The Handmaid’s Tale author is joined by Emily Wilson, Ocean Vuong and Booker-shortlisted writer Rebecca Perry in celebrating the newly announced Nobel laureate

• Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026

• Where to start with: Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s work has long been admired among poets of many countries. For new readers, I would recommend The Beauty of the Husband – direct and visceral, funny and angry and sad – or Men in the Off Hours. Delights await!

The combination of Iranian, Russian and Chinese aggression is deeply worrying: just how much more concerned about security should the country be?

The first time the window-rattling roar of a B-1 bomber woke me up this summer, I thought for one crazed second we were under attack. By the second time, I’d learned to recognise the sound of US planes taking off from their base at RAF Fairford for what it was: a reminder that although Britain wants no part in this war with Iran, we cannot quite escape the consequences.

We’ll feel them at the petrol pump, or in the supermarket this autumn, or in this winter’s heating bills. But living under the flight path adds an extra edge to it. The skies finally fell silent last week, but only because the bombers have been hastily summoned home after an alleged terrorist plot to attack Fairford, in which (according to the prime minister) there are “strong indications that Iran played a part”. If Fairford is now a target of war, did that threat disappear when the Americans did? Nobody knows.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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

Oversized coats, relaxed-fit trousers and secondhand jumpers that will last for years to come … here’s how to build an effortlessly cool autumn wardrobe on a budget

• The best men’s shirts for every occasion

It’s time to pack away your weekly rotation of T-shirts and shorts and start thinking about layers.

As always, there’s no shortage of inspiration for your autumn look. The menswear shows displayed their usual styling tricks: at Prada, the exaggerated shirt cuff became this season’s unlikely focal point. Then, there are the It boys, old and new, who are always good for a sartorial steer: comedian and actor Jack Innanen is the latest addition to the roster, though Brad Pitt’s 90s looks are just as current. And that’s all before you get to the colour palette: this year, bright colours can be thrown in among the traditional rich, earthy shades.

The director talks about what she learnt from her mother, working with a rookie Tim Burton, and 20 years of her cult classic Marie Antoinette

Hello, I’m Cherry, I’m 14 and an aspiring film-maker. I love how your films capture what it feels like to be a young girl growing up. We hear so much about the famous men in your family, but how have the successful women in your family inspired and influenced you? Your films capture the experience of what it is to be a young girl in a way words often can’t. CherryEmma
That’s nice to hear, thank you. I feel like I got a lot from my mom about being true to yourself, following what you’re interested in and seeing the beauty in your surroundings. My mom always noticed odd details in life, so a lot of my films are made up of those kinds of things.

Your films beautifully capture the isolation of hotel rooms – spaces completely detached from a character’s past or future. If you were forced into that stillness and could choose to preserve only one cherished memory while erasing another for ever, what would they be? Malpractice1
It’s hard to pick a memory, but recently we had a party in Versailles for the anniversary of Marie Antoinette and New Order played. When they started playing Ceremony [from the soundtrack] and the lights went on, I just know that in the future when I have to remember a happy memory, that’s going to be it. Even painful memories are part of making you who you are, and you learn from them, so I can’t think of anything I would erase.

Talks between Sainsbury’s and Morrisons have set industry tongues wagging, with analysts saying the market is ripe for change

• Tesco lifts profit forecast and says shoppers are resilient

They may be two of the most recognisable brands in Britain, with a combined 188 years serving shoppers, but industry watchers agree that either Asda or Morrisons – or both – could disappear within a decade.

This week, it emerged that Sainsbury’s and Morrisons – the UK’s second- and sixth-largest supermarket chains – had held merger talks between last November and February, before the larger player decided to walk away.

Finance expert launches Small Ideas Initiative to gather ‘practical, low-cost’ ideas to put before cross-party panel

Every day, people run into what the finance expert Martin Lewis calls “the life-potholes of unintended consequences” – clunky systems and poorly conceived rules that make life harder than it should be. His latest project, the Small Ideas Initiative, will attempt to address that, with a cross-party panel of politicians and policymakers crowdsourcing ideas for everyday fixes to take to government.

The ideas could cover anything from health and schools to policing, tech and money. Lewis is encouraging people to submit ideas for “practical, low-cost, non-controversial ways to improve the UK” before 12 November.

Inquest hears details of how three women spent their final days but why they ended their lives may never be known

Jane Adetoro and her younger sisters, Christina and Rebecca Walters, were “the closest sisters and the best friends”, according to their family. Devoted to their father, Joseph, whom they messaged every day, the adult siblings lived quiet lives in the flat they shared in west London and would do everything together.

When they died in May this year, it was no different. Early in the morning of 13 May, the sisters’ bodies were recovered from the sea in Brighton, hours after a taxi had dropped the three women at the beachfront.

‘Technical errors’ are embarrassing for Thames Valley police but unlikely to affect outcome of investigation

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has won his legal challenge against Thames Valley police over search warrants used to raid his home after they arrested him.

The former prince brought a judicial review of the legality of the force’s actions and those of the central criminal court, which granted the warrants.

Men aged 32 and 36 detained on suspicion of trespass, causing criminal damage and entering a prohibited place

Two Latvian men were arrested in the early hours of Thursday after they were discovered inside the perimeter of RAF Molesworth, a Cambridgeshire base used by the US military and Nato for intelligence operations.

The men, 32 and 36, were picked up at 2am inside the base, in an investigation that began four hours earlier when military police discovered an abandoned vehicle outside the facility.

Contest seen as test of Andy Burnham’s ability to unite Labour voters amid threat from Green party’s Zack Polanski

Polls have closed in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, a contest seen as a test of whether Andy Burnham can unite Labour’s voters or whether Zack Polanski can peel off support from the party’s progressive flank.

Labour is seeking to retain Keir Starmer’s former north London seat, where he won a majority of more than 11,000 votes in the 2024 general election.

Exclusive: Letter to government says changes will unfairly remove legal protections for children in England

• Letter: Legal rights must be retained for children with Send

Campaigners are calling on Andy Burnham to abandon the core elements of the government’s overhaul of special educational needs provision in England, arguing they unfairly remove children’s legal protections.

A group of children, parents and experts, led by the broadcaster Chris Packham, have written a letter calling for the prime minister to gut the plans laid out under his predecessor Keir Starmer.

Embassies post links to hastily produced online film echoing style of real Guardian documentary about mass killings of Gaza civilians

The Israeli government is promoting an online film project that mimics the style of NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s mass killings of civilians in Gaza, in an attempt to counter the real film’s findings.

The real documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and produced by the Guardian, is in cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries.

Nidal Hasan, army psychiatrist who killed 13 people, will be executed by firing squad on 3 December

Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defense department official later confirmed the execution will be livestreamed.

In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the Pentagon secretary said the firing squad would carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1pm on Thursday, 3 December. This would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.

Scott Chilton, who led Hampshire and the Isle of Wight police, barred from becoming a police officer again

A former chief constable showed a sense of entitlement, dishonesty and lack of integrity by having sexual relationships with two subordinate officers, including engaging in sexual activity while on call to lead major incidents, a misconduct hearing has ruled.

The panel found that the behaviour of Scott Chilton, 53, who retired as chief constable of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight before the hearing, amounted to gross misconduct.

Free-roaming Aldabra population far exceeds human population of Seychelles after decades-long recovery programme

A survey of the world’s largest free-roaming giant tortoise population has discovered that the once endangered species is thriving.

A population of Aldabra giant tortoises lives on an island in Seychelles called Aldabra Atoll.

People tell of lives changed beyond recognition after the 7 October attacks by Hamas three years ago and the subsequent Israeli offensive

Ahmed Ishtaiwi has six chairs. They are cheap and plastic and battered, but they are among the 43-year-old driver and mechanic’s most valuable possessions.

Andy Burnham is pressing ahead with his Brexit U-turn, using a visit to Germany to make a ‘commitment to deeper EU co-operation’. The prime minister has promised closer ties on issues such as security, youth mobility and immigration. The move has been welcomed by senior European officials, including the French finance minister, who invited the UK ‘to come all the way back’ to the EU. With public polling now shifting against Brexit, is the door open for the UK to decide if it wants to rejoin? Lucy Hough speaks to Europe correspondent Jon Henley

Consulate targeted in sanctions spat has unusual diplomatic status that clashes with Israel’s ambitions to fully annex the city

Israel’s attempt to close the British consulate general in Jerusalem was primarily designed to deter London from imposing sanctions on settlements in occupied Palestine. But it also served the current government’s ambitions to fully annex Jerusalem as a national capital, diplomatic and legal experts said.

The UK mission to the city has an unusual diplomatic status, which dates back to before the founding of the state of Israel, rooted in a vision of Jerusalem as a neutral enclave under international control.

Recent death of 87-year-old woman likely to focus attention on crisis in run-up to election at end of November

• Europe live – latest updates

Even before María del Carmen Abascal died on Wednesday night, a mere fortnight after her eviction from the Madrid flat where she had lived for most of her life, the frail 87-year-old woman had become the enduring face of Spain’s housing crisis.

Her plight – and the wider issue it embodied – had led to street demonstrations, the creation of a protest camp in the middle of the Spanish capital, and spurred the socialist-led government to propose emergency measures to facilitate and protect access to housing. When rightwing and far-right parties voted down those measures in congress last week, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, responded by announcing a snap general election for the end of November.

The incident is the latest to raise questions about the growing reliance on digital maps for wilderness navigation

The route up the Widowmaker Arete, a 1,700-foot wall in British Columbia, is deceptively described as “mostly easy slab climbing”, interspersed with “short steep sections that can include finger cracks, blocky face climbing”. It requires careful planning, and the right equipment.

When 16-year-old Bryce Vincent Gowryluk found himself facing its sheer headwall last week, he had neither. He did, however, ask the AI chatbot Claude for directions.

John Cena and Jessica Biel collect paychecks in a soulless and synthetic slab of corporate product that hints at what we can expect from the Paramount-Warner merger

After a windy road, this week it finally happened. The day that Hollywood, and many of those who are invested in it, had been dreading, the grimly inevitable disappearance of Warner Bros as it was consumed by what is now known as Paramount. The two once-classic studios will become one – Skydance, the David Ellison-owned company that has infinitely more money than common sense or base-level creativity.

The week has seen many, including the Guardian, speculate about what we may be able to expect, what kind of films the billion-dollar behemoth might now be releasing. Warners after all has created classics such as Casablanca, The Exorcist and 2001: A Space Odyssey while Paramount has been behind The Godfather, Chinatown and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Just imagine what the combined might of these two prestigious, industry-defining studios could achieve with the promise of 30-plus theatrical releases a year, huge amounts of money and considerable manpower at play.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Marking a century since the Dutch artist stowed away to New York, this vast retrospective gloriously showcases the abstract expressionist’s fierce boundary-pushing

Willem de Kooning was the last great artist who really knew how to draw. More precisely, if less provocatively, he was the last truly transformative painter to have been schooled in the academic tradition that produces what is still recognised, by most people, as “good drawing”. Accurate in the sense of a photograph but, like a filter on your cameraphone, also subtly tidying up the world to meet the ideals of classical proportion. “Draw what you see and not what you think,” the young De Kooning was told. Raw personal emotion had no place – a far cry from what this master of abstract expressionism was to become.

The intense labour required to build a connection between eye, brain and hand so quick as to be instinctive is illustrated by the charcoal still life Dish With Jugs. Made when De Kooning was in his mid-teens, and so minutely rendered that you might mistake it for a sepia photograph, the catalogue estimates that it took 600 hours at the Rotterdam academy to complete. The aim of this exercise was not to produce a single picture so much as to ingrain a way of seeing and reconstructing the world to the point that it becomes inescapable.

After his mother died, Otto became convinced he’d been wronged by the forensic investigators – and that one of them was a fraud. The truth was even stranger

On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm.

Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside her. Otto, who sometimes goes by the name Rainer, and whose last name is only known as “Z” because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, was a doctor who had cared for his mother for years, ever since she had suffered a stroke and moved in with him. He described the course of that night to me. He woke to the sound of her short breath and tried to sit her upright. Her eyes were shut, and her lips pursed. She stopped breathing. Otto reached for his phone to call for help, but then Doria opened her eyes and stared into his. She smiled, drew one last deep breath, shut her eyes again, and lay still.

The UK state is dumping its responsibilities on our doorsteps, while green-lighting policies that lead us closer to crisis

Would you mind fixing the NHS? And while you’re at it, could you please build an anti-missile system in your garden? Then regulate the banks, replace the water mains, tax the very rich and use the proceeds to rebuild our schools. Well, come on people: what are you waiting for?

I exaggerate, but this isn’t very far from the approach taken by the government’s Prepare campaign. Crucial functions, way beyond the scope of individual action, are dumped on our doorsteps while those in power fail to act. As a result, our national resilience is arguably lower than at any time since the second world war. At the Labour conference last week, Andy Burnham promised “a Britain where people feel the country has got their back again”. To make good on that pledge, he will have to change almost everything.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

It turns out all that time spent peeling and paring was entirely wasted. Now I’m gobbling them like apples and putting the extra fibre to good use

Every day’s a school day, honestly. How on earth did I get to just short of my 60th birthday before finding out that you could eat the skin of kiwifruit? Astounding, just astounding. What a revelation. It’s odd, because of all fruit skins, it’s probably the one that looks least appetising. Nice clean oranges and bananas almost beg to be troughed, skins and all, yet we know this is a no-no. But it turns out that all of this small, hairy, boringly coloured object can go down the hatch. Admittedly, I have been slicing the ends off first, but I might start eating them, too.

The first time is the hardest. You need to set aside years of prejudice against that hairy skin that you’ve been so painstakingly removing. Mind over matter. Initially, I sliced my kiwis longways and then each half into four. Now, I’m just eating them like apples. Sometimes three bites, usually two, occasionally just the one. I promise you, a lifetime’s fear of the fur evaporates in an instant. At least, for me it did. I have to report that when I talked my mum into giving it a try, she gagged alarmingly and swore at me with some venom as she fought to expel bits of skin from her mouth. Perhaps it’s not for everyone, after all.

Trump seems to invent ugly new variations on his press-bashing theme almost every day

When you hate the mainstream press as much as Donald Trump does, nothing gets in the way of the punishment fantasy.

Not court rulings. Not public opinion. Not even the dreadful consequence of less media coverage.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

A new global biodiversity report strikes an encouraging note. But we cannot rest on our laurels – and resilience is key

The new Living Planet Report is out. Published every two years, it assesses the health of the natural world and, historically, it’s made for gloomy reading.

Take 2024’s report, which showed global wildlife populations had plummeted by 73% in 50 years and that ecosystems were being pushed toward collapse.

A bold south London initiative to give land to community groups rather than private developers could transform the system

Lewisham council, in southeast London, is developing ambitious plans to transfer public land to community groups in an attempt to get new social housing built in the borough. According to papers tabled at Wednesday’s council cabinet meeting, the local authority is devising a new housing strategy, which includes giving packages of public land worth up to £2m each to community-led organisations such as housing co-operatives, on the condition that they build social housing.

The Green-controlled council is further considering placing any land it gives away through the programme into community land trusts, legal instruments that lock in permanent affordability. They may also provide low-interest loans to help developments get started, and pre-approve planning permission to speed up construction. It is hoped that the proposals will take effect within a year. Together, they form the most radical suite of solutions to the housing crisis any local authority is currently putting forward. If adopted elsewhere, the approach could transform the construction of social housing not just in Lewisham, but across the entire country.

Phineas Harper is a writer and curator

This long-awaited fight is happening exactly as intended: at the sweet spot where commercial potential meets a genuine absence of jeopardy

The 1912 Olympic marathon was held in a brutal Scandinavian heatwave, and before long Shizo Kanakuri of Japan was flagging. His journey to Stockholm had been debilitating; he had barely trained and struggled to sleep. At around the 16-mile mark he finally gave in. Exhausted and disoriented, he stumbled off the road and into a garden party, where – according to his bemused hosts – he sat and drank orange juice for an hour.

The next day, deeply ashamed at his failure to complete the race, he quietly took a boat back to Japan. In Sweden the mystery of the “disappearing runner” took on almost mythical proportions. Kanakuri’s name was on the country’s missing persons list for more than 50 years.

There was progress after #MeToo, but not enough. Certainly not enough to shift the assumptions that still protect men and denigrate victims

If the past is another country, and there is nothing so poignant as the innocence of recent history, then there is a third category of engagement with the era directly preceding our own, encapsulated by the line “that didn’t age well”.

I found myself thinking about this in relation to news of the seven male students accused of gang-raping a 20-year-old woman two years ago in their fraternity house at Cornell University, and now facing a civil suit brought by their alleged victim. Apparent failures by Cornell and the local district attorney to act appropriately at the time have triggered another round of commentary about the “death of #MeToo”, not least with the looming anniversary on 15 October, the date in 2017 when the hashtag first went viral. But the period I find myself thinking about predates even that, when it seemed as if these questions of consent had been largely resolved.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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

More research into the troubling rise in early onset cancers is needed. But we already know that food is among the culprits

The latest findings about the rise in cancers in people under 50, from the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF), are extremely concerning. While a cancer diagnosis is bad news at any time, it is a particular blow for those in younger age groups where most people are in good health. Overlapping trends observed in England, the Netherlands and the US include a troubling rise in the incidence of colorectal (or bowel) cancer. Other diseases that have increased in England include uterine and kidney cancers.

These diseases are still rare in young people: 10 times more adults in their 50s, 60s and 70s are diagnosed than those in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Earlier detection is thought to be one factor behind the rise in younger patients. Diagnosing more cancers sooner is an explicit policy goal in England, where late diagnosis and lower uptake of screening are two reasons for mortality rates that are higher than elsewhere in Europe.

The escalating violence reflects deep domestic rifts – but is fuelled by broader geopolitical power games

When the Nobel peace laureate is announced on Friday, the committee will be hoping that its choice ages better than 2019’s. Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, won the prize for ending the 20-year border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea – signing a peace agreement with President Isaias Afwerki. A year later, their new relationship facilitated a war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) that killed as many as 600,000 people, displaced millions more, led to atrocities by both sides, and pushed Tigrayans into famine.

Both sides bear responsibility for failing to properly implement the deal that ended that conflict in 2022, and the African Union and US did little to ensure that a piece of paper became a durable settlement. Now violence has resurged in northern Ethiopia, and old foes are forming bizarre new pacts. Last month, seven Ethiopian regional groups announced an “Alliance for Survival” to remove the federal government. Mr Abiy’s coalition is held together by his patronage, but so far may be faring better than his rivals, united solely by shared loathing of him and riven by deep disputes. The TPLF, which controls Tigray, has previously battled the Fano militia of Amhara, and their territorial dispute endures. Ethiopia accuses Eritrea – previously accused of atrocities against Tigrayan civilians – of backing the rebel alliance. Despite Asmara’s denials, there are multiple reports of Eritrean troops in Tigray.

Campaigners and Send parents including Chris Packham, Carrie Grant and Sally Phillips urge ministers to work with families and organisations to preserve individual provision and improve accountability in the system

The legal rights of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) are still under threat. The government’s proposed Send and education otherwise than at school (Eotas) reforms would significantly reduce existing legal rights to enforceable education, health and care plans (EHCPs), parental choice of educational settings and independent routes of appeal.

We support the government’s ambitions for a more inclusive education system. Better teacher training, earlier identification of need, greater specialist expertise and a properly staffed workforce are all necessary. But none of these initiatives require children and families to surrender the legal protections they currently have.

As we approach the centenary of equal franchise in 2028, it is important to build on the rights that were won by the suffragettes, writes Helen Pankhurst

There was a proud Pankhurst in the audience in Leicester as Sylvia: A Musical Revolution began its national tour (Suffragette cities: blazing Sylvia Pankhurst musical hits the road – in pictures, 3 October). A blazing show indeed – and one that, 98 years after women gained the vote on equal terms with men, asks how much remains to be done, how to do it and how women can bridge their differences to advance their common cause.

As Sylvia Pankhurst’s granddaughter and Emmeline Pankhurst’s great-granddaughter, I honour both women. Their political paths diverged. I seek to reconcile their legacies through Centenary Action, the cross-party coalition that I lead, in a shared cause: dismantling the barriers to women’s participation, selection and retention in politics.

Gareth Jones and Richard Hooper draw on their experience as educators to offer alternatives to the Ofsted system that is not fit for purpose

The news that Ofsted inspections are to be overhauled again indicates that a fundamental rethink is required, rather than tinkering again with the grading system (England school inspections to be overhauled again after barrage of complaints, 2 October). As an educator with 30 years’ experience in international schools (21 years as head of two schools), I would suggest that when further changes are made, the first step should be to stop calling them “inspections”. The word implies an unfeeling, top-down procedure. While British curriculum international schools tend to use an Ofsted-style procedure, American international and international baccalaureate schools tend to use “evaluation” or “accreditation” procedures.

In these, the school evaluates its own performance against a set of standards. The people who work in the school, including students, plus parents and board members, spend a year discussing the school’s achievements and identifying areas for improvement. They submit their report to the agency, which then puts together a team who will visit the school. The team is made up of practising educators from other international schools. So the school is evaluated by fellow professionals, which is much less threatening than a team of inspectors. Their job is to decide whether the school has accurately evaluated its own performance.

Pavan Dhaliwal responds to an article on the early release of prisoners. Plus a letter from a prison officer who works in a men’s open prison

Regarding your article (Prisoners thank Andy Burnham as they leave jail in first wave of early releases, 1 October), Michael Bogle’s story should make us ask a bigger question than whether prisoners are being released too soon.

Bogle, 38, has 100 convictions and has been jailed five times. He told the Guardian that he turned to shoplifting after becoming homeless, in order to eat. On leaving prison, he said that there was a risk he would shoplift again.

• Cadillac driver rode between Malaysia and Singapore

• Four-day trip helped him acclimatise for Singapore GP

Valtteri Bottas has revealed the details of an incident-packed 418km bike ride including encounters with snakes, being chased by dogs and the eerie atmosphere of riding through the jungle at night as the Cadillac driver cycled between Malaysia and Singapore this week.

The 37-year-old is a keen cyclist and after a suggestion from his girlfriend, the Australian Olympic cyclist Tiffany Cromwell, he decided to take on the challenge of riding from the last round in Sepang near Kuala Lumpur to this weekend’s grand prix on the street circuit in Singapore, under his own steam.

Manchester City’s chair is key to the project of making Abu Dhabi a secure world power but his next move may be the sale of the club

No one better understands the precarious tightrope Abu Dhabi walks when it tries to balance its relationships with western Europe while weighing the complex geopolitics of the Gulf region than Manchester City’s chair, Khaldoon al-Mubarak. He was eight when his father, ambassador Khalifa Ahmed Abdel Aziz al-Mubarak, left the family’s Paris apartment for work on 9 February 1984, and was assassinated on the street by a Palestinian terrorist.

And no one outside the emirate’s royal family could be more wrapped up in the project of making and maintaining Abu Dhabi as a significant and secure world power and the dominant member of the United Arab Emirates, a nation state still only 55 years old. His paternal grandfather, Ahmad bin Abdul Aziz al-Mubarak, was chair of Abu Dhabi’s Sharia judicial department and senior adviser to Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the founding president of the UAE. As such, Ahmad bin Abdul Aziz was the James Madison of the UAE (the founding father, not the Spurs player) in that he crafted the Islamic legal framework of the new nation in the 1970s.

Rayo Vallecano’s fascinating forward on his unique club, his musical passions and the goalscoring form that puts him among Europe’e elite

An 11-year-old, second-hand VW Beetle with more than 300,000km on the clock pulls over on Clown Fofó Street in the heart of Vallecas. The music goes off, the Smiths silenced and out gets Sergio Camello: movie aficionado with 156 films reviewed, part-time photographer, sometime drummer, Olympic gold medallist and the second-top goalscorer in Europe’s top five leagues. Engulfed in graffiti, stickers covering the glass between metal bars in red, a single step up from the street, the small door into Rayo Vallecano’s ground is locked, but in 64 hours it will open for the first time this season. “It’s my home, it’s Vallecas,” Camello says.

Forced to abandon their place, on Saturday at 2pm the tenants return. With the Madrid council declaring Estadio de Vallecas unsafe, unfit for purpose, Rayo’s home matches have instead been played in Leganés, out of the city to the south and boycotted by fans. Walking the neighbourhood that is proud of its social conscience, its community and its team, Camello can’t wait to be back again. And not just for the football; maybe not even for the football. “It’s the pre-game, the post-game, the people,” he says, passing the bar where they’ll be waiting for him after, same as always.

• Teenager almost certain to leave despite fresh offer

• Compensation for move to European rival would be low

Manchester United have made JJ Gabriel an official scholarship contract offer, but remain at risk of losing the teenage forward for as little as £350,000.

The prodigy, who turned 16 this week, stunned the club when he asked for his registration to be cancelled last month, setting in motion a scramble among Europe’s elite clubs for his signature.

• Manchester United midfielder left out of initial squad

• First leg of World Cup playoff is on Friday in Crete

Sarina Wiegman heaped praise on Ella Toone for her positive reaction to being left out of England’s initial squad for their Women’s World Cup playoff against Greece, after recalling the Manchester United midfielder for Friday’s first leg in Heraklion, Crete.

An injury sustained by Lucy Bronze, described by Wiegman as “really small”, prompted the England right-back to return to Chelsea and Wiegman called up Toone, who travelled to Greece from Spain, where she had organised a training routine during the international window.

• Confederation president clarifies his intentions to staff

• Canadian was eyed as potential rival to Gianni Infantino

Victor Montagliani has told Concacaf staff he intends to stand for re-election as the confederation’s presidentnext year, which will rule him out of going up against Gianni Infantino for the top job at Fifa.

The Canadian businessman is understood to have relayed the message to most of the 41 members of Concacaf, the North and Central American and Caribbean confederation.

Record try-glut in round one suggested all-out attack is en vogue, but maybe you can defend well and still concede tries in the modern game?

After one weekend of the Prem season the feeling was we had crossed the Rubicon. A remarkable 52 tries, eclipsing the previous record for round one despite the fact that fewer matches were played added further weight to the argument – a criticism and a compliment – that the English club game is creeping closer towards a form of basketball.

Then came round two and 41 tries. A sizeable number, certainly compared with seasons of yesteryear, but equally giving a sense that defences had their day in some cases. Sale’s gritty victory over Saracens was a dogfight, Leicester’s win over Newcastle wasn’t pretty and while Bristol ran in six tries against Northampton, their success owed everything to defensive steel.

Teams have always symbolized division within America. And the Fever have come to prominence during a time of dark political intensity

It’s over for now, but no professional sports team spent more time receiving and drawing attention to itself than did the Indiana Fever this season. The Fever has broken, the team eliminated by the defending champion Las Vegas Aces for the second straight season, but Indiana succeeded in being the WNBA’s canary in the coal mine, embodying both the obvious and unintended consequences of rapid growth, while also allowing themselves to be a season-long distraction: part-time professional basketball team, part-time right-wing culture war centerpiece. Less than a decade ago, Atlanta and Minneapolis were praised for their unified political stances. Today, Trumpism has replaced social justice as the defining characteristic of the league – and as the curtain closed on the 2026 WNBA regular season, Indiana stood at its epicenter.

The Fever were the most polarizing team in professional sports, known less for their basketball than their culpability in pulling the league from its old cultural identity as a Black/queer league into its current climate of political divisiveness – a calculated and dangerous path to popularity. This season, there was the basketball of the WNBA, and then there was the Indiana Fever, the league’s Maga-friendly option.

This article originally appeared on Howard Bryant’s Substack. You can subscribe here.

Some of the biggest names in European football will bid for a franchise in ESL-style league, now due to launch in 2028

The launch of NBA Europe will be delayed 12 months until 2028, with a pre-qualifying competition planned for next year to find four temporary members to join the 16-team league’s inaugural season alongside 12 permanent franchises.

The NBA is planning to invest about $10bn (£7.6bn) over 10 years in what sources have described as the sporting world’s biggest-ever startup competition. It is understood to have received multiple offers for the 12 franchises that exceed their targets, with prices expected to range from $500m to more than $1bn for the London franchise.

Schools blockaded again across country as teenagers and teachers demand more investment and ‘concrete measures’ to improve conditions

High school students have again blockaded schools and marched through cities across France, promising to continue their campaign against the poor state of the national education system in the tenth day of protests that have left hundreds injured.

Large crowds took to the streets on Thursday for mainly peaceful demonstrations in cities including Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Lyon, Toulon and Marseille, while in Paris a large procession marched through the city centre to the Place de la Bastille.

Captain Dan Keeler says there were ‘no lost lives on board’ and adds that deployment was ‘first experience with combat’ for most sailors

• Thousands turn out to welcome weary USS Lincoln sailors

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Donald Trump has urged James Talarico, the Democratic nominee in the US Senate race in Texas, to debate Ken Paxton – Republican attorney general that the president has endorsed in the election.

On Truth Social, Trump described Paxton as “ready, willing, and able” to take on Talarico – the 37-year-old state representative who has been leading in several polls.

In Georgia, Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent will face off against Mike Collins – a congressman and the Trump-backed Republican nominee at 7pm ET.

At the same time in Michigan, progressive insurgent Abdul El-Sayed, will debate Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee also endorsed by the president.

Finally, it’s the second debate in Maine in as many days. Susan Collins, the five-term Republican incumbent will spar (again) with the Democratic nominee, Troy Jackson, at 8pm ET.

Intense flash of radio waves is more than 10bn years old and has travelled through ‘approximately 80% of cosmic history’

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a mysterious flash of energy was released into the universe.

Astronomers have now detected that flash – a burst of radio waves which travelled for more than 10bn years before reaching Earth – what they believe to be the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) ever recorded.

Zelenskyy says Kremlin deliberately targeted ‘ordinary public transport stop’ in Kramatorsk, with 18 wounded

A Russian missile strike on a bus in the eastern city of Kramatorsk has killed at least 30 people, officials have said, in one of the worst attacks by Moscow on Ukrainian civilians this year.

The regional prosecutor’s office in the Donetsk region said on Thursday the vehicle had been hit at 10am by an aerial bomb. “As of now, the death toll from this morning’s attack has risen to 30. Eighteen people were wounded,” it said, adding that all local public transport had been suspended.

Complaints risks putting defence ministry on collision course with Department for Energy Security and Net Zero

The Ministry of Defence has objected to at least four planned windfarms in the past year over fears the spinning blades could cause “unacceptable interference” with radars used to detect military aircraft.

MoD officials raised concerns in late June over plans for an onshore windfarm in County Durham that could result in aircraft “not being detected” within an RAF Low Flying Area, according to a letter to Britain’s planning authority.

Devastating blaze near Sizewell B nuclear power station in Suffolk among a record 624 wildfires in July this year

This July was the worst on record for wildfires in England, provisional data shows, with England experiencing a clear upward trend in the total number of wildfires recorded.

This summer has been a stark reminder of the vulnerability of the UK to climate breakdown, after punishingly hot and dry weather turned large parts of the countryside into a tinderbox.

The Norwegian government has given a permit to a mining company to release waste into Førde fjord despite a 17-year battle by campaigners and a supreme court ruling against it

Shortly after the Norwegian stock market closed on 17 June 2026, a few dozen local people from the small west coast town of Vevring crowded around a laptop in a school. Surrounded by children’s drawings and windows looking out over Førde fjord, they listened as news arrived from Oslo. Norway’s supreme court had ruled against its government: a permit to release mining waste directly into the fjord two miles upstream was illegal, the court said.

The moment marked the end of a 17-year fight, one of Norway’s most protracted environmental battles in living memory. In Oslo, Ingvild Fonn Asmervik, the project leader for Naturvernforbundet (Friends of the Earth Norway), compared the joy she felt to giving birth to her child. For Anne-Line Thingnes Førsund, a third-generation fisher living on the banks of the fjord in Vevring and a volunteer for the charity’s local branch, it was more of a relief. Like a mountain lifting off her shoulders, she said.

A landmark report reveals that the world must change the way it produces food to avoid a biodiversity collapse

Conservation comebacks for wild tigers, tuna and green​ sea turtles prove that global nature loss can be reversed, ​scientists have said. ​But a report warns food production must be the next ​“positive tipping point​” if the world is to avert biodiversity collapse.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) analysed nearly 36,000 animal populations and more than 5,000 species, producing the largest ever database of vertebrate wildlife. Scientists found populations had declined by an average of 73% since 1970, showing that “nature continues to be degraded at an alarming scale”, with “no sign of losses slowing”.

Hundred-and-fifty-year-old Wych elm in Newcastle, Co Down, has grown sideways owing to strong winds

The “astonishing and bizarre” Bendy Tree in Northern Ireland has been crowned the winner of this year’s tree of the year competition.

The wych elm tree, located in Newcastle, County Down, owes its name to its near horizontal trunk, which has grown sideways owing to the strong seaside winds coming off the Irish Sea.

Intelligence specialist Teddy Young, 24, alleged to have drafted message in Russian containing classified information

A junior Royal Navy intelligence specialist from Bedfordshire accused of trying to pass military secrets to Russia appeared in court on Thursday.

Teddy Young, 24, was accused of abusing his high-level security clearance to access secret defence and intelligence data after being deployed on a warship.

Broadcaster apologises after admitting claims against Benjamin Cohen and Anthony James were defamatory

The BBC has apologised and paid “substantial” compensation to the couple behind the PinkNews website, after conceding that stories accusing them of sexual misconduct were false and defamatory.

In a sweeping admission, the BBC accepted at the high court that a 2024 iPlayer documentary about the PinkNews founder Benjamin Cohen and his husband, Anthony James, called PinkNews: Behind Closed Doors, had made “a series of very serious, false, and defamatory allegations”.

Court hears former justice minister Shahid Malik had only ‘very limited’ role in business that made £6.67m in three weeks

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A former Labour MP and justice minister has been found not guilty of charges around his role in a fraudulent Covid-19 testing company.

Shahid Malik, 58, was MP for Dewsbury between 2005 and 2010 and served as a minister in three departments in Gordon Brown’s government.

Offences targeting Muslims increased most in 12 months to March – up 15% – while antisemitic hate crimes rose by 10%

Racially and religiously motivated offences have reached record highs in the UK as the government’s main Islamophobia partner says attacks on mosques are increasing in severity.

Home Office figures show police recorded 146,825 hate crimes in the year ending March 2026 – a rise of 7% in the past year. Offences targeting Muslims increased the most – up 15%, from 4,479 to 5,132, while antisemitic hate crimes rose by 10%, from 2,874 to 3,162.

Statement outlines pause on protracted war US president has struggled to end after almost eight months

Donald Trump has promised not to attack Iran before November’s US midterm elections, outlining a pause on the protracted war he has struggled to end after almost eight months.

In a Truth Social post on Thursday, the US president said Washington was “having productive discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran”, which he claimed was “in very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily”.

Most prestigious literature prize goes to Canadian known for genre-crossing works such as Autobiography of Red

• ‘Delights await!’: Margaret Atwood and other writers on Nobel winner Anne Carson

• Where to start with: Anne Carson

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, the Swedish Academy has announced.

The academy cited the author’s “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.

Recovery marks a dramatic turnaround for Pike, who remains in hospital after a botched execution in Tennessee

Christa Pike is “up and walking” in hospital, her lawyer said, just more than a week after she survived two lethal injections during a botched execution in Tennessee.

The recovery marks a dramatic turnaround after Pike was declared brain dead on Monday, before waking up and beginning to speak on Tuesday. Her ordeal has shocked many in the US and overseas and galvanized critics of the death penalty.

Government forces’ attack raises risk of internal conflict in Ethiopia that could trigger regional war

Eritrean troops who crossed into Ethiopia’s Tigray region have come under drone attack from government forces, raising the risk that renewed internal conflict in Ethiopia could trigger an all-out regional war between the neighbouring countries.

Military vehicles carrying soldiers drove across Eritrea’s southern border into Tigray on Wednesday, reaching the town of Adigrat 25 miles (40km) south, according to civilian witnesses, a militia commander and the conflict monitoring group Acled.

Eye-watering sum, to be split between 20 bankers, is one of the biggest payouts in the bank’s history

Top bosses at Goldman Sachs are in line to share a bonus pot worth up to $500m (£378m) this year, marking one of the biggest payouts in the Wall Street bank’s history.

The eye-watering sum will be shared between 20 bankers, with its chief executive, David Solomon, due to take about $100m (£75.6m) of the reward, which is made up of Goldman Sachs stock.

Andrew Bailey tells chancellor ‘whatever the stance of fiscal policy, it must be credible and be seen as such by financial markets’

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The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, has urged the chancellor, John Healey, to agree a budget that reassures financial markets after the UK’s medium-term borrowing costs hit a fresh 19-year high.

With investors offloading government bonds previously considered safe havens amid fears of rising inflation, Bailey told all governments caught in the crosshairs of financial speculators that they needed to avoid market turmoil that raises the interest paid on debt.

Competition watchdog clears takeover despite concerns that suppliers will have less incentive to lower bills

Almost three-quarters of households in Great Britain are now served by just three energy suppliers, after E.ON Next completed a deal to buy Ovo Energy despite fresh concerns about competition in the energy market.

The takeover concluded on Thursday after Britain’s competition watchdog cleared it, despite concerns that the shrinking number of household energy suppliers could mean bill payers will have less choice and suppliers will have less incentive to lower bills.

Closure will cost at least 60 jobs, while Leeds and Bristol outlets to be converted to Flannels brand

Harvey Nichols’ Birmingham store is to close in January, with the loss of at least 60 jobs, while its Leeds and Bristol outlets will be converted to the Flannels brand in a shake-up under Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group.

The owner of Sports Direct bought the department store chain, whose headquarters are at the Knightsbridge site in London, for £43m on the day it was put into administration in mid-August.

A performance piece from 2014 has gone viral in response to an allegation of rape at Cornell University. But with such defiant pieces stretching back hundreds of years, will things ever change?

In September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz began to carry a blue mattress weighing 23kg around her university campus. The mattress was similar to the ones New York’s Columbia University used in its dorm rooms, where Sulkowicz said she had been raped by a fellow student two years earlier. Her performance/endurance artwork constituted her visual art senior thesis, drawing attention to the lack of criminal charges brought against her alleged attacker and his continued presence at the university. As she hauled it across campus, others could choose to assist her with her burden. Many did. She recorded responses to the piece in a diary.

“I could have taken my pillow,” she told the writer Jessica Valenti at the time. “But I want people to see how it weighs down a person to be ignored by the school administration and harassed by police.” Sulkowicz would carry the mattress, she said, for as long as her alleged attacker remained at Columbia. And so she ended up carrying it all the way to graduation where, helped by other women, she took it on stage. The university president refused to shake her hand, turning away from her instead.

The newly-official French citizen is planning to open an Italian restaurant in Provence. Will it float like his tequila brand or sink as swiftly as the Steven Spielberg submarine eatery that made one reviewer ‘embarrassed to be human’?

The Provençal village of Cotignac is not wanting for places to eat. Within a short drive of its pale stone houses, you can find a wealth of high-end dining options. La Table de Mentone, set within the beautiful Château Mentone wine estate, is famed for the produce it grows on site. The Michelin-starred Restaurant Bruno offers dazzling variations of truffle dishes. More locally, Picotte Provence offers the sort of charming village dining that showcases the best of what the region has to offer.

However, despite all these wonderful options, there is one thing that Cotignac does not yet boast, and that’s a celebrity vanity project. But that is all about to change, thanks to the news that George Clooney is planning to open a restaurant there.

Don your best plaid shirts for this supernatural thriller about a gang of beefy fishermen who tackle sea monsters. It is totally ridiculous – but you will have loads of daft fun

Abandon all hope, ye who enter Below. And jettison disbelief while ye be at it. A six-part supernatural thriller forged from industrial-grade bunkum, Below is set in Snook’s Arm, a struggling Newfoundland fishing community beset by an ancient, unknowable evil. And plaid. And sea hags, shifty conservationists, mist, motorbikes, curses, a catch-all nostalgia for the 70s-90s, galoshes, wind and, horrifyingly, the collected works of the Waterboys. But mainly an ancient, unknowable evil (and plaid).

Here’s twitchy young roustabout Wade Penney (Charlie Heaton) with some combatively accented exposition. “I tells ye, these waters can be deadly,” he splutters, waggling his fish slice seawards as he prepares breakfast for his credulous Airbnb guests. “It’s been one seafarin’ tragedy after another for us.” Wade is an idiot but he is not, in this instance, wrong. First there was the seafarin’ tragedy of 1986, a splosh-based catastrophe that saw his family’s cottage – and his disconcertingly muscular grand pappy – dragged underwater by forces unknown. Then there were the fishing bans, the decades of economic uncertainty and the resettlement programme – a looming government-led scheme that threatens the town’s remaining hopes for survival. And now? “Jumpin’ Jesus,” blurts ripped paterfamilias Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett). “Will ye look at dat!” We look at dat. It’s an iceberg. A towering wodge of inexplicable CGI menace has materialised in the harbour, bringin’ with it yet more trouble for the embattled sea hunks.

From Carrie’s bullies to Cathy Ames, sympathetic backstories have made villains boring. It’s time to bring back truly awful villains – in all their deliciously sinful glory

The new Netflix adaptation of East of Eden largely sticks to the plot of the John Steinbeck novel. There are tweaks – the introduction of a wedding photograph, for example, which becomes a significant item – but otherwise, it is faithful to the book. That is, in terms of the plot. There has already been some discussion about what it has done to Cathy Ames, played with considerable ferocity by Florence Pugh. Cathy, who later changes her name to Kate, kills her parents by burning down the family house. She shoots her husband, Adam, and leaves her baby sons wailing and alone. She slowly poisons the brothel madam Faye, a woman who acts as a mentor to her and treats her as a daughter, while simultaneously tricking her into leaving her everything in her will. In the book, Steinbeck lets Kate reflect on killing Faye. She finds that she has “no feeling” about it at all.

She is a brilliant, brutal character, but on television, she becomes something else: complicated. Her cruelty remains intact, but Pugh and showrunner Zoe Kazan have fleshed her out and given reasons for her fury. They invent a scene that implies Cathy was abused as a child by two men in the woods, and when she takes her final bow, the series returns to this moment in flashback, suggesting that her campaign of destruction has been shaped by a life of trauma and pain. In Steinbeck’s hands, Cathy is cold and unfeeling. In the 2020s, Cathy is more sympathetic and less of a brute.

Jeremy Strong’s slow-talking Facebook founder turns into a cameo, background to a thriller about a whistleblower that somehow never mentions Trump

Here is a film for all those people who solemnly deplore social media in conversation but haven’t quite got round to deleting their accounts. Sixteen years have gone by since The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher; this was the addictive, obsessive-compulsive movie about the birth of Facebook in Harvard’s macho-competitive cauldron of student sexism and nerdy self-pity, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the fast-talking, arrogant, not-necessarily-evil genius Mark Zuckerberg. Now Sorkin is back with a sequel of sorts, directing his own script – and now Zuckerberg is basically evil, but also weirdly slow talking, as if all the zinging, smart-alecky Sorkinesque dialogue energy of the first film has been siphoned away in early middle age and dispersed among the insurgents in the new cast.

Sorkin’s jittery, funny, syncopated style is unmistakable, as distinctive in its way as David Mamet, although he has one joke about “spatula” being a Yiddish word that he has borrowed from Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It is the story of how in 2021, Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire was challenged by courageous whistleblower-employee Frances Haugen and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, who were on a mission to tell the world how Zuckerberg, scared by falling revenue, changed the algorithm so that engagement was supercharged by rage bait and hate speech, malice and envy. Facebook, moreover, didn’t factcheck political ads, thus driving a huge, nationwide surge in extremist groups and teen bullying and becoming a major player in the Capitol riots. (Having said that, this film does not say aloud the word “Trump” and rather cravenly declines to specify Maga activity.)

The game is in full swing, as we find out the first famous face to be banished. Plus: The Paper finale gets emosh. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, BBC One
We’ve had our first round table – and incredibly frustrating cliffhanger ending – so now it’s time to find out which celebrity is the first to be banished. After confessing he is a traitor minutes after being chosen, surely it will be Richard E Grant? But that’s what’s so delicious about this game: you just never know what twist will come next. Continues on Friday with another murder. Hollie Richardson

Ahead of the Irish alt-rockers’ highly anticipated fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, we count down their potent, occasionally political, catalogue

A single inspired by the birth of bassist Conor Deegan’s daughter, It’s Amazing to Be Young is a lovely example of Fontaines DC operating in euphoric mode, a relatively recent addition to their emotional mood board: “Sometimes,” offered frontman Grian Chatten, “optimism is a necessary delusion.”

Susan Tomes
(Hyperion)
From Marianne Martines – taught by the family lodger, Haydn, to Teresa Carreño who played for Lincoln, there’s names new and old in this fascinating and appealing collection

This attractive compilation came out of Susan Tomes’ research for a book on female pianists across history. As she discovered, many wrote music as well, producing short works for the salons and domestic circles to which they were frequently restricted. Thanks to pioneering performers such as Tomes, some of the dozen women presented here are familiar names, but several will be new to many, as will their appealing compositions.

Take Marianne Martines, given lessons in lieu of rent by the family lodger, Haydn. Her miniature A major sonata possesses the sparkle of Scarlatti. Marianna von Auenbrugger died aged 23, but she was taught by Salieri, who paid for the publication of the Mozartian E-flat major sonata recorded here.

The Handmaid’s Tale author reflects on her loves, losses and literary achievements in a memoir that showcases her wisdom and wit

Margaret Atwood had to be persuaded to write a memoir. The thought of writing about herself initially seemed “dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?” Yet, she continues, time passed and the possibility of a memoir took on a “lurid phosphorescent glow. ‘Wasn’t there something appealing in the idea?’ my sinister alter ego whispered … I could thank my benefactors, reward my friends, trash my enemies and pay off scores long forgotten by everyone but me.”

Subtitled “A Memoir of Sorts”, Book of Lives is the Canadian author’s account of her loves, losses and literary achievements (she has written just over 50 books, including novels, short stories and poetry collections), and a fine showcase for her wisdom and wit. What little score-settling she includes is purely for the punchline. When a poet told Atwood in the early 1970s that she wrote like a man – he intended it as a compliment – she told him he forgot the punctuation. “What you meant was, ‘She writes. Like a man’.”

The Aussie trio explain creating their new record sampling kids’ science shows and Tunisian music – and their surreal film with Haley Joel Osment

Last December, Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi, the core members of the Aussie disco-pop collagists the Avalanches, found themselves winding through the frosty, mountainous region of Minakami, Japan, with Haley Joel Osment. The pair’s lauded debut album, 2000’s Since I Left You, has become a touchstone in plunderphonics – a genre known for its innovative use of samples – and in the years since its release, the group have amassed an ardent cult following. Osment, the former child star of The Sixth Sense and Forrest Gump, seemed to count himself among their devotees, frequently liking their posts on Instagram, so they decided to reach out and ask him to board their latest project: a 35-minute movie that would accompany their new LP, No Bad Memories.

“We’d never made a film before, so it was like, ‘This could be a complete disaster for him,’” recalls Di Blasi, who is dressed in a black tee and purple cap with the logo for the cult electronic label трип when we meet in Manhattan in mid-September. “We were like, ‘We don’t really have anyone yet … We don’t even know what we’re doing.’” To their surprise, Osment signed on.

Inspired by stones and metals, the memoirist and novelist’s first poetry collection for more than a decade is charming, whimsical and intimate

In the introduction to her first book of poetry in 12 years, Patricia Lockwood states that, “For almost a decade … I had not been able to hear it. The poems that I wrote would not end … too much was happening, there was a different kind of attention being paid.” It wasn’t that she didn’t want them to arrive. From Cave Painting: “And does she still write poems? / Not a whole one since I had been ill. / Five years. I kept saying I was / Doing it privately. So private even / I didn’t know about it.”

In that intervening period, Lockwood’s status has jumped from interesting US poet famous for the viral sensation Rape Joke to literary superstar: an acclaimed memoirist and novelist whose freewheeling, antic style is for many the internet’s maelstrom lassoed and put back on to the page. Who else can claim to have turned an audience with the pope into a biting comic essay?

The author of Moneyball brings his exceptional narrative skills to bear on Musk’s anti-government crusade

Donald Trump’s catastrophic errors get so much attention that his systemic ones can easily be missed. While the world looks on in dismay at his farcical war in Iran, the thuggery of Ice agents or clownish attacks on erstwhile allies like Canada and Denmark, the core functions of the American government are slowly disintegrating.

It is harder to get people to focus on the machinery of the state because the effects are often slow and hard to pin down. Outbreaks of disease – such as the recent wave of explosive diarrhoea across the US – might have happened anyway, but were probably made worse by lay-offs at the Centers for Disease Control. Likewise, Trump is not directly responsible for natural disasters, but response times in the past year may have been hampered by mass redundancies at the National Weather Service. Cuts to tax collection also seem to have reduced revenue by multiple billions, though we cannot be sure of the causal relationship.

There are moments of shivering joy as the protagonist of two enduring classics, Jack Sawyer, returns – but this time his journey feels endlessly repetitive

Bear with me, because there is some backstory to get through before we can talk about the book I am actually here to review. Back in 1984, Stephen King and Peter Straub collaborated on the fantasy novel The Talisman. Like all the best King stories, it follows a young boy: in this case Jack Sawyer, 12, whose mother, Lily, is dying. Jack learns that a magical object called the Talisman might save her – if he can find it in a parallel world known as the Territories. Straub and King followed this up in 2001 with Black House, in which an adult Jack investigates a series of child murders that turn out to have disturbing links to the Territories.

The books are very different: one a coming-of-age cross-country quest, in which Jack flips back and forth between two versions of the US; the other a fantastical and horror-inflected murder mystery. Both are brilliant and enduring classics which will always have a place on my bookshelves – I reread both of them, all 1,800-odd pages, to prepare for Other Worlds Than These and was as swept away and delighted as the first time round.

The sex writing threatens to throw the novel off-kilter, but there are rich rewards in this tale of music and middle-aged compromises

What is the role of art in an artist’s life? Should you commit everything to honing your talent in the hope of becoming a great master? Or should you use your artistic gift to enrich your life and that of your community? In Partita, acclaimed American novelist Barbara Kingsolver grapples with these questions seriously and passionately through the story of a piano prodigy turned music teacher.

The novel opens in the present, where Livia is a school music teacher in the same part of rural Tennessee where she grew up, married to a farmer who once worked on her father’s farm. Contented middle age has been disturbed by a phone call from Sigurd, a man she had an all-consuming, destructive love affair with at college. This pulls her back into her past: both the period of her brother’s suicide when she was 11, and the years when she escaped on a music scholarship to Indiana, convinced she was leaving her parents’ world behind for good. We discover that her dreams of being a world-class pianist were shattered by an accident that damaged her hand, and that Sigurd played a part in this.

The launch of a collector’s box hints at a new reality: the kinds of games I grew up with are becoming a luxury item, locked behind a forbidding spending barrier

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As a parent (and partner) to a habitual collector, I do feel like an unwelcome portion of my life is occupied by an endless war against stuff. Surfaces in my home ceaselessly accumulate piles of random objects: a JoyCon wrist strap, a sticker sheet, an unidentifiable plastic piece of a toy or gizmo, an Xbox 360 controller with no batteries, cases for Switch cartridges lost down the side of the sofa … Stuff encroaches everywhere, especially in a gaming household. Much as I regret the imminent disappearance of physical games, I do not regret the extra space I have in my attic as a result of switching almost entirely to downloaded games over the last decade or so.

Speaking of the imminent disappearance of physical games: Rockstar recently announced a £350 ($400) “collector’s box” of Grand Theft Auto 6 goodies … that doesn’t include the game itself. Not even a download code. The Grand Theft Auto VI: The Goodtime State – Vice City Collection, to give it its full and unwieldy name, contains a hat, a bag, a pair of sunglasses, a figurine, a poster and more, including a mirror and a “swizzle spoon” that looks, unambigiously, like a cocaine spoon. The game retails at £70, so if you want something to play alongside all your stuff, you’re looking at an outlay of £420.

PC, PS5, Switch 2; Wych Elm Games, Team 17
Abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks make up a dark landscape in which you play a private eye searching for a missing singer-songwriter

In a weird deserted town miles from anywhere, a troubled detective searches for a missing musician and the girl he may or may not have murdered. It could be a Silent Hill game or a lost David Lynch movie from the 1990s – in fact, it’s neither. And also both. If that whets your appetite, stick around, there’s plenty more to come.

Developed by Scandinavian studio Wych Elm Games, Silver Pines is a dark Metroidvania-style adventure, where you play as shambling private eye, Red Walker, exploring a 2D universe of abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks. Officially, everyone has left because of an incoming storm, but very quickly you learn that something much darker is afoot. Someone has hired you to find singer-songwriter Eddie Velvet, but you don’t know why; your only contact with your client is via the payphones dotted around town, where you can also save your progress – as long as you have a dollar to pay for the call. Each location is filled with clues and puzzles – a weird newspaper story pinned to the wall, a strange statue that needs a missing piece – and through these artefacts you unlock new rooms and descend further into the mystery.

Xbox, PC (version tested); The Coalition/Xbox Game Studios
E-Day boasts the best combat in 20 years of Gears games – but everything surrounding it is disappointing

Every Gears of War game released in the last 20 years has made reverent reference to Emergence Day, when alien creatures emerged from the earth, single-minded in their savagery. In E-Day, you’re there to witness it: the police lights, flipped cars, ground tremors, civilians running, aliens pouring out of fissures in the earth and ripping faces off. You’re at ground zero in a squad of four soldiers called Gears – Marcus Fenix, the leader; Dom, who wants to retire; Lucas, a green cadet with a buzzcut; and the dishonourably discharged Mags. Only this dysfunctional quartet can turn the tide. With guns. Lots of ’em.

Instead of answering questions raised by the ending of 2019’s Gears 5, we’re back to the start to find out why Marcus has a scar on his lip and why these soldiers started strapping chainsaws on to their assault rifles. Anything that was left to the imagination is here, for you to point at and say: “I understood that reference. This is a thing that I have seen.”

There’s no Leon, Claire or Ada Wong in Cregger’s adaptation. Instead, it re-creates something more fundamental – the strange, terrifying experience of actually playing the game

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I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. “It’s not a real Resident Evil movie,” they’ve claimed. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.

On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!

Charing Cross theatre, London
Büchner’s jagged masterpiece about a soldier’s descent is told with enchanting and stirring songs that occasionally defuse its stark terror

When Georg Büchner died aged 23 in 1837, he left behind Woyzeck as a bundle of papers that would be ordered and reordered for years to come, eventually discoloured by treatments used to decipher the playwright’s handwriting. His two dozen scenes, with a handful of extra fragments, form a tragic patchwork that is mirrored, in this musical version, by a similar number of stained pieces of cloth stitched into the stage curtains and by the 27 folk songs that thread the story together.

It remains the downfall of Franz Woyzeck, a desperate soldier sinking into madness who grows suspicious of his partner, but – as the first names of its romantic title suggest – the story seeks to better understand both characters. Büchner’s Woyzeck suffers from visions and hallucinations; here they are joined by traumatic battlefield flashbacks. Franz was a war hero, says Marie admiringly, adding a courageous backstory to Büchner’s downtrodden squaddie and suggesting that she sees a glimpse of Franz’s former vigour in the drum major (here named Varg) who brazenly pursues her. In the play, that leads to an affair, but the musical’s Marie fights off Varg when he attempts to rape her and it is the rumours of infidelity that accelerate Franz’s frenzy.

A musical about a drama group’s pilgrimage and reflections on activist art join an intriguing show about lost languages

In a Dublin theatre festival programme tackling heavy themes of racism, conflict and prejudice, Lourdes! The Musical (★★★★☆) promises something effervescent. Xnthony Ltd, the creators of Oliver Cromwell Is Really Very Sorry, have turned their lightly quizzical gaze to the French pilgrimage town – “a holy Blackpool, a divine Las Vegas” and a site of hope or desperation for five unlikely travelling companions.

Back in his home village in “Countryland”, in 2008, following a diagnosis of HIV that punctures his dreams of Los Angeles, singer-songwriter Matthew (Riain Cash) lends his star power to a parish drama group taking a musical about Saint Bernadette to Lourdes. Interweaving this show-within-a-show and the pilgrimage strands, Xnthony’s lyrics and Matthew Floyd Jones’s score blend pop, club beats and soulful ballads. Directed by Sarah Meadows, the supercharged ensemble joining Cash as, variously, a droll priest (Iestyn Arwel), a terminally ill mother and her transgender daughter (Nichola MacEvilly and Danielle James) and an eager tour manager (Molly Lynch) carry the music’s tonal shifts effortlessly.

Òran Mór, Glasgow
Blythe Duff and Mark Barrett are excellent as two people helplessly bound to each other in this bitter two-hander

The arrival of a first baby changes everything. It is not just the upheaval of fitting the child into your life: the shift is also psychological. Children become parents. Parents become grandparents. Responsibility and accountability move down a generation.

That is why, in Jonny Donahoe’s knotty, bitter two-hander, a man known only as Son (Mark Barrett) has called on Mother (Blythe Duff) after an eight-month gap. She is spikily indifferent to his appearance, here in her back garden where she is burning family photographs on a bonfire. Despite the frosty reception, he must persist.

Barbican Art Gallery, London
What seem at first indistinguishable canvases offer challenges, revelations and transcendental effects – but only if you can give yourself over to them

Writing about painting is a futile exercise at the best of times. This is especially the case when, as with Robert Ryman, the paintings in question are variations on the theme of white. If that sounds pretentious – or like a tired joke – then it might also be understood as a reaction against the dependence of so much art on language (which is also to say, bullshit). Because these bare-bones paintings – white paint, a flat surface, wall fixtures – are the “real thing” in the most literal way: they are not trying to tell you a story, they do not require you to be familiar with any abstruse theories. There is just you and the materials, how the paint lies, how it scatters the light. So the question is: how much do you like looking at paint?

Happily for me, given that it is a non-negotiable part of my job, I really like looking at paint. If you also like looking at paint, then there is much in this exhibition that will take your breath away. Take The Painting of the Mysterious Shadow from the mid-60s, after Ryman had left his job as a guard at MoMA, having given up on a career as a jazz musician, and settled into the project that would occupy the rest of his life. Six thick white stripes run horizontally across the canvas, as close to each other as can be managed by a steady hand without overlapping. The fabric is stretched over a deep wooden frame, meaning that its surface sits about three inches off the wall, and casts a thin shadow upon it. That’s your lot.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film risks being outdated in a more rancorous era. But could it restore the personality-driven genre to big screens or end it altogether?

For a man whose campaign slogan was once “Keep it real”, Ali G has his work cut out in the reality of 2026. The big dog of Da West Staines Massiv was the character with whom Sacha Baron Cohen carved out his own niche of gonzo-gotcha comedy in the late 1990s – and now he’s back with new film, Ali G: Who Iz I? But it’s unclear if his great creation has gone sufficiently fallow in the collective consciousness to still operate well in real-life situations, the kind of lethal idiot who once pitched Donald Trump anti-drip ice-cream gloves. And more critically, is the Ali G satirical project – which poked at 90s multicultural mores – still relevant and funny in far more rancorous times?

It’s not just Baron Cohen’s career as an undercover operative that’s on the line. It’s the future of character-led comedy as a going concern, now that he seems to be the last man standing in this once-noble tradition – in cinemas, at least. To be clear, character comedy isn’t merely comedy with characters; it’s comedy filtered through a central persona that overlaps with the comedian playing it and whose subversive sensibility colours the entire work.

A new exhibition curated by Edward Enniful looks back on the thrilling decade before smartphones, when art, music and fashion came together with a bang

Peeing in the sink he shared with Derek Jacobi, making a badger video with Brian May, climbing Everest with Alan Hinkes … as the great actor blasts into his 90s, stars celebrate his ‘loudness and madness’

Emma Thompson

The League of Gentlemen and Inside No 9 co-creator has always displayed a sense of gothic unease, and his new book combines myth, memoir – and his own disquieting drawings

When Reece Shearsmith was a boy, he overheard relatives chatting at a New Year gathering. “One of them was talking about [the ghost of] a woman they’d seen standing on the village green at three in the morning,” he recalls. “Another knew a woman who woke up and found a figure sitting at the end of her bed. It’s my first recollection of being properly scared and loving it.”

From then on, the Yorkshire-born Shearsmith was fascinated by all things uncanny. He would stay up late to watch Hammer horror films – his mother allowed it because she loved them, too – and immerse himself in books including the Hamlyn Book of Horror, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. His obsession carried through into adulthood and his work: Shearsmith is best known as the co-creator of the surreal comedy series The League of Gentlemen, Psychoville and the horror anthology Inside No 9. “I’ve managed to forge a career from the things I loved as a kid,” he says.

Ava shared the initial cost but Ruth has forked out for repairs. You decide who’s on the wrong side of this in-tents debate?

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

I paid for half of the tent, so I deserve equal use of it, even if we no longer live in the same country

Ava hasn’t used the tent in years, and I’ve stored it and paid for its upkeep. Surely I get first dibs?

With cancer cases rising fastest in poorer countries, Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu, president-elect of the Union for International Cancer Control, says Africa needs investment in research, diagnosis and prevention

When Dr Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu last saw Gloria in Abuja, the young breast cancer patient was so ill that she was in hospital. The cancer had spread to her bones and lungs, and she was struggling with complications from the disease.

Then, at a global conference on cancer thousands of miles away in Hong Kong last month, Bagudu saw her again. Gloria was walking with a stick because of the cancer in her hips, but she was attending sessions, speaking about her experience and advocating for other patients.

Christmas is getting closer, and this year’s calendars are already on sale. We tested the biggest releases to find the ones worth buying, including cruelty-free picks

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Christmas might feel like an age away, but the festive season has already begun for fans of beauty Advent calendars. Most of this year’s calendars are now on sale or available to preorder, and many of the most popular could sell out long before Whamageddon claims its first victim.

So, much as it pains me to say it, now might be a good time to buy one. Below, you’ll find my favourites, from bargain beauty Advent calendars under £50 to three-figure luxuries. I’ve tested 20 to find calendars packed with cult-favourite products suitable for a whole spectrum of skin types and preferences. I also looked at the packaging and broad appeal of each calendar to help minimise waste.

From tactile textures to softer lighting, these expert-approved updates bring all the warmth of autumn while steering clear of Sleepy Hollow vibes

• Professional organisers’ tips for a tidy home

After a long, hot summer, the autumn chill is creeping in and, according to social media, that means one thing: cosy season. I’m all for a blanket, a candle and those gorgeous amber and russet shades, but I’m less convinced that welcoming autumn requires turning your home into Sleepy Hollow.

Pumpkins, faux foliage and Jack Skellington-shaped everything might be some people’s idea of heaven, but I’d rather bring in the season without needing to overhaul my lounge by December. As interior designer Lia Gold, winner of BBC’s Interior Design Masters, puts it: “There are so many ways to make your home feel cosier without it having to smell like pumpkin spice.”

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food and the basics they scrimp on? The Queer Eye legend talks handmade gifts, secondhand shopping and bag obsessions with the Filter

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Jonathan Van Ness rose to fame as the beauty and hair care expert on the multi-award-winning show Queer Eye. Their eight-year tenure as one of the “Fab Five” presenters ended when the show’s final season aired in January 2026. A hairstylist by trade, they have their own cruelty-free, vegan haircare brand, JVN Hair.

Beyond TV and beauty work, Van Ness has continued a career as a comedian, writer and podcast presenter. They have written five books, including the New York Times bestselling memoir Over the Top and their latest young adult novel, which they wrote alongside Julie Murphy, Let Them Stare. Van Ness continues to be an advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community, working on campaigns with The Trevor Project and Planned Parenthood.

Breathable bedding, slanted tweezers and an indispensable garlic press … here are the buys you wish you’d discovered sooner. Plus, the best walking poles, tested

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Sometimes a product changes your life – or, more likely, just makes your day 10% better.

Whether it’s something small-but-mighty (a gadget that helps you open a jar without swearing, tweezers that get every hair) or a more expensive item that has proved its worth over the years (a much-loved designer dress, a garden mulch-maker), we asked you to tell us about the buys that have made your life just a little bit better.

It used to be quite normal to pop next door for a coffee or invite friends over for dinner. But not any more. What’s behind this change – and just how damaging is it?

‘I really loved hosting at home years ago, before I had kids, when my house wasn’t filled with toys and I had lots of time to plan and shop,” says Rehanna, 41, from Birmingham. Now, if she’s catching up with friends, she would rather go out. “I can’t host and cook at the same time, so if I have people over it will usually be a cold buffet I have made earlier. There are so many really nice restaurants where I live that I’d prefer to go out and try something new than make an old favourite at home.”

Personally, I’d never say no to a cold buffet – but Rehanna’s story is not unusual. In the US, the number of people who regularly host friends or family fell from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026 – a 70% drop over the last 50 years. In the UK, the numbers are not much better: last year, a poll of 2,000 adults found that more than four in 10 British people avoid hosting at home due to the clean-up it requires. And while chef Nigella Lawson is back on TV screens demonstrating her culinary prowess on The Great British Bake Off, it wasn’t long ago that the self-proclaimed domestic goddess revealed even she had “got out of the habit” of hosting formal dinner parties.

As summer fades and our social and dining habits adapt to the cooling weather, so, too, should the white wine we drink. Here are some options best-suited to the season

The wine world is full of clubs, and I’m a member of the Just-Drink-What-You-Bloody-Like club, which makes even the thought of white wines for autumn and winter feel uncomfortably prescriptive. But, for me, as the nights draw in, there’s less standing, more sitting; less chugging, more swirling; fewer sprightly aperitifs, more wine with seasonal food that demands a little more body and complexity. After months of saying yes to rosé, I’m choosing wine with more intention – it’s time to hunker down.

I’m looking for whites that are like a good cardigan, at once coddling and breathable. I want ripeness, body and freshness, and the Atlantic-influenced wines of Galicia in northern Spain – a place that’s no stranger to wind and rain – deliver. Expressive, with a saline edge, albariño from the Rías Baixas appellation has become ubiquitous in supermarkets and rarely disappoints (try Aldi’s Specially Selected one at £8.99), neither does the fuller-bodied godello from nearby Valdeorras (the Wine Society’s Exhibition range offers a good one for £14.95), while the blend of both those grapes and other local varieties from Galicia’s Ribeiro DO in today’s pick is a cool-climate humdinger for the colder months.

After the death of my beloved dog, I’m thinking a lot about the role food plays in all of life’s big events – be they happy or sad

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I lost my beloved cairn terrier Wilf a couple of weeks ago, and when I say lost, sadly, I don’t mean I mislaid him yet again on Hampstead Heath. Rather, after 13 and a half years of (mostly) civil disobedience, we had to make the tough but ultimately kind decision to say a final goodbye. Since then, I have been bombarded with kindness. Friends and family have rallied round to take me out for breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee, clearly worried that the bereavement might affect my appetite – well, apart from the one who responded by having a baby a week early, and who now requires me to provide for her.

It got me thinking about the part food plays in big life events. We so often cook, or otherwise provide for people in the aftermath of such shocks, be they happy or sad, as a way both to offer practical help and to show them how much we love them. Such tokens of affection tend to fall into two camps. The first is high-energy food that can be easily eaten with one hand while the other is holding a baby or clutching a sodden handkerchief, or simply when you’re just too busy to sit down. Just this morning, I received a picture of the new mother tucking into my extremely wholesome fruit and nut-packed granola with her daughter sleeping on her arm, but Melissa Hemsley’s five-ingredient flapjacks (pictured top) would fall into this category, as would Meera Sodha’s chaat masala popcorn and Thomasina Miers’ dark chocolate and toasted walnut banana bread. Like Anna Jones’s chocolate chip cookie power bites, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s spiced nuts or my own kale chips, they’re full of good things, and tempting enough to compete with the less nutritious options that are so easy to reach for instead. (That said, no one should judge anyone for the choices they make at times of stress.)

Investigators probe Asahi, Kirin, Suntory and Sapporo breweries – which together control more than 90% of Japan’s beer market

Japanese authorities have raided the country’s four biggest breweries over suspicions they colluded to set the price of beer and other beverages – a practice media reports said could have forced drinkers to pay over the odds.

Officials from the Fair Trade Commission this week searched the offices of Asahi Breweries, Kirin Brewery, Suntory Beer and Sapporo Breweries – which together control more than 90% of the domestic market. The quartet are suspected of violating the anti-monopoly law.

People often forget social rules when dogs are involved, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But you’ll have to say something if you want things to change

• Read more Leading questions

A good friend of mine stays with me regularly when she comes into town. She brings her husband and two dogs that don’t get along with my dog. They’ve “used the bathroom” in our house before. I try to be nice and help clean or pretend it doesn’t bother me so that they feel comfortable. But when she asks for a weekend to come back with everyone, I kind of dread it. I enjoy seeing her and she’s a great friend. I think our friendship would be better if she stayed somewhere else, but I would feel bad if she stayed in a hotel and I don’t think she’d visit as often. She cleans up after the dogs and whatnot, but I like my home to be my safe haven. This friend doesn’t handle confrontation well, but is understanding. What can I do to handle this?

Eleanor says: It sounds as though you’re in the jam we all get into when we try to smooth things over: you can have the social ease of pretending something is fine; or the outcome from confessing it isn’t, but not both simultaneously.

LD is the submissive to Lady Alice’s dominatrix – and it has been a revelation for them both

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

I have cerebral palsy and live with my parents. Lady Alice is a delicious secret

You can be curious about others’ beliefs without compromising your own

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who explained that her ill health was down to reasons I would describe as dubious. Taking certain supplements and changing her diet have significantly improved her health. Good for her. However, she was disappointed and a little annoyed that I didn’t share her outrage and wasn’t going to follow her views.

I’ve got another friend who thinks cholesterol is a lie and that we should live largely on meat (and supplements). Another went through a sugar causes cancer phase. And another is sceptical of vaccines. Each of them may be right. They might not. We are learning more about the human body every day. But I was raised by scientists and I want to see a large-scale trial before I get outraged and change the way I live. Equally, I’m not convinced that a lightly regulated for-profit industry (supplements) is automatically more trustworthy than a highly regulated for-profit one (pharma).

Since Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder in 1994, Denise Brown has devoted herself to ending domestic violence. She talks about her beloved sister, the trauma she witnessed in the couple’s marriage and how lives can be saved

The last night Denise Brown spent with her sister Nicole Brown Simpson was at a restaurant for a family celebration. Nicole looked out of the window. “All of a sudden she goes, ‘Oh my God, there he is.’ He was driving by.” Brown looked out, trying to get a glimpse of her sister’s ex-husband, the former American football star OJ Simpson. “I saw these headlights. She said, ‘He’s constantly following me.’” They went back to talking about their plans for the summer.

The following morning, 13 June 1994, Brown was up early at her parents’ house in Orange County in southern California, when the phone rang shortly after 6am. “I heard my mom scream a scream that I had never heard from a human being,” says Brown. “It was so guttural. Just awful.”

Move expected to make pump pricing more transparent and encourage competition after diesel hits record £2 a litre

Drivers will be able to see live petrol prices on Google Maps for the first time from Thursday, in a move that will help motorists shop around for the cheapest fuel.

Millions of motorists will be able to find the cheapest petrol and diesel prices by searching for a local forecourt in the Google app, in what could prove to be “a major development” in making fuel prices more fair, according to campaigners.

Average cost of home in September was £298,441, says Lloyds – about the same as year earlier and in August

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UK house prices flatlined in September, according to a leading index, as rising mortgage costs started to weigh on the market.

The average cost of a home was £298,441, roughly the same as it was a year earlier and in the previous month, according to the tracker from Lloyds previously known as the Halifax HPI.

Sykes Holiday Cottages showed no empathy and insisted on paperwork we didn’t have so soon after my husband’s death

We booked a break with Sykes Holiday Cottages for 11 of us to celebrate my mum’s 80th birthday last February. The cost was £2,400, paid for by my 87-year-old dad, but it was my husband who made the booking.

In January, my husband was diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma, and he died 10 days before the trip. My parents and some other members of the party still planned to take the holiday, and my dad informed Sykes of the death, since my husband was their point of contact.

Scammers reuse personal details harvested from fake Esta websites – and texts and calls can keep arriving for months

When the British actor Lisa Riley was preparing to travel to the US last year, she applied online for an Esta so she would not need a visa. After finding the site through a Google search she filled in her passport, bank and personal details and waited for the confirmation, which normally takes just under an hour.

When it failed to arrive, she emailed an address from the site where she had paid and got back a message unlike any she had seen before, with a link to a website that displayed a jumble of words and letters.

Researchers found five events, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, caused serious damage to mental wellbeing across UK

Brexit, Liz Truss’s mini-budget and other “shocks” over the last 10 years have led to a serious and lasting deterioration in the UK population’s mental health, research has found.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the first and second Covid lockdowns also triggered big rises in psychological distress, as measured by the number of people with depression and anxiety.

From blood pressure to ageing, research suggests the first 1,000 days of sugar exposure could leave a decades-long mark on health

They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many everyday foods remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar.

Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled.

Experts looking at UK, US and Dutch data found ‘significant increases’ in early onset cases of seven cancers, prompting warnings about lifestyle choices

Cases of seven types of cancer have risen sharply among younger people in England, major new research has found, prompting warnings that lifestyle choices are costing thousands of lives each year.

The number of people under 50 diagnosed with prostate cancer in England has quadrupled since 2001, while early onset bowel, kidney and uterine cancer diagnoses more than doubled.

Health minister says 28 contacts identified after death of citizen who arrived from DRC on Saturday

Kenya has reported its first-ever Ebola death, the health minister announced on Tuesday, as the disease continues to spread rapidly through the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the outbreak was announced in May.

This is the 17th outbreak of the highly infectious, often deadly disease in the DRC. As of 2 October, 4,082 people had died out of 8,463 confirmed cases in the country since the emergence of the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus, for which there is still no vaccine nor specific treatment.

Sarah Burton’s sporty, daffodil mesh dress made me smile. But the reason I chose it for Fashion Museum Bath is because it tells the story of our times, when bodies are more political than ever

One morning in February this year, I opened my laptop to find an email with an all-caps subject line: TOP SECRET. Being a fashion editor can be exciting but state secrets are not generally my beat, so I was intrigued. Sure enough, it was a thrill: an invitation from the Fashion Museum Bath to choose their Dress of the Year for 2025.

What an honour. Dress of the Year began in 1963, the brainchild of the museum’s founder Doris Langley Moore, as a way of keeping a static collection perpetually current. Each year a fashion expert picks an outfit or outfits that capture the year just gone, and these become part of the permanent collection. There is a Mary Quant dress and a Katharine Hamnett slogan T-shirt, Ossie Clark chiffon and Ralph Lauren pinstripes. There is sublime beauty from the catwalks of Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel and John Galliano, and pieces of cultural history: McQueen’s bumsters, Jennifer Lopez’s internet-breaking green Versace Grammy dress, Dior’s “We Should All Be Feminists” slogan, Naomi Campbell’s pandemic hazmat suit, a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, and the dress worn by the Duchess of Sussex for her Oprah interview in 2021. “Dress” is interpreted loosely, in the sense of clothing rather than a frock: the lineup includes men’s suits. The Bath museum is currently mid-revamp, having closed its doors in 2022, with construction soon to start on a new museum set to open in the city’s old post office in 2030. Meanwhile the collection is stored in Wiltshire and can be seen online.

From Charli xcx and Rihanna to Victoria’s Secret and Prada catwalks, the fashion industry is keen to move on from the comfy, wire-free bras popularized in lockdown

It’s a trend that might have been expected to be kept under the radar – or at least under a T-shirt. But high fashion’s recent endorsement of underwire bras could not have been more visible.

This fashion month, underwear as outerwear was omnipresent on catwalks, with underwire bras in red and black satin at Prada and black and silver at Tom Ford. At the Matieres Fecales show, Rihanna wore a bra from her own Savage X Fenty range peeking out of her unbuttoned jacket.

There’s a lot of Brando badboy baggage attached to this classic outerwear – here’s how to look chic rather than stompy

In lots of ways, the arrival of autumn makes getting dressed easier. Not having to shave above your knees. Enough pockets to make a handbag optional. But it’s not all plain sailing. For instance, I don’t think we talk enough about how hard it is to carry off a leather jacket.

I thought maybe it was just me. And then I came across Lucinda Chambers – Vogue fashion director for 25 years, now co-curator of gorgeous platform of desirables Collagerie – remarking that she found leather jackets tricky. Lucinda is without a doubt one of the best-dressed women in London, always rocking a strong look – colour, stripes, great jewellery, unexpected shoes – so I was amazed and a bit gratified to find even she struggles.

No longer messy and cumbersome, a new generation of powders blurs, sets and mattifies without the faff

I can’t remember the last time I wrote about loose powder because, honestly, there’s been little point. Pressed compact powders have become so sophisticated in formulation, so finely milled in production, that most of us rely on those to keep shiny bits matte and makeup looking fresh past lunchtime. Loose powders – messy, cumbersome and barely improved in decades – seemed trapped in the past. But there have always been times when one absolutely does benefit from a proper dusting.

A fine coating of loose powder locks down foundation and concealer like nothing else can – no bridal or TV makeup artist, dancer or performer would be without it. Now, seemingly all at once, a flurry of new generation powders are offering way more for your trouble.

After electronics giant Philips left, the city reinvented itself as a multicultural hub for creativity and innovation, and the home of Dutch Design Week

A baggily clad skateboarder’s wheels clatter across concrete floors, the noise bouncing off exposed pipes and iron girders. Vaulted skylights set in high ceilings illuminate the industrial space and its central kitchen, from which my main course – a silky lemon risotto, spiked with samphire, rhubarb, garlic, baby onions and basil – has just been transported.

I’m in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, in North Brabant, famous for its historic connection to Philips, the one-time electronics giant. The restaurant, Radio Royaal, is housed in what was once their engine room, in the Strijp-S neighbourhood. Today, Strijp-S buzzes with concept stores, an indoor food market, MU Hybrid Art House and the Area 51 skatepark. The broader area, Strijp, was where the company was largely headquartered: its zones are named S, T and R. In the late 90s, Philips withdrew from the city where it had started in 1891, and the letters I, J and P were never assigned.

Wildfires raged through the national park this summer, but much of the landscape remains untouched – and autumn is the perfect time to go

In the Cairngorms national park, the bracken is changing from dark green to russet and umber. Birch leaves are lined with gold, while the Scots pines remain proudly green. Autumn is arriving with a little sigh of relief here, after a summer few will forget.

The wildfire that began near Glenmore and Abernethy on 15 July burned more than 33 sq km (13 sq miles) of moorland and forest. More than 500 firefighters were involved; homes and businesses were evacuated; and the emergency response lasted over a month. Visiting now, it’s hard to see, or even imagine, the damage. Much of the burned area is high on the hill and far from the roads. It’s a huge loss but, in a national park stretching 4,528 sq km (1,748 sq miles), surprisingly easy to miss.

A new series of rambles cuts the 185-mile trail into bitesize portions reachable by train, with urban beavers, the Devil’s Chair tor and some delicious food along the way

Few pubs boast a more idyllic setting. As I emerge from the woods after a 15-mile hike, The Bridges, on the banks of the Onny River, in the rolling south Shropshire hills, glistens in the late afternoon sun. Inside it’s all wooden beams, with light streaming through stained glass and huge bunches of homegrown flowers adding splashes of colour. There’s time for a pint before general manager Sam Thompson shows me to my room in the recently converted stables.

I’m here exploring part of the 185-mile (297km) Shropshire Way, on a two-day Heart of the Hills hike – one of the county tourist board’s new Rail-Ready Short Breaks. Designed for people who don’t have time to tackle the whole route, the itineraries focus on loops that are easy to access by train, with illustrated PDF downloads, GPX files, accommodation suggestions and highlights of what to do along the way. My route will take me from Shrewsbury to Bishop’s Castle via Ratlinghope – about 27 miles, perfect for a weekend.

The classic pre-dinner drink and snack combo varies depending where you are in Italy. In this fair city, it’s an institution that can even be enjoyed first thing

I arrived in Verona, I admit, without a particularly clear idea of what aperitivo meant. In Italy, the ritual – broadly, a drink and something small to eat before a meal – speaks a different dialect in every city.

Milan has turned it into a polished after-work institution. In Venice, it is more itinerant: an ombra (a small glass of wine) along with a cicchetto (a bite-size snack) and then on to the next bacaro (one of the city’s traditional wine bars). Verona follows another logic.

Ape Sh*t, a new zine by writer and designer Carrie McLaren, looks at the ways monkeys and apes have communicated to humans that they’re individuals too

Zines have always lent themselves to weird and wonderful topics, from sci-fi reflections to punk fanzines to radical political tracts. The underground, often homemade publications have offered readers and writers a way to throw themselves into niche topics since long before the internet.

For Carrie McLaren, a veteran zine maker, the latest topic of choice is admittedly “bizarre”, disturbing and darkly funny: the tortured relationship between humans and monkeys.

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

Having reached 55 years around the sun, your quiz master was spoiled this week with ludicrously elaborate cocktails by his partner, and as a result vowed to deliver a grand, wildly complex set of questions.

Naturally, as the hangover kicked in, that ambition faded immediately: so it is 15 questions of news, bizarre facts and standard Thursday nonsense as usual. Allons-y!

Society tells us there is one way to live a life, and joy is a byproduct on the path there. But you don’t need a reason to enjoy the act of being alive

I have been dwelling on what it means to live well. Not because I have mastered it, but because I have become very comically bad at it. I have spent years rushing through my life, panicked and convinced I was running out of time. I worried constantly about work – getting it, keeping it, doing it, caring about it too much, hating it and losing it. I obsessed over being more productive. I fretted about money, mostly about not having any left after travelling too much. I poured so much energy into dating that it’s kind of impressive I haven’t had a relationship for the last six years.

But most of all I became fixated on my fertility and how it dwindled in my early 30s, leaving me to make choices most women don’t have to until later. I tried to save my eggs and couldn’t. My lack of a partner in a conservative Catholic Lebanese family became a cudgel.

Black communities across the globe have large and complex vocabularies to describe race, shaped by their specific cultures and histories

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One thing you might not know about this newsletter is how much it is shaped by behind-the-scenes chat. The Long Wave team, and its broader family at the Guardian, is a mini-diaspora in and of itself – one that is constantly in conversation. Often, during our meetings, someone will mention what was assumed to be a quirk of their specific background, only to discover that it is replicated almost entirely across the board. This week, we spoke about the fact that in many of our cultures, there is not just one word for “Black”.

“Green”, “red”, “yellow”, “blue”, “wheat”. These are some of the words many tribes in parts of Sudan use to describe complexion. There is no “Black”. I tripped over my words trying to explain to colleagues what these colours denoted – each category is infused with so much cultural depth. In fact, in some cases, they are not even descriptions of complexion, but of features, of broad ethnic background, and even of attractiveness. “Green” means dark, but also implies a sort of uniformity of colour, an even hue, and therefore almost a comeliness. Yellow is lighter, and comes with an unstated connotation of beauty. Blue is the darkest, and is sometimes pejorative, but other times just a description. “Wheat” is the one most likely to be a compliment, a shade that does not diverge too sharply into light or dark.

A teenager struggling with climate anxiety searches for hope in an unexpected place – writing letters to imprisoned activists. Max, 14, is on a quest to understand the human stories behind direct action and why so many climate protesters are in prison​. As replies begin to arrive, a dialogue bridging generations unfolds and connection transforms despair into purpose. ​When Max writes to the judge presiding over a high-profile trial​, he is surprised to hear the letter referred to in the judge's closing remarks

According to city’s rent board, eviction notices are up 44% and tenants are on edge over landlords swooping in over their homes

To say that Maria Zamudio and her team have been busy lately would be a gross understatement.

Every Monday at 9am, the phone lines at the downtown clinic of San Francisco’s Housing Rights Committee start ringing, and they keep ringing until closing at 5pm. In-person counseling appointments for renters facing eviction or landlord misconduct fill days in advance. After every weekend, the staff of seven sits in their office and sifts through more than 150 voicemails. The rental assistance hotline averages 200 calls a week.

Béjar’s daughter was 14 when she told him Instagram was failing to keep her safe. So when he became part of Meta’s ‘wellbeing team’, he knew he had to speak out – and his testimony cost it billions

The Social Reckoning hits cinemas this Friday, but the real world has already been working on a sequel – or rather, a threequel. Directed by Aaron Sorkin, the movie is a follow-up to The Social Network, detailing the further misadventures of Mark Zuckerberg and his social media empire, and in particular Frances Haugen, the employee who in 2021 leaked internal documents that appeared to show Facebook was aware of the harms its products had inflicted.

It’s no spoiler to reveal the film climaxes with Haugen’s testimony to the US Senate, on 5 October 2021. That very same day, Arturo Béjar, a consultant on the wellbeing team of Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook), hit send on a long-gestating email to Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives on a similar theme. “I wanted to bring to your attention what I believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,” Béjar began, before laying out some shocking statistics from his team’s survey. For example: 24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram said they had received unwanted advances, and 21.8% said they had been the target of bullying on the platform in the past seven days. Furthermore, 51% of Instagram users said they had had a bad or harmful experience in the past seven days. Only 1% of them reported it, and of those, 2% had the content taken down – so just 0.02%. This was a far greater degree of harm than the company’s existing measurements suggested. Zuckerberg never replied.

Little if any sign Bury Park is a place where any group might fear to tread, despite Tory MP’s comments to the contrary

From behind the counter of his chippie, Tanner Ahmed is wrestling with the notion that the regular stop-off point for fans attending Luton Town’s nearby football ground could be in a “no-go zone” for white people.

“The whole point of setting up was to cater for thousands who were coming through here every week, especially in the first year when the club was in the Premier League,” said Ahmed, affectionately known as Mr T, in the Bury Park area, a predominantly Asian district of Luton.

We would like to hear from young people in the UK about their experiences of looking for work

About 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in employment, education or training (Neet), according to a report published in May, which warned that the figure could rise to 1.25 million by the early 2030s without urgent government action.

Alan Milburn, the leader of the review into why so many young people are economically inactive, said the UK risked opening up a “generational fault line” between young and old without urgent steps to overhaul schools, the health service, the welfare system and the jobs market.

We would like to speak to people about their experience of using AI agents when dealing with their finances

Following the release of Meta’s Muse and Open AI’s dots there’s now capacity for these AI agents to assist with some financial transactions on a user’s behalf.

With this in mind, we would like to speak to people who use AI agents to manage their finances.

We’d like to hear from people who have been monitored or assessed by AI at work and what they thought about the experience

Firms are increasingly using AI to monitor or assess their employees, leading to concerns about workplace surveillance.

Instructors at tech training company Multiverse recently blew the whistle at their “remorseless” and “unnerving” AI monitoring system, while The Co-Op has used automated listening technology that rates every phone call some of them make to customers.

Perhaps you lost your home or possessions in a wildfire, or your mountain business has been affected by glacial retreat and snow scarcity

Has direct experience of a global climate event where you live changed how you now view the climate crisis?

Perhaps you were sceptical or even denied the climate crisis before the impact of recent global climactic events.

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