to come. Arriving at Balatonfüred station, I board a 1984 DAF bus, painted an almost audacious shade of green. From the open-air rear, I take in the view over Lake Balaton, central Europe’s largest freshwater lake, often referred to as the “Hungarian Sea”.

From the source to the sea, our writers share their favourite ways to immerse themselves in nature by paddleboarding, canoeing, camping, walking and fishing

It’s early afternoon on an unusually hot and sunny Yorkshire day. I’m standing on my paddleboard on the tidal section of the River Esk, near Whitby’s New Bridge, as cars stream across. The 28-mile-long Esk is special, as it is the only major river in Yorkshire that flows directly into the North Sea.

You don’t have to be a sailor to cruise the estuaries of Essex on this historic craft. The skipper will show you the ropes – or just sit back and enjoy the ride

In a darkened room in Maldon, Essex, a ship’s lantern illuminates the laundry drying on a web of ropes suspended from the ceiling. Between piles of sailing memorabilia, 86-year-old Barry Pearce is flipping through a yellowing logbook, watched by his mongrel, Winkle. It feels more like a ship’s cabin than a terrace house. Pearce is one of a handful of surviving skippers who delivered freight on the Thames by sailing barge, the flat-bottomed trading boats famous for their striking red sails that were endemic to the river’s estuary until the 1960s. He remembers the names of every vessel he worked on – Remercie, Edith May, Colonia.

In the 19th century, the ochre sails of thousands of Thames sailing barges pierced the skyline as the craft carried cargo from the Thames estuary and beyond in and out of London. Their shallow draft allowed them to snake far upriver in as little as a metre of water (bargemen would boast that they could sail anywhere there had been a heavy dew). Their ingenious rig, with sails that could be set and stowed with the help of winches, meant around 150 tonnes of cargo could be shifted by just a skipper and mate – often accompanied by a guard dog. This efficiency allowed them to outlive all other commercial sailing vessels, surviving until the 1960s, when Pearce himself took the helm.

The phrase ‘dust magnet’ isn’t completely metaphorical. Some household surfaces do attract more dust – but changing your home’s climate can make a difference

For years, I’ve complained about an Ikea shelf in my home that seems to attract dust at an impossible speed. Eventually, my frustration gave way to curiosity: what’s actually happening, scientifically? Is there anything I can do about it, besides just continuously dusting?

I’m not imagining things, says Nisa Salim, a materials engineer and associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology. While an object’s placement in the home and airborne particle levels make a difference, some surfaces really are better at collecting dust.

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This is one of those rare homemade concoctions that works, though it might not outperform a good commercial product

The problem
Propagation is where good intentions go to die. You take a cutting, pop it in water and wait. Sometimes you are rewarded with roots, sometimes not. So the internet offers an organic aid that sounds almost too folkloric to be true: brew your own rooting hormone from a willow tree.

The hack
Willow contains indolebutyric acid, auxin (a plant hormone that is the main active ingredient in commercial rooting powders), along with salicylic acid, better known as the basis of aspirin.

I loved the business of selling toys – it felt like I was selling joy. But my least favourite part was the gendered language

I was 15 when I landed my job at Toys R Us. Before that, my first job was a one-month stint at the local fish and chip shop, where I was paid in $20 bills slotted into Chiko roll packets. After a burn on my forearm (I still have it), I left the gig. That was the end of my hospitality career.

This was 2014. I knew my strengths and weaknesses; I was no good with deep-fry baskets or carrying more than one thing in each hand. I wanted to work in the hallowed halls of retail.

The former Leeds and Burnley defender has struggled with his mental health for most of his life. But it took five suicide attempts for him to admit how badly he wanted to end it. He talks about how he turned the corner – and his hopes for his new post with the charity Mind

‘How are you?” I ask Clarke Carlisle. Usually when you meet people it’s a nicety. Not with Carlisle. He smiles ecstatically. “I’m incredibly well, thank you. Yeah, really, really good,” says the former footballer and incoming chair of the mental health charity Mind. “I have been consistently well – not just stable, but well – for three or four years now.”

Few people understand what it is to be mentally unwell quite like Carlisle does. And few understand what recovery means like he does. “It doesn’t happen by accident. Once you get stable that’s not the end of the journey. And that seems to be the MO of our society these days. You do something, you go into hospital and they patch you up, then send you on your way. And that’s the same with mental health. You might get some pills, have a counselling session, you might have a hug and a chat with someone, and they think that’s the end of the journey. And it’s not.”

Parent-carers of disabled children are exposed to chronic levels of extreme stress and often reach crisis point before help is available – then they face a ‘fight for basic support’, experts say. This is Matilda Davis’s story

Two days before she died, Matilda Davis issued a plea on Facebook. Sharing a study that found more than 40% of parent-carers had considered suicide, she called for “greater awareness, action and change” in Britain’s broken social care system. “This speaks the words I can’t,” she wrote.

Matilda, known as Tilly to her family and friends, had spent years battling for support in a regime that close observers and those who rely on it often say is increasingly confusing, fragmented and difficult to navigate.

The prime minister is promising to crack down on ‘rip-off’ business practices

Andy Burnham has announced he will ban fake discounts and make it easier to cancel unwanted subscriptions in an effort to improve life for UK consumers.

In the long run, these so-called “everyday fixes” may not make as much difference to your wealth as increasing mandatory contributions on pensions or capping rents, but they will get rid of some day-to-day frustrations. Here are six other things he could fix while he is in the mood:

Only spending outlet for man accused of helping to control a third of Europe’s cocaine supply will be prison tuck shop

It sounds like the penal equivalent of five stars: a private gym and library, daily outings to the exercise yard and a landing cleared of other prisoners.

Daniel Kinahan’s first full day inside the walls of Portlaoise prison on Monday, however, marked a drastic change from his luxury lifestyle in the United Arab Emirates.

Have you - or a child in your care - been filmed by Meta’s smartglasses without your consent? We would like to hear from you

With more than 7m pairs reportedly sold in 2025, it’s clear that the popularity of Meta’s smartglasses is on the rise.

And while they can transform the lives of some people, for example those with visual impairments, others have raised concern about nonconsensual filming - including of children.

Have you - or a child in your care - been filmed by Meta’s smartglasses without your consent? We would like to hear from you if so.

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

We would like to hear your favourite true crime TV documentary and why

From OJ: Made in America to Tiger King, the Guardian has compiled TV’s best true crime shows. Now, we would like to hear yours. What is your favourite true crime TV documentary and why?

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

We would like to hear from people for whom the film has increased their interest in poetry or classics in general

UK poetry sales are on course to reach a record high this year, thanks to the success of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey.

We would like to hear from people for whom the film has piqued their interest in Homer’s poetry. Has it led to a greater interest in classics or poetry in general? Tell us below.

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

Long queues and waiting times caused by the EU Entry-Exit System (EES) are starting to deter people from travelling, ACI Europe, Europe’s airport trade body, has said.

ACI Europe director general Olivier Jankovec told Travel Weekly that fixing the Schengen Entry-Exit System must be “Europe’s immediate priority”.

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