He was Queen’s flamboyant frontman. She was his shy girlfriend, dreaming of marriage until they both realised he preferred men. Thirty-five years after his death, in the week he would have turned 80, Mary Austin talks about their unbreakable bond

There were four silver trunks in Mary Austin’s attic that she packed in the mid-1980s and hadn’t opened since. It was too painful. Almost 40 years on, in 2022, she opened one. It was crammed with lyrics from songs written by Freddie Mercury – Don’t Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, We Are the Champions and, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody. She shut the case. It was still too painful.

“To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.” Eventually she asked her two sons to sift through the treasures on her behalf.

The retired second-row on his recovery from addiction, depression and incarceration to find a new life as a meditation teacher

“Carefree,” says Ryan Caldwell when I ask him what word is tattooed across his fingers. He looks up from his hands on a rainy morning in Belfast. The former Ireland international, who played the role of enforcer for Ulster, Bath and Exeter, then laughs softly in acknowledgment of that incongruous word.

We have spoken for almost two hours about a wide range of dark and heavy subjects – from his addiction issues and imprisonment to his injury-riddled rugby career and the last big concussion that ended his playing days and sent him plunging into a deeper spiral of suicidal depression.

A self-confident woman strides on to the Fourth Plinth, Nan Goldin captures sex, cats and death and even the Turner Prize shows promise this year

• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

The most anticipated exhibition of the year centres on an embroidered epic of war and conquest that miraculously preserves an intimate window on the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. Yet, you may find yourself simply fascinated by the artistry of the Anglo-Saxon women who used coloured wool to depict billowing sails, charging horses and King Harold’s spectacular moustache. Jonathan Jones
• British Museum, London, 10 September to 11 July

Apparently a dedicated mud room will make you less stressed. But I have a very different approach

I was excited to learn that the latest interiors essential, according to the Washington Post, is a “dirty zone”. I’m ahead of the curve – I’ve already got a dirty zone by each main door (and also one directly outside the back door, where, rudely, a mystery animal has defecated). The fridge drawers are dirty zones thanks to the windfall apples I thought I would cook, but predictably left to liquefy. There’s a dirty zone next to the washing machine and a mildewy one inside it. There’s the festering compost bin I’m too chicken to tackle post-heatwave, plus the cupboard under the stairs, which we don’t talk about. Good luck finding a clean zone, basically.

Does this make me kinda chic? Unfortunately not: the Post is actually preaching the benefits of confining the sordid ephemera of life to carefully delineated and hidden areas: storage benches, monogrammed totes or even a “mud room” (for coats, shoes, skis, lacrosse sticks and dog-washing sinks – I think posh Britons call it a boot room). A 2021 study in the Netherlands found that participants who did chores in chaotic environments had higher levels of the stress marker salivary alpha-amylase. I always wonder what’s brewing in my mouth as I fall over piles of filthy shoes yet again while running to answer the door.

The Argentinian’s international career was singular, and his exit is a reminder that all good things come to an end

It was among the defining moments of the 2026 World Cup: Lionel Messi standing arms akimbo, looking up towards Argentina’s fervent supporters after losing the final. Tears streamed down his face after his team’s embarrassing loss to Spain in what we now know was Messi’s final match wearing that famous Argentina kit.

It was not the first time he’d cried at the tournament. There had been tears of joy in Argentina’s opening match, when Messi rolled back the clock to his glory days with a trio of spectacular goals against Algeria. There had been more when his brace against Austria pushed Argentina through to the knockout round as group winners, and even more when his equalizer against Egypt threw la Albiceleste a much-needed lifeline. Later, the world found out that Messi had been struggling all the while with the health struggles of his father, Jorge, a fact that clearly weighed heavily on him as Argentina made a dramatic return to the final in a bid to defend their 2022 title.

Amelia Dimoldenberg says publicists ignored her interview show for years but she can now be picky over A-list guests

Just a decade ago, Amelia Dimoldenberg found it impossible to drum up any mainstream celebrities to come on her mock date YouTube show, in which she chats awkwardly with guests over chicken and chips.

Even persuading a local actor connected with her London youth club to come on took years of prodding. Managers of A-listers with movies or albums to push instead battled to claim a spot on the hallowed cushions of the primetime TV chatshow sofa.

Exclusive: Prime minister wants to ‘bring back hope’ by tackling cost of living as MPs call for electoral reform

Andy Burnham will drive home his pledge to bring more essential services back into public control, telling MPs in the Commons on Tuesday that it will be the only way to improve growth across the country.

Burnham will address the house for the first time in 16 years from the frontbench, and six weeks since he became prime minister, after spending the summer recess announcing a slew of policies that will now be put before MPs.

Seven-year-old girl and aunt, 34, killed while four others injured in incident near Middlesbrough last Wednesday

A 23-year-old man has been charged with murder after a house fire killed a seven-year-old girl and her aunt, police said.

Officers were called to reports of a blaze at Birchington Avenue in Grangetown at 5.23am on 26 August.

Exclusive: 7,280 suspected illegal spills in rivers and sea recorded in first five months of 2026

The number of suspected illegal discharges of raw sewage into rivers and seas by water companies during dry weather increased significantly during the first five months of 2026.

Dumping raw sewage into waterways during dry spells via overflows amounts to pollution. It is considered a breach of the permits given to water companies and is illegal. Discharging during dry weather increases the toxicity of the sewage pollution entering waterways. Rivers have less flow and volume, and there is no rainwater to dilute the sewage pollution entering the waterway.

Las Vegas jury returns verdict against ex-South Side Compton Crips gang leader in killing of US rap legend

A Las Vegas jury has found former South Side Compton Crips gang leader Duane Keith Davis guilty of the murder of Tupac Shakur, bringing the case to a close nearly 30 years after the famous rapper was gunned down.

The jury took about three hours to reach a guilty verdict in a case that relied heavily on multiple confessions from Davis himself, including his description of the killing in the 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend.

About 4,500 people are missing across Nepal and Tibet after the disaster, including 900 feared trapped in mud-filled tunnels at 12 Nepali hydropower sites

The Red Cross estimates that more than 93,000 people have been affected by the disaster, heightening fears that the climate crisis is destabilising the geology of mountain and polar regions.

The Nepali prime minister, Balendra Shah, said the flood was an “unprecedented and devastating natural disaster” and that it was difficult to compile a complete assessment of the damage.

Comments signal president prepared to use dispute to push UK to raise defence spending and Nato contributions

Donald Trump has suggested he is reconsidering US support for Britain’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, in a move likely to strain the “special relationship” between Washington and London.

“I always review every position – that’s just one of many,” the US president told reporters in the White House, in response to a question about whether he was reviewing the US’s position over the South Atlantic islands, an archipelago whose status has long been disputed by Argentina, which claims sovereignty.

Washington says it acted after observing Iran was planning to deploy fresh mines in strait of Hormuz

The US and Iran have exchanged fire for the first time in a month, with missiles and drones fired at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, and Iran targeting US military bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in response.

The US president, Donald Trump, on Monday threatened further action. The US is trying to prise open Tehran’s grip on shipping going through the strait, which before the war accounted for a fifth of the world’s seaborne energy supply. Washington claimed that Iranian control over the waterway had been loosened by repeated US attacks on Iranian missile launchers and radars.

FCA chief, Nikhil Rathi, warned of ‘adverse consequences’ if challenge made to settlement, court filings allege

The boss of the UK’s financial regulator is accused of threatening a consumer group with “adverse consequences” if it blocked a £9.1bn compensation scheme meant to settle the motor finance scandal.

Legal documents reviewed by the Guardian said the alleged comments by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, amounted to “an inappropriate intervention by a public official”.

Critically endangered New Zealand bird enjoys record breeding season triggered by mass fruiting of native tree, pushing its numbers to 325

The population of the world’s heaviest parrot, the kākāpō, has surpassed 300 birds for the first time in 75 years, after a record breeding season triggered by the mass fruiting of a native New Zealand tree.

Ninety chicks were officially added to the population of the critically endangered birds on 1 September, pushing the total to 325 – a record high since recovery efforts began.

Annette and Kevin Maxwell say children with special needs have become moneymaking tool for private companies

Annette and Kevin Maxwell were nervous about sending their son Jonah to a residential home for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send). Jonah has severe autism – he is non-verbal, has epilepsy and behavioural problems and needs round-the-clock care.

“It was a huge decision, but we almost had no choice because with Jonah at home, you can’t work and we had two other children to think about. He’s beautiful, but he is very, very complicated,” said Annette. “Outsourcing parenting is just foreign to us and it’s horrible, but we didn’t have another option.”

While many young people have found jobs and built careers, some have struggled to complete their courses

The crisis in the youth employment market, with almost a million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) across the UK, has placed fresh emphasis on ways of getting employees into the workforce.

The government hopes to increase focus on technical and vocational learning in England from the age of 14. In parallel, there is an ambition to create thousands more apprenticeships.

Sum of financial support from a baby’s birth until age 17 is the city-state’s offer to address low birthrate and reluctance of couples to have children

With leafy cycle paths, rooftop water parks and child-friendly restaurants, Singapore’s east coast is one of the best places in the island city-state to raise a family.

Finance worker Lee lives in an apartment here with his wife and two cats, but like an increasing number of Singaporeans they do not intend to have children. They worry about the challenges of bringing them up, and the disruption to their lives.

Exclusive: How a court case over an unoccupied office block could end a widely used tax avoidance scheme

From the outside, the seven-storey building at 2 America Square looks like any other office block in the heart of London’s financial district.

Located about half a mile from Tower Bridge, one might expect it to be a hive of commercial activity, teeming with employees holding important meetings. However, much of the property is home not to staff vying for their next bonus, but to stacks of nondescript black boxes arranged in neat lines.

I need to take him off my family account, but it says the only way is for him to join me for a joint call with O2

My partner packed up and disappeared with his children while I was out with friends. I was left having to foot all our bills, including rent, which has made me financially stressed.

We had a family plan with O2 which meant family phones were all registered to my account. When my partner left, he stopped paying his share of the monthly phone bill, so I set about trying to remove his, and his children’s, phones from the account. O2 explained he would need to join a conference call with me and O2 to agree the transfer of the numbers in question.

A yes to membership would have given Brussels a boost but Icelanders have not voted to isolate themselves

Iceland’s 52.8% to 47.2% vote against reopening EU accession talks is, undeniably, a blow for Brussels. But claiming it as a Brexit-style victory for “national sovereignty” or evidence of broad rejection of the EU misrepresents the reality of the island’s relationship with the bloc.

For the EU, Iceland was a dream candidate: small, stable, prosperous and strategically located in an increasingly contested Arctic. Eager as it is to wield more geopolitical clout and revive flagging momentum around enlargement, a vote in favour would have given Brussels a very welcome boost.

John Fabiano has travelled the globe photographing dogs with jobs – from Italian truffle sniffers and Greenlandic sled dogs to Perla the hotel receptionist in Cologne

She spent the biggest moment of her career at the Paris Olympics thrashing around like a toddler having a tantrum – then went viral globally. Now, a new Netflix film reveals how the much-mocked breakdancer got over it

Netflix’s Untold is ostensibly a series of sports documentaries. However, since its inception five years ago, it has been most successful when sport collides with the wider celebrity machine. There have been films about Caitlyn Jenner, Jake Paul and Vinnie Jones. The gold tends to come when the subjects spill over into public notoriety. With that in mind, it was only a matter of time before they made a film about Raygun.

You may remember Raygun as the Australian breakdancer who spent the biggest moment of her career at the Paris Olympics thrashing around like a toddler having a tantrum in a supermarket. If you didn’t see her routine, you will almost certainly be aware of the memes she inspired. Adele discussed her during a concert. Rachel Dratch did an impersonation of her on Jimmy Fallon. For months, Raygun was everywhere. As this film demonstrates, she really didn’t want to be.

We are used to the idea that our fellow humans might intentionally mislead or manipulate us, but the idea that machines can now do the same is deeply unsettling. Researchers are racing to find solutions before it’s too late

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

In November 2023 – a lifetime ago in the field of artificial intelligence – some of the most powerful people in the world descended on Bletchley Park, the wartime codebreaking hub in Buckinghamshire, to talk about AI safety. In attendance were the then US vice-president, Kamala Harris, the AI bosses Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, delegations from 28 countries, two of the three so-called “godfathers” of AI, and Elon Musk.

The first iteration of ChatGPT had been released only a year earlier, and there was already plenty of evidence that AI models could be used for ill, from spreading misinformation to generating deepfakes. A presentation at the summit, however, highlighted a different issue: what if the biggest problem wasn’t to come from people misusing the technology, but from AI’s own behaviour?

An EU export ban on Dutch tech giant ASML’s machines could force the pause we all need

At this point, it should be clear that AI is a choose-your-own-adventure book where every option ends in disaster. Exploding carbon emissions and ecological collapse? Turn to page 37. Other outcomes include some or all of: the bubble bursting and an ensuing financial crisis; mass unemployment via automation; the end of democracy and the rise of authoritarian surveillance states; raving cults who believe the pattern-matching algorithm is a consciousness; terrorists who create devastating bioweapons; nation states that deploy autonomous weapons systems that act on non-human timeframes; nation states or terrorists that hack all the myriad systems we depend on; or an AI that, conscious or not, pursues directives that are at odds with human wellbeing.

Imagining that people such as Elon Musk, the OpenAI boss, Sam Altman, Palantir’s Peter Thiel and the Trump administration tech adviser Marc Andreessen will lead us to a utopian future of flourishing environmentalism, social harmony and endless leisure requires hallucination and sycophancy so great that that choose-your-own-adventure scenario could only have been written by ChatGPT.

Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now

Which do Enfield’s Tories and Greens value more – a golf course or thousands of new homes? It’s a question of political values

New towns will again be a lasting Labour legacy, just as in the eras of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. Those monuments to optimism, created in the mid-20th century by pulling down slums and building better, will be joined by seven more in an attempt to ease the housing crisis.

Enfield has been the exemplar, its proposed 21,000-home new town enthusiastically backed by its previous Labour council, which was struggling with 3,000 families expensively dumped into miserable temporary accommodation, and, I’m told, 7,000 on the waiting list. But in May’s elections, the great anti-Labour storm brought in a regime resisting the new town in every way it can. A minority Conservative group, propped up by the Greens (yes, Tory-backing Greens), informed the government that it was “withdrawing”. Both parties had run on an anti-new town campaign.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Whatever happens to the early release scheme, Andy Burnham needs to consider the possibility that sentences are just too high

Prisons in England and Wales are full because sentences have increased, and everybody knows this. Lord chief justices know this – four of them said it outright in a report for the Howard League two years ago – ministers know it, and anyone who can count knows it. The prison population in England and Wales was 40,000 in 1991, 88,000 in 2024 and is estimated to hit 105,000 by 2028. Every government promises to increase capacity; no government this century has been able to do that fast enough to cope with the numbers.

One prisons inspector, lamenting conditions that were creating unacceptably high levels of violence, said: “The bath was in danger of overflowing, and they either had to turn the taps off or they had to let some water out.” But the taps have not been turned off, the bigger baths (new, often private jails) have been offset by existing baths (old Victorian prisons) disintegrating, and as soon as a government found the energy and maturity to let some water out – in the form of the early release scheme – it immediately hit the wall of tabloid outrage that created this problem in the first place.

Who dreams of having a Euro summer now when staying in an ancient, uncooled building in the Old Town is like trying to sleep in a wood-fired pizza oven?

This week the Euro summer comes to an end – and so does a certain type of posting on Instagram.

Waiting at the bus stop in the grey winter dawn, a slanting rain soaking your trouser leg, you can warm yourself by scrolling your feed and seeing pictures of Australians enjoying a Euro summer. There it is again – azure Greek coves, plates of barbecued sardines, the yachts rented by the hour, and selfies on the balcony of some Paris Airbnb, drinking wine in the long, blue night.

In Alaska, the Himalayas, the Andes, Greenland, and perhaps also the Alps, deadly chain reactions are just waiting to be triggered

You may not have felt it, but the earth beneath our feet is getting twitchier, and global heating is to blame. As temperatures surge and climate breakdown accelerates, interactions between climate and geology are becoming ever more apparent – as marked by last week’s horrific events in Nepal and Tibet. We still have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the idea that a changing climate can impact what scientists call the geosphere, but the evidence has long been incontestable.

In 2021, a similar deluge ripped through a series of mountain valleys in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, severely damaging two hydroelectric power plants and taking about 200 lives. In August 2025, a colossal landslide in an Alaskan fjord created a 500-metre-high wave in an area frequented by cruise ships. A few months earlier, the collapse of part of a glacier in Switzerland’s Valais canton caused a debris-laden torrent that destroyed and buried most of the already evacuated village of Blatten.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL. His latest book is The Fate of the World – a History and Future of the Climate Crisis

A year on from the purge, with thousands of jobs cut and billions in foreign aid lost, a former leader reflects on the sorry saga – and why it would never happen to Nasa

A year has passed since I and thousands of colleagues lost our jobs at USAID. Asking myself “Why us?” I have come to the conclusion that the American public had very little idea of what we were doing and why.

Doge, the “department of government efficiency”, began its work in January 2025, with USAID as its first target, in a reckless campaign that even Elon Musk has said he would not repeat. At that moment of chaos, Americans lacked the knowledge that could contradict the false narrative presented by Musk, who called the agency a “criminal organisation” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America”.

These things are undermining not just our public spaces but the very nature of being human. Let’s shame them off the streets

So far I am yet to be tempted into purchasing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. To a certain extent this is a function of possessing a large, misshapen and comically convex head upon which no pair of sunglasses has ever looked remotely appropriate. Nor am I one of those consumers who professes to be “really into gadgets”, a preference I’ve always found weirdly unspecific. It’s subtly telling when people claim to be into “gadgets”, because they’re never talking about, say, a tin opener. What they really mean is something gimmicky and expensive that almost certainly requires the services of a datacentre and enough water to irrigate Kent.

And even if I were to surmount these two obstacles, you then get into the ethics of the thing. I’m nobody’s idea of a PR expert, but if your shiny new product keeps requiring patches and updates to prevent people from using it to do degenerate things to women, perhaps it might be worth walking it back to the research and development stage.

Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist

The MoD grossly overspends then claims poverty. It’s high time it was treated as just one part of a progressive government

Nowhere was the confidence of the prime minister, Andy Burnham, shown as clearly as in his appointment of chancellor. There were weeks of speculation that this appointment was a choice between the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, and the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, with their contrasting political economies.

It has been a hallmark of Burnham’s politics that he and his team do not get involved in briefing wars, so it was only when former defence secretary John Healey appeared in Downing Street together with Mahmood that it was clear that the prime minister had cut the Gordian knot, reassuring the markets with a cool, calm political operator with extensive Treasury experience as chancellor. Healey’s two years in defence meant that he would know both sides of the argument when it came to one of the biggest questions of the forthcoming budget: how to meet the bold new Nato defence spending targets without derailing the social ambitions of the Burnham government.

New child safety measures are welcome, but the wider risks posed by these platforms remain unaddressed

“Hook, hold, harvest and hide” was how Megan O’Neill, a lawyer for the US state of California, characterised Meta’s business model in the trial that ended last week with an $18bn settlement, to be shared between the states and territories that brought the case. It was a clever way to describe the company’s approach to users’ attention and data. But the sharpness of her words was not matched by the deal. While the strengthening of child safety features is welcome, the tech giant once again batted off efforts to alter its products.

Meta’s decision to settle enabled it to avoid any admission of liability. It put a stop to the awkward questions being asked of witnesses including Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s CEO, and the damaging claims made by whistleblowers such as Arturo Béjar. This former Meta safety engineer told the court that his own daughter had been sent unsolicited photos of male genitals on Instagram.

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

The president’s deportation machine is creating a class of people inside the US who have fewer protections against the power of the state

Is the Trump administration creating a group in the US with fewer protections against executive power owing to their immigration status? Its often openly racist actions suggest so. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims to target “the worst of the worst” – undocumented migrants who commit violent crimes. Yet the Guardian reported that over half of those arrested in July had no criminal convictions or pending charges. That month, ICE made record arrests and deportations, apprehending 1,500 people and removing 1,100 daily.

When campaigning, Donald Trump falsely claimed that Haitians were “eating the pets”. In office, his administration moved to end temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians. In June, the supreme court let the protection expire, leaving about 350,000 people at risk of deportation to a country gripped by violence and instability. The court’s decision means more than 1 million TPS holders from 13 nations previously considered too unsafe to return to are now at risk of deportation. Many have lived and worked legally in the US for years.

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.

Datacentres should generate their own power and control their emissions, writes Richard Lamming, while Michael McClelland says we should reduce our digital communication. Plus a letter from Malcolm Fraser

The case of future datacentres demanding more electricity than the entire United Kingdom (Two planned datacentres will have higher UK carbon emissions than ExxonMobil, analysis finds, 25 August) is an example of corporates transferring their problems to society and the electorate. This must not be allowed to happen.

One solution would be to make each datacentre responsible for generating all its own electricity and for reducing its CO₂ emissions to zero. These installations will have vast areas of roofing and car parks that could be covered in solar panels, space for wind generation and battery storage, and for emissions scrubbers.

Readers respond to Polly Hudson’s article about the things people said to her (or didn’t) after her mother died

I do so agree with Polly Hudson’s piece about how the bereaved are addressed (My mum has died – and there is one kind of response I can’t stand, 26 August). After my teenage daughter was killed in a road traffic accident and I returned to work people would keep asking: “How are you?”. To which the only response could have been: “If you really want to know have you an hour or two to spare?”

The idea that walking down a corridor en route to the office kettle was the venue for any rational response was plainly idiotic. A more thoughtful colleague suggested that I wore a notice around my neck that read: “Terrible, actually, but thanks for asking.”

Mark R Shaw says airborne pollutants have caused a massive decline in insect numbers, in response to a Country Diary

Nigel Brown’s understandable joy in finding a rosy footman in his moth trap (Country diary, 25 August) ends with “an important ecological message” that the substantial elimination of airborne sulphur dioxide pollution, which was devastating to the lichens and algae on which caterpillars of footman moths largely feed, has allowed recovery and even geographical spread.

However, what might be a more realistic message is that the balance has changed in our major airborne pollutants since the 1990s, from sulphur dioxide to nitrogen oxides (a byproduct of internal combustion engines, among others), and this has benefited lichens and algae, which thrive under the current regime – and hence also footman moths as a special case.

Autumn pleasures | Solar gain | Meghan and Harry | Rowing knowledge | Eye test | Bad mood

Regarding Emma Brockes’s Digested Week (Is there anything sadder than the end of summer?, 28 August), the end of summer is the beginning of autumn – the best season of the year. Trees changing colour making woodlands look so beautiful, with autumn crocuses underneath. Gentle weather for walking the dog. Harvesting apples and pears, and planting bulbs for spring. Enjoying the later months of this year and looking to the beginning of the next.
Fiona Cruickshank
Enfield, London

• Following your article on plug-in solar panels (Plug-in solar: could a low-cost panel cut your bills?, 21 August), my only thought is exactly how long will they be hanging on the new owners’ balcony railings or garden walls before they go walkies? Highly portable and highly stealable.
Ralph Jones
Rochester, Kent

• Men’s transfer interactive | Women’s transfer interactive

• You can mail Will and follow us on TikTok and Bluesky

A lot of people are highly invested in people moving companies and changing jobs. You do not get this with accountancy or waste management.

In case any players do not get a move today and are desperate to get out of their club, there are options. Not all country’s celebrate deadline day on 1 September, so there is still hope of heading off to Turkey or Portugal.

England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain – 1 September

Argentina, Netherlands - 2 September

Scotland - 3 September

Turkey - 4 September

Russia - 10 September

Brazil - 11 September

Portugal - 15 September

UAE - 28 September

Saudi - 12 October

The smile on Declan Rice’s face with six minutes of normal time remaining said it all. He had just shut down Ian Maatsen as the Aston Villa full-back zoomed into the box. Arsenal, for whom Bukayo Saka scored the only goal, were authoritative and seemingly took great satisfaction in keeping Villa at arm’s length.

Unai Emery’s work‑in‑progress side struggled to test the champions, David Raya untroubled. The records will show Villa have lost their first two league matches of a season without scoring for the first time since 2002 but, despite successive defeats, this time there was no capitulation.

• Spaniard beats Roman Safiullin 6-4, 6-4, 6-4

• Alcaraz has not played since April with wrist injury

As Carlos Alcaraz edged closer to the conclusion of his first singles set in more than four and a half months, like so many times in his career instinct took over. Up 5-4, 30-15 in set one, Alcaraz swept forward to the net behind a precise wide serve and, when his opponent Roman Safiullin responded with a dipping backhand return directly to his feet, Alcaraz delicately pushed a half-volley over the net for a winner.

It was a gorgeous shot, a perfect example of the creativity and feel trademarked by Alcaraz that has been missed throughout his extended injury layoff. That touch of genius was followed, predictably, by a wide smile, a quick hold and a comprehensive victory as the Spaniard returned to competition with a stellar 6-4, 6-4, 6-4 win against Safiullin.

• Reigning singles champion beats Camila Osorio 6-2, 6-4

• Men’s 10th seed Arthur Fils beaten by Stefanos Tsitsipas

Aryna Sabalenka said she is determined to look ahead, rather than dwell on a difficult past few months, after beginning her US Open title defence with a 6-2, 6-4 victory against Camila Osorio.

“The good thing for me is not looking back no matter what, if it’s good or bad, because I feel a good result can also stop you from performing well because you’re basically focusing on the past,” Sabalenka said. “I never look back. If I win the tournament or lose the tournament, today is a new day, and I have to stay in the moment.”

• Sarfaraz Ahmed sacked after 194-run loss at Lord’s

• White-ball coach Mike Hesson steps in

Pakistan have decided to rip up their plans during an already chaotic tour of England by announcing that seven players and head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed have been sent home before the third Test at Edgbaston next week.

Already confirmed to lose the series after going 2-0 down with a 194-run defeat at Lord’s on Sunday, Pakistan have now asked Mike Hesson, the New Zealander who runs their white-ball teams, to replace Sarfaraz as head coach. Umar Gul, their bowling coach, has also been swapped out for the Australian Ashley Noffke.

• Edward and Mo Farah among those to be inducted

• Sonia Lannaman and Shirley Strong also honoured

Britain’s first black Olympic medal winner Harry Edward is to be inducted into the England Athletics Hall of Fame. Edward will join the likes of Mo Farah, former sprinter Sonia Lannaman and medal-winning hurdler Shirley Strong, who will all be honoured at a ceremony in Birmingham in November. Edward’s citation includes the tribute: “A true citizen of the world and a pioneer of British sport, England Athletics is proud and humbled to induct Britain’s first black Olympic medallist into the Hall of Fame.”

Edward was until recent years a forgotten hero of the 1920s, a decade that saw him win two bronze edals, in the 100m and 200m, at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics. He was also three times the AAA 100yd and 220yd champion and won the 100, 220 and 440-yard AAA championships in 1922, inside a single hour. King George V came down from the stands to personally congratulate him.

• The Women’s Football Show discontinued for new season

• BBC plans YouTube chat show presented by Alex Scott

BBC Sport is insisting it remains “fully committed to women’s football and the WSL” despite discontinuing its flagship BBC One highlights programme The Women’s Football Show for the new Women’s Super League season.

It is understood the BBC will focus on digital platforms to showcase highlights instead, including showing them on its newly launched YouTube women’s football channel, instead of the weekly television show with a studio, presenter and pundits, which had aired previously on BBC One at 11.30pm on Sundays, after first going live on BBC iPlayer at 9pm.

Beth Mead and Niamh Charles are notable additions to the champions’ squad that looks just as strong as last season

Guardian writers’ predicted position: 1st (NB: this is not necessarily Tom Garry’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips)

Last season’s position: 1st

• Batter dropped from tour to Zimbabwe and South Africa

• Chief selector Bailey insists his Test chances still alive

The once-glittering international cricket career of Marnus Labuschagne is on the ropes after he was dropped from the ODI side, even if chair of selectors George Bailey made it clear he remains in contention for the Test side.

Labuschagne was dropped from Australia’s white-ball touring party to Zimbabwe and South Africa, a squad named with next year’s ODI World Cup in mind.

• Cape Town stunt sparks major debate over safety risks

• Airlink insists flyby conducted according to regulations

A pre-game stunt involving two passenger jets flying dramatically low over a stadium in South Africa drew huge cheers from the estimated crowd of 56,000 people, but also sparked a major debate over safety risks. The flyby by two Embraer jets, operated by the local airline Airlink, happened on Saturday before the second rugby union Test between South Africa and New Zealand in Cape Town.

The flight tracking service Flightradar24 estimated that the lead jet passed just 41-46 feet (12-14 metres) above the roof of Cape Town Stadium, with the crowd and the world’s top-ranked rugby teams below. The second jet, which was very close behind, flew through a cloud of pink dust that shot up from the stadium roof as part of the show.

Increase coincides with proscription of Palestine Action last year which has led to thousands of arrests for allegedly supporting the protest group

Almost half of all terrorism arrests in Great Britain since the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers in 2001 have come in the past year, official data shows.

There have been 6,539 arrests for terror-related activity in Great Britain since the 2001 attacks and 3,021 of those arrests were in the year ending 31 March 2026, according to the Home Office.

Zelenskyy says dozens more injured as strikes leave thousands without electricity in Odesa region

On behalf of the Irish presidency in the EU Council, Ireland’s defence minister Helen McEntee said the talks in Wicklow come “at a moment of profound challenge for all of us in terms of defence and security,” with closer cooperation needed “more than ever.”

Ukraine, maritime security, and resilience against hybrid and cyber threats will be top of the agenda today, she says.

Exclusive: FCA pressures firms to do more to sort 760,000 accounts as watchdog urges families to use free tracking service

Child trust fund providers are being put under the spotlight to check they are treating savers fairly and doing all they can to reunite young people with lost accounts.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said about 760,000 accounts worth an average of £2,000 were yet to be claimed – more than £1.5bn in total – as it launched a review of the market.

TCG Isin expected to play vital role in locating Filo Jet’s voyage data recorder 514 metres below surface

A deep-sea search and rescue vessel is on its way to Cyprus as Turkey joins efforts to retrieve the 20 people still missing after a passenger ferry capsized off the island’s northern coast.

The TCG Isin will join the vast operation to find survivors after the high-speed ferry sank on Sunday barely four nautical miles outside the port town of Kyrenia.

Justices’ 5-4 ruling permits Trump administration appeal to block lower court order halting above-ground work

A divided US supreme court has permitted Donald Trump to continue building his controversial $400m White House ballroom despite legal challenges, raising the likelihood it will be completed.

In a 5-4 ruling, the justices permitted the Trump administration’s request to ⁠block a lower court order that had halted above-ground construction of the project while a lawsuit by a historic preservation group seeks to block it.

Savings grow as energy prices in Great Britain rise and cost of panel installation falls, analysis finds

Households in Great Britain’s cloudiest regions could still save more than £400 a year on their energy bills by installing rooftop solar panels, research has found.

Rising wholesale energy prices mean the potential savings from a home solar panel system have climbed in recent years, as the cost of installation has continued to fall, leading to increased demand.

Report calls for legally binding targets to cut microplastic pollution as soil ‘is a complex living ecosystem’

The accumulation of microplastics in soil presents an emerging threat to the UK’s food security, according to scientists, MPs and campaigners who have called for legally binding targets to cut microplastic pollution.

UK agricultural soils have been identified as among the most contaminated by microplastics in Europe, often as a result of repeated applications of sludge from water treatment works as fertiliser, according to a report published by the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on microplastics.

Flash flooding in Arizona tourist destination was likely triggered by compounding climate factors, such as drought and warming in Pacific Ocean

• Remote Grand Canyon lodge hit by deadly flash flood boasts fabled history

A deadly flash flood in the Grand Canyon over the weekend was likely driven by a confluence of climate factors, including drought, wildfire scarring and warming temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that can supercharge storms.

At least two people have died, nearly 80 people were rescued and one remained unaccounted for after a surge of water and debris swept through the immensely popular tourist destination on Saturday, fueled by torrents of rain that hit the national park’s Bright Angel Creek area.

Andy Burnham urged to seek consensus over response to extreme heat and forthcoming ‘super El Niño’

Andy Burnham should call a cross-party meeting to discuss the UK’s response to worsening extreme weather, including the forthcoming ‘super El Niño’, the Liberal Democrats have said.

The prime minister chaired a Cobra emergency meeting on the drought earlier this month but there has been little from the government on the wider threats posed by five successive heatwaves since May and expected global issues with food shortages and inflation.

Data paints sobering picture of 11- to 24-year-olds growing up in ‘bleak world’ shaped by pandemic and social media

The number of young people with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014 as a result of growing up in a “bleak world” dominated by austerity, the pandemic and social media.

New research paints a sobering picture of how 11- to 24-year-olds in England are increasingly lonely, isolated and “disconnected” from themselves, peers and wider society.

Body of victim thought to be in her 70s found in bin bag in walled garden area of Stanley Park on Friday

Police in Liverpool have urged members of the public to come forward with information after the body of an unknown woman believed to be in her 70s was found in a black bin bag in a popular park.

Merseyside police were contacted by a passerby who had found the woman’s body in Stanley Park, in the Anfield area of Liverpool, at about 5.25pm on Friday 28 August.

From a darling of the Tory right to a moderate former army officer, we profile the key players

• Andrew Griffith and Tom Tugendhat join Badenoch’s top team in Tory reshuffle

Kemi Badenoch has kicked off the return to parliament with a reshuffle of her top team in order to take on Andy Burnham and Reform UK. She has made sweeping changes to the shadow cabinet and ruthlessly axed her shadow chancellor. Here is a run-down of the new characters sitting across from Labour on the opposition frontbench.

Jasmeet Wadhwa, who fled Taliban persecution in Afghanistan, lost his life while trying to reach UK in April

A British family is pleading with French authorities to release the body of a relative that officials have held for five months after he died in the Channel in April.

Jasmeet Wadhwa, 32, died while attempting to reach the UK on a dinghy on 1 April with his mother, Harbans Kaur Wadhwa, after they fled Taliban persecution in Afghanistan in January.

Three projected victories are ‘a message’ to US that Carney ‘has the support of the Canadian people’, says one lawmaker

Canada’s ruling Liberal party has swept three special elections in a result that showed voters backing the prime minister, Mark Carney, after his face-off with the US president, Donald Trump.

The Canadian Press, Canada’s national news agency, projected Liberal victories in Chicoutimi-Le Fjord in Quebec, Beaches-East York in Toronto and North Vancouver-Capilano in British Columbia.

City council emphasises economic case for Madring amid local outrage over disruption and environmental impact

Opponents of Madrid’s newly constructed Formula One circuit have accused the regional authorities of putting profit before people’s wellbeing after tests for the inaugural Spanish Grand Prix at the track later this month yielded noise levels that were almost twice the legal decibel limit.

The regional government of Madrid and the city council are hoping that the 5.4km-long (3.3 miles) Madring circuit – which has been built in the north-east of the Spanish capital at a cost of €83m (£71m) – will attract visitors, boost the local economy and put the city firmly on the motor racing map. The Madring bills itself as “a perfectly connected circuit: just 20 minutes from the city centre”.

Police say the drugs were uncovered as part of ongoing investigations into illicit drugs in Broome

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A Western Australian man has been charged after police said they found approximately 3.5 grams of methylamphetamine in a ziplock bag wedged between the bacon and egg of a McMuffin meal during a car search.

The arrest on 20 August was part of ongoing investigations into illicit drugs in Broome, in WA’s Kimberley region.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says about 800 Shahed drones fired into Ukraine in four days in effort to ‘wear down’ country

Kyiv is enduring hours of daytime air raids and air raid warnings as Russia has fired 800 jet-powered drones into Ukraine in four days, using the faster weapons to sustain prolonged waves of attacks

The new-model Shahed drones have a cruising speed of 200mph to 250mph , about double the 115mph achieved by the piston-engine version and beyond the speed of Ukraine’s cheap interceptors, making them harder to stop.

Renewed fighting in Middle East weighs on financial markets; Shein shares tumble after Hong Kong stock market debut

UK government borrowing costs have risen to the highest since 2008, as higher oil prices stoke inflation fears. Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, is now up 1.3% at $91.69 a barrel.

The yield on the 10-year gilt has jumped 7 basis points to 5.223%, the highest since June 2008.

Despite satellite tracking firms suggesting oil flowing through Hormuz is around 6m barrels a day, that is well below pre-conflict levels.

In the meantime, the buffers the global oil market has been relying on are becoming exhausted. US inventories are nearing minimum levels, while China’s ability to keep imports low will be tested as seasonal demand picks up.

In-store inflation rises to an annual 1.5% in August, according to a survey for the British Retail Consortium

The pace of price rises in UK shops rose to its highest level in two years in August, a trade body index shows, with higher energy costs pushing up the price of food and AI chip demand making technology more expensive.

In-store inflation stepped up to 1.5% year on year in August, up from 0.9% in July, led by prices for tinned and packaged food which increased by 2.5% against 1.1% in the prior month, according to data from the research company NIQ for the British Retail Consortium.

Premium of nearly 10% paid by housebuyers comparable with cost of a cheaper private school over seven years

A house near a top state secondary school costs an extra £40,000 on average, according to research that reveals education premiums that rank alongside some private school fees.

The average property in a postcode district that includes a top 50 state secondary commands a price tag of £415,791, compared with £375,217 across the wider local authority areas in which those schools are located, a UK-wide analysis by the estate agent Yopa found.

Hong Kong flotation at $26bn by firm once valued at $100bn follows failure to list in US and UK

Shares in the fast-fashion brand Shein slumped as much as 10% as the China-founded company made its long-anticipated trading debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

The Singapore-headquartered company, once valued at almost $100bn (£74bn), went public on Tuesday pricing shares at HK$48.56, valuing the business at just over $26bn.

The gripping series about controversial real-life verdicts returns. Plus: The Great British Sewing Bee gets bookish. Here’s what to watch today

9pm, Channel 4
With trial by jury under scrutiny, this is a timely moment for the return of this gripping series, which reruns an actual criminal trial and follows the 12 jury members as they reach their verdict. This time, the case of brothers – one of whom is only 14 years old – accused of killing their stepfather causes instant polarisation. Debates around nature and nurture and punishment for its own sake emerge straight away. Phil Harrison

The last time she displayed a sculpture in public in Britain, someone covered it in white paint. But, undeterred, the acclaimed artist is a placing a black woman in Trafalgar Square

Tschabalala Self is relentlessly positive and unstoppably optimistic. The US artist is waiting for the unveiling of Lady in Blue, her new sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, a towering, colourful painted bronze of a black woman striding (positively, optimistically) into the future. Self seems resolutely hopeful about the work, which is pretty impressive considering what happened to her last public sculpture in the UK. “Yeah,” she says, speaking from her home in upstate New York. “I mean, that was a completely racist act.”

In 2022, Self unveiled Seated at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, London. Like Lady in Blue, it was a vast, brightly painted bronze depiction of a black woman, this time seated demurely on a chair. After being shown at Coal Drops Yard without incident, it was moved to the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, where the reception wasn’t quite as warm. “Within the first week,” says Self, “it was spraypainted white, but only on the skin of the sculpture.” As vandalism goes, it doesn’t get much more pointed, or racist. “The first feeling I had was just pain that my sculpture had been harmed. That someone had enacted violence on an object I had imbued with love and affection.”

Christine Edzard’s The Man With the Plan tours the country with a timely message about tackling want, disease, squalor, idleness and ignorance

A new film that addresses issues fundamental to the new prime minister’s declared mission will star Simon Callow as a historical British political figure.

The hero of The Man With the Plan is William Beveridge, who helped to lay the foundations of the postwar welfare state. It shows that the Liberal peer was much more radical than is usually assumed – and certainly far more so than Churchill anticipated when he asked Beveridge to draw up a report into the future of Britain’s fragmented social insurance and national health system after the second world war.

Beckett’s masterpiece is given a postmodern cinema slant, with characters in different locations, music and humour in a free and fanciful interpretation

Remember remixes? Where you take a song and swap out parts of it with new or pre-existing material, changing it just enough to be still recognisable? Argentinean director Alejo Moguillansky applies this quintessentially postmodern aesthetic to film with a funky cinematic remix, or even series of remixes, of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Fin de Partie, AKA Endgame. The result feels a little retro and possibly a bit too pleased with its own cleverness, and the spoonerist title is juvenile. But in the end this really achieves something with both the source material and the remix that’s fresh, pleasingly provocative, and at times moving.

Beckett’s 1957 absurdist masterwork has just four characters on stage throughout, two of whom do most of the talking: cantankerous blind, disabled Hamm banters with his servant/slave Clov, while Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, live in dustbins upstage and talk rather less. There’s an air of apocalyptic doom, much talk of drugs, food and, above all, time running out.

There’s a committed performance from a spunky Adria Arjona in the Guest director Adam Wingard’s decent B-movie but it’s missing some sharper weaponry

There’s something rather fascinating about an indie director who heads to the A-list before returning to their roots, a wider skillset and different perspective gained for better or worse. Working within a stricter system – the tiniest of choices being agreed upon by the largest of committees – can often be a creatively crushing experience that we’ve heard gruesomely detailed by many who survived it but the expansion of what one is allowed to technically do with a bigger budget can also be instructive and enriching. The dream scenario is bringing back the good and allowing the bad to inspire new work that makes the most of how unshackled one again now is.

There are plenty of examples of how this hasn’t worked. Neill Blomkamp following Elysium and Chappie with chintzy low-budget horror Demonic (easily his least effective film although since opening his own AI “studio” I imagine the worst is yet to come), Marc Forster following Quantum of Solace and World War Z with a blind Blake Lively film that, ironically, no one saw while Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck went from the greatness of Half Nelson to the blandness of Captain Marvel to the headache of Freaky Tales. But then we were also gifted with the hometown intimacy of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma after he came back from space for Gravity and Hogwarts for the Prisoner of Azkaban while Karyn Kusama brushed off the nightmare of Æon Flux with the brilliantly creepy dinner party thriller The Invitation.

Two icons share cake and take us on a touching trip down memory lane. Dench is mesmerising, and McKellen is such a devilish guest that he’ll make you weep and giggle too

I am writing this in the wake of Dolly Parton’s death, so I am very much in the mood for the gentle celebration of ageing icons while we still have them. An hour of 91-year-old Judi Dench having tea with 87-year-old Ian McKellen? Sign me right up and I will not so much as breathe heavily in their direction lest anything go wrong.

McKellen – Sir Ian, “Serena” to his friends – navigates the “treacherous” pavement leading to Dame Judi’s fairytale 15th-century home in Surrey, which is as cosy and sparkling as its owner (if anyone is listening, I will take an hour of just Dench, taking us around the house and garden, like the world’s most mesmerising estate agent), and unwraps two lumps of parkin cake to go with their tea. One from Yorkshire, where Dench is from, and one from Lancashire because McKellen was – is – a Burnley (then Wigan, then Bolton) boy.

The Black Bananas singer knows all the words to Rapper’s Delight and relates to AC/DC, but which song reminds her of a heartbreaking theft?

The first song I fell in love with
Van Halen’s Runnin’ With the Devil. I was five or six and I went to visit my cousin Tommy who was much older. He was on a hockey team and we went to see them practise before the game and they had Runnin’ With the Devil on really loud. I was like: “Wait, what’s this?!”

The song I do at karaoke
You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC. Me and Brian Johnson – my voice has that thing, you know?

Irish noisemongers Gilla Band, shadowy producers Two Shell and lovable band the Big Moon have new records, and there are tours from Bob Dylan and Kelela – plus the best of jazz, global and classical

• ‘It’s easier when nobody’s watching’: inside the secretive and sublime freak-folk of @
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

Their un-Googlable, very online name is the antithesis of this earthy duo’s sublime art-folk. Like their emotionally ambiguous music, the pair don’t give up their mysteries easily
• The best music of autumn 2026: Johnny Marr, Phoebe Bridgers, Rachel Chinouriri and more
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

Victoria Rose arrives at Philadelphia’s 30th St Station and apologises for the sticky streaks covering her car’s interior. She’s a beekeeper, and it’s just propolis, a resinous sealant for gaps in the hive. Her bandmate, Stone Filipczak, is riding shotgun, and her protective gear occupies the rear passenger seat. We’re heading to one of their favourite spots, an Ethiopian restaurant that doubles as a venue. The dining room quickly gets boisterous – a challenge for our interview given that Filipczak and Rose are relatively soft speakers, and not wildly keen to divulge specifics about the music they make as @. Like Rose’s bees, they’re a secretive and self-sustaining pair.

As you might guess, @ is pronounced “at”. It’s a tough Google. The name, Filipczak explains, came from “a vision of an @ sign on a kick drum head”. Not that they have any need for one: @’s art-folk is rooted in acoustic guitar, woodwinds and vocal harmonies that furrow and frolic. Their fantastic second album, Autosmile, is their first with the venerated indie label 4AD. (The name is a reference to a meme showing a dopey sunflower: “When you and gang faded and auto smile gets turn on …”)

As R&L replace the BBC’s unsigned artists stage with one filled with rock scions and a Simon Cowell boyband, many are decrying disappearing opportunities for grassroots acts

This year’s Reading and Leeds festival lineups are a testament to the catholic tastes of a generation who have little regard for musical tribalism or the concept of genre: brash pop stars rub up against drum’n’bass acts, underground rappers, meat-and-potatoes indie bands and much more.

What at least 70% of those acts have in common, however, is that early on in their careers they were supported by the BBC’s Introducing scheme, a combination of regional and national radio shows playing music submitted by unsigned artists and festival stages that platform them. For almost 20 years, a BBC Introducing stage has been a core part of Reading and Leeds – until it was scrapped last month.

A tireless account shines a light on the Booker-winning author’s mysterious early years and the undeserved criticism that accompanied with her success

‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford), “won’t do.”

The cardiganed image confuses the author with her protagonists. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more.

Global crises are tightly linked to how we treat each other at the local level, argues this optimistic book

In times of crisis, there is one person to whom the left still turns for guidance.

More than a decade and a half after leaving government, Gordon Brown has mellowed into the Labour party’s favourite wise elder; one who has never disappointed the faithful by going off to make a ton of money, remaining quietly committed to public service and deeply engaged with the world’s knottier problems. Having successfully led the global response to the financial crash of 2008, and advocated powerfully during the pandemic for global cooperation against the virus, he was never going to simply sit back and shrug as the world spiralled into conflict and chaos under Donald Trump.

Struggling with Alzheimer’s, the central character sets out on his final journey to a euthanasia clinic

The word “Alzheimer’s” never appears in Switzy, Emma Cline’s third novel, which arrives pre-endorsed as a Booker prize longlistee. But we can be certain that it is the disease afflicting its central character, David Hastings – certain in a way he finds it increasingly hard to be about anything.

When the novel begins, David and his assistant Cody are aboard a private jet flying from his home in the US to the UK. Landing at London City airport (which the book, experiencing its own senior moment, situates in the countryside), they visit David’s daughter and her family before travelling on to Zurich (hence “Switzy”). One more appointment, a catchup with an old boarding school roommate called Tom, awaits just over the French border, after which David will be euthanised at a facility resembling Dignitas.

The Guardian’s weekend wrap of essential reads from the past seven days, selected by Jacqui Housden

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Hello and welcome to this week’s Five Great Reads. Settle into your weekend with some truly inspirational stories – from the incredible life of Dolly Parton, to a vision for greener cities, and life-affirming reflections on grief. Plus, a little bit of gossip.

There are juggernauts and indie gems aplenty for when the nights draw in, from an ingenious puzzle game to blockbusters such as Marvel’s Wolverine and Call of Duty
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

After 20 years away, Capcom’s hyper kinetic action adventure returns, pitting skilled samurai Miyamoto Musashi against hordes of warriors and demons in Edo-period Kyoto. Master the complex combat then prepare for flashing blades, disembodied limbs and geysers of spraying blood.
• 4 September; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox

Before The Witcher 4 arrives in 2028, CD Projekt Red is returning us to the world of The Witcher 3 for one last foray. Looks like wind’s still howlin’

The game that graced us with Bathtub Geralt, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, arrived more than a decade ago. So it was a touch surprising this summer when developers CD Projekt Red announced a new expansion to the venerable adventure, titled Songs of the Past, for next year. It will release alongside a full remaster of the original game, which will be free for anyone who bought it back in 2015. (The studio is also working on a sequel, The Witcher 4, but that’s not due until 2028.)

As it turns out, this is all possible thanks to a partnership with Fool’s Theory, a studio founded by CD Projekt Red veterans, which took on the brunt of the development work. “We’ve had this story in a drawer for many years,” explains Marcin Blacha, VP story director at CD Projekt Red. “Of course, we moved on to Cyberpunk 2077 and now The Witcher 4, as well as our other projects. But because we knew The Witcher 4 would take time, we saw a gap in our release calendar where Songs of the Past could go. Thankfully, we were able to find the right partner to help execute it.”

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Asobo Studio
The medieval franchise is transplanted to Crete, conjuring action-adventure magic from familiar ingredients

The path in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a familiar one. Amid ancient ruins and sun-dappled gorges, a young woman, Sophia, dutifully treads the same footsteps as a Minoan warrior from millennia ago, one with whom she seems to share a visionary connection. The “resonance” between these two characters is made clear by their echoing actions – a crank pushed in the bronze age that still works in the medieval present, for example. Through these spliced timelines, it becomes clear that Sophia, compelled by her supernatural gift, possesses little agency. Destiny beckons her forwards.

This is a smart meta concept for a game that, at its most basic level, boils down to keeping your left thumb planted firmly on the analogue stick, always pushing Sophia onwards in linear fashion. You jostle her through ornate corridors rendered as higgledy-piggledy pirate camps and cobbled Venetian streets. For the greater part of the game, you propel her through the Minoan remains of Crete, which harbour a dark and terrible secret. It is classic third-person action-adventure fare, building on the template laid down by the likes of Tomb Raider and then refined and complicated by titles such as The Last of Us. Little, from an interactive perspective, surprises: you dash, vault and swing between teetering podiums, squeeze through tiny gaps in rock and crouch behind conveniently placed walls to avoid enemies.

The flat routines of a dead end railway job screen out an approaching menace in a quietly intriguing game from the indie developer of Cat Lady and Lorelai

Lonely jobs have provided excellent material for independent video games over the years. From Papers, Please to Firewatch to The Stanley Parable, players have been happy to spend hours dwelling in depressing cubicles or rural hideaways, usually because there is an intriguingly hidden point to it all.

In Trainwatch, a character named Troy has taken a seemingly godforsaken job as a railway worker in an unnamed desolate backwater. His main task over the course of a single month is to manage a level crossing, closing the gate whenever a train comes, while also carrying out daily chores such as cooking and washing. It sounds serene, but Troy is also running away from something. The other stipulations are that he stays sober and calls his wife every night. And there is something lurking in the fog at the edges of the fields – one day he must face it.

O2 Arena, London
The polymath rapper’s stage show, which also features SWAT teams and a warship, is truly bravura stuff – but you can’t help feeling this is an artist at a creative crossroads

A$AP Rocky dangles precariously from a helicopter, while beneath him black-clad SWAT officers brawl with his white-masked followers. This isn’t some cliffhanger setpiece from the rapper/actor’s latest film – it’s just how shows on his Don’t Be Dumb tour open. It’s a big production: there are further prop helicopters, including a smaller one up in the rafters from which he also raps (a reference to his single Helicopter), while the stage recreates the top deck of a naval warship, for reasons that never become clear.

The bizarre set underscores a sense of a man in career transition, unsure who he is any more. In the eight years since his last album, this survivor of homelessness and incarceration became a father, three times, with Rihanna; he’s pivoting towards movies – good ones – and co-chairs the Met Gala. His new record sought to redefine him as an artist, juggling more of his trademark pugilistic rap with ambitious stylistic experiments and unexpected collaborations (Damon Albarn! Danny Elfman!).

Royal Albert Hall, London
Period instrument grain and an energised Jakob Lehmann did a fair job with Berlioz’s concert setting of the drama, but the hall’s murky acoustic buried some of the sparkle

Berlioz wrote his setting of the Faust story for concert performance, counting on the fact that what went on in his audience’s mind’s eye would be more fantastical than anything that could be portrayed on stage. The forces he employed aren’t on the same scale as those for his Requiem – written almost a decade earlier, in 1837, and heard here earlier this month – but are still huge. Here they came in the form of the period-instrument orchestra Les Siècles, plus the Choeur de Radio France and, joining in the closing five minutes, the Radio France children’s choir – conducted by Jakob Lehmann, making an energised Proms debut.

Les Siècles’ period instruments brought their own grainy texture to the palette, from the chattering piccolos representing Méphistophélès’s malignant spirits and the silky violin swoops lulling Faust to sleep, down to the inclusion in the orchestra of an ophicleide, an instrument that’s an evolutionary dead end on the tuba’s family tree. The Hungarian March sounded snappy, as did the brass fanfares, echoed at one point by a small band up in the gallery.

Swinton takes a dead man’s identity, Glasgow’s heir to Billy Connolly heads on tour and Gillian Anderson, Keira Knightley and Natalia Osipova all hit the stage
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

Minerva theatre, Chichester
A female secret agent’s extraordinary courage never quite comes to life in a drama that struggles to find tension in her high-stakes story

Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan was a second world war spy codenamed Madeleine. A mixed-heritage British Indian and Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent in Nazi-occupied Paris who showed extraordinary courage, her story is ripe for dramatic retelling. So why does it feel so fractured and unsatisfactory in director Elin Schofield’s production?

Perhaps because of the limited documentation of this medalled war hero’s life. That is not helped in the delivery of her story in playwright Stephanie Street’s non-sequential narrative, beginning with her interrogation in 1943, after being caught by the Germans, and shuttling back and forth across the years, from early family life to her death in Dachau concentration camp.

The queen of country was interred next to her late husband in an intimate ceremony attended by close family

Dolly Parton was laid to rest in a private ceremony in Nashville on Friday, her family has confirmed.

The queen of country music, who died aged 80 on 25 August “after bravely facing a brief battle with cancer”, was interred at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum alongside her husband of 60 years, Carl Thomas.

Concern among staff that fragile artwork’s scarce ‘light hours’ given to someone with no known interest in museum

The British Museum privately hosted the Donald Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel in the exhibition space of the Bayeux tapestry earlier this month, the Guardian understands.

The museum’s director of development, Charlotte Appleyard, hosted the PayPal founder at a VIP viewing of the tapestry, which is yet to open to the public, on 18 August.

Bramham Park, Leeds
Charli xcx and Fontaines DC are spellbinding and there’s an awesome array of genres, but the biggest turnouts are for tech house names like Kettama and Josh Baker

• Charli xcx, Reading festival review – Pretentious? Just a bit. But Nietzsche would have loved it

Reading and Leeds festival will probably always be a post-GCSE rite of passage: a gleefully riotous taste of freedom before having to make actual life decisions. But the sibling events have been struggling for a sense of identity beyond this, particularly post-Covid. In 2025, the festival decided to theme days based on genre, which felt out of touch – but, this year, organisers have decided to tackle gen Z’s borderless approach head on. There are new stages, such as the chandelier-adorned Ballroom, and overall the lineup is wonderfully mazy.

On the festival’s second stage, you can catch everything from UK underground rap selector DJ EJ, warbly US rockers Geese, and raw, live-drummed jungle from 4am Kru. “I dedicate this one to all the bad bitches from small places. Let’s make a song about the bad bitches from Leeds,” Slovakian pop star Adéla gleefully giggles during her own set here, before launching into neon-streaked megahit Ain’t in LA. In a ping-ponging journey across styles, other highlights include London singer Dexter in the Newsagent’s blue-skied bedroom pop, Australian artist Mall Grab’s Game Boy grime beats and Bar Italia’s insouciant rock, which is significantly more fun and dance-y than their recent lukewarm album reviews might suggest.

The famous pueblos blancos in southern Spain’s Sierra de Grazalema natural park teem with wildlife amid a limestone wonderland of peaks

‘The wind is in from Africa / Last night I couldn’t sleep.” Joni Mitchell has ear-wormed her way into my head as my wife and I step out from Zahara de la Sierra into the mountains of Sierra de Grazalema natural park. The Africa bit probably comes from yesterday’s visit to Zahara’s castle museum. Here, high above the tiled terracotta mosaic of village rooftops, we learned how the recapture of this picturesque hill town was a turning point in the Reconquista – the military campaign of the 1400s that saw the Catholics retake southern Spain after seven centuries of Moorish control. As for sleep deprivation, I may just have overdone it on last night’s tapas.

Either way, Africa feels present as we tramp through the countryside of Andalucía, if only in the wildlife. The painted lady butterflies drifting over the flower-spangled verges, the turtle doves purring from the olive groves and the booted eagle drifting overhead: all are summer visitors recently blown in from the great continent to our south.

This rubbly cousin of hummus is flavourful and satisfying at any time of day, served warm, topped with a colourful salad and just made to eat with homemade flatbreads

Few things make me happier than a bowl of warm musabaha served with freshly baked bread straight from the pan. It’s a combination that shouts comfort, generosity and the simple pleasure of sharing food. Across the Levant, musabaha is a much-loved breakfast or brunch dish, though I’d happily eat it at any time of day. Served with the buttery, soft turmeric and nigella-seed flatbreads, it becomes a meal that is nourishing, intensely satisfying and perfect for gathering family and friends around the table.

Whether it’s homemade ice-cream or a skirt you can wear as a dress, your August favourites suggest you’re holding on to summer for as long as possible

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After five brutal heatwaves we’d expect you to be sick of summer by now, but judging by your August hitlist, many of you can’t get enough of it. An ice-cream maker, packing cubes and travel wardrobe heroes suggest you’re determined to embrace every last drop of sunshine before summer 2026 gives way to rain and the school bell.

You’ve been thinking ahead too, though. A plastic-free lunchbox and a foolproof coffee maker will help ease you back to work and school, and there’s always undereye concealer when all the coffee in the world can’t hide your post-holiday blues.

This no-frills pizza oven gets the basics right and is more than good enough for most people

• The best pizza ovens – tested
• Ooni Koda 2 review

The market for pizza ovens tends to be dominated by a handful of specialist brands, so it can feel like a gamble to buy from a lesser-known manufacturer or a retailer that offers a wider range of goods.

The ProCook outdoor pizza oven is no gamble, though. It’s every inch a capable, compact and versatile pizza oven, despite being just one product in an offering that includes pretty much everything from storage jars to squeegees.

Too cloying, too sweet or just right? Our tester works through the shop shelves to find the best slaw for your next barbecue, picnic or packed lunch

• The best supermarket veggie burgers

I find shop-bought coleslaw hard to stomach because it’s sharp, gloopy and often made with copious amounts of poor-quality mayonnaise and spirit vinegar. Pungent ingredients, such as cabbage and onion, are better eaten fresh, otherwise they break down and give off a disconcertingly sulphurous and sweaty aroma.

I judged each product in this test on appearance, aroma, texture and, above all, taste, and awarded extra points for value. I marked down for an off-puttingly strong raw onion aroma.

We’ve rounded up genuinely good offers on Filter-recommended and tested products across home, beauty, travel and more

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August bank holiday is summer’s Boxing Day: the fun’s over, you’ve got no money left, and it’s probably raining. (As someone whose birthday falls at the fuzzy end of August, I can confirm that it always, always rains.) And, just as on Boxing Day, the shops erupt in discount fever.

Retailers aren’t cutting prices to soothe our post-holiday blues. They’ve got a whole season’s stock to shift, and need to free up space for autumn/winter pieces and (sorry) Christmas. There’s also a solid chance that they need to encourage online spending, because when the sky turns grey the high-street looks as inviting as wet socks.

The first genuinely cool thing to have happened in Borough Market for ages

A Turkish-Cypriot meyhane, which translates roughly as “wine house”, has slotted in upstairs at the Globe Tavern in Borough Market, south London. Any cab driver worth his salt will bend your ear over the fact that this is “where Bridget Jones lives”, which might be a bit confusing if you’ve booked in to eat kuzu şiş (lamb neck kebabs) and to knock back a couple of rakis with a fermented turnip juice chaser.

That Bridget Jones trivia, by the way, is completely true: the upstairs space at the Globe was used as the heroine’s gaff in that famous film franchise. Now, however, when you climb the staircase up to Kismet, an old, slightly eerie and flickering TV by the restaurant entrance begins to tell a very different tale. This is chef Keiran Mustafa’s very personal tribute to his family’s homeland and the community they built in London. Mustafa was the opening head chef at BiBi, to my mind one of the best restaurants in London, and before that he worked at industry stalwarts Chez Bruce and the Harwood Arms.

An intriguing and refreshing hot-cold combo of eggy rice, butter, cold cucumber sauce and pickles

When cooking on a weeknight, it’s easy to forget that sometimes experimenting with temperature is as important as flavour. Hot things combined with very cold things are exceptionally refreshing in the summer, and also make the mundane more exciting and playful. This dish of hot rice, hot butter, cold cucumber sauce, hot egg and cold pickles might sound, well, a bit weird, but I promise it’s delicious, comforting and also cooling.

Good Time Cooking: Show-Stopping Menus for Easy Entertaining, by Rosie Mackean, is published by Pavilion Books at £26. To order a copy for £23.40, visit guardianbookshop.com

Celebrate the flavours of the coming season via this rewarding salad and rich dessert to share

As the days start to shorten and the temperature drops (finally!), the produce becomes richer, sweeter and more comforting, and the onset of autumn is a time of year that naturally brings people together around the table, which is something I’ve always loved about food. At the restaurant, we try to let the ingredients do the talking, and we work closely with growers and producers to make the most of whatever’s in season. Today’s recipes celebrate some of my favourite seasonal flavours: the salad is simple but deeply satisfying, balancing sweet roast squash with bitter greens and a punchy black olive tapenade. For dessert, meanwhile, chocolate mousse with poached fruit is my idea of autumn in a bowl, not least because quince has a beautiful, floral character that develops as it cooks, and pairs perfectly with dark chocolate and the nutty richness of browned butter. The creme fraiche adds freshness and balance, and brings everything together. Both dishes are rooted in the philosophy that guides my cooking: celebrate the season, respect great ingredients and create food that encourages people to slow down and enjoy each other’s company.

The indulgent, pleasantly mouth-puckering Floridian dessert in nine easy steps

Beautiful as the Florida Keys are, with average August temperatures topping 30C and with hurricane season looming, I think I’d rather enjoy their most famous culinary export in the calm of our own more temperate isles (well, usually, at least). Cool and creamy, with a refreshingly sharp, citrus tang, this is the perfect make-ahead dessert for any bank holiday festivities.

Prep 20 min
Cook 15 min
Chill 3 hr+
Serves 6

Assisting an ageing loved one can start with small tasks but may lead to full-time caregiving that requires more support

Helping an ageing parent or loved one often begins with easy-to-field requests: Pick up a prescription. Drive them to a doctor’s appointment. Grab groceries.

However, light tasks – just “helping out” here and there – may eventually snowball into the avalanche of full-time caregiving, a phenomenon becoming known as “caregiver creep”. Like “caregiver burnout”, it’s not a formal term, but there is growing awareness about this slow build among healthcare providers and experts.

After a burglary, my parents decided we needed extra security. Jerry was the answer – and this hungry, handsome hound helped us all in countless ways

Jerry came into our lives because a burglar had broken in. My mum had woken in the middle of the night to find an intruder in our kitchen. He scarpered, but the psychological damage was done. Two days later, my dad came home with the cutest little rescue puppy, with traces of beagle and labrador in him. He was two months old, had a black, brown and white coat, and big, bashful eyes. We called him Jerry because we had a cat called Tom. “I’m not sure how he’ll protect us,” I said. “He will,” my dad replied.

Jerry was very laid-back and Zen. He became part of the family straight away. He also became the therapy dog we hadn’t realised we needed. With two teenagers in the house (me and my older brother) and a hyperactive younger brother, someone was always in a strop and needing to let off steam by taking him out for a walk. Each time, Jerry obliged. I’d bore him with my latest teen-romance trauma; he was a very good listener. Sometimes, he’d have five walks a day, with both of my parents taking their turn. He certainly got his steps in.

Camille had bad experiences with men, so when she met Marcus they took things slowly. Now sex is a shared joy

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

Marcus will go down on me for as long as it takes. He has a gentle touch and is an amazing kisser

Mike, 37, a scientific editor, meets Caterina, 35, a teacher

What were you hoping for?
Good company, nice food and an interesting evening with someone new. I got everything I hoped for.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions considers the possibility of one wage for all

Last week’s replies: If all car tyres were filled with CO2, would this cut atmospheric carbon?

I once worked in an equal pay collective, and the principle has always seemed a good one to me. The person who worked on reception was just as important as the managing director – their actions could be make or break for the company. I remember also meeting someone, a member of the British Communist party, who had been impressed by a visit to East Germany (at that time a communist state). It stuck in my mind that she said the incentive for people to become, for example, surgeons, was that, though they wouldn’t necessarily receive higher pay, was simply that it was more satisfying work than, say, being a road sweeper. So is equal pay possible, desirable even, and would it create a better society overall? Stuart Macmillan, Fife

Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday.

Despite plans to scrap the lifetime Isa, experts still advise you open one now and not wait for the new first-time buyer account to launch

If you want to start saving towards your first home, don’t wait until a new Isa just for first-time buyers goes on sale. That is the advice from experts after more details emerged about a savings account the government plans to launch to help people get a foot on the property ladder.

The first-time buyer Isa is likely to replace the existing lifetime Isa in two years and is supposed to be simpler than the older account. However, it looks as if the financial benefits won’t be as attractive as those offered by the current product, so there’s no advantage in hanging around.

Plagued by bank impersonation scams, one Guardian Money reader got even by stringing the fraudsters along … for hours

• New payment set up? The bank scam where your ‘bank’ is the scammer

“A couple of Sundays ago at just past 11am my mobile rang. An automated message purported to be from Barclays Bank, querying a payment to Argos for more than £1,000. Not only had I not made a payment to Argos recently, nor do I bank with Barclays.

I am plagued with these kinds of calls. Usually, when possible, I make it clear to the scammers that I know their game. Usually, that call ends there and then.

Some young people are teaching in countries like South Korea as education funding is gutted and recent grads face a tough job market in their own countries

A year ago, Arianna Marie, 25, was struggling to control the students in her Florida elementary school classroom.

She was living with her parents to save on rent and quickly feeling her passion for teaching dry up, even though it was her first job since graduation.

Studies have found that anti-inflammatory drugs can improve your mood. But what does that mean for conditions such as depression and anxiety?

Inflammation is the immune system’s response to injury or infection. If you cut yourself and the area becomes red and swollen, that’s inflammation: immune cells are rushing to fight germs and repair tissue.

But inflammation can also occur in the body during illnesses, and a low level of inflammation can arise from obesity or ageing. “A marker of that inflammation tends to be elevated cytokines in people’s blood,” says Prof Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London and author of Immune Health: A Myth-Busting Guide. “They’re the molecules immune cells use to communicate with each other.”

More and more young people are engaging in sexual strangulation. But experts say there’s no safe pressure – and we have to start talking to teenagers about it

When touching someone’s throat, it can only take the pressure of a handshake to cause serious injury, unconsciousness or death. These injuries, which include brain damage and stroke, are often internal and invisible, showing up days or even months after the initial incident occurred. Experts say many who participate in sexual choking are not aware of the risks.

Choking or sexual strangulation is common among young people, says Prof Heather Douglas of the Melbourne Law School. In a 2024 survey of 4,702 Australians aged between 18 and 35, she and her research team found that 57% reported ever having experienced sexual strangulation; 51% reported ever having strangled a partner and 43.9% reported participating in both.

The public health emergencies in 2022 and 2024 saw the virus reported in 145 countries, but in the new cases children appear particularly affected

A fresh outbreak of mpox in Guinea Bissau – the country’s first – means the virus formerly known as monkey pox is back in the headlines. So what has changed?

Since 2022, there have been almost 190,000 lab-confirmed cases of mpox reported worldwide in 145 countries. Before then, outbreaks of mpox tended to be relatively small and in a handful of African countries, where the viral infection was known to be endemic.

Scientists found those who had used hormone replacement therapy were 10% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia

Hormone replacement therapy may reduce the risk of dementia, a study has found.

Scientists tracked more than 180,000 postmenopausal women in the UK in the largest study of its kind. They found that those who had used HRT were 10% less likely to develop any type of dementia and 16% less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the most common form, compared with those who had never used it.

Looking for an alternative to fast fashion, Eve Ogden Schaub decided to create a garment from homegrown flax

From crop tops to shorts and brightly patterned dresses, many of today’s clothes are the result of fast fashion. But one woman is taking a radical approach to challenging this trend by growing her own dress.

Eve Ogden Schaub is in the midst of a project to create a linen garment made from flax she is growing at home, documenting the process in videos shared on her Instagram account.

Due to its ubiquity in fast fashion, gen Z are pushing back against the synthetic material and using it as an insult

In 2015, Kate Moss called an easyJet pilot a “basic bitch” and a catchy new insult meaning obvious and uncool hit the mainstream. Had it happened in 2026, Moss might have used the word “polyester”, reportedly gen Z’s new favorite diss, levied at cheap-looking videos on TikTok, and sometimes at other users’ taste.

But its use as a figurative insult also echoes a literal backlash against polyester, now the most-produced synthetic fibre on the planet.

The ‘dad’ look favours straight lines and muted colours, while ‘dudes’ prefer baggier clothes with adornments

There is a competition going on at the US Open this week and it’s not the one involving rackets and balls. Instead, leading men who are not entered into this year’s draw are serving looks rather than aces.

Tennis legend Roger Federer took to the court on Tuesday in navy blue polo shirt and shorts, navy blue sweatbands and navy blue socks. The cuts were trim and the top was tucked in. The young Spanish player Carlos Alcaraz wore a Nike vest, untucked and the colour of Ribena, maroon shorts, and trainers that looked like a sweetshop counter.

Across six decades, the late country singer and pop culture icon turned self‑presentation into a flamboyant art form

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Dolly Parton may have had a record 25 US country No 1 singles, released 66 studio albums and earned six Golden Globe nominations, among many other achievements, but the Tennessee-born star also had an incredible number of fashion moments. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, she famously quipped when asked about her style. As we bid her farewell, six Guardian writers reflect on their favourite Dolly looks.

***

Pierogi are a religion in Poland, but I’d never been a believer. Could a recce in the charming Baltic city convert me?

I used to live in Poland. I worked in a fish-and-chip shop in the western city of Poznań, boning cod and peeling potatoes for £1.50 an hour. With the exception of that job, I enjoyed everything about my time in the country, not least the food. I liked the chicken broth with noodles, the slippery herring, the knuckles of pork the size of basketballs, the cold beetroot soup that beats gazpacho hands down.

One thing I was less delighted by were Polish dumplings – pierogi. It wasn’t that they weren’t nice – they were – it was more that they didn’t seem to warrant the extreme levels of affection and esteem Poles often bestow on the doughy parcels. By being ambivalent about them, I was going against a well-established grain.

Want to avoid the crowds in Florence and Siena? Escape to these islands, from lively Elba to tiny, car-free Giannutri

Scattered between the Tuscan coast and Corsica, the seven islands of the Tuscan archipelago offer a striking contrast to mainland Tuscany. All are part of a protected national park, but each has its own character – some are lively, others tiny and sparsely inhabited. Montecristo and Gorgona are only accessible via strictly limited guided tours, but here’s a brief guide to the highlights of the other five.

***

Tourism is only just taking hold in Vipava, but the locals are determined to do it right, by putting community first and preserving what makes it special

The drive to Pedrovo is vertiginous, and each hairpin bend has me sending a silent prayer that we won’t meet a tractor coming the other way. When we near it, we abandon the car and continue on foot to the hamlet, a scattering of red-roofed, whitewashed houses high on the steep karst hillside. The air is warm and dry, scented with wild sage.

We follow a hand-painted sign to Čilčevi Farmstead. Descending stone steps to a lush garden, we find a shaded table set with fresh cheeses produced at the farm’s own dairy. Below, the valley stretches in both directions, a wide flat plain hemmed in by steep mountain slopes, with the Vipava River winding lazily through fields and vineyards.

From secluded coves in Ireland to an evening passeggiata on Italy’s Aeolian islands, readers share their discoveries
• Tell us about your most memorable food and drink discoveries in Europe

Giant griffon vultures glided parallel with my bus as it reached the highest point of Cres, the least populated of the four main islands in the Kvarner Gulf at the very north of the Croatian Adriatic. Covered in scrubby heath, olive groves and lavender, with small towns and villages on its coastline, its wildness is its appeal. Some, like Cres town, are unobtrusively set up for holidaymakers; in others local people just quietly get on with the life they’ve lived since the Venetians ruled here. All are lapped by the turquoise, crystal seas Croatia is known for.
Rhiannon

The solution to today’s underwater conundrums

Earlier today I set you the following puzzles. Here they are again with the solutions.

A fish is swimming in a tank that is two metres high, one metre across and one metre deep. The image below shows one path it swam.

Forget writing that novel: the most satisfying tasks are often the smallest. From batch cooking and bird feeding, to filling a kettle with meticulous precision, our readers reveal their favourites

Sometimes, it’s the smallest accomplishments that bring the biggest feelings of joy. You don’t need to run a marathon or write a novel to get a sense of achievement; something as simple as reorganising your cutlery drawer or repairing a garden fence can prove surprisingly satisfying. Here, readers share the modest achievements that have brought them great pleasure.

I really enjoy cooking and have a large collection of spices. Recently, I bought a few dozen glass bottles and organised my herbs and spices in a drawer, with labels on the lids and sides. Every time I cook, I feel pleasure from being able to instantly put my hand on the requisite spice without fumbling through piles of little boxes, and having to open and smell them to be sure which is which. Anna Smith, musician, Utrecht, the Netherlands

As the sex doll industry grows and AI changes the products available, what does it mean to engage in any kind of relationship with a woman-shaped thing?

Two weeks ago, two distressed citizens stumbled across what they assumed was the mangled corpse of a woman, stuffed into a suitcase in a small town about three hours south of Sydney. They called the local police, who in turn issued a statement that a body in a suitcase had been found. The wider public waited sombrely for Australia’s tally of dead women to tick up by one.

But instead, a day later, after forensic analysis, it was determined that the woman in question wasn’t a woman at all. The “body” was that of a sex doll, marked with fake bruises, left to rot on a lonely dirt road. In Australia, as in the UK and some other European countries, it is not illegal to own a sex doll unless it resembles a child. Given the doll’s seemingly mature presentation, police investigations were called off.

I need to buy a smart television big enough to read ransom notes – and I’m taking no prisoners

Fourteen years ago, I received a text from my eldest son claiming he’d just found the TV face down on the sitting room floor, destroyed. I didn’t entirely buy his theory about the dogs being responsible – I discovered a football lying suspiciously near the crime scene – but it was a problem I needed to solve before my wife returned from a business trip.

That was the last time I bought a new television. It still works, but it’s small by today’s standards, to the extent that it’s impossible to read the contents of a ransom note held by a detective in a drama. As TVs have expanded, the ransom notes have got smaller; I often have to pause the programme, get up and put my nose to the screen.

As Russia hits another ammunition warehouse, killing at least 38, locals put blame on poorly placed depots

It is a day and a half since a Russian jet-powered drone smashed into an ammunition dump in Myla, a village 15 miles outside central Kyiv. Volodymyr, 61, a security guard, leads visitors from his family’s badly damaged home, its roof blown off, back windows shattered, through the garden towards the impact site 300 metres away.

The garden, like so many in Ukraine’s villages and suburbs, is a sizeable allotment. But today the greenhouse is shattered, a vegetable patch is blackened and crisp underfoot. Several metres of grapevine have been destroyed. Even so, Volodymyr finds two surviving bunches to hand to the Guardian.

Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting the decision – and they’re only getting more passionate

Twenty years ago, Pluto got demoted. After a vote by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in August 2006, Pluto was relegated from major planet to dwarf planet status. Our solar system dropped from nine planets to eight. At the time, many scientists were unhappy with the decision. Two decades on, the debate is, if anything, even more polarised.

“The definition of a planet they created, you can’t use it at all,” says Philip Metzger, the director of the Stephen W Hawking Centre for Microgravity Research and Education at the University of Central Florida. “It makes the definition of a planet completely non-useful in science.”

Relatives of those missing have been given PowerPoint slideshows of recovered bodies in effort to speed up identification of the dead

The bodies continue to wash up. But the morgues have already run out of room.

Since the deadly floods coursed through the Himalayan valleys of Nepal and Tibet, the numbers of people killed have continued to rise. The bodies have surfaced in their hundreds and continue to be pulled from the thick, tar-like mud that engulfed everything after the flood waters receded. By Sunday, the death toll stood at 804 in Nepal and Tibet.

Floods and mudslides have swept away houses and roads with many hundreds missing

More than 1,400 people are still missing and 392 have been confirmed dead after the flash floods and landslides on the Nepal-Tibet border.hit the Himalayan border areas of ⁠Nepal and in ​Tibet in China. An avalanche of ice and rock triggered massive flash floods causing widespread damage to villages and infrastructure.

Officials said hundreds of travellers from countries including India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Malaysia, were reported missing.

We would like to hear about the TV shows that you simply can’t stomach anymore and why

From Euphoria to The Great British Bake Off Guardian writers have compiled the TV shows that are now part of their viewing history they feel tainted by. Now we want to hear from you.

Which TV shows that once thrilled have now turned sour for you?

We would like to hear from frontline or key workers about how the heat has affected them in the workplace this year

With record high temperatures across the UK this summer we want to hear from those whose work meant they couldn’t escape the extreme heat.

August 13 marked the hottest day of the year so far with temperatures reaching 38C in London and 37C recorded in other parts of the country; this marks the first year temperatures of 37C and above have been recorded on three separate days in the UK. Climate scientists are saying the incoming Super El Niño is likely to deliver more record breaking hot weather next year.

We want to hear from young people who have chosen to start their own businesses rather than follow a traditional career path

A growing number of Gen Z are starting their own businesses, with the number of Start Up Loans taken out by young founders rising by 132% over the past five years, according to analysis by the British Business Bank. Meanwhile, Hiscox analysis of Companies House data found nearly 400,000 Gen Z directors are now running UK-registered businesses.

We’d like to hear from people aged between 18 and 29 who have started a business about what inspired you to do it and how you got started. How is your business going? What have been the biggest challenges and rewards? Do you see yourself continuing to run your own business in the future?

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