A woman’s confession on the eve of her nuptials causes uproar in this insouciantly offensive provocation from the director of Dream Scenario

• This review contains spoilers

How much of your past should you reveal to your adorable fiance before the big day? Very tricky issues are probably best avoided in the run-up to the ceremony, but can still be recklessly raised by attractively naive young people who assume the worms surely can’t be that big or plentiful – or difficult to get back into the can.

Such a situation is the centre of this contrived but amusing high-concept, high-anxiety movie from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli; a Euro-satire of American bourgeois aspiration that sets out to discomfit and excruciate in the spirit of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure or Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen.

Clustered together in the area of Cheetham Hill are more than 50 shops specialising in vapes and vaping paraphernalia. How can they all make a living – and for how much longer?

I meet Ali outside his tiny wholesale business, Fly Vape – the store name combined with the image of a vape bookended by angel wings appears on the shopfront. In place of a halo is a cloud of vapour. The softly spoken 40-year-old says that working in the vape trade is “OK, better than nothing”. He opened Fly Vape just over two years ago, selling vaping products to small retailers such as convenience stores. Candy-coloured boxes bursting with fruity flavours line the shelves, although body sprays, soft drinks and a plentiful selection of bongs are available too. His customers come “from all around the UK”, he says, although he names only “Leeds, Bradford, Hull”. He shrugs at the fact that, compared with his neighbours, his sales are modest. He is not one of the “big men” here, he grins.

Ali’s store is in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, where two adjoining litter-strewn back streets near Manchester prison (formerly Strangeways) have emerged as a surprising industry hub in recent years. Ali’s is one of more than 50 outlets specialising in vapes and their accompanying products in an area that has been dubbed Britain’s “vape capital”. Most appear to be wholesalers; there are few passersby and some doors bear signs stating “trade only”, “not open to the public”.

It costs the UK economy £700m a year, and criminal gangs are operating with near impunity. Every time a lorry gets robbed, raided or hijacked, it’s Mike Dawber who investigates

In August 2021, Mike Dawber, the UK’s leading detective in cargo crime, got a call from officers in Bradford CID. They were planning to search two warehouses that contained, in their words, an awful lot of suspicious goods. This was a job that required Dawber’s expert eye. He drove an hour from his home, in the unmarked police car that doubles as his office, and arrived to discover the description barely did it justice.

As soon as he walked in to the first warehouse, he noticed 17 pallets of golfing equipment. They had, he knew, been stolen three weeks before from a truck at Lymm motorway services, just outside Manchester. He reckoned they were worth about £1m. As Dawber continued his survey, he came across 18 pallets of Asics trainers, stolen three years before, at Warwick services. Then 14 pallets of lawnmowers: five years before, from a truck on the A1 at Colsterworth. He came across IT equipment, sportswear, high-end fashion, electrical goods, toasters, microwaves, beauty products. One pallet was simply labelled “Eyelash technology”. Dawber didn’t know what eyelash technology was, exactly, but he later learned that a pallet of it was worth more than £500,000.

Today, the space around Earth can no longer be considered empty. More than 30,000 objects are in orbit, and that figure is rising exponentially

Some reports suggest that by the end of this decade there could more than 60,000 active satellites in space. Launch by launch, what began with a handful of scientific and military spacecraft has accelerated into a constant flow of objects, publicly and privately owned, placed into different orbital lanes, each serving a variety of purposes.

There is now a diverse collection of satellites spinning around the globe, ​including communication​ and weather ​satellites​, navigation satellites and Earth observation technology that takes images of the surface.

The R&B singer’s must-read autobiography candidly describes a life of heady highs and horrific lows

Despite a 30 years-plus discography and a slew of undeniable classics (Sittin’ Up in My Room, The Boy Is Mine, modern R&B blueprint What About Us?) and deep cuts feted by the likes of Solange, Kehlani and Normani, there’s a sense that Brandy, the fan-anointed Vocal Bible, is still underrated. Her vividly told and occasionally harrowing memoir, Phases, co-written alongside Gerrick Kennedy and out on Tuesday, goes some way to explaining why that might be.

As well as detailing her formative years in Mississippi and later California, where she learned her trade singing in church choirs and at youth groups, and later her meteoric rise as a teenage superstar, Phases paints a picture of a young woman whose insecurities were often exposed and abused by others. It also spotlights issues around duty of care in the music industry; in 1999, while nursing an addiction to diet pills, and juggling her role on the hit teen sitcom Moesha with a relentless recording and touring schedule, Brandy suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of just 20.

Ranging from quantum mechanics to eating disorders to the nature of fiction, this is a breathtaking interrogation of family, connection and memory

Transcription ends with an epilogue. It’s a letter, or at least an extract from a letter, written by Leopold Blaschka, a 19th-century Bohemia-born artist who, with his son Rudolf, crafted intricate and breathtakingly realistic models of flowers, plants and sea creatures made out of glass. So astounding was their technique, so uncanny, that sceptics assumed they must be using secret devices. “It is not so,” he insisted. “We have the touch. My son Rudolf has more than I have because he is my son and the touch increases in every generation.” Until this point, Blaschka hasn’t been referenced by name even once. But here, in coda form, is the essence of Transcription, a novel about touch, devices and familial inheritances that is itself intricate, uncanny, sometimes breathtakingly realistic.

It begins with a middle-aged American narrator travelling to Providence, Rhode Island, home to Brown University, where Ben Lerner studied poetry and political theory as an undergraduate. He is there to conduct a magazine interview with a polymathic German intellectual named Thomas. No ordinary assignment: Thomas was his mentor at college, the father of his friend Max, and now, at the age of 90, this conversation is expected to be his last will and testament. At the hotel, bathos strikes – the narrator drops his smartphone in a sink; it’s unusable and he’s too embarrassed to confess. Thomas soon gets into his conversational stride, but his rich sentences go unrecorded.

Fully loaded Kuwaiti tanker set alight as Israeli military spokesperson says country has ‘the munition, targets and manpower’ to continue campaign

• Kuwaiti tanker hit by Iranian attack in Dubai port, raising oil spill fears

• Trump threatens to ‘obliterate’ Iran’s energy grid if ceasefire not reached ‘shortly’

Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry has said it has intercepted and destroyed ten drones over the past hours, and eight missiles launched towards the Riyadh area and the country’s eastern region.

Early this morning Kuwait said its air defences were responding to hostile missile and drone attacks. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Kuwait said where the drones or missiles came from.

Iran attacked and set ablaze a fully loaded crude oil tanker off Dubai. Local authorities later said response teams contained the incident with no oil leakage and that no injuries had been reported

Donald Trump warned that the US would obliterate Iran’s energy plants and oil wells if it did not open the strait of Hormuz.

The Israeli military said four soldiers had been killed in combat in southern Lebanon, where its forces are clashing with Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Two giant Chinese container ships have sailed through the strait of Hormuz on their second attempt to leave the Gulf after turning back on Friday, ship-tracking data shows. The transit signals a diplomatic breakthrough between Beijing and Tehran as Iran widens its list of approved nations for transiting the vital route, Lloyd’s List reported.

Indonesia’s foreign minister called for an emergency UN security council meeting and a thorough investigation” into a “heinous attack” after three UN peacekeepers from Indonesia were killed in southern Lebanon.

Blasts were heard in Tehran and power cuts hit some areas of the capital, Iranian media reported on Tuesday. Israel earlier carried out missile strikes on what it called military infrastructure in Tehran and infrastructure used by Hezbollah in Beirut.

Japan and Indonesia agreed to step up coordination on energy security, Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi said on Tuesday.

Two Iranian missile launches targeted central Israel, Israeli media reported, with the emergency service saying it had not received reports of any injuries.

Turkey reported a ballistic missile launched from Iran had entered Turkish airspace before being shot down by Nato air and missile defences.

An earlier summary of key developments is here.

Government willing to help some consumers with energy costs as experts predict price cap to rise by £288

Q: What do you make of the suggestion that Donald Trump could end the Iran war without securing the strait of Hormuz? Or do you think he should finish the job?

Farage replies:

I don’t think we should take literally anything right now that Donald Trump says … And then the last thing he’s going to do, or the last thing his colleagues in the White House are going to do, is to give the Iranians any idea of what their true intentions are.

Was it to remove nuclear capability? Was it aimed at regime change? I don’t think any of us quite know the absolute truth about that.

The problem is any third party inquiry is a waste of space unless you can subpoena police officers, social services, civil servants who were all part of turning the collective blind eye. And I think everything this government has done on this issue is an attempt to literally kick the can down the road, to not fully open this up.

Ex-Radio 2 presenter reportedly investigated over claims relating to teenager but case closed through lack of evidence

Scott Mills was questioned over allegations of serious sexual offences against a boy under 16 in 2018 but the case was later closed due to lack of evidence, it has emerged after he was sacked with immediate effect.

Mills, who hosted Britain’s most popular radio breakfast show on BBC Radio 2, was taken off the air last week, and on Monday the BBC announced his contract had been terminated.

PM says union’s decision to reject deal for extra training posts and 7.1% pay rise without putting it to members in England is ‘reckless’

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has threatened to withdraw an offer of thousands of extra NHS training posts if resident doctors in England do not call off a six-day strike after Easter.

The prime minister has given the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association, 48 hours to ditch its plans for industrial action or the government will pull the current offer from the table.

Exclusive: Reform UK will be ‘steering well clear’ of CPAC event in July, says a source, as will senior Tories

Nigel Farage will snub a major conference of US conservatives that is being brought to the UK by Liz Truss.

The short-lived former prime minister, who was accused of crashing the economy, was chosen by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to lead a version of the event in the UK in July.

Homes evacuated in Lurgan as police carry out controlled explosion on device, which man was forced to carry in ‘terrifying ordeal’

Gunmen hijacked a car, placed a device inside and forced the occupant to drive the vehicle to a police station in Northern Ireland on Monday, prompting a security alert and the evacuation of about 100 homes.

Some streets in Lurgan, County Armagh, remained shut on Tuesday morning as police investigated the scene.

Louis Mosley says government should resist calls to trigger break clause in £330m deal with US analytics company

• UK politics live – latest updates

Palantir’s UK boss has urged the government not to give in to “ideologically motivated campaigners” as government ministers explore a way out of a £330m NHS contract with the tech company.

Ministers have sought advice on triggering a break clause in Palantir’s deal to deliver the Federated Data Platform (FDP), amid questions over the company’s presence in the public sector.

Nearly 70% of under-16s with accounts on Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok had maintained access, survey finds

The Australian government has accused big tech firms like Meta, TikTok and Google of disobeying the landmark ban on under-16s using social media, after the country’s online safety office warned many children had accounts.

A survey of 900 Australian parents found around a third (31%) said their children still had one or more social media accounts after the ban, compared to 49% before the laws.

Inquiry will directly look at whether factors influenced offending and institutional response in England and Wales

• UK politics live – latest updates

The grooming gangs inquiry will directly examine whether ethnicity, culture or religion influenced offending and whether they shaped the institutional response.

The statutory independent inquiry has published its terms of reference, which will be laid before parliament when it returns from recess on 13 April. The inquiry will then begin its full investigation into the group-based sexual exploitation of children in England and Wales.

Two AH-64 Apache helicopters on training run maneuvered near hillside home of Trump-supporting musician

The army has launched an administrative review after two AH-64 Apache helicopters on a training run hovered near the hillside home of Kid Rock as the outspoken supporter of Donald Trump saluted their crews.

Kid Rock posted two videos on social media on Saturday. Each shows a helicopter hovering alongside his swimming pool while the entertainer claps, salutes and raises his fist in the air. The Nashville skyline can be seen in the background.

From Italy to France, Germany to Hungary, far-right governments and politicians are targeting media with the same playbook

• Revealed: Five EU governments found to ‘consistently’ dismantle rule of law

Barely six months after Giorgia Meloni’s government was sworn in, the chief executive of Italy’s public broadcaster Rai resigned. Carlo Fuortes cited “a political conflict” as the reason for his departure in May 2023, a year before the end of his term.

The top posts quickly went to nominees with ties to Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist roots. Rai’s CEO is now Giampaolo Rossi, a former Rai board member who has in the past voiced support for Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.

Nationwide reforms aim to standardise collections and expand food waste recycling to tackle stagnating rates

Recycling rules across England have long been inconsistent – but that will change from Tuesday when the government’s Simpler Recycling legislation comes into effect.

The poster child of the AI boom, valued at $850bn, needs to show strategic discipline after ‘casting its net too wide’

If OpenAI is going to float this year, it has to get serious about its business model. The wow factor around the US company – the poster child of an AI industry boom that has stoked fears of a stock market bubble – has been long established, but when will the profits come? The party can’t go on for ever.

The developer of ChatGPT is one of the biggest startups in the world and is now valued at $850bn (£645bn). Meanwhile, it is reportedly spending $600bn on infrastructure (the amount it invests in datacentres and chips to power its AI models) by 2030. At least this is a reduction on an initial estimate of $1.4tn.

The great naturalist, who is about to turn 100, is still surprised by wildlife in his new series about British gardens. But not every pet owner will be happy with his top tips

Whenever David Attenborough speaks, the world listens – so his latest BBC programme, which heralds the broadcaster’s 100th birthday, is bound to attract attention.

Secret Garden, which features five different UK gardens, might not be what people normally expect from Attenborough, says the show’s series producer, Bill Markham, as “there’s no lions and tigers”.

He went from a Glasgow council estate to Hollywood fame. Now, in his directorial debut, the X-Men star is challenging stereotypes about his homeland via the remarkable tale of a real-life hip-hop hoax

It’s the final night of the Glasgow film festival and James McAvoy is a wee bit out of breath. His directorial debut, California Schemin’, is playing across all three screens at the Glasgow Film Theatre in the city centre, taking the festival’s prestige closing slot.

Usually, a big name would say a few words of introduction in the main cinema then bask in the glory. Not McAvoy. Getting in among it still comes naturally 25 years after he left this city to pursue a career that has blazed from his award-winning Cyrano de Bergerac in the West End of London to playing Professor X, the founder of the X-Men, in the blockbuster Hollywood franchise.

Stefan Golaszewski’s exquisite new show about life after baby loss is a feat – an unsettling, funny, moving and emotionally devastating TV triumph

Lisa and Stephen are good. “You good?” asks Stephen (Paapa Essiedu), plonking himself next to his wife on the sofa. “Yeah,” replies Lisa (Siobhán Cullen) from the depths of her oversize fleece hoodie. “Good,” says Stephen. “All good.”

Lisa and Stephen love each other and when Lisa has a miscarriage, then another miscarriage, they don’t talk about it, not really, because you don’t, do you? It’s just one of those things. “Gotta stay positive,” as Stephen says. “Eyes up, move forwards.”

A death rate of up to 90%, attributed to warming seas, is threatening the trade in Hiroshima prefecture, which produces most of the country’s farmed oysters

The Kure oyster festival is doing a brisk trade in beer and grilled meat on sticks. But the longest queues are in front of the oyster stalls, where chefs shuffle piles of mottled shellfish across griddles, waiting for their hinges to ease and reveal their fleshy interiors.

Nobuyuki Miyaoka, who is attending the festival with his son, daughter-in-law and their young children, likes his oysters steamed with sake and served with a few drops of tangy ponzu sauce. “The local oysters were fine until this year,” he says. “They used to be a lot bigger … look how small they are.”

Chefs prepare oysters at the Kure oyster festival. This year, local businesses and consumers say the shellfish have been scarce and smaller than usual

Snappy performance, high-quality screen, best-in-class keyboard and trackpad show cheaper can still be great

Apple’s brand new entry-level laptop is powered by the chip from an iPhone and offers more than just the essential MacBook experience for a great price, putting the PC industry on notice.

The MacBook Neo is the first of its kind from Apple. A 13in laptop that runs on an A18 Pro chip and brings the starting price for a brand new MacBook down to £599 (€699/$599/A$899) – £500 or the equivalent less than the MacBook Air.

A journalist tells the improbable tale of a British diplomat who worked to free Ireland – and paid the ultimate price

Roger Casement had a life that defies categorisation: an imperial administrator who exposed imperial atrocities; a one-time diplomat for the United Kingdom who enlisted German help in Ireland’s fight for freedom; a closeted gay man who left detailed records of his sexual adventures; a knight of the realm convicted of conspiring against the crown.

TE Lawrence (“of Arabia”), himself no stranger to the hypocrisy of British imperialism and the difficulties of illegal sexuality, called Casement a “broken archangel”. Rory Carroll, the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent, retains some of that poetry in this deeply researched and fascinating account of Casement’s role in the creation of the Irish state.

England and Wales pioneered the criminalisation of coercive control, but it doesn’t apply outside of intimate or family relationships. Why stop there?

When Rachael Reign finally left her relationship and called the police, she came with a litany of allegations.

She felt parts of her life had been controlled, she told the call handler. She said she had been given instructions about what to wear, which included a ban on certain shades of nail varnish. She felt pressured to give up a portion of her income. She had been told that bad things would happen if she left.

In Hungary, the Iran war is exposing tensions. On April 12, voters may decide that Orban’s geopolitical contortions are a liability

On 3 March, Viktor Orbán held a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin. According to official Hungarian reporting, the discussion focused on “energy issues” and other routine matters. What followed was anything but routine. Within days, the Hungarian foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, had flown to Moscow, and returned with two freed prisoners of war, dual citizens of Ukraine and Hungary.

Hungary is not part of the military conflict in Ukraine, but the message was unmistakable. With his PoW diplomacy, Putin was not only signalling goodwill towards Hungary, he was effectively endorsing Orbán’s re-election on 12 April.

Péter Krekó is a political scientist, behavioural scientist, economist and director of the independent thinktank the Political Capital Institute in Budapest

It will take a regulator with grit and guts to enforce the UK’s impartiality laws. This is Labour’s chance to remedy our twisted media landscape

Labour feels more sure-footed. A stronger sense of its own identity flows from standing up to Donald Trump, his war and his insults. MPs are less often looking over their shoulders at the right and its media.

Here comes one test. Selecting a new chair of the media regulator Ofcom is in its final phase: which of two reported frontrunners is appointed will reveal the government’s frame of mind. Ofcom has been moribund, weak to the point of invisibility. One key area is the regulation of online harms, as the government seeks to toughen up on the safety of children and the sanity of the nation, against a libertarian right that defends aggressive notions of free speech, and permits fact-free dangers, such as vaccine and climate denial. Kemi Badenoch is a free-speecher who argued for the weakening of the Online Safety Act in 2022 by removing the ban on “legal but harmful” material for adults, claiming it was “legislating for hurt feelings”. Keir Starmer is strengthening the law by banning addictive algorithms.

I’m not saying I paid for all of it. But I probably should have flossed more

I was at the dentist’s, because that’s where I always am at the moment, lying there, mouth full of stuff, thinking: “This is just a phase and not the new normal.” The conversation is one-sided by necessity, which is the only saving grace of being there at all, that window into a world where I’m not constantly talking and get to find out what other people are interested in for a change. No, there’s one other saving grace: I still have teeth.

And maybe it’s part of the training, or maybe he’s just a very cheerful guy, but the dentist is an enthusiast. He loves all the seasons and the way a composite filling can stave off recession around the upper canines. He loves tea, coffee, red wine and turmeric; he loves fizzy drinks of all kinds, as a relatable prelude to the news that I have to stop consuming them. It would be hard to be warned off those things by someone who didn’t understand how nice they were. He determinedly never talks about the events of the world, but he doesn’t like a lot of silence, either, and that’s how we landed on the topic of the time he bought a Ferrari.

The crime bill proposes a stronger model of consent – and with violent imagery and child sexual abuse soaring, who, really, can argue against it?

• Susanna Rustin is the author of Sexed: A History of British Feminism

Once you stop to think about it, the need for a law to ensure that participants have consented to appear in online pornography is obvious.

Egregious past failures have been well documented. They range from the New York Times’s investigation of Pornhub, which concluded that one of the world’s biggest pornography businesses hosted videos featuring underaged and sex-trafficked subjects (Pornhub subsequently removed more than half of its content) to the horrors uncovered in the trial of Dominique Pelicot. On the online chat site Coco he shared multiple videos of his then wife, Gisèle, being raped while unconscious in a chatroom called “without her knowledge” (Coco was shut down in 2024).

Susanna Rustin is a social affairs journalist and the author of Sexed: A History of British Feminism

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A tribunal verdict on the term is revealing about the complexities of having multiple cultural identities – and western attitudes to ageing

It should be uncontroversial to state that what we want to be called – or do not want to be called – should be respected. This simple enough principle is what defined the grievance between NHS co-workers Ilda Esteves and her colleague Charles Oppong.

Last week, an employment tribunal ruled in Esteves’ favour, agreeing she was subjected to harassment from Oppong for his repeated references to her as “auntie”. The healthcare assistant was awarded £1,425 in compensation.

A wartime leader’s words are critically important. But Trump, contradicting himself and denying reality, is no Churchill

During a White House ceremony on 9 April 1963, then president John F Kennedy bestowed honorary citizenship on former prime minister Winston Churchill, remembering how effectively Churchill inspired millions with his words during the second world war. As Kennedy put it, Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle”.

The same cannot be said of Kennedy’s successor Donald Trump. Their names may be awkwardly conjoined atop the shuttered Kennedy Center, but the comparison ends there. Kennedy, like Churchill, spoke effectively, with great attention to the facts, particularly during the Cuban missile crisis, when the world’s leaders hung on every phrase and participle spoken by the leader of the free world.

As Cesar Chavez Day becomes Farmworkers Day, we must remember that the hero is the movement

The way we commemorate history is often – too often – by celebrating an individual with a statue, a place name, a holiday. While some have been torn down – statues of Gen Robert E Lee have given way in some parts of the US to statues of Harriet Tubman – Republicans are trying to reverse the shift in statuary. To that end, the Trump administration recently plunked down a Columbus statue on the White House grounds, a replica of one thrown into the harbor in Baltimore in 2020 as the Black Lives Matter protests addressed racism and colonialism.

Still, maybe the age of individual heroes is fading. This year, Jon Wiener, a retired history professor and current Nation magazine editor, nominated Minneapolis for the Nobel peace prize for its residents’ valor and solidarity in opposing ICE and defending their neighbors. The magazine’s editors wrote: “Through countless acts of courage and solidarity, the people of Minneapolis have challenged the culture of fear, hate, and brutality that has gripped the United States and too many other countries. Their nonviolent resistance has captured the imagination of the nation and the world.” The Nobel is a longshot, but the Twin Cities – both Minneapolis and St Paul – got the John F Kennedy Profile in Courage award “for risking their lives to protect their neighbors and immigrant community members ... with extraordinary courage and resolve”.

Without diplomacy or restraint, the economic shock will deepen and US soldiers may become embroiled in a quagmire

The fifth week of Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran has confirmed the absence of any overarching strategy. The US continues to hit Iranian targets while building up forces in the region. Iran continues to launch missile and drone attacks on Israel and neighbouring Gulf states. Tehran’s proxies in the region have entered the fray. Its closure of the strait of Hormuz has seen oil prices shoot up and had knock-on effects already visible across fuel, fertiliser and supply chains. No amount of contradictory social media posts from Mr Trump can negate the shortages felt across the world, from Asian factories to European diesel markets. The pain is likely to get worse. There is no sign of imminent US victory or Iranian collapse.

This instead looks like a war of attrition. Each side can point to successes and their opponents can highlight failures. That is what sustains the conflict. The stakes extend far beyond the battlefield. The war is embedding itself in the global economy, shaping what is produced, moved and ultimately affordable. Even European ministers now admit they are losing sleep over what comes next – not just the war but its economic consequences.

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.

Increased openness is a change for the better. But cuts have made the courts’ work far harder

Opening up family courts in England and Wales to journalists was never intended to solve all their problems. This is a public service that, like so many others, is chronically overloaded and underfunded. While the number of children in council care fell slightly last year, the figure of 81,770 in England was still 16% higher than a decade ago. Recent increases in legal aid fees applied only to immigration, housing and criminal cases – leaving family lawyers out.

But new rules about what can be reported are an important legacy of the court’s president, Sir Andrew McFarlane, who retired on Monday. These apply both to public law cases, involving care proceedings, and private law cases, which are usually disputes between couples. Following the national rollout of transparency orders, which enable reporters and legal bloggers to write about cases as long as they protect anonymity, his successor – who is yet to be announced – will inherit a more open family justice system.

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

Readers respond to an editorial on the UK competition watchdog’s investigation of vet chains and the cost of treatment

The Competition and Markets Authority report on vet chains is welcome, but your editorial (24 March) does little to clarify things for struggling pet owners. The remedies include a further levy of between £600 and £1,000 per year, to be paid by practices to the regulator. This represents an increase of approximately 5% in our small independent referral practice, and will necessarily lead to increased prices, which have been displayed on our website since opening. Reform of the Veterinary Surgeons Act 1966 may lead to similar rising costs.

Current median salaries for veterinary surgeons are less than those of teachers and nurses. While pet owners may wish that care was cheaper, they also depend on it being available. Veterinary qualifications involve a minimum of five years’ undergraduate training, without the benefits of clinical years bursaries offered to doctors and dentists.

Paul Marshall says calling for an end to fossil fuels is impractical, in response to church leaders’ criticisms of GB News’s stance on climate science

The net zero consensus is crumbling – that is the background to the open letter addressed to me last week from 60 well-intentioned but misguided clerics (Church leaders criticise Christian owner of GB News over channel’s climate attacks, 26 March). I share their concerns for stewardship of the planet and their belief in the importance of human flourishing. I also agree that the planet is in a gradual warming phase and that carbon emissions have contributed to this.

Where we differ is on their policy response. Calling for an end to fossil fuels is an impractical and ideological policy position that leads to the emasculation of our main sources of energy at the expense of millions of jobs. It is subject to what is called a collective action problem. Net zero might work for the UK if the whole world had signed up to same timeline. However, India and China have very different and distant schedules. And now that the US has left the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UK is left pursuing a path of unilateral economic disarmament.

It is frontline staff who promote change in everyday interactions and set positive goals to help reduce reoffending, says Natasha Porter

The role played by prison officers is so often overlooked and misunderstood, and your editorial (22 March) is right to highlight staff when addressing some of the issues facing prisons. Those on the frontline are uniquely placed to drive change across the system, and good prison officers can radically improve outcomes for those in their care. To build a prison system that promotes rehabilitation, staff must be at the heart of these efforts and we need to be recruiting, training and developing outstanding frontline leaders.

The challenges in prisons are well documented and reoffending rates remain stubbornly high, costing the taxpayer billions every year. With so many prisoners spending more than 22 hours in their cells every day, the officers on the landings are the most influential members of staff in a prison. Only they can reach all prisoners, even those who refuse to engage with the rest of the system. The success of efforts to reform the system – including many of those introduced by the new Sentencing Act – requires transformative leaders on the frontline.

John Sommer and Dr Ginevra Read on the declining standard of food in schools

Regarding your article on school dinners (School dinners in England dominated by grab-and-go foods such as pizza and sausage rolls, 27 March), the declining standard of school meals has a lot to do with the way that secondary schools organise lunchtimes. There has been a tendency to shorten lunchtimes, often to deal with behavioural issues, but also to reduce the cost of supervision. This can be shortsighted as the rush for lunch becomes more intense, adding to tensions rather than reducing them.

The system encourages the grab-and-go mentality. Perhaps in addition to minimum nutrition standards, government guidance on the organisation of lunchtimes would make delivery of good school lunches a reality.
John Sommer
Bristol

Our cartoonist on the 78-year-old’s shock move to Bristol and his attempts to connect with the young ‘uns

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Surrey look well placed to reclaim the title after their runner-up finish last season while all eyes are on promotion for Lancashire

• Teenager plays in Portugal for Valadares Gaia

• Lionesses face Spain and Iceland in World Cup qualifiers

England have given a shock call-up to the 17-year-old midfielder Erica Meg Parkinson for April’s World Cup qualifiers against Spain and Iceland.

The Singapore-born Parkinson, who plays for the Portuguese first division side Valadares Gaia, will be part of Sarina Wiegman’s senior squad for the first time, having previously featured across the Lionesses pathway.

• Chief executive says he has no ‘stance on Howe’s future’

• Owners sold St James’ Park to themselves for £172.1m

Eddie Howe has seven games to reassure Newcastle’s hierarchy that he remains the right manager to lead the club into next season.

Newcastle sit 12th in the Premier League and David Hopkinson, the chief executive, has made plain his displeasure at the recent 2-1 home defeat by Sunderland.

Pre-game incident has gone viral online and plays directly into broader debate of how the sport wants to be perceived

No prizes for guessing the most viewed rugby clip at the weekend. The number of views on X has long since passed three million and – spoiler alert – people were not studying the finer detail of Gloucester’s defensive effort at Villa Park on Saturday. Leicester’s Geoff Parling used to be just another stern-faced Prem coach; suddenly he is an unlikely global social media star.

For those who missed it – and here’s hoping you enjoyed your mini-break on Jupiter – here is a potted summary. The TNT Sport presenter Craig Doyle and a new colleague, Liam MacDevitt, were on the pitch before the game, with MacDevitt being urged to take a kick at goal as part of his on-screen Prem initiation. All seemed OK right until the moment an angry Parling loomed into shot.

• De Zerbi is only candidate currently talking to Spurs

• Tottenham intend to give Italian a long-term contract

Roberto De Zerbi has moved closer to becoming Tottenham’s new manager after further negotiations on Monday. The club have made him their prime target to replace Igor Tudor and save them from what would be a ruinous relegation to the Championship.

De Zerbi is in fact the only live candidate given that Spurs are not talking to anyone else. The makeup of his backroom staff has also been discussed.

While Jannik Sinner’s duopoly with Carlos Alcaraz looks unbreakable, Aryna Sabalenka is dominating despite a more competitive women’s top 10

“No, I think it’s all an individual sport,” Jannik Sinner says, chuckling quietly, as he reflects on another triumphant fortnight at the Miami Open after his efficient win over Jiri Lehecka. Sinner had been asked whether he was aware that his win meant the maintenance of one of the defining records of this new era of men’s tennis: since the Madrid Open in April 2024, every tournament with Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz present has been won by either player. The duopoly continues.

Unsurprisingly, Sinner was far more focused on what the victory meant to him. By following his Indian Wells triumph with a title in Miami, he secured one of the greatest achievements of his career in the Sunshine Double. He has now won three consecutive Masters 1000 titles and 34 consecutive sets at this level. This was an immense feat, further underlining his enduring dominance over all challengers aside from his great rival, Carlos Alcaraz.

The Balkan nation only became Fifa members in 2016, but win over Turkey would secure first World Cup finals place

“We didn’t even know each other.” Samir Ujkani is thinking back to March 2014 when a makeshift Kosovo squad, largely thrown together from unglamorous corners of central Europe and Scandinavia, convened to face Haiti for the country’s first official game.

He was a rarity: a player with Serie A experience between the posts for Palermo and 20 caps for Albania, who was willing to bet on what has become one of international football’s great success stories.

His squad has been hit by withdrawals but the manager will aim to improve the mood music at Wembley on Tuesday

A negative reaction to a drab draw with Uruguay at Wembley? It sounds familiar. After all, the reviews were hardly glowing when England began the 1966 World Cup with a dismal goalless draw against the South American team. The criticism came from all angles but had become a cautionary tale by the time Bobby Moore had his hands on the Jules Rimet trophy.

Opinions in international football shift quickly. At the moment the mood music around England could be better. Presented with solid and streetwise opposition last Friday, they struggled to lift the tempo. Time to panic? Did it matter that these warm-up games double as learning exercises for Thomas Tuchel as he finalises his World Cup preparations? That what happens in a friendly in March often bears little relation to the real thing in June?

Union boss says workers have received some, but not all, of their pay

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A federal panel will meet today to consider exempting oil and gas drillers operating in the Gulf of Mexico from a decades-old law meant to protect endangered species including whales, birds and sea turtles.

The meeting of the Endangered Species Committee for the first time in more than 30 years is the latest effort by US president Donald Trump’s administration to unwind regulations it says hold back domestic energy production.

President says he is open to scaling back strikes on oil and wider energy industry if Moscow reciprocates. What we know on day 1,496

Knesset approves measure that has been criticised by European countries and rights groups

Israel’s parliament has passed a law imposing the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of fatal attacks, a measure sharply criticised as discriminatory by European countries and rights groups.

The legislation makes the death penalty the default punishment for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank found guilty of intentionally carrying out deadly attacks deemed acts of terrorism by a military court.

As ties with Washington sour, China is reviving a cold war strategy to defend against a US attack

Dotted across the mountainous roads of Sichuan and just a few hours’ drive from some of China’s most bustling cities, the crumbling ruins of an abandoned military experiment are eerily quiet.

Top secret factories that once housed thousands of workers are now overgrown with vegetation; nearby villages, empty of young people who were once shipped in from across the country to build China’s future, are plastered with advertisements for hearing aids and, in one case, a bundle deal on coffins.

Millions of workers were deployed to these remote mountain locations as part of a huge defence program that stayed secret for over a decade.

Simon Roberts says Easter shop will be unaffected by Middle East conflict, but industry warns prices may rise this year

Shoppers will not see food prices rise until at least the summer and Easter will be unaffected by conflict in the Middle East, the boss of Sainsbury’s has said, despite fears of an inflation spike.

Simon Roberts said it was “too early” to say whether and when food price inflation related to higher commodity costs would hit supermarket shelves and that the UK’s second-largest supermarket had long-term agreements with suppliers to help protect shoppers.

Five miles from their former city zoo, seven gorillas are exploring their new ‘African forest’ home

It has been an eventful few months for Bristol’s gorillas. The troop made headlines around the world when an urban explorer snapped pictures of them looking downbeat in their old, almost deserted home near the city centre. Then they were moved – under armed police escort – to a new out-of-town base and promptly suffered a shock bereavement.

On Monday, in warm spring sunshine, the western lowland gorillas were to be found exploring a new woodland habitat at Bristol Zoo Project, five miles from their former city home. They clambered up the horse chestnut tree, as tall as a three-storey building, sampled the green shoots of a hawthorn and scanned the floor for treats.

For decades, there was no record of Andrena rehni exisiting in the US. In 2018 it was found in Maryland and five years later I found it in New York State

I’ve loved insects ever since I was a kid and spent summers looking for them. My mum would always tell me that from the age of one – even before I could walk – I would happily sit outside, watching ants and trying to follow them back to their colony.

As an adult, I take people out to meadows with nets to catch insects and take a close look at them. It’s about trying to cultivate a childlike curiosity that people have lost or forgotten in daily life.

President is convening so-called ‘God squad’ to override provisions of Endangered Species Act for ‘national security’

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Donald Trump is dispatching a so-called “God squad” of top officials to revoke protections for endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico, purportedly to protect national security by expanding oil and gas industry operations.

If successful, the administration may kill off dozens of protected species – from Rice’s whales and whooping cranes to sea turtles.

Home to one of the world’s largest deposits of freshwater, the Great Lakes region will soon host next-generation generators – just as prices are being hiked across the US

Submersible hydroelectric technology deployed across the Great Lakes could become a key cog in clean energy efforts, supporters say, amid surging electricity demand and costs.

Home to one of the largest deposits of freshwater on the planet, the Great Lakes region has on its shores some of the largest cities in North America in Chicago, Toronto, Montreal and Detroit, where electricity demand is growing. While none of the five Great Lakes have significant tides or currents to fuel hydropower, several of the waterways that link the lakes do.

Heathrow wanted changes to fund multibillion-pound upgrade, but airlines had warned steep rises would be passed on to passengers

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The UK aviation regulator has partially rejected plans by Heathrow to significantly raise its landing fees to fund a multibillion-pound upgrade, arguing the airport can still invest without steep rises to ticket prices.

The Civil Aviation Authority said the average charge for each passenger should rise from £28.40 to £28.80 between 2027 and 2031.

‘Precious ocean life is being pushed to the brink,’ say campaigners, arguing that overfished marine areas are ‘protected only on paper’

Almost 40% of England’s seas are designated as marine protected areas. Their purpose, the government says, is “to protect and recover rare threatened and important marine ecosystems … from damage caused by human activities”.

And yet in the four years to 2024, trawlers using vast nets, including those that scour the seabed, caught more than 1.3m tonnes of fish within them, according to official figures that campaigners say show they are “little more than lines on a map”.

Madeleine Sumption says politicians make big claims about things they only partially control to appeal to voters

Keir Starmer’s pledge to “smash the gangs” profiting from small boat crossings has followed a pattern set by Conservative-led governments of employing “bullish rhetoric” with little evidence that it can be delivered, an expert has claimed.

Madeleine Sumption, the director of the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, says the prime minister has repeated the mistakes of Rishi Sunak and David Cameron by making “bold claims with great certainty about things governments only partially control” .

Leader understood to have spoken to 10 trade unions after party claimed working class voters are turning to them

Zack Polanski has kicked off a charm offensive designed to convince trade unions to stop funding Labour and throw their weight behind the Green party, as he delivered the first in a series of speeches to union conferences.

The Green leader has had “good conversations” with 10 trade unions, including some affiliated to Labour, according to party sources, and is due to address the University and College Union and the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union, not affiliated with Labour, in the coming months.

If approved, move is latest in series of buildings, warships, institutions, programs and currency named after president

He has buildings, institutions, government programs, warships, currency, and now Donald Trump is getting an airport that bears his name even as he looks forward to a towering Trump presidential library in Miami.

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, signed a bill on Monday saying the Palm Beach international airport was being renamed to the President Donald J Trump international airport.

Feminists and rights defenders say online threats have rapidly escalated, forcing some to leave the country for their safety

Yordanos Bezabih, an Ethiopian women’s rights activist, had faced online threats for years: of acid attacks, gang-rape and death. She tried her best to ignore the abuse as she continued her advocacy work. But in 2025, the threats became more menacing. In April, an anonymous Telegram group with 6,000 subscribers organised an effort to track down her location.

They shared deepfakes of her – nude images and videos. The following month, a stranger started to film her in the streets, calling her by her social media handle.

Cable signed by Marco Rubio and seen by Guardian suggests staff work with Pentagon psychological operations unit

The United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool to help do it.

The cable, signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Monday and obtained by the Guardian, also suggests embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s psychological operations unit to address the problem of rampant disinformation. It lays out a sweeping set of instructions for how embassy staff should push back against what it describes as coordinated foreign efforts to undermine American interests abroad.

Jack Karlson’s rallying cry of ‘democracy manifest’ added to national collection of sound recordings that hold historical, cultural and aesthetic significance

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Thirty-five years ago, when Jack Karlson was hauled into a police car outside a Chinese restaurant in Queensland, he couldn’t have known his bombastic speech would be watched by millions around the world, become a meme and, now, be preserved in Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive.

Karlson’s declaration – “Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest! … What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?” – is one of nine pieces of audio that have been added to the NFSA’s Sounds of Australia collection this year, along with a pedestrian crossing signal and Missy Higgins’ 2004 hit Scar.

Core focus will be on beauty, personal care and home products after spinning off brands such as Hellmann’s and Pot Noodle into $60bn entity

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Unilever is in advanced talks to combine its food business with US-based McCormick, in a deal including $15.7bn (£11.9bn) cash that would give the Marmite-to-Hellmann’s mayonnaise owner majority control of a $60bn food empire.

London-listed Unilever will control 65% of the new spin-off, which will combine brands such as Knorr and Pot Noodle with McCormick’s condiments and spices including French’s mustard, Old Bay seasoning and Cholula hot sauce.

The factories, which buy cheap crude and turn it into fuel, are struggling as higher oil prices threaten their razor-sharp margins

The towns that are the bulwark of China’s energy security can, at a moment of global crisis, appear deceptively quiet. Trucks carrying oil trundle along wide-open highways that have little traffic, while a few boarded-up shops in crumbling low-rise buildings hint at a long-forgotten local buzz.

A ramshackle noodle shop serving hand-pulled ribbons of dough was empty at lunchtime, save for a few construction workers and a teacher watching videos on Douyin, the social media platform, with his meal.

Exclusive: Pubs, restaurants and hotels warn of mounting pressure days before rates rises and higher wage bills take effect

One in five hospitality businesses fear collapse in the next 12 months, according to an industry-wide survey that comes days before rises in tax and employment costs kick in.

From Wednesday, many pub, restaurant and hotel companies face the prospect of a higher bill for business rates paid to their local authority, while an increase in minimum wage thresholds takes effect on the same day.

Brent crude jumps 51% since start of March and gold suffers fifth-largest monthly fall in 50 years

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The Brent crude oil price is on track for its biggest monthly gain on record in March after the Iran war caused mayhem in the markets.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, has climbed by 51% since the start of March, LSEG data shows, beating the previous monthly record of 46% in September 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, leading to the first Gulf war.

A new season of Netflix’s dating show about neurodivergent singletons is a welcome antidote to grim reality TV headlines

Logan is a big fan of Hannah Montana and Spongebob Squarepants. He loves model trains and watches videos of them crashing, because that way he knows that no one was hurt. His favourite desert is cheesecake. These are touchingly pure interests from a 25-year-old man who lives in the hedonistic capital of Las Vegas. “I describe myself as trying to be well-groomed, very patient, not lazy and always punctual,” he says. “Classy, fancy, romantic – wait, romantic? Is that the word?”

Logan is one of the new participants on Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum: a series that follows a group of neurodivergent young people as they search for a romantic connection, which returns this week for its fourth season. Unlike other dating shows, such as Love is Blind and Love Island, the stars of this show don’t seem to be motivated by fame and the promise of a Boohoo discount code in their name. In fact, Love on the Spectrum is the antidote to the reality TV of today, which often revolves around controversy and conflict. Watching these young people and their families navigate their search for love isn’t merely wholesome, it makes for life-affirming TV.

Top notch choreography features heavily in tale of a student who is inhabited by an assassin’s spirit determined to wreak revenge

On her way home from a bad day at work and a disappointing drinks date with a sleazy social media influencer (Hidenobu Abera), college student and part-time waitress Fumika (Akari Takaishi) finds a bullet casing on a stairway. She unthinkingly picks it up, not realising that her own suppressed rage and need for vengeance will instantly connect her through this object to the ghost of Kudo (Masanori Mimoto), a recently murdered hired assassin with his own load of unresolved emotional issues. Luckily, supernatural happenstance in this action-comedy charmer from Japan will help both of them to grow as people, or in Kudo’s case an ex-person. It turns out that Kudo can inhabit Fumika’s body at will and effectively use her as a karate-chopping, gun-slinging martial arts meat puppet in order to right wrongs, fight bad guys and eventually help him avenge his own murder. Fun!

Star Takaishi and director Kensuke Sonomura have collaborated before on the successful franchise Baby Assassins (wherein Takaishi plays a professional contract killer who poses as a normie, basically the inverse of her character here). Sonomura was the action director for three Baby Assassins features, which might explain that this, his third gig as a main director, feels more weighted towards scenes that showcase fisticuffs and fancy fight choreography rather than character development and emotional nuance. But that’s fine because Takaishi has charisma to burn and an impressive range; she’s equally convincing as a hapless student screaming in shock at the destruction being wrought around her as she is as a dead-eyed killer when Kudo inhabits her body. Meanwhile, Mimoto, a Japanese action film stalwart, is compellingly soulful as a murderer experiencing flickers of conscience rather late in life who hopes he might be a good influence not just on Fumika but also his former protege Kagehara (Mario Kuroba).

This tale of a pair of women who tire of their partners and arrange sex with strangers is not sexy enough for erotica and not real enough to be drama

Chloé Robichaud’s new film is a remake of the 1970 French-Canadian sex comedy of the same name (the French title is Deux Femmes en Or) and it hasn’t travelled well: silly, clumsy and dated.

Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) are two unsatisfied women who live next door to each other in a bland suburban condo development. Violette has just had a baby, and her husband Benoît (Félix Moati) is always away, supposedly on business, but actually having hotel-room assignations with a woman called Eli, played by Juliette Gariépy – an actress with cult status for her chilling lead performance in the psychological thriller Red Rooms. As for Florence, she has no children but is also unhappy with her bland sexless relationship with David (Mani Soleymanlou); she comes off her antidepressants to let her long-repressed wild side run free.

Hoda and Yasmin help US Muslims navigate the path to true love. Plus: a tender film about a throuple having a baby. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Three
“Wait, did my mom send you?” Muslim singletons across the US are set up by lively match-making duo Hoda and Yasmin in this fun, eye-opening dating show that first aired over there last year. First up in the opening double-bill is 30-year-old Mariam in Houston, who has been engaged three times but won’t settle until she finds the perfect potential husband – which includes him being an 80s music lover. Hollie Richardson

Dogged detective work tracked down the instrument that had vanished more than 50 years ago, but the true story behind its theft injects a note of sadness

It sometimes feels as if a week doesn’t go by without a legacy-building documentary about Paul McCartney. The latest is this geeky tale about the 1961 Höfner bass guitar, the unmistakable violin-shaped instrument which, as a teenager in 1961, he bought for the equivalent of £30 in Hamburg, and which became a part of the Beatles’ iconography. After the band split, it went missing and was finally recovered in 2024, after more than 50 years, thanks to some dogged detective work, initiated by Nick Wass, a Höfner employee, and involving a certain ambulance service worker called Steve Glenister who responded to Wass’s calls for information, but was weirdly reluctant to say quite how much he knew.

It is an amiable tale with a happy ending but, oddly, the film can’t quite absorb the sadness, and even shame, that are disclosed in the denouement. Stealing by people who are hard up, and for whom opportunistic thievery is an instinctive mode of survival and whose grownup children may not, a generation later, want to think about what their parents did – these are big, sombre ideas with big sombre implications that don’t quite mesh with the documentary’s happy mood board.

Radicalised by the inventiveness of groups such as the Harlem Renaissance, the LA-based musician is determined to reclaim the radical possibilities of culture in an age of institutional and algorithmic exploitation

‘For many years, I’ve called myself a surrealist blues poet,” says Aja Monet in her warm, deep voice. Sitting in a London cafe, the Los Angeles-based artist looks striking, with her blue braids woven up in an intricate style. She was up late uploading the final master recordings for her new album, The Color of Rain, which she says was heavily influenced by her reading around how “surrealism was a real intentional device that artists used in response to the rise of fascism throughout history”.

High-minded and yet invested in the cut-and-thrust of our lives today, it’s a typical comment from Monet. With themes around love, resistance and the absurdity of our current times, her performance, poetry and music offers a balm for the suffering and abuse meted out by establishment power. Already in 2026, her second poetry book Florida Water was nominated for an award by the foundational US civil rights organisation the NAACP, and she performed alongside Stevie Wonder at Time magazine’s event celebrating Martin Luther King Day.

M Gessen explores the wild truth about their cousin, who keeps kidnapping his own child. Plus: will the world of porn really be Screwed By AI?

“Anyone’s first cousin could be plotting murder …” New York Times columnist M Gessen is the reporter and host of this leftfield five-parter released under the NYT/Serial Productions banner, with shades of its previous series such as We Were Three and S-Town. A braggart with a problematic habit of kidnapping his own son, M’s “idiot” cousin Allen is charged with ordering a hit on his ex-wife, Priscilla. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

The 19th composer John Field was the first to name his gentle and delicate piano pieces ‘nocturnes’. The word – and the genre of ‘sleep music’ – it presaged, is ubiquitous today

One of the most familiar topics of our time is the trouble many of us have in winding down at the end of the day. Insomnia is rife: crossing the threshold between day and night has become a challenge for many of us. Music is often recommended as a way to help us relax, and there are countless sleep music playlists on streaming sites to lull us into unconsciousness and bear us towards morning on a current of soothing sounds. Max Richter’s Sleep, “an eight-hour lullaby”, a set of musical episodes that mirror what’s happening in our brains during the various phases of sleep, is, 11 years after its release, currently No 2 in the official classical artist albums chart. It’s been performed all over the world, with audience members provided with camp beds, blankets and pillows and gently serenaded through the night by live musicians playing Richter’s meditative score.

Musing over photos of slumbering audiences, I started to wonder about the history of music being used as an aid to sleep. The lullaby must be as old as humanity, but lullabies are essentially vocal. Their words often work against the grain of the music, sometimes conjuring up some very non-soothing images: “When the bough breaks, the baby will fall / Down will come cradle, baby and all.” Lullabies are a strange hybrid, musically comforting yet often expressing a vein of underlying anguish. Sleep music, on the other hand, tends to be purely instrumental. The absence of a voice makes it more abstract; without words, the meaning of the music remains open and listeners are free to connect however their imagination suggests.

Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff
Moving from Schubert through Chopin to Liszt, the young pianist brought deep interpretative insights

Moving from Schubert through Chopin to Liszt, this recital by Alim Beisembayev – the Kazakh-born winner of 2021’s Leeds international piano competition – described an arc delineating the passionate surge of Romanticism over the span of 30 or so years from the 1820s to 1853.

Beisembayev’s approach to Schubert’s Moments Musicaux, D780, was calm and understated, perhaps as a way of underlining the vast contrast with the Liszt yet to come. Using the fine acoustic of the Dora Stoutzker hall to his advantage, he created an intimacy where Schubert’s characteristic slipping in and out of major and minor modes was quietly evocative. Tellingly, the two Moments in F minor – No 3 where sadness and insouciance dance together and No 5 with its more dramatic outbursts – presaged the key of Chopin’s Fantaisie, Op49.

The fortunes of a single family are entwined with the turmoil of the 20th century in this ambitious, gothic-inflected debut

This gothic-inflected saga has received much attention in Europe for its quirky and confident take on 20th-century Hungarian history. It is sobering to reflect that its author not only has no personal memory of the end of communist rule in eastern Europe, but that he wasn’t even alive when the twin towers fell. Born in 2003, Nelio Biedermann is among the first wave of gen Z writers of fiction and Lázár is his debut novel.

The opening pages introduce us to a world straight out of gothic fable. In an isolated manor house by a forbiddingly dark forest, a strange-looking baby is born. This unearthly child, Lajos, is fated to carry forward the family name of the Lázárs, a noble dynasty with an alarming tendency to go mad, die violently, or both. Meanwhile, in another wing of the house lurks the baron’s older brother, Imre, who is barred from the baronetcy by reason of insanity.

A deep dive into the horror novelist’s archives reveals pedantry, penny-pinching, and a total redraft of Carrie

When Caroline Bicks first met Stephen King she was worried. As a teenager she had scared herself silly with his books – Carrie and The Shining were the two that crept under her skin and refused to budge – but now she found herself in the odd position of being Stephen E King professor at the University of Maine. King had endowed the chair at his alma mater in 2016 for the study of literature, and Dr Bicks was a Harvard-trained Shakespeare specialist. What, beyond a name, would they really have in common?

At the time of her appointment, Bicks’s employers had told her not to initiate contact with the famous author in any way. But four years into the job she got a phone call from “Steve” who turned out to be a teddy bear: “I couldn’t believe it. The man responsible for terrifying generations of readers – including me – was so … nice.” Not quite a meet-cute, but promising.

Retail sims aren’t my thing, but the tactile, nostalgic pleasures of hit indie title Retro Rewind have me yearning for the era of physical media, smoking indoors and uncomplicated geopolitics

It’s early doors, but 2026 may be the biggest bin fire of a year in my lifetime. Wars starting, then ending, then starting again in the course of a week. People running their cars on hopes and dreams because a tank of petrol costs more than the vehicle. Manospheric morons making millions. Several depressing celebrity deaths before I’ve so much as eaten my first Creme Egg of the year.

I had no idea that the antidote to my anxiety and rage would be a cheap little title, made by two French blokes, in what I usually regard as the most turgid gaming genre. Retro Rewind is the moment’s indie darling, selling more than 100,000 copies on Steam in a week. In it, you run a video rental shop in the 90s. You need to buy videos. Display them well. Drop flyers. Serve your customers. Buy more stuff. It’s no different from any other retail sim out there, and I normally shun them because I play video games to escape the boring world of work and into an exciting one of dragons, aliens, and being brilliant at sports.

As physical media makes an unlikely comebac​k​ among younger gamers, the humble VHS emerges as an unexpected archive of gaming’s messy, magical evolution​ that I saw first time around

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As I am nostalgic and of a certain age, I recently bought a VHS video recorder, just for the retrospective thrill of it; then I won a 32-inch CRT television at an auction in Shepton Mallet. Partly, this was to play a few old videos I had found in my loft, including one of me appearing in a 1990s youth TV show talking about sexism and Tomb Raider. (I was against the sexism, to be clear). But it was also because I wanted a new way of spending my money on fragile video-game nostalgia.

The rise of the games industry in the 1980s and 90s coincided with the explosion of the home-video business, and the two crossed paths in lots of interesting ways. There are the obvious treasures I want to get hold of: VHS copies of Street Fighter: The Movie and the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, naturally, as well as early games-inspired hits such as The Last Starfighter, The Wizard and WarGames. I rented most of these from my local video shop in the 80s – which, like many others, also sold computer games by the budget publisher Mastertronic, another interesting (at least to me) crossover between these two entertainment formats.

Huge cuts announced this week show that truly no developer working in games is safe from corporate whims

The video game industry is currently experiencing a seemingly endless bout of ruinous deja vu. Every month, another publisher posts an all too familiar statement about job losses in its development studios. There will be airy expressions of regret and platitudes praising the skill and contribution of the imminently jobless; it is all filtered through layers of corporate doublespeak intended to disguise the human cost of downsizing.

On Tuesday, it was the turn of Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, one of the most successful titles on the planet. In a note posted online, CEO Tim Sweeney announced that more than 1,000 jobs would be lost – this followed the cutting of 830 staff in September 2023.

From owing a debt to obscure Japanese horror Sweet Home to the influence of Aliens and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the franchise continues to petrify players three decades on

To many of us playing and writing about video games in the 1990s, Resident Evil seemed to come out of nowhere. The emerging PlayStation and Saturn consoles were all about slick, bright arcade conversions – the shiny thrills of Daytona and Tekken – and Japanese publisher Capcom was in a rut of coin-op conversions and endless sequels to Street Fighter and Mega Man. Scary games were rare at the time and mostly confined to the PC. So when the news of a horror title named Biohazard (the Japanese name for the series) started to emerge in 1995, it caught the attention of games journalists as it seemed radically out of step with prevailing trends. Games were about power, but as early demos quickly revealed, Resident Evil was about vulnerability.

Thirty years later, it’s still here. The series has sold more than 180m copies worldwide, with 11 core titles and dozens of spinoffs and remakes, as well as film, television and anime tie-ins. Its characters and monsters are icons, its tropes now embedded in game design practice. What has allowed it to not only survive but flourish in such a rapidly changing industry? Why do we still let it scare us?

Whitechapel Galery, London
The Turner prize-winner has spent her career exploring organic forms, with often beautiful results – but the most recent work obscures it with what looks remarkably like rubbish

Sometimes the seed of an idea can grow into something monumental. In Veronica Ryan’s case, kernels and pods have grown into a whole career filled with organic forms bursting to life with stories and symbolism.

It’s an approach that has served her well, winning her the Turner prize in 2022. And now the Montserrat-born British artist is being given the full retrospective treatment, with a show taking viewers from her early experiments in lead to more recent sculptures made of twine, bandages and plastic.

Finborough theatre, London
Irritable passions ferment beneath the frowsty knits and beads in atmospheric 1935 psychological thriller

Lonely lives, falling between the gaps, are at the heart of this 1935 psychological thriller by Rodney Ackland, adapted from Hugh Walpole’s novel. It’s an atmospheric period piece, but isn’t entirely a stretch to reflect on our own concerns about solitude in an ageing population.

The three ladies in an English cathedral town are without partners, families or much of an income. They eke out their genteel poverty in a rickety boarding house. They weren’t raised to work; Miss Beringer, in desperate need of a job, can only imagine becoming a paid companion or, possibly, flower arranging.

In Brigid Larmour’s finely etched production, irritable passions ferment beneath the frowsty knits and beads. The characters are prey to spite and greed, nerves and night terrors. Voices are tremulous; eyes glance at a fearful future.

Beringer is the new lodger: Catherine Cusack, whittled by anxiety, timidly nibbles on a scallop-edged biscuit. She is welcomed by Julia Watson’s Mrs Amorest, flustered but keeping up appearances. Down to her last £10, she writes into the void to a long-absent son.

The third lady is Agatha. Fruitily overblown in the novel, that’s how Edith Evans played her in 1935 (“a monstrous and poisonous plant, grotesque and bulbous,” according to one review). Abigail Thaw makes her disconcertingly eccentric: forbidding in jet black, she mocks and snaps at quivering Miss Beringer (“Do you know when you’re going to die? Do you want to know?”). She covets Beringer’s one cherished possession – a translucent chunk of amber from a beloved female friend.

It’s a play of cross-hatched conversations and melodramatic plotting. Larmour’s design team help turn the screw: the dank-toned house and clothes in tones of moth and cobweb, a bitter wind blowing (set, costumes and sound by Juliette Demoulin, Carla Joy Evans and Max Pappenheim).

Ackland’s plays about rackety lives are increasingly revived. He, Walpole and John Gielgud, the play’s original director, were all queer artists, and it’s tempting to imagine them drawn to these lives on the margins of British society. Though these ladies don’t so much rage against the dying of the light as wait, fearfully, to be snuffed out.

• At the Finborough theatre, London, until 19 April.

Who needs Worthy Farm? From woodland raves and psych freakouts to fell walks and barbecue hoedowns, there’s a festival for everyone this summer. And some of them don’t even require a tent

Download
10 to 14 June, Donington, Leicestershire
If you needed another reminder of the cultural capital currently wielded by the sounds and styles of the early 2000s, witness nu-metal veterans Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park headlining the UK’s biggest rock festival alongside Guns N’ Roses, who continue to fly the flag for Donington’s Monsters of Rock heritage. Further down the poster you’ll find the really adrenalised stuff: Blood Incantation’s cosmic death metal; Drain’s febrile hardcore; and Die Spitz’s peerlessly cool doom-punk hybrid. Huw Baines

Barbican Centre, London
From Stavros to Wayne Slob, Loadsamoney to DJ Dave Nice, the 64-year-old distilled whole characters and social types

To younger audiences, Harry Enfield may be best known for his Prince-turned-King Charles in Channel 4 satirical soap opera The Windsors – and it’s in character as the monarch that he enters the stage for this Audience With … event, reviewing his whole career. By the end, he’s staked a strong claim to be considered head of our comedy state, with a show anthologising a formidably comprehensive array of personae, catchphrases and showbiz anecdotes from Enfield’s 40-plus years making funny TV.

Not for the first time in career retrospectives like this, I came away marvelling at just how many indelible characters and sketches of Enfield’s have entered common currency; have become totems, indeed, of the times in which we live(d). Not that Enfield makes any such claims for himself; there’s nothing self-congratulatory about this show. Quite the opposite: the 64-year-old wears his iconoclasm like a badge of pride, with material that’s often as indelicate as the best of the jokes with which, back in the 80s and 90s, he made his name.

A torn page bearing Dylan’s lyrics for the 1967 song I’m Not There is set to go under the hammer in April when it could fetch £40,000

Almost 60 years after it was first typed out by Bob Dylan, a torn page of lined paper bearing a draft for the lyrics of I’m Not There has been discovered, tucked inside an Allen Ginsberg paperback.

During the summer of 1967 in New York, just outside Woodstock, Bob Dylan wrote and recorded more than 100 songs with his then-backing group The Band, including I’m Not There. A small collection of these tapes would be released eight years later by Columbia Records, while more songs, including I’m Not There, would only be released over the following decades.

Their shows caused mayhem. Now Tamm Reynolds – AKA Midgitte Bardot – is really going for the jugular, hitting back at prejudice with a wild new act

Most performers want attention when they’re on stage. Tamm Reynolds, however, gets it all the time – even when not dressed in fishnets and push-up bra as their alter ego, Midgitte Bardot. “I also like having my bush and ass out,” Reynolds adds. Before we meet at Woolwich station in London, where the artist has kindly agreed to pick me up in their car, they send me a text: “I’m assuming you know what I look like.” Sure enough, they are hard to miss. As a non-binary trans drag queen with dwarfism, Reynolds must be in a minority of one.

Yet to define Reynolds purely in those terms would be to do them a massive disservice, since they are also a writing and performance powerhouse. Three years ago, in Travis Alabanza’s queer cabaret revue Sound of the Underground, Midgitte climbed aboard a cherry-picker in order to sing a filthy blues rock tune called Hot Piss, brandishing a jug of frothy yellow liquid. The climax can’t adequately be described in a family newspaper, but it resulted in the loudest cheer I’ve ever heard at the Royal Court. Eat your heart out, Jerusalem.

The images are famous, but the women who took them are often forgotten. An inspiring exhibition focuses on the pioneering ‘new vision’ of Marianne Brandt, Lucia Moholy and more

‘The string section we got in thought I was the tea boy. When I asked for a psychedelic improvisation like A Day in the Life, they went: “Why is this guy telling us what to play?”’

We’d made our first album and were waiting for it to come out. But we wanted to carry on writing more stuff while we were in the mood. I even cut Christmas dinner short at my uncle’s in Brixton, London, so we could get back to the studio. We would work until we passed out, then I’d sleep underneath the mixing desk with my head in the bass drum, as that’s where the pillow was.

I transferred money to my current account for exchange of contracts, but the bank refused access to the funds

Two weeks before completing on my new home, I notified my bank, NatWest, that funds would be transferred via my current account to my solicitor. It assured me there would be no problem and sent a congratulatory bottle of alcohol.

I duly transferred £260,000, whereupon NatWest refused access to my funds. First, it instructed me to use a public fax bureau to transmit sensitive details, then that I had to resubmit my biometrics in a branch.

It’s a quintessentially Welsh experience of castles, cockles and cawl when you explore the south-west of the country by train, bus and a new footpath opening this week

Sit on the left when you catch the train from Swansea to Carmarthen, and you can watch huge sandy estuaries unspool outside the window. There’s a curlew standing by the water, an egret-haunted pool in the wetlands, and a boardwalk along the foreshore, part of the 870-mile Wales Coast Path. It has been a six-hour, four-train journey to get here from Essex, but I’ll soon be on foot.

Carmarthenshire has picturesque railways, a network of buses, and some epic long-distance paths, so it makes for an ideal car-free break. The 13-mile Tywi Valley Path (officially opening in time for Easter) will link Abergwili near Carmarthen and Ffairfach near Llandeilo, helping walkers and cyclists access some lovely scenery. I’m visiting just before Saint David’s Day, and there are daffodils everywhere. Carmarthenshire offers a quintessentially Welsh experience, packed with castles, cockles and cawl (stew).

Spring has officially sprung, but your March favourites tell us you’ve still got one cosily socked foot in bed

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March claims to be spring – and some of it even reckons it’s British summertime – but even the sunniest days are “summer in the sunshine, winter in the shade”. Judging by the products you loved most, you haven’t decided whether to emerge from hibernation yet, either.

Pillows and bed socks accounted for a quarter of all your favourite things this month, and your fashion must-have was a snuggly hoodie. But your enthusiasm for a glow-up eye cream and a legendary hot brush suggests you’re harbouring an itch to get out.

With an egg-cellent roster on offer, which chocolate treats are the most moreish and which aren’t worth shelling out on?

• The best novelty hot cross buns

At the age of 45, my Easter egg hunt is about seeking out quality, transparency and flavour, rather than just finding the most eggs. Then again, I haven’t been on one for about 35 years, and my tastes have since changed, as has the market. Beyond those foil-wrapped novelties of yesteryear, there’s now a genuinely impressive selection of thoughtfully made, handcrafted chocolate eggs aimed at those with a more mature palate.

As with all chocolate, certifications matter: Fairtrade guarantees a minimum price, fairer working rights and investment in climate resilience, while the Rainforest Alliance focuses on environmental standards and farm sustainability. The quality and processing of the chocolate is also important. Most eggs contain the likes of invert sugar syrup, soya lecithin and E471, so rather than highlight every additive, I’ve instead flagged products with minimal processing, as well as those that use palm oil. I haven’t marked down for high sugar content – it is Easter, after all – but I have included the percentage of sugar.

This pricey infrared therapy mat claims to help mood, sleep and muscle recovery. It felt more like a glorified heating pad

• Plastic-free cutting boards and $17 bike lights: 11 things you loved in March

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I have a $1,400 mat stashed under my pink velvet couch.

It’s my roommate’s PEMF and infrared therapy mat, and yes, it costs nearly as much as my monthly rent. Measuring 6ft in length, made of vegan leather, layered with bright-blue amethyst and obsidian crystals and weighing as much as a Siberian husky, the HigherDose mat makes my basic yoga mat feel like a flimsy slab of cardboard.

Keep your lawn neat – and avoid petrol models – with our pick of the best electric mowers, from cordless to budget-friendly to rented options

• How to create a more eco-friendly lawn: six things you can do right now

Leaving your lawn to develop naturally into a meadow of pollinator-friendly wild flowers is the best option from an ecological perspective, but many of us still like to have at least a small area of grass, whether it’s to break up your flower beds or provide a space for the kids to play. And every lawn needs a mower.

Your family’s lawnmower might have been a fossil fuel-guzzling petrol beast, but today, an electric model is far more energy-efficient and kinder to the planet. I’ve tested electric mowers from five manufacturers to find out which are the best.

Best overall and best cordless lawnmower:
Makita DLM432PT2

Best budget lawnmower:
Einhell GC-EM 1600/37

This Easter feast is steeped in the flavours and traditions of the Middle East

Whenever I’m asked about my favourite dish to serve to friends and family, in most cases I’d say slow-cooked lamb at the centre of the table. After a long, slow cook, the meat becomes tender and rich, and the spices melt into every bite. Served with flatbreads, tahini, fresh herbs and sharp pickles, it invites everyone to build their own perfect mouthful. Across the Middle East and Mediterranean, lamb symbolises generosity and celebration, especially at Easter, when roasting it remains an adored tradition.

A rich roasted carrot dish and a flavour-bursting side to serve together for a luscious Easter celebration

The intense sweetness that comes from roasting carrots should not be underestimated. And, when that’s topped with a savoury, nutty crumble, it’s a great combination. Add the wonderfully seasonal purple sprouting broccoli on the side, and it’s a luscious Easter celebration. A few low-waste tips, too: always use the parsley stalks, and try pickling the shallots in leftover gherkin brine. Trust me! And it wouldn’t be a spring recipe without our beloved wild garlic, so make the most of that while it’s about.

A simple, moreish meat-free main that looks as wonderful as it tastes

Pithiviers look absolutely beautiful at the table. For the classic shape, you can buy circular all-butter puff pastry (Picard does an excellent one, with two sheets in one packet) or cut regular puff pastry into circles. That said, it’s just as delicious and there’s more bang for your buck with a big rectangle. Either way, it’s filled with moreish artichokes, olives and feta, with fresh lemon and parsley to lift the flavours. It’s 100% the type of meat-free main that everyone else wants to try, too.

These fun, charming little treats are easy and quick to put together – and make for a great Easter activity with kids

Much as I love Easter eggs – and I really do, despite being that irritating person still nibbling away at them at Christmas time – these charming, crunchy little nests full of colourful treasure are up there with hot cross buns as my favourite seasonal produce. Top tip: they’re even easier to make if you enlist a small sous chef or two to help stir the pan!

Prep 20 min
Cook 5 min
Chill 2 hr
Makes About 12

When Merlin came to live with me, his only job was to clear the weeds from my fields. But his calm, affectionate nature has made him a vital part of my therapy practice

Merlin the sheep came to me by chance four years ago. A friend of mine had a lamb she was bottle-feeding, but she couldn’t look after it any more so she asked me if I could take care of it. I live in Moortown, Leeds, and rent about three hectares (seven acres) of land in Eccup, a small village nearby, where I’ve kept horses for about 13 years. I needed some help clearing the weeds that the horses wouldn’t eat and sheep seemed like the best solution because they’ll eat anything – so I said yes.

The lamb was called Bambi and when I came to collect her, my friend offered me another lamb, Merlin. Shortly after, Bambi died and it was just Merlin left. It wasn’t long until he started to show his special powers.

Emigrating to be with your partner sounds wildly romantic, but what happens when the person is right and the place very much isn’t?

I met my wife in Queensland in 2001. She’s from Bern, but was in Australia to study marine science. She needed help collecting fish for her project, and had heard that I was handy with a spear gun. We hit it off straight away, and began our romance on semi‑deserted islands near the Great Barrier Reef.

We went on to make a life together. My wife liked Australia and eventually got citizenship, but after we had our first son she wanted to be near her family.

The singers and sisters on growing up in west London, finding fame in the 90s and relaunching their music as a duo

Born in Canada, Natalie and Nicole Appleton are singers best known as members of the group All Saints. Raised between Ontario, London and New York, the sisters joined the band in 1996 alongside Shaznay Lewis and Melanie Blatt. After the success of their self-titled 1997 debut and a string of hits including the chart-topping singles Never Ever and Pure Shores, All Saints split in 2001. The sisters released music together as Appleton in 2002, and have since reunited with All Saints for three albums. Appleton’s new single, Falling Into You, is out now.

Sandra and Roy are adapting to sex as new parents, from postpartum pain to acting fast when they have a private moment
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Sex was a reminder that I’m still me. That this identity still exists, which is really important because you do lose it a bit, especially in the early weeks of becoming a mother

From council tax to water, broadband to stamps, costs climb again from next month …. and that’s before any knock-on effects from Iran war

• UK savers told to act now before Easter Sunday cash Isa deadline

Next month, UK households face a bill surge in which the annual cost of essentials, including council tax and water, will increase by more than £200 – and that is before the full impact of price jumps caused by the Iran war hit your pocket.

The “awful April” increases are particularly unwelcome as the financial turmoil caused by the Middle East conflict has pushed up mortgage rates, fuel prices and energy bills for rural households.

From a former wartime ‘shadow factory’ in London to converted country mansion in Yorkshire, homes with open living

Mid-range handset gets chip, storage and MagSafe upgrades to offer more essential iOS features for less

The cheapest new iPhone has been upgraded for this year with a faster chip, double the storage, automatic portraits and MagSafe, providing even more of the core Apple smartphone experience for less.

The iPhone 17e is an upgraded version of the mid-range “e” line launched last year with the first iPhone 16e and is the latest member of the iPhone 17 family. It starts at £599 (€699/$599/A$999), undercutting the iPhone 17 and iPhone 16 by £200 and £100 respectively to be the cheapest new iPhone sold by Apple.

Screen: 6.1in Super Retina XDR (OLED) (460ppi)

Processor: Apple A19 (4-core GPU)

RAM: 8GB

Storage: 256 or 512GB

Operating system: iOS 26

Camera: 48MP rear; 12MP front-facing

Connectivity: 5G, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C, Satellite and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins)

Dimensions: 146.7 x 71.5 x 7.8mm

Weight: 170g

Fraudsters exploit isolation and search for human contact to often devastating effect. These are steps you can take to avoid them

As you have got older, retirement has left you with more time on your hands. Loneliness has set in. Luckily, you have found a friend through one of the online motoring groups you are in, and a close bond has blossomed over your common interest in cars.

But your new friend has found themselves short when it comes to paying for their university textbooks, and has asked you for £50. It’s not much, and you get on so well that you agree to pay via bank transfer.

‘Zombie filler’, or using cadaver tissue that’s been sterilized and branded as Alloclae, is the latest cosmetic surgery rage. Is it safe?

The residential block at 655 Park Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is so storied it has its own Wikipedia entry. It has housed luminaries from bestselling romance author Danielle Steel to esteemed yachtsmen and the 20th-century heir William Kissam Vanderbilt II. A more recent resident, on the ground floor, is Alpha Male Plastic Surgery, a clinic offering a broad menu of elective procedures catering to the needs of the modern man.

On a coffee table in the waiting room, fanned-out brochures tout facelifts, non-surgical penile implants, and Tesamorelin – an FDA-approved peptide injection targeting stubborn visceral belly fat. Flatscreen monitors mounted behind the front desk shuffle through ads for a “Full Male Model Makeover”, proprietary procedures like BodyBanking® and the 360 TorsoTuck®, and for the gym rat who habitually skips leg day, even “Amazing New Calves”.

When Ubokobong Amanam lost his fingers in an accident he teamed up with his brother John, a special effects artist, to design a prosthetic that suited him – now they run a thriving business

On a humid morning in Uyo, Nigeria, Ubokobong Amanam shows off the lifelike prosthetic where his fingers once were. The skin bears tiny wrinkles, and the nails are naturally shaped. Seven years ago, he was badly injured in a firework accident. Doctors could save him, but not his fingers.

The prosthetics available at the time were clumsy, poorly fitted and designed for bodies nothing like his.

Pushing yourself to the limit, training through injury and choosing the gym over socialising are all signs that you may have an unhealthy reliance on exercise

At the peak of his adventuring career, Luke Tyburski was a man of extremes. The former pro-footballer, then in his early 30s, had dedicated himself to intense endurance challenges, of the sort that make a marathon look like a fun run. Beginning with the Marathon de Sables (a notorious multistage ultramarathon in the Sahara desert), he then ran the world’s highest ultramarathon at Mount Everest base camp, battled dehydration during a 100km run on a tropical island, and took on the vividly named Double Brutal Extreme Triathlon in north Wales. The endgame in all of this was a self-designed challenge, which saw him swimming from Africa to Europe, cycling through Spain and running to Monaco – 2,000km in total, in just 12 days.

Tyburski was a professional adventurer, financing his pursuits via magazine articles and speaking gigs, and even making a documentary about his quest. His whole raison d’etre was to push past his limitations, showing what a person is capable of when their mindset is strong enough. Yet, privately, he was dealing with depression, related to a loss of identity after the end of his footballing career, which took in Australia, the US and Belgium before he tried out for clubs in the UK. “Training and racing creates an escape, and the highs are extremely high,” says Tyburski. “But when I returned home from an adventure, the lows were extremely low, because I hadn’t addressed what I was running away from.”

The popular fitness trend is all over social media, and curious, I tried a few classes – they left me totally out of air

I have spent years in and out of the gym, trying the latest fitness trends. Consequently, my social media feed often populates with shirtless, sweaty men promising to transform my workouts.

Then it started. First, it was the occasional video of athletes grinding through a series of herculean tasks: pushing plate-laden sleds, collapsing over rowing machines, sprinting laps and throwing weighted balls at a wall inside of what looked like an aircraft hangar. That trickle became an avalanche, and I became curious.

Prepare for bouclé jackets, quilted chain-link bags galore and an outfit formula that is proving to be consumer catnip

Just six months after Matthieu Blazy unveiled his debut collection for Chanel, and a week after it landed in stores, excitement over the new designer has reached fever pitch. There have been queues outside shops, grapples at the tills and dozens of social media posts bragging about purchases. Now, Blazy’s Chanel effect is coming for the high street. Prepare for bouclé jackets and quilted chain-link bags galore.

“It is a good sign that it has become immediately a reference point for the high street,” says Mario Ortelli, a managing partner at the luxury advisory firm Ortelli & Co. “When a new product and new creative direction is successful it is copied by the high street. If not, it means it is not relevant or is only relevant for a niche set of consumers.”

Show draws almost entirely from collection of Lancashire schoolteacher Peter Smithson, a fan since he was 10

Peter Smithson’s wife, Belise, has never minded when he receives a corset from Japan or a pair of fur-trimmed knickers and they are not for her.

“No, she’s never seen it as strange,” said Smithson, a chemistry teacher and Vivienne Westwood supercollector. “She has never judged it. She gets it. She knows it is part and parcel of who I am.”

From flannel shirts to herringbone tailoring, Pep Guardiola’s stylistic pivot hint​s at a man renegotiating his identity ​in the twilight of ​his footballing era

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Last Tuesday, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola lost to Real Madrid in a £270 shirt.

The grungy flannel number from the cult Swedish menswear brand Our Legacy was so noteworthy it consumed more post-match oxygen than the news that Manchester City had been dumped out of the Champions League before the quarter-finals. Never mind that Guardiola is beginning to look bereft of ideas for the first time in his career. All anyone cared about was whether he’d hired a stylist.

It will come into its own in summer. Until then, try layering it with spring-ready jackets and chill-proof knitwear

Beyond the Belgian capital’s more obvious sights lies a thriving district known for its classic Belgian cuisine, alternative art scene and gigantic flea market

The Brusseleir dialect that’s still spoken in much of the Marolles dates back to the middle ages, a symbol of the independence of this proudly working-class neighbourhood in central Brussels. Located between the Palace of Justice and Halle Gate, it’s always been an inclusive refuge for immigrants from Europe and north Africa. The must-see Brussels tourist attractions of the Grand-Place central square and Mannekin-Pis statue are within walking distance, but the Marolles offers a very different experience: fashion, antiques and bric-a-brac shopping; alternative creative centres and provocative graffiti; characteristic estaminets (hybrid pub, cafe, bistros) specialising in hearty local dishes; and artisan breweries.

Join the Famous Five in Dorset, relive Springwatch in the Peak District … our selection of Easter treats will keep all the family entertained

Spring has arrived at Wicken Fen, one of Europe’s most important wetlands, and with it the first summer migrants. Chiffchaffs are usually the earliest, with their rhythmic song ringing out across the fens. Then, if the weather is mild, blackcaps and willow warblers might join them. Listen closely, especially early morning or at dusk, for the foghorn-like calls of the booming bittern across the reedbeds. There’s a pushchair- and wheelchair-friendly boardwalk around Sedge Fen, and wheelchair-accessible wildlife hides. Look out for the electric blue flash of a kingfisher, and male marsh harriers performing their dramatic sky-dancing flights as the breeding season gets under way, before the cuckoos arrive in late April.
From £10 adults, £5 children (under-5s free), nationaltrust.org.uk

The luscious chocolate and apricot torte is the stuff of legend in the grand, old world of Viennese coffeehouses. But which makes the tastiest?

I’m on a tram on Vienna’s Ringstrasse as towering facades, columns, statues and domes drift past, each more ornate than the last. Here, the State Opera; there, the Austrian parliament, built in the Greek neoclassical style.

As I gawp, I shove cake in my mouth. After all, Vienna isn’t just the city of music, or lavish architecture. Thanks, in part, to its centuries-old coffeehouse culture, it’s also one of Europe’s finest pastry destinations. Cake (or more precisely, torte, kuchen or Mehlspeisen) has its own day here – “Sweet Friday”, the most delicious of Catholic customs, when meat dishes are replaced with sweets. I have been introduced to it via the medium of Marillenknödel – apricot dumplings.

Your top tips for seasonal outings from birdwatching to gorgeous gardens, amazing architecture and more
• Tell us about a trip to Spain – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Last April, I based myself in Oban and took my teenagers puffin-watching at Lunga, off Mull, in the Treshnish Isles, with an organised tour (Staffa Tours) by ferry and foot. It was a real delight. The guides were brilliant and helpful, especially with my mobility issues, and we were surprised and amazed at how tame and friendly the puffins were – allowing us to get great views of their faces from as near as 5ft or so. Next spring, we are going again as this is the best time to see them arriving in their thousands.
April

Language experts say you should learn in the right order and shift to a growth mindset

If there’s one thing guaranteed to make a pop-culture character look cool and sophisticated, it’s being multilingual. Think James Bond, Yasmin from Industry or Scrooge McDuck.

Learning a new language not only makes you look cool – it also allows you to familiarize yourself with another culture, connect with new people and enjoy a wider variety of art and media. And it’s good for your brain. Studies have shown that learning a new language is associated with improved concentration, stronger communication skills, a more powerful memory and greater creativity.

Even old pennies corrode too slowly to be useful. You’d be better off saving them up and buying proper plant feed

The problem
If a plant looks a bit yellow or drooping, someone might suggest putting a penny in the pot. The idea is that the copper will leach into the soil, liven up the plant and maybe even ward off fungi. It is one of those tips that refuses to die, passed on like family folklore.

The hack
The promise is simple: pop a coin in the compost and let chemistry do the work. Supposedly, the copper acts as a mini-fertiliser and a mild fungicide.

Slumped on the pavement, she wasn’t breathing – and I wouldn’t have realised if I’d been listening to music as usual. Time to stop blotting out the world …

For years I walked the streets of London wearing noise-cancelling headphones, absorbed in playlists, politics podcasts or long voice notes from friends, and a million miles away from wherever I was. One damp January evening last year, I was walking home from my parents’ house, headphones dead in my bag, when I noticed a small figure slumped on the pavement with her eyes closed. I might not have noticed her had I been in my own world, fixated on what was playing in my ears.

I asked for her name. “Can you hear me?” I tried several times, my voice tightening. She didn’t respond, and worse, she didn’t seem to be breathing. My mind raced back to the one first aid class I took in school, but drawing a blank and worried that I might get it wrong, I dialled 999 and frantically tried to figure out if I could feel her pulse.

One thinks mirgrants take advantage of Britain being a generous country, the other thinks they need more safe routes. Can they find common ground in the rise of the Green party?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Abdal-Jabbar, 56, Manchester

Occupation Monitors offenders on electronic tags

Abel Ortiz was brought from Mexico to LA when he was just two months old and has been​ living undocumented​ ever since. Now 38, he has a full life​ cutting hair, building a community, loving​ a city that has never fully loved him back.​ ​In a time of escalating ICE raids and the ache of uncertainty, Abel has made a radical decision: he’s leaving – not because he has to, but to escape perpetual limbo and be free to see the world

The 34-year-old plumber last month secured the Green party its first byelection victory and a record fifth concurrent MP. She discusses the problem with career politicians – and being screamed at by voters

Hannah Spencer presents nothing like a politician – open, frank, friendly, wearing hot-pink joggers. I don’t want to say I’ve never encountered these qualities in an MP, but I’ve never encountered them in the same person. Her house tells the story of her recent byelection victory. The path and the hall are filled with mostly empty cardboard boxes that once contained leaflets.

When Spencer, 34, won Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester for the Greens last month, there was a 26% swing from Labour. She won more than 40% of the vote, up 28 percentage points on the party’s performance in the 2024 general election. It was billed as a shock to the political establishment, a seismic blow to Labour (who were knocked into third place) and a reality check for Reform, who had peacocked their certain victory beforehand yet finished a distant second. But it wasn’t that much of a surprise to the Greens.

Leonid Radvinsky’s widow has been left with a crucial role in deciding what happens to the business that made her husband a billionaire

Yekaterina Chudnovsky, online biographies say, is a mother-of-four who “enjoys spending time with her family and teaching them the importance of giving back and helping others”. They add that Ukrainian-born Chudnovsky, known as Katie, finds sanctuary in walks on the beach.

In interviews, Chudnovsky has spoken warmly about her commitment to philanthropy, her dedication to supporting cancer research and her work as a lawyer for an unnamed global technology firm. Pornography is never mentioned.

A once robust American anti-war movement is significantly weaker than it was in its heyday. The immensely unpopular war on Iran offers a real opportunity to rebuild it

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for authorization to use military force in south-east Asia. His resolution passed unanimously in the House, and only two voices dissented in the Senate. As for the public, 77% of Americans said they trusted the government to do what is right, and more than 60% supported war.

It is common today to hear that the US war in Vietnam was unpopular, but it certainly did not begin that way. It took several years, billions of dollars, tens of thousands of deaths, and constant anti-war mobilization before Americans changed their minds.

We’d like to speak to people in the UK who are cutting back on fuel use after the increase in petrol and diesel prices linked to the war in Iran

We’d like to speak to people in the UK who are cutting back on fuel use after the increase in petrol and diesel prices linked to the war in Iran.

Are you taking fewer journeys or using alternative modes of transport? Are you still travelling to work the same number of days a week? Have you cited fuel costs as a reason to work from home?

As some landlords introduce bans or restrictions, we want to hear from pub-goers about their experiences and views

A growing number of pubs in the UK are restricting or banning children, with some landlords citing safety concerns, changing atmospheres and lost trade. Others argue that pubs should remain welcoming community spaces for people of all ages.

We want to hear from pub-goers, both parents and non-parents, about their experiences and views.

Were you surprised by your bill? How did you manage the cost? We would like to hear from you

The UK’s competition watchdog has ordered vets to cap prescription fees at £21 and proposed a cost-comparison website.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said public satisfaction with the cost of services was “low” after a two-and-a-half-year investigation that found “there is not strong competition between veterinary businesses”.

We’d like to hear from volunteers who have experienced a charity closing

Across the UK, many small charities face increasing financial pressures, forcing some to shut their doors. When this happens, it can leave the people who relied on those services without support - and volunteers and communities trying to step in and keep things going.

We’d like to hear from volunteers who have experienced a charity closing. Have you or others tried to continue the work informally and what were the challenges of doing that? Did you try to keep it going - and what difficulties did you face? What happened to the people who depended on the service?

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