The ex-soldier has marched 36,000 miles since he left Hull in 1998. He’s crossed the Americas, Asia and Europe, fallen in love, been held at gunpoint and been deported, in between nearly drowning, nearly dying of thirst and nearly being eaten. But that’s just the start of it …

‘It’s a big moment,” says Karl Bushby, who has had plenty of big moments in his life. He is recording himself on his phone for social media. “We’re in Dover, and I’m about to have my first fish and chips and mushy peas in 28 years. Mushy peas, my God, I forgot they even existed!” He points his phone at the plate in front of him. “It better be good.” And he tucks in. “Mmmm. See, this is a big chunk of fish and a decent bit of batter, and that’s something you don’t see in other parts of the world. I mean, come on! That. Is. Fish. And. Chips! You see, Britain is special.”

It has been two days since Bushby swam the Channel to return to England. Tomorrow, he’ll start the walk home to Hull for the first time since he left in 1998. He hopes to get back on 1 November, the same date he set off all those years ago.

Some of Britain’s wealthiest financiers, including Sir Paul Marshall, have given a platform to critical coverage or are linked to its leading opponent

“This is virtue signalling,” said Nigel Biggar. “These are elites who are trying to demonstrate that they are being progressive.”

The target of his scorn was one that has obsessed him for years: the movement to pay reparations for the slave trade, and specifically the Church of England’s plan to spend £100m atoning for its involvement.

Preparing her first report on England’s social care system, the peer says ‘everything is on the table’. This should include older people’s wealth, rather than taxes on younger workers

Residents with advanced dementia lined the day room, glazed stares or sleeping mouths agape, with that terrible human vacancy everyone most fears for their own end days.

This was Millvina House in Anfield, Liverpool, which I visited with Louise Casey, who is heading the commission on social care in England, last week. Here is a snippet of what she saw: an angry man jolting into life, shooting out his arm at her and bellowing: “Out! Get out! Get out!” A young care assistant went to stroke his back and calm him down. It’s a hard job, and part of it is watching for warning signs of aggression, one of dementia’s dreadful symptoms. “People don’t want to know,” Casey said, “but if you are born, you will die. Chances are you will need care, and dementia is the biggest killer.”

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

As the Oscar-winning Stasi surveillance film hits the stage, Knightley and co-star Luke Thompson talk about the paranoia at its heart, the cost of theatre tickets nowadays – and their fury at ringtones in the stalls

Unpacking assorted tubs of carrot sticks and salad, Keira Knightley winces apologetically. “I just realised I’ve got very crunchy food,” she says. How apropos that she should consider the impact that her lunch might have on my audio recording when we are here to discuss The Lives of Others, a new play in which the characters are divided between the spies and the spied-upon.

Based on the Oscar-winning 2006 film and set in East Berlin in 1984, the play stars Knightley as Christa-Maria, a theatre actor in a relationship with a director, Georg, played by Luke Thompson. Earwigging on them is Wiesler (Stephen Dillane), the Stasi officer whose principles are gradually challenged and weakened by his round-the-clock exposure to this cultured couple.

Over 10m people have tuned in for episodes of new season of BBC hit as mass TV audiences become increasingly rare

For the celebrities chosen as traitors in the BBC’s juggernaut reality show, the task is simple – kill off fellow contestants without getting caught.

Yet with the new series of Celebrity Traitors once again attracting huge audiences, its UK producers are delighting in one of the show’s more wholesome qualities – its popularity is staving off the death of television’s ability to unite the nation.

A living room encounter with a toast-loving pigeon proved a big mistake. It led to weeks of drawn curtains and crawling around on the floor to avoid its eerie and unerring gaze

The pigeon landed on the windowsill. It was shortly after dawn during the spring holidays, but I was 11 and had been up for a while eating toast and watching TV. It pecked at the window and I turned to see this bird pressed up against the glass. It was beautiful, with two dark wing bars and a navy-tipped tail. I was immediately taken with him. It wasn’t until later that I realised he wasn’t just looking inside, he was looking directly at me.

Pigeons are not that common in Somerset, and since we lived on the top floor of a house in a quiet village, our view was mostly sky, so we had come to really value sightings of them. We were having a run of beautiful mornings, and I enjoyed watching its peculiar rituals through the sash windows. The way he moved across the sill, his small dark doll’s eyes, his slightly unnatural head tilt, the way he seemed to know where he was. We certainly didn’t see pigeons as pests. Nor did we see them as threats.

Fund upgrades UK’s GDP growth forecast for 2026 to 1.3%, but says it is likely to edge down next year

• IMF warns global economy ‘could soon test the limits of resilience’

John Healey should “stay the course” and continue repairing the UK’s public finances, the International Monetary Fund’s top economist has said, after the fund lifted its growth forecast for Britain.

Little more than a fortnight before Healey’s first budget, Silvana Tenreyro, the IMF’s economic counsellor, said the UK “stands out” among G7 countries in having a plan to narrow its deficit.

ZyMix platform has contract with Tencent, which US alleges has links to People’s Liberation Army

A new messaging and payment “super app” marketed at British students uses servers owned by a Chinese company that has been put on a US military blacklist for its alleged affiliation to the People’s Liberation Army.

ZyMix, which is being pushed on university campuses as the UK’s first super app designed “for gen Z”, combining chat, payments and community features, has a contract with a German-based subsidiary of Tencent Holdings, a Chinese conglomerate in Shenzhen.

Exclusive: Homes demolished along east coast after being deemed too vulnerable to live in, figures reveal

Seaside communities along the east coast of England have lost at least 183 homes to coastal erosion and landslides over the past 16 years, figures obtained by the Guardian reveal.

After councils judged properties across the Yorkshire and East Anglian coasts too vulnerable to remain safely occupied, the homes were proactively demolished.

Former Labour leader says he believes the prime minister has an ‘authentic commitment’ to taking the UK back into the EU

• Andy Burnham promises ‘serious dialogue’ over UK’s relationship with EU

Here are pictures of ministers arriving for cabinet today.

John Healey should “stay the course” and continue repairing the UK’s public finances, the International Monetary Fund’s top economist has said, after the fund lifted its growth forecast for Britain, Heather Stewart reports.

About 2,000 criminals are being freed this month to ease overcrowding, while probation union moves towards strike

The second wave of early prison releases has begun, with hundreds of offenders walking out across England and Wales under the government’s controversial plan to ease overcrowding.

About 2,000 criminals, including domestic abusers and violent offenders, are being freed this month, with another 3,000 to follow in stages over the next year. The total was reduced from 6,000 after an intervention by Andy Burnham.

Cambridge University study suggests stark gender divide in misdiagnosis, with women also waiting longer for treatment

Women with autoimmune conditions are up to 74% more likely than men to be told their symptoms are psychological or psychosomatic, and face much longer waits for a diagnosis and treatment, a study suggests.

Hundreds of millions of people – about one in 10 globally – are affected by autoimmune conditions, which can cause a range of health issues including fatigue, muscle pain and rashes.

Actor who played Walter White Jr on the acclaimed show and advocated for disability representation remembered by Bryan Cranston as ‘my sweet son’

• RJ Mitte – a life in pictures

The actor RJ Mitte, whose personal experience living with cerebral palsy informed his role as Walter White Jr in the television series Breaking Bad, has died aged 34 in Brownsville, Texas.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of beloved actor, philanthropist, and passionate disability rights advocate RJ Mitte,” Mitte’s representatives said in a statement. “Drawing from his own experience living with cerebral palsy, Mitte brought authenticity to the role and built a platform on disability awareness and inclusion.”

Cocaine seizures in Europe are up more than fivefold in 10 years as a host of cartels take root. A four-month Guardian investigation reveals the true scale of a continent-wide shift

A four-month investigation by the Guardian has revealed that the surge in cocaine trafficking to Europe is directly linked to the expanding presence of Latin American criminal networks in Europe, where they have forged close ties with local mafia organisations.

The investigation, utilising databases, police and intelligence agencies, along with interviews with judges, prosecutors and experts from eight countries, shows that cartels and factions from Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico and the US are active in at least 12 European countries. Between 2014 and 2024, there was a 471% rise in the quantity of cocaine seized and more local laboratories processing cocaine derivatives were dismantled.

Herring, flatfish and oysters are increasingly off the dining table, with just five fish species now dominating

In days gone by, the UK’s domestic cooks were an adventurous lot when it came to seafood, prepared to dish up anything from an oyster cocktail to whale meat curry.

But an academic investigation of more than 1,000 fish and shellfish recipes published in a lifestyle magazine over the last century suggests tastes have become much narrower. Ruth Thurstan, from the University of Exeter, studied seafood recipes published in the British version of the magazine Good Housekeeping from 1923 to the present.

Pre-1970s: A diverse mix of species in recipes. No single group ruled but flatfish, herring and oyster were prominent. Recipes emphasised domestic skills, economy and preparing whole fish.

The 1970s shift: A decline in diversity of fish species in recipes, with increased focus on the “big five”.

1980s-present: “Big five” present in the majority of recipes, with a decline of other species – though not all have vanished entirely.

AR7 report was scheduled for 2028 in time for Cop33 summit but some petro-states and major developing countries want to postpone it

Scientists are coming under pressure from some petro-states and major developing countries to delay publication of a key global report on the climate, despite pleas from vulnerable countries worried that postponement could spell disaster for them.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-convened body of the world’s leading climate scientists, is meeting this week in Addis Ababa to discuss its seventh assessment report, a comprehensive survey of all that is known about the climate crisis.

Marches in Delhi against changes to voting registration led to dragnets, internet blackouts – and questions about India’s electoral independence. Plus, the cinematographer capturing the beauty of the mundane

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Months of simmering public anger have given rise to a season of discontent in India. In its latest iteration, the demand is for the removal of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the scrapping of a controversial electoral rolls revision that has struck 130 million people off the register. Protests have erupted every day over the past week, prompting a violent crackdown on dissenters in the capital.

Over the weekend, Delhi was effectively under lockdown, transformed into a militarised landscape of barricades, road closures and paramilitary forces marching through the streets. Ahead of a protest led by the Cockroach Janta party on Saturday, authorities deployed a massive dragnet: 245 trains to Delhi were cancelled, 45 metro stations were shut, liquor shops were closed, internet services were cut off in the heart of the city and activists were put under house arrest.

Swamped with ‘daily avalanches’ of soiled items and poor-quality fast fashion, secondhand stores are in crisis. What went wrong with people’s good intentions? And is it possible to donate more effectively?

The small stockroom of St Raphael’s Hospice charity shop in Cheam, south London, is rammed with donations. “On average, we get 30 to 50 bags a day,” says Caroline Worley, the commercial manager, “but it’s not unusual to receive over 100.” This might sound like a good problem to have, but the sheer volume of stuff is the shop’s biggest challenge. “Sometimes, there’s only [enough] floor space to tiptoe,” says 48-year-old store manager, Colin French.

Rummaging through the donations, it’s clear that much is unsaleable: a smelly, soiled bathrobe, tatty trainers, heavily bobbled jumpers, old socks, an empty Swarovski jewellery case. “Absolutely typical,” says Worley. They’re also overwhelmed with deluges of low-quality fashion – a shift in donation habits that accelerated during Covid, because, says Worley, all that time at home enabled people to sell their best stuff on Vinted.

This peculiar – some would say truly irresponsible – hagiography of boxing superstar Mike Tyson veers from psychedelics and sobbing to the inadvisable face tattoo via a cameo from the US president

Netflix’s new four-parter on Mike Tyson is one of the strangest sports documentaries it has ever released, or maybe just one of its strangest documentaries full stop. The streamer has form in sporting hagiographies – tales told with questionable distance from their subjects, and all the objectivity of cold war agitprop. Tyson is different, though: not only is it lopsided, but it also feels deeply icky. And that’s before Donald Trump arrives to defend its subject – a great catch for the programme-makers but a wholly baffling cameo that makes you wish he would stick with geopolitical meddling and golf.

It ends – spoiler alert – with the former boxing champion taking the hallucinogenic drug DMT (or as he calls it, “the toad”, after the animal that produces it), while sobbing and inviting the show’s director to join him. Its episodes are peculiar, sometimes compelling, and – as many viewers will surely feel – truly irresponsible.

It is billing £32.99 a month but I have had no functioning phone line since it switched me to Digital Voice

I’ve had no landline since May 2025 when BT switched it to Digital Voice. Weeks passed, and each call to BT involved at least an hour waiting on hold and answering security questions before being passed between departments.

Eventually, last December, two engineers were sent and discovered that a wire had been severed during the upgrade. They said they needed a cherry picker to reconnect it to its original location and would return. They did not.

His egalitarian homeland used to harbour reservation against the architecture star. But with 13 new Unesco listings and a new exhibition in Helsinki, Aalto’s work is finally getting the recognition it deserves

In the early 1950s, Alvar Aalto built a boat to get to his remote summer residence on an island in Lake Päijänne, about 200km north of Helsinki. But the celebrated Finnish architect was not a happy skipper. He named the boat – a title as cumbersome as his buildings were elegant – Nemo prophet in patria: “No man is a prophet in his own land”.

The name was a dig at Finland, which the architectural maestro believed had taken him for granted. Other nations, he moaned, recognised his talent more than his own. Today, arriving in Helsinki, I find that Finland doesn’t just love Aalto, he’s a national treasure.

Our cartoonist looks at the battle for eyeball and earhole supremacy in the game’s rapidly changing media landscape

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• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

French photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont spent two decades capturing demos, clashes and countercultural gatherings in America. ‘They dreamed of living in a better world,’ he says

At first the idea of mercy was something that helped me through the ordeal. But would real forgiveness be a form of Stockholm syndrome?

I knew Mohamed Tahlil as a gentle pirate who oversaw a team of guards during the first months of my life as a hostage in 2012. I had travelled to Somalia to report on the outbreak of modern piracy off the coast. On the 10th day, along a dusty road near Galkayo, in the centre of the country, I was kidnapped by pirates. For the next two and a half years, I was a hostage.

I spent most of my time on a thin, sweat-soaked foam mattress on the floor of a dusty room. The dim concrete prison houses changed, but the filth and the circumstances didn’t. Sometimes my captors moved me into the Somali savannah – where we camped in the open and slept on the ground – and for a six-month stretch, I was held on a hijacked tuna vessel, where I joined 28 fishers from east Asia who had been captured about three weeks before I was placed on board. (They had captured me on land, but they were a pirate gang, organised to capture ships at sea.) In each location, pirate guards would sit around with AK-47s and listen to the radio, or else chew khat, a narcotic plant.

Farage was its champion, now it’s Badenoch – and the aim is the PM’s defeat at all costs

While the merits of a so-called Britannia shield to protect Britain from missiles and drones are debatable, the Conservatives’ proposal did achieve one thing last week: the very idea of the shield was used to anoint a political leader.

In a significant development, little observed amid the hullaballoo of news events, Kemi Badenoch’s uncosted, pie-in-the-sky plans to build a £10bn anti-missile system were enthusiastically heralded by the rightwing press. It was not just a matter of the plans themselves being lauded, even by outlets that must know them to be ridiculous. More significant is what it said about the champion chosen by these media organisations in their offensive against the Labour government and Andy Burnham.

Jane Martinson is an academic and Guardian columnist. She is a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group, and writes in a personal capacity

If far right nationalists gain power in four big countries simultaneously, we are in for a dramatic Trumpian tilt

When it comes to Europe’s economy or its peace and security, it is obvious that decision-making has to be done largely at the European level to be meaningful. Yet electoral politics is still conducted mostly at the national level. The silver lining of this mismatch is that from country to country in Europe we have governments with different political priorities and leanings. Unlike in the US, where one presidential election can radically change the entire country’s course, as we have seen so vividly under Donald Trump’s leadership, the same drama has not so far unfolded in Europe. This may be about to change.

Pedro Sánchez rolled the dice in Spain last week, calling a snap election for next month after an unholy alliance of the conservative People’s party (PP), the far-right Vox and Catalan pro-independence party Junts blocked his big housing reform package in parliament. If the socialist prime minister, hailed by progressives globally but demonised by Europe’s right and Trump’s US, loses his election gamble, Spain could fall into the hands of a conservative/far-right coalition, which is currently ahead in the polls.

Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist

Burnham was lying, Farage told a press conference on Monday. This was clearly just another plot to undermine him

Let’s face it. The very idea that Russia may have tried to interfere with the Brexit referendum is clearly absurd. I mean, what could a hostile state hope to gain from sowing division between the UK and the EU? We all know that Vladimir Putin has nothing but the best interests of European democracies at heart. That’s why he invaded Ukraine. To help it become a bit more democratic. The sort of democracy which is so highly prized that 99% of its citizens vote for its leader. If only others could be more like Russia.

If anything, Putin would have wanted the UK to remain within the EU and it was only his impartiality that prevented him from saying so. Besides which, why would the Russians want to get involved in anything so politically insignificant as the partial break-up of an organisation it considers an enemy. It just makes no sense. And it’s not as if Russia has any track record of clandestine foreign engagement. Next people will be suggesting Russia paid Reform’s former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, at least £30,000 to make helpful speeches in the European parliament and recruit other MEPs.

Let’s be clear: the risk to humanity is unprecedented. Without an urgent public debate and robust use of international law, we will lose control of the future

In my two years as attorney general, I spent more time working on national security than any other issue. The range and gravity of the threats posed to our nation are multifold, from terrorism, armed conflicts and nuclear proliferation, to the impacts of financial insecurity and the climate crisis. All profound challenges, yet ones our superb intelligence and defence communities are well placed to counter. The risk from AI is of an altogether different magnitude, not only in scale, but also because there is a limited time window to address it. The risk is difficult to overestimate: it poses an existential risk to humanity. The lights are flashing red and we must act now before it’s too late.

Although the extraordinary threats posed by AI have long been flagged by those closely involved in its creation, it was not until very recently, after the disclosure of the Hugging Face hack and the resignation of Jacob Coxon from Anthropic, that the issue at last started to gain traction in the public discourse. This moment is an opportunity, and to capitalise on it we desperately need increased urgency in international coordination to regulate frontier AI. There must also be meaningful public engagement with how AI should be shaped to benefit humanity, rather than entrench the power of a few. We cannot leave this to China, the US and big tech – we must all demand a voice in the debate.

Russia’s silence over the death of a lab worker underlines that pandemic preparedness amounts to nothing if information on threats is withheld

In pandemic preparedness work, scientists like to focus on the technical challenges: identifying pathogens, diagnosing infections, understanding their effects and developing vaccines and treatments. Each step promises progress through human innovation, investment and planning. The World Health Organization (WHO), for example, brings experts together to identify and prioritise emerging disease threats and collect the evidence needed to prepare for them. But preparedness depends on more than scientific innovation.

As the past week has shown, politics is the elephant in the room in all of this. No one could have predicted we would be talking about pneumonic plague, and that the death of a single lab worker in Russia would cause global headlines. It might feel like an overreaction: the WHO deals with thousands of potential disease signals worldwide every month. But the circumstances of this case are unusual given the lack of transparency from Russian authorities on what happened – and ongoing concern about biological weapons research.

On the Today programme, his comments were disconnected, cliche-riddled and unremittingly stupid. But to clog the collective consciousness with nonsense is exactly the point

Had Reform merely announced its intention to suspend the asylum system for an entire parliamentary term, I’d have just ignored it. Even to dignify its policy platform with a response is to enter its alternate universe, in which it’s preparing for government. I prefer, if only fractionally, this universe we’re in, where the party hangs by a thread on the results of a parliamentary inquiry into Nigel Farage’s £5m gift from a disinterested well-wisher.

Had Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, gone on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme merely promising a British version of ICE, I still would have ignored it, not due to complacency, more due to a bone-penetrating despair that anyone, even he, would look at the US’s shadow militia, performing staged acts of unfettered violence and inhumanity, and think: “That looks cool – I bet I could get some political capital out of that.”

The latest attack by Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia may prove to be more calamitous for the region than the world imagines

On Saturday, Houthi rebels launched a shocking and deadly attack on Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh. At the time of writing, the missile strike on King Khalid international airport has killed at least 13 people and left 300 injured, marking a significant turn in a regional conflagration that is only getting more intense. It was the single most deadly attack on any Gulf country since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran in February. In Saudi Arabia, a country that is unaccustomed to such fatalities, the death toll is bewilderingly high and likely to prompt a bloody response.

Over the past year, the Gulf has entered a new era of instability that is not temporary and cannot be reversed. This may feel like an overstatement – casualties have been relatively low, after all, compared with Gaza and Iran – but the gradual erosion of peace and security in places such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE has changed the region more dramatically than its leaders would like to acknowledge.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Young protesters have exposed the limits of a strongman’s authority. Crushing dissent risks deepening the democratic crisis he should confront

Narendra Modi’s heavy-handed crackdown on protests over electoral rights in Delhi appears to have backfired. Over the weekend, his government tried to crush demonstrations led by the gen Z Cockroach Janta party (CJP). It locked up thousands of young people, detained journalists and shut down the capital as if he had declared emergency rule. Abhijeet Dipke, who launched the CJP in May after India’s chief justice compared jobless youths to “cockroaches”, was detained with other leaders when he landed in Delhi. Those who did take to the Indian capital’s streets were roughed up by police or taken into custody. Even when the usually deferential supreme court ordered peaceful assembly be protected, Mr Modi’s government showed its authoritarian contempt for fundamental constitutional rights.

This was less a display of strength than a government showing its fear of voters it claims to represent. But the actions did not stop the protests. On Monday, thousands marched in Delhi, demanding the resignation of India’s election chief over reports that the names of more than 130 million voters were deleted from the electoral roll to benefit Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in recent elections. It’s a charge that India’s election commission denies, although some commissioners have raised concerns over voters’ names being removed without their knowledge.

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Ed Davey’s critics want headlines, but their leader’s strategy wins seats. Undermining him could help the rightwing parties into power

Will the first victim of the political conference season be the Liberal Democrats’ Sir Ed Davey? It might seem quixotic, given that he is the most successful liberal parliamentary leader in a century. Yet a meeting of Lib Dem MPs on Tuesday night could see them collect the 18 signatures needed for a confidence vote. It’s hard to see what a putsch would achieve, apart from giving the party’s opponents a stick to beat it with. That may be the point: weakening Sir Ed in an internal war of attrition so that he walks away would be easier than removing him via a no-confidence vote passed by a majority of all Lib Dem MPs.

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,” said Napoleon Bonaparte. With populists slipping in the polls, Lib Dem plotters should remember this, especially as Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives are looking to advance at the Lib Dems’ expense. The Tory economic pitch is to end the 60% marginal tax rate on earnings between £100,000 and £125,000, and let couples pass on the family home plus another £1m tax-free. It’s a clear bid to win back affluent southern voters in England’s “yellow wall”.

Among the hardships of the second world war, a restricted diet with little sugar did little harm, write Roger Wilkinson and Helen Keats; plus a letter from Jane Robbins

An interesting juxtaposition: (While British children go hungry, we waste 1.1bn meals a year. Bring on the redistribution revolution, 6 October); and (The generation raised on sugar rations – and what their health reveals 70 years later, 7 October). Shocking that the average family throws away 156 meals a year, but this knowledge allows us war babies, who still scrape our bowls clean and only throw away items where the mould is too developed to scrape off, to be very smug. And next we’re told that we will probably live longer as a result of our parsimonious cheeseparing. My cup of smugness overflows.
Roger Wilkinson (born 1944)
Leasgill, Cumbria

• My 98-year-old aunt, who along with my mother and family lived in Rotterdam during the German occupation and “hunger winter”, is remarkably healthy. She lives independently, does her own shopping and cooking, and cycled to the local care home to “help out” until she was 80.

Responding to an editorial on the extent of sexual abuse of pupils by their peers, a reader calls for more nuance and compassion. Plus a letter from Donna Hill

As a paediatrician specialising in the care of children who have been sexually abused, I am well aware of sexual harm that occurs in school settings by peers (Editorial 5 October). This is just one aspect of the wider issue of children and young people who sexually harm other children and young people.

Of all the children my organisation cares for, 30% are harmed by other children – data we shared with the children’s commissioner in their report in 2023 on the impact of pornography on harmful sexual behaviour on children.

Readers respond to John Harris’s article on the need to consider disabled people of working age when reforming the care system

I found myself nodding in agreement at John Harris’s worries about his son’s future as he leaves full-time education to enter the world of adult social services (Social care for disabled adults is in as much crisis as support for elderly people – so why is the government silent about it?, 5 October). John’s concerns were shared by my wife and I as our disabled daughter moved from her specialist residential further-education setting 17 years ago.

However, with her gutsy approach and strong financial support by way of 24-hour care from our local council, she is able to say, “I love my life”, and has expressed this in a little book, How I Flourished, published by Lewisham Adult Learning. This despite being quadriplegic, having no speech and being dependent on her personal assistants for all the necessaries of life.
I could wax at length about her wheelchair dancing, the “proper job” she secured with a wonderful charity (the Deptford-based Entelechy Arts), her painting, thirst for maintaining social relationships involving long and tiring overseas travel, and so on. The blunt truth, however, is that we, as her parents, have always needed to be closely involved in managing her care and safety, and for taking up the opportunities to broaden her landscape. We are aware that she has had a much better deal than so many people in adult care institutions.

In response to a report that rare footage of a 1966 re-enactment has been found, Sue Jenkins recalls her own that year. Plus a letter from Bryn Hughes

Having read your article (‘A God-almighty punch-up’: rare footage shows Battle of Hastings (the 1966 one), 6 October), I would love to know if anyone else remembers the “battle” that took place at Hastings on 5 March 1966 between students from Leicester University and Leicester College of Art and Technology (later De Montfort University).

We wore sacks painted with whitewash and made shields and helmets from cardboard; my diary entry (I was a second-year student at the university) gives a vivid picture of the day’s events, which ended with a dance on the pier. Apparently the BBC made a film – what happened to that, I wonder?
Sue Jenkins
Thame, Oxfordshire

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43rd over: South Africa 109-4 (Markram 46, Mulder 10) Renshaw gets taken for a respectful single, but Starc gets clipped for four first ball of the day! This is a strange world. There’s a wide in there as well, on the off side. Starc has bowled some wild balls in this Test, a tendency that he had earlier in his career, but had fixed up in the last few years with adjustments to his technique. Not sure what’s gone on the last few days.

42nd over: South Africa 105-4 (Markram 46, Mulder 6) And it’s not a bad first over, either. So Renshaw will bowl spin ahead of Nathan Lyon this morning? That is curious. Mulder sees it out, and carefully drives the last ball for one.

Ruth Chepngetich’s failed doping test, five months after she obliterated the record in 2024, left the sport deeply uneasy but powerless to act

When Ruth Chepngetich annihilated the women’s marathon world record in Chicago two years ago today, NBC’s commentators compared it to the moon landing. “Bring it on Neil Armstrong!” cried one. “She has done things in this sport that we have not seen,” said another. “Unbelievable!”

That was a word others reached for too after the Kenyan had crossed the line in 2hr 9min 56sec, a time that not only smashed the world record by 1min 57sec, but her personal best by a staggering five minutes. Afterwards she was asked by Robert Johnson of Let’s Run what her response was to those who believed she must be doping. “People must talk,” she replied. “I don’t know.”

The 52-year-old reflects on the pain of being sacked after two decades turning Red Bull into an F1 powerhouse, questioning his purpose in life and dealing with panic attacks

Christian Horner should be in steamy Singapore, preparing for another grand prix victory, but here he is, at home on an autumnal morning in genteel Highgate as his wife, Geri Halliwell-Horner, welcomes me with a cheerful hug. Horner smiles as the former Spice Girl produces an impressive imitation of my South African accent which echoes her old headteacher at Watford Girls.

After the most controversial man in the recent history of Formula One says hello, Halliwell-Horner and I discuss the fact that my two daughters also went to her school and that one of their history textbooks had her name printed on the inside page – while the ex-Ginger Spice talks about gritty old Watford, grammar school education and Nelson Mandela.

Australia and New Zealand are main contenders on home soil while pressure is straight on England in new format

The Rugby League World Cup returns with a new format and a new feel this week, but in the men’s event there is a familiar clutch of nations vying for glory. Ten teams will compete in a complex group format, with only four semi-final spots on offer after the quarter-final stage was removed.

Two of those semi-finalists will come from the four-strong Group A while the remaining six nations play in a new inter-group format. The nations in the three-team Group B play the three in Group C and vice versa, with the top two from a combined table of both pools going into the semis.

Norway’s champions, who host Bayern Munich on Tuesday, have excelled under Bjarte Lunde Aarsheim and Morten Jensen. We paid them a visit

“When we recruit players, we say something bold.” The morning’s training session at Lyse Arena has finished and, over lunch, Morten Jensen is explaining how he and Bjarte Lunde Aarsheim have propelled Viking Stavanger from mediocrity to an implausible place among Europe’s elite. “We always tell them: ‘If you come to Viking and play for us, we’re going to be the best coaches you ever had.’”

It is a story more than a decade in the making for Jensen and Aarsheim, who were appointed joint head coaches in November 2020. On Tuesday they will oversee the club’s first home Champions League game, against Bayern Munich, the latest step in a journey that has brought shared success in every sense.

• Rider was to take part in track world championships

• British Cycling confirms Richardson was withdrawn

Matt Richardson has been withdrawn from the Great Britain team for next week’s track world championships in Shanghai amid allegations of serious misconduct.

The 27-year-old, who switched allegiances from Australia after the Paris 2024 Olympics, had been seen as one of Britain’s strongest medal hopes, with chances in the team and individual sprints and the keirin. But after a Times story, which reported that there had been concerns about his behaviour from other riders, he is now in the process of leaving the team’s training base in China.

• Prem club release statement after releasing Totoa Auvaa

• ‘His conduct falls short of the standards expected’

Saracens have sacked the rugby player who sparked English cricket’s captaincy crisis on a night out with Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson last summer following his involvement in another alcohol-related incident.

In a statement released on Monday evening, Saracens confirmed that Totoa Auvaa, a 21-year-old Samoan forward, has been dismissed following an internal investigation into an incident in St Albans last weekend.

If ever validation is needed for attack being the best form of defence, Frank Lampard can call this game up on Wyscout. Coventry climbed out of the relegation zone to the heady heights of 14th place after their second successive win showcased the benefits of their manager’s willingness to balance risk with reward.

Jack Rudoni’s early penalty underscored a sense of positivity that was enhanced by an even quicker goal at the start of the second half from Sidiki Cherif and not unduly dimmed by Sven Botman’s howitzer making it 2-1.

• Burnham had formal meeting with Khaldoon al-Mubarak

• Prime minister was also guest at ‘small number’ of games

Andy Burnham had a formal meeting with Manchester City’s chair, ­Khaldoon al-Mubarak, at an investment summit, chatted to him in the stands at a star player’s testimonial game and was accompanied by staff from the club on official overseas visits.

Details of the prime minister’s contacts with the scandal-hit club and its Abu Dhabi owners during his time as Greater Manchester mayor were released by the combined authority. Burnham old MPs that “all of my dealings” with Manchester City’s owners would be published.

Rescue operations underway after one vessel is sunk in the Black Sea and another damaged

On frozen Russian assets, Poland’s Sikorski says the use of frozen Russian assets is “a complicated issue,” but takes a very clear stance in response to any suggestion of releasing them back to Russia.

“We are working on it, but there is also some rumours that some people are expecting these assets to be released back to Russia.

I don’t think I’m speaking just for myself in saying: over our dead bodies.”

“Russia right now is not ready for ceasefire, but still, this only can encourage us to stay with Ukraine and to, strengthen, the pressure on Russia and always be ready for conversations, but and also especially for, for ceasefire negotiations.

But, until this doesn’t happen, we are with Ukraine. We are with the president the German government is is backing the Ukrainian government and the president, completely. He is the person to lead Ukraine, and we are with him.”

Exclusive: Chris Bruni-Lowe used Redfield & Wilton Strategies role to develop potential campaign tactics, sources say

A close adviser to Nigel Farage had an influential role at a national polling company despite not being publicly associated with the firm, the Guardian can reveal.

Chris Bruni-Lowe, Farage’s private pollster for many years, played an important role in the operations of Redfield & Wilton Strategies and used it to develop potential campaign strategies, according to several sources who have worked there.

Case of couple who wed legally in Austria exposes clash between EU court ruling and national restrictions

A same-sex couple are suing authorities in Slovakia for refusing to register their Austrian marriage, testing whether a landmark EU court ruling can turn recognition abroad into legal security at home.

Their fight exposes a clash between European obligations and national restrictions – and what that means for LGBTQ+ people living under Robert Fico’s populist-nationalist government.

Surge in EHCP applications poses risk to public finances and may lead to deteriorating levels of support

Councils are warning of potentially “catastrophic” debts, which are forecast to reach a record £10bn over the next 18 months, as a result of rapid growth in demand for special educational needs and disability (Send) support in English schools.

Although the government recently cleared more than £5bn in historic council Send debts, a surge in requests has led to authorities predicting they will have re-accrued that debt figure by April, and doubled it by 2028.

Plans for a new theatre for world’s longest-running soap in Digbeth scrapped as part of cost-cutting measures

The BBC is set to stop recording The Archers in Birmingham for the first time in the show’s 75-year history, after scrapping plans for a radio drama theatre that was to be the new home of the world’s longest-running soap opera.

A pledge to move recordings to the so-called Tea Factory, the BBC’s new Birmingham hub in Digbeth, has become the latest victim of the corporation’s £500m cuts plan.

National park officials took the precautionary measure to limit tourist access after heavy rain caused the Iguazu River to flow at six times the normal rate

Heavy rainfall fuelled by a supersized El Niño weather pattern briefly forced Argentinian authorities to close tourist access to the famed Iguazu Falls, amid fears that rapidly rising water levels would cause the river to burst its banks.

National park officials took the precautionary measure on Monday when the Iguazu River’s flow exceeded 12,000 cubic metres per second – more than six times its average rate.

River Lagan, Belfast: Right now you can see winter in the black-headed gull plumage, and spring in the mallards’. Yet feathers are also vital to how birds even came to exist

On my walk along the towpath, I pick up a small grey feather. It’s a flight feather, probably from the wing of a feral pigeon. I stroke it absently as I watch the birds that are swimming on the river’s surface. Steeped in autumn sunshine, the different species are also feathered with other seasons. Summer is in the fuzzy down of a late-hatched moorhen chick. Winter gleams in the white heads of the “black-headed” gulls. And, while a mallard’s emerald-green head is, as yet, tatty as old velvet, his crisply curled drake’s tails herald the coming spring.

If the story of birds is told in their plumage, then moult – the shedding and regrowth of feathers – is the turn of a page. The moorhen chick reminds me that the first chapter is about keeping warm. I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, almost tucking the pigeon feather in as well. While our hair and birds’ feathers are both made of keratin, they differ in how they grow. In essence, hair extends as a single linear thread, whereas down feathers emerge frothing in all directions. As a fledgling matures, its outer feathers then lengthen, with a central shaft supporting branches that can flatten out and zip together to make a smooth surface.

Exclusive: Some of £2bn savings needed from energy budget expected to come from boiler upgrade scheme, sources say

Ministers are preparing to slash the amount of money available to subsidise heat pumps as they look for ways to fund higher defence spending, sources have told the Guardian.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, has been tasked with finding more than £2bn in savings from her budget to help pay for defence investment under a plan drawn up by the previous government.

Clear skies bring warm days and cold nights to Montenegro, while a low-pressure system moves towards Aegean Sea

• Europe live – latest updates

Temperatures fluctuated dramatically in the Balkans last week, with unusually large differences between daytime highs and overnight lows – known as the diurnal range.

An area of high pressure over the region brought prolonged sunshine during the day, while clear skies at night allowed temperatures to drop rapidly as heat escaped into the atmosphere without cloud cover to slow the cooling.

UK to bring further sanctions against Tehran and IRGC after assessment Iran was likely to have coordinated incident

Andy Burnham said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were “almost certainly” behind threats to RAF Fairford, the firmest attribution of responsibility made so far by the UK after an incident late last month.

The prime minister told MPs the UK would bring further sanctions against Tehran and the IRGC in the aftermath of an ambiguous episode that, despite over a fortnight of police investigation, has yet to lead to anybody being charged.

Home secretary also expands police support ‘with immediate effect’ for high-profile public figures not currently MPs

Security arrangements for high-profile public figures including politicians and members of the royal family are to be urgently reviewed after the killing of Ann Widdecombe, the home secretary has said.

Shabana Mahmood said former MPs, party leaders who are not MPs, peers, former members of devolved parliaments and party spokespeople will also be offered police support.

Kanishka Narayan, concerned by Australian incident, says British cyber defences could be bypassed by artificial intelligence agent

• UK politics live – latest updates

An AI-driven cyber-attack similar to the OpenAI breach of Australia’s healthcare system is likely, “if not inevitable”, in the UK, according to a senior minister.

Kanishka Narayan, the UK AI minister, indicated that the British government’s own cyber defences would be bypassed by a technology that has developed highly sophisticated skills in cybersecurity.

Judge leading UK inquiry says most operators using privilege against self-incrimination to refuse to provide information

• UK politics live – latest updates

Most SAS personnel approached by an inquiry into alleged extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan have refused to answer any questions, the judge leading the proceedings has said.

Lord Justice Haddon-Cave is investigating allegations of more than 50 summary killings by UK special forces soldiers as well as claims of an alleged cover-up of illegal activity and inadequate investigations by the Royal Military Police.

Aircraft taken out of operation after flight from Perth after the discovery of parasitic insects on board

Qantas has been forced to ground a plane in Rome after bedbugs were discovered on the aircraft on its way from Perth.

The parasitic insects were found in the front of the economy section of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner as it made its way from Perth to Rome for the QF5 flight on 9 October, a source with knowledge of the incident confirmed on Tuesday.

Security forces use helicopters to rescue dozens of people as the two storms damage infrastructure and cause flash flooding

At least five people have died after Hurricane Simon and Tropical Storm Rachel pummelled Mexico’s Pacific coast, causing flooding that downed trees and electricity poles, blocked roads and inundated homes.

Simon claimed the life of a 71-year-old man who died when a wall collapsed in Chilpancingo in the southern state of Guerrero, governor Evelyn Salgado said at a press conference.

Attacks by Iran-backed group come amid counteroffensive by Yemeni government supported by Riyadh

Actor, who allegedly punched one Delta attendant, bit another and tried to open plane door, was charged for two separate assaults after the plane landed

The actor Selma Blair was arrested on Sunday at John F Kennedy airport in New York after she allegedly attacked two flight attendants on a Delta Air Lines flight, and separately charged with two counts of assault for allegedly kicking a police officer and a nurse after landing.

Blair’s arrest happened at about 11pm, after Port Authority of New York and New Jersey officials said they responded to a call “about a physically abusive passenger aboard Delta Air Lines flight 938 which was parked at the gate” at JFK after arriving from Los Angeles.

Supermarkets use special offers to draw in sales, while more people buy Halloween products early this year

• Business live – latest updates

UK grocery price inflation has edged up again as shoppers lean on special offers to keep their costs in check, new figures show.

Supermarket prices were 2.5% higher than last year in the four weeks to 4 October, up from 2.3% last month, data from Worldpanel by Numerator shows.

Asian markets fall and Samsung shares tumble after its Chinese rival CXMT claims strong progress

• Business live – latest updates

Shares in semiconductor companies fell on Tuesday after the boss of Broadcom compared many AI investors to “casino” gamblers, and Chinese memory chip maker CXMT said it had made good progress on a new chip architecture.

South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index tumbled 6.25% as investors dumped chip stocks, while other Asian markets were also lower. Japan’s Nikkei fell 1.8% and the Taiwan exchange lost almost 2%, with the country’s chip maker TSMC down by a similar amount.

Bosses of Citroën owner and French carmaker also urge UK government to consider limiting imports from China

Stellantis and Renault have backed the UK car industry for inclusion in proposed rules to protect EU industry, but urged the British government to consider limiting imports of Chinese cars.

Emanuele Cappellano, who leads Stellantis’s European brands including Fiat, Citroën, Opel and Vauxhall, and François Provost, the chief executive of France’s Renault, said the UK should effectively be counted as one of the EU’s 27 member states for the purposes of the proposed “Made in Europe” legislation.

Accountancy firm Deloitte Cyprus among those that appear to have backdated records outlining the Russian billionaire’s assets

Aides of Roman Abramovich – including staff at the global accountancy firm Deloitte – falsified paperwork mapping the oligarch’s sprawling offshore business empire, records suggest, helping his businesses dodge tax and disguise assets.

New analysis of leaked corporate records uncovers what appears to have been a long-running and carefully orchestrated strategy of backdating documents.

This offbeat tale of machinations at an eccentric poetry magazine in 80s New York is laugh-out-loud funny – and a paean to the power of poetry

If you have been into a bookshop since 2022, or perhaps even just breathed in and out, you could not have failed to clock the phenomenon that was Lessons in Chemistry. Bonnie Garmus’s debut remains a global sensation. The story of Elizabeth Zott, a gifted research chemist who, forced out of her lab by rampant 1950s misogyny, becomes the inspirational host of a TV cooking show, has so far sold a staggering 9m copies around the world. It spent the best part of two years on the Sunday Times bestseller list, was translated into more than 40 languages, and scooped numerous awards. In 2023 it became an Emmy-winning TV series; a year later New York Times readers voted it one of their top 100 books of the 21st century. Elizabeth Zott made such a splash that even her favoured brand of rowing machine saw a spike in sales.

What was the key to its prodigious success? Timing helped. In the aftermath of #MeToo, readers embraced a heroine who refuses to be cowed by injustice, who, thanks to resilience, pragmatism and straight-up hard work, ultimately comes out on top. The book is smart and very funny, a propulsive mashup of feminism and fairytale that balances darkness with whimsy, heartbreak with hope. It is also carries a shamelessly inspirational message. “Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies,” Zott exhorts her audience of housewives in the TV studio. “Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what you will change. And then get started.”

Mobeen Azhar isn’t afraid to tackle hard topics in a brilliant documentary about the rise of Islamophobia – even when it involves hearing criticism about his own decisions

In 2024, the journalist Mobeen Azhar made a documentary called Small Town, Big Riot that ought to have been highly influential, but, in our atomised modern media landscape, wasn’t. He deconstructed how anti-immigrant racists, radicalised by online propaganda, lies and hearsay, end up on the streets perpetrating shocking violence and rioting against a largely imaginary foe.

Azhar’s new film tackles a wider, thornier problem and is less satisfying as a result. But in his willingness to debate hard topics – even if it means hearing difficult arguments, some of which are aimed at him personally – he is still provoking thoughts and airing views that better-known journalists would never go near.

True story about a former maths teacher who became a puzzle champion in retirement is squeezed into predictable sports-movie formula

It’s not quite up there with Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver to get into character, but Michelle Yeoh reportedly spent two years learning the Rubik’s Cube to prepare for this Chinese drama in which she plays a real-life former maths teacher who became a champion in retirement. The true story is stretched and squeezed here, fictionalised to fit sports-movie formula; it ends up being so-so entertaining and funny in places, but disappointingly predictable. The biggest surprise is that cubing is so popular it has its own world championship.

Still, Yeoh gives a superb, spiky performance as blunt, foul-tempered Zhao Yanhong; following a stroke, Zhao is living in a nursing home where she is the resident badass, assaulting her robot care companion and making illicit trips to the off-licence. She discovers her natural talent for the Rubik’s Cube when a washed-up ex-champion called Wu Youwei (Haoran Liu) comes to the nursing home to give a tutorial. What follows is a classic sports-film structure, with qualifying heats and Zhao training day and night, lifting weights and pounding the city streets. (Yes, running is de rigueur in a Rubik’s Cube movie; physical strength is Zhao’s weak spot says Wu, who agrees to be her coach.)

Sara Minami gives a wonderfully crazed performance in a twisted, fresh take on the genre as Yuriyan Retriever’s debut feature examines infatuation, bullying and beauty norms

Back in the 90s and 00s, Japanese horror (or “J-horror” if you want to save on syllables) was much admired, reasonably widely distributed and sometimes remade in other languages. They never actually stopped making them in Japan, but the results don’t seem to get as much crossover exposure as they used to. That may be because we have quite enough horror getting made closer to home, especially since it’s so remunerative at the box office.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see evidence that the genre keeps evolving in Japan just as it does everywhere else, and there is something tangibly fresh and kicky about this low-budget horror-comedy amalgam. Made by comedian Yuriyan Retriever, an irrepressible character whose dadaist shtick got her on America’s Got Talent twice, makes her directorial debut with this satirical ghost story which sends up male misogyny and women’s obsession with romance alike.

A riveting documentary about the journalist who took the US president to the cleaners. Plus: John Simpson celebrates 60 years at the Beeb. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, BBC Four
Why did journalist and advice columnist E Jean Carroll decide to sue Donald Trump? “Because he called me a liar and I couldn’t let it stand.” This documentary follows her groundbreaking media career before retracing her journey to suing Trump twice in the civil courts over sexual abuse and defamation allegations (in 2019, and 2022), which she won both times. Hollie Richardson

Jay-Z in 8, the rap mogul’s HBO docuseries, covers his life and career in effort to mend his image – with no pushback. Why is he so fixated on the court of public opinion?

During the finale of Jay-Z’s Jay-Z in 8, the recent eight-part HBO documentary series on his life and career, the billionaire rap mogul talked with record producer Rick Rubin about the song Family Feud from his 4:44 album. He clarified one of its lyrics, “Al Sharpton in the mirror takin’ selfies / How is him or Pill Cosby ‘posed to help me?”, in which he chided Sharpton, the civil rights leader, and Cosby, the disgraced actor-comedian, for constantly criticizing rap music. He called Sharpton an “extortionist” who goes “from place to place” demanding: “You want our support … give us the money.” Listening to him chastise Sharpton, I pondered how he doesn’t see himself as a similar figure.

Starting in 2019, Jay-Z partnered with the NFL in 2019 as entertainment director, deciding the Super Bowl half-time performers and working with the league on other community endeavors. Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback, has recently alleged that the deal came after NFL owners decided they needed a “Black face” to help them quell outrage from Black people after Kaepernick was blackballed by the league for kneeling during the national anthems as a form of protest against police brutality. Jay-Z was lambasted for undercutting Kaepernick’s cause for personal gain, marring his reputation with many fans who came to view him as the same counterinsurgent figure he criticized in the documentary.

(XL)
This is a beguiling, endlessly inventive and frequently astonishing fifth LP from a group at increasing ease with being the best band of their generation

Fifteen centuries ago, the Byzantine archbishop Theophilus of Adana did first-hand business with the devil for his own superficial betterment. Today, we just blindly tick a little box marked “accept terms and conditions” or let high-street snake oil merchants inject poison into our faces. The Faustian pact has become as depressingly banal as it is endemic and destructive – and unlike Theophilus, we can’t rely on the Virgin Mary to save us now. In the midst of headlines about AI destroying humanity, the idea of listening to music submerged in precisely this shade of doom might sound like, well, hell. If anyone can thread that poisoned needle, it’s Fontaines DC.

When the Dublin band introduced their last album, 2024’s Romance, it came with a surprise new look. Their uncoordinated jeans and shirts had been replaced by neon hair, shiny trousers and bug-eyed sunglasses that split the difference between Korn and the Prodigy. As they faced up to having traded their anonymity to become arena fillers, it wasn’t hard to read this look as a sort of protective cosplay, a cybergoth Sasha Fierce for five fairly low-key Irish lads trying to make peace with leaving their roots behind. Newly melodic and lavishly produced, Romance made no bones about the band’s ambitions and became their first platinum-certified album.

LSO St Luke’s, London
From syncopated funk to the Latin requiem mass, Gregorian chant to bureaucratic recitative, the score to David Önaç new oratorio, premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra, is serious and beautiful

How do you put a value on a human life? If you’re an insurance underwriter that’s not a philosophical question, it’s a practical one. The answer, incidentally, as calculated by Lloyds of London in 1779 was £45: the figure placed on each enslaved person transported across the Atlantic alongside corn, fish and other cargo. Court transcripts from two decades later describe a woman quarantined for smallpox, subsequently bound, blindfolded and tossed overboard tied to a chair. The captain later expressed his regret for the loss of “so good a chair”.

Archives can tell us what, but it takes art to give us the human how of the past. Enter composer David Önaç – commissioned to take the historical documents unearthed from the Lloyds archive and give them howling, raging life in his new Atlantic Requiem, premiered this weekend by the London Symphony Orchestra, an expanded BBC Singers, three soloists and (in a last-minute step-in) conductor Malcolm J Merriweather.

The Scandal star talks to Ben Affleck about his childhood in Massachusetts. Plus, the Eras strand returns with the story of 90s pop phenomenon the Spice Girls

The singer shamelessly blasts Lady Gaga in the car and is brought to tears by Portishead – but which song does she have to be careful listening to?

The first song I fell in love with
I remember listening to Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics when I was really young. There was something about the line at the beginning that I was completely intoxicated by.

The first download I bought
When I was about 10 or 11, I would put my headphones on and wander through the park all angsty listening to Fake Tales of San Francisco by Arctic Monkeys, my first download on my iPod Nano. I loved the storytelling, the characters and the gritty tableaux they described: it felt so real, even though it was far away from where I grew up.

An evidenced-based account of the difficult choices facing couples across the world – from America to Iran

‘Don’t be weird about this,” representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed into the camera as she prepared to jab a hormone-filled needle into her midsection, adding that she knew full well that, yes, people were definitely going to be weird about it. At 36, the congresswoman had begun freezing her eggs, and was making a point of bringing her online audience along with her as she did, stepping directly into the fraught question of how an ambitious woman should manage her fertility.

It’s a live concern: around the world, birthrates are falling sharply. “Only the Black Death in the 14th century is comparable to what is happening now,” Financial Times journalist Camilla Cavendish notes in a new book examining why. Setting aside the most toxic gender-war narratives, “the standard explanation is that as women get educated, they choose freedom and autonomy over family”. As Cavendish explains, however, that is “not the whole story”.

Modernity means cities – or so we’re told. This bold new study of those who make their living from the land argues otherwise

The word “peasant” has a negative edge: it has come to mean someone ignorant, unsophisticated, lowborn. Such an attitude, writes Maraym Aslany in this impressive piece of anthropology-cum-history, is “a residue of the massive psychodrama which made us who we are … we became modern by expelling the peasant parts of ourselves”. Her book weaves together a global history of peasants and an account of the four years she spent travelling in India, Cambodia, Peru and Ghana, living with and talking to peasant families.

She aims to challenge the notion that the decline of the peasantry is the necessary condition for becoming “modern”. This notion arose in Britain, the first country to rid itself of its peasants when, with the enclosure acts, it turned its land from a common good into a financial asset. As this model of capitalist modernity began to take over the world, intellectuals of every stripe argued that peasants stood in the way of “progress”. Voltaire saw them as slow-witted people unable to understand their piteous state, stumbling blocks in the pursuit of enlightenment. Karl Marx believed that their “relentless property fanaticism” made them a reactionary element within capitalism.

The great Irish writer died, a broken man, at only 46. Imagining a second act for him is a great idea – but the results are sentimental and unconvincing

In 1895, four days after the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest, the Marquess of Queensberry left a card at Oscar Wilde’s club that publicly accused him of “posing as a somdomite”. Instead of instigating the libel case that led to his imprisonment and early death in a Paris hotel just five years later, what would have happened if Wilde had simply torn that card up? John Boyne’s new novel sets out to answer that intriguing question.

For starters, Boyne contrives a fate for Wilde’s beloved Lord Alfred Douglas which entertainingly redistributes the details of the real Wilde’s life before, during and after his time in Reading jail. This sets up the novel’s cat-and-mouse game with the history it is reimagining. Wilde himself, conveniently released from marriage by the early death of his wife, is then free to live not as a tortured, scandal-haunted genius, but as a randy, wisecracking, party-going queen. The upside of this is that Oscar gets to swap bons mots with a crowded cast list of celebrities; the downside is that he shows little sign of the troubled and radical mind that produced the real Wilde’s late journalism and fiction, never mind the subversive linguistic pyrotechnics of The Importance.

The bestselling writer talks about leaving Edinburgh for London in his latest mystery, and what the future holds for Rebus

Sir Ian Rankin rarely watches television. Certainly, there’s no gleaming flatscreen in the corner of the apartment in Edinburgh where he writes, listens to music and constructs elaborate Lego models (all four Beatles, their Yellow Submarine and, once, a 6ft version of the Eiffel Tower). Did he not see the most recent incarnation of his most famous creation, Detective Inspector John Rebus, this time played by Richard Rankin (no relation), in the wake of previous performances by Ken Stott and John Hannah? “I did,” he concedes. “They gave me them on DVD, so I could play them on my computer.”

Ah, his computer – it’s had its screen and hard drive replaced, and there are grooves in the keys. It sits on top of a plain, compact trestle-table desk he bought on London’s Charing Cross Road in 1987 and lugged back to his Tottenham flat on the tube; both have accompanied him from London to rural Dordogne, in southwest France, where he lived for a few years with his wife, Miranda, in the 1990s, and back to Edinburgh, where the couple and their two sons have been ever since.

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

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

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

The launch of a collector’s box hints at a new reality: the kinds of games I grew up with are becoming a luxury item, locked behind a forbidding spending barrier

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As a parent (and partner) to a habitual collector, I do feel like an unwelcome portion of my life is occupied by an endless war against stuff. Surfaces in my home ceaselessly accumulate piles of random objects: a JoyCon wrist strap, a sticker sheet, an unidentifiable plastic piece of a toy or gizmo, an Xbox 360 controller with no batteries, cases for Switch cartridges lost down the side of the sofa … Stuff encroaches everywhere, especially in a gaming household. Much as I regret the imminent disappearance of physical games, I do not regret the extra space I have in my attic as a result of switching almost entirely to downloaded games over the last decade or so.

Speaking of the imminent disappearance of physical games: Rockstar recently announced a £350 ($400) “collector’s box” of Grand Theft Auto 6 goodies … that doesn’t include the game itself. Not even a download code. The Grand Theft Auto VI: The Goodtime State – Vice City Collection, to give it its full and unwieldy name, contains a hat, a bag, a pair of sunglasses, a figurine, a poster and more, including a mirror and a “swizzle spoon” that looks, unambigiously, like a cocaine spoon. The game retails at £70, so if you want something to play alongside all your stuff, you’re looking at an outlay of £420.

PC, PS5, Switch 2; Wych Elm Games, Team 17
Abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks make up a dark landscape in which you play a private eye searching for a missing singer-songwriter

In a weird deserted town miles from anywhere, a troubled detective searches for a missing musician and the girl he may or may not have murdered. It could be a Silent Hill game or a lost David Lynch movie from the 1990s – in fact, it’s neither. And also both. If that whets your appetite, stick around, there’s plenty more to come.

Developed by Scandinavian studio Wych Elm Games, Silver Pines is a dark Metroidvania-style adventure, where you play as shambling private eye, Red Walker, exploring a 2D universe of abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks. Officially, everyone has left because of an incoming storm, but very quickly you learn that something much darker is afoot. Someone has hired you to find singer-songwriter Eddie Velvet, but you don’t know why; your only contact with your client is via the payphones dotted around town, where you can also save your progress – as long as you have a dollar to pay for the call. Each location is filled with clues and puzzles – a weird newspaper story pinned to the wall, a strange statue that needs a missing piece – and through these artefacts you unlock new rooms and descend further into the mystery.

Xbox, PC (version tested); The Coalition/Xbox Game Studios
E-Day boasts the best combat in 20 years of Gears games – but everything surrounding it is disappointing

Every Gears of War game released in the last 20 years has made reverent reference to Emergence Day, when alien creatures emerged from the earth, single-minded in their savagery. In E-Day, you’re there to witness it: the police lights, flipped cars, ground tremors, civilians running, aliens pouring out of fissures in the earth and ripping faces off. You’re at ground zero in a squad of four soldiers called Gears – Marcus Fenix, the leader; Dom, who wants to retire; Lucas, a green cadet with a buzzcut; and the dishonourably discharged Mags. Only this dysfunctional quartet can turn the tide. With guns. Lots of ’em.

Instead of answering questions raised by the ending of 2019’s Gears 5, we’re back to the start to find out why Marcus has a scar on his lip and why these soldiers started strapping chainsaws on to their assault rifles. Anything that was left to the imagination is here, for you to point at and say: “I understood that reference. This is a thing that I have seen.”

Battersea Arts Centre, London
Women up for a role as Chekhov’s aspiring actor navigate their meetings with a needling director in a tense show

Smile. Introduce yourself. Say you’re such a big fan. Now do whatever he tells you. These are the unspoken rules the women follow as they take turns auditioning in Caroline Williams’ discomforting, rage-fuelled production about men and power and rotting winged roadkill.

The women are auditioning for the role of Nina, the aspiring actor in Chekhov’s The Seagull, in an experimental production directed by sombrely pretentious wunderkind Goran (a brooding Rowan Polonski). Using live-feed cameras in his show, he is the type of director to dismiss the need for an intimacy coordinator while claiming credit for having one in the room.

Ibraaz, London
Too controversial for the Venice Biennale, this haunting video and audio work commemorates murders and genocides with an angry act of mourning

The sound of mourning spills out into the streets. A single, endless wailing note echoes out of the basement of Ibraaz, a relatively new cultural centre in London’s Fitzrovia. This is Gabrielle Goliath’s heart-wrenching Elegy, each of its three films featuring a woman singing just one note until their lungs falter and another woman steps up to fill in for her. Just as a note is about to die, it is sustained. It’s a haunting, shocking act of mourning for murder, injustice and genocide.

And it almost never made it.

Tate Modern, London
The Lebanese artist has turned trumpets, drums, cones and voices into an ingenious, interconnected sonic beast with funny, sad and mystical results. Prepare to feel the earth move!

On the floor of the Turbine Hall, there are wide water basins and huge flattish rough-hewn rocks you might see on moorland or in a desert. You can sit or stand or climb on them. But if you look up, you won’t be able to stop looking up – because it’s raining musical instruments. Immense elongated brass trumpets and giant glowing drums seem to float in the air, suspended from the girders of the former power station’s roof.

If Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui had just left it at that, it would be an impressive, intriguing installation, but this is Tate Modern, honey, and Atoui hasn’t been asked to occupy its grandest space with mere physical objects. Instead, his sculptural creations and found stuff resonate and echo with an ever-changing, invisible art of noises. An earth-shaking bass note throbs from a hanging trumpet – or is it from that translucent cone rising out of the ground like an ethereal minaret? Then a drumbeat booms through the space and a woman’s plangent, achingly lovely voice sings notes of infinite nostalgia and melancholy.

Peter Flannery’s 90s TV drama classic is getting a theatre reworking in Newcastle. The director and cast talk about doing justice to its themes of scandal and decay – and emulating its star-making actors

In a small room at the top of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Live theatre, four actors are bringing to life the principal characters from one of British television’s best-loved dramas. Sitting around a table strewn with coffee cups, water bottles and annotated scripts, Tosker and Geordie have been boozing in a nightclub and weighing up their chances of pulling. Mary and Nicky have been arguing about whether they have a future together.

The scenes are from a new stage version of Our Friends in the North, the landmark nine-episode series first broadcast in 1996 on BBC Two. Set against a backdrop of Labour politics and police corruption, it charted 30 years in the lives of four working-class geordies and made stars of Mark Strong, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Christopher Eccleston. It was a hit with critics and viewers, won awards and regularly makes “greatest ever” lists.

Paul Greengrass’s Peasants’ Revolt epic, The Uprising, is just the latest in a long line of movies depicting an unsuccessful attempt at remaking the nation

The British are perverse. We fetishise our failures, even if they are essentially tangential to a national narrative that should be about imperial conquest, slavery and being unremittingly unpleasant to foreigners. We tell and retell, for instance, the story of Captain Scott even though he died in Antarctica in 1912 after losing the race to reach the south pole first to the unacceptably Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Similarly, Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk typified the British tendency to snatch national glory from the jaws of defeat. And then there was the tragicomic disaster of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the 1853-56 Crimean war in which our boys raced to putatively glorious if stupid deaths. It’s as if, for us British, pointless sacrifice and embracing failure are what heroism means. And our cinema has colluded with this perversity.

But there is an exception to this national veneration of failure. Britain has been reluctant to embrace its revolutionary defeats. There is, for instance, no film dealing with the Chartist movement’s 19th-century struggle for universal suffrage. Even more strikingly yet, it is only now, in 2026, that a film has been made about the calamitous 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, even though it is a pivotal event in British history. Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield as a – let’s just get this over with – revolting peasant, joins a mere handful of other movies, including Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s 1975 Winstanley, Bill Douglas’s 1986 Comrades and Mike Leigh’s 2018 Peterloo, that dare depict how radical collective action was crushed by a ruthless state.

The revelation comes after the four-hour film’s Venice premiere drew a string of criticisms and insults from the founder of SpaceXAI

Alex Gibney, director of the new four-hour documentary about Elon Musk, said that Universal, owners of the film’s international distribution rights “wavered” over releasing the film outside North America.

Gibney was speaking to the New York Times as the film opened in the US (where it is being released by the independent distributor Bleecker Street), and appeared to confirm a story in the Hollywood Reporter that Universal, which had acquired the international rights to the film in 2023, had got cold feet. Asked by the New York Times, “Did Universal Pictures waver in setting up its international release plans?” Gibney replied: “Yes.”

Estimates suggest the eco satire starring Tom Cruise could join the list of top turkeys, including Cutthroat Island and The Marvels

Digger, the ambitious eco-fable starring Tom Cruise and directed by Alejandro G Iñárritu, is heading for an even worse financial outcome than previously thought, with reports suggesting it will lose around $245m (£185m), placing it among the biggest disasters in movie history.

According to a report in Variety, Digger’s estimated second weekend revenue in North America of $3.2m is a 60% drop on its opening weekend figure of $8m, meaning its current domestic gross is $14.4m, for a global total of $35.3m, with a projected final box office total of around $50m worldwide.

The 85-year-old was helped on stage by actor John Stamos, who shared an emotional message about his ‘musical hero and mentor’

After months of cancelled comeback tours, the Beach Boys have played their first public show since July – with co-founder and frontman Mike Love joining the band on stage in Cincinnati, Ohio, despite “facing serious health challenges”.

Love was helped on to the stage by his son Christian Love and the actor and band member John Stamos, who told the audience at PNC Pavilion on Saturday night that Love has “been going through some health issues … but he would not miss tonight”.

From ancient forests to spas, medieval cities and the birthplace of Bauhaus, Thuringia packs a punch for a car-free autumn break

It’s early morning in Erfurt, the capital of Germany’s Thuringia region, and Domplatz is abuzz with local growers setting out crates of vegetables and flowers beneath the soaring medieval cathedral towers. This 14th- and 15th-century engineering wonder holds the Gloriosa, the world’s largest medieval free-swinging bell, cast in 1497 and weighing 12 tonnes. Though the city and surrounding landscape are notably flat, its skyline is pierced by soaring church towers and steeples, the atmospheric old town hardly changed over the centuries.

Thuringia – often called the “green heart of Germany” – lies in the centre of the country, between Hesse, Saxony and Bavaria. It’s famous for its dense forests, intellectual heritage and hearty cuisine, and I’m here for four days to explore using public transport.

Upgraded, cheaper AirPods have noise cancelling, sound and controls to rival many plugged-in buds but without tips

Apple’s latest AirPods set a new standard for open-fit buds with upgraded noise cancelling that now rivals many plugged-in designs of the same price.

The AirPods 5 have the same design the popular AirPods 4 offering an option for those that do not like silicone ear tips used by most noise cancelling earbuds. They come in two versions, with or without a wireless charging case and swipe controls, costing from £119 (€149/$129/A$219) – £10 cheaper than the launch price of their predecessors.

Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.3, SBC, AAC, H2 chip

Battery life: four or five hours with ANC (22 hours with case)

Water resistance: IP57 (up to 1 metre for 30 minutes)

Earbud dimensions: 30.2 x 18.3 x 18.1mm

Earbud weight: 4.3g each

Charging case dimensions: 46.2 x 50.1 x 21.2mm

Charging case weight: 32.3g/34.7g

Case charging: USB-C or wireless (Qi or Watch)

Our testers reflect on a year of discoveries, from family game nights to fewer chores

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It’s our birthday! So to celebrate turning two, we asked our contributors to reflect on their year of testing pretty much everything – from beauty products to video doorbells. It turns out they’ve had some unexpected wins along the way.

Some managed to tick an extra thing off their to-do list. “After six months of testing IPL devices, epilators and then IPL devices again, I had no need to book in for my usual pre-beach wax this summer,” says Lise Smith. Rachel Ogden says testing toasters has meant knowing her smoke alarm “works just fine”.

Our wholegrain hero sorts the wheat from the chaff in the search for a simple pleasure: a satisfying sandwich loaf

• The best supermarket sourdough

I’ve broken my strict, like-for-like approach this week in the interests of just finding a really good sliced wholemeal sandwich loaf. Alas, most of these are made to the standard Chorleywood process, with each one a cardboard replica of the other and with only nuanced differences. However, I did find two with exceptional flavour and one with a notably good, firm texture that’s ideal for spreading stuff on; to my surprise, several have an impressive lack of additives, too, and they all score well on value.

The Chorleywood process is an industrial method for making bread in just three and a half hours using high-speed mechanical processes and chemical additives. It was developed in the 1960s, and now accounts for about 80% of the bread made in the UK. If you’re looking for palm oil-free loaves with zero additives, emulsifiers or preservatives, sandwich loaves are hard to navigate, but there are some that fit the bill – just check the label.

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

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

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

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

• The best eye masks to help you sleep better

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

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

Roast chicken thighs with roast squash, leeks and two punchy dressings

I’m delighted that it’s roasting tin season once again, and what better way to kick it off than with this chuck-it-in-the-oven sticky miso chilli chicken with squash and leeks? The sesame, miso, garlic and ginger marinade can go on the chicken ahead of time if you like (in which case, I’d include a squeeze of lime juice), but if you’re short on time, five minutes before cooking will do the trick. The vegetables cook under the chicken, in the manner of potatoes sitting under a rotisserie chicken, but with the added hit of flavour from the miso. Then, to make it really sing, there’s a punchy sesame, chilli and coriander dressing to finish.

A pleasingly proper curry-filled pie with a zingy chutney to go with it

This is one of my all-time favourite pies, pie born out of the Midlands. While studying at University College Birmingham, the now head of department at the college of food there, Lewis Walker, and I were in digs together and regularly ended up in very late-night balti houses after big nights out. These pies remind me of that really special time. It wasn’t much before my university days when balti cooking emerged in 1970s Birmingham, apparently created as a way to appease the British palate of the time. Its roots are in Pakistani-Kashmiri cooking and the base of the curry always has to contain tomatoes, onions, peppers and chillies, although variations can be built on those foundations. They’re a wonderful celebration of multicultural Britain.

A spicy Turkish dish with big flavours and big pasta, all topped with garlicky yoghurt sauce

Biber salçası is a Turkish paste made from concentrated cooked red peppers and salt. It comes in two varieties: acı (spicy) and tatlı (sweet). The hotter version adds a deep, umami heat to cumin-spiced lamb in this pasta recipe, which in Turkey is known as markana. Traditionally, markana is served with garlicky yoghurt and a generous drizzle of chilli butter enlivened with pul biber and sumac. With flavours this loud, it’s best to use a large pasta shape such as paccheri, because its cavernous middles can hold satisfying morsels of the filling.

Flavour Heroes: 15 Modern Pantry Ingredients to Amplify Your Cooking, by Gurdeep Loyal, is published by Quadrille at £27. To order a copy for £24.30, go to guardianbookshop.com

A smooth and satisfying soup in nine easy steps

Pumpkin soup, so delicious in theory – sweet, velvety, lightly autumnal – is so often disappointing in reality. Thin in flavour and consistency, thanks to squash’s high water content, it’s likely to make even the most conscientious cook regret not chucking those Halloween offcuts on the compost heap when they had the chance. This, I hope it goes without saying, is not that sort of pumpkin soup.

Prep 20 min
Cook 1 hr
Serves 4-6

Struggling to breathe, so big she could barely walk, Pumpkin practically begged for help when we met. Before long I was taking her home

Pumpkin arrived at our animal shelter in March, after her owner passed away. As CEO and president of SPCA Cincinnati, I expect something heartbreaking when my team asks me to see an animal – perhaps they have been neglected or abused. Pumpkin was neither. She was dirty and had some fleas but that was not our concern. She was severely obese.

At 25lb (11.3kg), Pumpkin could barely move. Her legs were bowed from the weight and she walked with a waddle. Examining her wasn’t easy. Her breathing became so laboured that she turned blue.

An English teacher and a personal trainer disagreed on emissions targets, but how did they fare on public spending and defence?

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

Edward, 38, Bristol

Occupation English teacher at a secondary school

I was standing at the traffic lights with the weight of the world on my shoulders when a man approached. He will probably never know the impact he had on my life

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

My cousin had recently died in a terrible accident and I had been the one who had to identify the body. It was one of the darkest periods of my life, on seemingly every front: I was in the midst of a divorce; it was during the global financial crisis and the company I worked for was badly struggling, making every day feel heavy with uncertainty and stress. Everything was a mess and I was emotionally exhausted.

One morning during rush hour, I stood at the traffic lights waiting to cross on my way to the office. I was lost in my thoughts but must have looked like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, because something unexpected happened.

A sex podcast opened up a whole new way of communicating for Helen and Ian

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

I’ve discovered I like to be spanked – my orgasms have become much stronger

New post-Brexit rules mean that dual nationals cannot enter the UK unless they have a British passport

My teenage daughter is unable to see her grandparents because of the UK’s new requirement for dual nationals to hold a UK passport.

I’m a UK citizen, married to a French national, and we live in France. Our two older children have both French and UK passports. Our third child was born while we were living in Zimbabwe and only has a French passport.

Appointment or renewal reminder appears in victims’ calendar to lure them into logging in to fake Google, Microsoft or PayPal page

You’re preparing for the week ahead and take a look at your Google calendar. There’s an entry for a meeting that you must have completely forgotten. The note that pops up when you click on it says you’ll be reviewing a project and includes a link to more details. Confused, you follow it to find out more; the website you land on asks for logon details, and you provide them.

Unfortunately, this was not a failure of your memory but a calendar phishing scam. You have handed your name and password to fraudsters who will sell it on in a batch with other people’s details, use it to break into your work email, or to persuade you that they are contacting you from your bank, or another institution.

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

Finance expert launches Small Ideas Initiative to gather ‘practical, low-cost’ ideas to put before cross-party panel

Every day, people run into what the finance expert Martin Lewis calls “the life-potholes of unintended consequences” – clunky systems and poorly conceived rules that make life harder than it should be. His latest project, the Small Ideas Initiative, will attempt to address that, with a cross-party panel of politicians and policymakers crowdsourcing ideas for everyday fixes to take to government.

The ideas could cover anything from health and schools to policing, tech and money. Lewis is encouraging people to submit ideas for “practical, low-cost, non-controversial ways to improve the UK” before 12 November.

If you take a break from the gym you may lose muscle and gain fat, but it isn’t as simple as one turning into the other

‘This is not true,” says Prof Leigh Breen, a specialist in muscle physiology at the University of Leicester. But it’s a statement he hears a lot, particularly from people who have taken a long break from exercise. “They’ll often refer to the notion that their muscles have ‘softened’ or don’t feel as toned.”

The reality is that there’s no biochemistry linking the two types of tissue. Muscle and fat are distinct. “There’s no known process in the human body that would support muscle turning into fat, or vice versa,” says Breen.

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

The incident is the latest to raise questions about the growing reliance on digital maps for wilderness navigation

The route up the Widowmaker Arete, a 1,700ft wall in British Columbia, is deceptively described as “mostly easy slab climbing”, interspersed with “short steep sections that can include finger cracks” and “blocky face climbing”. It requires careful planning, and the right equipment.

When 16-year-old Bryce Vincent Gowryluk found himself facing its sheer headwall last week, he had neither. He did, however, ask the AI chatbot Claude for directions.

With cancer cases rising fastest in poorer countries, Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu, president-elect of the Union for International Cancer Control, says Africa needs investment in research, diagnosis and prevention

When Dr Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu last saw Gloria in Abuja, the young breast cancer patient was so ill that she was in hospital. The cancer had spread to her bones and lungs, and she was struggling with complications from the disease.

Then, at a global conference on cancer thousands of miles away in Hong Kong last month, Bagudu saw her again. Gloria was walking with a stick because of the cancer in her hips, but she was attending sessions, speaking about her experience and advocating for other patients.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Burton’s sporty, daffodil mesh dress made me smile. But the reason I chose it for Fashion Museum Bath is because it tells the story of our times, when bodies are more political than ever

One morning in February this year, I opened my laptop to find an email with an all-caps subject line: TOP SECRET. Being a fashion editor can be exciting but state secrets are not generally my beat, so I was intrigued. Sure enough, it was a thrill: an invitation from the Fashion Museum Bath to choose their Dress of the Year for 2025.

What an honour. Dress of the Year began in 1963, the brainchild of the museum’s founder Doris Langley Moore, as a way of keeping a static collection perpetually current. Each year a fashion expert picks an outfit or outfits that capture the year just gone, and these become part of the permanent collection. There is a Mary Quant dress and a Katharine Hamnett slogan T-shirt, Ossie Clark chiffon and Ralph Lauren pinstripes. There is sublime beauty from the catwalks of Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel and John Galliano, and pieces of cultural history: McQueen’s bumsters, Jennifer Lopez’s internet-breaking green Versace Grammy dress, Dior’s “We Should All Be Feminists” slogan, Naomi Campbell’s pandemic hazmat suit, a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, and the dress worn by the Duchess of Sussex for her Oprah interview in 2021. “Dress” is interpreted loosely, in the sense of clothing rather than a frock: the lineup includes men’s suits. The Bath museum is currently mid-revamp, having closed its doors in 2022, with construction soon to start on a new museum set to open in the city’s old post office in 2030. Meanwhile the collection is stored in Wiltshire and can be seen online.

Smaller and less visited than Como and Garda, Lake Iseo harbours a gorgeous car-free island ideal for easy-going cycling and sightseeing

Rust red and burnt sienna speckle the green mountain rising from Lake Iseo. Golden autumn sunlight shimmers on the water. Monte Isola, Italy’s largest lake island, is a peak of sheer cliffs and dense forest, dotted with old fishing hamlets and hillside villages, each as pretty as the terraced villas of Lake Como and Garda, but with far fewer visitors. I arrive at the small port town of Peschiera Maraglio – where striped wooden boats jut from the water like the gondolas of Venice – on a ferry from Sulzano, a five-minute hop across the water.

“Only three people on the island are allowed to own a car: the priest, the doctor and the mayor,” says Chiara, my tour guide from Brescia. Residents can zip up and down the steep island roads on mopeds, and a small fleet of van-sized buses trundle around throughout the day, but nearly all cars are forbidden and visitors have to explore on foot or bike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just 19% of the online encyclopedia’s biographies are of women. Is this because it’s edited by ‘mostly white, middle-aged, European men’, as the comedian claims?

Name: Wikipedia.

Age: 25.

Life had come crashing to a halt when I lost my brother. But in the cinema I found comfort and a strange solidarity

In 2022, my younger brother drowned in an accident. His death reset life as I knew it. I had been offered my first proper job; I didn’t take it. I was planning to move out; I stayed at home. At this critical juncture, with my foot on the pedal, ready to enter adult life, everything exploded.

At home, there were now three of us. We orbited separate corners of the house, each needing a different thing for comfort: for my mum, exercise; for my dad, music; for me, escape.

The solutions to today’s puzzles

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

The round table

A giant screen, big battery, rapid chip and top cameras push the great iPhone 18 Pro to the max with a price tag to match

Apple’s largest Pro iPhone gets its biggest battery upgrade yet to make it a true two-day phone with new Siri AI and a variable aperture camera.

The iPhone 18 Pro Max is the supersized sibling of the regular 18 Pro and, though it is no longer Apple’s most expensive phone thanks to the £2,000 iPhone Duo, it has a similarly large price tag to match costing from £1,299 (€1,599/$1,299/A$2,299).

Screen: 6.9in Super Retina XDR (120Hz OLED) (460ppi)

Processor: Apple A20 Pro

RAM: 12GB

Storage: 256, 512GB or 1TB

Operating system: iOS 27

Camera: 48MP + 48MP UW + 48MP 4x, 18MP front-facing

Connectivity: 5G, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6, Thread, USB-C, Satellite, UWB and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins)

Dimensions: 163.4 x 78 x 8.75mm

Weight: 249g

A teenager struggling with climate anxiety searches for hope in an unexpected place – writing letters to imprisoned activists. Max, 14, is on a quest to understand the human stories behind direct action and why so many climate protesters are in prison​. As replies begin to arrive, a dialogue bridging generations unfolds and connection transforms despair into purpose. ​When Max writes to the judge presiding over a high-profile trial​, he is surprised to hear the letter referred to in the judge's closing remarks

After Susan Brison was raped and left for dead, her husband, Thomas, did his best to support her. They are still together, while many relationships collapse after a sexual assault. What did he get right – and wrong? And why did she want him to write about her ordeal?

On a hot, still, silent noon, at a junction of dirt roads in rural France, Thomas Trezise stood scanning the horizon, looking and listening for his wife. He tried to soothe a deep foreboding. Susan Brison had headed out for a morning walk two hours ago. How could she be gone so long?

This was 4 July 1990, the start of what was meant to be a busy summer. Trezise and Brison were both assistant professors in the US – he in French at Princeton and Brison in philosophy at Dartmouth – and had just arrived at the remote farmhouse of Trezise’s French colleague. Life seemed packed with promise. “I’d found someone with whom I really wanted to spend my life and I just felt very, very lucky,” says Trezise. “Susan and I had fallen quickly and deeply in love – it was magical – and at that point, we were also trying to conceive a child. We loved being in France. I kind of felt I’d found my way. It was a good place … until it happened.”

Naffah Naffah makes the bells in the mountains near Beirut. His sons will take over the foundry when he retires

The story of Lebanon’s last remaining church-bell maker begins with a rifle. In the 18th century, Youssef Gabriel, a local metalworker, was secretly making and equipping Arab revolutionaries with rifles to assist their revolt against the Ottoman empire, which controlled Lebanon at the time.

Then, one day, a Russian engineer came to the Lebanese town of Beit Chabab to make a church bell. Gabriel, intrigued, shadowed the man and picked up the process on sight.

Could a drug intended to prevent painful rashes also protect our brains as we get older? The signs are promising – but not conclusive. Yet that’s enough to be driving a boom in shingles jabs

When Jenny, a 50-year-old marketing and branding professional from Cambridge, went for her shingles vaccine last year, an entirely different disease was on her mind. Having witnessed three of her four grandparents succumb to dementia, with all the distress that brought, she wants to avoid the same fate. She hopes the shingles vaccine might help.

Jenny is far from alone. Britain’s high street chemists have reported a rise in demand for the shingles vaccine, at least some of which is driven by people more worried about dementia than shingles. And while the vaccine is free for some on the NHS, most under-65s pay around £450 for the full two doses.

We would like to hear from young people in the UK about their experiences of looking for work

About 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in employment, education or training (Neet), according to a report published in May, which warned that the figure could rise to 1.25 million by the early 2030s without urgent government action.

Alan Milburn, the leader of the review into why so many young people are economically inactive, said the UK risked opening up a “generational fault line” between young and old without urgent steps to overhaul schools, the health service, the welfare system and the jobs market.

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

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

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

Our business, labor and consumer rights reporters will answer your questions in a live Q&A on Thursday 15 October

The US economy is top of voters’ minds ahead of the November midterms with food and gas prices remaining high, the job market unstable, consumers angrier than ever, and a new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, in place.

We’ll be hosting a live midterm election Q&A on Thursday 15 October 2026 at 12pm EDT on the Guardian US site with a panel of our business, labor and consumer rights reporters: Lauren Aratani, Michael Sainato, Heather Timmons and Gaya Gupta. The team will cover cost of living challenges, tariffs, inflation and new federal policy proposals from local candidates.

Will the Iran war cost Trump in the US midterm elections? Your questions answered

Who are the groups financially backing the candidates in the midterms?

The makeup of the Democratic party, plus key races to watch

We’d like to hear from people who have been monitored or assessed by AI at work and what they thought about the experience

Firms are increasingly using AI to monitor or assess their employees, leading to concerns about workplace surveillance.

Instructors at tech training company Multiverse recently blew the whistle at their “remorseless” and “unnerving” AI monitoring system, while The Co-Op has used automated listening technology that rates every phone call some of them make to customers.

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