Dozens of CIA officers have been afflicted by debilitating symptoms over the past decade. Are they the result of ‘mass hysteria’? Or are they from attacks with an energy weapon and, if so, who is responsible? And has there been a cover-up?

Shortly after 1am one night in April 2019, a CIA officer on a work trip to London was jolted awake in his hotel room by the most intense head pain he had ever experienced. His body was soaked with sweat and he felt like his eyes were spinning in their sockets. He manoeuvred his way out of bed, hoping to make it to the bathroom to vomit, but found his sense of balance had deserted him. Eventually, he fell back into a fitful, shallow sleep.

The next day, arriving at the work meeting he had travelled for, the officer found he could not remember the names of colleagues in the room, people he knew well. As the meeting got under way, he could barely follow the discussion. Initially, he chalked it up to a terrible – if rather odd – case of food poisoning. But over subsequent weeks, worrying symptoms persisted: brain fog, loss of balance and increasingly harsh tinnitus.

I grew up in France, where all children are taught about the revolutionary roots of their nation and what the state owes its citizens. The lessons leave their mark

Young British people have plenty to be angry about. Crushing student debt, private-school privilege, a housing market they can’t enter. Yet unlike their French counterparts, they have little tradition of turning that frustration into collective action. I grew up in France as a Briton, and for years I have watched my French friends do something my British ones never seem to: take to the streets.

“To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! Let’s march, let’s march!” It shouldn’t be too surprising, given the rousing lyrics of La Marseillaise, that France’s revolutionary spirit is not a relic of the past.

Kitty Sayers is a master’s student in journalism

Running is one of the easiest exercises to take up, but it can be easy to lose your mojo and get injured. Coaches give their advice on how to hit your stride

Whether you have never been for a run or are building up to a marathon, sometimes the biggest challenge is just getting out the door. Here, running coaches share their tips on everything from mindset to avoiding injuries – but mainly how to find joy in running.

The broadcaster on her days as a shoplifter, catastrophising, and a first kiss with her dance partner

Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, Stacey Dooley, 39, left school at 15 and worked as a shop assistant. In 2007 she was selected to take part in the BBC reality series Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. This led to the series Stacey Dooley Investigates and her career as presenter of hard‑hitting documentaries. In 2018, her face-to-face confrontation with an Islamic State soldier won her the One World Media award and she also received the MBE for services to broadcasting. She has made three new investigative films for the BBC and presents BBC series Clickbait Clinic. She met dancer Kevin Clifton when they were partnered on Strictly Come Dancing; they have a daughter and live in Merseyside.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I’m quite greedy. I achieve something or something’s feeling really brilliant and I’m, like, “Right, what are we doing next? What are we getting next?”

With an extremely wet and windy winter forecast, take steps to keep you and your home safe and dry

With the Met Office warning that this year’s supersized El Niño could mean a wet and stormy winter lies ahead, it’s never been more important to maintain your home.

Payouts for storm damage to UK homes surged 32% to £244m in 2025 amid the destruction caused by the heavy rain and strong winds that accompanied the likes of Storm Éowyn and Storm Floris.

Holly, 42, a horticulturist, meets Graeme, 47, a forest manager

What were you hoping for?
Really, just a fun night with minimal awkwardness was my fairly low expectation before the meeting.

First impressions?
A very positive, engaging lady with a beautiful smile.

What did you talk about?
Growing food, the joys of seeds, birdwatching, the failings of young people when it comes to proper raving, epigenetics and breaking generational cycles.

President says deal essential to lower US fuel prices but move set to create fresh crisis with Ukraine and Nato allies

Donald Trump was on a fresh collision course with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and European allies on Friday after a stunning agreement to buy Russian diesel, upending years of US and western pressure on the Kremlin to end its four-and-a-half year war against Ukraine.

Zelenskyy reacted furiously to Trump’s announcement of the deal with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, calling it “absolutely terrible” and “not fair and not honest”.

Two women, now in their 50s, say MoD refuses to take responsibility for abuse they suffered as children

Anne and Jane* were 10 years old when a member of staff connected with their British military school in Bünde, Germany is alleged to have singled them out and sexually abused them.

Now in their 50s, the women say he coerced them into keeping silent, and for decades they had only discussed their experiences with one another. “He said if we ever told anybody, then our fathers would lose their jobs and they would be kicked out of the army,” Jane said. “Being two young 10-year-old girls who basically followed their fathers around the world, their jobs were our lives.”

Tom Watson, of Worcester, alleged to be behind Big Time Charlie X account that created so-called Traitorbase

The owner of a recruitment firm has been accused of being at the centre of a so-called “doxxing” campaign against the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), anti-racism activists and business executives who recruit black, Asian and minority ethnic workers.

Tom Watson, from Worcester, is alleged to be behind an X account calling itself “Big Time Charlie”, which was deactivated shortly after he was named by the campaign group Hope Not Hate.

Some say party risks ‘looking twee’ by focusing on small fixes amid growing nervousness that budget lacks ambition

In the days since Labour’s annual conference, party insiders have been sharing a word cloud produced by the pollsters More in Common, which shows the phrases voters most associate with Andy Burnham.

Such polling is rarely flattering for politicians, and the prime minister’s version had its fair share of negatives. But one of the most prominent words in the cloud – and the one that has caught the imagination of Labour strategists – was “trying”.

Tories said to be ready to fight in Clacton, with standards investigation rumoured to be nearing its end

Nigel Farage’s rivals are gearing up for a byelection in Clacton in the months ahead, amid speculation that the standards inquiry into his £5m gift is nearing a conclusion.

Conservative sources said the party was ready to fight in Farage’s seat, although senior figures in the shadow cabinet are divided about whether it would be winnable, given Farage’s victory in a byelection over the summer.

Governors of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida declare states of emergency as a downsized Fema faces first major test

Hurricane Isaias crashed into the US Gulf coast on Friday as a dangerous category 2 storm, hammering communities in Alabama and the Florida panhandle with damaging winds, heavy rain, flooding and life-threatening storm surges.

The first hurricane of the Atlantic season made landfall near Destin, Florida, the National Hurricane Center said. It had maximum sustained winds of 105 mph (169 kph). The storm weakened to just below major hurricane status before it came ashore.

Pentagon said execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be broadcast live

• US politics live – latest updates

The US is facing worldwide condemnation over a “barbaric” plan to execute a disabled man by firing squad and livestream it to the public, with critics comparing the Trump administration to dictatorships in Iran and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed on 3 December.

CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke detained at airport, as police patrol capital amid growing demands chief election officer resigns

Police in New Delhi detained scores of protesters on Saturday – including Cockroach Janta party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipkeas – as ⁠thousands of officers and paramilitaries ⁠patrolled India’s capital to guard against a youth protest demanding India’s chief election officer quit.

The protesters, led by the “Cockroach” youth movement, want the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, to quit over a revision of voter lists that critics say favours prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party. Metro stations were shut and mobile internet suspended in Delhi ahead of the arrival of protesters.

Prospect of contentious Orange Order march through Garvaghy Road in Portadown has led to a nearly two-week standoff

The Northern Ireland secretary of state has banned the Drumcree parade after a 13-day impasse between the Orange Order and nationalists.

Chris Bryant announced on Friday night that it was “not in the public interest” for Orangemen to march the contested route through Garvaghy Road in Portadown, which Catholic residents had blocked.

Competition is hotting up, with National Savings & Investments lifting rates to the highest in years

National Savings and Investments (NS&I) has increased the returns on some of its accounts, with many now paying more than 5% for the first time in nearly three years.

Competition in the savings market has been growing, leading to some of the highest interest rates for years.

Students say they are desperate to get back to class but conditions are so bad that the protests must continue

On a normal school day, Mohammed, 17, wakes at 6am, cares for his younger siblings to help his single mother who works as a security guard, then takes two crowded buses and a local train to get to his high school in Sevran, a low-income banlieue town in the suburbs north-east of Paris.

“There aren’t enough chairs or desks to go round, so some students have to stand up,” Mohammed said. “Classes can be so packed you can’t interact with the teacher. In this year’s heatwaves, it felt like 40 degrees in overcrowded classrooms with no shade or curtains. It was so hot my brain couldn’t function.”

Are we really living through ‘end times fascism’? The authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor think so.

In a new series from the Guardian, the pair speak to Radical Thinking with Aditya Chakrabortty in an extended interview. From Trump 2.0 and the rise of the tech billionaire to Gaza and the ongoing climate emergency, Klein and Taylor argue we are not just lurching from crisis to crisis, but are in a new and dangerous moment in history. However, they haven’t given up hope of a fightback.

Radical Thinking will be published every Saturday in the Politics Weekly feed

Pressure is building on the party leader after byelection defeat, a damaging row over Zionism and polls that show him less popular than Nigel Farage

When Zack Polanski addressed his campaigners flush with victory after the Gorton and Denton byelection in February, he declared: “Labour’s electoral stranglehold is over.” The election of Hannah Spencer as the new Green MP for the Greater Manchester seat was a seismic victory, he continued: “I said we were here to replace Labour and this is what replacing looks like.”

But in the wake of Polanski’s defeat in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection on Thursday, and a calamitous row over the party’s stance on Zionism, the debate around what, or who, could be replaced has shifted to Polanski himself.

Extremists are on the rise globally – but UK activists have seen them off in the past in everything from football, politics, music and more. How did they do it?

Tariq Mehmood encountered the far right early – at primary school. “When white children surround you in the playground and sing, ‘God made little black people, he made them in the night, he made them in a hurry, and forgot to paint them white’, and the school doesn’t clamp down on that, then you’re living within the far right. It’s not one organisation, it’s a mass movement.”

Jimmy McGovern’s grab-you-by-the-throat prison show is back and it could hardly be more urgent, prescient or excellent. Brace yourself though … Bake Off it is not

It takes a lot to drag me away from comfort TV in the autumn. Blame the shrinking hours of light or the apocalyptic news cycle but the closest thing I like to get to televisual trauma in October is watching comedians get into their own graves in The Celebrity Traitors. I doubt I’m alone. I don’t want to psychoanalyse the British public but I’d take a punt that collectively we are just about capable right now of looking at Josh Widdicombe trying to find a purpose next to Emma Willis on the Strictly dancefloor (and reportedly, even that’s a struggle).

Enter legendary Jimmy McGovern with a new series of the Bafta-winning prison drama Time (Sunday, 9pm, BBC One) to drag the nation out of its Bake Off-related coma. Having already covered the devastation of men’s and women’s prisons in the first two series, the good news is that McGovern and co-writer Samuel Bailey’s trilogy surely can’t get any more distressing. The new episodes will be set in *checks notes* a youth offending institution for boys. OK great. It’s about children in prison. Thank you, Jimmy! I hope you’re happy! No one else is going to be.

Her debut made her a global star. Now she has finally written a follow-up – and this time, it’s political. She talks about impostor syndrome, screen adaptations and becoming radicalised

The artist and novelist Audrey Niffenegger began writing the long-awaited sequel to her bestselling debut, The Time Traveler’s Wife, in 2012, just after Obama’s re-election. It was a “rosy” time in American politics, “as good as it gets over here”, she says now, but her new novel required her to imagine what the world might look like in 20, 40, 60 years’ time. In the 14 years she spent exploring various dystopian futures, American politics moved on. And her imaginings began to look worryingly realistic.

An early scene in the new book involves a group of neo-Nazis at a house party. When she was writing it, few people believed the US would witness a resurgence of neo-nazism. It’s not like she is “psychic or anything”, she tells me, the clues were all there. “The first thing I remember reading in the news was Watergate, and so I’ve grown up with Reagan, and the Republicans coming on stronger and stronger, so that every Republican president we get is more of a disaster. And I thought the logical progression of that would be fascism,” she says.

It’s not often I get the chance to admire my handiwork, but I have finally fixed a light switch

For a single strange moment, everything appears to be in hand: the garden is tidy and free of dead branches, thanks to Gardening Steve; the back door, which refused to close properly for most of the summer, has fixed itself in the cooler weather. I’ll take that as a win.

The bathtub’s clawed feet are sitting on two long planks, safely spreading its enormous load evenly across the squishy, sinking bathroom floor. There are, theoretically, further repairs to be undertaken here, but I’ve reached an age where I’ve had to make sharp adjustments to my idea of what constitutes a permanent solution. If nothing else happens, this will do.

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

• Get this in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for Five Great Reads here

Hello and welcome to the weekend.

This selection of reads from across the Guardian has chronicles of evolution, investigations and interviews which ask us to think about how we remember our loved ones when they are gone, and – of course – stories that leave you with a little something sweet.

Jeremy Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg in Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network, and the Last One Laughing star reckons with divorce in her new standup tour

The Social Reckoning
Out now
The David Fincher-directed The Social Network has only come to seem more canny over time, with the site co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg being held responsible for all manner of social ills. In this sequel from Aaron Sorkin (this time directing and writing) based on the incidents around the 2021 leak of internal Facebook memos, Zuck is embodied not by Jesse Eisenberg but Jeremy Strong.

Stephen King’s high-school scare-’em-up is reinvented for 2026, and the pop superstar brings the love in her feelgood live extravaganza. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

Here’s how to follow along with our coverage – the finest writing and up-to-the-minute reports

️ Sprint race updates from 10am BST; qualifying 2pm BST
️ Wolff tells critics: ‘watch Teletubbies not F1’ | Mail Philip

But nothing can delay the portentous driver countdown, not even a down-pore …

And we will not be off in seven minutes. A week after the Malaysian Bahrain rain, more in Singapore.

• New Zealand 50-19 Australia to continue unbeaten run at Eden Park

• Les Kiss’s side start bright but given reality check in second half

New Zealand preserved rugby’s established hierarchy with a 50-19 blowout victory over Australia that secures the Bledisloe Cup for a 24th year and pushes the All Blacks’ unbeaten run over the Wallabies at Eden Park into a fifth decade.

The Wallabies lost touch with their hosts in the second half despite a valiant but futile defensive performance led by the captain Harry Wilson, who had scored a try just before half-time to keep his side in the contest.

• Pat Cummins’ side resume their first innings at Kingsmead

• Any thoughts? Get in touch with an email

69th over: Australia 198-6 (Renshaw 51, Cummins 39) Jansen sees how Nortje is operating and he wants a piece too. The ball is old, why not? Unsociable bouncer at Cummins, who tries to get over it like he did previously but instead wears it inside the curve of his shoulder. Then good fielding behind point denies him a run from the yorker, which is how he escaped Nortje. All of that makes Cummins uncomfortable enough to play and miss outside off stump, but the edge doesn’t come. He’s not daunted though: fifth ball of the over, dropping back past the bowler, you could forgive a lower order player for not belting through for a single. But Cummins does.

68th over: Australia 197-6 (Renshaw 51, Cummins 38) Nortje is firing up, and Renshaw is staying cool. Cummins starts the over, getting a nasty short one that he just about rides the bounce of, then a full straight one that he squeezes out behind square well enough to get off strike. Renshaw though looks absolutely perfect as he defends a mid-level short ball, then goes under a bouncer, then swishes his bat over a wider line to leave.

Former Test batter and Afghanistan coach is taking the Lions abroad and is telling his players to ‘be smart’

Jonathan Trott pretty much entered Ashes folklore from the outset, scoring a series-winning century on his Test debut at the Oval back in 2009. Less spoken about, but just as relevant to the latest move in his upwardly mobile coaching career, is the first time he pulled on an England shirt two years earlier.

Drafted into the Twenty20 side for a low-key home series against West Indies, Trott knew only Ian Bell from Warwickshire and, out of his comfort zone, walked away with scores of nine and two. The difference two years on? Playing cricket in the finishing school of the Lions setup that he has recently taken charge of.

⚽ All the latest news as the Premier League resumes
⚽ Ten things to look out for | Today’s fixtures | Mail us

Talking of West Ham and stoppage-time drama – it’ll all become clear – there was also late drama in the Bundesliga last night. Leaders Borussia Dortmund were all set to maintain their 100% start after late goals from Daniel Svensson (80) and Nico Schlotterbeck (85) put them 2-0 up on Werder Bremen. But Ludovit Reis pulled one back for the visitors on 88 before on-loan West Ham striker, Niclas Füllkrug, headed home an equaliser deep into added time to thwart his former team.

Even New Romantics have a view but this long story will not be cut short amid endless hypotheticals and split narratives

It’s Wednesday afternoon (UK time) and I find myself interviewing Tony Hadley on TalkSport about his upcoming big band tour. We play a bit of Spandau Ballet, chat about the classics and his career – hanging out with Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. In as much as you can deduce in a 10-minute chat on Zoom, Tony seems like an absolute gent.

We do always try to bring it back to sport – Tony is an Arsenal fan, there’s a bit of Arteta, Leeds at the weekend. Tony brings up Billy Bremner and suggests that my co-host Charlie Baker and I are too young to remember him playing. We are, and how wonderful to be called young.

As the top flight returns, armed with the knowledge its serial champions have been the authors of a 10-year sham supremacy, the first question is simple: how is it going to feel?

The internet: an apology. It turns out you were right. It was actually a simulation all along. Now, talk to me about chemtrails again. And yes, maybe Vinícius Júnior has been replaced by a handsome, baffled-looking waxwork.

Welcome to the weirdest weekend of them all. We are now post-judgment, post-statement, postlapsarian. As the Premier League prepares to snap back into what must be described, out of habit, as reality, armed with the knowledge its serial champions have been the authors of a 10-year sham supremacy, the first question is fairly simple. How is it going to feel?

England have the edge over Greece after the first leg of their World Cup playoff but remain a team in transition

It took a labyrinthine move from Sarina Wiegman’s team to find a way through deep-lying Greece. On the outskirts of Heraklion, the ancient city of Knossos, which is associated with the legend of the Minotaur and the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus to contain it, Laura Blindkilde Brown’s quick pass to Alessia Russo was artfully flicked first time to her Arsenal teammate Georgia Stanway and the midfielder slotted in past the goalkeeper Fafailia Petaloti.

There were muted celebrations after the goal, reflective of the frustration they felt at having taken 39 minutes to get their first goal against the team ranked 54 places below them.

• Hall of Famer led 1985 Bears to Super Bowl title

• Coach was known for tough, gruff demeanor

• The Super Bowl Shuffle to SNL: a life in pictures

Mike Ditka, who won NFL titles as a player and coach with the Chicago Bears, has died at 86, his family announced Friday.

“It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved husband, father, grandfather, and friend, Mike Ditka,” the family said. “While the world knew Mike as a Hall of Fame football player, legendary coach, and leader of the Chicago Bears’ Super Bowl XX championship team, we knew him as the heart of our family. Mike will be missed beyond measure and remembered forever.”

Everywhere the PM turns, he finds generous adversaries. They have made his early days in No 10 so much easier

I don’t know where Andy Burnham found his magic lamp, but I hope he’s taking good care of it. In the early hours of Friday morning, the genie that’s looked so kindly on him these past few months granted him yet another wish, with a byelection win in Holborn and St Pancras. It was just the latest gift for a prime minister for whom things keep going right – and who is especially blessed in his choice of opponents.

Let’s start with that win in London, where Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali defeated the Green party leader, Zack Polanski. It’s easy to miss how rare such a victory is. As the veteran psephologist Peter Kellner pointed out, this was a win that “defied history”. If the past half-century were any guide, Labour should have lost, thanks to a “truly dreadful record” defending its own seats when in government and facing a byelection challenge from the left or centre-left, the likes of the Greens or the Lib Dems. The average swing against Labour in such contests had been 24%. “On those figures,” wrote Kellner, “Polanski should have won at a canter.” But he lost.

Jonathan Freedland 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.

It won’t promote growth, will take decades and will swallow up billions of taxpayers’ money. The only winner will be the airport’s owners

Infrastructure sends politicians berserk. Propose more money for the health service or reopening youth clubs and frowns break out all round. Can we afford it? But shout infrastructure and cheers go up. The word suggests glamour, chest-beating and “growth”. Reason flies out of the window.

The saga of Heathrow’s third runway beggars belief. A foreign-owned private company wants to make more money out of its cramped west London investment. The airlines are sceptical and passengers will have to pay surcharges higher than any in Europe. Meanwhile fields lie empty round its rival, Gatwick, and capacity at London’s third airport, Stansted, is underused.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

There was a real chance of a Green byelection win in Holborn and St Pancras. He made bad decisions and cost his party dear

As ever, among all the noise triggered by Labour holding the seat of Holborn and St Pancras, the most plain-spoken and undeniable analysis was provided by that sage and national treasure John Curtice, of Strathclyde University. The result, he said, echoed national opinion polls and reflected two undeniable facts: that the Greens are in need of a period of contrition and reflection, and Labour ought to be slightly less than ecstatic.

Andy Burnham’s party, with a majority of 3,364, he said, showed they “are in a much better position than they were six months ago, but still not as popular as they were in 2025”. The Greens, meanwhile, remain “a more significant player than historically they have ever been”, but have lost much of the ground they gained during Zack Polanski’s first year as leader, when the serial failures of the local MP – one Keir Starmer – provided him and his party with such a glorious succession of political opportunities.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Fixing the broken education system will be just the start. The biggest challenge for an aloof political class is to finally pay attention to an abandoned generation

When adolescents protest that the government is failing to uphold their right to an education, and the government’s response is to send in riot police, the government has lost the plot. People outside France may have spent the past week watching the student protests in Paris and other cities, and thought, “Well, France has a long tradition of insurrection” or, “That’s just the French being French.”

But the situation that has provoked the high-school walkouts and teenage anger is most likely not one they would immediately associate with the France of their imaginations. In place of its lost plot, the French government has a collection of anecdotes and statistics that it should be ashamed of: 27th place in the most recent OECD education rankings, schools with ceilings collapsing and rats in classrooms and, in a school in Bagnolet, no drinkable water; an increase in the average number of students per class from 27 in 2010 to over 30 today; half of primary and high schools missing teachers at the start of the school year – many of them with no substitutes or replacements.

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

Some change in our lifestyles and environments over a generation has caused this increased risk. What, exactly, is a mystery

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

In the field of global health, we often talk about each generation living longer and healthier lives than their parents. We’ve seen this in the gains in life expectancy, the sharp decrease in child mortality and in the near elimination of many vaccine-preventable diseases. But since the turn of the century this progress has stalled, and in some cases several health metrics have gone backwards.

Take cancer, which was long thought to be a disease linked to old age. While most cancers do indeed still occur in elderly people, a new report highlights that a number of cancers are increasing in people who are under 50, often referred to as “early onset cancer”. The report, undertaken by the World Cancer Research Fund, looked at data from 12 different cancer types in England, the US and the Netherlands over the past 20 years. What they found isn’t pretty.

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

The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but at least now I get to say I know a Nobel prize winner

“Anyone worried about pneumonic plague?” This is a friend – a medic – texting me after reading reports at the weekend of the 28-year-old Russian woman who died while working at a “plague research lab” in Siberia. Relying on details from the famously open Russian state guaranteed the presence of a certain dark subtext to the tantalisingly short news item. Namely: lab-grown disease cultivated for reasons unknown and with a 100% mortality rate escapes Russian facility into general population, eight hours’ flying time from London. In other words, we’re all going to die.

A byelection win is a fillip for Andy Burnham and shows Zack Polanski must confront the failures damaging his party’s credibility and appeal

By holding Holborn and St Pancras, Andy Burnham’s Labour has shown it can attract liberal and left-leaning voters. The seat has substantial numbers of young adults, students, professionals and Muslims – offering fertile ground for the Greens’ ecopopulism. However, Labour prevailed. Having won leave-voting Makerfield in June, Mr Burnham can now claim an appeal that bridges Labour’s divided electorate. It’s worth noting that turnout in London was low and Labour’s vote share fell 3.7 points. But that compares with an average 19.3-point fall in four byelections under Mr Burnham’s predecessor. The new leader clearly has bought Labour breathing space and checked the Green advance.

The Greens more than tripled their vote share in the constituency to 33%. But they were beaten. Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali took 45% in Sir Keir Starmer’s former seat, leaving Zack Polanski’s ambition of entering parliament unfulfilled. For a party that began the year promising to turn voters’ hunger for change into a serious challenge to Labour, this was a sobering moment. The passing of a motion declaring “Zionism is racism” at its conference probably cost the party support – though the result in central London alone cannot definitively say that. There is a separate question of leadership. Mr Polanski now says he would have voted against the motion. Why, then, did he not make his opposition clear when it mattered last weekend?

The new exhibition at Tate Britain is part of a wider cultural resurgence from 30 years ago. This is nostalgia for a pre-digital era

Each generation imagines itself to be cooler than the one that went before it, and weirder than the one that comes after it, to update George Orwell. Gen X is no exception. “It felt like something was happening,” Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker writes in the catalogue for The 90s: Art and Fashion, which opened at Tate Britain this week. “Something good. It felt like the weirdos were taking over.”

The exhibition, curated by the former editor of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, is part of a wider 90s cultural revival. Oasis’s Wonderwall was the UK’s unofficial World Cup anthem this summer, after last year’s sellout reunion tour. Pulp have also just completed a world tour. The 1993 novel Trainspotting has become a musical; less surprisingly, so has 90s-set romance One Day, which found a new audience with 2024’s Netflix series. Love Story, which fictionalises the doomed relationship between John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette, broke streaming records. Cult drama This Life is now on iPlayer. Vogue has described the era as “fashion’s most revisited decade”.

Readers respond to articles on the Green party’s motion

As ever, Jonathan Freedland is on the money in his article (The Green party’s anti-Zionism motion is yet another attempt to tell Jews how we should think, 3 October). As a non-religious Jew-ish Londoner, I am appalled at the passing of the motion to declare Zionism as a form of racism, and I am seriously considering leaving the Green party as a result.

While I condemn the Israeli government’s actions against the Palestinian people, and I am not a Zionist myself, Zionism as defined by the motion is only one political interpretation and completely ignores ancient religious and cultural definitions held by many Jews who also condemn the current Israeli government.

Readers gasp at the news that their beloved columnist is leaving the Guardian after 25 years

How could you let this happen (It’s true: this is my final column. You have exactly 24 hours to complain before my inbox self-destructs, 2 October)? You have some truly great writers, and for them I will continue to support the Guardian, but it’s Marina Hyde’s column that many of us look forward to most. She is uniquely and reliably smart, funny and spot-on. Is it money? Like Nye Bevan with consultants, fill her mouth with gold if you have to; you can clean it up afterwards. But I fear I’m too late, and all that’s left to say is: Thank you, Marina, for brightening so many of our days, and for putting our thoughts so brilliantly into words. And thank you, Guardian, for giving her the space to do so.
Richard O’Brien
Highbridge, Somerset

• The honour is all ours, Marina. It’s devastating news to know that I can no longer laugh, cry, squirm, gasp, disagree and love your columns. I have looked forward to reading your words for the last 25 years and you will be very much missed. Thank you, and go well.
Gill Empson
Aston-on-Trent, Derbyshire

Readers respond to Adrian Chiles’s article on the sweet spot between quaint rural place names and nominative determinism

How could Adrian Chiles have overlooked Dorset, where quaint village-naming meets nominative determinism (From Bentley Pauncefoot to Yetts O’Muckhart, I’m obsessed with Britain’s weirdly named villages, 7 October)?

The county is home to the three Matravers brothers: dark and cruel Langton, squandering the family fortune at the gambling tables; Worth, a one-nation Tory and local vicar with a floppy fringe; and youngest brother Lytchett, who was probably something of an afterthought for his parents and who launches social projects but never quite follows them through.

His integrity is one reason I’ve stuck with him, says Nick Davey

Elvis Costello has been a role model since I was a bespectacled teen and he appeared on the music scene to provide some credibility for NHS glasses. I no longer keep the scrapbook, but did cut the clipping from the Guardian in 2022 when he nominated his Honest playlist. His integrity as an artist and a human being has been one reason I’ve stuck with him for 49 years. I was delighted, therefore, to see consistency in his picks for his second Honest playlist (4 October), with Georgie Fame as his alpha and Louis Armstrong’s Keepin’ Out of Mischief as his omega. He seems, however, to have forgotten about his teen party listening. And we’d better not ponder the reasons for his change in response to “The best song to have sex to”. Thanks for keeping my hero in the spotlight.
Nick Davey
Chesterfield, Derbyshire

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Hammam al-Hammami is believed to have been targeting the passenger terminal at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv

The co-pilot who tried to seize control of a passenger jet flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv last week was planning to launch a suicide attack targeting the passenger terminal at Israel’s international airport, prosecutors in the United Arab Emirates said on Friday.

Hammam al-Hammami attacked the plane’s Indian pilot with an emergency axe, but failed to prevent his badly injured colleague from opening the cockpit’s security door to allow passengers to overpower his assailant.

Only ‘very small number’ of people already in Lebanon or Jordan will be referred, says organisation running scheme

The Home Office is facing claims it gave false hope to the people of Gaza after it emerged that a new safe route for Palestinian refugees will only be open to those who have already escaped to Lebanon or Jordan.

Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, announced the reopening of a resettlement scheme for refugees at Labour’s annual conference last month. A statement from her department said: “Around one in four referrals will be for Afghan women and girls and Palestinian refugees, fleeing war and persecution.”

The quake caused buildings and roads to collapse but the country appeared to escape widespread destruction or deaths

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck southern Panama on Friday, damaging buildings and sending thousands into the streets, but the country appeared to escape widespread destruction or deaths.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the ⁠earthquake hit at a depth of ⁠12.6km (7.8 miles), with an ​epicenter in a sparsely populated area about 200km (124 miles) from the capital, Panama City. It lasted about a minute.

Unions tell government to fix ‘overbearing mess’ of inspection regime and its impact on staff wellbeing – or risk industrial action

Tensions between England’s headteachers and Ofsted are developing into a crisis after school leadership unions said they had no confidence in the watchdog and would hold strike ballots unless “significant wellbeing issues” caused by Ofsted’s inspections regime were fixed.

The Association of School and College Leaders​ (ASCL), which includes senior leaders in many secondary schools, described Ofsted’s inspection system as “an overbearing mess” and urged the government to pause inspections to stop teachers leaving the profession.

Exclusive: Firms made more than £340m last year from processing industrial and commercial wastewater at sewage works that are unable to remove many chemical pollutants

Water companies in the UK made more than £340m in revenue last year by pouring billions of litres of industrial and commercial wastewater into sewage treatment works that experts say are not designed to remove most chemicals, leaving pollutants to pass into rivers, seas and farmland.

Water companies in England are required by law to take industrial wastewater and issue permits called “trade-effluent consents” that allow businesses to send it to sewage works, though water companies can refuse applications.

‘The climate issue is the security issue,’ says Turkish minister at Pacific pre-Cop summit in Fiji

Wealthy countries should spend far more on dealing with the climate crisis than the 5% of GDP promised by Nato members for defence because “the climate issue is the security issue”, the host of the next UN summit has said.

But, in comments that are likely to prove contentious, the Cop31 president-designate, Murat Kurum, hedged on whether countries should try to repeat a previous agreement to “transition away from fossil fuels” – the primary cause of the climate crisis – when they meet in Turkey next month.

Lockerbrook, Derbyshire: Last week they were here, now they are not. Yet the details of their epic migration are still a mystery to us

The sudden absence of something, even though you know it’s coming, can dent the heart a little. The Japanese, inevitably, have a phrase for it: mono no aware, the pathos of things – and by things, in this case, I mean house martins.

Last week I had stood in the same spot, looking across the same valley. The weather then was much the same as it was today, low‑angled sunlight through patchy cloud lighting up the yellowing birch leaves and bronzing moors on the north-eastern slopes of Kinder Scout. It had picked out the spread wings of a buzzard a little below my eyeline, along with a haze of large insects, which in fact, I quickly realised, were house martins.

Installation of eight canopy bridges in Alta Floresta has enabled 15,000 safe crossings by animals including spider monkeys and marmosets – and more bridges are planned elsewhere

By about 7am, with dense fog blanketing the landscape, Gabriel Falquetto had already come across several road-killed animals along the ES-164 highway in Brazil’s Espírito Santo state. The biologist was on his way to Kaetés private natural heritage reserve (RPPN) in the Atlantic Forest, where he monitors wildlife and roadkill.

Then he spotted the lifeless body of a primate on the pavement. It was a buffy-headed marmoset (Callithrix flaviceps), a species listed as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list. An estimated 2,500 individuals remain in the wild, making it one of the world’s most threatened primates.

Ex-prince was granted £302,000 in compensation for early end of lease and king has reportedly contributed to costs

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor faced a £1.8m bill to cover repair and restoration of his former Royal Lodge home in Windsor after the lease was officially surrendered.

But the former prince was granted £302,000 in compensation for giving up the lease early on the 98-acre property, meaning his total costs came to £1.5m.

Men found inside RAF Molesworth, used by US and Nato for intelligence, freed on strict conditions as police continue investigation

Two Latvian men have been released on bail after being arrested at an RAF base in Cambridgeshire used by the US military and Nato.

The two men, aged 32 and 26, were arrested at 2am on Thursday after they were discovered inside RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, which is used by the US military and Nato for intelligence operations.

Director general called for ‘a little less conversation, a little more action’ – but from what other songs could he draw inspiration?

The BBC director general, Matt Brittin, has started the job at a time of huge crisis. Money is short, jobs are being cut and it’s likely entire channels will be culled to stem the tide. This is a moment that requires great motivational charisma, which is why, in a recent all-staff call, he urged BBC employees to be “a bit more Elvis – a little less conversation, a little more action”.

Clearly, this isn’t great. But maybe this is how things are now. Perhaps, if you really want to unite a flagging workforce against a vast and inevitable decline, you need to start quoting song lyrics at them. With that in mind, here are some more that Brittin could use in his next call.

Brain drain of psychologists, psychiatrists and nurses leaves NHS ‘weaker’, driving patients to seek care elsewhere

• Full report | NHS at risk of ‘system failures’ as demand for ADHD and autism care soars, inquiry finds

The NHS is facing an exodus of staff quitting its ADHD and autism services to join private clinics amid huge demand from children and adults to get a diagnosis.

The loss of specialist personnel to the private sector has already forced one NHS trust in England to limit access to its neurodevelopmental service to only the most urgent cases.

Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson, 30 and 33, and friend Carter Rhoad, 30, were killed on a surfing trip in 2024

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The parents of Australian surfing brothers murdered in Mexico have said “no outcome can ever undo this tragedy” after three men were convicted of the 2024 killings.

Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson, aged 30 and 33 respectively, and their friend Carter Rhoad, 30, were on a surfing trip to Mexico’s Pacific coast when they were shot dead in Baja California state in a suspected robbery.

Zacharia will replace Karoline Leavitt, who left the role at the end of August after giving birth to her second child

Donald Trump on Friday announced that he had picked Katie Zacharia to be the next White House press secretary, lining up a conservative commentator he called a “devoted fan” to be his most prominent spokesperson.

Zacharia will replace Karoline Leavitt, who left the role at the end of August after the birth to her second child.

Immigration officer shot man in car where five-year-old child was sitting, sparking fierce protests

Leading New York Democrats expressed anger and demanded curbs on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violence after a federal officer shot a man driving a car in which his five-year-old son was sitting, sparking fierce protests.

At least seven shots were reportedly fired and the man was hit in the neck late on Thursday afternoon as children were coming home from school in the busy Marble Hill neighborhood of New York City. Marble Hill is considered part of Manhattan, but is physically located in the Bronx.

Recommended dose of hepatitis B vaccine will be withheld from thousands of newborns by Danish researchers

A controversial research trial that will withhold hepatitis B vaccines from some African newborns was given approval to move forward this week.

It is a central part of the vaccine vision for Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime vaccine opponent.

Brussels says Beijing’s shipments could fall by more than half over four years, cutting millions of vehicles amid fears for European jobs

The EU said it has reached a landmark deal with China to “halve” its sales of hybrid cars in the bloc amid fears surging sales could kill off parts of the European car industry.

Trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič said the deal was the first of its kind and the result of “intense” negotiations with China since June to curb a trade deficit of €1.18bn (£1bn) a day, which has caused mounting tensions between the two economic powers.

Exclusive: Chancellor urged to reverse Jeremy Hunt’s tax surcharge cuts to claw back billions in lost revenue

• Business live – latest updates

Tax cuts for big banks have deprived the UK government of £6bn in revenues, according to campaigners, who are calling on the chancellor, John Healey, to increase taxes and force lenders to pay their “fair share” in the budget.

Calculations by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which represents unions with more than 5.3 million members across England and Wales, shows that the public purse is billions of pounds worse off as a result of tax cuts introduced under the Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt in 2023.

Company, which grown rapidly in recent years, has been under scrutiny as privacy concerns grow

Flock Safety plans to shed about 18% of its employees, people with direct ⁠knowledge of the plans said on Thursday, as the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras and license-plate readers faces mounting opposition to its products from communities and ⁠lawmakers.

The people said the job ⁠cuts came after ​a voluntary buyout program and were expected to affect roughly 270 employees at Flock, a surveillance technology startup that has seen rapid growth in recent ⁠years. Employees will leave the company at the end of the month.

Christian Bittar becomes eighth person to clear their name, days after five former Barclays bankers were acquitted

Former City trader Christian Bittar has become the eighth person to have his conviction for rigging interest rates quashed, just days after five other former bankers also successfully cleared their names.

Christian Bittar, who previously worked for Deutsche Bank, was convicted in 2018 of conspiracy to defraud.

New York film festival: the director has made a fascinating and troubling companion piece to her Netflix documentary 13th, which takes a fiery look at American injustice

It feels at once like the blink of an eye and an eternity since Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th arrived on Netflix, a month before the election of Donald Trump to his first term as president. The intervening decade has more or less borne out the film’s thesis on the enduring specter of white supremacy in American life: that a clause within the 13th amendment abolishing chattel slavery – that involuntary servitude could be used as punishment for a crime – was immediately and continually exploited to criminalize black people, mass incarceration thus being the modern incarnation of America’s original sin.

The Oscar-nominated film, which saw a surge in viewership during the protests of 2020, has remained both a time capsule of late Obama-era moral clarity and, arguably, the acclaimed director’s best picture. At least, until now – 14th, DuVernay’s sequel, of sorts, soon also to arrive on Netflix, is just as lucid and galvanizing as its predecessor, with an updated, more pressing urgency befitting a democracy in distress.

Bourse de Commerce, Paris
There are 700 works from François Pinault’s collection on display – more than half of them by Irving Penn – but it’s a blinkered selection and annoyingly didactic

‘Beware … of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle” scream the words of Aimé Césaire – writ large and bold by Barbara Kruger, in a giant installation, The History of Tears, that fills Bourse de Commerce’s spectacular Rotunda. Kruger’s angry, menacing, viscerally charged work – words as images, and large-scale video clips of people seething with self-hate – is a thrilling setup for Remember Me, an exhibition that promises a take on 200 years of photography through 700 works by more than 70 artists drawn from the collection of the French billionaire François Pinault. That excitement quickly dissipates as the exhibition moves on.

This is the biggest photography show ever held at the Bourse de Commerce. Remember Me has two main problems: first, it tries to say too much with too few artists. For a start, nearly 450 of the 700 or so works are by Irving Penn. It leans heavily on classical, conventional approaches, styles and familiar names, and that creates a very obvious skew in the perception of what photography is, does, and how it is presented.

In this week’s newsletter: Dead-eyed billionaires can’t hold a candle to the maniacal cinematic villains of old – it’s time Hollywood rewrote its source code

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Sixteen years ago The Social Network was released and the first stirrings of a new cinema archetype were seen: the tech-bro villain. Perhaps that’s too damning a description for the Mark Zuckerberg portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg in David Fincher’s 21st-century classic about the dawn of Facebook; he’s certainly not a villain in the mwah-ha-ha, moustache-twirling sense. But he is, at the very least, on the wrong side of antiheroic: brilliant, brittle, status-craving, cruel and in charge of a social network with an exploding user base. Back then of course, the ramifications of this combination of troubling personality traits and transformative technology hadn’t quite dawned on us all: to many, social media sites still seemed a societal net positive. But the character was chilling enough to give even the most Pollyanna of tech evangelists a moment of pause.

Fast forward to 2026, when faith in social media – and technology more broadly – is at Mariana Trench lows, and a sequel to Fincher’s drama has arrived in cinemas, this time both written and directed by the first film’s writer, Aaron Sorkin. The Social Reckoning whizzes the action forward to the tail end of the 2010s, by which time Facebook has grown into a near-trillion-dollar monolith. It follows real-life data engineer Frances Haugen (played by Mikey Madison), whose concerns over the radicalising qualities of Facebook’s algorithm prompt her to leak confidential files to investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), resulting in the release of the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files. Right around the same time as this damaging publication, and also depicted in the film, is the small matter of a riot-slash-insurrection at the Capitol, egged on by the outgoing US president on, among other places, Facebook, prompting his belated ban from the platform by Zuckerberg.

Rick and Morty fans will love ancient Greece animation Krapopolis. Plus, Danny Dyer takes the SNL UK hosting reins. Here’s what to watch this evening

11.40pm, BBC Three

After 37 years, the staunchly silent dog will speak for the first time in the audiobook of his autobiography – and it turns out he sounds like a hobbit

He has been on screen for 37 years, but he has never uttered a word. Now, Gromit will speak for the first time – with the voice of the Hobbit star Martin Freeman.

The claymation dog, who has partnered with his eccentric inventor-owner Wallace in a series of Oscar-winning films including The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, is releasing an autobiography this month – including an audiobook edition.

Warning: contains spoilers
The four short scenes added to the new version has made the film the highest-grossing of all time – but the only people really enjoying this are the Disney accountants

Does it really matter which film is the highest-grossing of all time at the global box office? Will James Cameron be lying awake at night staring into the darkness and pondering whether to withdraw humanity’s access to giant, blue-skinned space elves out of sheer spite, just because Avatar has been dethroned once again by Avengers: Endgame? It seems unlikely. Are the Russo brothers at this very moment leaping and capering with wild abandon because adding a few new scenes and releasing their film for the umpteenth time has led to this momentous changing of the guard? Probably not. Is a Disney accountant somewhere holding a tiny awards ceremony in which every nominee is himself? Well yes, absolutely, because the mouse house ultimately owns both films.

And yet the most interesting thing about Avengers: Endgame’s return to cinemas is not how much money it has made – for the record, the rerelease, titled Avengers Endgame: Encore, had brought in another $126m worldwide by last weekend, taking its lifetime total to approximately $2.925bn (just ahead of Avatar’s $2.923bn) – but what Marvel added to the picture while we were all busy counting.

Drawing from post-hardcore, twee and emo, the Exeter trio’s intoxicating energy feels like an invitation to form your own band

From Exeter, UK
Recommended if you like Boyracer, the Promise Ring, Rites of Spring
Up next Little Bastard EP out now

It’s tempting to view any half-decent scene as either a magical happening or a simple quirk of geography and timing. In reality, they’re more like monuments to the importance of showing up. For that to continue to happen, you need bands like Pushbike. Rattling through four songs in well under 10 minutes, each crooked hook, euphoric yelp and cheesewire guitar lead on their Little Bastard EP feels like an invitation to form a band, draw a flyer, or book a show.

(Blue Note)
This elegant contemporary reinvention of 1963 album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman pairs Marsalis’s post-bop sax with Reeves’ agile vocals, to time-stopping effect

In the early 1960s, the Impulse! label tried to steer its star saxophonist John Coltrane away from increasingly uncompromising and experimental music that it feared might be scaring its customers. Label boss Bob Thiele suggested a more palatable all-ballads album with a little-known African American supper-club singer called Johnny Hartman, whose warm, Bing Crosby-like baritone but bracing absence of schmaltz had already impressed Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Coltrane and Hartman hit it off perfectly, and the 1963 album, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, was an unexpected mini masterpiece of restraint, flawless timbral expressiveness, and mutual understanding.

Invited by Blue Note Records in Coltrane’s centenary year to curate his own tribute, post-bop sax luminary Branford Marsalis made that album the template for Dedicated to You – done as contemporary reinventions, not mere cover versions. Marsalis invited Dianne Reeves, a vastly experienced jazz singer with a Sarah Vaughan-like mix of flawless intonation and agile spontaneity, to take the vocal role. “Listening to all the great singers coming up”, Reeves has said, “I learned that they stood in the band, not in front of the band. They saw themselves as co-creators of the sound.”

(New West)
Following 2023 breakout Time Ain’t Accidental, the best songs here are when Williamson strips back country music, rebuilding it as something familiar yet different

In her essay Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion writes that she left New York City when “the golden rhythm was broken”. Texas-born alt-country singer Jess Williamson borrows the title for the aching opening track of her sixth solo album, on which she contemplates whether she has had enough of Los Angeles. But while Didion was looking back on leaving the city of her youth behind, Williamson is still in LA, wrestling with competing desires to stay or flee.

This tumultuous love-me, love-me-not is set to Williamson’s most traditional soundscapes to date: “Deep in the woods I feel the hum of the city,” she sings on Hum of the City in her strongest Texas drawl over mournful strings and twiddling banjo. Gone are the iPhone-programmed drums that made her 2023 breakout Time Ain’t Accidental so appealingly offbeat, and while the Americana flourishes give weight to Williamson’s nostalgia for her native Dallas, at times they make the album stodgier and less imaginative than her previous record.

Frankfurt Radio Symphony/Altinoglu
(Alpha)
Conductor Alain Altinoglu brings weight and purpose while the instrumental solos are piquant and precise.

If the Leningrad was Shostakovich’s official response to the second world war, the Eighth Symphony was his answer to the question: “Will you tell us what you really think?” Written while the fighting was still under way, its immediacy remains striking today, a quality reflected in Alain Altinoglu’s purposeful interpretation with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony orchestra.

You hear that directness at once in the way the strings dig deep, bringing remarkable colours to a 26-minute Adagio that, in the wrong hands, can sound merely bleak and black. Not that Altinoglu shuns the horrors: his phrasing and textural dynamics bring fearsome weight and a sense of wide-eyed terror to the composer’s protracted cry of despair. The orchestra covers itself in glory with instrumental solos that are piquant and precise. Resonant details are captured by an outstanding German production team that manages to outdo the Berlin Philharmonic’s excellent 2020 account under Kirill Petrenko (Shostakovich fans will need both).

The French author discovered Carson on a bus while stranded in a snowstorm and has been enthralled by her fearless imagination ever since

• Where to start with Anne Carson

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

1. Anne Carson is one of the greatest writers of our time. I discovered her work on a Peter Pan bus from New York to New England. I’d bought Antigonick in a bookstore a few days earlier, almost randomly. From the very first lines, I was enthralled. While we were on the bus, a snowstorm suddenly blanketed the roads, and the other passengers and I found ourselves stuck for 10 hours in rural America, surrounded by an entirely white landscape. I took my computer out of my backpack and started to translate Antigonick into French. Spontaneously. I was so absorbed by the power of Carson’s text that I didn’t notice the hours pass.

2. One of Carson’s greatest strengths is that, unlike so many other contemporary writers, she doesn’t try to “make literature”. She writes. Sometimes clouds do the speaking, in her work, and sometimes monsters do; sometimes, in the middle of a collection of poems, she lets an imaginary Catherine Deneuve take over the narration. Sometimes she writes a letter to her own sleep and sometimes she publishes notes she’s scribbled on her hand. She writes about Homer, but also Rosalía; about Brecht, but also Marilyn Monroe.

Translated by Josh Cohen

The poet and author on F Scott Fitzgerald’s perfect novel, losing faith in Ernest Hemingway – and the recent debut that blew her away

My earliest reading memory
Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy – where an assortment of differently shaped dogs go on a walk – wormed its way into my subconscious when I was very young. The great dane (Hercules Morse, as big as a horse), the dalmatian (Bottomley Potts, covered in spots), the dachshund (Schnitzel Von Krumm with a very low tum) … I could probably still recite most of it from memory.

My favourite book growing up
I had a lot of picture books illustrated by the great Korky Paul, and remember being obsessed – even as quite a young child – with the intricate grotesquerie of it all. He’s probably best known these days for illustrating the Winnie the Witch books, but my favourite was The Rascally Cake by Jeanne Willis, in which a rotund, green-haired man called Rufus Skumskins O’Parsley makes a cake out of disgusting things (rotten eggs, spider legs, garden snails and so on), only for the cake to come to life and attempt to eat him. Probably more than a little bit of Skumskins found its way into the protagonist of my second novel, The Glutton.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle; As You Wake, Break the Shell by Becky Chambers; The Eye of Goliath by Diego Muzzio; Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (Penguin, £9.99)
This short novel won almost every genre award following its 2016 US publication. As a Black writer, LaValle had a conflicted relationship with the works of HP Lovecraft. As a child, he loved the tales of cosmic horror, but grew to recognise the racism and other prejudices of the author. Unable to “throw the man’s stories away” because of how formative they were on his own imagination, he decided to write his own response to one of the most obviously racist, The Horror at Red Hook, recasting it through the perspective of a musician and hustler from 1920s Harlem later known as Black Tom. It’s a powerful tale of horror – both everyday and the occult – told with sheer brilliance.

As You Wake, Break the Shell by Becky Chambers (Hodderscape, £22)
In this cosy science fiction love story set on a distant planet, life is a constant struggle for the human colonists. As the book opens, botanist Signy is yet to meet the love of her life, Cora, a rorqual pilot. Rorquals are gigantic interplanetary creatures, trained by human pilots whose implants allow them to communicate with the beasts as they transport supplies. Chapter 1 is followed by chapter 764, set more than a decade later, when the two women are blissfully married. The non-linear narrative may reflect what we’re told is the rorqual view of time, but it also removes much suspense. The characters are adorable, and the details of growing plants in an artificial environment, or Cora’s relationship with her rorqual, are enjoyable, but readers may grow impatient with the glacial pace and reiterations of their feelings for one another. Even the “naturally solitary” rorqual is given to declaring its love for Cora. In the final pages there’s a tonal shift that ends on a cliffhanger: how Cora and Signy survive is to be revealed in a sequel.

From Coronation Street to It’s a Sin, Davies’ memoir of a career in TV is also a rallying cry for creativity

Television is an intimate art form, once beamed into living rooms, now on devices right in front of our faces. The screenwriter Russell T Davies understands that intimacy. Whether discussing his early days developing lost-to-history soap spin-offs, making a splash with the pioneering gay series Queer As Folk, or reviving Doctor Who to great acclaim, he makes it feel as if you’re at the pub with him, settling in for the night, ready to hear his best stories.

This warm and gossipy autobiography offers a peek behind the curtains of the British TV industry, and as such, it goes light on Davies’s own life story. Instead, he gallops through five decades in the business, using the framework of his TV shows to propel the book forward at great speed. He was born in Swansea in 1963, to a family who loved watching TV. While he was studying English at Oxford, a friend suggested that, as he thought television was so great, he should consider doing it as his job.

PlayStation 5 (version played), Xbox, PC; Epic Games Publishing
This fetchingly presented horror game brings style and scares, but overextends itself with repetition

A small band of soldiers enters an abandoned facility, where puckered flesh sprouts from cold steel. It’s a promising but familiar start to a sci-fi horror story, with heavy overtones of Alien and The Thing. Neither of those, though, were so … dinky.

End of Abyss’s facility is presented as a kind of a model-village recreation of The Thing’s Outpost 31 that you peer into from above. Your little bobble-headed hero takes up a tiny fraction of the screen, with most of the remainder drenched in foggy darkness, or even blanked out entirely. This is a world of Usborne-style cutaways, where anything outside the walls is total blackness.

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.”

Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester
Matthew Dunster’s disruptive reinvention of the tragedy merges two roles for its star and at times enters Game of Thrones territory

The TV series Succession was partly modelled on King Lear, the family name Roy derived from the monarchic French roi. Returning the compliment, Matthew Dunster’s production centralises dynastic dynamics among the young as they plot around a splintering figurehead.

The reading is supported by a modern setting – jeans, car keys and handguns for hessian, horses and swords – on an Anna Fleischle set of spangly strings variously dividing the stage into a nightclub, England and France, dungeons and, in the storm scene, serving as shower curtains to keep theatregoers dry.

The Turbine Hall gets haunted by sound art and the colossal air fair opens its doors, while Sherman champions the fantastic and the grotesque – all in your weekly dispatch

Tarek Atoui
Sound art inspired by everyday objects and the eerie harmonies of history provides the latest artistic intervention in Tate Modern’s biggest space. Read more here.
• Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, from 13 October to 11 April

Barbican theatre, London
With a dual narrative set in Tokyo and a world of dreams, Philippe Decouflé’s epic production is as bewitching as its balletic unicorns

How to stage Haruki Murakami’s epic, dual-narrative novel without leaving the audience in a muddle? Director-choreographer Philippe Decouflé goes big, filling the enormous Barbican stage with a kaleidoscope of dream worlds for Ako Takahashi’s adaptation. It could have become a scramble of stories and inquiries into memory, technological advances in society and the imagination. Instead, it is turned into one long immaculate coup de théâtre.

There are two versions of the protagonist, Watashi (Tatsuya Fujiwara) – one is in Tokyo, the other in a world comprising dreams. The city is noirish while the latter is beautiful but dangerous, with a complicated storyline involving the sundering of humans from their shadows, a walled city, roaming animals and a professor (Narushi Ikeda) who collects their skulls to channel past experiences through sound.

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.

Student protests across France, Russian strikes on Kyiv, wildfires in Indonesia and Comic-Con in New York – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Commercials once launched careers from Ridley Scott to Guy Ritchie, now automated production is cutting costs – and the chance to learn by doing

When Ridley Scott was awarded the UK’s highest accolade for a glittering career directing films from Alien and Blade Runner to Gladiator and The Martian, he reminded those attending the Bafta event eight years ago that making commercials had been his “film school”.

The advertising industry has long been a breeding ground for British film and TV talent who have gone on to make the jump to Hollywood productions, including Guy Ritchie, who started out making music videos and commercials, and Paddington in Peru director Dougal Wilson, whose credits include a number of John Lewis’s famous Christmas ads.

Layby hookups are all in a day’s work for Romola Garai in her steamy new drama Adultery. She talks faking orgasms, keeping secrets – and making audiences pass out

In a raging storm in the Peak District last winter, a blue Toyota Yaris was parked in a remote roadside spot with a sex scene being filmed inside it. “It can pose challenges, depending on the size of the car,” chuckles Romola Garai. “Me and Dominic [Cooper] got in this hatchback and asked: ‘How far do these seats go back?’ Soon there was a gale blowing outside. We were in the car, ready to shoot, but outside the entire film crew were being buffeted by high winds. They said: ‘You guys stay in there, don’t get out!’ while all the lights were getting blown away.”

What did the co-stars do while the camera crew battled the elements? “What actors always do in these situations – have a long, gossipy conversation about people in the industry. While everyone else was trying to save the show, we were sitting in the car, like: ‘Well, I’ve heard he’s a total nightmare!’”

The comedy wunderkind shot to fame with his show Literally, Who Cares?! and a role in Lena Dunham’s Too Much. Now he’s bringing his take on self-involved zoomers to the TV screen. Just don’t call him the voice of a generation

Leo Reich’s new Channel 4 sitcom is “Girls meets Peep Show. That’s always my favourite part of pitching anything: choose two really good things and say it’s a mix of those!” says the comedian with a slight smirk. Still, it’s a fair summary: It Gets Worse is a bracingly candid, occasionally provocative hangout comedy about twentysomethings floundering professionally and personally in the big city that comes accompanied by a strong stench of British bleakness (see: the title, for a start). Yet it does fail to flag one key aspect. While Girls and Peep Show covered the travails of millennials and gen X respectively, It Gets Worse is happening now – making it the UK’s first true gen Z sitcom.

Or not. “I’m sceptical of the idea that generations have any real unifying features across the board, so I don’t want it to be like: this is a gen Z sitcom!” says the 28-year-old. In fact, it soon becomes clear that It Gets Worse is deliberately USP-less. We first meet Reich’s Ethan – “a middle-class loser gay guy” – and his pals Sam and Abi as they’re packing up their London flatshare, having been forced out because of a rent hike. But this isn’t the start of a meditation on the cost of living crisis – or anything else. “The point isn’t there’s some big concept where everyone’s a superhero, it’s: these are some people dot dot dot.” When I ask how closely the final show resembles his original idea, Reich looks askance. “The idea, I would say, was quite broad …”

An autumn break in the French mountain town of Saint-Gervais-Les-Bains offers thermal treatments and glorious walking trails before the winter ski crowds descend

Mont Blanc is hiding behind the clouds, but the Aiguille du Midi spears the sky above a mountainside ablaze with russet, gold and tawny tones. The maples flare red; rowan trees are dusted with crimson berries.

Our little group has trundled up to Mont Lachat station (altitude: 2,115 metres) on the Tramway du Mont Blanc, the century-old cog railway that climbs improbably steep slopes from the French alpine town of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains. Operational since 1909, the railway was once intended to reach the 4,809-metre summit of Mont Blanc, but war, glacial terrain and waning funds put an end to that ambition. But even from Mont Lachat, the view is a showstopper. On one side, the Bionnassay Glacier slips scenically down the slope, a buzzard soaring over the milky-green glacial lake at its base, while on the other the Chamonix valley basks in soft autumnal sunshine.

This fantastic tart is a minor miracle invented by a legendary chef, yet it has very few ingredients and an intriguing technique for baking it

Often, the greatest dishes are made from very few ingredients and with pretty standard techniques, and this tart is one of them. It’s based on an old Frédy Girardet recipe that, despite his reputation as one of the all-time greats, calls only for a simple application of process to deliver a knockout result (which is one reason I put it in my latest book). A pastry case is spread with sugar and cream, then dotted with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon. The pastry is not blind baked, but filled and baked in a very hot oven. That sounds wrong, but it is not: a fierce heat is needed to bake the pastry under its filling and to meld the cream, sugar and butter. A pinch of flour is mixed with the sugar and, as it all boils up, that smidgen of flour holds everything together as it bubbles and reduces until it takes on the appearance of condensed milk while the pastry cooks and toasts at the edges. I still use Girardet’s quantities because, unsurprisingly, they work perfectly. Merci, chef.

Henry Harris is chef/co-owner of Bouchon Racine, London EC1. His book, The Racine Effect, is published by Quadrille at £40. To order a copy for £36, go to guardianbookshop.com

Whether it’s a super-glowy serum or a cult gardening tool, here are our writers’ favourite buys from the past year

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The Filter is turning two! To celebrate, we asked our contributors for their favourite products from the past year, and rounded up the team’s picks too.

From handbag-sized umbrellas and stylish yet practical wellies to reading lights and luxurious duvets, these are the products that stood out.

Our reviewer sheds some light on the best dawn simulation alarms, from Lumie and Philips to Dreamegg

• The best eye masks to help you sleep better

To wake each day in darkness is a plight you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, yet that’s what many of us do routinely throughout winter. Getting up in the dark decouples our life from our circadian rhythm (our body clock), with bodily processes such as cognition and metabolism put to work before they’re fully prepped.

Thank heavens, then, for sunrise alarm clocks. These “dawn simulation” devices glow with gradually intensifying brightness as your wake-up time approaches, kickstarting your circadian rhythm before you get out of bed. For many users, this results in a happier, healthier start to the day.

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.

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.

A touch of homemade scotch bonnet jam turns up the heat in this classic concoction

Our daiquiri sums up what All Roads is all about: familiar flavours with a little twist. Pineapple, rum and lime are a classic combination, and the addition of scotch bonnet jam brings a subtle warmth that makes this just as good for those first crisp autumn evenings as it is on a sunny day.

Malika Green and Paschelle Brown, All Roads, London SW9

A crisp surface and creamy core are the traits of this cheesecake with no base, here topped with spiced and sliced apples and a sticky, caramel sauce

My go-to cheesecake these days is a burnt Basque. It’s so good it doesn’t even need a biscuit base, which might be the very reason some people aren’t fans. But Basque cheesecakes are rarely too sweet, because the burnt top provides just enough bitterness to balance things out and the insides stay ridiculously creamy. If I can give you one tip, though, it’s to make sure you take it out of the oven while it’s still really wobbly, to get the best set. An overbaked Basque is no fun at all.

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.

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?

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).

From a flat in a new urban village in London to a family-sized home in a rural village in Norfolk

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.

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.

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.

The sleep disorder has been the butt of jokes and a comedic plot point, but the reality of living with narcolepsy is anything but funny. Things could be about to change for people with the condition though, after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first ever drug to treat narcolepsy itself, rather than just its symptoms. Madeleine Finlay tells Ian Sample how the scientific breakthrough came about, and Julie Flygare, who has narcolepsy and founded the non-profit Project Sleep, explains what it is like to live with the condition and how the drug could be gamechanger

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 1,700ft wall in British Columbia, is deceptively described as “mostly easy slab climbing”, interspersed with “short steep sections that can include finger cracks” and “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.

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.

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 commanding the catwalks to acting as plus-ones for their famous parents, celebrity kids are bang on trend

Knee-length skirts and bras worn as tops were two of the main takeaways from fashion month, which wrapped up this week. But the biggest trend had nothing to do with clothing. From New York and London to Milan and Paris, the shows were the ultimate proof of a nepo baby takeover.

John Travolta’s daughter, Ella Bleu, 26, made her Paris catwalk debut at Miu Miu. Apple Martin, 22, the daughter of Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, walked the Chloé show.

After 10 years as creative director of the Paris-based luxury brand, the designer bows out. From a rock’n’roll aesthetic to see-through brogues, here are 10 stand-out moments

Our four-legged friends are turning heads from Louis Vuitton to Schiaparelli – but what does their presence in the most exclusive of spaces say about the industry’s changing attitudes?

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The front row at a fashion week show is a known hotspot for celebrities. During the most recent iteration that wrapped up on Tuesday, sightings included Heathcliff, AKA Jacob Elordi, high-fiving the Adolescence star Owen Cooper at Bottega Veneta; Rihanna arriving 63 minutes late to the Matières Fécales show; and Dua Lipa gossiping with Nicole Kidman and Pedro Pascal at Chanel. But peppered in among the Hollywood crowd was another type of guest going head-to-head for the photographers’ attention: dogs.

From a cavapoo at Louis Vuitton to a shih tzu at Schiaparelli, four-legged companions – rather than designer bags – sat on the laps of many showgoers. At the Balenciaga show, Brooklyn Beckham and Nicole Peltz sat next to Miranda Priestly – no, not Meryl Streep in her Devil Wears Prada character, but the brand’s creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli’s rescue dog. Tommy Hilfiger took his post-show bow with a fluffy samoyed – a look-a-like of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s pup who stars with Kelce in a campaign for the brand. Elsewhere, a miniature schnauzer in goggles and a chihuahua wearing a puffer jacket took over the catwalk at Chopova Lowena.

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.

The lost practice of hitchhiking is a subculture, an art, and a way of travel that satisfies wanderlust like no other trip. Plus, it costs nothing

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I’m alone, hunched over by a dusty road junction, and feeling the bite of the morning sun. I’ve already been waiting here, on the outskirts of Esperance on the south coast of Western Australia, for more than three hours. Another wave of traffic approaches. I smile, stretch out my arm and raise my thumb.

Most drivers who pass wave or give me a thumbs up. One gives me the finger. There isn’t much traffic. Someone tosses a water bottle out their window at me.

From a historic bathhouse in Sweden to forest bathing in Croatia, readers share their favourite places to relax and recharge

• Tell us about a small European ski resort – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Tucked away off a pretty shopping street in a beautiful art nouveau building is one of Stockholm’s oldest spas, Centralbadet where a day ticket costs from £23. As winter darkness descends, candles are lit around the pool and a quiet calm envelops you. Swimming by candlelight is a treat. Next a sauna followed by an ice-cold plunge. Afterwards a nightcap is in order so it’s a brisk walk in the cold crisp air to Fotografiska restaurant. It’s a great spot to savour one of Stockholm’s best views; the old town Gamla Stan and the twinkling lights on Lake Mälaren.
Sarah Rochfort

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.

From talking horses and savage humans to Home Alone, The Fugitive and The Untouchables, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Which high-profile US politician used to rap as Mr Cardamom?
2 What is Anguilla’s lucrative internet domain?
3 Ostalgie is the yearning for aspects of life in which former country?
4 Which church is recreated in Lego’s largest set?
5 Which siblings lived at Dove Cottage, Grasmere?
6 How did Saffie Osborne make horse racing history in September?
7 Which challenge starts near Fort William and ends on Yr Wyddfa?
8 Which TV historian was at school with Gazza?
What links:
9 Benjamin Franklin; Francis Moore; Joseph Whitaker; John Wisden?
10 Lily Snowden-Fine; Cecily Bloom; Harley Bird; Amelie Bea Smith?
11 Burgundy; Aviz; Habsburg; Braganza?
12 First of Shawwal and tenth of Dhul-Hijjah?
13 Tiny people; giant people; impractical intellectuals; talking horses; savage humans?
14 Ketchup; blood; paint; quicksand; silly putty; toothpaste?
15 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Home Alone; The Fugitive; The Untouchables?

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

Our wildlife series Young Country Diary is looking for articles written by children, about their autumn encounters with nature

Once again, the Young Country Diary series is open for submissions! Every three months we ask you to send us an article written by a child aged 8-14.

The article needs to be about a recent encounter they’ve had with nature – whether it’s a hedge full of berries, a beetle on the move, or a nervous deer.

Crops such as vetch, field beans and forage peas can improve soil if you use them as a mulch

I am locked in an eternal battle with my soil. Now, I adore the earth and believe it to be miraculous in its life-giving properties. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t sometimes (or often) feel deeply frustrated with the intransigence of the heavy clay I’m working with in my veg patch. Clay soil is especially miraculous in how nutrient dense it is. Yet, those nutrients are, somewhat ironically, more challenging for gardeners to access for their crops than with other soil types.

The answer – as with almost all problems faced in a chemical free, mostly no-dig garden – is adding a mulch of organic matter (either compost or well-rotted manure) that can be incorporated into the earth by insects, who will improve its texture in the process. And yet, this trusty approach is tricky in my veg patch as we live on a hill and there is about a metre’s difference between one side of the site and the other. This situation (plus the stubbornness of soil made sodden by a wet winter and then solid by a heatwave summer) has meant the layers of compost I laid over the last year have been either washed away or not particularly well incorporated into the deeper soil.

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

Species with leaves large enough to be seen from space is already critically endangered – and plans are afoot to protect it

A chance social media encounter has led to the race-against-time discovery of a new species of giant waterlily that has until now been hidden in the depths of Colombia’s jungle.

But the plant, which is so huge it is visible from space, is already considered critically endangered.

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

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.

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.

Ahead of the budget later this month, we’d like to hear from people in the UK about what measures they feel might help – or not help – financially

We want to find out more about any financial concerns people in the UK have ahead of the budget on 28 October 2026. What measures would you like to see in the budget and what issues would you like to see addressed?

For instance, do you have particular concerns around energy bills, petrol, childcare, fiscal drag, pensions – or something else? Let us know below.

First Edition newsletter will be hosting a reader Q&A with economist Isabella Weber, a leading voice on inflation, affordability and cost of living and now’s your chance to put your questions to her

Isabella Weber is one of the most sought-after and influential economists of her generation, and has advised policymakers and governments in the US, Germany, Europe and Latin America.

She has become a leading voice on inflation, affordability and the cost of living. Her new book, Anti-Fascist Economics, looks at the relationship between economic insecurity and the rise of the far right, arguing progressive politics must respond to the rise of authoritarianism by urgently addressing the economic pressures people experience in their daily lives. For years Weber was treated as an outlier.

Weber is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate in research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center, and is the author of the prize-winning How China Escaped Shock Therapy.

We’d love to hear your questions. Perhaps you would like to find out how the cost of living affects the current political landscape? What’s happening in the bond markets? Or the advice she’d give to progressive politicians, from incumbents like Burnham and Mamdani to the German parties taking on the AFD. From austerity to zero deficits, nothing is too simple or complex.

We would like to hear from students and staff about the impact of the strikes

Students at Edinburgh, Dundee and Nottingham face a term without any teaching due to staff strikes as the higher education sector struggles with rising financial uncertainty.

University and College Union (UCU) members in Edinburgh launched their industrial action on 28 September, while their colleagues at the University of Dundee were embarking on a five-week strike. UCU members at the University of Nottingham announced a further round of strikes starting on Monday 5 October and lasting until the end of the semester in December.

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.

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