More than 80% of the UK’s tradespeople have had tools stolen. Some have lost months of work as a result. With thefts up 16% in a year, can the police and the government do anything to protect them?

If you’re on social media and have even a passing interest in home improvement, there’s a good chance you will have seen Kevin Tingley’s work. The 39-year-old decorator is known as Paint Warrior – and has millions of followers across TikTok and Instagram. He’s in demand, highly skilled, generous in sharing tips from his many years of experience and even has his own range of products on sale in the UK and the US.

But even with his social media army and branded brushes, he’s still not immune to the biggest threat faced by British tradespeople: tool theft. “It was Boxing Day morning,” Tingley says. “I was still in bed, my wife was on her way to the gym. She came running back in and told me that all the doors of my van were open.”

Richard Hewett, who was forced to sleep in his car when his relationship broke down, is one of many in the UK hit by rising costs and a lack of social housing

When Richard Hewett’s relationship broke down, he was forced to leave his partner’s council house – but found his disability benefits didn’t stretch far enough to get him his own flat in his Essex home town. He resorted to the next best option: sleeping in his car.

It wasn’t what he had expected, aged 59. At 6ft 2in, he squeezed into a Ford Focus and struggled to sleep. When he broke his ankle, he couldn’t look after it properly, contracted sepsis and had his leg amputated.

As the extraordinary superhero satires comes to an end, a mighty showdown has terrifying parallels with modern America. What a horrifying pleasure it has been to watch

The Boys is back in town, for its fifth and final season. There’s too much to recap in full for those who have not yet had the pleasure of the satirical superhero show created by Eric Kripke from the comic books written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or who have not yet been horrified by the gory splatterfest (courtesy of all kinds of body fluids) of the preceding 32 episodes, which have seen orifices and appendages put to extraordinary use, and some of which have rightly entered what we will very carefully spell as the annals of TV history.

So, let’s just say that the new season finds us set for a showdown between an increasingly power-mad (“Have you seen the memes about me? Posting them should be a crime”) – or, as the voices of angels start speaking to him, possibly just mad – Homelander (Antony Starr) and the Butcher crew. The former is now overlord of the US, with the president and, apparently, Sage (Susan Heyward) at his beck and call. But the gang has just succeeded in screening – in front of a Maga … I mean, Homelander-loving … rally – the long-buried footage of him leaving the passengers on Flight 37 (as he did all the way back in season one when he was just a little baby villain) to die.

It sends us to sleep and wakes us in the night, excites us and depresses us, gives us confidence one moment, anxiety the next. How does this messy drug wield so much power?

Whatever you think of alcohol, you have to admit that it’s versatile. Ever since the first humans started smashing up fruit and leaving it in pots to chug a few days later, we’ve been relying on it to celebrate and commiserate, to deal with anxiety and to make us more creative. We use it to build confidence and kill boredom, to get us in the mood for going out and to put us to (nonoptimal) sleep. Where most mind-altering substances have one or two specific use-cases, alcohol does the lot. That’s probably why it’s been so ubiquitous throughout human history – and why it can be so hard to give up entirely.

“We often call alcohol pharmacologically promiscuous,” says Dr Rayyan Zafar, a neuropsychopharmacologist from Imperial College London. “It doesn’t just calm you: it can stimulate reward pathways, dampen threat signals, release endogenous opioids that can relieve pain or stress, alter decision-making and shift mood, all at the same time.”

Decision to cap interest rate at 6% from September is unlikely to defuse row over crippling cost of debt

• Full story: UK caps interest rate on student loans

The government has announced a small concession for millions of university graduates with “plan 2” student loans.

However, the decision to cap the interest rate charged at 6% from September is unlikely to defuse the row over the crippling cost of degree course debts.

The US constitution should make it possible to remove a president who’s not fit for office. But we’re going to need another way out

For the past few months, I have been waging a cold war with a neighbour who constantly puts out their rubbish on the wrong day. And by “cold war” I mean complaining incessantly to my longsuffering wife while the neighbour goes about their business blissfully unaware that we are mortal enemies. But enough is enough. Last week I decided to end this situation via a strongly worded letter. “Tuesday will be Explosions Day in your house, neighbour!” I wrote. “There will be nothing like it!!! Put out your Fuckin’ Rubbish properly, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

I am sorry to drag Allah into this obviously imaginary exchange, but I’m just channelling the US president. I’m sure you’ve already seen Donald Trump’s profanity-laden Easter Sunday warning to Iran, where he threatened to carry out the mass bombing of civilian infrastructure – but if you haven’t, then go read it and weep. The days where Trump’s outbursts were amusing (remember “covfefe”?) are long gone. There is nothing funny about endless stream-of-consciousness screeds from a man who is not just destroying the US, but dragging the whole world down with it. If a civilian acted like the president routinely does, they’d find themselves fired very quickly.

Last-minute intervention led by Pakistan sees US president abandon his ultimatum for Iran to surrender

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• Iran war ceasefire announcement – what we know so far

• Explainer: What is in Iran’s 10-point ceasefire plan and will the US agree to it?

The US and Iran agreed to a two-week conditional ceasefire on Tuesday evening, which included a temporary reopening of the strait of Hormuz, after a last-minute diplomatic intervention led by Pakistan, canceling an ultimatum from Donald Trump for Iran to surrender or face widespread destruction.

Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire agreement came less than two hours before the US president’s self-imposed 8pm Eastern time deadline to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges in a move that legal scholars, as well as officials from numerous countries and the pope, had warned could constitute war crimes.

Brent crude oil dropped to $93 a barrel after US president’s announcement and Iran’s pledge to reopen strait of Hormuz under its management

• Middle East crisis – live updates

• Full report: US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire with Tehran saying it will reopen strait of Hormuz

Oil prices plunged by almost 15% after Donald Trump held off on his threat to bomb Iran into the stone ages on Tuesday night, and Iran’s foreign minister said passage through the strait of Hormuz would be allowed for the next two weeks under the management of its military.

Posting to Truth Social, with just over an hour until his deadline was due to pass, the US president said he was holding off on threatened attacks on Iran’s bridges, power plants and other civilian targets, subject to Tehran agreeing to a two-week ceasefire and reopening of the strait of Hormuz.

Chuck Schumer attacks president’s ‘ridiculous bluster’ while Republicans cast decision as shrewd tactical move

• US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Political leaders and many Americans breathed a sigh of relief on Tuesday evening, after Donald Trump announced a provisional ceasefire deal following threats to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” if Tehran failed to reopen the strait of Hormuz by a self-imposed deadline.

The announcement of the agreement, mediated by Pakistan, came roughly 90 minutes before the 8pm ET deadline by which Trump pledged to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges in a move legal and military scholars said would be considered a war crime.

Rapper had been booked to play at festival in London, prompting outcry over his past antisemitic remarks

The Wireless music festival has been cancelled after the artist formerly known as Kanye West was banned from entering the UK amid a deepening political row over his previous antisemitic statements.

West, legally known as Ye, was due to headline all three days of the festival in July and made an application to travel to the UK via an electronic travel authorisation (ETA) on Monday, but this was blocked by officials.

PM’s most senior civil servant now has task of rewriting civil service code and ‘making it recognised for improved productivity’

Antonia Romeo, Keir Starmer’s most senior civil servant, has been given a powerful new mandate to deliver his priorities, while Darren Jones, the No 10 chief secretary, has shifted to a role more focused on wider Whitehall reforms.

Romeo, who was promoted last month, took over the job of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service after an unsuccessful year in charge by her predecessor, Chris Wormald, who was not considered effective enough by No 10.

Politicians warn party’s pledge to ‘punish’ countries seeking justice for slavery will harm and isolate Britain

Commonwealth politicians say they will not back down from seeking reparations as UK public figures, including a former Reform insider, warn the rightwing party’s pledge to “punish” countries seeking justice for slavery would harm and isolate Britain.

This week, Reform UK said they would halt visas for nationals of countries formally demanding reparations from Britain if they took power.

US vice-president rails against ‘bureaucrats in Brussels’ interfering in Sunday’s vote during Budapest visit

JD Vance has railed against the EU, accusing it of blatantly interfering in Hungary’s upcoming elections, even as the US vice-president said he had travelled to Budapest to “help” Viktor Orbán win Sunday’s vote.

Speaking to reporters shortly after landing in Budapest on Tuesday, Vance’s tone was combative as he alleged that the EU was responsible for “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference” he had ever seen.

Nasa astronauts begin journey home having collected eagerly awaited images of impact craters and ridges

Nasa’s Artemis II astronauts have described the powerful emotion they felt while soaring over the moon as they photographed impact craters, cracks and ridges and began their long journey home.

Among the eagerly awaited images captured by the crew, who worked in pairs at the Orion capsule windows, are those of the Earth rising from behind the moon, a solar eclipse and parts of the 590-mile (950km) wide Orientale impact basin that have never been observed with the naked eye.

More than 33GW of battery capacity approved for Turkish grid since 2022 compared with 12-13GW in Germany

Turkey has given the green light to more batteries to buffer its electricity grid than any EU member state, a report has found, in a further sign of rich countries losing steam in the race to a clean economy.

More than 33GW of battery capacity have been approved in Turkey since 2022, according to the climate thinktank Ember, while the total planned and operational capacity in European frontrunners that started deploying them earlier, such as Germany and Italy, is 12-13GW.

How Mikel Arteta treasured this win. All the tension that had built up in the Arsenal manager after devastating defeats in the Carabao Cup and FA Cup was suddenly released in the moment that Kai Havertz calmly slotted home from fellow substitute Gabriel Martinelli’s cross in the first minute of injury time and Arteta set off on a celebration charge down the touchline, fists pumping.

He had been a frustrated presence until then as Arsenal put in another anxious performance against a spirited Sporting side who could have established a precious lead ahead of next week’s second leg in north London if they had taken their chances. But having scored in the last round against his former club Bayer Leverkusen, once again it was Havertz who edged Arsenal closer to the last four for only the fourth time in their history.

Annie Ramos, who came to US from Honduras as a toddler, was detained last week at husband’s base in Louisiana

The wife of a US soldier who was detained last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at her husband’s Louisiana military base was released from federal custody on Tuesday.

“All I have ever wanted is to live with dignity in the country I have called home since I was a baby,” Annie Ramos said in a statement following her release.

Vogue’s global editorial director says Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada ‘distant’ from the real her

After more than 30 years helming Vogue, and becoming a pop icon in the process, Anna Wintour has graced the cover of the fashion magazine alongside her Hollywood doppelganger, Meryl Streep.

The global editorial director of Vogue is photographed by Annie Leibovitz alongside Streep, who plays Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, a brash, ruthless editor of a fashion magazine thought to be based on Wintour.

Exclusive: Former UN climate chief to co-chair Lancet Commission examining how sea-level rise is reshaping health, wellbeing and inequality

• What are the health impacts of sea-level rise, and who should pay?

• Christiana Figueres: Sea-level rise is a health crisis and we must hold polluters accountable

Countries are being “held hostage” by their reliance on fossil fuels, a former UN climate chief has warned, describing the health impacts of climate change as “the mother of all injustices”.

Christiana Figueres, an international climate negotiator who helped deliver the Paris agreement signed in 2016, made the comments as she was announced on Wednesday as co-chair of a Lancet Commission examining how sea-level rise is reshaping health, wellbeing and inequality.

Iran bombed US bases and allies’ facilities soon after Russian satellites mapped them, according to Ukrainian assessment. What we know on day 1,505

Russian satellites made detailed imagery of military facilities and critical sites across the Middle East including US bases and other targets that were attacked by Iran soon afterwards, according to a Ukrainian intelligence assessment. Reuters reported that the assessment cited at least 24 surveys of areas in 11 Middle Eastern countries from 21-31 March, covering 46 “objects” including US and other military bases and airports and oilfields. Within days of being surveyed, military bases and headquarters were targeted by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, the assessment said.

Russian satellites were actively surveying the strait of Hormuz, according to the Ukrainians. Reuters said a western military source and a separate regional security cited their own intelligence in backing up the claims. Reuters said the Iranian foreign ministry had no immediate comment and the defence ministry in Russia did not respond to a request for comment.

Reuters said its regional security source confirmed a specific incident where a Russian satellite imaged Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia days before Iran struck the facility on 27 March, hitting a sophisticated US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft. The next day a Russian satellite passed over again to assess the damage, the assessment said. The Ukrainian report also alleges Russian and Iranian hackers were collaborating in the cyber domain.

The Ukrainian military said it had struck Russia’s Ust-Luga oil terminal in the Leningrad region on Tuesday. The general staff said on Telegram it had preliminary confirmation of damage to three storage tanks belonging to the Transneft-Baltika company.

Crude oil exports from Russia’s Sheskharis terminal in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk were suspended after a big drone attack and a fire, two sources told Reuters on Tuesday. The terminal, which typically loads 700,000 barrels a day of crude oil, is Russia’s key oil outlet in the Black Sea. Its suspension will add to the strain on Russian infrastructure, which has been repeatedly attacked.

Moscow’s troops targeted two buses in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, its governor, Oleksandr Ganzha, said on Telegram. A drone smashed into a bus approaching a stop in Nikopol’s city centre, he said, and later another bus was hit in a neighbouring community. Four people were killed in Nikopol and at least 16 injured, officials said. In the southern city of Kherson, a Russian attack on a residential area that lasted half an hour killed four elderly people and injured seven more, said the regional governor, Oleksandr Prokudin. Other deadly Russian strikes took place in Zaporizhzhia and Sumy oblasts, said Ukrainian officials.

Ukrainian drone strikes killed five civilians including a 12-year-old boy and his parents in Russia and Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, Russian officials said on Tuesday. Reuters could not independently verify the officials’ statements, and Ukraine denies deliberately targeting civilians.

Pheap Rom was one of 15 people sent to prison in African kingdom last year despite completing US sentences

A Cambodian man deported by the US said he would have accepted being sent to Cambodia, but instead ended up imprisoned in Eswatini, a country he knew so little about that when he first read the name he thought it was another immigration detention centre in Louisiana.

Pheap Rom, who had been convicted of attempted murder, was one of 10 deportees sent to Eswatini by the US in October 2025. They joined a group of five men, from Cambodia, Cuba, Jamaica, Vietnam and Yemen, who were deported to the small southern African country in July. All were sent to a maximum-security prison. Rom was deported from Eswatini to Cambodia in March.

A new book by Molly Crabapple documents the rise and fall of a revolutionary Jewish party that fought against Zionism and for ‘solidarity across difference’

There is perhaps no more vivid illustration of the moral nadir Israel has reached than the Knesset’s passage, two days before Passover, of a death penalty law that applies only to Palestinians. The measure, whose approval was greeted with tears of joy and the popping of champagne in the legislative chamber, is a concise legal expression of the core animating idea of modern Israel: that there exists no humane obligation in Jewish tradition with a durable universal ambit. The notion that Jews should have a special concern for the fate of all humanity, regardless of ethnicity or creed, lies dead beneath the rubble in Gaza.

It had to be killed, however, because there was a time when it lived. Cosmopolitanism over nationalism, social democracy over rapacious capitalism, collective liberation over ethno-chauvinist fortress-building – these were the values that animated the Jewish Labour Bund, a revolutionary party founded in 1897 in the Tsarist empire. “For leftist Jews longing for resources within our own past for combating the Zionist death cult,” as author, activist and artist Molly Crabapple puts it, “the Bund is a model.” A model with an audience – Crabapple’s new history of the Bund was already in its second printing the week before it came out.

Some of the young Americans swept up in the movement are looking for the meaning of life; others for a new partner. Well, it’s a broad church …

Name: Catholicmaxxing.

Age: Less than a year.

From bouclé and bomber to quilted, suede and multiwear, our jacket edit will lift the mood – and have you ready for the most changeable of seasons

• The best women’s spring wardrobe updates for under £100

Spring is the most confusing season when it comes to fashion. Mornings can be grey and drizzly, but come the afternoon, the sun may be shining like it’s August. A trusty spring jacket will help you navigate the forecast and the transition into the warmer months.

The perfect spring jacket is lighter in weight and often softer in colour than a winter one. Taking inspiration from the flowers, greenery and lush landscapes these months bring is a great way to add joy to your everyday. A pastel-coloured jacket can instantly make your outfit feel more seasonally appropriate, too. Leaving behind the warm embrace of your puffer isn’t easy, and I love a classic black coat, but neither seems fitting on a bright April morning.

Universities in Britain rely on overseas applicants paying full fees, which has given rise to some unscrupulous recruiters and left many hopefuls and their families deep in debt

When Sam started looking into studying abroad, it didn’t take long for his phone to start ringing. At 24, he was living with his parents in a small city in the southern Indian state of Odisha and he’d been stuck in an entry-level job for four years. He hoped a master’s degree in the UK might lead to a high-flying finance job in London, or at least give him an edge when he came back home.

After filling in a few forms on study abroad websites, Sam soon started receiving calls from unknown numbers. Eventually, he answered one. The person on the phone was an education agent – a recruiter who helps students apply to foreign universities – pitching his services. The offer sounded appealing. The agency would help Sam decide which universities to apply to, advising on the most suitable courses and where he had the best chance of admission. They would help draft his application, and if he got in, assist with immigration. They would do all of this for free. “I was sceptical,” said Sam. “Like, why would you do that?”

The UK and EU countries who abstained when Ghana’s UN resolution was adopted may soon find it harder to sustain the same old script on reparations

The most revealing thing about Ghana’s UN resolution was not that it passed. It was who could not bring themselves to stand with it.

On 25 March, the UN general assembly adopted the Ghana-led resolution by 123 votes to three, with 52 abstentions. It declared that the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans was “the gravest crime against humanity” and urged steps including formal apologies, reparatory justice and the return of looted cultural property. The three states that voted no were the US, Israel and Argentina; the UK and all EU member states abstained.

The former chancellor was the chief architect of Germany’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels and cuts to defence spending. Both haunt the country today

The former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is enjoying a curious political revival. Not so long ago, his reputation seemed in tatters. In light of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many came to regard his longstanding ties to Russia and personal friendship with Vladimir Putin as self-serving. Fellow Social Democrats (SPD) tried to expel him from the party, and as recently as last year the government defunded the ex-chancellor’s office.

And yet a veritable Schröder nostalgia is now seeping into German political discourse, a phenomenon that’s less to do with a reappraisal of his chancellorship than with a desperate identity crisis on the centre-left.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist. She is the author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990. Her latest book, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, comes out in May

When it’s hard or impossible to identify trustworthy sources, you can choose to believe whatever you find comforting, invigorating or infuriating

In early March, a week after the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the White House posted a video of real American attacks mixed with clips from popular movies, television series, video games and anime.

Iran and its sympathisers responded to the strikes by flooding social media with outdated war footage allegedly from the current conflict alongside AI-generated content depicting attacks on Tel Aviv and US bases in the Persian Gulf.

Those facing the earliest and harshest consequences are, overwhelmingly, those who did the least to create them

• World held hostage by reliance on fossil fuels, Christiana Figueres warns

• What are the health impacts of sea-level rise, and who should pay?

There are moments in history when a crisis long treated as distant reveals itself to be intimate, immediate and profoundly human. Sea-level rise is one of those moments.

For years it has been discussed in the abstract language of centimetres, coastal infrastructure and future projections. This can make it seem like a technical challenge – something for engineers and planners to grapple with. But rising seas are already damaging bodies, minds, livelihoods and cultures. Sea-level rise is a present-day health crisis.

The US was founded on a pledge to limit the damages of war, even if it has often failed to uphold its commitment

Far from expressing remorse for his threat to bomb civilian infrastructure, Donald Trump is doubling down as we approach his deadline for Iranian submission: 8pm ET on Tuesday.

It’s not enough for the US to achieve a military victory – one that continues to elude him, with his stated goals for the war still unmet. Instead, “a whole civilization will die, never to be brought back again,” as he posted on social media. He then added that we are approaching “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World”.

There is no question that Trump’s threats, if carried out, would amount to war crimes. The international justice system is positioned to act

Donald Trump is openly threatening war crimes in Iran because he apparently thinks he can get away with them. Sadly, the US supreme court has given him reason to believe in his impunity within the United States. But there are international options for prosecution that lie beyond the court’s lawless license. They are not easy to exercise, but the terrible precedent of the world’s most powerful president openly flouting international humanitarian law should compel action.

There is no doubt that Trump is contemplating war crimes. As part of his plan to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages” and wipe out a “whole civilization”, Trump has threatened to destroy such civilian infrastructure as desalination plants, electrical-generating facilities and bridges.

The Reform leader cynically pushes the boundaries of how far he can go without alienating too many of the voters he needs – but it’s a perilous calibration

What counts as beyond the pale these days? Having successfully pushed back the cordon sanitaire that surrounds British politics, Nigel Farage is struggling to work out where, precisely, it now lies. Some decisions are simple. Attacks on Grenfell victims are, and have always been, beyond the bounds of decency. Farage promptly sacked Simon Dudley last week after the housing spokesperson mused of the victims that “everyone dies in the end”.

But on other choices Farage dithers. Not wishing to sound prudish to his more hard-boiled supporters, he previously dismissed accusations he was racist at school as “banter in the playground”. It was only in January that he did what any other mainstream politician would do with likely unprovable claims of racism and denied them completely.

Martha Gill writes about politics and culture

The threat posed by a new space race is real. But so is the wonder of humankind’s reaching for the skies

“Everything we need, Earth provides. And that is somewhat of a miracle, and one that you can’t truly know until you’ve had the perspective of the other.” This is how the US astronaut Christina Koch summed up her experience of travelling to the far side of the moon on Monday. The feeling of a deepened appreciation for home recalls statements by an earlier generation of space travellers. The famous Earthrise photograph, taken on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, has been credited as one of the drivers behind the environmental movement. Such was the power of the first images of the “blue planet” captured from space.

The hope that such journeys can foster global cooperation and appreciation for life was also the theme of the prize-winning novel Orbital, which is set on a space station among a multinational crew. But if it was ever possible to overlook the darker side of space travel, it definitely isn’t today. In the 1960s, the American and Soviet programmes were projections of the two blocs’ military strength. In the 2020s, the tech billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are key players in a dramatically revived US industry, while a post-terrestrial geopolitical battle between the US and China takes shape. Nasa aims to put a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030.

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.

Speculation that the leader’s teenage daughter will succeed him is rife. But Ju-ae’s high profile is about continuity, not change

North Korea is unique in turning a putatively communist state into a dynastic system now in its third generation. So while the proposition that Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter will inherit power is sparking debate, unexpected political transitions are not entirely new. On Monday, South Korea’s intelligence agency said that it had “credible” information that Kim Ju-ae is positioned as her father’s successor. Its briefing to legislators in Seoul followed appearances alongside her father highlighting her military credentials – including driving a tank – and months of rhetorical inflation, with state media describing her as “a great person of guidance”.

The Mount Paektu bloodline – linking the family to a sacred mountain seen as the mythical origin of the Korean people – is championed in North Korean propaganda. Yet, given that Ju-ae is around 13 and her father only 42, talk of succession appears wildly premature. Very little is known about her: her exact age is uncertain; she may in fact be called Ju-hae – North Korean media does not name her; and she may have two siblings, possibly boys.

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.

Former ambassadors and high commissioners call on Keir Starmer to stand with European and Commonwealth partners against the unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory

• Report: UK government urged to act over proposed illegal Israeli settlement

While all eyes are on the US-Israel war on Iran, Israel proceeds with its systematic West Bank annexation. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, recently condemned “annexation moves”, including the illegal E1 settlement project designed to divide the West Bank in two and destroy Palestine’s viability.

The Iran war and Israel’s military occupation of south Lebanon have delayed the publication of Israeli tenders to build 3,400 houses on Palestinian soil at E1 – but tenders will be issued on 1 June. Criticism by Britain, Germany, France and Italy does not deter this Israeli government, which has over decades grown used to rhetorical condemnation without consequences. So it keeps growing the illegal settlements, deliberately undermining the two-state solution – the policy of successive British governments and our European partners. As Jennifer Rankin has observed (‘Weak and pathetic’: why is the EU not using its leverage to stop Israel?, 2 April), the EU is not using its leverage to stop Israel.

Readers respond to Elle Hunt’s review of Meta smartglasses, pointing out that the technology has a lot to offer to people with visual impairments or hearing loss

I read with sympathy the concerns of Elle Hunt in relation to privacy issues around Meta smartglasses (I wore Meta’s smartglasses for a month – and it left me feeling like a creep, 1 April). Clearly there needs to be ongoing development of technology and protocols that protect the public from ill-intentioned users. As the chief executive of a charity supporting people with a visual impairment, however, I would like to emphasise the point touched upon in your article: how transformative this technology is already proving for blind people.

We are seeing significant numbers of our visually impaired staff and clients using Meta glasses in conjunction with their mobile phones to improve their ability to perform ordinary functions that most of us take for granted. A visual impairment can be disempowering and isolating. Having a tool that can read your bills to you, tell you when your bus is coming, make calls for you when your hands are full and read the cooking instructions on your dinner is offering a level of independence that many visually impaired people have lost.

Mónica Joyce Moniz on the origins of marmalade. Plus letters from Tony Batcup and Mark de Brunner

As a Portuguese-British citizen, I feel it is my duty to add to your explainer article (Keir Starmalade, anyone? Will marmalade really have to be rebranded in UK?, 4 April) and explain where the word marmalade originated from. Marmalade comes from the fruit marmelo (quince). And marmalade was and is quince jam in Portugal. This jam began to be exported to England at the end of the 15th century. Only in the 17th century did the English start to apply the word marmalade to orange jam. As with many quintessential British things like tea, the English adopted it and made it their own. I like this story because my two countries are represented.
Mónica Joyce Moniz
Wyton, Cambridgeshire

• Your article about the alleged rebranding of marmalade made me smile – it has always been incorrectly named. As it comes from Citrus x aurantium, and not Citrus x sinensis, it should be known as bitter orange marmalade – perhaps the EU and the UK can save the bitter talk for other more important differences?
Tony Batcup
Las Condes, Santiago, Chile

Don’t-shop Wednesday | Saved by the dog | Farage/Braverman birthday | Double-barrelled surname | Spelling test

Perhaps the boss of Waitrose should leave his ivory tower and spend an extended period on the shop floor to experience the life of a shop worker and see the shoplifting epidemic that is happening day in and day out. He may then reach boiling point one day and react out of character. Perhaps a “Don’t-shop Wednesday” at Waitrose, in support of Walker Smith (Waitrose employee sacked after stopping shoplifter from taking Easter eggs, 5 April), might have some effect and reach top executives.
Roy Wilson
Harrow, London

• The heartwarming column on how Beau the labrador saved his master’s life after he suffered cardiac arrest on a beach (The pet I’ll never forget, 6 April) reminded me of when we got our new collie. Arriving home, my husband went on ahead to open the house door and didn’t see that I had tripped and landed face down on our lane. The dog ran back and sat on guard until hubby returned to find the dog, and me.
Jeanette Hamilton
Buxton, Derbyshire

• Havertz goal offers response after back-to-back defeats

• Arteta praises ‘extraordinary’ Raya for crucial saves

Mikel Arteta acknowledged that Arsenal had a point to prove against Sporting after losing their last two matches and believes that Kai Havertz’s late winner could prove to be a “big moment” in their season.

Arsenal had David Raya to thank for making three superb saves that kept the scores level before Havertz came off the bench to seal a priceless away victory. It was a huge relief for Arteta, who had urged his players to rediscover their identity after they suffered back-to-back defeats for the first time this season against Manchester City in the Carabao Cup final and Championship side Southampton in the FA Cup.

“This is why you guys come to these games,” Vincent Kompany had said, and especially here. For the quality, the chaos and the goals, the edge, the drama and the history that invades every moment. Another wild Champions League night had this place believing in another crazy comeback, the noise level rising towards what appeared destined to be one, last thunderous crescendo as Real Madrid rose again and went for their biggest European rivals. In the end, though, Bayern Munich held on for a win that sets up another, definitive battle at the Allianz Arena next week.

Strikes from Luis Díaz and Harry Kane either side of half-time had given Bayern a 2-0 lead, underlining an incontestable authority in the opening hour. But a Kylian Mbappé goal 16 minutes from the end began a rebellion that could have left the tie on even more of a knife edge than it is, Madrid finding chances for a draw or even another victory. They also found Manuel Neuer rolling back the years, aged 40, with nine saves.

• Wirtz denies Liverpool ‘gave up’ in Manchester City loss

• Isak could return off bench after four months out injured

Arne Slot has warned Liverpool will suffer another emphatic defeat should they switch off against Paris Saint-Germain in their Champions League quarter-final first leg on Wednesday evening but believes his toiling team can save their season by going “toe-to-toe” with the European champions.

The pressure on Liverpool and their head coach has intensified following Saturday’s 4-0 capitulation against Manchester City in the quarter-final of the FA Cup. Florian Wirtz disagreed with the captain Virgil van Dijk’s damning assessment that Liverpool “gave up” at the Etihad Stadium, but both the £116m playmaker and Slot admitted there can be no repeat of that performance at Parc des Princes.

• Four youth sides picked could not be promoted

• Plans involve mid-season split and up to £1m investment

Major structural changes to the Women’s National League, including four Women’s Super League academy sides entering tier three of the pyramid from 2027 and the introduction of a mid-season split similar to that used in Scotland, have been proposed by the Football Association, the Guardian can reveal.

The plans come alongside a potential investment package of about £1m, enhancements to legal and medical support in the loan system, and a hope of attracting more fans and media attention to the league.

The defending champion is a lot more relaxed but ‘just as motivated’ this year after finally winning at Augusta

On the Tuesday of last year’s Masters, Rory McIlroy dined with Justin Rose in the clubhouse at Augusta. He arrived right around the time that all the guests at Scottie Scheffler’s champions dinner were having cocktails on the balcony. “I was pulling up Magnolia Lane,” McIlroy says. “And I’m like, well, do I go and park way over at the parking lot? Because I’m not going to park in the champions parking lot.’”

Not when there’s Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and everyone else looking down. “I didn’t want to get out and use a valet because they were going to see me and it was going to be weird. So I had this really awkward moment,” McIlroy says with a laugh. “Thankfully that was the last time that I needed to do that.”

Southampton continued their Championship charge as they thrashed Wrexham 5-1 to replace the Welsh side in the playoff places.

Fuelled by their stunning weekend FA Cup quarter-final triumph over Arsenal, Tonda Eckert’s in-form side flew out of the traps at Stōk Cae Ras with early goals from Kuryu Matsuki and Flynn Downes, having already hit the woodwork twice.

• Bucharest hospital confirms his death after heart attack

• Coach led team to Euro 84 and won multiple club titles

Mircea Lucescu, the Romanian football great who was a serial trophy winner as a player and a coach, has died aged 80.

Lucescu’s death was confirmed by Bucharest university emergency hospital on Tuesday. He had been taken to hospital after reportedly having a heart attack on Friday morning.

• Former footballer denies assault in north-west England

• Barton to remain in custody with trial set for 1 September

Joey Barton has denied assaulting a man outside a golf club in north-west England. The 43-year-old former Manchester City and Newcastle midfielder appeared via video link from Liverpool prison for the plea hearing at Liverpool crown court.

He pleaded not guilty to causing grievous bodily harm with intent to Kevin Lynch on 8 March. Barton’s co-defendant, Gary O’Grady, was not asked to enter a plea to the charge on Tuesday.

• Former captain spent past two seasons at Brive

• Alex Sanderson: ‘He’s still got the ability’

Courtney Lawes has been backed to regain his England place following confirmation he will be joining Sale Sharks this summer on a one-year deal. The former national captain has spent the last two seasons with Brive in France’s Pro D2 but has indicated he would love to play international rugby again should the chance arise.

While Lawes will be 38 next February and retired from the Test arena after the 2023 World Cup in France, he still feels he can make an impact at the top level of the game. That view is shared by Sale’s director of rugby, Alex Sanderson, who is looking forward to welcoming the former Northampton stalwart to Manchester.

Union rejected 4.9% pay rise for resident doctors, who are on six-day strike, but offered its own staff 2.75%

The British Medical Association has been accused of the “height of hypocrisy” for offering its own staff below-inflation pay rises while demanding a 26% increase for resident doctors.

Tens of thousands of medics walked out of the NHS in England on Tuesday, the 15th time they have staged industrial action since March 2023 in their campaign for “full pay restoration”.

Voters pick Clay Fuller, deciding Iran war was not enough to propel a Democrat into a conservative-leaning House seat

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Clay Fuller supports the war in Iran. Shawn Harris opposes it. Voters in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former district in north-west Georgia decided that this distinction was not enough to propel a Democrat into a conservative-leaning House seat on Tuesday night.

Associated Press called the election as results from the rural counties of north-western corner of the state rolled in.

Former diplomats say ministers must threaten action against any companies bidding to build E1 settlement of 3,400 houses in West Bank

• Britain must lead efforts to stop Israel’s annexation of the West Bank – full text of letter

A group of leading former UK ambassadors and high commissioners has called on the UK government to threaten action against any companies bidding to build an illegal Israeli settlement “designed to divide the West Bank in two and destroy Palestine’s viability”.

In a letter published in the Guardian, the 32 former diplomats said tenders for the planned E1 settlement, which would involve the construction of 3,400 houses on “Palestinian soil” as part of Israel’s “systemic West Bank annexation”, were due to be issued on 1 June.

Comments by US president’s son seen as gesture of support for ousted pro-Russian leader Milorad Dodik

Donald Trump’s eldest son has criticised the EU as “a little bit of a mess” during a visit to Bosnia’s Republika Srpska widely seen as a gesture of support for the ousted pro-Russian leader Milorad Dodik.

Donald Trump Jr travelled to the Serb-run region’s de facto capital, Banja Luka, as the guest of Dodik’s son Igor. The visit coincided with remarks by JD Vance in Budapest, who accused the EU of meddling in an election in Hungary, even as he endorsed Viktor Orbán ahead of Sunday’s vote.

Freelancer Shelly Kittleson was reportedly held by Iran-backed militia which says she must now leave country

The US journalist Shelly Kittleson, who was kidnapped from a Baghdad street corner last week, has been released, secretary of state Marco Rubio announced on Tuesday.

“We are relieved that this American is now free and are working to support her safe departure from Iraq,” he said on social media.

Shahid Bagheri leaking fuel towards Hara mangrove forest, home to migrating birds and endangered turtles

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An oil slick from a stricken Iranian ship threatens to contaminate one of the Middle East’s most important wetlands, satellite image analysis suggests, making it one of a number of spills posing a risk to the livelihoods of coastal communities in the Gulf.

The Shahid Bagheri, a drone carrier, began leaking heavy fuel oil in Iranian territorial waters near the strait of Hormuz after it was hit by a US warplane in the first few days of the US-Israel attack on Iran.

Marcos Orellana, a special rapporteur, found lax environmental standards and lack of oversight allowed pollution to accumulate

• Revealed: Mexico’s industrial boomtown is making goods for the US. Residents say they’re ‘breathing poison’

Mexico is facing a “toxic crisis” and has become a “garbage sink” for the US, exposing Mexican communities to dangerous pollution, a UN expert has warned.

In an interview with the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab, an investigative outlet, Marcos Orellana, an environmental specialist, said pollutants ranging from imported waste to dangerous pesticides were affecting people’s right to live healthy lives.

Worst polluters hold world’s future in their hands as they benefit from higher fossil fuel prices, but global trends favour renewables

Oil stands at about $110 a barrel and some forecasts have predicted it could reach $150. Food prices are on the rise and are expected to leap further owing to the fertiliser supply crunch, leading the World Food Programme USA to warn that global food insecurity could reach record levels, with 45 million more people pushed into acute hunger. Industries from steel to chemicals have alerted markets that they face shortages and soaring costs, while households across the world are feeling the pinch – people have been told to turn down their thermostats, take the bus or cycle, and cut their speed on motorways.

The impact of the US-Israel war on Iran – the third global shock in six years, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic – has laid bare how reliant our economies still are on fossil fuels. Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, said in March: “Fossil fuel dependency is ripping away national security and sovereignty and replacing it with subservience and rising costs.”

Hogshaw, Derbyshire: Our old Buxton tip is an area rich in nature. It’s depressing our local council wants it developed

Our old Buxton tip might bear the scars of former abuse, but it’s now an entangled, self-willed wood, largely made up of willows and birch, which is surrounded by flowers in summer and has a species list of 870, composed mainly of insects. The diversity arises because these two pioneer trees are among the most invertebrate-friendly in our islands.

Where you find insect abundance, you’ll also hear birdsong, because the music is fuelled largely by invertebrate protein. Recently we organised a dawn-chorus walk and managed 20 early spring vocalists. Song and mistle thrushes, dunnocks and wrens, as well as bullfinches and greenfinches, were among the breeding birds we heard and which are red- or amber-listed by the British Trust for Ornithology.

Police investigating as former worker is suspected of having designed program to avoid security checks

A former worker at Meta is under criminal investigation on suspicion of downloading about 30,000 private Facebook images.

He was employed by the social media company when it is believed he designed a program to be able to access the pictures while avoiding internal security checks.

As global row intensifies, Reform UK has said it would not issue visas for people from any country seeking reparations

The rightwing Reform UK party has said it would stop issuing visas to people from any country that seeks reparations for the transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of Africans, at a time when the global battle for reparative justice is intensifying.

Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, this week claimed the UK was being “ridiculed on the world stage” and said the “bank is closed” to anyone who wanted to “use history as a weapon to drain our Treasury”.

Iceland’s chair Richard Walker says Walker Smith is ‘welcome to a job with us’ as public fundraiser hits £7,500

Keir Starmer’s cost of living tsar, who is the chair of Iceland, has offered a job to a worker who was sacked from Waitrose after trying to stop a shoplifter.

Waitrose has faced a public outcry over its treatment of Walker Smith after the Guardian reported he was fired two days after he stopped the shoplifter taking items from an Easter egg display, including Lindt chocolate bunnies.

Watchdog finds allegations against City of Sanctuary UK were misleading after complaint from Tory MP

A refugee charity subjected to vicious social media attacks over a migrant welcome project in schools has been cleared of wrongdoing after watchdogs found allegations it encouraged pupils to send Valentine’s Day cards to asylum seekers were misleading and false.

City of Sanctuary UK came under fire last year after rumours spread online that under its schools programme, children were being “forced” to write heart-shaped welcome cards to adult migrants, including cards addressed to “my fiance”.

Former SAS soldier and Victoria Cross recipient, who has always denied wrongdoing, did not immediately apply for bail on Wednesday

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Ben Roberts-Smith will remain in jail after his legal representatives declined to apply for bail on Wednesday, a day after Australia’s most decorated soldier was charged with war crimes.

The former SAS soldier and Victoria Cross recipient was expected to make his first court appearance on Wednesday after being charged with five counts of war crime – murder in relation to alleged offences in Afghanistan between April 2009 and October 2012.

Chad Bianco of Riverside county obtained warrants to seize ballots cast for state’s successful redistricting referendum

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A California sheriff’s decision to seize about 650,000 ballots based on specious allegations of fraud has raised considerable alarm bells that similar efforts to undermine confidence in the electoral system could materialize this fall.

The episode underscores how sheriffs and other officials can transform shoddy claims about voter fraud into law enforcement actions. Executing a warrant to seize ballots disrupts the chain of custody that is critical to maintaining ballot integrity, and also plants the idea in the public’s mind that a crime has occurred.

Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation has asked a court to halt the separatist push, arguing it would violate their treaty rights

A First Nation in Alberta has said that a separatist push for the province to secede from Canada is “consummately irresponsible and dishonourable” and should be shut down, arguing in court that a proposed referendum would violate their treaty rights.

A minority of residents of the oil-rich province have long argued that the province’s woes are due to the structure of payments to the federal government and a perceived inability to get their vast fossil fuel reserves to market.

Baby was delivered during Caribbean Airlines flight from Kingston to the US; nationality of child to be determined

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A routine passenger flight from Jamaica landed at New York’s John F Kennedy international airport with one more person than it took off with after a woman gave birth in midair, potentially setting up a tricky situation over the newborn’s citizenship.

The “medical event” occurred on a Caribbean Airlines flight from Kingston on Saturday, according to a news release from the carrier.

Elon Musk’s aerospace to AI company will host summer event to try to convince buyers it is worth $2tn

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SpaceX will kick off the marketing for its highly anticipated stock exchange debut by hosting an event in June for 1,500 retail investors, as executives set out to convince buyers that the aerospace to artificial intelligence group should be valued at $2tn.

In an unusual move, the company has earmarked a large portion of its shares – potentially up to 30% – for non-professional, non-institutional investors, banking on the popularity of its chief executive, Elon Musk, to help it raise $75bn (about £56bn) in what is expected to be the largest public offering in history.

Scale AI gig workers describe desperation of using people’s personal profiles and copyrighted work to train AI

Tens of thousands of people have been paid by a company part-owned by Meta to train AI by combing Instagram accounts, harvesting copyrighted work and transcribing pornographic soundtracks, the Guardian can reveal.

Scale AI, 49%-controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire, has recruited experts across fields such as medicine, physics and economics – putatively to refine top-level artificial intelligence systems through a platform called Outlier. “Become the expert that AI learns from,” it says on its site, advertising flexible work for people with strong credentials.

Oil prices swing and stock markets tense on approach to Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen strait of Hormuz

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The oil and ‌gas crisis triggered by the blockade of the strait of Hormuz is “more serious than the ones in 1973, ​1979 and 2022 together”, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.

Speaking as Donald Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen the waterway approached, Fatih Birol told ⁠Le Figaro newspaper that the impact of the Middle East conflict on the oil market was larger than the combined force of the twin shocks of the 1970s and the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

They have degrees, expertise and years of experience – but can’t find work. For many Americans, AI training has become a last refuge in a brutal job market

When Patrick Ciriello lost his job and couldn’t find work for nearly a year, his family’s foundation crumbled.

“You hear about people who hit rock bottom,” Ciriello told the Guardian. “Well, I was there.”

The sleeper hit film has been transformed into a Disney stage show. But does it let exploitative huckster PT Barnum off the hook? We go behind the scenes of its launch run in Bristol

‘Ladies and gents, this is the moment you’ve waited for!” Nine years after Hugh Jackman first purred those opening words, silhouetted against a foot-stomping crowd, the inevitable has happened: The Greatest Showman is now a Disney stage musical. Despite derisive reviews, the 2017 film was a sleeper hit, powered by an anthem-packed soundtrack that included the Oscar-nominated paean to self-realisation and resilience This Is Me. It seemed written in the stars that those bangers would be rolled out in a live circus-theatre spectacular, and the production adds new songs by the original composers, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, whose musical Dear Evan Hansen made the opposite (but ill-fated) journey, from stage to screen.

Rather than launching in London or on Broadway as might be expected, The Greatest Showman is premiering in Bristol with an eight-week, sold-out run treated as a tryout. Its future is unconfirmed but it is worth noting that Theatre Royal Drury Lane, former London home to the mighty Frozen, will soon be vacant because Disney’s Hercules is closing in September.

From Sleep Token to Ghost and Slaughter to Prevail, the genre’s biggest stars are using freaky facial disguises. Are they hiding behind them – or revealing their true nature?

When US avant garde metal band Imperial Triumphant decided that their image needed a shake-up in 2015, they considered putting on corpse paint, the ghastly makeup popularised by 90s black metal. But, their singer/guitarist Zachary Ezrin says, they then realised how much effort it would take – and how uncool the post-gig rituals would feel: “You just rocked a show, and now you have to sit backstage and wipe off your makeup.” (Perish the thought of being the average female pop star.)

They instead chose to wear striking gold masks modelled after 1920s art deco architecture, though these brought their own problems when they got lost in transit. “We had to do one show where Steve [Blanco, bass] was wearing a new mask that we put together from parts. We went to some Hungarian costume shop and just started grabbing stuff and piecing it together.”

The period drama set in feudal Japan is an epic of divine proportion, tackling grand questions of faith and colonisation with remarkable fervour

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The year is 1640. Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) arrives in Japan with fellow Jesuit missionary Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) to search for their missing mentor, Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson). There, Rodrigues witnesses how “Kirishitans” – historical Japanese Catholics – must practise their faith in secret because their religion is heresy in Edo-period Japan. As he observes how the Japanese belief differs from his teachings, Rodrigues begins to question his faith. Despite praying ceaselessly, Rodrigues does not hear back from God.

Silence, one of Martin Scorsese’s passion projects, was released in 2016 after nearly three decades in development. Scorsese’s dedication mirrors the spiritual journey of his protagonist.

The ugly side of chess is pored over in this Netflix documentary, looking at how lurid online gossip led to a lawsuit, conspiracy theories and a bitter rivalry. Sadly, there’s little new here

‘Every conversation I have about chess”, says Hans Niemann, “leads to anal beads.” In any other context that might seem something of a non-sequitur. But in the context of Niemann, it makes a lot of sense. For the uninitiated, Niemann was the chess prodigy accused in 2022 of cheating against world champion Magnus Carlsen – some said by using a vibrating sex toy to direct his play, leading him to a shock (pun intended) victory.

As ridiculous as it sounds – the sort of thing that would be laughed out of the Black Mirror writers’ room – the theory gained ground online, and in the press. This Netflix one-off draws heavily on archive footage ridiculing the incident, featuring everyone from Piers Morgan to Trevor Noah, who quips that, with anal beads, “even if you lose, you still kinda win”.

François Ozon’s adaptation of the 1942 novella L’Etranger passionately honours the original text while bringing a contemporary perspective to its themes of empire and race

A heatstricken reverie of violence and mystery unfolds in this film, a numb ecstasy of the inexplicable, as experienced by a sensitive white European under the unbearable noonday sun. Set in 1940s French Algeria (and filmed in Morocco), François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.

An archive reel introduces us briskly to Algiers and its casbah, with a hint of Julien Duvivier’s Pépé Le Moko; then we are shown our antihero Meursault, remanded there on trial for the capital crime of murder, played with many an unreadable moue of listless unconcern by Benjamin Voisin. Flashbacks show us his dull office job in Algiers, where he turns down a promotion and transfer to Paris, one of his many shrugging gestures of indifference to his own interests.

Lorenazo Ligas is a brilliant but flawed hero in fun new series Ligas. Plus: Do you have OCD? Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Atlantic
Lorenzo Ligas (Luca Argentero) is a debauched genius, a lawyer whose brilliance is matched by his capacity for self-sabotage. This trope isn’t original, but there’s a certain freewheeling relish to the Italian drama. As it begins, Ligas is defending a gone-to-seed pop star accused of murdering a cop. But the clock is ticking. Can our maverick hero exonerate his client before he destroys his own career prospects? Flashy, flimsy fun. Phil Harrison

When the singer-songwriter and Sufjan Stevens collaborator became gravely ill, he had to learn to walk, talk, hear, play and sing again. Music – and a love of antique instrumentation – helped him rebuild

On Halloween 2022, Angelo De Augustine was at home in Los Angeles when he suddenly collapsed. “I got all these strange sensations and knew something was very wrong,” says the 33-year old singer-songwriter. “Then I lost control of my body.” Luckily, he had family around who were able to rush him to hospital, where he was put through days of exhausting tests. “I was conscious most of the time unfortunately,” he says drily, “but I don’t remember a whole lot about it other than I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see well and I couldn’t really move.” Despite countless explorations, doctors were unable to offer a concrete diagnosis, and eventually sent him home. “They said, ‘Come back if you go completely deaf or blind.’”

Reeling and semi-incapacitated, De Augustine had just one thought: to finish Toil and Trouble, the album he had been making for the preceding year. “Nobody was helping and I didn’t think I would survive the illness,” he admits. “I couldn’t do basic tasks like lift things, but I’d worked so hard I didn’t want to leave it incomplete. As far as I was concerned, I wanted to get it finished and then thought I was probably gonna die.”

The Whole New World composer who soundtracked millennial childhoods and won eight Oscars looks back on a stellar career

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In early 1991, the composer Alan Menken took a keyboard to St Vincent’s hospital in New York to visit his friend and creative partner, the lyricist Howard Ashman. Ashman was in the final stages of Aids-related illness, but was determined to finish his work on Disney’s Aladdin. Together, they knocked out the music and lyrics for Prince Ali – one of the movie’s most joyous numbers – as Ashman lay in bed.

Menken and Ashman had already collaborated on Disney’s hit 1989 animated musical The Little Mermaid; in the winter of 1991, they were putting the finishing touches on Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast simultaneously. Ashman was “fighting for his life” while they were working on all three, Menken recalls from his home studio in upstate New York. At first, he had no idea his friend was sick, let alone battling HIV; Ashman only revealed his diagnosis after they won the Oscar for best original song for Under the Sea in 1990.

Electric Ballroom, London
The era-defining duo’s ultras are suitably spoiled in the first of this intimate five-day run, showered with rarities that put a different spin on their well-known history

‘Tonight …” says Neil Tennant, with a suave pause, “no hits!” The crowd roars. “B-sides?” he teases. “Album tracks! And what we’re calling – although really it’s both of those – fan favourites.” It is a rare gig when the singer of a history-defining pop band can promise that no one will be hearing some of the best songs of all time tonight – West End Girls, Always on My Mind, Rent, to name some of several dozen – and get a hero’s welcome. But Pet Shop Boys have been on their Dreamworld greatest hits tour since 2022, one that’s barely even made room for their excellent and underrated 2024 album Nonetheless on the set list, let alone many wildcards. The Pet Shop Boys casual has been lavishly fatted in recent years. The Pet Shop Boys ultra, however, has been a little parched.

It’s something this five-day run of intimate shows at Camden’s Electric Ballroom seeks to remedy, drawing from the band’s margins to promote a new tome on their highly intentional visual history: in typical one-word fashion, the tour is called Obscure. Tennant and synths foil Chris Lowe announced beforehand that they had rehearsed 35 possible songs from their 42-year run, but their enduring commitment to the single format, with its considered B-sides and remixes, makes the possibilities endless: one fan compiled a pre-game playlist of 226 “B-sides and non-singles”, and doubted even then that it was comprehensive. Tennant has a tray containing the lyrics – fair play, given that two songs tonight have never been played before, while others are getting their first trip out of the cupboard in decades.

From soundtracking the silent era, via 50s rock’n’roll and the ‘symphonic pop’ of Henry Mancini to iconic works by John Williams and Hans Zimmer, movies are unimaginable without music. Ahead of the London soundtrack festival its artistic director picks 10 scores that moved the dial

The music of cinema’s earliest years played a crucial role in how audiences – with a live pianist or organist soundtracking the silent movie – experienced the stories on screen. But it wasn’t until the advent of synchronised sound that they were guaranteed the same musical experience.

Even that moment, widely regarded to be 1926’s Don Juan – an otherwise silent film – wasn’t a true soundtrack. Warner Bros used the Vitaphone system, essentially a recording on disc that was played with the picture. The same system was used for 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first film for which voices were synchronised to the picture as well. Playing a disc to picture was unreliable, and it wasn’t long before music could be printed directly on to the celluloid of the film itself and the soundtrack proper was born.

This garrulous, charming story of a young man stuck in a daycare centre for disabled adults offers a vital insider’s perspective

Upward Bound is a dismal adult daycare centre in the Los Angeles suburbs, with “poop-coloured” walls and a small swimming pool out the back. The name on the sign is cruelly misleading because Upward Bound serves as a dumping ground for the city’s disabled community, a pen to hold people who have aged out of school. Any inmate who manages to clamber free – be it up, down or sideways – has slipped the net, beaten the odds and might therefore be viewed as a small miracle.

The author Woody Brown feels similarly touched with magic, having swerved the hell of adult care in pursuit of a professional writing career. He’s the first non-speaking autistic graduate of UCLA and a 2024 alumnus of the writing programme at Columbia University; Upward Bound, his triumphant first novel, looks back not with anger but with compassion and grace. Brown feels for the centre’s exhausted staff almost as much as he does for its mouldering, desperate “clients”, who are forced to map out their days with pointless time-wasting activities. Upward Bound – a jailbreak story of sorts – suggests that practically everyone here has been falsely imprisoned. His book is the literary equivalent of sending the ladder back down.

A New Yorker writer traces the web of deceit that led a troubled teenager to his violent death

Early one winter morning in November 2019, a surveillance camera at MI6’s headquarters on the Thames registered the silhouette of a young man on the balcony of an apartment complex on the opposite side of the river. It was dark but the fifth-floor balcony was brightly lit. The man seemed to hesitate a moment before he jumped. On the way down his hip struck the embankment wall and, possibly unconscious as he hit the water, he drowned. His body was found five hours later face down in riverbank mud, shirtless and in tracksuit bottoms. The autopsy revealed multiple injuries (including a broken jaw) that were caused either by the fall or by a prior assault; the pathologist was unable to determine which.

The Metropolitan police identified the body as that of Zac Brettler, aged 19. He had spent the night he died with a gangland debt collector and drug trafficker named Verinder Sharma. Sharma, 55, said he owned the apartment and allowed Zac to stay with him in the complex rent-free. But phone records and CCTV showed that a third man, Akbar Shamji, had been present that night. A cryptocurrency and real estate trader who lived in Mayfair, Shamji denied any wrongdoing during police interrogation, and continues to maintain his innocence. He stated that Brettler was a compulsive liar who had pretended to be the son of a dead Russian oligarch in order to befriend him and his business associate Sharma. In a further bizarre imposture, Brettler used the alter-ego “Zac Ismailov” and even affected a Russian accent. Shamji could not be arrested on suspicion of murder since he was not in the apartment at the time of the fall. As for Sharma, the M16 camera provided proof that he had not pushed Brettler over the balcony. If these men did not cause the teenager’s death, who did?

Set in County Donegal, the poet’s polyphonic third novel wittily explores the fragile dynamics of a family navigating the loss of a father

The dark hull of a shipwreck, beached and rotting on the sand, provides the powerful symbolism in award-winning poet and author Susannah Dickey’s third novel Into the Wreck. Five members of a family mourn the death of a gentle but distant father: a man shaped into silence by the Troubles, and whose absence leaves each of them trying to comprehend a family truth that was never fully articulated.

The story is set in a coastal town in modern-day County Donegal, delivered to us in five separate narratives. Gemma, the middle child of three, is studying for A-levels alongside an awkwardly timed new obsession with boys; she harbours a self-imposed responsibility to maintain the fragile equilibrium of the family home. Anna, the eldest, fled to London at 16 to escape constant confrontations with her mother and is now forced to return for her father’s funeral, while Matthew, the youngest, silently and heartbreakingly carries the weight of the world’s and the family’s problems on his 15-year-old shoulders.

The journalistic adventurer and trans trailblazer is revealed as brilliant, prolific and deeply selfish

Jan Morris had two stipulations before she would agree to sit for a painting for the National Portrait Gallery in London. Ibsen, her Norwegian forest cat, should feature. And so should one of her calves. The gallery acceded, and the resulting portrait shows Morris, then just shy of 80, in a yellow jumper and dark green skirt, Ibsen glowering beside her bare legs. She was pleased with the portrait, though she thought it could, perhaps, have been a little larger.

Could any canvas contain Jan Morris? Janus-faced hardly does her justice. She was a sympathetic historian of empire who became a republican Welsh nationalist ( and who nevertheless accepted a CBE). The author of more than 50 books ranging across travel writing, biography, history, memoir and fiction, she was a workaholic who, as some of those books testify, could be shockingly lazy. A preacher of the “religion of kindness”, she was cruel to her children.

From a subtle Princess Peach lip jelly to a Yoshi egg that’s been traumatising children, the cosmetic chain’s latest tie-in is out of this world

When The Super Mario Bros Movie came out in 2023, it came with a rather unlikely tie-in: a range of skincare and bathing products from cosmetics chain Lush. The store, known for its devotion to natural ingredients and support for social justice causes, didn’t seem like the obvious partner for a major video game franchise. Because of this, I thought I should try them out, assuming that my dalliance with beauty journalism would be short-lived.

I was wrong. The collection was so successful, Lush later released a Minecraft range, which I also reviewed, and now there’s a Super Mario Galaxy range to tie in with the new movie. Somehow, I have become the Guardian’s Lush correspondent and it seems I am now trapped in a sweet-smelling cycle of video game-branded toiletries. There are definitely worse fates, so I’m just going with it.

PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox, Nintendo Switch 2, PC; Deck Nine/Square Enix
Max and Chloe, the two teen protagonists of the 2015 game, reunite as adults – giving players the chance to finally finish their journey

In 2015, Life Is Strange stood out for two reasons: its female protagonists, a depressingly rare feature at the time, and its unique brand of millennial cringe. The thirtysomething Frenchmen who created this series may not have had the best grasp of the 2010s teen lexicon, but they did have a good gauge on what’s important about any coming-of-age story, and that’s the relationships between the characters. Max Caulfield, the shy, time-travelling wannabe photographer, and Chloe Price, the traumatised, punk-rock tearaway, had a memorably intense friendship. It was the heart and soul of that game, and now, 11 years later, they are reunited as adults in this final chapter of their story.

For a lot of players, Max and Chloe felt like more than best friends. The game’s original developers were not brave enough to make this explicit in 2015, but newer custodians Deck Nine retconned a romantic relationship between Max and Chloe into 2024’s Life Is Strange: Double Exposure. You can still play Reunion as if the two really were just friends, resulting in some awkward ambiguity in some scenes. Whichever way you slice it, though, this is a game about first love, and how it always stays with you, even when its object does not. And damned if it didn’t make me feel something.

We are paying more for a PlayStation so that idiots can use ChatGPT to mislead people on dating apps – something is rotten in the state of gaming

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When the PlayStation 5 launched almost five and a half years ago, it was listed at £449 in the UK. If you were to buy one at the recommended retail price today, it would be £569.99, or £789.99 for the updated Pro model. Sony has just raised the price of its console by another £90, the latest in a series of hikes. This is unprecedented: consoles have always decreased in price over time (until they become retro collectibles – the other day, I saw someone asking £200 for a SNES on Vinted). So, what’s going on?

Unfortunately, this is another case of artificial intelligence ruining things for everyone. AI data centres need lots and lots and lots of computing power to be able to present you with lies whenever you Google anything, and this has pushed up demand and pricing for RAM and storage. This isn’t the only reason prices are rising – the wars in Ukraine and Iran have caused global economic disruption, and rampant inflation has eaten into many companies’ bottom line. But AI is the cause that’s easiest to get angry about, because it doesn’t need to be this way.

From an interactive session of Sex With Friends to improvised Robot Karaoke, the Friday Live celebration of play and performance amid the museum’s venerable halls was a reminder of gaming’s cultural clout

In the grand entrance of the Victoria & Albert Museum, beneath a looming dome with ancient statues visible through nearby arches, a programmer/DJ is busy live-coding a glitchy electronic music set. Either side of her, large LED displays show streams of code and strobing pixellated images as the bass pounds. She’s part of a group named London Live Coding, an experimental collective that makes music by writing and manipulating audio programs. It is loud, disorientating and brilliant, and I can’t help wondering what Queen Victoria and her husband would have made of it.

The set is part of the museum’s long-running Friday Late evening series, a collaboration with the London Games Festival. It showcased a range of independent video games and immersive interactive experiences, focusing on the link between play and performance. Visitors were given a map and left to wander the halls, corridors and galleries looking for installations. You could play the Bafta-winning comedy game Thank Goodness You’re Here! on a giant screen beneath a 13th-century spiral staircase. You could wander down the darkened Prince Consort’s gallery and find groups of giggling pals playing the hilarious erotic physics puzzler Sex With Friends, in which ragdoll-like characters have to be guided into (consensual) sexual encounters – much to the amusement of spectators.

Hammersmith Apollo, London
The sitcom star and Taskmaster stalwart is on commanding form as she embarks on Older Than Jesus, her first – and deeply daft – standup tour

That staple realisation of early midlife, that one has now lived longer than Jesus did, usually hits around aged 33. Aisling Bea is 42, and only just getting round to performing Older Than Jesus – a show, or at least a title, you suspect may have been long in the planning. Fair enough: what with hit sitcoms here and a Taskmaster stint there, the County Kildare import has only now embarked on her first standup tour. But there’s nothing rookie about the 75 minutes offered up here: Bea is on commanding and fun-loving form with a set assembling the thoughts prompted by (and sometimes even related to) her recent “accidental pregnancy” and becoming a mum.

Lest that suggest maturity on the show’s part, let me cheerfully note that Bea comes across as unreconstructedly daft and self-involved as ever. Whether she’s recalling a childhood fashioning DIY Dairylea spreadables with secondhand “bodies of Christ”, acting out at the wrap party for a duff Take That movie, or moonlighting as a dad at her sister’s antenatal class, the keynote is always cartoon egotism and a keen sense of her own ridiculousness. Putting her back out when performing a “slut drop”, or later curating the playlist to her own C-section, we’re invited to savour the contrast between the glamourpuss Bea of her own fervent imagination, and the less Insta-friendly reality.

Watermill theatre, Newbury
Screenwriter Daisy Goodwin imagines the old queen revisiting her diaries and reveals a tale of control and coercion behind Albert’s dutiful devotion

When screenwriter Daisy Goodwin read that Prince Albert liked to choose Victoria’s bonnets, she wondered: was this an act of domestic devotion, or of something darker? She explored the heady early years of their relationship in a TV drama – but this new play finds a tale of coercive control within the revered model marriage.

We open at Windsor, in the dank tail of Victoria’s long reign. Amanda Boxer’s queen is a fretful owl in black bombazine, withering and imperious, if no stranger to self pity (“a poor widow with no one to support me through all my tribulations”). An inveterate diary-keeper, her children worry that the candid volumes will be published after her death.

Sadie Coles HQ, London
From holiday snaps to atrocities, Throbbing Gristle album covers to backsides in shorts, the Polish painter reproduces the scattered attention and flattened perspective of our social media age

Wilhelm Sasnal has transformed the ground floor of Sadie Coles’ elegant gallery into a parade of broken images: the Oval Office, a ghastly forest, a blasted tree trunk, the artist’s wife and daughter, a British post-punk band, and the sitting US president surrounded by cronies, his face resembling the burn produced by screwing a lit cigarette into a photograph.

These paintings, most of which are untitled, are broken in the sense that an online link can be broken: it is difficult to connect them to their source. (It would be useful to know the location of that tree, for instance.) They are also broken in that they do not fit together as a whole. What connects that revolting White House interior, with its acid greens and faecal browns, with a spooky forest? What links President Trump to the founders of industrial music?

Dorfman theatre, London
Comedy infuses Winsome Pinnock’s disarming but ebullient drama about two Black academics who are given the job of authenticating the diaries of an enslaver

You don’t imagine many laughs in a story about enslavement legacies and erased Black histories. But comedy infuses Winsome Pinnock’s ebullient drama about two Black academics who are given the job of authenticating a cache of 18th-century diaries written by an enslaver.

Fen (short for Fenella, played by Sylvestra Le Touzel), is a direct descendant of Henry Harford, now managing his illustrious country estate, and it is she who finds the diaries that catalogued life on his Jamaican farm run by enslaved people. She gives Abi (Rakie Ayola) and Marva (Cherrelle Skeete) full rein of the diaries, so that they can authenticate them for posterity. Harford showed every sign of having been an abolitionist, she says in mitigation, although Abi and Marva’s investigations turn up disturbing evidence of his brutality in Jamaica.

It’s fast, affordable and its colours are as vivid as screenprints. Designer and risograph devotee Gabriella Marcella talks about founding Riso Club, connecting device users from New York, London, Damascus, Kyiv, Lille, Lima and beyond

Gabriella Marcella felt something in her brain click when she first used a risograph printer. “The process, the immediacy – it resonated,” says the Scottish-Italian designer. “A lot of my aesthetic comes from that machine.” Many artists and creatives share that reaction, and now Marcella has curated an exhibition of international art showcasing their work at Glasgow’s Glue Factory Galleries.

The risograph, created in Japan in the 1980s, is a nifty printer that looks like a photocopier but creates work like a screenprinter. The company that produced it, Riso Kagaku, was founded by Noboru Hayama, a businessman whose goal was to make intuitive and affordable printing products. Using soy inks to produce small print-runs of products with a handmade feel and distinctive style, the risograph print – or riso – has become synonymous with zines, activism and independent creatives.

London festival will feature an intimate Styles performance as well as appearances from Warpaint, Kamasi Washington, Devonté Hynes and more

Harry Styles has announced the lineup of artists he has curated for this year’s Meltdown festival, held at London’s Southbank Centre.

As well as performing a solo concert on 16 June at Royal Festival Hall, sandwiched amid his run of 12 dates at the considerably larger Wembley Stadium, Styles has brought together a diverse range of artists spanning jazz, pop, indie rock and electronic music.

London gallery to undergo biggest transformation in its 200-year history, with Kengo Kuma’s design called ‘exemplary’

The National Gallery has announced that its largest and most significant transformation in its 200-year history will be designed by the Japanese architect behind Tokyo’s Olympic stadium.

The new wing will be designed by Kengo Kuma as part of Project Domani, the gallery’s expansion into art from the 20th and 21st centuries. Its completion will make the National Gallery the only museum in the world that exclusively displays paintings where visitors will be able to view the entire history of painting in the western tradition.

The standup is taking their club night to new heights with an all-day extravaganza. They talk about new talent, learning to laugh in hard times and ‘performative activism’

Kemah Bob’s face lights up when they tell me about their “passion project that has got really out of hand”. In 2018, the Texan standup created FOC It Up, a comedy club for femmes of colour, after wanting to work with more people of colour “that weren’t dudes”. “It really was that simple,” they grin. Starting as an hour-long slot within a festival run by the cabaret company The Cocoa Butter Club, it has grown into a nurturing space for many comedians: they’ve hosted countless mixed-bill comedy nights, launched a podcast and taken shows to the Edinburgh fringe. “I wanted to have a space that felt different – warm and inclusive,” says Bob. “Not in a performative way. In the way that’s like: they’re all here, and that’s really cool.”

Not one to stand still, Bob is preparing for the club’s biggest event yet – a full day of workshops, masterclasses and networking opportunities, finishing with a “banging” comedy show at Soho theatre. Bob laughs when announcing the event’s name: “FOC Fest! It is just so cheeky.”

Chips, fish fingers, pizza … restaurant food for children is depressingly predictable. Are there more adventurous options? I took my four-year-old daughter on a month-long mission to find out

We’re heading out for dinner. Before I tell my four-year-old where we’re going, she has already announced that she’s going to have fish, chips and lots of ketchup. It sounds delicious; a classic. But there’s the irksome feeling that the intrepid impulses of childhood should be met with food that expands palates rather than feeding into the well-trodden path to a beige meal.

My guilt is only slightly assuaged by the ungenerous thought that maybe I can lay some blame at other people’s feet. Namely – as if it hasn’t got enough on its plate already – the hospitality industry. A certainty of fish and chips hasn’t come from nowhere – so often, regardless of the type of restaurant, kids’ menus have the same fodder.

Ancient hill carvings of horses, crosses and crowns have fascinated artists, writers and travellers for centuries. I went in search of their stories

In the churchyard next to Wilmington Priory in East Sussex, I found a yew so ancient and stooped that its trunk had eaten half a gravestone. Its boughs were supported by long poles, a creepy sight that made me shudder. I had come here to see something just as strange, but more benign than this folk-horror vision – the figure of the Long Man of Wilmington on the hillside opposite, on the steep scarp of the South Downs. He treks over the hill, a stave clasped in each hand. Climbing Windover Hill, just beneath the South Downs Way, I saw that while he was once a chalk giant, his lines are now marked with concrete blocks.

The Long Man may be Anglo-Saxon in origin – the shape is similar to the design on a buckle discovered in Kent in 1964 by the archaeologist Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, which probably represents the god Odin (or Woden); but he may be a much later adornment for the hillside, made to be viewed from the priory. His form entranced the photographer Lee Miller and her husband, the artist Roland Penrose, who lived close to the Long Man. Penrose painted a surrealist representation of the Long Man on the inglenook fireplace at Farleys, their home – for them the figure was a protective spirit. It also inspired the composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor, the folk collective the Memory Band, and Benjamin Britten picnicked at its feet.

Our expert spills the beans (sorry) on everything you need to know about coffee. Plus, chefs on cooking the perfect roast and Jess Cartner-Morley’s April essentials

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The Filter recently did its very first live reader Q&A, where you had the chance to serve up your deepest, darkest roasted questions about coffee. There were so many that we didn’t have time to answer them all on the day. I’ve enlisted the help of Ben Young over at Craft House Coffee in Sussex to put some of your more challenging questions to his team in the roastery.

Many of you just wanted to know how to make better coffee – and without spending big money. Several readers professed their love of the moka pot, wanting to know the optimal technique. “Start with boiling water and lower the temperature once coffee starts flowing,” advises Ben. “As soon as you see any signs of bubbling or spurting, take it off the heat and cool the base to stop the brewing process.”

Jess Cartner-Morley’s April style essentials: fancy brollies, Biscoff eggs and the perfect holiday dress

Scrimp on moisturiser, splurge on serum: the secrets of a great skincare routine

The nine best bean-to-cup coffee machines in the UK, tried and tested

How to wear a quarter-zip jumper without looking like a finance bro (and 14 of the best)

‘Rich, indulgent and full of flavour’: the best hot chocolate, tasted and rated

Whether it’s organising the shed, sharpening tools or giving garden furniture a good scrub, here are tips to prep – and enjoy – your outdoor patch

• The best pressure washers – tested

The winter of soggy malaise is over. Daffs have popped up; the tulips are well on their way; the days are bright, clear and longer than the nights are short. With that comes a sense of the outdoors: the garden. Perhaps this fills you with delight, getting your fingers in the earth after work or dinner. Or perhaps it fills you with a sense of vague dread – you haven’t been out there all winter, and there’s just so much to do.

But our gardens are places for us to enjoy and share with others in our ecosystem. So if you want to spend the summer luxuriating in yours, now is the time to get your sticks together: sow, grow and don’t mow.

Not sure where to begin or want to simplify your current regimen? Our expert demystifies the marketing with her step-by-step skincare guide

• The best anti-ageing creams and serums

Skincare has never been so overwhelming, as we’re bombarded with ads for complicated-sounding products and TikTok routines that promise dramatic results in just days. I get it. Despite having been a beauty journalist for more than 15 years, even I haven’t been able to escape the noise; I’ve stood in front of a bathroom cabinet full of half-used serums, wondering why my skin was left feeling worse, not better.

Somewhere along the way, we were sold the idea that more steps, more products and more intensity equals better skin. But it rarely does, and what works best, ultimately, is consistency – which is boring (sorry) but effective.

Whether it’s a tiered tulle skirt or a hardworking Henley tee, our fashion expert’s Easter basket is brimming with joy

• The best women’s spring wardrobe updates for under £100

I am a big fan of Easter, which is an underrated holiday in my opinion: lots of joy and food, but better weather than Christmas (or at least more daylight) and less stress.

So my April shopping list starts, naturally, with a chocolate egg. More goodies include not one but two stormingly gorgeous new-season high-street skirts. Also, an umbrella to keep you smiling through the inevitable spring rain – and the shades you’ll want when the sun comes out. Because that’s April for you!

Freeze, dry or pulse past-their-best rosemary, thyme and more, to use in anything from bread or potatoes to chilled yoghurt soup

What can I do with herbs that are past their best?
Joe, by email
Happily, Joe and his on-the-turn herbs aren’t short of options. “The obvious choice for hard herbs is to chuck them in a sandwich bag and freeze them for future stock-making,” says Alice Norman, founder of regenerative bakery Pinch in Suffolk. Alternatively, Sami Tamimi, author of Boustany, would be inclined to dry his excess herbs. In summer, he’d simply pop them on a tray and put them outside in the sun, but right now he “dries them in a 60-70C oven, then packs in containers, ready for the next time you’re short of fresh herbs”.

Norman’s current MO is to blitz languishing herbs (“rosemary and/or thyme work best”) with a 3:4 ratio of fine salt. “You don’t want too many herbs, because that will throw off the moisture content and turn the mix black, but you need enough for the blades to catch and break down the rosemary properly.” Pulse until fine, then store in an airtight jar in the fridge (where it’ll keep for a month or so). “That can be used for so many things, from seasoning game to roast potatoes, and it works particularly well in bread.” To which end, take any focaccia recipe, boost it with mashed potato and replace the required salt with the herby salt: “The potato helps retain moisture, while the rosemary salt adds fragrance.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Serve this over sticky rice, to soak up all those spicy, buttery juices

The classic combination of soy sauce and honey salmon is a staple in our house, and works for kids and adults alike. However, sometimes I want to change things up, so here I’ve elevated it slightly with a gochujang dressing – similar principle, but with a bit of heat and depth, as well as richness from the butter. Using butter might seem unusual, but it is often paired with soy sauce in Japan (shoyu butter) with an indulgent result. Serve the fish over sticky rice, to soak up all those spicy, buttery juices, with steamed greens on the side.

The Guardian aims to publish recipes for sustainable fish. Check ratings in your region: UK; Australia; US.

This marvellous staple of the Portuguese kitchen is a rich bean stew with pork and sausages that makes an excellent one-pot feast. You might find it’s perfect for midweek …

If you are trying to incorporate more beans and pulses into your diet, as I am, then this robust, one-pot feast, which food writer Edite Vieira describes as “a marvellous standby of the Portuguese kitchen”, is one to bear in mind. Though each region has its own variations, “basically”, she explains, “feijoada is a rich bean stew with pork and sausages”. The Brazilian version, often cited as that country’s national dish, is the product of the West African “love of beans”, according to the Oxford Companion to Food, with some suggesting that it’s a South American creation that travelled to Europe along with returning colonisers. Others insist with equal fervour that the dish was “born in the north of Portugal, and imported and adapted to what was available in Brazil”. Like so many such homely favourites, its precise history will probably ever remain a mystery; what’s important is that it’s simple to prepare, easy to adapt according to taste and budget, and very satisfying.

It’s wild garlic time again! Try this pesto with an aromatic chicken, fennel and potato stew, then dive into a fudgy banana cake with a tantalisingly crunchy top

I love Mexican chillies for the subtle flavour they give to cooking. Take the ancho, with its sweet, earthy notes of chocolate and plum. That adds immense depth to dishes traditional and avant garde alike, and is now readily available online and in shops. In today’s one-pot, which is a near-perfect way to cook a whole chicken, the ancho adds character to a classic sofrito, while in the pudding the savoury notes and touch of heat complement the dark caramel, helping to create a banana cake that is anything but bland. If you can’t find ancho, try any other medium-heat chilli flake in its place (nora, aleppo), or simply leave it out. The results will be delicious either way.

Experts weigh in on why some people have an inexplicable barrier to responding – and what they can do about it

“There’s no such thing as a bad texter. They just don’t want to respond,” said influencer Delaney Rowe last year on the online talkshow Subway Takes. “People go around thinking being a bad texter is like a pathology, but it’s not. It’s a cop-out.”

“I don’t believe in bad texters,” announced radio host Dan Zolot last year. “If you want to answer you will answer.”

After I collapsed during a run along a beach, my loyal dog Beau sprang into action

When I lost my wife, Jo, to cancer eight years ago, I knew it was time for a fresh start, so I packed up my London home and moved to Poole on the Dorset coast. I longed for a companion, so I welcomed a labrador puppy into my life, naming him Beau in a nod to the time Jo and I had spent living in France.

A gun dog from Derbyshire with a sleek black coat and deep brown eyes, Beau was an adorable and mischievous puppy who kept me on my toes right from the start. When he was six months old, he rummaged in a fisherman’s bucket and swallowed a fishing line and hook. Thankfully, it came out the other end, narrowly avoiding surgery.

Japan’s ban on married couples having different surnames has prompted an event to highlight people’s reluctance to change their name

At the very least, the three men and three women calming their nerves on a Friday evening at a venue in Tokyo know they have one thing in common.

Spaced out across booths, they will soon be placed in pairs and given 15 minutes to get to know one another.

Before Miguel, Sandra’s sex life was rather vanilla. When they got together, he suggested swinging – and all that changed

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

I never thought, when I was a pregnant Catholic teenager, that I’d have this lifestyle, but my God, it’s fun

She can’t get enough of hearing about my hook-ups, and I can’t get enough of the fact that she can’t get enough

Through no fault of their own, she faces repaying £100 a month until she is 93 or face legal action

My 66-year-old mother has been told that she has been overpaid her civil service pension by £40,000 and must repay it, or face legal action. Once the tax she’s paid on the income is deducted, she owes £32,000.

Her monthly pension payments have now been cut, which means her annual income will fall from £19,700 to £12,000, and she was, additionally, ordered to repay £496 a month for five years. This was later reduced to £100 a month, and a charge was put on her house as security. She’s been told she will have paid everything she owes when she’s 93.

The key takeaways for who is eligible and how to seek redress from the new FCA motor finance scheme

Complain now to be at the front of the queue. That is the message from the City regulator and the consumer champion Martin Lewis as a scheme gets under way to pay out about £7.5bn in total to millions of motorists mis-sold car loans.

More information emerged this week about how much money the different categories of people might get and how it will all work after Monday’s announcement that an industry-wide compensation scheme for victims of the UK’s car finance scandal is definitely going ahead.

From a 300-year old building in the heart of ‘cheddar cheese and cider’ country, to a newly renovated smallholding in an area of outstanding natural beauty

Only way to avoid missing a flight because of EES rules: squeeze everything into a cabin bag and skip luggage check-in

Travellers to the EU risk missing their flights because bag drop-off times don’t allow for the long queues to get through a new security system.

My family of four missed our easyJet flight home from Málaga because, although we followed advice from the airport and arrived three hours before departure, the bag drop-off didn’t open until two hours before.

Scientist who established productive growth of HIV in an immortalised cell line, which led to the development of the UK’s first antibody test for the virus

The virologist Robin Weiss, who has died aged 86, was the outstanding scientist of the UK’s response to the Aids pandemic. In 1984 he led the team that identified the CD4 molecule as the cellular receptor for HIV, the causative virus of Aids. Subsequently he established productive growth of HIV in an immortalised cell line, and this allowed the development, with Richard Tedder, of the UK’s first antibody test for HIV, later commercialised by the Wellcome Foundation.

Critically, this test allowed HIV-infected people to be identified accurately and at scale. Robin was the first to demonstrate antibody neutralisation of HIV, a fundamental basis to vaccine development. These major scientific advances were all achieved while Robin was the youngest-ever director (1980-89) of the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London.

Some people using retatrutide, which is not yet approved, are reporting ‘emotional flattening’, but experts point to a more complex picture

• ‘Traceability is vital’: labs test thousands of unregulated substances amid peptide craze

• What are peptides, are they safe and is there evidence to back up the hype?

A recent TikTok video shows a man in a black baseball cap, with text over the video stating: “strange effects of Reta” and “ruining relationships”.

He is referring to retatrutide, an experimental weight-loss drug that targets three appetite-related hormones. It is still in clinical trials but has generated such interest that some users are already sourcing it illegally online before approval. The “weird theory going around”, the TikTok poster says, is that the drug can “make you fall out of love”.

I suffered with my mystery illness for decades before gaining a diagnosis. Could retraining my brain be the answer?

By Hermione Hoby. Read by Alby Baldwin

An army of ‘pregnancy prep’ influencers is offering would-be parents everything from sensible advice to quackery and questionable supplements. What’s really needed?

Anything to do with pregnancy can sometimes feel like a crash course in withstanding uncertainty. From getting pregnant in the first place to avoiding complications later on, any parent-to-be is forced to reckon with the limits of their own control.

The stats around this are worth emphasising: about one in seven couples in the UK will have difficulty conceiving. About one in eight known pregnancies will end in a loss. And as many as 29% of low-risk pregnancies will experience some kind of unforeseen complication. Often there’s no rhyme or reason to any of this. “You can do everything ‘right’ and still face delays. That’s biology, not failure,” says Dr Linda Farahani, a consultant gynaecologist and specialist in reproductive medicine at the Lister Fertility Clinic in Chelsea, London.

Scottish designers are showcased alongside a backstage set and props including a Chanel-branded megaphone

In 1971, Manolo Blahnik created shoes for the designer Ossie Clark’s catwalk show in London. Relatively new to shoemaking, the Spanish designer forgot to put steel pins in the heels of the shoes, which meant that models wobbled, unbalanced, down the catwalk. Blahnik thought it was the end of his career. But the press thought it was a deliberate style; the photographer Sir Cecil Beaton even christened it “a new way of walking”.

The sandal in question, a green suede heel with ivy leaf embellishments, is just one treasure currently on display at the V&A Dundee’s new exhibition, Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show, which helps bring to life more than 100 years of history, charting its journey from the discreet salons of 19th-century London and Paris all the way up to the extravaganza it is today.

Fabric that once defined Northern Ireland’s capital is at heart of its stylish revival, embraced by designers, royalty and heritage farmers alike

On a cobbled street in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, next door to a hipster coffee shop and opposite an ice-cream parlour that has a near-constant queue since going viral on TikTok, the elegant Kindred of Ireland boutique is doing a surprisingly brisk trade in artfully oversized butter yellow linen blouses and exquisite Donegal mulberry tweed jackets finished with a length of rose pink linen tied in a bow at the nape of the neck.

Half a century after the Troubles, Belfast is finding a new identity through an industry that once defined it. Linen – the fibre that built its wealth and earned it the name Linenopolis – is being woven into a story of renewal. Almost a century after the postwar collapse of an industry that, at its peak, employed 40% of the working population of Northern Ireland, linen is returning as a marker of identity.

The key to stopping pale colours feeling saccharine? Breaking them up with tougher textures – here are three ideas to whip up this weekend from our styling editor

Nevermind the trends, want to know how to dress for actual spring weather? Then read on

It all came to a head, as matters of getting dressed so often do, over black tights. I had wanted to wear my silver skirt, you see. It was a rare blue-sky day and the sunshine was making me crave reflective surfaces to maximise the light. Anyway, you know how it is when you just get a yen to wear something. So I pulled out said silver skirt and then realised I didn’t want to wear the black opaque tights I wear with it in winter, but it wasn’t anywhere near warm enough to wear it with bare legs as I do in summer. I was completely stumped. And it made me realise: I need a refresher course in what to wear at this time of year. Spring has sprung, but I have forgotten how to hop to it.

So here we have it: your pocket primer on how to dress for spring. I’m talking about the spring that happens every year, an actual real-world meteorological phenomenon, not about the fashion trends of this particular moment. The lengthening days, daylight commuting, the juicy greens and yellows of the landscape, the maverick unpredictability of rain. Whether zebra stripes are the new leopard does not concern us today. We don’t need fashion to provide the newness when newness is in abundance in the world. So we can flick back through the pages to remind ourselves of spring’s fashion classics.

Under Anne Hidalgo – mayor for 12 years until last week – the French capital added bike lanes, cut traffic and reclaimed public space, but not without resistance

When Corentin Roudaut moved to Paris 10 years ago, he was too scared to cycle. The IT developer had biked everywhere as a student in Rennes but felt overwhelmed by the bustling French capital. Cars were everywhere. Cyclists had almost no protection.

But once authorities carved out space for a segregated bike lane on Boulevard Voltaire near his home in the 11th arrondissement, Roudaut returned to the two-wheel commute and did not look back.

Some of the best under-the-radar attractions across the Channel include steampunk wonders in Calais and the largest collection of impressionist works outside Paris

You don’t need to venture too far into France to find its wow factor. Indeed, within minutes of exiting the ferry or Channel Tunnel, you can be staring a fire-breathing dragon in the face. The Dragon de Calais is a 25-metre-long mechanical beast that stomps along the renovated sea front carrying 48 passengers on its back (adult ticket €9.50), emitting jets of fire, steam and water from its nostrils. It was created by the team behind Les Machines de L’île, a collection of steampunk wonders including a 12-metre elephant, in Nantes.

Designed as a shortcut between the Atlantic and the Med, today the scenic waterway from Toulouse to Sète is seen as a living ‘work of art’

Centuries before Donald Trump started playing around with the world economy, “tariff” was a levy paid to Spain by ships using the strait of Gibraltar; it was named for Tarifa, the town near the strait’s narrowest point. France’s kings had long dreamed of a waterway linking the Atlantic to the Mediterranean: as well as depriving the Spanish monarch of easy money, it would save ships a long voyage around Spain and Portugal, risking storms and pirates.

From the Atlantic, vessels can reach Toulouse from the Gironde estuary (on the Garonne River), but not until the 1660s did anyone have a viable plan for the remaining 200km to the Med. Considered one of the biggest engineering feats of the 17th century, Pierre-Paul Riquet’s Canal du Midi (finished in 1681 and called the Canal Royal du Languedoc until the revolution) rewrote the history of transport and commerce in the south of France – for centuries it carried wheat and wine, people and post.

Regular swappers say they not only make big savings but create connections. Here is how it works

About six miles from Reims, beside a golf course, is a house with a heated pool and space to sleep 10 people that would probably be perfect for many of those planning to book a family holiday in France.

An hour’s drive from Disneyland Paris, the four-bedroom property is quiet, located near a village with a bakery, has an electric gate that provides security, and is on almost half an hectare (one acre) of land.

Woolton Hill, Hampshire: I visit an old friend in an old haunt, where a small herd of Shetlands has been set to work

Thirty years on from the impassioned action of the road protests, the Newbury bypass soars above us on the old railway embankment. I can’t entirely accept it even now, having been part of the campaign. Today, walking in The Chase, the nature reserve that lies adjacent, the roar of traffic slips into a background hum, aided by other memories I’ve built up here.

Many of those have been with my dearest friend, Sarah. She volunteers as a “cow watcher” for the National Trust, and I’ve come with her as she checks their whereabouts and wellbeing. They are conservation grazers; keeping coarser scrub in check, spreading seed and poaching areas, and encouraging greater biodiversity and plantlife.

Cryptic crossword setters are still finding new ways to celebrate April Fools’ Day

It’s April, so it’s time to continue our tracking of the ebb and flow of April foolery in crossword puzzles. In brief, the good times continue.

I haven’t yet found any cryptics of the rule-bending variety, but, avoiding spoilers, would like to recommend the Financial Times puzzle by the setter known locally as Harpo, navigating to Independent 12,318 by the solver known locally as Enigmatist and our own Paul here at the Guardian.

QUICK START
YOUNG AT HEART
SECOND LINE
PAY UP FRONT

SUM TO FINAL

Blend cryptic wordplay with Japanese verse to form a delectable haiklu (patent pending)

he made The Third Man
once oddly go missing with
endless avarice

(6)

It sounds thrifty and natural, but kitchen waste won’t help. Here’s what will

The problem
Fungus gnats are one of the most annoying houseplant pests because they seem to appear out of nowhere, hovering around the soil and your face with equal enthusiasm. One internet fix suggests crushing eggshells and adding them to the compost to keep the gnats away. It sounds thrifty and natural.

The hack
The theory is that a layer of crushed shell will stop adult gnats from laying eggs and maybe even add a little natural fertiliser to the soil. It’s also the kind of hack people love because it recycles kitchen waste.

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

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When Zac Brettler jumped to his death in London, the coroner recorded an open verdict, admitting: ‘I don’t know what happened.’ The acclaimed author of Say Nothing and, now, London Falling, talks about his search for answers

In the summer of 2023, the American writer and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe was in London for the filming of Say Nothing, the television adaptation of his much-lauded, much-awarded account of a Troubles murder. It was there, on set, that Keefe got talking to a visitor, a friend of the director, who happened to tell Keefe about friends of his, the Brettlers, a London family who had experienced something tragic, strange and terrible.

Rachelle and Matthew Brettler’s 19-year-old son, Zac, had died in November 2019 when he jumped from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. There had been no reason to believe he was suicidal – but plenty to suggest that he was very afraid. Zac had spent his last few months in the orbit of two men who believed him to be the son of a Russian oligarch, heir to a £200m legacy. Both men had been with Zac on the night he died – one had been in the apartment at the time – and gave varying accounts in police interviews. The family believed that the Met response had been full of holes – key witnesses hadn’t been formally interviewed, bloodstains on the apartment walls hadn’t been tested – and the investigation concluded in 2021 with the Crown Prosecution Service deciding there was insufficient evidence to bring charges for murder and perverting the course of justice. The inquest in 2022 ended in an open verdict. “I can’t fill in the gaps; I can’t speculate,” the coroner concluded. “I don’t know what happened.”

Maybe you use them to decide what to eat or to help you write text messages. We’d like to hear from you

AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are now a part of everyday life.

More and more people are using them to help make decisions in their lives, like sending text messages, deciding what to cook, or navigating relationships.

Do you agree with the guidance? Have you been limiting screen time for your child? How is that going?

Children under five should spend no more than an hour a day on screens and under-twos should not be watching screens alone, according to UK government advice.

The guidance was developed by a panel led by the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, and the children’s health expert Prof Russell Viner.

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?

We want to hear from owners of dogs, cats or other pets who have tried these trackers

With a growing number of pet fitness trackers on the market, owners can monitor the stats of their companions as never before. But these devices can be costly, and their necessity is debated.

We want to hear from owners of dogs, cats or other pets who have tried these trackers to hear if such health monitors have proved useful, neutral or problematic.

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In a patch of desert in Isfahan province, personnel clear the site where just hours earlier two C-130 planes and two helicopters were destroyed

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The small farming community of Parzan near the city of Shahreza in Iran’s Isfahan province had been largely spared from the US-Israeli war now in its second month – until several US aircraft landed on a dirt airstrip near their village.

The site of the destroyed aircraft in Isfahan province