The new breed of camera-equipped streetlights has the potential to fight crime and track down missing persons. Or will it just take Britain one step closer to a surveillance state?

How would you feel if your neighbourhood lamp-posts could recognise your number plate, and also your face? Maybe you wouldn’t mind, given how long we’ve had automatic number plate recognition and CCTV. What about if that lamp-post could power itself through its own solar panels, and perhaps find another use for any extra power generated – that would be good, right? This is what Conflow Power Group (CPG) in Warwickshire claims for its iLamps, the first of their kind in the UK.

What if lamp-posts had the potential to incorporate new AI capability – gait analysis, suspicious behaviours – that you haven’t even heard of? This is what the organisation Big Brother Watch worries about. And what if the home secretary had explicitly said she believed in a “panopticon state” – that is, a state that could watch you at all times (as Shabana Mahmood already has) – and what if she still had a job when the lamp-post eyes got their updates? Or what if the next home secretary was even keener on hyper-surveillance (hard to imagine), and the street apparatus was already in place? What about all the data this would harvest – who would own it?

After seven days in charge, how is the new UK PM doing? Send your questions to our columnist Polly Toynbee about Andy Burnham and his new government, his policy announcements so far, and what he needs to be doing next. She’ll be taking your questions from 2pm (BST).

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Andy Burnham has been prime minister of the UK for a week, during which time he has announced a slew of policies as he makes his start on shaping Labour’s narrative for the next three years in government.

From re-introducing a £2 cap on bus fares in England (and providing funding for the devolved governments to follow suit), via a VAT cut to energy bills, to confirming a 20% cut in business rates for hard-pressed hospitality firms such as small live music venues and pubs, Burnham has attempted to demonstrate that he knows cost of living pressures need to be addressed.

Activists under threat from Beijing are facing strange difficulties with UK immigration. Their safety must not be traded for warmer relations with China

• Nathan Law is a pro-democracy activist and former legislator from Hong Kong. He is currently a political refugee in the UK

As authoritarian countries such as Russia, China and Iran are more active in engaging in long-arm strategies to silence their critics in the UK, transnational repression is garnering more attention. It is right that the Metropolitan police and other British law enforcement agencies have specific units and mechanisms to counter it. But it takes more than just confronting this long-distance repression to make political dissidents of these authoritarian countries feel safe in the UK, and the UK government is not living up to expectations.

The threat is real. Members of the Hongkonger community have received threats from the Chinese regime – some have had threatening letters, some people were deepfaked into sexual content, some even had families questioned and arrested back home. With the level of this targeting linked to the deterioration of Hong Kong politics, many have utilised the humanitarian pathway enabled by the previous government to relocate.

Holly Dyson’s addiction led to extreme pain, hospital trips and thousands of pounds’ worth of debt. Here is how she recovered

Holly Dyson’s last alcoholic drink was a can of cider to manage her withdrawal symptoms, which she had in her dad’s car on the way to rehab on 2 May 2023. She’d barely eaten in two weeks. Instead, she spent her last few days at home in the north-west of England vomiting blood into the toilet bowl and lying in bed twitching, feeling unbearably nauseous. Her hand hovered over the numbers 999 on her phone, ready to call an ambulance. At 26 years old, Dyson’s body was shutting down.

About a week earlier, a doctor had given her six months to live. For the past few years, her drinking had spiralled out of control. Her liver was “deranged”, the doctor said. To Dyson, it felt like “a bowling ball” – weighing her down so much that she would have to use “two hands to lift my body up out of bed because my liver felt so heavy and swollen.” Her face was also swollen and she was unrecognisable from the sporty young woman she had once been.

Esperanto had always seemed to me like an idealistic movement that had failed. So why was its annual congress so vibrant and full of young people?

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One day, as a 16-year-old in the late 2000s, I received an AOL instant message from my friend Kenyon. He wanted to know whether I had heard of Esperanto, the universal language. Kenyon was several years older than me, and something of a mentor. Like me, he was a musician – he engineered my teenage band’s first record – but unlike me, he had a head full of trivia that made him the confidently nerdy star of any Saturday-night gathering of outcasts. His pitch: Esperanto was invented in the late 19th century by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist named LL Zamenhof, who aimed to create a language so irresistibly easy to learn that it would be adopted as a shared second tongue by people the world over. From a position of mutual understanding, world peace would surely follow. Yes, the language had been around for well over 100 years and, yes, universal fellowship had yet to be achieved. But the internet had inaugurated a new era of global connectivity, and users could learn through an abundance of online classes. Perhaps we were on the verge of an Esperanto renaissance. Kenyon had been practising for a few years and was practically flua.

As a typical adolescent, I was in the midst of my own social awakening. I had begun to travel the US playing music, relying on nothing but the hospitality of friends of friends of friends. I was finding communion and what felt like boundless possibility in mass bike rides and sweaty dance parties in derelict churches. I was also dabbling in the world of hitchhiking and freight-train-hopping, visiting new places by exploiting the only slightly off-limits mechanisms of our industrialised society. Goods needed to move, and I could move with them, thanks to the kindness of those who showed me the ropes just because I wanted to learn. Esperanto seemed comparable: another disparate social club with a baked-in rejection of the forces, writ large and ill-defined, that sought to divide us. But even then, its goals felt redundant: the internet had already given me new tools to communicate across distance and difference. Simple as it might be to learn the language, why bother?

It’s a bit of a mystery why it takes Odysseus so long to get home if he’s not shacking up with Calypso and others ...

I did not walk into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey intending to pick holes. If there was zero sexual chemistry between Odysseus and Circe, who was I to say that’s not how it went in the poem? I was most likely thinking of a feminist retelling (Madeline Miller’s novel Circe), rather than Homer, anyway.

Nevertheless, even allowing for metaphor and whatnot, even factoring in that Circe’s passion for Odysseus is (almost?) definitely a rumination on the double standards of godliness, in which the guy gods are allowed to sleep with whichever mortals they please, but the lady ones are not supposed to (I don’t think?), I am sure something happened.

Spanish prime minister also says the fires serve as a reminder to plan for the ‘worsening’ climate emergency

• France and Spain race to contain huge wildfires before fresh heatwave begins

Joe Pinner and Jane Clinton

Tourists caught up in the wildfires spoke to us about their experiences.

“My main memory is how bizarre it was to watch people enjoying holidays on the beach while a major catastrophe was unfolding in full view, not far away. Is this how the world ends?”

The Conservative party leader said that Labour’s plan allows for too many serious offenders to be freed early

It is not just the Russians firing on Brits in the English Channel; Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, has accused a French warship of firing “warning shots” near him while he was on a boat in the Channel monitoring small boat crossings.

In a post on social media, he says:

On the channel today monitoring illegal migrant crossings … as I was being interviewed by the BBC just now a French warship approached close and fired 17 live rounds behind us. There was no notice or training exercise in place. Felt like warning shots or attempted intimidation

On the crisis in prison places, this has been a long time coming. We did some things, as I said [see 10.11am], it wasn’t enough, and I’m sorry about that.

But I can’t fix the past, but what I can do is come up with solutions for now, and for tomorrow.

This was something which we were doing in government. We had plans to rent prison places, just like Sweden has done with Estonia, so that we didn’t have to just release these sorts of violent criminals early. We could have put them in other countries.

If everybody says ‘no prison near me’, we won’t get these [prison places] built, so this is something the public can help with … We cannot say ‘no’ to every potential site for a prison.

An ⁠earthquake ​with ⁠a ⁠preliminary magnitude ​of ‌7.1 ‌struck ‌the country’s Kumamoto prefecture

Around 300,000 people have been instructed to go to evacuation centres, the disaster management agency said.

The quake’s epicentre was ​about 20 kilometres south of Kumamoto, central Kyushu island’s largest city with a population of around 700,000.

At least 1,500 protest after six men on drug-related charges put in solitary confinement before possible execution

Prisoners at Iran’s largest jail have sewn their lips shut as hundreds of them joined a mass hunger strike amid a surge in executions over drug offences and charges linked to anti-government protests.

The hunger strike, involving at least 1,500 death row prisoners at Ghezel Hesar prison near Tehran, began two weeks ago after six men convicted on drug-related charges were transferred to solitary confinement before their possible execution, according to Iranian rights groups.

Suffolk police ceded investigation into James Loubeau to the US military, leading to court martial acquittal

A US airman accused of a “spree” of rapes and sexual assaults in England, drugging some women and breaking into the homes of others, was able to avoid British justice after local police handed over part of the case to the American military.

Two British women went to Suffolk police in August 2019 to allege that James Loubeau and another US airman had drugged and raped them after they met in a nightclub in Bury St Edmunds, a local market town.

President also blames Brazil and Mexico and says online critics ‘do not want the ideas of freedom to succeed’

More than a week has passed since Ferran Torres scored the extra-time goal that gave Spain its second World Cup, but – at least for Argentina’s president – the tournament is not over.

Javier Milei has claimed that a coordinated “anti-Argentina campaign” was behind criticism of the country’s team, accusations of racism among its fans and conspiracy theories alleging that Lionel Messi’s side was secretly being favoured by Fifa.

Samsung and SK Hynix fall by more than 10% amid renewed fears over AI spending and Chinese competition

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The sell-off in AI stocks has intensified, driving South Korea’s stock market down to its lowest level in three months.

Investors continued to ditch chip stocks on Tuesday, amid rising concerns about the huge amount of borrowing among AI companies to fund their datacentre expansion plans.

Move comes after the presenter has faced allegations of bullying, but there is no suggestion it is related

Naga Munchetty is to leave BBC Breakfast after 17 years on the television show to become co-presenter of Radio 5 Live’s breakfast show.

The current 5 Live Breakfast hosts, Rachel Burden and Rick Edwards, announced on Tuesday’s programme that they would step down in December.

Umbrellas, deck chairs and loungers seized in Torre del Greco authorities’ crackdown on people reserving spots overnight

Authorities in a coastal suburb of Naples seized umbrellas, loungers and deck chairs during a dawn sweep of a beach aimed at cracking down on the growing trend of people attempting to reserve prime spots overnight.

Torre del Greco’s port authority said coastguard staff and local police had together collected 40 items as part of a national beach and lake safety operation that targets people labelled by the Italian press as furbetti dell’ombrellone, or umbrella cheaters.

For generations, support for Israel was central to Jewish-American identity. But today, amid accusations that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, a growing generational and political divide is reshaping views in the US Jewish community. Matthew Cassel travels to New York City – the heart of Jewish-American life – to explore how Israel’s wars across multiple fronts are challenging long-held traditions and dividing families.

Met officers issue a final appeal for information as they seek a breakthrough in hunt for missing London estate agent

Det Ch Insp Teresa Foster, who leads the Metropolitan police’s cold case homicide team, first heard about the disappearance of the London estate agent Suzy Lamplugh when she was 12 years old watching the TV news at home in the small New Zealand town where she grew up.

“It was a huge story,” she said, recalling how the unsolved case attracted global attention in 1986. “It was shocking.” Foster later emigrated to the UK and four decades on is making a final appeal for information that could lead to the discovery of Lamplugh’s body and bring closure for her family.

Funding crisis could lead to an exodus that would be a blow for British science and national growth

On a chilly day in December 1945, Bernard Lovell, a physicist at the University of Manchester, struck out for the Cheshire countryside to study cosmic rays, the streams of high-energy particles that crisscross the universe. Peering at the signals from his army surplus radar, he made an unexpected discovery: radio reflections from the ionised trails of shooting stars.

The work marked the birth of radio astronomy at Jodrell Bank. A year later, engineers at the site mounted a radar on the base of a searchlight, providing sweeping access to speeding meteors. When Sputnik launched in 1957, they had just completed the Lovell telescope, the largest radio telescope in the world, the only one capable of tracking the Soviet satellite.

My climate dread was becoming unbearable. I never thought I would do comedy, but what if I channeled my anxiety into something lighter?

If you had told me six months ago that I would soon be performing standup comedy to dozens of strangers, I would have assumed it was a bad dream.

Public speaking ranks about as high as driving in rush hour traffic through downtown Boston on my list of favorite activities. That I would choose to do standup, with its potential for public humiliation, is basically unimaginable.

Matthew Myerscough’s remarkable find is one of many detailed in his new book. But his journey into fossil hunting began years earlier, when he was caught in an avalanche

When Matthew Myerscough walks along a beach, he cannot help hunting for fossils. “I think my fossil radar is always on – even if I’m not looking, it’s hard sometimes to not see things,” says the 40-year-old civil engineer, who has discovered thousands of fossils on British beaches.

It was while he was “not looking” on Lavernock beach near Penarth, south Wales, that he recently stumbled across the fossilised bone of an early type of plesiosaur, a marine reptile that roamed the oceans while dinosaurs stalked the land during the early Jurassic period.

Sonya Walger and Henry Ian Cusick created a love so magical that they’re responsible for what’s widely regarded as the greatest TV episode of all time – not to mention inspiring a fan to get a full leg tattoo of their faces

• More from our series Making Love: ‘We met and two minutes later we were kissing’ – how Gavin and Stacey became Britain’s most bang tidy TV couple

Lost is one of television’s most romantic dramas. Forget smoke monsters, time travel and that infamous ending – this was a show fuelled by swoony stories. Sun and Jin; Rose and Bernard; Sawyer/Jack/Kate/Juliet; Charlie and Claire; Sayid and Nadia (not Shannon). Love was the reason behind so many of the islanders’ need to survive, or to sacrifice themselves.

But it was Penny’s and Desmond’s relationship that defined the series.

The comedian and actor’s new Netflix special is a gleefully absurd take on politics and potty-mouthed humor

Mary Beth Barone knows exactly who will be offended by her new Netflix special. “JK Rowling, Republicans, establishment Democrats, the British, the Irish and Zionists,” she tells me, reading a list from her Notes app. Then there’s “Katy Kats – which is what Katy Perry calls her fans – and male comedians and one specific girl named Tatiana”. When informed that this encompasses over half of the population of the US, she beams.

Barone’s comedy is a delicate balance between sweetness and cynicism. In her stand-up she’ll adopt a ditzy pose while she tears down morally bankrupt politicians, sends up cis male entitlement or implores her audience to have sex with moderates in the hope of bringing them over to the left. In the past five years, she has edged her way closer to the mainstream with a Comedy Central web-series, a couple of stand-up spots on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show, and a podcast co-hosted with her friend Benito Skinner that is so popular it has its own merch line. The past 12 months have seen her career go into overdrive: now she is the co-lead of a wildly popular TV show (Overcompensating, created by Skinner), chats to the A-list on the Golden Globes’ red carpet and sits front row at New York fashion week.

The superlative Royal Ballet star finally has her own show. She talks about fabulous footwork, her Argentina-inspired leotard – and why she named her cat after a certain footballer

Marianela Núñez is talking about football. This is before the World Cup final, after England’s game with Argentina. “That was a hard position for me!” she says. Núñez moved to England from Buenos Aires aged 15 and has danced with the Royal Ballet for 28 years. She’s a British citizen, but her loyalties are clear: check out her Argentina-inspired leotard on Instagram or her cat named after Lionel Messi.

In Argentina, they call her the Messi of ballet – although when it comes to who has the finest footwork, they should really be calling him the Núñez of football. A principal dancer since the age of 20, Núñez has been at the top of her game for so long you can forget what a remarkable dancer she is. When she faces the ballerina’s equivalent of a penalty kick – Swan Lake’s 32 fouettés, Sleeping Beauty’s Rose Adagio – you never doubt her, but it’s her romantic spirit, the bright beaming energy, her vivacity in Don Quixote, the tragic yearning of her Odette, the way she breathes in ballet like oxygen, that make her special. She is deeply besotted with what she does.

If you thought he was just a shady rule-dodging reprobate, the Fifa boss’s latest 15-page Instagram rant might make you think again

I hope you have found time to enjoy Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s 15-page Instagram meltdown about his World Cup. The last time I saw this many defiant words, they were inked on someone sitting cross-legged on the floor of an El Salvadorean supermax prison.

Infantino has been clapping back at his haters – putting them on blast, in the parlance of our times – and on this evidence seems mesmerisingly close to picking out a Chicano script font and getting STILL I RISE needled across his corporate clavicles. Right next to the ones reading THROUGH THE FIRE, UNBREAKABLE and BUILT DIFFERENT.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Unequal capitalist societies survive on the premise that certain things are inevitable. Admit that these are political choices, and who knows what voters will demand?

This is the danger zone. The period when one prime minister leaves office and the next takes over can inspire either dread or delight: a few days in which the country forms a gut reaction to the new government.

One week on, Andy Burnham has well and truly ditched the slow fatalism that marked Keir Starmer’s early days in power, in favour of the message that help is on the way: from cost of living support to a pledge to end rough sleeping and Monday’s commitment to fix the social care system.

With the news that the ginger giants arrange playdates for their offspring, scientists say messing about has health benefits for humans of all ages

The school summer holidays are upon us. Cue the annual expectation that parents will conjure up six weeks of affordable, memory-making fun while holding down a job and hanging on to their sanity. Baking, picnics and den building may be wholesome, but they also involve spending time with your children. By day four, the den starts to look less like a place of adventure and more like somewhere to hide till September.

The answer, of course, is the playdate: the socially sanctioned art of abdicating responsibility for a few precious hours so you can finish a cup of tea while it’s still warm. And it turns out that humans aren’t the only ones to have discovered the benefits of a little parental outsourcing. A recent study suggests that orangutan mothers also arrange playdates for their offspring.

Helen Pilcher is a science writer and the author of This Book May Cause Side Effects

Like genies of folklore, AI agents take their instructions literally – to potentially disastrous effect. We must track their ability to do what we actually mean

In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world’s AI software and open-source AI models, was hacked. A malicious dataset had been used to run code on one of its servers. Whoever was behind it captured internal security credentials and moved through systems over a weekend, running thousands of actions from a swarm of temporary server environments. It looked like the work of a sophisticated criminal group.

It was not. It was one of OpenAI’s new, still unreleased GPT models.

Born in the former East Germany, I was caught between two systems. But it’s a mistake to think of the ‘in-between’ as life’s waiting room

In the 1970s, the German novelist Christa Wolf wrote a letter to her friend and fellow author Lew Kopelew, which included these lines: “One stands quite comfortably between all fronts, and must come to understand that this is, in fact, the only possible place to be.” The fronts Wolf was referring to were the Soviet Union and the west, the GDR and West Germany, the politics of the cold war – but I believe the idea resonated with her personally, as she was then too, in the middle of her life.

There is a certain irony and wit in those lines. Standing between all fronts can mean you don’t have to choose – a relief, for some. Or it can mean you never arrive anywhere, neither here nor there. At worst, it marks a person with no standpoint, no stable position. Lost in foggy ground.

The president is using forced labor as a pretext to slap tariffs on countries around the world

With the midterm elections less than four months away, it’s a precarious time for Donald Trump and Republicans: Trump’s war against Iran is going badly, his approval ratings are in the toilet, gas prices are soaring and pushing up inflation, and nation after nation is furious about Trump’s insults, bullying and ugly American unilateralism.

So amid all this mess, what does Trump do? He turns to his favorite economic plaything: tariffs. On Monday, Trump signed orders to slap a 50% tariff on many Canadian goods, and four days later, he imposed across-the-board 10% or 12.5% tariffs on goods from more than 80 countries. Trump was no doubt thumping his chest, while millions of people overseas were dumping on him for yet another unnecessary, hostile act.

At a time when the quickening pace of global heating has never been clearer, climate policies are being deprioritised

A new and ominous word has entered the vocabulary of firefighters struggling to cope with the vast wildfire sweeping through south-west France. A pyrocumulonimbus is a fire-generated thunderstorm that can whip up winds in unpredictable ways, making the containment of a blaze and assessment of its likely course far more difficult. A known phenomenon in North America and Australia, firefighters believe France is suffering its first in the Bordeaux region, as the country endures the consequences of the third major heatwave of the summer and prepares for a fourth.

The dire statistics of the ongoing fires in France and Spain tell a story of deepening devastation and human misery. A far greater expanse of French land has already been burnt this year, compared with the 30,000 hectares during the whole of 2025, while 220,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in the Gironde. In Spain, the environment ministry has calculated that over 170,000 hectares have been affected, compared with 29,000 last year. Over 100,000 people have been forced to flee.

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Thanks to new technology we are are acquiring insights into earlier times, and realising how little we truly know

Archaeologists believe the Upton Lovell Shaman, who lived in what is now Wiltshire 4,000 years ago, was an important religious leader and metalworker because of the artefacts and tools buried with the body. Until very recently it was also believed, on considerably slimmer evidence, that this shaman was a man: it was simply assumed that someone of such status must be male, and the view was barely questioned over the years. Now ancient DNA analysis performed at the Francis Crick Institute has revealed that the body, held by the Wiltshire Museum, is in fact a woman.

That should cause a stir in bronze-age studies. But it is also yet another example of how many of our assumptions about human history have been upended by the rise of ancient DNA analysis over the past two decades. Others include the revelation that there were (frequent) liaisons between humans and Neanderthals just 50,000 years ago, a reconstruction suggesting that the first modern Britons had “dark to black” skin, and the closing of longstanding mysteries such as what really killed two members of Italy’s powerful Medici family in the 16th century (probably malaria, not murder as was often believed). Every time we widen our keyhole view of the past even slightly, we are confronted by how many of our seemingly grounded assumptions are, in fact, wrong.

Rabbi Jeff Newman, David Williams and Tom Carr respond to an editorial on the new prime minister’s plans to decentralise power

Your editorial (22 July) rightly identifies the structural paradox at the heart of Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda – that it takes a confident assertion of central power to give real power away. But one institutional mechanism that goes some way to resolving this paradox operationally deserves mention: the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (Nista), which has sat jointly between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office since April 2025.

Inherited from Keir Starmer’s government, Nista (with about 250 civil servants) merges what were the National Infrastructure Commission and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority into a single body reporting simultaneously to both departments. Under Starmer, the Cabinet Office side of that dual accountability was relatively weak. Under Louise Haigh’s new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet – explicitly endorsed by the Institute for Government as implementing long-called-for structural reforms – that balance may shift.

Dr Stephen Battersby on the lessons this Labour government can learn from the 1970s

Your editorial quoting Sam Johnson-Schlee saying that our ability to trust that our homes will keep us safe is under threat is not news to environmental health officers working in housing (The Guardian view on Britain’s uninhabitable homes: as temperatures rise, a new approach is needed, 23 July). Every day they are faced with homes that contain threats to the health and safety of occupiers – from excess heat or cold, or damp and mould. For many years there has been a lack of resources, including environmental health staff to inspect homes or the political will to tackle the problems on the scale needed.

You are right to suggest that a new approach is required, but we can also learn from the 1970s, when local authorities would take the lead on collective action to improve housing. So councils should be the place to look to get things moving. This will require funding, not only to help homeowners but also to ensure that councils have sufficient staff with the right skills.

Simon Armitage’s Odyssey | Preventing lobbying | Surviving obituaries | Cream cracker lunch | DIY decision

Re Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, Charlotte Higgins urges us to watch the film, but also read the poem – “you won’t regret it” (25 July). I bypassed the verse and went straight to Simon Armitage’s stunning four-hour radio adaptation of Homer from 2004, now on BBC Sounds, which helped, thrillingly, to clarify much of what remained a bit murky in the movie.
Quentin Falk
Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire

• Re your article on lobbying the government (Besieged by lobbyists, will UK ministers protect our ecosystems? No, they’ll chicken out, 23 July), the NHS trust I worked for had a policy that prevented doctors from meeting drug representatives without a pharmacist present. This ensured doctors’ prescriptions were based on good evidence rather than drug firms’ promotions. Perhaps it’s time for a similar system to be put in place when MPs meet lobbyists.
Stephen Carter
Cullompton, Devon

Charles MacKinnon disagrees with the British Gas owner’s justification for cutting 1,300 jobs

According to Centrica’s boss, Chris O’Shea, most people using British Gas prefer to talk to a chatbot rather than a person (Customers prefer AI chatbots, says British Gas owner as 1,300 call centre and back office jobs axed, 23 July).

He says that 90% of his customers prefer to use digital channels than speak to a person in the first instance, and that the number of customer calls has fallen by 20%. Well, this is hardly surprising, given the difficulty of getting through to a real person. Finding a telephone number to do so is a challenge in itself, and then there are all the layers of numbers and deflections to encourage use of the digital channels while you are kept on hold at your own cost before you can get to an employee.

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• Follow updates from Tuesday’s action around Glasgow

• Full medal table | Sprinter slams no-shows | Mail Martin

Check out the medal table.

Swimming: Another impressive swim from 16-year-old Amalie Smith who wins her 200m medley heat comfortably. This comes after taking silver in the 400m event.

Follow the latest standings for the Glasgow Games as 74 countries compete for the 645 medals on offer

The 23rd Commonwealth Games are taking place in Glasgow between 23 July and 2 August. There are 74 Commonwealth Games Associations eligible to compete, all of whom are expected to send athletes to the championships.

Medals will be available in 215 events, spread across 10 sports. Six of them include Para sport competition: 3x3 basketball, athletics, bowls, cycling, swimming and weightlifting. The other four sports are artistic gymnastics, boxing, judo and netball.

• Northern Irish boxer one victory away from a medal

• Tryagain Morning Ndevelo inspired by his name

Before these Commonwealth Games, Jon McConnell made headlines for turning down the 13th season of Love Island. Now the Northern Irishman is one win away from a medal after defeating India’s Sumit Sumit to reach the 70kg quarter-finals in Glasgow.

“I didn’t expect [the attention] at all,” he said. “Someone sent me the interview [about Love Island auditions] and I was a wee bit shocked. I didn’t even know I said half of it. It was after a sparring session and with the adrenaline I was just saying different stuff.

As she heads to Royal Lytham as a guest of the R&A for Thursday’s start of the Women’s Open, the inaugural winner looks back

Golf commitments in the United States meant Jenny Lee Smith was unable to accept the North East Sports Personality of the Year award for 1982 in person. She attended the following year’s event, this time to present the trophy to Kevin Keegan. His death last week shocked Smith, prompting her to reflect back on that time. It delivers a snapshot of Smith’s sporting status at a time when Keegan was wooing Tyneside.

“It is very sad,” says Smith of Keegan’s death, aged 75. “We did a lot of work together because I was sponsored at the time by Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, who did the same for the football team. He became a good friend and was such a lovely chap.

• Four-year deal agreed with successor to Deschamps

• ‘I have so many emotions, I am ready for the challenge’

Zinedine Zidane has been appointed as France’s new head coach, replacing Didier Deschamps at the helm of the team he led to glory as arguably their greatest ever player.

The French football federation president, Philippe Diallo, announced Zidane’s appointment at the FFF headquarters in Paris on Tuesday, saying he has been given a four-year contract.

Full-back on being reunited with former manager, the shock of Arne Slot’s sacking and being mistaken for a bridegroom

It has been quite the summer for Milos Kerkez. There was time at home in Serbia, holidays in Montenegro and Spain, a frantic knock on his bedroom door one day to tell him that Arne Slot had been sacked, an unexpected reunion with Andoni Iraola shortly afterwards, and thousands of well-wishes sent his way after being photographed escorting a bride into church in his hometown of Vrbas. Congratulations on the wedding are also extended at the start of our interview on a rooftop terrace at Liverpool’s team hotel.

“No! This is wrong, everyone gets this wrong!” the full-back exclaims. “It was my oldest brother. In Serbia it is normal for the younger brothers to take the bride to the church. That’s what I did and now everyone thinks I got married. It was Rade, not me. There are three of us – Rade is the oldest, I’m the youngest and Marko is the middle one. I keep having to explain to people that I never got married. I was going around the club when we started back and people were congratulating me. I’m like: ‘No, I’m not ready for this yet!’”

• Toulouse defender expected to cost about £26m

• Newcastle still looking for defensive reinforcements

Sunderland are poised to sign the long-time Newcastle target Dayann Methalie from Toulouse. The France Under-21s defender, who can play left-back or wingback and also operate in the centre, has attracted widespread interest this summer but Régis Le Bris now appears close to acquiring him for about £26m.

Newcastle had extensively scouted Methalie, who made 27 Ligue 1 appearances for Toulouse last season, and reportedly tried to sign him in January. The club have now indicated they opted against the idea of recruiting the 20-year-old and have not submitted a bid this summer. Nonetheless, Methalie appeared an ideal fit for Newcastle’s new transfer policy of recruiting young players in the £20m-£40m price bracket.

As the paddock disperses for its traditional mid-season three-week break, the race is on to catch Kimi Antonelli

Mercedes came into the season as favourites and have lived up to the billing. Their car has been dominant with eight wins from 11 meetings, a strike rate greater perhaps even than the team had expected. Despite the rather skewed conclusions of the Aduo engine assessment, which declared the Red Bull the cream of the crop (on the basis of internal combustion output rather than overall capacity) the Mercedes power unit as a whole, including the hybrid electrical element that is now so vital, is without doubt the class of the field.

Cockroach Janta party says government has broken promise, with detentions in Delhi, Assam, West Bengal and Bihar

India’s youth-led “Cockroach” movement, whose nationwide protests forced the resignation of the education minister, has accused the government of backtracking on its promise not to act against student protesters and has threatened to restart demonstrations.

The Cockroach Janta party (CJP), which organised mass protests over exam paper leaks and other irregularities, said it had received reports of hundreds of students being detained or “harassed” by police.

Memorials for the Republican senator to start in US Capitol as Israeli and Ukrainian leaders are set to meet with Trump

Two days of funeral ceremonies for Lindsey Graham, the late South Carolina Republican senator, will begin in Washington on Tuesday, with mourners set to include Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Both leaders will also meet Donald Trump at the White House.

New bridge makes it easier to dodge satellite surveillance, investigation argues, as Ukrainian president warns Russia is to receive 30,000 more North Korean soldiers

Russia and North Korea are close to completing a bridge that will form the first road link ever built between them, amid concerns the two increasingly close allies are creating infrastructure to boost military cooperation in the Ukraine war.

The bridge spans the Tumen River, between Khasan in Russia’s far east and Tumangang in North Korea, a remote, thinly populated stretch of borderland where the river marks the final few miles of the frontier before it reaches the coast.

Nice backs wider use of system that keeps organs alive outside the body, to help improve low transplantation rates

A machine that keeps organs alive outside the body could save four in every five donated lungs that currently go to waste in England and Wales.

The UK has one of the poorest lung transplantation rates in the world. The latest figures from NHS Blood and Transplant show that 170 patients in the UK, including six children, are waiting for new lungs.

Former co-presenter of BBC motoring show given penalty after being caught twice in three weeks

The former Top Gear host Richard Hammond has been fined £999 by a court after being caught speeding twice in three weeks while driving his luxury cars.

The 56-year-old was in a Porsche when he broke the speed limit on 2 December last year, and was caught out again 20 days later while driving a Bentley.

The Earth keeps getting hotter and experts fear this year's El Niño, nicknamed 'Godzilla' because of its predicted intensity, could raise global temperatures by up to 3.6C. Environment correspondent Damien Gayle spoke to climate scientists to understand how the weather phenomenon and the climate crisis pose a huge threat to the planet

• ‘Super’ El Niño could cause global food price shock lasting into 2028, analysts say

• El Niño is back with a vengeance – and fears of ‘Godzilla’ strength may be the least of our worries

From Afghanistan to Taiwan, unprecedented deluge highlights devastating impact of climate breakdown

“It rained for 10 days and 10 nights, non-stop – I’d never seen anything like it,” says Anar Gul, a construction worker who lives in the remote district of Dur Baba in eastern Afghanistan.

The houses in his village are built from stone and mud, which makes them extremely vulnerable to heavy rains. After days of rain, Gul’s kitchen collapsed and his neighbour, Sayed Afsar Sadat, saw a large part of his house completely destroyed. “Rains like this are coming heavier and earlier each year,” says Sadat. “They are destroying the roads and washing away our crops. It’s impacting us directly.”

Experts who helped Burnham draw up Manchester carbon neutral pledge say backtracking would send wrong message amid wildfires and heatwaves

Leading climate scientists who created Greater Manchester’s carbon neutral by 2038 commitment are urging Andy Burnham to unequivocally reject new drilling in the North Sea.

In a letter to the prime minister they said he, as mayor of Greater Manchester, had unveiled one of the UK’s most ambitious local climate programmes that tackled housing, green growth and public transport.

Exclusive: Foreign secretary to take up World Bank seat and play active role in shaping changes to global lender

Britain’s foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, is to indicate he will put the climate crisis and overseas development at the heart of UK international relations by taking up the country’s seat on the board at the World Bank.

The position, which is usually delegated to a junior minister, means Miliband will play an active role in shaping the changes to the World Bank that developing countries have called for, and ensuring the climate remains a core focus for overseas aid.

Green party leader shared picture of man wearing T-shirt with words ‘we’re only making plans for Nigel’ alongside a guillotine

Police are “conducting inquiries” into an image shared by Green party leader Zack Polanski on Instagram after Reform UK reported it for “inciting murder”.

The image showed a man wearing a black T-shirt with the words “we’re only making plans for Nigel”, alongside a photograph of a guillotine.

Unions say basic needs still not being met a year after regulator told operators to improve facilities

Train drivers are considering strike action over a lack of toilets, with unions saying basic needs are still not addressed a year after the rail regulator told operators to provide more facilities and breaks.

Aslef said it was “putting the industry on notice”. The train drivers’ union added that companies had failed to deliver adequate toilets and reduce maximum driving times without a toilet break.

Scientists say decision is blow to UK astronomy as deep space observatory is home to world-leading facilities

Jodrell Bank Observatory, the hub of a world-leading network of radio telescopes, is facing closure after government funding for the facility was slashed.

The deep space observatory includes the Grade I-listed Lovell telescope and is prized by astronomers who study galaxies, black holes, star formation, planets beyond the solar system and the afterglow of the big bang.

Nostalgic foods like toad-in-the-hole also in demand at Waitrose as people pivot towards familiarity amid climatic and political upheaval

Forget a crisp salad and glass of chilled rosé. Enervated Britons are seemingly more likely to crave a rich cottage pie and a robust red in heatwaves.

In a trend termed “reverse comfort eating”, Waitrose’s cottage pie sales have soared 110% in the last month and South African red wine is up 68% compared with the same period last year. The surprise spike in demand for winter comfort foods also includes retro chicken, bacon and leek pie (up 41%), chicken korma (up 67%) and chicken and ham gratin (68%).

ICE report reviewed by the Guardian discloses a patient was ‘subject to force feeding, hydration or urinary catheterization’, which experts have described as torture

The Trump administration subjected at least one person undertaking a hunger strike in immigrant detention to forcible medical treatment – engaging in medical practice that healthcare associations and international human rights groups have described as torture.

A document from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) health service agency, reviewed by the Guardian, confirms for the first time that the administration has used forced treatment on a hunger striker since Donald Trump began his second term. The document, published online in February by the ICE Health Service Corps (IHSC), discloses that an unnamed patient who began hunger strikes between October and December of last year and “was subject to force feeding, hydration, or forced urinary catheterization, or involuntary blood draws”.

In normal times the Mashala shelter founder takes in strays, but in wartime, he is the only lifeline for animals in the area

During Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, Houssein Hamze woke up one night to the sound of barking. Alarmed, he got up to check on the dog – his first rescue pet. Moments later, a bomb dropped next to his home and a piece of shrapnel landed right where he had been sleeping.

“I swear to God, he really saved me from death. Animals always possess a sixth sense we don’t have,” Hamze said.

The Houthi threat to Saudi oil exports comes as Japan, South Korea and the Philippines are still reeling from the closure of the strait of Hormuz

Governments in Asia are scrambling to avoid their second major energy crisis in six months, as another maritime chokepoint in the Middle East faces a violent blockade, leaving only the Suez canal completely open for the free movement of gulf oil.

Countries like Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and South Korea – which rely on Middle East oil for up to 90% of their imports – are working to secure supplies after Yemen’s Houthis launched a blockade of Saudi Arabian shipping passing through the Bab al-Mandab strait, which forms the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

Social media influencers fighting against extradition to UK where they face rape, sexual assault and other allegations

Social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate will remain in jail at least two more weeks until their next hearing as they fight extradition to the United Kingdom, where the brothers are accused of rape and sex trafficking, a federal judge said on Monday.

US magistrate Lauren Louis set a detention hearing for 13 August to determine whether the Tates should stay in jail or be released during what could be a months-long extradition process.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

BT’s Openreach could be forced to pull a discount scheme for new fibre broadband customers, after the industry regulator said the deal was “not fair and reasonable” and could damage competition in the market.

Ofcom said the “New To Openreach” scheme, which offers discounts of up to £9.50 for up to 30 months, was targeting “aggressive” discounted pricing at new customers that rival fibre broadband providers rely on to grow.

Matching these discounts may not allow competitors to recover their costs, given the low prices they are already offering to all of their customers.

…Without sustainable competition, over time prices could rise. And firms competing to deliver affordable, ever better broadband helps underpin economic growth.

In such a competitive ‌market, we don’t believe that regulation should protect poor business models and we disagree with Ofcom’s analysis.

Openreach must be able to compete, but they cannot use their significant market power to drive other networks out of the market.

In reaching our final decisions on their planned offers, we will prioritise promoting sustainable competition, which is fundamental to keeping prices low in the long term and bringing better broadband to people across the UK.

MTC provided security at heavily criticised Manston centre in Kent and could now make £500m managing the site

A private security company linked to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown reported a slump in UK revenues after losing an asylum centre contract but could make £500m managing the same facility until 2036.

Management & Training Corporation (MTC) said sales fell from £28.4m to £17.6m in 2025 after its contract to provide “security and care” at the heavily criticised Manston site in Kent ended in September.

Landmark deal covers about 76,000 claims and could end contentious, decade-long legal battle

Johnson & Johnson said it would pay an estimated $5.5bn to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging its baby ⁠powder and other talc products caused ⁠ovarian cancer, in a landmark ​deal that could end a contentious, decade-long legal battle.

Johnson & Johnson on Monday said the settlement covers about 76,000 claims, including ones consolidated in a federal court in New Jersey, and related cases in state court, ⁠representing nearly all of the remaining talc claims against the company.

Consumer goods group reports strong sales growth, owing in part to World Cup marketing campaigns

• Business live – latest updates

Unilever has warned it will push through further price rises over the coming months, as the Marmite, Dove and Hellmann’s owner tries to recoup its own growing costs.

The Anglo-Dutch company said that while the pace of price rises slowed in the second quarter, owing in part to World Cup-related discounts and efforts to stay competitive in Brazil, it said these were “temporary factors” and would not shield consumers for long.

The German scientist showman turned corpses into gruesome entertainment and scored a global hit – but he sidestepped the moral questions truly great art asks

Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of “plastination”, will be remembered as the man who killed off 1990s shock art. He certainly plastinated any reputation Damien Hirst had as a disturbing artist of mortality.

When this German scientist turned showman made a popular bloodsplash around the world in the latter half of the 90s, Hirst was still pickling sheep, sharks and pigs and displaying them as philosophical specimens. Other artists, too, played with carnality and horror, from endoscopy videos to model landscapes filled with Nazi atrocities. But it was just art. Then along came Von Hagens with his Body Worlds exhibitions, using plastination to perfectly preserve dissected bodies. He did what Hirst and co never dared: he displayed actual human corpses as a kind of grisly but purportedly educational art object.

Shark Week arrives in an overstuffed period for the film genre even if nothing will ever rival the greatest of them all

Tracy Jordan, Tracy Morgan’s character on 30 Rock, once advised a friend to live every week like it’s Shark Week. In 2026, Hollywood has finally taken these sage words to heart.

Though Discovery Channel is only observing its annual Shark Week of shark-themed programming for the customary seven days, shark movies have been enjoying a yearlong renaissance – in terms of volume, if not necessarily quality. Two shark thrillers – The Devil’s Mouth on Prime Video and Above & Below as a paid VOD rental – are releasing this week, presumably to complement nonfictional Shark Week programming, but they’re far from the only fish in the sea. Earlier this month, Clint Eastwood’s daughter starred in The Bay, another VOD title. In June, there was Chum, starring Alice Eve; in May, Deep Water, Renny Harlin’s return to the subgenre following his classic Deep Blue Sea. Before that, Thrash was a Netflix hit. That’s half a dozen shark movies so far this year. It’s a wonder no one has arranged a 10th-anniversary re-release of The Shallows.

Director Tzeli Hadjidimitriou grew up on Lesbos, and her elegant debut feature explores how the Greek poet’s birthplace became a hub for lesbians

A fine-boned, elegantly crafted documentary, this first feature from Greek director Tzeli Hadjidimitriou tells a story at once personal and public: about the lesbian scene that grew up around the town of Eressos on the island of Lesbos (also called Lesvos). Hadjidimitriou is from the island, but not Eressos itself, which was once the home of the seventh century BC poet Sappho, whose love poetry threads through the film. Given that pedigree, lesbians, including the director herself, have flocked to Eressos for years to pay homage. By the 1970s, the growing number of queer visitors started to form not just a scene but a community, at first one centred on the nudist beach where many women camped out.

Hadjidimitriou’s still photographs are also spliced in throughout, capturing the glorious sensuality of these often naked women, most looking chuffed to bits to have found a little corner of heaven where they can be themselves. But relations with the local people were not always easy, and unsurprisingly the tourists had to contend with homophobia of varying degrees of vocalness, as well as aggressive invasion of their women-only spaces. Luckily, as one woman recalls, there were usually a few butches around to help hustle the intruders off. Over time, tolerance grew, greased by the money the visitors brought to the island, and eventually female-run bars and hotels sprang up.

The former This Morning host has done a Meghan, rebranding herself as a cookery guru with a YouTube show that veers from agonisingly dull courgette slicing to sweary banter. Somehow, in spite of it all, I am rooting for her

Holly Willoughby is a woman in search of a fresh start. Her stint on This Morning ended messily, with her response to the Phillip Schofield scandal – the infamous “Are you OK? I hope so” monologue – making her a figure of public mockery. Subsequent attempts to relaunch her career, like her short-lived time hosting a Bear Grylls reality show, stalled. So now it has come to this: Holly Willoughby Together (With Voy).

Your response to it will vary based on how generous you’re feeling. The kindest offering would be to say that Willoughby has pivoted to YouTube, having cannily observed that television is dead and this is where all the eyeballs are these days. It is a cookery and lifestyle show that allows her to be unapologetically herself without the meddling influence of executives who have spent years trying to enforce a persona upon her.

Sam Reid revels in the role as Lestat, a glam rock prince of darkness. Plus: Shabaz ‘King of the Povos’ Ali meets a billionaire. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
True Blood meets Eurovision in this ludicrously camp vampire drama. This is the third series of Interview with the Vampire but it takes a new turn, now set in 2025 with the spotlight on blood-sucking glam rocker Lestat – played so erotically by Sam Reid that he can pull off lines such as “MDMA and LSD: the Torvill and Dean of hallucinogens” and “I carry with me an immortal erection”. Hollie Richardson

The duo’s groundbreaking 1985 tour reveals a strange collision of pop stardom and communism, a re-edit of Lindsay Anderson’s efforts that got him fired

Here is a documentary that has a very important story to tell, maybe more important than it feels comfortable admitting. It’s about two separate subjects – or maybe three: Wham!, China and film-maker Lindsay Anderson. A superpower nervously edging towards western-style openness, a pop band nervously doing what needed to be done to make it big in the US, and a great film director, needing the money, taking on a project he didn’t really believe in.

In 1985, Wham!’s beetle-browed manager Simon Napier-Bell had a cunning plan for how George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley could break the US: Wham! would be the first ever western pop band to perform in mainland China. They would play where the Beatles, the Stones and Elvis had never played, and the resulting global publicity would launch them into the US. (He was right – it did.) In our modern age, the movie and music businesses routinely consider China as the key element of the all-important Asian market, but in 1985, Michael and Ridgeley were the Kirk and Spock of the charts, going where no pop act had gone before.

Author Alexander McCall Smith’s new series is an attempt to use short fiction to make listeners feel better about the world. Plus, what happened when two London gangsters decided to make a film?

While he is best known for his No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels, Alexander McCall Smith has something of a soft spot for short stories, which can “cover a whole sweep of history in a couple of paragraphs”. His new series features a selection of short original works that he hopes will make listeners feel better about the state of the world, beginning with a pleasingly twee tale inspired by a friend’s miniature helicopter landing pad. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

The country-pop superstar loves Abba and secretly listens to Lloyd Webber, but which British heartthrob’s single gets her out of bed in the morning?

The song that changed my life
There’s many critical songs on The Mission soundtrack, but Gabriel’s Oboe [by Ennio Morricone] hit me hard. I had to pull off the road, I cried like a baby. I didn’t realise how powerful music could be until that moment. I was 22.

The first single I bought
At Seventeen by Janis Ian. I reference it in my album Little Miss Twain and it says so much about the emotions of a teenage misfit. I felt like her, I related – but I was also thinking: “Wow, I have to some day write this well.” It gave me a goal; I was so in awe. I made very little money, babysitting, taking care of my neighbour’s horse, singing in bars. I would get like 20 bucks, that I would mostly give to my family, but I got that record for myself.

The singer-songwriter and Water from Your Eyes guitarist was unstoppably prolific, despite a growing dependence on substances. Now sober, he reflects on his new album and the songs that helped him turn his life round

For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to get through the day. There was plenty of it: dozens of self-produced albums and EPs uploaded – since his This Is Lorelei project launched in 2012 – to what was then a plucky, independent platform called Bandcamp. Now 35, he is perhaps the quintessential Bandcamp artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His peers treat him like a lost folk hero from a bygone era.

Amos is sitting in the basement of a cafe in Camden Town, north London, cradling an iced matcha; coffee makes him “feel like shit”, he says, and he no longer indulges such foibles. The title of one of those Bandcamp albums, OK N8, is tattooed on his knuckles. A friend inked it a few years ago, soon after Amos got sober. “Exactly when you’re not supposed to be making decisions like getting a tattoo on your hand,” he jokes. His active blue eyes dance around behind a golden-brown fringe and an unruly, woodchip beard. In a tough spot he will swing back in his chair and search for answers that always seem to be hiding beneath the table. But each time he stumbles upon the truth, he looks up with a hungry smile.

(Atlantic)
How do you follow up the album that made you a star – and a caricature? In classic Charli style: with a pivot to guitar and a meta masterpiece about the instability of identity

After a decade spent trailblazing a unique kind of pop freedom from the genre’s fringes, A-list success seemed like the thing that might finally trap Charli xcx. Her 2024 club-rat opus Brat spawned memes, embarrassing political bandwagoning, Collins’ word of the year and possibly terminal damage to the bra industry. Its ludicrous cultural impact looked set to pickle her as a caricature of a Parliament-toting bad girl; the question of whether “Brat summer” could last – whether Charli could sustain the interest – was so rife she turned it into a mockumentary, The Moment. It made success look miserable: your creation turned cringe by execs wanting to milk their prize cow dry of every last acid-green drop.

Even for a pop star renowned for reinvention, it put a higher price on her next move. Pivot and risk losing new fans and looking wilfully contrarian. When Charli released the sub-two-minute single Rock Music, many heard it as a middle finger. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she drawls over guitars that buzzed like speakers weathering interference from a Nokia 5110, “so now we’re making rock music.” There were boring thinkpieces about the dancefloor being very much alive, actually (as if Charli had ever ridden culture for clout then binned it off), and about whether she was trying to eject fair-weather new fans. But the key to this cheeky song is surprisingly earnest: “Jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don’t it’s OK,” she sings naively, an affirmation to take creative leaps, and to come with Charli – or not, as you like – as she takes this one.

The writer and climber brings colour and carnival to his account of a country and people shaped by its mountains

It comes as a shock to learn that Britain’s uplands were not always rocky, covered with coarse grass and suitable only for sheep. About 54,000 years ago – a mere blink in geological time – this island’s high places were teeming with nature. Lushly forested peaks, crags and gorges were home to megafauna including mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and giant elk. The one sour note in this elevated Garden of Eden was the carnivorous cave lions and sabre-tooth cats who prowled the browse looking for a meaty dinner.

Ed Douglas’s achievement in this excellent book is to return a proper sense of colour and even carnival to Britain’s high places. His first job, though, is to define his terms. In 1936, the celebrated US geographer Roderick Peattie declared that what made a mountain was not its elevation so much as its capacity to “enter into the imagination of the people who lived in [its] shadows”. But by the 1990s, the United Nations, newly tasked with protecting the world’s high places from environmental and economic decline, insisted on getting out its tape measure and statistical charts and coming up with some universal criteria.

A bereaved father and son bond over greyhound racing in an east Durham town in terminal decline

The adjoining villages of Easington and Easington Colliery in the coalfields of east Durham make the perfect case study of the shift from England’s industrial boomtime to terminal decline. Twenty miles from a major town or city, they’ve been left to languish ever since Thatcher went to war with the industry that made them. If you want to understand why the white working class feel abandoned today, go to Easington Colliery and its surrounding villages.

It’s this community that Middlesbrough-born writer Louise Powell brings to life in a powerful debut set in the world of greyhound racing, or “flapping”. Underdogs is an utterly authentic depiction of an England that’s overlooked, but still very much alive. Pigeon lofts and flat caps, meat raffles and social clubs – all still exist, just very rarely in 21st-century novels.

A sad, heartbroken woman becomes obsessed with a famous writer in a continuously humorous and touching story from the Sorrow and Bliss author

The protagonist of Meg Mason’s new book, the follow-up to the 2020 tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, is an invisible woman. She might well be standing there but you won’t notice her. She’s a techie at literary festivals – the person who shuffles up to a famous writer a few minutes before their event and apologetically slides a microphone cable down their shirt while they’re making small talk with the chair or accepting a bottle of room-temperature mineral water from an anxious publicist.

No man is a hero to his valet, and no writer is a hero to the technical staff lurking in the wings of a venue. Mason’s opening pages present a teasing but not quite libellous series of cameos of real writers: George Saunders deciding at an inconsiderately late stage to insist on swapping his headset for a lapel mic; Ann Patchett being frosty with a fan; Mick Herron accidentally stepping on someone’s foot and not apologising.

The academic’s ambitious guide to the ethics of tech falls short of its promise to provide meaningful answers

The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some mystical, formless thing, it is the product of hours of human labour, in silicon and quartz mines, microchip factories and data labelling centres. If citizens want to wrest power from the tech companies that are building AI, it helps to understand clearly what they are selling us. This also means seeing through the marketing and hype: “the cloud”, that nebulous, distant place where your photos are stored, is just someone else’s computer; an AI “hallucination” is a system error or data labelling mistake; intelligence is a very broad – and potentially misleading – term.

The story in Silicon Valley is that AI will either save us, ushering in a new era of prosperity and human longevity, or it will wipe us all out. Drage argues, convincingly, that big tech cannot possibly deliver on its utopian promises while it continues to chase profit and power above all else, and while it serves the interests of a narrow few. Meanwhile, the cultural obsession with the AI-induced apocalypse conveniently redirects attention from the practical conversations we could be having about how to make AI safer – by ensuring citizens have more power over how their information is used, and how AI models are trained and regulated, for example. Tech titans’ apocalyptic visions also create the false impression that AI safety is more important than climate change, geopolitical tensions and inequality, three problems that are already causing a huge amount of suffering and that, if addressed, would reduce many AI-linked risks too.

PC, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, PS5; SFB Games
Detective Grimoire is at it again in the long-awaited new entry to this stylish series of comedy whodunnits

In a boom time for mystery games, the Detective Grimoire series stands out for its style and sense of humour. The Mermaid Mask continues to build upon the formula laid down in Secret of the Swamp and polished in Tangle Tower, and while there is still room for further improvements this sequel is worth the seven years’ wait.

This time, the casually competent Grimoire and his smart if sarcastic sidekick Sally have been summoned to a submarine to solve the locked-room murder of its captain, Magnus Mortuga. You click around the cluttered rooms of the vessel to hear the detectives’ comedic commentary and look for clues and – closer up – click and drag to move objects around for further examination or to solve a puzzle. (For those playing on Nintendo Switch 2, the mouse controls are actually useful here, if not comfortable in the long run.)

The debut from Scandinavian outfit Dead Astronauts promises shooting, survival, and, in a shake-up to the genre, seeds that terraform its pristine world right before your eyes

The wilds of the sub-Arctic north: towering pine trees, flashes of psychedelic-yellow lichen, and a sun that never wholly sets during the summer months. This land is gorgeous, yes, but also unforgiving, yet in Haex (pronounced “hex”) you have an unusual tool at your disposal to make it a little more hospitable: a cube that fits snugly in the palm of your hand out of which grows a plant. You plant this so-called Seed in the earth and – voilà – the world around you transforms: new vegetation and topography but also narrative threads to follow, and, naturally, enemies. Wield these small-but-mighty kernels of change at your own peril.

“Your adventure and your world is player-shaped,” says Haex’s creative director Tobias Nyman. He explains that everyone starts a campaign with a unique, procedurally generated world. Each Seed then contains further procedural data that causes it to terraform before your eyes. “You change the world as you go,” he says. “It becomes even more unique.”

The horror movie sensation of 2026 has its roots in gaming’s discovery of ‘noclip’ – and the hidden virtual realms that could be opened up inside games. Developers explain how everyone got lost in these liminal spaces

It starts on 4chan, in a May 2019 thread entitled “unsettling images”. The first post was a photo showing an empty room with the now iconic yellow wallpaper, no natural lighting and a kind of inexplicable jutting half-wall. Shortly afterwards, another user (there are no usernames on 4chan, just identifying numbers) responded with 78 words of text that would essentially lay out the blueprint for a future $262m A24 movie sensation.

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms,” the post begins. For the uninitiated, “noclip” refers to a game mode in which collision with solid objects is disabled, allowing players to move freely through walls and floors. Think of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in the film, finding a permeable wall in the basement of his furniture store and passing through to the world on the other side.

Going by the mantra, if you want to make someone laugh, make them cry first, the game’s developers have created a lonely magpie who fills the void by wreaking havoc

Amid the gleeful anarchy of Bad Magpie’s debut trailer, there’s a striking note of melancholy. The game’s protagonist – a wounded corvid that creates havoc wherever she goes – calls out forlornly as a flock of her kind passes above, with a conspicuous gap in their formation.

Milktooth games designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this particular image in her head for years. Lying in the grass one afternoon during the 2020 lockdowns, she looked up and saw a V-shaped pattern in the sky, poignantly incomplete. “It really stuck with me,” she says. “I posted about it online and someone told me about a ‘missing man’ formation, which is an aerial salute to a fallen pilot.”

Soho theatre, London
She has penned jokes for Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien and the Academy. Now she’s seizing the limelight with scattergun routines about everything from penises to free-bleeding

Laurie Kilmartin is not afraid of vulgarity. The Peabody award-winner flits between penis jokes, free-bleeding chaos and a taste for vengeance in this scattergun hour that marks her London debut. Having made her career as a staff writer for Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O’Brien, Kilmartin’s own voice is crude, acute and pretty mean, delivering each dark joke with a furrowed-brow intensity, followed by a flash of a wide, are-you-gonna-take-it smile.

Jumping through the decades, the US comedian cycles through school bullies, the need for better assassins, and the limited dating pool of men over 50. There’s a pitch-black quality to some of these tales, with a particular knife-edge to her story of an abusive swim coach. Other anecdotes feel drier, like they’ve just had the dust blown off them; she settles too long on lockdowns, which I thought we’d all agreed we were done talking about long ago. Even a moment on Charlie Kirk feels like it missed the moment, though other elements of her US political commentary are easy winners.

Neston Park, Wiltshire
​In a new home after a year off, there’s a thread of fierce political anger running alongside the spirited musical performances – including standout sets from Barrington Levy and Daniela Mercury

At Womad, opening at new home Neston Park after a year off in 2025, the boundary between spectator and performer dissolves entirely: you bump into headliners in the loo queue, spot them wandering the site with their kids, or sit in on an intimate panel discussion with them hours after their main-stage set. Phone signal is practically nonexistent at the new site, forcing a crowd reliant on group chats into analogue meet-ups; the new arboretum layout holds a cosier, village-like setup than before, complete with a mercifully shorter trek from all camping areas. You can start the morning at your own speed: pounding through a west African djembe workshop, joining “laughing yoga”, or relaxing in a wood-fired tub while distant basslines echo through the trees.

Musical highlights often happen when artists go off-script. Reggae legend Barrington Levy provides Friday’s standout moment by rejecting strict act times, turning to the side of the stage to deliver a blunt ultimatum: “Mr Promoter, don’t invite me to your festival and tell me to get off the stage. I’m fucking playing as long as I like.” The crowd back him and he stays, launching back into Black Roses and Here I Come, his star power locking in a crowd of nodding, fist-pumping seniors, families, and kids getting a proper musical education.

Bayreuth festival theatre, Bayreuth
Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka’s production swaps 14th-century Rome for an abstract near future in an over-busy staging . Jennifer Holloway’s Adriano is a standout in a strong cast

It was Adolf Hitler’s favourite opera – and thus vital to a historical chapter that Germany’s Bayreuth festival long preferred to avoid. But Rienzi has finally arrived at Wagner’s symbolic HQ, opening the 150th anniversary season as an exception to the festival’s rigid canon of his 10 “mature” works.

Rienzi’s problems are unavoidable. Since the complete handwritten score was given to Hitler and subsequently disappeared, no authentic version of Wagner’s longest opera exists. Aesthetically, Rienzi shares the vast scale of French grand opera but sounds broadly Italian. Flashes of chromatic ambition hint at a Wagnerian language to come. Yet there are endless repetitions and the sense of an epic both overcompressed and underpowered.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Lucas and Arthur Jussen brought fun and energy to Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and John Adams’ Harmonium was monumental and moving in the City of Birmingham Orchestra and Chorus’ Prom under their chief conductor Kazuki Yamada

American minimalism can punch and thrill, hypnotise and slow your pulse, but how often does it make you laugh? What a brilliant idea, then, from Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to pair John Adams’ formative 1980 epic Harmonium – a sonic wrestle with love and death and desire – with music by the wittiest, slipperiest, most self-puncturing composer in the business, an artist who will break your heart with the cheekiest of grins: Francis Poulenc.

It’s entirely typical that Poulenc can’t even bring himself to call a symphony a symphony. Any delusions of grandeur are seen off at the pass by diminutising his 1948 “Sinfonietta”, which duly unfolds in a series of impeccably shaded and textured dances, marches and melodies that thumb their nose at anything so dutiful as development.

Netflix documentary A Child of My Own tells the stranger-than-fiction story of a hospital worker who went to extreme lengths in her efforts to become a mother. Its director recounts their meetings in a Mexican prison

The CCTV footage of the hospital corridor is grainy but you can make out a young woman carrying an oversized gift bag. Nothing unusual there. Except that inside the bag is a newborn baby girl, just hours old. And the woman carrying the bag, walking out of the hospital’s main entrance, past two security guards who are idly chatting, is not the baby’s mother.

Her name is Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza, known to everyone as Alejandra. When film-maker Maite Alberdi met her in a low-security Mexican prison, Alejandra was in the final year of a 13-year jail sentence for snatching the baby. Alberdi listened rapt as Alejandra told her story: “Everything she was telling me was extraordinary, stranger than fiction.”

Pop star aims to use legal process to name ‘wrongdoers who hide in the shadows and wreak technological havoc with impunity’

Ariana Grande has filed a lawsuit against hackers who she alleges have stolen unreleased music, as well as private photos and video footage, and sold them online.

Grande filed the lawsuit in a Los Angeles court on Monday. It doesn’t name the hackers, who are referred to with the generic name John Doe. Grande will look to have them identified during the legal process “in order to hold them accountable for their invasive and reprehensible conduct”, the lawsuit reads.

Wilson, whose work on Homer’s epic was praised by Nolan, said his film was grandiose and superficial with ‘nothing convincing to say’

• Peter Bradshaw reviews The Odyssey
• ‘At times I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew’: Christopher Nolan interviewed
• What Nolan’s Odyssey changed, invented – and left out

Emily Wilson, the classicist whose 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey was cited by Christopher Nolan in early publicity for his hugely successful adaptation of the poem, has roundly criticised the film, saying “it has nothing convincing to say” and that it “lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth”.

In a scathing essay for the London Review of Books, Wilson writes: “I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality … the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants.”

Jonsson has come a long way from east London’s Docklands, winning accolades on stage and screen

Few characters carry the cultural weight of Black Panther. Since 2018, the Wakandan king has become a global symbol of Black excellence, credited with reshaping expectations of representation on screen.

The first film grossed more than $1.3bn (£1bn) worldwide, won three Oscars and became the first superhero movie nominated for best picture.

From olive oil to matcha, soy sauce to sage and onion stuffing, there’s a frozen designer dessert out there to tickle even the most jaded palate. Here’s the best – and worst – of what’s on offer in Britain this summer

What’s with all the weird ice-cream flavours this year? It feels as if supermarkets and independent companies are vying to make the most novel alternatives to a good old scoop of vanilla. But which are actually worth having? I tried 99 varieties of ice-cream tubs and ranked them from sickeningly sweet to dinner party-worthy.

99. Paxo sage and onion stuffing, Anya Hindmarch
(One scoop £4.50 or 500ml tub £16, The Ice Cream Project, London)
Anya Hindmarch’s Ice Cream Project has become a yearly summer fixture, in which the fashion designer collaborates with well-known brands to create nostalgic novelty flavours (at designer prices) for which customers queue round the block. This year the flavours skew toward roast dinners, and include Oxo (which I couldn’t try, being vegetarian) and Paxo. It tastes exactly like the stuffing … which isn’t really what I want from an ice-cream. Taste 1/10, Value 1/10, Originality 7/10

Ebikes with child seats – plus idyllic campsites and pit stops en route – turn a five-day ride on the car-free Véloscénic into a wonderful family holiday

“Are you mad?” says a fellow guest over dinner at our campsite. “I heard you’re here on a long-distance cycle ride with your toddlers.”

I am in Orne, a region in Normandy, with my sister Issy and our three-year-old sons, Sid and Ralph. The landscape folds around us in green-over-green – hedgerow, oak, mossy manor wall – then opens into meadows where Percheron horses graze, knee-deep in wildflowers. Deer leap from the bocage. Cidre and poiré have been pressed here since the middle ages. The villages are sandy stone, blue- and green-shuttered; roses against the boulangerie.

Shark’s cordless vacuum is a whiz at cleaning hard floors and pet hair, but a disarmingly short battery life caught our reviewer off guard

• The best cordless vacuum cleaners – tested

Vacuuming rarely starts with vacuuming. First you have to clear the floor of stray socks and abandoned toys left behind by children, pets or messy partners. Then there’s the irritation of finding the vacuum’s dustbin still full of dirt, or the battery flat because someone forgot to charge it.

The (take a deep breath – long name coming up) Shark PowerDetect Speed Clean and Empty Pet Pro cordless vacuum Ultramarine IA3241UKT certainly won’t pick up the scattered toys for you, but it has been designed to make the job of vacuuming as frictionless as possible.

Too many outfits and not enough suitcase space? Whether it’s sightseeing or sundowners, our fashion writer shares her secrets for packing smarter

• The travel essentials that made your holiday better
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When you hear the words capsule wardrobe, you probably picture beige knits and minimalist tailoring. A capsule isn’t just about dressing neutrally, though: it’s about choosing a handful of pieces that work together in countless combinations.

There is no time that skill is more important than when you’re packing for a holiday. I have streamlined my approach by sticking to a simple rule of thumb: instead of packing for every possible scenario, I focus on versatile staples that can be dressed up or down and worn more than once.

Who makes the smoothest, creamiest, chocolatiest tub? We have the inside scoop for you

• The best supermarket dark chocolate

There’s been a marked shift towards less-processed ice-cream since I tested vanilla ice-cream for this column last summer. Most ice-cream on the market used to be a cocktail of gums and emulsifiers, but now they’re of much higher quality and with fewer additives.

All today’s chocolate ice-creams are sophisticated, rich and complex, with deep, dark flavours, and I scored them on taste and texture first (I favour denser, French-style, custard-based ice-creams). I also prioritised smoothness and mouthfeel.

Supportive and surprisingly cool for memory foam, Panda’s flagship topper gave our reviewer some of the best sleep she’s had all summer

• The best mattress toppers – tested

When I was struggling to sleep in a heatwave, diving into a 6ft slab of memory foam didn’t exactly sound like the answer. Memory foam is renowned for trapping heat, and the more “sinky” the foam, the more heat you’d expect it to trap. Less comfort layer, more boiled marshmallow.

However, the foam used by Panda in its flagship mattress topper genuinely seems to break the mould. It has the cosy feel of conventional memory foam, but it eased my night sweats so well when I tested the best mattress toppers in summer 2025 that I named it the “best cooling topper”, beating rivals filled with airy wool and microfibre.

Sweetness and spice abound in this refreshing summer salad

When the weather is glorious, I have very little desire to do any “proper cooking”. Turning the grill on for about 15 minutes is the maximum amount of heat I want to subject my home to, which is why, in the summer months, I eat this sort of salad on repeat: stone fruit with golden slices of halloumi is my favourite pairing. Add a little freshness with some sweetness and spice, and it is a glorious thing. You could even spoon it on to slices of toasted ciabatta for an open sandwich or elegant crostini.

Fragrant, punchy vegan dishes that can be kept in the kept in the fridge or freezer for an easy midweek dinner

Whether you love it or loathe it, tofu is one of the most versatile ingredients in any kitchen. For me, it’s the saviour of stressful dinner times, because it cooks in minutes, absorbs flavour like no other and packs a real nutritional punch. Here, it plays two very different roles: crisped until golden in a fragrant, spice-infused Vietnamese-style pho, and mashed to give body and bite to bold, punchy Thai-ish fishless cakes.

You’ll leave fed, challenged and gastronomically punch-drunk

Nico Simeone is the Scottish-Italian chef behind the Six by Nico restaurant empire, and Lennox, in Spring Gardens, Manchester, is his new baby. If you are unfamiliar with Six by Nico, it’s a fever-dream version of fine dining: Simeone conjured up themes such as “The Chippie”, “Italian Road Trip” and “Ancient Rome”, then served six courses in homage to them. Tokyo! Mad Hatters! Childhood! At one point, the Six empire was growing like knotweed, and by 2025 there were 17 restaurants. You had more chance of eating at a Six by Nico than finding an NHS dentist.

Suffice to say, many adore the concept – overlooking its middling cooking skills – because it’s pocket-friendly, and the six-course format gives a night out with friends a sense of occasion not available at Pizza Express. Lennox, Simeone says, will be very different: à la carte, focused on dry-aged meat, but with the same playfulness and invention. There would be a fish finger with katsu curry and celeriac remoulade; a tempura oyster shell filled with dry-aged beef tartare and oyster emulsion; and gnocchi with deboned chicken wings and parmesan. Lennox would be personal, bespoke and absolutely unscalable. No rollout planned, no siree. But by August 2026, there will be three of them. Hang on, what? Yes, shortly after Manchester came Glasgow, and then Edinburgh. Simeone sleeps with one eye open; I salute his indefatigability.

They make grand claims about beauty benefits or extra energy – and even actor Gillian Anderson has her own brand. We investigate what they’re really doing – and put them to a taste test

Show yourself some love. Fuel your focus. Life’s too good for bad energy. Find your calm in the everyday chaos. Live fit. No, not new-age slogans or something you’d find scribbled in neon on the wall of a cocktail bar, but marketing taglines slapped across cans of functional soft drinks. Walk into any supermarket or newsagent and there they are, bright and cheerful, right next to the Tango, promising everything from improved mental clarity and zen-like calm, to a blast of highly caffeinated energy as part of your sandwich-and-a-snack lunchtime meal deal. Influencers love them. Your favourite podcasters are sponsored by them. Even Gillian Anderson has a functional drinks brand (brilliantly, she’s called it G Spot).

If you have not yet swigged an electrolyte-loaded lemonade or opened a can of probiotic fizzy pop, you might be wondering what functional drinks even are. Because they are marketed as having one or more of many possible physiological and cognitive benefits, it’s a big category. There are functional drinks for focus, productivity, relaxation, calm, protein, energy, gut health and perhaps most confusingly, for hydration – which is, after all, the core function of most potable liquids.

It used be called playing the field, but now young people are claiming dating multiple people at once is intentional and growth-enhancing

Name: Roster dating.

Age: The term seems to be about a decade old; the practice is much older.

I was just 10 at the time but my siblings and I will never forget the sense of safety, comfort and warmth they offered

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

We were doing the groceries when a blood vessel burst in my mother’s brain. I was 10 years old and on a family holiday to France that very suddenly changed its tenor. In the following weeks Mum went through brain surgery, suffered a stroke and was placed in intensive care.

We had been staying in a gîte but moved to a small hotel closer to the hospital. It was a terrifying and stressful time, even as a young kid who knew things were serious – but didn’t understand quite how serious.

Will’s lack of self-worth is creating a barrier between him and Fi, but talking more could help them adjust to their mismatched libidos

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

I worry that Will sees me more as a mother figure than a sexual being

You are stepping into a family system with its own history and loyalties; try to consider how you might set boundaries without rejecting his mum

I’m in my 30s and have been living in Spain for a decade. My partner is Spanish and we have lived together for a year.

The bond he has with his mum sometimes makes me feel angry, jealous and helpless. I’m aware that, culturally, Spanish people often have closer bonds with their families and I try to accept that. He is an only child and his father left his family when he was a teenager and started another. I feel my partner has developed an unhealthy and codependent relationship with his mum.

We told it of our 11pm arrival time but when we got there our room was no longer available as it had ‘overbooked’

I booked and paid for a room in the Travelodge London King’s Cross Royal Scot hotel six weeks in advance. It was for myself and my husband, who has heart disease and dementia.

I had called the hotel on the day of arrival to advise that we would be checking in at 11pm and was told that was fine.

I’m a self-employed driving instructor and I’m running out of cash to hire a replacement dual-control vehicle

My livelihood as a self-employed driving instructor is under threat owing to Nissan’s failure to repair my leased dual-control car.

It has been off the road awaiting a spare part for three months, and I’ve now been told it will take at least a further month to arrive.

Criminals send victims to a cloned site that collects login, personal and payment details

You have had a Spotify account for years and your credit card is linked for the monthly payments. When an email arrives telling you that your payment couldn’t be processed you are not surprised as the expiry date on the card is soon.

“We encountered an issue while processing your recent payment,” it says. “To keep your access active and avoid interruption, please review and update your information.”

Unclear terms and expensive extras can turn what seemed like a cheap rental into a costly one

It is not too late to get a good deal on your holiday car rental, even if you have booked already and are travelling soon. But there are many pitfalls to avoid so that you do not end up paying over the odds.

A survey from Which? found that one in eight people who had hired a car in the past two years had ended up paying more than they were first quoted.

Women and men exhibit different heart attack symptoms. Knowing these lesser-known factors can help save your life

A few months ago at work, when I rose from my seat and walked a few steps, something felt off. There was a strange pressure in my chest and rib cage, but I ignored it, took my water bottle from the kitchen and returned to my desk.

The next day it happened again. There was no pain and my breathing was fine. But whenever I stood up and took a few steps, the odd squeezing would return. I work at a hospital as a neurosurgery coordinator, and the wall was lined with posters about stroke and heart distress signs. I barely glanced at the pictures, having memorized them years ago.

Elevated high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, or hs-CRP, score: the level of these proteins increases with inflammation, and a high level can indicate blood vessels in the heart are narrowing (cardiovascular disease).

Lipoprotein(a) elevation: a genetic test for inherited LDL (“bad”) cholesterol; high levels significantly increase risk of heart attack via plaque buildup in arteries.

Apolipoprotein B elevation: measures the amount of Apo B, which carries substances in your blood that make the plaque.

Coronary artery calcium score (high CAC): a high score probably means a large amount of plaque is present in arteries and the risk of a future heart attack is high.

Ask your primary care doctor what kinds of cardiac testing are available to you. If bloodwork is suggested first, do it. If you have a family history of heart attacks and want to check your arteries now, discuss proteins and inflammation markers. You may need to consult a specialist for these steps.

Provide as much information as possible, even if you don’t think it’s related to your current problem. It could make a difference in someone deciding on a scan or sending you to the ER. The more details you provide, the better someone can assist. For instance, if you have a stomach ache that hasn’t gone away in three days, disclose it.

Keep asking about next steps. You are entitled to an answer and it’s the doctor’s job to help you find it. If your inquiries are not being taken seriously, book an appointment elsewhere. Do not give up or wait it out. Persistence can help you identify serious risks.

Julie Charnet is a healthcare worker and writer in Philadelphia

The classic gym routine doesn’t isolate your stomach muscles as much as you might think, but here are five that will

If someone in a film or TV show wants a six-pack, chances are they’ll drop to the floor and start doing sit-ups. According to Dr Lee Brown, senior lecturer in strength and conditioning at the University of East London, that’s more Hollywood than science.

“It’s embedded in the archaic practices of boxing coaches and therefore everyone seems to follow it,” he says. “But they’re far from the best exercise for training your core.”

Stress, the cost of living, long working hours and even excessive exercise have all been touted as reasons the illness is rising among women in their 30s and 40s. What can be done to help them?

The “lightning strike” pain was like nothing Francine Jones had experienced before. “That is the only way I can describe it,” she says, of the stabbing in her torso that would occur every 10 minutes or so. “It was a really sharp, intense pain, as if someone was giving me an electric shock … it took my breath away.”

It had started in May with a strange pricking sensation under her bra. Then 10 large blisters, plus a host of smaller ones, formed in a band from her stomach to her back. They burned, “like someone was putting an iron on me. I don’t think I wore underwear for five or six weeks.” Showering, or even a cold flannel, would make her skin burn. Then came “the itch”, which lasted for five weeks and was so intense that she was lucky if she slept for four hours a night. “It was like something was crawling all over me all the time.” I can hear her wincing.

Feel lethargic even after a full night’s sleep? From not enough fibre to too much sitting, experts explain why your get up and go has got up and gone

The very air you breathe could be an issue. “Close the door, shut the window, add a partner and a heater, and by 3am a typical bedroom sits at 1,500 to 2,500 parts per million of carbon dioxide,” says Dr Jemma King, author of Sleep First: Sleep Smarter, Think Sharper, Feel Better. “Research shows that above 1,000 ppm sleep efficiency drops, deep sleep reduces and salivary cortisol rises on waking. You’re sleeping, but your nervous system is mildly activated all night.” Luckily, it’s an easy fix: open a window – even 2cm will do the job, according to King.

Are you stuck in a makeup rut? Or maybe just beginning to wear cosmetics? Here, experts reveal how to to find the right products for you

Makeup trends change over time – and so does our skin. How can you enhance what you have and refresh your look? Here, makeup artists share the fundamentals of applying cosmetics, at every age.

Around town, on the pitch and even in the pool, the New York mayor keeps his suit on – what do his sartorial choices tell us?

Playing football. Playing in the sand. Dancing on a stage with Alicia Keys and the entire New York Knicks roster. Swimming in a swimming pool. Swimming in the ocean.

Traditionally, a suit and tie would be considered inappropriate attire for each of these activities. Yet over the past year Zohran Mamdani has seemingly been on a one-man crusade to prove otherwise: to convince people that a formal suit is, actually, suitable for all activities.

Latest edition of one of world’s most influential fashion photography publications is also shot entirely in India

Against the ancient, weathered walls of Jaigarh fort, high on the hills above Jaipur, Bhavitha Mandava stood barefoot and draped in gold.

Just a few months earlier, the Indian model had been catapulted from a life of obscurity as a student at New York University to become one of the most recognisable and celebrated new faces of fashion. This year, she became the first Indian woman to open the Chanel catwalk at their Métiers d’Art show and her divisive Chanel outfit for the Met Gala, fashion’s most exclusive event, became an international talking point.

A physio, a tailor and a historian on the style trends that can put women in hospital and how to avoid the dangers

“Buyer beware” is one of the oldest principles in English law. Now, a pair of wide legged trousers from Zara is bringing the phrase back to the forefront of shoppers’ minds.

On social media the £25.99 wide-legged trousers from the high-street retailer have earned the moniker “Zara death pants” thanks to a slew of videos showing wearers tripping over the leg of the trousers and injuring themselves.

Horchata, the revered creamy drink made from tiger nuts, is still served in grand Valencian parlours – always accompanied by sugar-glazed pastries

It was a glimpse of an old couple sharing a tender moment in the bustling horchatería that drew me into one of Valencia’s most storied culinary traditions. As he sipped his milky horchata de chufa and a white crescent moon appeared on his coiffed moustache, they shared a soft laugh and she dabbed it away from his upper lip.

“There’s no fixed time to drink horchata,” the lady said. “As long we have at least one every day.”

Sagre – the historic local events that pop up in villages across the country in summer – are the perfect way to get a taste of regional cuisine and culture

I cannot remember a summer when at least one evening hasn’t been spent following signs to a local sagra. Not quite a food market and not quite a village fete, a sagra is like a village moving its kitchen outdoors for a few nights.

When I think back to those nights from childhood, the first image that comes to mind is of a woman’s hand closed into a fist above a pan of hot oil. Through a tight circle formed between her thumb and forefinger, she would squeeze soft lumps of batter, one small ball at a time, into the oil. In a few seconds, each soft mass would become a pittula, a small Salento fritter: swollen, uneven, golden, too hot to eat straight away but too good to wait for.

On a coastline brimming with seafood shacks, crab sandwiches and hyperlocal flavour, our food writer is happy to be distracted from the stunning scenery

If we take it as read that the better the view, the worse the cooking, then by rights south Wales’s Gower peninsula should be a culinary desert. The first time I visited almost 15 years ago, I was unprepared for its loveliness – back in 1956, Gower (never the Gower, as locals were quick to correct me) was the first place in the UK to be designated an area of outstanding natural beauty, and though the peninsula abuts the country’s second city, Swansea, it still feels profoundly rural. Crisscrossed by narrow lanes flanked by towering hedges and ancient churches, it’s a great place to cycle, to drive, and above all to walk up an appetite.

Indeed, it’s been a long-held ambition of mine to hike the 43 miles of the Welsh Coast Path from Mumbles to Loughor. Sadly, it remains just that because on this latest trip I spent considerably more time chomping than yomping … though in fairness I was on a research mission for a walking trip with a friend here later in the summer, because as a food writer and semi-professional glutton, I never like to head anywhere unprepared.

From being abused by staff and other travellers to being denied access to toilets, flying is an increasingly distressing and frustrating experience for many wheelchair users. Here, they share their stories

When Hannah Babalola boarded KLM flight 598 on 26 May, she was tired. A Paralympic athlete, she had been competing at an event in South Africa’s Cape Town, and was hoping there would be no hold ups on her journey back home to Chicago.

Babalola, 37, is well-travelled. A former wheelchair racer, she now competes in marathons and has flown to dozens of countries over the years without big problems.

Skincare-inspired regimes feel unnecessary – but giving your plants more attention is always a good thing

The problem
Plant care has had a glow-up. There is now an entire regime that’s been lifted straight from the bathroom cabinet: cleanse, hydrate, serum, tone. These beautifully boxed kits promise lush plants, make lovely gifts and look wonderful on a shelf, but the question is: does your monstera actually need a four-step routine?

The hack
The promise is that plants, like skin, thrive on a structured routine, and that investing in a multi-product care kit will reward you with glowing foliage.

The work was simple: deliver letters, notices of assessment and other important legal documents, by bicycle. The locations, I came to realise, were varied and inconvenient

• Read more in this series here

A gopher is a small, solitary rodent with large front teeth native to North and Central America. It’s also the name of the job some workplaces give to errand runners (though it’s more usually spelled gofer).

When I was a 21-year-old law student in Canberra, I was in desperate need of casual work. I came across an ad pinned to one of the corkboards outside the library. Bleary-eyed after another all-nighter to finish an assignment, I took down the number of the law firm.

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Stephen Walsh was such a workaholic that none of his colleagues would believe he’d ever leave. But then he learned to dance and he’s now part of a dazzling tap troupe

When he was 57, Stephen Walsh found himself in hospital with a stomach bleed from an ulcer. As he lay in bed recovering, he thought about his future. “‘You always had this vague idea that you’d retire early,’” he told himself at the time. “‘Well, I’m going to do it.’”

Discharged from hospital, he gave his business partners three years’ notice. They had worked together at the General Electric Company, and after it was broken up in 1999, they launched their own training and consultancy business specialising in how to improve companies’ efficiency and outcomes.

Super-premium Android has top performance, long battery life and good cameras, but is let down by software

Honor’s svelte Android phone-tablet has been given a glow-up for its sixth version, offering a great alternative to Samsung for a fancy foldable with a red suede-like back framed in gold.

The Magic V6 continues the Chinese challenger brand’s strategy of taking a razor-thin device and slapping a giant circular lump on the back to fit in top-class cameras, something others often forgo. It costs a not inconsiderable £1,500 (€1,700/A$2,999) but only until August when the price jumps to a cool £2,000 (€2,300) – a solid £300 more than last year’s model as the cost of RAMageddon continues to bite, even at the very top end of the market.

Main screen: 7.95in (403ppi) 120Hz OLED flexible display

Cover screen: 6.52in (406ppi) 120Hz OLED

Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

RAM: 16GB

Storage: 512GB

Operating system: MagicOS 10 (Android 16)

Camera: 50MP + 50MP ultrawide + 64MP 3x tele; 2x 20MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, dual sim + esim, USB-C, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6, GNSS

Water resistance: IP68/69 (1.5 metres for 30 minutes)

Dimensions folded: 156.7 x 74.5 x 8.75-9mm

Dimensions unfolded: 156.7 x 145.6 x 4.0-4.1mm

Weight: 219-224g

While longer-term action is needed, there are steps that can be taken during the holidays to help keep children safe

This summer, repeated heatwaves drove classroom temperatures to unbearable levels, leaving pupils and teachers scrambling to cope and forcing thousands of schools to close. School WhatsApp groups have lit up as parents, teachers and governors try to work out what can be done.

Experts agree that in the medium term governments and local authorities must act to ensure all schools are equipped to withstand the new realities of a climate destabilised by the continued burning of fossil fuels.

Comedy star of the 1970s as one of the Goodies whose love of birds led to a second career as a wildlife presenter

Bill Oddie, who has died aged 85, was a multi-talented performer who found his greatest comedy success on television with his fellow Cambridge University Footlights members Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden in The Goodies, a sketch show that combined the anarchic elements of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with “silly” sight gags.

Oddie’s self-taught musical skills steered the trio into the charts with his compositions – pastiche rock’n’roll songs such as The Funky Gibbon and Nappy Love. And when that was all over, he carved out a new career as the small screen’s most famous birdwatcher, credited with encouraging new generations to become enthusiasts for the natural world.

St Mungo’s project aims to challenge stereotypes by narrating stories of people supported out of rough sleeping

In his days of rough sleeping, Lee, 54, recalls the nights that were so cold it hurt. Having lived in North America for several years – including a year spent sleeping rough in Canada – he returned home to London for mental health support, hoping the NHS would be able to help. Instead, he ended up homeless.

On his first night on the streets of London, a St Mungo’s outreach worker came across him. He was taken to A&E to await help in the warm and, in the middle of the night, he got a call. “I’m outside,” a St Mungo’s team member told him. Knowing that help was there, he says, was when things started to change.

We would like to hear from people living near AI datacentres about their experiences and any concerns they might have

There are around 450 large data centres across the UK. These warehouses contain computing infrastructure that power cloud services and, increasingly, AI.

There is much debate about how datacentres affect their local areas, with concerns raised by nearby residents about land use, pollution, noise, and the “heat island effect”.

We would like to hear from people for whom GLP-1 drugs, such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, have not worked

We would like to hear from people for whom GLP-1 drugs, such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, have not worked.

About 5-10% of people who try GLP-1 drugs are in this category. We’d like to know your story. Was it that the drugs were unbearable, or that despite using them for an extended period you found no benefit? Did you encounter stigma as a result? Are you using other approaches to gain the benefits you hoped to see from GLP-1s?

Wildfires are burning in parts of the UK and Europe, forcing people to leave their homes, disrupting travel and affecting communities. We would like to hear how the fires have impacted you

Wildfires are affecting communities in the UK and other parts of Europe, with people forced to evacuate their homes, travel disrupted and smoke affecting air quality in many areas.

In France, around 10,000 people have been evacuated from camping sites and other holiday accommodation near Bordeaux in the south-west on Thursday, as a wildfire ravaged a seaside pine forest, AFP news agency reported. The blaze in Le Porge had ripped through 2,400 hectares (5,900 acres) since Wednesday, officials said

How do you choose what makes the front page? How hard is genAI making the job of the picture editor? Fiona Shields is the Guardian’s global head of photography, overseeing all the images across our websites and print publications. She’ll be taking your questions at 3pm on Wednesday BST

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Join us as 3pm on Wednesday 29 July, as the Guardian’s Fiona Shields answers your questions about the art, sciences (and logistics) of covering the world through images.

Over the last few years Fiona has worked closely with photographers covering the wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and beyond; the seismic political shifts in the US and UK as well as thousands of daily events (captured brilliantly in our daily news photo galleries).

Please post your questions for Fiona now.

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