A countdown of the greatest literature published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?

Voters are desperate for a turnaround in living standards. The runners and riders for the Labour leadership must address this

“Westminster is a cocoon. Lots of people in lovely jobs, so it becomes easy to forget the world outside.” Catherine West should know. She’s been an MP for 11 years, even if you hadn’t heard of her until this weekend when the Labour backbencher threatened Keir Starmer for the leadership, firing the first shots in the civil war that now engulfs the government. Before Wes Streeting broke cover, before Andy Burnham boarded that train to Euston, there was Catherine West.

Ever since, she has been pelted with insults. But, when we spoke this weekend, she was not only self-aware, it was one of the few times this week that I’ve heard a Labour politician grasp that what’s at stake goes beyond who sits where at the cabinet table, or how their party is polling: it’s about who leads the UK into the 2030s.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

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

With the PM’s future numbered in days, no wonder Charles might have felt reading out the government’s agenda was not the best use of his time

The king looked fed up. His attempts to throw a sickie had come to nothing. Did the government really want to go ahead with the state opening? Apparently it did. Would it be OK if he phoned it in? He fancied a day working from palace. It wouldn’t be OK. It was a three-line whip. One of the few occasions a monarch was obliged to attend.

“My lords. Pray be seated,” Charles said. He sounded exhausted already. Where was everyone, he wondered. The Labour benches had plenty of gaps on them. The chronicle of a death foretold. Over on the Tory side of the Lords, there were fewer tiaras on display than usual. Must be because Claire’s Accessories has closed down. But at least he could see Chris Grayling. Always good to see someone being rewarded for abject failure. It’s what makes Britain great.

Reform UK leader insists the sum did not have to be declared but there are also other aspects of his finances to be addressed

• Farage faces inquiry over £5m gift

Nigel Farage has been dogged by questions about his finances since the Guardian revealed he received a £5m gift from a donor in 2024.

Although he insists the gift did not have to be declared, several important questions remain unanswered.

Delta Goodrem, rappers on scooters and a Lion spray-painted silver from head to toe … as Europe’s pop circus returns amid protests and pyrotechnics, we pick the songs set to dominate this year’s grand final. Bangaranga!

Oh, Vienna. The buildup to Eurovision 2026 in Austria has been beset by controversy. Five nations – including Spain, the Netherlands and seven-time winners Ireland – have boycotted the event in protest at Israel’s participation. The first semi-final on Tuesday saw chants of “free Palestine” echoing around the Wiener Stadthalle venue. The song contest’s slogan, “United by music”, feels increasingly ironic. Hardly ideal preparation for the annual pop party’s 70th anniversary.

Still, the cheesy Euro-pop show must go on and Saturday night’s grand final is primed to be as compelling as ever. In fact, surprises have already been sprung. Rather randomly, Boy George co-wrote San Marino’s entry and provided guest vocals, but failed to make it through Tuesday’s semi-final. Do you really want to hurt me? For voting viewers, it seemed the answer was yes. Nul points for you, former Culture Club frontman.

Council has voted to lease the Tropicana to entertainment company Live Nation which plans to turn abandoned space into events venue

The Tropicana in Weston-super-Mare was once a shimmering art deco lido, a premier coastal jewel where thousands flocked to bathe in the Somerset sun.

But as the decades passed since its 1937 opening and an era of cheap air fares and Mediterranean holidays arrived, the lido’s lustre dimmed and it was closed in 2000. For 15 years, it sat as a hollowed-out shell, a sad monument to a left-behind town.

Health secretary’s move to force race sparks scramble on left of Labour for candidate to oppose him

Wes Streeting is preparing to launch a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer on Thursday if the health secretary can secure the support of enough MPs to trigger a contest.

Streeting’s move to force a race has sparked a frantic scramble on the left of Labour to find a candidate to oppose him, with Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner both possible contenders.

One of PM’s expanding cohort of critics in Labour party says policy programme ‘sums up where we have gone wrong’

For Keir Starmer’s Labour critics, his second king’s speech, in which the government set out what it would do in parliament over the next 12 to 18 months, was a crystallisation of everything that was wrong with the prime minister’s strategy.

Over 34 bills and three draft ones, Starmer set out a programme he said would “make this country stronger and fairer”. But the package, which included limiting trial by jury, reshaping the NHS and moving the country closer to the EU, fell short of what some in the prime minister’s party feel is needed to win back voters’ trust.

Greater Manchester mayor seeks to reassure his supporters after potential seats for him fail to materialise

Andy Burnham has told Labour MPs they should hold the line and that he has options to return to parliament after several seats identified by his allies failed to materialise.

Two seats that backers of the Greater Manchester mayor had described as “nailed on” as recently as Monday night are now out of contention after the MPs concerned got cold feet.

Ahead of the crucial talks, security has been heightened in Beijing, with trade, AI and the war in Iran set to dominate the meeting between the two leaders

• Trump lands in China for high-stakes summit with Xi Jinping as Iran war looms over talks

• Explainer: five key issues on the table at summit

Donald Trump will drive through a Chinese capital that is smoggier than it was on his last visit in 2017, when the authorities launched emergency measures to clear the skies of pollution days before his first state visit to Beijing.

Factories were ordered to halt production and heavily polluting cars were banned from the roads in the days ahead of the US president’s trip nearly a decade ago, an era in which China had declared war on air pollution and made special efforts to clear the skies ahead of important political events such as visiting dignitaries and the Beijing Olympics.

Watchdog to examine whether Reform UK leader should have declared sum he received before entering parliament

Nigel Farage is facing a formal investigation by the parliamentary standards watchdog over a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

The Reform UK leader received the money weeks before announcing he would stand as a candidate in the 2024 general election.

Homebuyers more cautious due to possible mortgage rate rises and higher inflation as sellers sit on properties

Fears of higher mortgage rates and rising inflation as a result of the Middle East conflict are leading to a subdued and downbeat housing market, according to estate agents.

Demand from potential homebuyers across England and Wales has shown a “noticeable softening” recently, according to a monthly survey of estate agents by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Swedish study of 600,000 patients between 17 and 60 years old suggests there is no safe age to get heavier

Gaining weight as an adult increases the risk of cancer by up to five times, according to research involving more than 600,000 patients.

Obesity can cause 13 different cancers and is thought to be linked to another eight. But less is known about the impact on cancer risk of the amount of weight put on – and when in life it is gained.

Prime minister under pressure over failure to grant military service exemptions as multi-party government looks at risk of collapse

Israel’s ruling coalition has submitted a proposal to dissolve parliament to pave the way for early elections as the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, came under mounting pressure from ultra-Orthodox parties.

The move, initiated by Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party, came as Netanyahu appeared to be facing a possible collapse of his fractious coalition.

Medicines watchdog approves two treatments for patients with spinal muscular atrophy

Hundreds of children with a rare muscle-wasting disease will be able to receive two drugs that can improve their survival in a move parents hailed as a “lifeline”.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has published final draft guidance recommending that any patient who would benefit can have either drug.

Greenpeace finds cocktail of pesticides including seven banned in EU may have been used on seven categories of vegetables and soft fruit

It is a beautiful early summer Sunday afternoon and you have stopped for a pub lunch. A waiter sets down a roast served with carrots, peas, parsnips, potatoes and onion gravy, and then for pudding, strawberries and cream. It feels like the perfect rustic meal to accompany a day in the country.

However, a report by Greenpeace, published on Thursday, has found that the ingredients of the traditional Sunday roast have potentially been treated with a cocktail of more than 100 pesticides. Data from the Fera pesticide usage survey for 2024, showed 102 – including seven banned in the EU – were used on seven vegetable and soft fruit categories.

Lindsay and Craig Foreman were given 10-year sentences after entering the country on a motorcycling trip

The “terrified” family of a British couple jailed for 10 years in Iran on spying charges have said they have lost all contact with them.

Lindsay and Craig Foreman, both 53, were arrested in January 2025 while travelling through Iran during an around-the-world trip by motorcycle.

Project organisers say high costs and energy crisis have scuppered green route from Camden to King’s Cross

The Camden Highline, a multimillion-pound effort to transform a disused rail line into a greenery-filled walking and cycling paradise, has been all but scrapped.

Nearly a decade since it was conceived as London’s answer to New York’s fabled High Line, the project has fallen victim to high costs and the energy crisis.

Wes Streeting is expected to launch a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer as soon as Thursday. News of the health secretary’s plans came during the king’s speech, derailing what was supposed to be another chance for the prime minister to reset the political agenda. Lucy Hough speaks to head of national news Archie Bland

Health secretary’s lack of challenge had reassured Starmer and his allies – but then briefings about a speculative Thursday launch emerged

As the unofficial political truce of the king’s speech approached, with still no sign of a leadership challenge from Wes Streeting, some of his Labour colleagues assumed the health secretary’s chance to go for the top job might have passed for ever.

“There is a risk he becomes the David Miliband of this generation if he doesn’t do something,” one MP said, a reference to another longtime heir apparent who never made the final step.

Péter Magyar says his government has summoned Russian ambassador over drone attack near Hungary’s border to ask when Vladimir Putin plans ‘to finally end this bloody war’. What we know on day 1,541

Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar says his new government has summoned the Russian ambassador over a massive drone attack near Hungary’s border in a significant shift from his predecessor’s friendly relations with Moscow. “The Hungarian government strongly condemns the Russian attack on Transcarpathia,” Magyar told journalists. He said the Hungarian foreign minister will speak with the Russian ambassador Thursday morning. Under the outgoing government voted out of office this month, Hungary blocked aid for Ukraine and tried to slow its efforts to join the EU.

Magyar said his foreign minister will ask “when Russia and Vladimir Putin plan to finally end this bloody war”. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy replied on X: “Thank you for your compassion and strong position!”

Russia fired at least 800 drones in a massive daytime barrage on about 20 regions of Ukraine on Wednesday, Peter Beaumont writes. The strikes came as Kyiv and Moscow traded long-range attacks after a brief ceasefire. Ukrainian monitors detected at least eight salvoes of Russian drones, including some entering from Belarus, with the apparent target being Kyiv’s critical infrastructure. Poland scrambled fighter jets as a preventive measure due to the Russian airstrikes on Ukraine, the Polish army said.

Moscow doubled down and launched a fresh wave of attacks on Kyiv early on Thursday morning, mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram. He said loud explosions were being reported across the city. Ukraine’s air force said Russian missiles were targeting Ukraine’s capital in a sustained assault.

The governors of two Russian regions bordering Ukraine, both frequent targets of Ukrainian attacks, have stepped down and their replacements met with President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said on Wednesday. Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the Belgorod Region, and Alexander Bogomaz, governor of the Bryansk Region, both stepped down at their own request, the Kremlin said. Russian media said Alexander Shuvaev, a highly decorated veteran, is the new governor of Belgorod, and Yegor Kovalchuk, a banking, legal and administrative specialist, has become governor of Bryansk.

The governor of the border region of Kursk, another Russian border region, Alexei Smirnov, was dismissed after a mass incursion by Ukrainian forces in 2024 and jailed earlier this year on corruption charges. There was no word on any future duties for the two outgoing governors.

Supporters of a bill in the US to aid Ukraine and sanction Russia have reached a critical threshold that allows them to bypass Republican leadership and force a vote on the House floor in the coming weeks. The legislation seeks to cement US assistance for Ukraine by approving more than $1bn in security aid and making another $8bn available in loans. Lawmakers on Wednesday gained 218 signatures on a petition that will force a House vote. While the measure is unlikely to become law, the vote will put lawmakers on record concerning their support for Ukraine. Supporters have called on Donald Trump to act more forcefully to deter Russia and boost Ukraine.

Moscow authorities have imposed restrictions on the publication of photos and videos showing the aftermath of “terrorist attacks”, including drone strikes, the mayor’s office said. The directive was aimed at “preventing the dissemination of unreliable information”, a government website said. It prevents media, as well as individuals and emergency services, from publishing any pictures or videos of “terrorist acts, including drone attacks” until they appear on websites of the Defence Ministry or city government.

Russia’s repeated airspace violations of countries on the eastern flank of Nato underline the urgent need to consolidate the alliance’s air defences against missiles and drones, the leaders of 14 allies said on Wednesday. They also called for greater cooperation in building up defence industry capacity in a joint statement, issued after a meeting of eastern flank allies in Bucharest hosted by Romania’s president Nicusor Dan and Polish president Karol Nawrocki. Romania, Poland and Baltic states have had their airspace repeatedly breached by Russian drones. Russia has denied targeting Nato states.

In 2023, the Guardian profiled a group of women who had formed an unshakeable bond after they saw their attacker convicted and decided to waive their anonymity. That interview has now led to a documentary

The three women refer to each other as “the girls”, even though they are in their 40s and 50s, long past girlhood. They have a WhatsApp group called Sister Solidarity, even though they are biologically unrelated.

The unshakeable bond between Laura Hughes and Lauren Preston, both 45, and Mary Sharp, 58, came about for the saddest reason – all three were raped and abused by Martin Butler, a manipulative drug dealer on their estate in London who groomed and coerced them decades ago.

Cannes film festival: The Irish actor plays a disillusioned Circassian chef with a knack with animals in Kantemir Balagov’s clunky third film

All talented directors are allowed an off moment in their careers – and this is the stage arrived at by Kantemir Balagov, whose earlier film Beanpole was such a triumph. This follow-up – his third feature in fact – is his first English language movie, set among the expat Circassian community in New Jersey; it features star names and one colossally self-conscious icon cameo unsubtly signalling cinephile importance. Butterfly Jam is contrived, tonally uncertain, implausible and frankly plain silly in its underpowered kind of magic-unrealism, with some clunky secondhand Mean Streets mob-fraternal dialogue and pedantic ethnic-foodie cred, and elliptically positioning key scenes off camera for no obviously satisfying reason.

Barry Keoghan plays Azik, a widower who with his longsuffering pregnant sister Zalda (Riley Keough) runs a Circassian food diner in Newark; as chef he cooks a sublime delens a delicious cheese and potato dish to his own (secret) recipe, accessorised with delicious jams, one of which, he whimsically announces, is made of butterflies. (He is presumably kidding but he has an amazing touch with the natural world, as we will see.) His teen son Temir (Talga Akdogan) is a talented wrestler who dreams of Olympic glory and he has a sweet crush on fellow wrestler Alika (Jaliyah Richards).

Scientists are focusing on improving apples’ resilience after stressors like wild temperature swings and drought

Terence Robinson still remembers the Valentine’s Day Massacre – of 2015, not 1929.

For the Cornell University horticulture professor, the term doesn’t conjure up Tommy guns and Al Capone’s Chicago. Instead of a gangster, the culprit in Robinson’s massacre was the weather. And its victims were the apple orchards of the north-eastern United States.

St John the Divine, Kennington has built one of UK’s largest youth choral programmes in area marked by deprivation

St Paul’s Cathedral school, one of the UK’s most prestigious private schools, has long been associated with the musical elite. So was seven-year-old N’raeah, from south London, nervous about auditioning for its internationally renowned choir?

“No,” she said, beaming. “Everybody’s counting on me to sing beautifully.”

From rinsing wool in a colander to deep cleaning your washing machine, here are 15 expert tips to help your clothes last and last

• How to make your leather last a lifetime

It’s a common problem: you buy something new and start wearing and washing it regularly, only to find that it has developed a slightly grey tinge or faded colours after just a few months. Most clothes aren’t fragile, but they’re not indestructible either – and the way we wear, wash and store them makes more of a difference than we think.

Looking after your clothes properly can mean they last longer, hold their shape and don’t need replacing nearly as often, which is better for both your bank balance and the planet. And while investing in well-made pieces is important, what you do afterwards matters just as much.

A new biopic has contributed to an atmosphere that casts the late singer as a profoundly damaged figure who is more victim than victimiser

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The release of Michael has triggered what can only be described as mass hysteria in some quarters. I looked on in bewilderment as the reception to the film seemed to entirely erase child abuse allegations against the artist, as well as launder almost every aspect of his life beyond that.

This week, I look into what seems like a new generation’s discovery of Jackson, and his rehabilitation through a strange online obsession.

Removing Starmer solves the problem of an unpopular leader, but without a coherent alternative agenda his successor won’t fare much better

Labour has spent much of the past year paralysed by competing fears. MPs’ dread of facing voters with Keir Starmer as prime minister has been kept in check by their recoil from the process of replacing him. They know the prime minister is an electoral liability; they know that the electorate takes a dim view of chaotic, regicidal parties that showcase disunity and factional rancour when they are supposed to be running the country.

Impatience with Starmer’s leadership has, until now, been neutralised by reluctance to gamble on a contest that might replace him with someone worse. Last week’s local and devolved ballots changed the calculus. Labour MPs now have indisputable evidence that they are cruising towards nationwide electoral oblivion. A growing number think the trajectory will not change if the leader stays the same.

The future starts with us: Gordon Brown in conversation.
On Thursday 10 September, join Hugh Muir and Gordon Brown to discuss the intricate connections between global instability and civic decline, as explored in Brown’s new book, The Future Starts With Us. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Outrage is mounting about the Gulf country’s complicity in Sudan’s catastrophic civil war – and it might be starting to hit them where it hurts

There are certain states whose reputations in the global community are tainted. For habitual violations of international law, they are shunned, boycotted or slammed with economic sanctions. Reading these words, perhaps you’re thinking of Russia, Israel, Iran or North Korea. But there is one country that is rarely considered an outlaw, even if its actions increasingly fit the bill.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is belatedly starting to draw some scrutiny over mounting evidence that it is backing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that have been terrorising Sudan for years. Since the beginning of the civil war in 2023, which was triggered by a contest for power between the RSF militia and the Sudanese army, the RSF has been accused of ethnic cleansing and sexual violence. A United Nations fact-finding mission concluded that its assault on non-Arab populations in the west of the country carried “the hallmarks of genocide”.

All I want is someone to help me spend my money without treating me with contempt. Thank goodness for those small, independent shops – they nail it every time

Let us all rise to acclaim the local shop, the little independent establishment that always seems to have exactly what you went in for. These places are not many in number, so we must be sure to celebrate those that remain with us. Their prices might – might – be a little higher than a bloated multiple owned by some faceless private equity operation, but surely, if this is the case, it is a price worth paying.

I find most shopping rather like watching my football team – a reliable source of disappointment. It’s not that I’m a particularly exacting customer. All I ask is for someone to serve me; ideally someone who doesn’t appear unhappy about taking my money off me. If they’re actively cheerful, helpful or knowledgable, so much the better. It’s not much to ask, is it? When I tell you what I’m looking for, please don’t look at me like an idiot for asking. In a health food shop the other day, I enquired as to the whereabouts of the nut roasts and she looked at me as if I’d asked for moonrock.

In a case of ‘oh dear diary’, the OpenAI president Greg Brockman is having to read extracts from his musings about Elon Musk in court. It’s a terrifying reminder that what’s divulged to AI really isn’t private

The hottest new read of 2026 may well be The Secret Diary of Greg Brockman, Aged 38¾. It’s got everything: feuding billionaires, scheming CEOs and a perhaps somewhat unreliable narrator. You won’t find it in the library, but you can watch Brockman, a co-founder and president of OpenAI, being forced to read the juiciest bits out loud in court.

Before you ask ChatGPT to explain, here’s the backstory: Elon Musk is in a legal battle with Brockman and the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. Musk, a former board member of OpenAI, is accusing the men of violating the AI firm’s founding agreement by turning it into a for-profit entity. Meanwhile, Altman et al are arguing Musk is just upset he’s not in control of the company and wants to bring down his competition.

All kinds of musical riches by formerly overlooked composers may be languishing in lofts and dusty archives.

The discovery of a new work by Ralph Vaughan Williams has set the world alight this week. Well, not quite, but it’s a great story. In a box in the archives of London’s Morley College Elaine Andrews came across a previously unknown Vaughan Williams song. Titled Before the Mirror, it sets a Swinburne poem that itself was inspired by a Whistler painting.

Hearing it played on Radio 4’s PM on Monday [58 mins in] reveals music of surprising tonal adventure and expressive ambiguity, written shortly after Vaughan Williams married Adeline Fisher in 1897. And the manuscript’s workings, its crossings-out and corrections, are a fascinating insight into Vaughan Williams’s creative process.

I don’t know a single journalist my age who hasn’t ricocheted around the rapidly shrinking media industry, through multiple buyouts, redundancies and pivots to video

Many years ago I rage-quit from my editor job at a digital youth media publication.

It was the beginning of the pandemic, my team had been slashed to an exhausted handful who cried every morning, and my freelance budget had been cut to zero – all while I was still expected to reach traffic targets. A spree of insane business decisions were made that trickled down to me like sewage water at a music festival. So I quit. I was tired and being overly dramatic of course, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t justified in being upset.

Keir Starmer’s programme is fatally limited by the timidity of an election manifesto that shied away from hard arguments

Ending 14 years of Conservative rule was supposed to bring an end to dysfunctional government. In the speech that launched his 2024 general election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer said that “a vote for Labour is a vote for stability … a vote to stop the chaos”. Less than two years later, Sir Keir’s government looks no sturdier than its predecessors. The prime minister’s chances of serving a full term in office look slim.

There are as many reasons for this precipitous decline as there are Labour MPs calling for a change of direction. The common analysis is that a project branded by the single word “change” has neither transformed people’s lives for the better nor given them confidence that a transformation is coming. For many voters, the prime minister is the embodiment of a miserable status quo.

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

The critically ill Nobel peace laureate should be released. Iranians’ human rights are under attack from both the regime and the US-Israel war

“Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner’s rope,” the Iranian Nobel peace laureate Narges Mohammadi observes in a forthcoming memoir smuggled from her cell. “Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail – and then make sure no help arrives, or they create conditions in which death can come easily, helping it along by standing in the way of life-saving care.”

Long denied adequate treatment, Ms Mohammadi is now in a critical condition. She was found unconscious in her cell after a suspected heart attack in March and had been experiencing chest pain, loss of consciousness and extreme weight loss. She was finally moved to hospital this month, with authorities approving her transfer to specialist care in Tehran only this week. Supporters fear that she will be sent back to prison if her condition improves.

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

Fiona O’Farrell, Sarah Mulholland and Jennifer Evans on the ongoing circus surrounding potential challengers to Keir Starmer’s leadership

As an active and loyal Labour member, I am infuriated by what is happening within the party (Burnham allies warn against quick ‘coronation’ of Streeting if Starmer quits, 12 May). The ongoing circus about the leadership is a terrible distraction from the numerous global and national issues that the government and the prime minister should be focused on. But the most infuriating aspect of the entire shambles is the relentless speculation and briefings from so-called “allies” of Andy Burham.

No Labour member has an innate right to be selected as a parliamentary candidate. The assertion that a sitting Labour MP should give up the seat voters elected them to, necessitating a byelection so that Burnham can run, then assuming that he would automatically retain the seat, is arrogance beyond belief. And it makes the party look ridiculous.

A ‘case study in hope’ is not how Fernando Quintana Marrero would describe life for Londoners who feel exploited and unheard

In your interview with Sadiq Khan to mark his 10 years as mayor (11 May), he describes London as a “case study in hope”. This will feel deeply disconnected from reality for many Londoners.

Yes, there have been improvements in areas such as air quality. But ordinary people do not experience London through political narratives or carefully selected statistics. They experience it through soaring rents, housing insecurity, overcrowded transport, rising living costs and the growing sense that this city is becoming unaffordable for anyone on a normal salary.

Ian Williamson and Susan Gregory respond to an article by Sam Wollaston on pub closures and share experiences in their own communities

For campaigners like us, who are fighting to rescue their village pub, Sam Wollaston’s article about the The Hare and Hounds in Bowland Bridge, Cumbria, could hardly be more depressing (‘Now the village is dead. It’s awful’: why was one of Britain’s best pubs forced to close?, 7 May). Wollaston is, of course, quite right about the long list of challenges that are putting pubs out of business. Yet despite the odds being stacked against us, there are groups like ours all over the country that are refusing to give up – and a good many are succeeding.

We are trying to buy the Somerset Arms, which closed three years ago, leaving the Wiltshire village of Semington without a pub. We have tremendous support from the community and we take great encouragement from pubs like the Hop Pole Inn in nearby Limpley Stoke. It also stood empty for many months but has recently been named Camra’s pub of the year. I have seen for myself what a huge impact it has had on the life of the village. The Somerset Arms will rise again. We hope that the Hare and Hounds will too.
Ian Williamson
Chair, Semington Community Benefit Society, Wiltshire

Michael Hecht responds to a study calling for New Orleans residents to be relocated due to rising sea levels

Here in New Orleans, we are not climate deniers. For more than 300 years, New Orleans has defended its unique position, most recently with a $15bn storm wall system that kept the city bone-dry during a category five storm.

That is why it was frustrating to read the Guardian’s unquestioning coverage of a recent Nature Sustainability perspectives paper by Torbjörn Törnqvist and colleagues (‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds, 4 May). Rather than science, the study is an ideologically driven policy argument dressed in the guise of geological inevitability.

Hearts players and supporters had this much in common; they did not have a clue how to act or react. For eight minutes, with this game already at an end, the scene promised to be a euphoric one. Hearts, having swept Falkirk aside, were staring at the prospect of travelling to Celtic Park on Saturday needing only to avoid a three-goal defeat to win the league.

A twist lay in store. Deep in stoppage time at Motherwell, the controversial awarding of a penalty to Celtic and subsequent conversion materially altered the Hearts position. The whiff of cordite has been added to the mix. Derek McInnes, the Hearts manager, was so enraged by the Celtic call as to label it “disgusting”. He added: “I heard there was a 96th-minute penalty. I didn’t need to ask who for.

No Erling Haaland, no Rayan Cherki and no Jérémy Doku from the start. The result: a canter to victory against Crystal Palace that takes Manchester City back to within two points of Arsenal after 36 games each.

The good news for Pep Guardiola is that a much-changed team before Saturday’s FA Cup final did the business, with Phil Foden displaying the magic that can make him a force. The poorer tidings are that Arsenal host Burnley on Monday and the chances of them dropping points to the relegated visitors are slim.

• Boro to return to training on Friday after semi-final loss

• Southampton analyst accused of spying on training

Middlesbrough are scheduled to return to training on Friday in order to be ready to contest a potential playoff final against Hull at Wembley on Saturday week.

Although Boro lost the semi-final to Southampton, they are pushing for the south-coast side to be expelled from the playoffs after William Salt, one of Tonda Eckert’s analysts, was allegedly caught spying on Kim Hellberg’s team at their Rockliffe Park base near Darlington last Thursday.

• Carrick has accrued 33 points from 15 league matches

• United hierarchy unconcerned by relative inexperience

Manchester United will open ­formal discussions with Michael Carrick with a view to appointing him as permanent head coach.

The 44-year-old’s success since taking the role on an interim basis in early January has impressed Jason Wilcox, the director of football, and the chief executive, Omar Berrada. After replacing Ruben Amorim, who was sacked on 5 January, Carrick has earned 33 points from 15 Premier League matches, the most of any team in the division.

• Uncapped trio in squad for first New Zealand Test

• Crawley dropped; Ahmed and Bashir selected as spinners

On a day when England named three uncapped players in their Test squad, brought Ollie Robinson out of cold storage and officially confirmed a new selector had joined the set-up, perhaps the most significant news was the identity of their fielding coach.

Sarah Taylor, the former England wicketkeeper, will be in charge of the fielding drills during the three-Test series against New Zealand that begins at Lord’s on 4 June – the first female coach to work in the men’s senior setup.

• Georgian opens the scoring as PSG beat rivals 2-0

• Inter victorious over Lazio in Coppa Italia final

Paris Saint-Germain secured a fifth successive Ligue 1 title by beating their nearest challengers, Lens, 2-0 in their penultimate match of the league season on Wednesday.

Khvicha Kvaratskhelia scored after 29 minutes and the substitute Ibrahim Mbaye grabbed a stoppage-time goal to put PSG on 76 points, out of the reach of Lens, who are assured of second place on 67 points.

In an exclusive interview the Brazil coach talks about being in charge of ‘the most important national team’, how to get the best out of Vinícius Júnior and what he learned at Madrid

Is Carlo Ancelotti an ambitious man? The Italian leans back and smiles. “Me? I’m not ambitious. Why? Why are you asking that?” The reason for the question is simple: the 66-year-old is one of the most successful managers ever, with five Champions League wins and league titles in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. But he still wants more. Last May he was appointed Brazil head coach with one objective: to win the World Cup.

“I’m not obsessed with winning,” Ancelotti says. “What I have is a passion for enjoying the moments that football has given me. I’m not obsessed with winning the World Cup, but I have the pleasure and passion to enjoy the moment I’m living in, leading the most important national team in the world.”

Kelechi Iheanacho scored a penalty winner nine minutes into stoppage time after a video review, boosting Celtic’s Premiership defence thanks to a comeback win at Motherwell as the most dramatic title race in decades took another sensational twist.

Iheanacho slotted in a spot-kick after the former Hearts midfielder Sam Nicholson was penalised for handball after jumping to head the ball away. The ball appeared to hit his raised hand right in front of his head.

Discussion over racing should include those working in the sport and fans, along with MPs and animal rights campaigners

The Green party surged to record results at local and national level in last week’s elections, prompting Zack Polanski, the party’s leader in England and Wales, to suggest that two-party politics is “dead and buried”. Ladbrokes, meanwhile, subsequently cut the odds about the Green party winning the most seats at the next general election to 12-1, while an overall majority for the Greens is priced at 28-1.

Not likely, in other words but, at the same time, far from impossible. In the case of a majority for Polanski’s party, it is roughly the same price as Moon Chime, the winner of the big handicap hurdle at Haydock last Saturday. However the party fares in terms of seat numbers, the Green voice in the next parliament, in three years’ time or possibly fewer, seems sure to be significantly louder than ever before.

Warsh will serve four-year term as chair, taking over amid rising inflation and pressure from Trump to lower rates

The US Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as chair of the Federal Reserve, one of the most powerful roles in the federal government that holds enormous sway over the economy.

The 54-45 Senate vote on Wednesday was split along party lines, with the exception of the Democratic senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, who joined the Republican majority. It was most divisive confirmation vote for the position in history.

Minister Vicente de la O Levy says ‘Cuba is open to anyone that wants to sell us fuel’ as rolling power blackouts increase

Cuba has completely run out of diesel and fuel oil, the country’s energy minister said on Wednesday, as Havana faces its worst rolling blackouts in decades amid a US blockade that has strangled the island of fuel.

“We have absolutely no fuel (oil), and absolutely no diesel,” the energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, said on state media, adding that the national grid was in a “critical” state. “We have no reserves.” Fuel oil is a product derived from crude oil distillation used to generate heat or power.

Passengers will remain in isolation for 45 days of isolation, with health officials confirming they remain asymptomatic

Six people who were evacuated from the cruise ship affected by a hantavirus outbreak have left Arrowe Park hospital in Wirral to complete their isolation at home, health officials have said.

The passengers from the MV Hondius had been admitted to the Merseyside hospital, the UK’s initial Covid quarantine site, for checks by public health and clinical specialists.

Organisers as well as speakers will be held responsible for unlawful speech as police face exceptionally busy weekend

The Metropolitan police have said organisers of this weekend’s Unite the Kingdom and March for Palestine demonstrations will be held responsible for any hate speech connected with the events, in what they expect to be “one of the busiest days for policing in London in recent years”.

Tens of thousands of people are expected to march in the capital for the Unite the Kingdom event in central London and the Nakba: 78 March for Palestine from south Kensington to central London. Senior officers said protesters would face “the highest degree of control”. The FA Cup final is also due to be held at Wembley on Saturday.

Lu Jianwang was accused of operating a ‘secret police station’ in Manhattan’s Chinatown at the behest of Beijing

A New York man was found guilty on Wednesday of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government after he was accused of operating a “secret police station” on behalf of Beijing in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Lu Jianwang, 64, should have alerted the US attorney general that he was a Chinese agent when he helped open the so-called police station in 2022. They also said he helped China’s government locate a pro-democracy activist living in California.

After drawing delighted crowds since first sighted in Orkney the young male has swum 400 miles across the North Sea

A peripatetic walrus who became a local celebrity as he toured the north-east coast of Scotland has now been spotted in Norway, bringing to an end his Celtic sojourn.

The young male was christened Magnus after he after first hauled his estimated 2.5-metre frame out of the sea on to Stronsay pier in Orkney on 16 April.

Pioneering environmentalist Charles Waterton enclosed his parkland and lake near Wakefield in the 1820s

Over four years in the 1820s, Charles Waterton built a 9ft-high, 3-mile-long wall around the parkland and lake of Walton Hall. The fox- and poacher-proof boundary enclosed what could be the world’s first nature reserve, completed in Yorkshire 200 years ago.

Waterton, an eccentric, controversial and pioneering environmentalist, built nest boxes, special banks for sand martins and innovative bird hides, and offered local people sixpence for every hedgehog they brought into his reserve.

Demarcation of 410,000 hectares of territory is intended to protect the Amazonian community from farming, illegal mining and logging

More than 25 years after the existence of one of the Amazon’s most vulnerable nomadic hunter-gatherer communities was confirmed, the Brazilian government has begun demarcating the Pardo River Kawahiva Indigenous territory, giving greater protection to the uncontacted people.

The demarcation of the 410,000-hectare (1m-acre) territory located between the states of Mato Grosso and Amazonas in north-west Brazil, was confirmed by the National Indigenous Peoples’ Foundation (Funai) last week. But the process remains fraught, with legal challenges from groups linked to the country’s agribusiness sector, and the forthcoming presidential election in October.

Court cases in Kenya point to a growing market for ants as exotic pets in Asia and Europe that has implications for conservation and biosecurity

In the biblical text Book of Proverbs, King Solomon describes the harvester ant as a model of wisdom and industriousness: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!”

Almost 3,000 years later, the thriving international parallel market for a distinct species of the ant native to east Africa has been thrust into the global spotlight after a series of convictions in Kenya for ant smuggling.

British author Donna Fisher has won the Libraro prize for the unpublished manuscript of her ‘provocative and timely’ book, Sheep’s Clothing

An unpublished novel exploring cancel culture in the post-#MeToo era has won the inaugural Libraro prize, a £50,000 award set up to “sidestep the traditional barricades of the book industry” by allowing readers to select a shortlist from manuscripts uploaded to a platform directly by writers.

British author Donna Fisher won the prize for her novel Sheep’s Clothing, which follows a singer and her on-and-off friendship with a bestselling author who is accused of sexual assault.

Ofcom attempts to block UK access to site cited in multiple coroners’ reports as it levies fine under Online Safety Act

A nihilistic internet suicide forum implicated in over 160 UK deaths has been fined £950,000 by the online regulator in its latest attempt to shut it down.

Ofcom said the US-based website remained accessible in the UK despite over a year of warnings. Online safety campaigners have accused the regulator of taking an “interminable” amount of time to act.

When Malcolm X arrived at Sheffield University in December 1964, it was a young Pakistani student activist, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, who had arranged his passage. That detail tells you much about my father, who has died aged 86.

Ghayasuddin went on to co-found the Muslim Institute, one of Britain’s earliest Muslim organisations, and the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, of which he became leader in 1996. Upon taking this role he threatened a campaign of civil disobedience unless the government passed legislation protecting British Muslims. The new Labour government of 1997 took on and implemented many of his demands – funding Muslim state schools and passing equalities legislation.

Mariyah Symone Collington and Kendrick Lamont Key Jr, who also died, had fallen off a cliff during an off-duty hike

The remains of the second US army soldier who went missing during military exercises in Morocco have been recovered, the army said on Wednesday, ending a multinational search operation that deployed air, naval and artificial intelligence assets.

The soldier was identified as Spc Mariyah Symone Collington of Taveres, Florida, the US Army Europe and Africa said in a statement. She was 19 years old.

With Mexico under pressure from Trump to tackle drug trafficking groups, analysts say ‘it’s the most tense situation since the 1980s’

Relations between Mexico and the United States are being pushed to breaking point amid accusations by Washington that Mexican officials have been “in bed for years” with drug traffickers, and reports of CIA agents freely operating south of the border.

“There are many who are betting on the defeat and failure of the Mexican government,” said Claudia Sheinbaum tersely on Wednesday, when asked about the allegations at a news conference. ”We want a good relationship with the United States government. What are our limits? The defence of sovereignty and respect for the Mexican people and their dignity.”

Erik Fleming sentenced in Los Angeles court after previously pleading guilty over the Friends actor’s death

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A Los Angeles judge on Wednesday sentenced Erik Fleming, a licensed drug addiction counselor, to two years in prison for his role in the death of the Friends actor Matthew Perry.

Fleming, 56, acted as a middleman by delivering the actor the doses of ketamine that killed him in October 2023. He had pleaded guilty in 2024 to a count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine, and a count of distribution resulting in death.

Molar found in Siberia features deep hole that appears to show earliest known evidence of dental treatment

Neanderthals used stone drills to treat cavities almost 60,000 years ago in what is the earliest known evidence of dental treatment.

The single molar, which was unearthed in a cave in southern Siberia, features a deep hole that appears to have been created using a sharp, thin stone tool during the lifetime of the tooth’s owner.

Brand owner Mondelēz was accused of reducing weight of Alpine Milk bar from 100g to 90g without significantly altering the packaging

Many chocolate lovers consider shrinkflation a serious crime – and they have been vindicated after a German court ruled that the makers of Milka cheated consumers by cutting the bar’s size, while keeping the wrapper the same.

The three-week case in a regional court was brought by Hamburg’s consumer protection office. It accused the chocolate brand’s US owner Mondelēz of deceiving shoppers by cutting the weight of Milka’s classic Alpine Milk bar from 100g to 90g without significantly altering the distinctive purple packaging.

Exclusive: Doctors say ‘highly concerning’ poll highlights risk to patients of turning to AI for medical advice

One in seven people are using AI chatbots for health advice instead of seeing their GP, a UK study has found.

The poll of more than 2,000 people found that – of the 15% turning to chatbots – one in four had done so because of long NHS waiting lists.

Industry body says energy consumption driven by AI up 15% globally in two years as it warns of societal backlash

Datacentres are consuming 6% of electricity in the UK and US, with the growing strain of AI on energy supplies prompting community resistance, according to research.

The proportion of electricity used by vast warehouses stacked with microchips to power AI and the internet has risen 15% worldwide in the past two years as annual global investment in datacentres approaches $1tn (£740bn) – nearly 1% of the global economy, according to the International Data Center Authority (IDCA).

CEO admits talks with Chery as other European carmakers discuss plans with Chinese firms to share factory space

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Nissan’s chief executive has confirmed he would consider building cars for other manufacturers at the UK’s largest car factory in Sunderland, amid talks with China’s Chery.

Ivan Espinosa said Nissan was “looking at options” for Sunderland and its 6,000 workers as the struggling Japanese carmaker on Wednesday reported steep losses for the year to March.

As the US gears up for a major anniversary, a new expansive exhibition looks at history in a range of objects, from an 18th-century gunboat to a Maga hat

To paraphrase the musical Rent, 131,487,300 minutes – how do you measure, measure 250 years? Especially in a country navigating an election year fraught with divisions and disagreements over basic facts?

That is the challenge facing the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington DC as it marks the semiquincentennial of US independence.

She shot to fame as a teenager, but always felt like an outsider in Hollywood. Now she has started a podcast and written a memoir for women who find themselves at a standstill

A few years ago, Jennie Garth was feeling lost. Her three daughters were growing up – her eldest had already left home – and Garth was bored and unfulfilled. In March 2023, she noted in her diary that potential acting jobs were “few and far between, if at all really”. She rarely heard from her agent, and she didn’t want to get in touch with him “just to hear how different the business has become, how they just aren’t looking for a woman my age, with my stereotyped abilities”. As an actor, and one who had been particularly typecast, she was used to rejection, she wrote, “but this is getting a little scary”.

In the 90s, Garth had been a TV superstar. She was 18 when the teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210 came out, in which she played Kelly Taylor – rich and spoilt on the surface, traumatised underneath. Although she continued to work after it came to an end in 2000, not least on the show’s spin-offs, it must be hard to have hit your career high in your first job. More fulfilment came from other areas in Garth’s life – she loved motherhood – although she found the end of her marriage to her daughters’ father, the actor Peter Facinelli, so traumatic that she ended up in hospital after an accidental overdose and had a spell in rehab.

Cannes film festival: Léa Drucker gives a bravura performance as a brilliant surgeon whose already chaotic life is further complicated by a same-sex affair with a journalist

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them. Léa Drucker carries off the lead with terrifically competent elan; there’s hardly a scene in which she is not interrupted by a call on her mobile, going into bravura walk-and-talk acting on the phone while on the street, arriving at the office or getting into or out of her car.

She plays Gabrielle, a brilliant surgeon – what other sort is there in the movies? – who specialises in maxillofacial reconstruction. Gabrielle is battling budget cuts, scolding her idle interns, doing outstanding work and is heavily reliant on her assistant Kamyar (Laurent Capelluto). At home, she has a tricky relationship with her partner Henri (Charles Berling), whose teen children from his previous marriage she has raised while resenting his ingratitude for this, as well as for his somewhat semi-detached attitude to their relationship. She is also deeply concerned by her elderly mother Arlette (tenderly played by Marie-Christine Barrault) who is entering the twilight of dementia.

The rising star of Spanish cinema discusses being orphaned at six, new feature Romería and why she always works with children

Family reunions in European arthouse cinema are almost always unhappy events, on a scale of strife that ranges from simmering resentment (Louis Malle’s Milou in May) to spectacular score-settling (Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen). There are still splatters of bad blood on the Sunday best in the films of Carla Simón, but the Spanish director has a rare gift: she makes you leave the cinema with renewed faith that having relatives and keeping in touch with them may actually be a wonderful thing.

Indeed no film-maker working in Europe now is as capable of turning birthday gatherings, garden parties or poolside barbecues into thrillingly sprawling canvases of human virtue and vice as this 39-year-old rising star. From a riotous water fight in the Berlinale Golden Bear-winning farming drama Alcarràs to a foul-mouthed dinner table singalong in her new film Romería, Simón directs kinship meetings with the attention to detail that other film-makers may invest in action sequences or dance routines.

Cannes film festival
Set in a beautifully filmed provincial Japanese town, what could have been a soapy drama is told with poetic restraint and subtlety by Kôji Fukada

Japanese film-maker Kôji Fukada has created a film of great lucidity and calm, a walking-pace drama set in the quiet town of Nagi in the south of the country; this is a provincial place of seclusion and restraint, notable for its military base but also an interesting contemporary art gallery. The movie is less overtly sensational and emotional than Fukada’s previous pictures such as Love Life or Goodbye Summer, though it has the same Rohmeresque gentleness, the same considerate and caring mien, the same palate-cleansing wash of cool daylight. These are factors which do not however preclude intensity, even passion and a feeling that a dreamlife of yearning is taking place underneath innocuous waking reality.

At the centre of the film is an enigma: Yoriko (Takako Matsu) is a single woman who runs a dairy farm in Nagi, but her real passion is art. She draws and sculpts, but entirely for her own pleasure. None of her pieces get exhibited or sold. One warm spring day – the movie is elegantly interspersed with chapter-heading closeups in which different kinds of calendar get the days torn off – Yoriko is visited by her good friend Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), an architect who after some time in Tokyo, moved to Taiwan to start a practice there with her husband Masato but returned to Japan after her divorce. What makes their friendship interesting is that they are sisters-in-law, or perhaps ex-sisters-in-law. Masato is Yoriko’s brother. So how exactly has their friendship survived and thrived for so long?

Centred around the Wigan Casino and its amphetamine-fuelled all-nighters, this is a passionate portrait of a unique cultural moment and its obsessive high-kicking fans

Alan Byron’s film is an absorbing docu-celebration of the northern soul scene that flourished from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s. It was a fascinating, vernacular youth movement and a kind of regional open secret: a club culture, a zine culture, a music-and-fashion culture which uncynically invented and sustained itself without the need for any svengali figure from London to keep the show on the road. Northern soul fans were passionate about thumpingly sensual mid-60s American soul, a musical style which they kept alive on the all-night dancefloor by doing spectacular spins and drops, while the official voice of the music business decreed that disco or MOR rock or glam or heavy metal was where it was at.

DJs would travel to the US to sort through the boxes and mounds of 7-inch vinyl which had been discarded by Motown and the radio stations – basically prospecting for gold – and bring it back to northern English clubs. The principal clearing house was the mighty Wigan Casino which mounted legendary all-nighters from 2am to 8am, attracting soul fans from miles around who knew that this was the only place where certain tracks could be heard. (No Spotify or Apple Music in those days.)

From Édith Piaf to Charli xcx, a moving study of the ways women express themselves – and the obstacles they face

When Lauren Elkin was a child, she took lessons with a voice teacher in Northport, Long Island, who would get her to perform in front of a mirror. Singing songs from the Italian classical repertoire, Elkin – who was a soprano – was required to smile and lift up her eyebrows as she sang since “it helps with placement”. She was told her breathing should come not from the chest but the diaphragm, and that she must smooth over the vocal break, which is where the chest voice changes into the head voice.

Elkin practised hard to make her voice “nearly featureless”, even though she secretly wanted to rebel. Looking back, she wishes she’d understood that she could “work with, not against the imperfections in my voice … with its different colours and resonances, its scratches and cracks like skips on a record, its atmospheric flaws … Embracing the flaws can strengthen the work; through vulnerability can come power.”

After his Kendrick Lamar feud, Drake alienated female fans. With new album Iceman, he’s aiming for the top of the charts again

Despite his A-list pop star status, there’s been a noticeable scrappiness to Drake’s rollout for his ninth album, Iceman. Last month, the rapper iced out his favorite courtside seats at the Toronto Raptors’ arena, with faux icicles dangling from the chairs. He followed that up with a more brazen stunt: a huge block of ice in downtown Toronto for the public to chip at until it thawed, revealing the album date. In early May, he debuted a quirky episodic series on YouTube featuring skits in an ice manufacturing plant and the rapper driving an Iceman-branded truck around Toronto. The mood seemed cheeky and defiant: good news for anyone who missed the memester of his 2016 viral hit Hotline Bling.

It has been an eventful and complicated time for Drake since his most recent solo studio album, 2023’s For All the Dogs. While he is still the most-streamed rapper in the world, he has been attacked by hip-hop. Two years ago, Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar and Drake engaged in a battle that no one came out of unscathed. There were accusations of intimate partner violence towards Lamar, a song about a possible daughter that Drake has hidden, and Lamar’s Grammy-winning death blow – Not Like Us – about Drake being a hip-hop “colonizer” who chases after young women. Consensus has said that he lost the beef between him and Lamar, and the consensus is right, but the backlash against Drake was already starting to formulate before Lamar issued the first warning shot in 2024 diss track Like That.

Six decades ago, Munrow’s passionate and persuasive advocacy for early music opened audience’s eyes and ears – and took the rackett on to primetime TV. Fifty years after his early death, we look back at an inspirational and influential musician

In March 1968, a 25-year-old musician strode on to the stage of London’s Wigmore Hall with a collection of unusual instruments. He proceeded to entertain the audience with tongue-in-cheek descriptions of a shawm, a crumhorn and a rackett – the first time they’d ever been seen, let alone heard, on the Wigmore stage – and he played them with breathtaking virtuosity. That concert, the London debut of the Early Music Consort, was greeted with delight, which set the pattern of things to come. With all the bravura of the 1960s, David Munrow erupted into the world of early music and transformed what had been a minority interest into popular listening.

His flame burned brightly, but briefly: in May 1976 he took his own life at the age of 33. But his impact lives on in the music he rediscovered and popularised, and the innovative ways in which he presented and performed it. The Dufay Collective’s William Lyons has said that his own “programming ethos was very much influenced by that of Munrow: variety and information”. Recently, Skip Sempé, the director of Capriccio Stravagante, wrote that “Munrow … inspired all those who, however unconsciously, followed him with great professional and commercial success. To this day, I feel that every early musician in the UK owes their career to him.”

Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
The polka-dotted phenomenon land their spaceship in Leeds for an ecstatic show that balances supremely complex musicianship with ridiculous good fun

The proud tradition of bands performing in barmy masks ranges from the Residents’ giant papier-mache eyeballs to Slipknot’s scary gimp ensembles, but Quebec duo Angine de Poitrine’s polka dot outfits may just take the biscuit. Double necked guitarist/bassist Khn de Poitrine sports a giant upside down pyramid head with a Pinocchio-style long nose. Drummer Klek de Poitrine’s bonkers outsize head makes him look like Monty Python’s Black Knight, but has its own dangly proboscis which flails around as he plays, and a tiny gold pyramid on top. The stage, the drum kit, the merch stall and several of the fans are also swathed in polka dots. One particularly inspired group have even turned up sporting Klek’s gold pyramids.

If it looks like a phenomenon, that’s exactly what it is. Although the band formed in 2019 and have jammed together much longer, Angine de Poitrine went viral early this year when a US radio station published a video of the duo performing at a French festival. This first ever UK gig was completely sold out – as are several much bigger shows this autumn – and the madcap duo are greeted like conquering heroes before they play a note. Before they even come on stage, fans are taking photos of Khn’s complex pedal board setup.

Modernist poet whose work is considered hard to grasp but rewarding for the reader who persists

The poetry of JH Prynne, who has died aged 89, has been called opaque, hermetic, impenetrable, forbidding even, and at times it was all of these. But it also sang. To read his Kitchen Poems (1968), The White Stones (1969) or The Oval Window (1983) is to encounter a writer for whom sound and sense were never separable.

As Robert Potts wrote in the Guardian: “Prynne is hard-going, off-putting and much disliked by many more traditional writers; he is also, when one gets into him, so good that he changes the way you think and feel.”

To a light led sole in pit of, this by slap-up barter
of an arm rest cap, on stirrup trade in
crawled to many bodies, uncounted. Talon up
crude oil-for-food, incarnadine incarcerate, get
foremost a track rocket, rapacious in heavy
investment insert tool this way up.

And so, then, the
magnetic influence of Venus sweeps its
shiver into the heart/brain or hypothalamus,
we are still here, I look steadily at nothing.
“The gradient of the decrease may be de-
termined by the spread in intrinsic lumin-
osities” – the ethereal language of love in
brilliant suspense between us and the
hesitant arc. Yet I need it too and keep
one hand in my pocket & one in yours,
waiting for the first snow of the year.

Radical hope and rage combine in this tale of ecological precarity and resistance among sex workers on a brothel island

‘Yes, you will leave this place,” the chorus of child protagonists in a community of sex workers say at the start of Tahmima Anam’s incantatory and fiery new novel of female defiance, Uprising. “This story will save your life,” we were told three times in Deepa Anappara’s 2020 debut, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, also featuring precarious children dwelling in the margins. What is the distance between imagination and action, lived realities and dreams? How can solidarities be forged in such circumstances? Uprising holds within its pages some answers and a deep conviction – for a better life, a more just world – and then reaches out and fights for it.

As a journalist, Anam visited the infamous “floating brothel” Banishanta in Bangladesh; her new novel, set on an isolated island “at the end of the country, in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea”, fictionalises the island’s community and ecological precarity. Here, a generation of daughters grow up watching their mothers trapped in sex work – “we knew that the work was something that was paid for in money, and also in bodies” – and wish a different life for themselves. The women are controlled by the cruel Amma, who was once herself sold into sex trafficking. The victim becomes the perpetrator – and the children are discerning enough to know that their mothers are “not here because they had done something bad, but because something bad had been done to them”. The first lesson of the island? No one is coming to save you – and living here changes you, as inexorably as the rising tides.

An extraordinary exploration of wilderness and its meaning that takes us from the ocean floor to volcanic peaks

Off the coast of California, two miles down, there exist geothermal nurseries: gatherings of tens of thousands of small violet octopuses, each the size of a grapefruit. Known as pearl octopuses (Muusoctopus robustus), they congregate around hydrothermal springs which warm their eggs, allowing them to hatch in less than two years (in cold water it can take 10 years). When I want to calm my mind, I think of these gatherings, this factory of octopuses powered by the Earth’s energy that exists quietly away from our gaze, and might easily never have been discovered. How many more such worlds exist?

The seafloor is just one setting in Cal Flyn’s carnival of a book, The Savage Landscape, a wondrous personal journey to locate and understand wilderness. It’s a work of extraordinary physical and narrative movement that takes us from the depths of the ocean to volcanoes and icebergs, but is also a journey into our own psyches, and the stories we tell ourselves about “wild” landscapes. Above all, it is a reminder that the places we might conceive of as empty or barren are no such thing; that within wildernesses there is abundant life, both human and nonhuman.

A north London cafe is under siege in a state-of-the-nation satire that brings together the haves and have-nots

Britain, muses trainee barrister Xan, was getting “hotter, crueller and angrier”. Amanda Craig’s 10th novel watches as it boils over. Her setting is Prospect Park, a fictional north London suburb caught between gentrification and decline, on the 12th day of Christmas. Outside a hotel housing asylum seekers, protesters and counter-protesters have gathered. In a flat nearby, a man has been stabbed, and thugs go from shop to shop, searching for the teenage boy they think did it.

Locals look on anxiously. Jade from the beauty parlour and Daisy from the health food shop brave the central street to warn others of trouble. In the kebab shop, Mehmet locks up his doner meat and sharpens his knives. Places with shutters close them.

Why are Nintendo releasing a straight-up remake of the space-flight shooter – with many of its original limitations – rather than a fresh new take?

The Nintendo 64 was not my first video game console, but it was my formative one. Getting to grips with 3D movement in Super Mario 64 with that weird three-pronged controller is one of my most visceral childhood memories; the long, long wait for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the background noise to a huge chunk of my youth. But back in the 1990s (in the UK at least), it felt as if nobody had an N64. When everybody had a PlayStation instead, I felt I was the only kid in my whole city who cared more about Banjo-Kazooie than Crash Bandicoot.

If even Zelda seemed comparatively niche in Europe in the 90s, Lylat Wars (known elsewhere as Star Fox 64) was a real deep cut. It’s a 1997 space-flight shooter starring Fox McCloud and his squad of animal pilots laser-blasting across different planets in nimble crafts called Arwings. I played this game to absolute death in 1998, when I got it for my birthday alongside the fabled Rumble Pak, which made your controller vibrate and shudder whenever something cool was happening on screen (fun fact: Lylat Wars was the first console game to feature controller rumble). But I really hadn’t thought about it much since. Then, last week, Nintendo announced a Switch 2 remake.

Previously prohibited use of websites such as Omoggle that connect a streamer to a stranger’s video feed now allowed

Last week, at 4am, 19-year-old Sammy Amz was scrolling through X when something caught his eye: a popular Twitch streamer was competing in a 1v1 “mog-off” with a stranger, and losing.

The next day he opened the Omoggle gaming website and began to play. Quickly he matched with another user – green dots appeared on their faces onscreen, as the website began to compare their measurements: canthal tilt, palpebral fissure ratio, nose-to-face width ratio and so on.

PS5, Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Annapurna Interactive
The nostalgic antics of a trio of tenacious teens make for silly yet undeniably enjoyable gameplay, framed by a playlist of bona fide bangers

The older we get, the more we tend to romanticise our teenage years. As bills pile up, we yearn for the simple days of drinking cider in parks. We often tend to forget the bad parts: the frustrating lack of autonomy, the unrequited crushes and the doofuses you’re forced to tolerate in the playground. But after four hours spent hanging out with the pretentious teens in Mixtape, I felt pretty relieved to be in my 30s.

Set in a nondescript town in northern California, Mixtape follows the exploits of tenacious trio Rockford, Slater and Cassandra as they head to a legendary party on their last day of high school. With Rockford about to leave her friends to move to the big city, she wants to immortalise the gang’s time together in musical form. Every song on a carefully curated mixtape triggers a totally tubular flashback to one of their shared memories.

For anyone needing a break from binging The Pitt, you can always put in your own shifts as a hospital manager, surgeon, paramedic and of course as a demonic morgue assistant

Like the rest of the western world, our household is currently binging medical drama The Pitt, revelling in its visceral depiction of life in a modern emergency department. So far the series has yet to inspire a video game tie-in (though there has been an amusing parody), but fans wishing to try their hand at tense medical (mal)practice, should not despair. Here are eight of the best hospital games spanning more than 40 years of gruesome interactive surgery. Squirt some hand sanitiser and come this way.

Sherman theatre, Cardiff
Connor Allen’s autobiographical show is a twister that winds in everything from gothic mystery to therapy sessions in an ambitious, rather incoherent mix

Connor Allen’s autobiographical show features plenty of smoke and mirrors, literal and figurative. Smoke swirls from a pit on a darkened stage, jagged mirrors stand like rocks across it. It is an emotionally anguished play featuring a mixed-heritage protagonist (played by Allen) who has been abandoned by his Jamaican father and raised by his Welsh mother. His inability to forgive his father takes him back to Jamaica where he experiences a psychic watershed.

This twister of a drama shifts ambitiously in form and tone, sliding between gothic thriller, family psychodrama and standup-style direct address at one point when Allen interacts with the audience with tipples of gin in warmly comic tones.

At Sherman theatre, Cardiff, until 23 May

V&A South Kensington, London
Indigenous and First Nations artists are the beating heart of this fascinating exhibition of contemporary art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific. It deserves a better showing

Every three years, Queensland Art Gallery scours the whole of Asia, Australia and the Pacific (which is probably why it takes three years) to find the best art being made across the region. The Asia Pacific Triennial is a giant, incomprehensibly enormous task.

Now, the V&A is somehow trying to sum up those three decades of art from multiple continents, dozens of island nations, countless Indigenous populations in … three rooms. Help!

When she broke through the glass ceiling and became chancellor, Reeves found her office had its own latrine. Rosie Holt reveals why she turned the story into a play called Churchill’s Urinal

Britain is a conservative country, we are repeatedly told. So when Labour came into government, and Rachel Reeves became the UK’s first ever female chancellor of the exchequer, there were barriers to making change. The most striking, reports the satirist Rosie Holt, was to be found in the toilet of Reeves’ office in Westminster. “There was a urinal in No 11,” says Holt. “And Reeves told an interviewer, ‘I’m going to break glass ceilings and urinals.’ She was setting up getting rid of this urinal as a symbolic win. I thought that was funny and interesting.”

But things did not go according to plan. “She couldn’t get it removed, not only because the building was listed, but because the urinal was an object of historical significance. It had been pissed in by various chancellors – including Winston Churchill.” For Holt – standup, online character comic but also a lapsed theatre-maker – this story was irresistible. On last year’s fringe, she workshopped a new play making antic political farce out of Reeves’ battle with a historic pissoir. One year on, Churchill’s Urinal – written by and starring Holt with contributions from her ex-partner, the comedian Stewart Lee – has its London premiere.

Aviva Studios, Manchester
Kip Williams’ in-the-round staging, with the action live-projected onto enormous screens, can be disorientating, but Du Yun’s Pulitzer-winning work is compelling and kaleidoscopic

English National Opera takes a bold leap, selecting one of the most uncompromising pieces of 21st-century music theatre for the first new opera staged in its northern base. Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone, which won the Chinese American composer the 2017 Pulitzer prize, tackles human trafficking head on in an allegorical tale of two angels that fall – literally – into the clutches of a dysfunctional couple who hesitate for all of five minutes before deciding to mutilate and exploit them.

For this inaugural production, a collaboration with Factory International and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, they have recruited Kip Williams whose The Picture of Dorian Gray dazzled the West End and Broadway. The innovative Australian director employs his breathless technical wizardry to fashion a dizzying in-the-round staging.

Beloved animated series will return for 36th season in the fall after telecoms giant Bell Media reaches deal with Disney

Fans of Les Simpson have a message for anyone who doubted the future of the beloved and long-running Québécois version of the animated satirical show: Mange de la crotte.

Les Simpson will return for its 36th season in the fall after telecoms giant Bell Media said it had reached an agreement with Disney for the rights to air and dub the show. The deal caps nearly a year of uncertainty surrounding the adaptation, which is beloved in Canada’s lone francophone province.

‘This is part of my series Mother. I would ask my subjects: Do you feel more like a Mary Magdalene or a Virgin Mary? It’s always a fun question to ask’

Paul McCartney famously says that he got the melody for Yesterday in a dream. I used to think that was artistic licence, but then it happened to me with this image. I had a dream about a half woman-half animal, standing alone in the middle of a field, with trees surrounding her.

I was working on a series of images, called Madre, about the depiction of womanhood. The media in Bolivia always present women in a traditionally feminine way. It is rare to see a woman who displays more masculine attributes and her not be immediately labelled as a lesbian – there is no nuance.

After a breakup, photographer Diana Markosian hired an actor to play her ex-boyfriend in hope of finding closure

Falling in and then out of love is a universal experience that often brings sadness, grief and heartbreak, and with time, hope and healing. Photographer Diana Markosian used her camera lens to document these complex feelings in her new project, Replaced.

She brings the viewer on her journey of having, losing and reclaiming love, in a project that blurs documentary and fiction. “[The moments] no longer existed in the way they had, and I wanted to reclaim them,” she says. “I wanted to feel that I could exist in my own story again.”

Photographers search for dark skies in the most remote landscapes to find places where the galaxy shines with extraordinary clarity. They share not only their breathtaking results but also their methods, trials and adventures

• Stargazing in New Zealand’s first dark sky community

They just want to help children safely across the road on their way to and from school. Yet lollipop people are having to wear body cameras after an increase in abusive and dangerous drivers. How did things get so out of hand?

There aren’t many jobs that often involve jumping out of the path of speeding cars – but for the lollipop people of Britain today, this is the sad reality. And it doesn’t stop there: aggression, swearing and middle fingers are just a few examples of the intimidation and abuse they face on our roads.

“Oh my God, I mean, abuse of lollipop people? What has the world come to?” says Lynne Gorrara. It’s a crisp, sunny afternoon in Ipswich and the 61-year-old is holding a towering stop sign above her head, clearing a crossing for a stream of schoolchildren. This spot – on a narrow residential road, with a hospital in one direction and shops in the other – is notorious for abusive drivers.

A new book by linguistics professor Valerie Fridland, who was raised in Memphis by parents with French accents, explores the power behind the way we speak

Valerie Fridland writes in her new book, Why We Talk Funny: the Real Story Behind Our Accents, that humans instinctively use accents to categorize those around us. “We learn to recognize other people as being like us through the way that they sound,” Fridland says. It happens early: studies suggest small children, when choosing friends, favor those who share their accent.

In one study, for instance, five- and six-year-olds were shown pairs of kids on a computer screen, one with a local Canadian accent and one with a British accent. Asked who they wanted to be friends with, they picked the kid with the local accent – even though they lived in Toronto and are exposed to a huge range of accents every day.

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan

From Kylie’s prosecco to Margot Robbie’s gin, we taste the star-backed booze to see what actually tastes good – and what’s just selling a dream

If you were incredibly late to the party, you’ll have become aware of celebrities making their own brands of alcohol in March, when Margot Robbie’s artisanal gin, Papa Salt, hit the rocks. Specifically, bars were refusing to stock it because oyster shells had been involved in its distilling.

It was such a charming tale; Robbie fell in love with London when she lived in Clapham in the 2010s, and wanted to give something back, namely, a gin with the flavours of Australia: wattleseed, wax flower, and oyster shell. “But what barman wants to have to ask every customer that orders a gin and tonic whether they’re allergic to shellfish?” was the question posed by Joanne Gould, food and drink writer and regular tester of alcohol on the Filter, with devastating inarguability.

Our writer has a wardrobe wake-up call. Plus, top tips for sustainable plants and Kim Cattrall’s shopping secrets

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How many pieces of clothing do you own? Dozens? Hundreds? The average UK adult’s wardrobe contains 118 items, including underwear, according to environmental charity Wrap. That shocked me until I started counting my own clothing mountain and reached number 237, at which point I had to stop and write this newsletter.

When the Filter asked me to spend March testing six ways to consume less, I didn’t expect fashion to feature much: I work from home wearing boys’ joggers from Asda (they’re cheap, and they fit my sub-5ft frame perfectly). But after auditing my belongings as part of the challenge, I have to ’fess up, not least to myself: I’ve been over-buying clothes for years.

Start small, pick perennials and go peat-free: how to buy plants sustainably

Busy boards, bath buddies and Tonies: the best toys and gifts for two-year-olds

The best face moisturisers for every budget, season and skin type, tested

Jess Cartner-Morley’s May style essentials: summer totes, chic shirts and the best shoes of the year so far

The best blenders for smoothies, soups and frozen desserts, tested

Whether you want floaty, floral, midi or maxi, the perfect summer dress should be versatile and easy to style. Here are 30 of our favourites this season

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s May style essentials

There’s a particular kind of optimism that comes with the first real day of summer sun; not the false start kind in April, all blue skies and betrayal, but when you can leave the house without a coat and not immediately regret your decision.

In theory, the summer dress is the easiest item in your wardrobe to style. One decision, one zip (or none) and done. However, this ease can be deceptive. Without the option of layering, a summer dress has to be versatile.

We spill the tea on the supermarket bags worth your cuppa – and which should be left to stew

• The best (and worst) supermarket coffee

My grandma would turn in her grave if she knew I tested these teabags by brewing them in a cup, but that’s how I drink tea mostly. Or at least I did until I met tea specialist Matt Ritson, who helped me test today’s teas with the industry-standard cupping process and, afterwards, introduced me to some mind-blowing whole-leaf teas. We studied the appearance and aroma of the wet leaves in an observation bowl, then the colour and clarity of the tea itself, before supping it from small bowls and aerating the tea to maximise its surface area.

The bags I tested ranged from 2p to 34p a pop, but when you think about the quality and sourcing of the higher-priced teas, even they are incredible value. We scored them on flavour, structure and balance, plus certification, trading standards and sourcing. I also awarded points to plastic-free bags – it seems the industry is finally responding to the uproar against microplastics, though some producers need to catch up and work without the polypropylene glue that’s still often used to seal teabags.

Caramel vape with your latte? ‘Banana ice’ with your curry? The perfect pairing is out there – and vapeologists are keen to help you find it

Name: Vape sommelier.

Age: Emerging.

A three-course, south Asian feast: spicy coconut dal, a cheesy toastie with a knockout pickle, and a fudgy, spicy halva cake to finish

Public institutions, from hospitals to museums, are the most international communities, both in the workforce and in those who visit. It’s something that became obvious to us when we were cooking our globally inspired meals for frontline workers at Kings College Hospital, London, during the pandemic. The menu at Café Jikoni, our new restaurant at the V&A East museum, speaks to the depth and breadth of east London’s diverse community, with dishes that cross borders, celebrate pluralism and taste like home – wherever that may be. After all, the best hospitality is all about making your guests feel at home.

A masterclass in smoking duck breasts the Sichuan way, but with used teabags

When I worked at River Cottage HQ, we used to smoke duck, rabbit and fish in a smoker made out of an old bread bin. It always felt like an exciting and alchemical way to cook, yielding incredible results, and it’s so simple, not least because food has been smoked since we first learned to cook over fire. Today’s recipe is my simple take on Chinese zhangcha duck, River Cottage-style and with a zero-waste twist by using spent teabags as the perfect fuel.

The answer is probably more about absorption than quantity, say our panel of experts

I’ve been advised to increase the iron in my diet but, as a vegetarian preoccupied with getting sufficient protein, I’m at a loss.
June, by email
Last year, a study by Randox Health found that almost one in three women who attended its UK clinics have an iron deficiency, which is to say that June isn’t alone. Yes, there are good sources that vegetarians can tap into, but we first need to address a few key points: “The heme iron you get from animal sources – red meat and darker poultry, say – is in a form that’s slightly better absorbed than non-heme iron, which is found in the likes of beans, tofu and leafy greens,” says Dominique Ludwig, nutritionist and author of No-Nonsense Nutrition. This is where vitamin C is your friend: “When we eat non-heme iron and vitamin C together, it increases absorption, so it might be a case for having peppers or tomatoes with your tofu.” But there’s another potential hitch: “On a vegetarian diet, some of that iron can be blocked from absorption because of things such as phytates [a plant compound found in whole grains, legumes, etc], or tannins in tea and dairy,” Ludwig adds, so it’s not simply about how much iron you’re getting, but how good your absorption is.

“Women aged 19-49 should aim for 14.8mg iron a day, but after menopause that drops to about 8.7mg, which falls in line with men’s requirements,” Ludwig says. “If you’re vegetarian, then, you can’t just be having pesto pasta, you need to be eating beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, soy products, and leafy greens, too.” Tofu can have 3-5mg iron per 100g, cooked lentils 3-4mg, chickpeas 2½-3mg, cashews 6-7mg and sesame seeds 14-15mg. So, much like getting dressed, layering is important.

Oats in the morning are a no-brainer: “A 40g serving will give you 2mg iron, so have them with milled flaxseed and berries for the vitamin C,” Ludwig advises. The same principle applies to the likes of a tofu scramble: “Throw in some kale and tomatoes [again, for the vitamin C] and serve it with wholemeal bread, and you’re looking at about 7mg iron,” Ludwig adds. In other words, your day is getting off to a good start.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Female home owners report feeling stuck between men’s contradictory expectations – they are told to be independent, but not assume the breadwinner role

When Tiffany Tate put the wheels in motion to buy her first home, it felt like a win – until a date’s response stopped her cold.

“If you buy that house, what’s a guy going to do for you?” he said. It was just after their first date, and just before what would be their last.

A tiny bird with a giant ego, Crispin was a remarkable singer – especially if you told him how talented, intelligent and gracious he was

I was around four years old when my parents bought me Crispin, my first pet. A handsome yellow canary, Crispin was bad-tempered and behaved like an alpha male. He would spend hours preening. I thought he was enchanting.

A gentle female canary, Mariflor, arrived soon after. She became Crispin’s other half and the mother of their chicks, Maribel and Quintin. Having a canary family compensated for my lack of siblings and extended family. It gave me a sense of responsibility and filled my life with joy.

When Leah and I planned a family, we wanted to be as mutual as possible. Could reciprocal IVF – Leah carrying an embryo made from my egg – be the way forward?

Late last year, it became my friend’s favourite party trick. “Rosa’s going to have a baby next week,” she’d say to a group of people who didn’t know me. I’d watch their faces as they tried to inconspicuously scan my body, detecting no sign of a bump. “Congratulations!” they’d say, smiles tight, clearly wondering what other delusions I might have up my sleeve.

I was, however, about to have a baby. At daybreak on a warm October day, our beautiful, 6lb 10oz, 19.5in‑long baby girl was born; skin pink and taut, scream wet and bright. I held my wife’s hand and head as our daughter emerged from her body – a daughter who had initially come from me.

Ali used to want sex more than James, and feels guilty that she doesn’t enjoy it as much as she used to
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Any pressure to have sex doesn’t come from James – it comes from within, from a fear of complete loss

We had booked a cruise for him and his carers, but we had a string of problems when we tried to change names

In November 2024, I booked a cruise for my wife, myself and our severely disabled son for this July. I’d booked well in advance to ensure an accessible cabin for my son. At home, he needs round-the-clock care from a rota of eight carers, so we made extra bookings for three to accompany him.

Because the care team has other commitments, I couldn’t confirm their names at the time of booking and was told to do so by this April, when the balance had to be paid.

If you are looking for a new account, there are some good rates around, but also pitfalls to watch out for

Earning as much as 7% on your savings sounds great – but what’s the catch? The top-paying accounts often come with strings attached, which could mean your money is not working as hard as you thought.

That’s important because there is a lot of cash sitting in fixed-rate savings accounts that are about to reach the end of their term. The total amount in accounts maturing between April and June is £90bn, according to the savings app Spring – and that money will need to find a new home.

Haringey council’s penalty seems extortionate – especially when other authorities charge lower amounts

I read your story about a man fined £500 for dropping a cigarette butt on the pavement.

I have been issued with a £500 fixed-penalty notice (FPN) by Haringey council for putting a butt in a refuse sack awaiting collection on the street.

Criminals exploit confusion or anxiety over new IHT rules by offering a ‘safe haven’ for savings pots

The caller pitches a great deal. Shift the moneysaved in your pension and reinvest it in a scheme overseas where you can avoid it being caught under next year’s changes to the UK’s inheritance tax (IHT) system.

From April next year, any money left in a defined contribution pension after your death, which is most workplace and all private pensions, will be pulled into the IHT net.

Rather than bribery, or hiding carrots under ketchup, the key may be to expose foetuses to healthy flavours

It is an age-old battle with small children that most parents will recognise: please, please, eat your vegetables.

Some will read them books with titles such as The Boy Who Loved Broccoli. Others have been known to smother veg in tomato ketchup, or mix avocado and fruit with Greek yoghurt and call it icecream. Or resort to plain bribery.

Social media is awash with clips of people paying to be ‘bathed’ in sound. But what’s the science behind the practice?

• Read more in the Antiviral series

I, for one, am partial to a bath: what’s not to love about a dim room, candles and nary an electronic device in sight?

But a wellness trend that has emerged in recent years makes soaking in tepid water seem quaint: increasingly, people are paying to be “bathed” in sound.

Long considered an important milestone in one’s fitness journey, pull-ups build upper body strength and look impressive in the gym

The pull-up has long been seen as an important fitness metric. From 1966 to 2013, public middle and high school students in the US were required to do pull-ups as part of the presidential fitness test (an evaluation Donald Trump has considered reinstating). US Marine Corps members were long required to perform pull-ups as part of their regular physical fitness test, and prospective UK Royal Marines must complete a minimum of three to four pull-ups before they are eligible to join.

There is no definitive data on how many adults can perform a proper pull-up, but two things are clear: they are very difficult and look extremely cool.

Lat pulldowns.

Bent-over dumbbell rows.

Single-arm dumbbell rows.

Wide upright rows.

Shoulder shrugs.

Scientists are discovering more and more associations between poor oral health and everything from heart disease to dementia. But can flossing and brushing properly guarantee a longer life?

Isn’t it weird that dentistry and medicine have been kept largely separate? Why should our mouths be treated differently from the rest of our bodies? Going to the dentist often feels like more of a lifestyle and cosmetic add-on, especially for adults in the UK. And, even if you can find an NHS dentist, the service is not free at the point of use like medical doctors are.

The origin story for this rift is that dentistry began, in the middle ages, as a trade – with tooth extractions handled by “barber surgeons” and dentures crafted by jewellers and blacksmiths. Today, dentistry and medicine still have their own separate training routes, professional bodies and NHS setup. Generally speaking, medical doctors can’t act as dentists, and dentists aren’t medical doctors. But the tide is turning on this conceptual separation, because the links between oral health and systemic healthcare are becoming ever more apparent.

In an unexpected turn of events, brooches have escaped from Granny’s jewellery box, climbed out the window and gone clubbing

I have arrived in my brooch era about two decades ahead of schedule. I had brooches earmarked for a later life stage, accessories that would chime with The Archers, gardening, possibly solving the odd crime in the village, that sort of thing.

But in an unexpected turn of events, I am already the correct age to wear a brooch. Not because I’m old, but because brooches have changed. They have cast off their church fete vibe and become cool. Zendaya wore a diamond serpent brooch pinned to the back of her white jacket to last year’s Met Gala. At a press conference before the recent Mexico City premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2, Meryl Streep added no fewer than six brooches to the lapel of her pillarbox red Dolce & Gabbana suit. Pedro Pascal wore a silk Chanel camellia the size of a sunflower to the Oscars. The brooch has escaped from Granny’s jewellery box, climbed out the window and gone clubbing.

Co-founder of Gap whose tastes helped establish the template for the clothing brand’s affordable ‘preppy’ look

The first branch of Gap was a single small storefront selling men’s denim and vinyl discs at 1850 Ocean Avenue, in the classy Inglewood neighbourhood of San Francisco, the city which, at the time of the store’s opening, 1969, was at the centre of hippy and other youth cultures. The founding story is that a middle-aged real-estate developer, Donald Fisher, couldn’t find Levi jeans in his size – with a 31in inseam – in the city, and set up the store to supply Levi’s piled wall-high in all cuts and sizes. But much of what the world now thinks of as Gap actually came from his wife, Doris Fisher, who has died aged 94.

The Fishers invested their life savings in the $63,000 start-up cost of the store, which Donald wanted to call Pants and Discs. The night before they had to instruct the signwriter what to paint on its fascia, Doris came up with “The Generation Gap” (referring to the divide between their age group and the then-young baby boomers), then shortening it to “The Gap”; although her style choices for Gap clothes often diminished rather than accentuated age and gender differences.

In the age of Botox, Ozempic and injectables, some women want to spend less on bridal beauty – and just be themselves

I got engaged last summer. Immediately, I started imagining how I would look at my wedding. The woman who appeared in my mind had different hair, different teeth and a completely different body than me. “I will transform my arms by the time of my wedding,” I kept thinking, though I did not take any action to transform my arms. It was inconceivable that I would show up to my wedding looking like myself.

Each social media app fed me wedding prep recommendations, including dieting (rebranded as “eating clean”), working out five times a week, regular laser treatments and facials, red light therapy, lymphatic drainage massage, teeth whitening, Russian manicures, eyelash extensions and multi-step hair routines. I saw an essay by a woman who wrote about spending $30,000 on her physical appearance. “In the lead-up to my wedding I treated my body like a design project and gave myself full [rein] to indulge in every and anything I had ever remotely considered,” she explained.

PM’s wife, accompanying him to the polls, follows a long line of women to mobilise the jacket when stakes are high

Not a white flag but a cream blazer was what Victoria Starmer chose to wear to accompany her husband, the prime minister, to vote on Thursday morning. She follows in a long line of women who have mobilised the power blazer at high-stakes moments.

Starmer’s, which looks much like a £1,690 ivory Alexander McQueen crepe design, comes hot on the lapels of another. In episode one of the new series of Amandaland, Amanda wears a beige double-breasted iteration in a high-stakes fictional moment: to give a toe-curling talk about her (not shallow) lifestyle brand Senuous as part of careers week at her kid’s school. Earlier in the week, the Princess of Wales launched the Foundations for Life report wearing a creamy beige high-waisted Roland Mouret suit.

Improve your mountain skills by day and party by night at the Arc’teryx Alpine Academy in Chamonix

After a day spent hiking across the Col d’Entrèves glacier, a sugar hit is required. I descend on the cable car and join the queue at the ice-cream counter. Above me, surrounded by jagged peaks, looms the huge white figure of Mont Blanc, serene and pure against a brilliant blue sky. Although it’s late afternoon, people are still heading up the mountain, and there are two clear groups. On one side are the tourists, who are about to be lifted into unfamiliar frozen realms at 3,375 metres (11,072ft), hoping to grab a picture and return. Mixed among them are the weathered faces of mountain experts: hikers confidently heading for a high-altitude hut, or climbers with coils of rope.

How many of those tourists, I wonder, are wishing they could be mountaineers, secretly regretting the twists of fate that kept them away from that path? But all is not lost. The aspiring adventurer, no matter what age or background, can begin the journey to competence in the mountains. The annual mountain festival I am attending aims to facilitate that by offering the chance to gain hands-on experience with experts.

The island of Samsø offers tranquil walks, biking, birding, distillery and pottery tours, and locally sourced fare – including citrusy ants

‘We have lammerullepøllse – lamb rolled sausage – today,” says Daniel Hesseldal-Haines, chef at Det Lille Sommerhotel on the Danish island of Samsø. “It tastes better than the translation sounds. And,” he gestures towards a woman sitting by the window, “the lamb is from Camilla’s farm.”

Camilla gives us a friendly wave, and my eyes fix upon her sweater, featuring row upon row of colourful motifs. Think Fair Isle but less orderly: each stripe holds a different design. “Oh, I made this,” she says. “It’s hønsestrik – chicken knitting. You can use it to tell your story – so this one is about hiking,” she adds, pointing to each section: “These are my footprints, this is my tent, my coffee flask …”

From B&Bs and cabins to fincas and family hotels, these rural boltholes make ideal bases for exploring the region’s mountains, trails and historic towns and villages

For centuries, outsiders have been lured to the radiant hills and valleys of Andalucía, not least the Moors of north Africa who left such an impact on the land and culture. More recently, an influx of northern European aficionados has fostered a string of seductive, small-scale guesthouses to join some idiosyncratic Spanish-owned properties. These are idyllic, tranquil settings in which to de-stress and recharge, hike, ride, cycle, cook, swim or simply stargaze – the rural skies here are blissfully free of light pollution. Nor are cultural highlights ever far away, whether in Granada, Córdoba or Seville.

It took 10 years for Naseby to achieve its DarkSky International certification. Now, a night out in the tiny Otago town is like ‘a tour through the history of the universe’

As the last strip of pink on the horizon fades to indigo on the Maniototo Plain in Otago, every word I speak arrives in a puff of condensation. Six hundred metres above sea level, in winter the temperature here can drop to -15C. Spring isn’t much warmer. But the chill is worth it. Standing in the dark in what feels like the middle of nowhere, I’ve come to a paddock not far from the historic mining town of Naseby to stargaze.

Even in a country where there’s about 20km of space per person, the Maniototo Plain is sparsely populated. During the 1860s gold rush about 20,000 fortune seekers descended on Otago, but when they eventually moved on, towns like Naseby were left to a sleepy future. Now home to just 140 people, it’s not even a place you drive through. “We’re not on the way to anywhere,” says local Jill Wolff. “You’ve got to choose to go to Naseby.”

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The answers to today’s pronunciation puzzles

Earlier today I set you these two word puzzles. Here they are again with solutions.

1: Pronounced the same, spelt differently.

(Second option) (Switch back and forth)

(Suitable) (Commandeer)

(Satisfied) (Components)

(Conference attendee) (Assign)

(Price reduction) (Disregard)

(Way in) (Enrapture)

(Incorrect) (Disabled)

(60 seconds) (Tiny)

(In attendance) (Give)

(Fruit and vegetables) (Generate)

(Deny) (Rubbish)

(Distress) (Surprise victory)

Alternate

Appropriate

Content

Delegate

Discount

Entrance

Invalid

Minute

Present

Produce

Refuse

Upset

Horticulturalists express alarm after award-winning Matt Keightley launches app that can automate designs

With glasses of champagne sipped among the peonies, Chelsea flower show is generally a friendly and genteel occasion. But this year, the secateurs have been drawn as gardeners clash over the use of AI in designing the exhibits.

Matt Keightley, an award-winning designer who has created gardens for figures including Prince Harry, is using artificial intelligence to design his garden for the prestigious show, held at the Royal Hospital gardens in Chelsea, London, next week.

As an astronomer, I had witnessed many celestial phenomena. But nothing prepared me for those few minutes in 2017 when the world fell silent

I have never driven with more determination than when rushing away from Shelby Park in Nashville. We had reached Davidson Street when my husband shouted: “There! There’s sunlight!” I skidded into a car park of a printing company with barely any time to spare. We jumped out of the car, put on our dark glasses, and looked at the quickly disappearing sun. It was surrounded by clouds, but a tiny sliver of light was still shining. This was 1.27pm on 21 August 2017. We had travelled all the way from London to Tennessee to experience the Great American Eclipse – an astronomical phenomenon I had never seen before.

As an Italian-born astronomer, I had always felt at a bit of a disadvantage. I have a doctorate in astrophysics, focused on collisions between galaxies. I have seen many celestial phenomena – comets, planetary alignments, fireballs, galaxies, northern lights – but not a total solar eclipse.

A big shot earned a triumphant snare drum roll with a resolving crash. My timing was often slightly late, occasionally wildly inappropriate

Music came to me very early on. I’m told that as a baby I would fall asleep to opera – arias would stop me crying. By age six I was enrolled at the local conservatory of music in Athens, learning classical guitar and moving, quite seriously, through music theory and the fundamentals. By my teens, I was in a band with friends, covering everything from Avril Lavigne to Muse, aiming for precision over hours of rehearsal. My music practice was very disciplined and far removed from anything resembling “entertainment”.

Sport, on the other hand, barely registered for me.

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Exclusive: Where parties fielded multiple candidates in last week’s vote, those at top of list were more likely to be picked

Fancy your chances in politics? Then perhaps you should change your name to Aaron Aaronson or Aaliyah Aardvark, figures from last week’s local elections in England suggest.

A Guardian analysis of election results compiled by the website Democracy Club points to a striking alphabet effect. In wards where a party fielded three candidates, those listed nearer the top of the ballot paper – with a surname nearer the start of the alphabet – finished ahead of their party colleagues in 2,200 cases, or 65% of the time.

Prospect of flight cancellations and petrol shortages prompt people to switch from air and road to rail and bus

The Middle East crisis, now in its 11th week, has resulted in higher fuel prices for drivers and prompted fears of jet fuel shortages, rising air fares and cancelled flights.

Given the uncertain outlook, prospect of higher travel costs and potential disruption, we asked whether people had changed their holiday plans.

More than 1.2 million people have been forced to flee their homes amid bombings, evacuation orders and demolitions

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Israel’s destruction in southern Lebanon happened in phases. Hours after Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel on 2 March, the Israeli military issued forced evacuation orders for more than 100 villages close to the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Bombing quickly followed. Tens of thousands of residents of south Lebanon began heading north, taking shelter in cities such as Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. Many people outside the formal evacuation zones also fled their homes, recalling the autumn 2024 war in which Israel bombed wide swathes of south Lebanon without warning.

Find out how we compiled our list of the 100 best novels published in English – and nominate your favourites

• See 100-61 on the list here

This week, we reveal our list of the 100 greatest novels published in English, as voted for by authors and critics around the world. We polled 172 authors, critics and academics for their top 10 novels of all time, published in English, and asked them to rank their choices in order of preference. We scored the titles according to how often they were voted for, and then added a weighting based on individual rankings to produce the overall list of 100 greatest books.

What would be at the top of your list? Which authors do you think should be there? What are your favourite novels of all time?

If you have been affected by the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship, we would like to hear from you

Twenty Britons from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak continue to be offered practical and emotional support as they isolate at a UK hospital.

Along with the 20 British nationals, a German who is a UK resident, and a Japanese passenger, were taken to Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral on Sunday after the MV Hondius docked in Tenerife.

We’d like to hear how you’re adapting your expenditure as the cost of living rises amid the conflict in the Middle East

Rising prices and economic uncertainty linked to the conflict in the Middle East are putting pressure on household budgets across the world.

The International Monetary Fund has warned the conflict is pushing up the cost of energy and food, increasing borrowing costs and weighing on economic growth. Surveys suggest millions of households are already making changes to cope – cutting back, dipping into savings or taking on debt.

Whether it’s on the beach, along the prom or over dramatic cliffs, tell us about your favourite seaside walk – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

The King Charles III England Coast Path, which launches officially this year, is opening up miles of previously inaccessible coastal terrain to walkers in England. We’d love to hear about your favourite coastal walks all around the UK, from the White Cliffs of Dover to the Western Isles of Scotland.

The best tip of the week, chosen by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet wins a £200 voucher to stay at a Coolstays property – the company has more than 3,000 worldwide. The best tips will appear in the Guardian Travel section and website.

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