At the height of Covid, hundreds of cancer patients had mastectomies without the reconstruction that would normally accompany them. They would eventually get the surgery, they were told – but for many that promise feels more meaningless by the day

Every time she lifts her arms to get dressed or hang out her washing, Julie Ford gets a painful reminder of one of the most terrifying experiences of her life. At 7am one day in April 2021, she had gone into hospital, alone and wearing a mask, to have her right breast and lymph nodes removed in a bid to stop breast cancer from spreading. Later that day, still groggy from the anaesthetic, in pain and with surgical drains hanging from both sides of her chest, she had staggered to the door with the help of two nurses. She was eased into a friend’s car and driven home to fend for herself.

While Julie’s breast had been removed, it was not reconstructed. Usually, both procedures are carried out in the same operation. But as reconstruction using tissue from the patient’s abdomen is a complex, eight-hour procedure requiring a large surgical team, it was considered “non-essential” and paused by most NHS trusts during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tom Watson wants to fill in the creek in front. The Golden Bear says play safe if the pin is on the right. McIlroy defied the conventional wisdom and won

There’s hot, and then there’s the back nine on Sunday at Augusta when there are five players within two shots of the lead. The TV weathermen reckoned it was 30C but then they weren’t down at Amen Corner when Rory McIlroy was standing on the tee at Augusta National’s 12th hole, that little rinky-dink 155-yard par three, tied for the lead and waiting for the wind to drop long enough that he could get his shot off. Four days ago, they asked Tom Watson what was the one change he’d make to this golf course if he could. Watson didn’t blink. “I’d fill in that creek in front of No 12.”

“Touché” said Gary Player.

What a relief that this is the end for Sam Levison’s grim drama. A show which was once blackly funny is now humourless torture porn

To say that season three of Euphoria is long-awaited would be something of an understatement. HBO’s high school drama debuted in 2019, when it garnered a fanfare of attention with its heady mix of grinding trauma, heavenly eyeshadows and cheap/daring (delete as appropriate) feats, including a locker room scene starring 30 penises. In the years since, it cemented itself as a show with much to say about gen Z’s relationship to sex, drugs and mental health, and pushed Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney and former Disney teenybopper Zendaya to the A-list. It has also released a mere 18 episodes in that time, a victim of everything from the Covid pandemic to the Los Angeles fires. Like a new Rihanna album, Euphoria season three has – in time – become shorthand for a pop culture mirage that would maybe, possibly arrive sometime before 2030. At least, we hoped, before most of the cast were in their 30s.

Excitement, too, has waned over time. Rumours of rifts between the cast and creator Sam Levinson have only grown since its return was confirmed last autumn, and the press tour that followed has had a distinct flavour of “contractual obligation” about it (social media posts from the cast were few and far between, while Zendaya, in an interview with Variety, ambiguously described filming as a “whirlwind”). It brings me no pleasure, then, to report that, based on the three episodes released for review, Euphoria’s third (and probably final) run was absolutely not worth the wait. It’s a grubby, humourless work of torture porn that’s obsessed with and repulsed by sex work.

For its inaugural show, the V&A’s east London outpost is celebrating 125 years of Black music-making in Britain. We asked top performers to pick their favourite exhibit

Goldie: Kemistry and Storm (The Diptych) by Eddie Otchere (1995)

The prime minister’s meal in a Yunnan restaurant in Beijing has spawned a national menu. The man has, bizarrely, become a phenomenon

It’s always heartening when people agree with you. I had Keir Starmer down as a non-ideological technocratic centrist dad the moment I first clocked him, with a tin ear for both simple human interaction and the darker subtleties of the political arts. So despite carrying his famous “Ming vase” over the line in the 2024 election, I’ve been wholly unsurprised by him flatfooting and pratfalling through jagged shards of porcelain ever since, living down to all my worst fears. Now absolutely everybody else thinks he’s crap too.

Or so I thought, until a family visit to China last month, when I established a connection beyond mythical Ming vases. The “Keir Starmer menu” has become a foodie phenomenon.

Martin Rowson is a cartoonist and author

Ludwig Koch was once as influential as David Attenborough is today – a new film by his granddaughter sheds light on a tragic event in the naturalist’s life in Berlin before he fled the Nazis

In his lifetime, pioneering German sound recordist Ludwig Koch’s heavily accented voice was as familiar to British audiences as David Attenborough’s is today. His tireless passion for capturing birdsong and bringing it first into German and, after his exile from Nazi Germany, British homes via sound books and BBC radio, made him a household name from the late 1930s onwards.

He was celebrated beyond his life, parodied by Peter Sellers (playing Koch observing life at a Glasgow traffic junction) and immortalised in Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1980 novel Human Voices, about the wartime BBC, which depicts Koch’s assiduous approach to capturing natural sounds and indirectly highlights how the organisation benefited from new voices like his.

Péter Magyar’s Tisza party wins election as prime minister concedes defeat, in result likely to reshape ties with EU

• ‘Hungary has chosen Europe’: EU leaders jubilant after Magyar’s victory

Hungary’s opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has won the election, bringing an end to Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power, in a result that is likely to rattle the White House and reshape the country’s relationship with the EU.

Less than three hours after polls closed on Sunday, Orbán conceded defeat after what he described as a “painful but unambiguous” election result.

Centcom says blockade to begin at 10am ET; US president says ‘I don’t care if they come back or not’

• Full report: Trump says US will blockade strait of Hormuz after Iran peace talks fail

• Planeloads of negotiators and too little time: US and Iran’s 21 hours of talks

Circling back to Donald Trump’s coming naval blockade, the US military said it would block all Iranian Gulf ports on Monday at 10am ET on Monday (5.30pm in Iran and 1400 GMT), effectively seizing control of maritime traffic in the strait of Hormuz.

“The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman,” US Central Command said on X.

This is like a game of chicken. It’s who caves first. The Iranian regime is hoping that Trump will cave. Today, he showed he’s not.”

Exclusive: MPs say profit-making levels in England are ‘scandalous’ and call for cap on amount private companies can make from NHS

Private firms providing services to the NHS including healthcare and consultancy have made £1.6bn in profits over the last two years, research reveals.

The findings – on the basis of contracts worth £12bn – have prompted claims of “scandalous” profiteering, concern that the health service is being “taken for a ride” and calls for ministers to impose a cap on maximum profit levels.

£2bn of the £12bn of contracts went to firms with owners based outside the UK.

£533m of that £2bn went to companies owned by people living in tax havens such as Jersey and the Cayman Islands.

Firms, especially those owned by private equity outfits, used £353m of their £12bn NHS income to pay interest on debts.

Exclusive: Ministers planning new legislation for alignment without full parliamentary scrutiny if in national interest

Ministers are planning to fundamentally reshape Britain’s relationship with the European Union, with new legislation that could result in the UK signing up to EU single market rules without a normal parliamentary vote.

In a major development in the prime minister’s push for closer ties with the continent after the Iran war, the Guardian understands ministers are bracing to face down opposition to “dynamic alignment” with the EU from those who “scream treason” over the powers in a new EU-UK reset bill.

Researchers say hardship is a direct legacy of welfare benefit cuts imposed by Tory governments in recent years

More than a fifth of all “austerity generation” British children have been scarred by poverty for at least half their childhood, a direct legacy of the welfare benefit cuts imposed by Conservative governments in recent years, research reveals.

The proportion of children born after 2013 who spent at least six of their first 11 years of life in hardship surged after ministers froze working age benefits levels and imposed policies such as the two-child limit, it found.

President says US-born pope is ‘not doing a very good job’ and is ‘a very liberal person’ in unprecedented assault on leader of Catholic church

President Donald Trump has delivered an extraordinary broadside against Pope Leo XIV, saying he didn’t think the US-born leader of the Catholic church was “doing a very good job” and that he was “a very liberal person”, while also suggesting the pontiff should “stop catering to the Radical Left”.

Flying back to Washington from Florida on Sunday night, Trump used a lengthy social media post to sharply criticise Leo, then kept it up in comments on the tarmac to reporters.

West End spectacular about beloved bear wins seven prizes, while Rachel Zegler, Rosamund Pike and Paapa Essiedu all recognised

• Olivier awards 2026: full list of winners

It was a night of sweet victory for Michael Bond’s marmalade-loving bear as Paddington: The Musical dominated the Olivier awards on Sunday. Amid the tuxes and gowns of a glittering ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the duffle coat-wearing bear got his sticky paws all over seven prizes including best new musical.

The award for best actor in a musical went to the duo who play Paddington: James Hameed provides the lovable hero’s voice and is the remote puppeteer, while Arti Shah performs in the furry costume. The show’s baddies, Tom Edden (as the busybody Mr Curry) and Victoria Hamilton-Barritt (as Millicent Clyde, who wants Paddington to literally get stuffed), won best supporting actor and best supporting actress in a musical respectively. Luke Sheppard was named best director for the production, which also picked up awards for costume design (Gabriella Slade and Tahra Zafar) and set design (Tom Pye and Ash J Woodward).

Officials grant Grade II* protection to ‘rare building that raises more questions than it answers’

It is an elite list with some of the most significant and beautiful buildings and structures in England, including Battersea power station, Middlesbrough’s Transporter Bridge and the London Coliseum.

Now the Grade II* landmarks are being joined by a mysterious, limestone rubble “barn” on a grassy knoll in the Lake District, which was most recently used as a shelter for sheep and cows.

• 2025 winner joins Nicklaus, Faldo and Woods in retaining title

• He triumphs on 12 under by one shot from Scottie Scheffler

You are left wondering how on earth Augusta National managed to inflict such psychological torture on Rory McIlroy for all those years. Or maybe that is precisely the point, that ­McIlroy’s ending of his Masters hoodoo in 2025 placed him into a fresh head space where failure is not an option. It turns out Green Jackets are like London buses. Back in Augusta, where he became only the sixth man in history to complete a career grand slam, McIlroy entered the record books once more. He is now the fourth golfer to successfully defend the Masters, after Jack ­Nicklaus, Nick Faldo and Tiger Woods. As a six-time major winner, he has surpassed Seve Ballesteros.

What next, Rory? He could walk on Rae’s Creek. McIlroy’s latest Masters triumph arrived with the 36-year-old considerably short of his best for much of the tournament. That only emphasises his excellence.

US Navy to impose blockade today in bid to choke off flow of Iranian oil

• Explainer: strait of Hormuz blockade

• Business live – latest updates

Oil prices have jumped back above $100 a barrel after weekend talks between the US and Iran ended without an agreement and Donald Trump imposed a blockade of the strait of Hormuz.

The US president announced the blockade on Sunday, targeting Iranian vessels and ships that have paid a toll to Iran for passage through the strait, in an attempt to choke off the flow of Iranian oil.

UK’s willingness to consider role in removing mines from strait is seen as distinct from Trump’s blockade proposal

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The UK will not be involved in any blockade of the strait of Hormuz, the Guardian understands, after claims by Donald Trump on Sunday that the US would be blockading the waterway with the assistance of Nato allies.

Speaking to Fox News, Trump said “it won’t take long to clean out the strait” and claimed “numerous countries are going to be helping us”, adding that the UK and other nations were sending minesweepers.

The two sides turned up to test one another’s resolve. It was probably unrealistic to expect a dispute that has taken up years of discussion to be settled in one marathon session

• Middle East crisis – live updates

It was as if the two delegations in the Iran-US peace talks in Islamabad hoped that the sheer number of negotiators flown into Pakistan could overcome the handicap of having only a finite number of hours in which to settle a 20-year dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, now overlaid by complex new issues such as future control of the strait of Hormuz and US compensation for its attack on Iran.

Iran sent two planeloads of negotiators. They included many members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), present to ensure that no gains made in the field were relinquished at the diplomatic table. Diplomats fanned out across political, legal, security, economic and military files. One Iranian-drafted technical explanation on nuclear facility safety ran to more than 100 pages.

Demand at online marketplaces could settle at a new, higher normal, with the crisis leaving consumers ‘scarred’

Car buyers’ interest in electric cars has surged across Europe since the start of the war in Iran, as the rising cost of petrol highlights the cheaper power available from a plug.

Online marketplaces in the UK, Germany, France and Spain reported huge increases in inquiries about electric vehicles since the start of the conflict in February.

Late-night gallery tours and new venues signal a city staking its claim as a regional arts capital

On a recent weekday evening, the doors of more than a dozen galleries and museums across Abidjan stayed open till midnight, several hours later than usual, as art enthusiasts went around town on a bus tour. It was the Night of the Galleries, designed for people to drop in after work and enjoy Abidjan art week to the fullest.

The after-hours special showcase was first tested in January 2024 on the sidelines of the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament hosted and won by Côte d’Ivoire. The tradition continued this year during the art week’s third edition, which ran from last Tuesday to Sunday.

As government reorganisation ties part of the forest to Southampton, local people are angry

Della Keable could not hold back the tears as she explained how her family had lived in the forest for centuries, making a living among the trees, loving the tight-knit feel of the place. “I’m sorry,” she said as the emotion got too much. “But the forest is part of our souls.”

Keable is among thousands of people protesting against the UK government’s decision to split up the administration of the New Forest as part of local government reorganisation.

Swedish retailer continued to advertise partnership with Soly and failed to offer me any advice

I am one of many left thousands of pounds out of pocket after signing up for solar panels via Ikea’s website late last year.

Ikea had partnered with the European installer Soly, and the fact the panels were being advertised via such a well-known company gave us confidence.

Good wine, cheap tapas, ramshackle decor and a sense of history are the key ingredients of these Madrileño institutions. I went on a bar crawl to find my favourite

The first hurdle to overcome when searching for the Spanish capital’s top bodegas is the correct interpretation of the word “bodega”. It is defined as a warehouse, winery, wine cellar and wine shop or bar specialising in wine. In Spanish slang it can also mean a convenience store.

I asked several people working in the Madrid wine trade, and they all struggled to define exactly what a bodega is – and sometimes disagreed with each other. For example, while La Bodega de los Reyes fits the description because it has a wine cellar, a nearby bar owner said it couldn’t be classed as a bodega as it was just a wine shop.

After the death of his husband, Antony Sher, the former RSC director embarks on a quest to see every First Folio

This is really two books in one. The first part consists of the diaries written by Antony Sher in the six months before his death from liver cancer in December 2021. The second, longer part is a record by his husband and partner of 35 years, Greg Doran, of an obsessive quest to see as many of the more than 200 extant copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio as possible. Taken together, the two parts amount to a very moving record of one person’s confrontation with death and of his partner’s attempt to cope with survival.

Sher, in his multiple roles as actor, artist and writer, was always a shrewd observer, and what he called The Dying Diaries show a characteristic mix of candour, resilience and wit. He doesn’t minimise the horror and writes at one point that “this cancer thing is like a bomb in our household”, which sits there unobtrusively and goes off at unexpected moments. But he also confronts it with wry humour. When he discovers that the two lesions in his liver are the size of a satsuma and a walnut, he thinks that might make a good title for his diaries. Reflecting on the fact that the last play he did, Kunene and the King by John Kani, was about an old South African Shakespearean actor dying of liver cancer, he adds: “Who says that actors don’t take their roles home with them?” And although his last days are grim, what comes across is his and Doran’s shared delight in many things, from wildlife to tapes of the US comedian Jackie Mason, and their unshakeable love for each other.

The two comedians tour the world in search of overpriced attractions, dodgy food – and trips you really wouldn’t want to go on

The last thing the world needs is another celebrity travelogue. You have to assume that the genre that gave us Coastal Railways with Julie Walters and Rob Brydon’s Honky Tonk Road Trip is commissioned by drawing names and places out of two tombola drums.

The celebrity travelogue is smug. The celebrity travelogue is lazy. The celebrity travelogue insults our intelligence like little else. And so it is with a mixture of delight and horror that I announce that this one isn’t bad. Zero Stars is a rare exception to the form, mixing a novel premise with bearable hosts.

Having diverse microbes in the gut has been promoted as a way to boost immunity, but studies suggest it’s more complicated than that

The trillions of microorganisms that live in and on our bodies – known as the microbiome – have been hailed as the key to better immunity. “Lots of studies correlate the types of bacteria in your microbiome with health and disease across almost every mental and physical condition,” says Prof Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London and the author of Self Defence: A Myth-busting Guide to Immune Health. “But most of that evidence is correlative, and we still need to understand exactly how the microbiome affects health.”

Scientists often look at one measure: diversity. In other words, how many different species of microbes live in the gut. “The more diverse your microbiome is, the more it seems to correlate with not being ill.”

We were told we couldn’t take a joke, and that social media isn’t real life. Now the misogyny of early chatrooms and Gamergate has reached the White House

Why has it taken so long for us to treat misogyny as a political problem? The modern manosphere has been metastasising for many years – and for years, mainstream culture has responded with a helpless shrug. There was nothing unusual about men hurting women, even if the technology was new.

In the early aughts, angry and alienated men began indulging in recreational misogyny online, bombarding women and girls in the public eye with threats, insults, harassment, hacking, and hideous “revenge porn”. Strange as it may now sound, though, “the internet” was still seen as separate from “real life”.

Laurie Penny is a journalist, author and screenwriter. They write the substack Force of Culture

The king has the chance to offer some tough love. Perhaps he could start with a speech to Congress about the Trump administration’s reckless trajectory

It will be a definitive moment for King Charles III and the British monarchy. And for better or worse, it could help salvage UK-US relations after Donald Trump insulted Keir Starmer. In the public high point of his state visit, the king will mount the rostrum in the US House of Representatives on 28 April to address a joint session of Congress. Of all the British monarchs in the 250 years since US independence, only his late mother, Elizabeth II, was afforded this rare honour – and her accomplished 1991 performance brought the house down. This time could be more tricky.

Times have changed, as has the land of the free, and the biggest change is Trump. He will not be present on Capitol Hill when the king speaks, but his dark shadow lurks everywhere. Trump will undoubtedly portray Charles’s attendance at a separate White House state banquet as a royal endorsement of his person and policies. And it is precisely this galling prospect of a presidential propaganda coup that has led most people in Britain to oppose the visit. Starmer, in contrast, hopes it will set the badly soiled “special relationship” back on track.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment

The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us – nuclear stockpile monitoring, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism – are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. A different kind of protection that consists of public health, vaccination programs, food safety, clean air and water, social services, civil rights and the rule of law is also under attack. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the federal government that serves the Trump agenda and the oligarchy is glutting itself on taxpayer money, including the grotesque sums dumped on the Department of Homeland Security and the US military now being warped into Pete Hegseth’s twisted vision of a ruthless mercenary force. Hegseth has reportedly stood in the way of promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her newest book is The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

I’ve just watched another of my neighbours rip up everything green and growing around their home. It’s enough to make David Attenborough weep

It’s noisy outside. I forget over winter how loud the garden gets when the imperatives of shagging, fighting for territory, then raising babies become urgent – the sparrows are kicking off, the tits are fighting a turf war and competing wood pigeons are cooing to seduce Susan, the escaped wedding dove who lives on our roof. When I sat in the sun yesterday, the industrious buzz of bees tackling the dregs of cherry blossom was lawnmower-loud, accompanied by “back off” peeps from blackbirds nesting in the ivy.

There was another noise too, though: the rumble of a mini-digger ripping up a nearby garden. They started with the hedge – I thought, actually, that was all they were going to do, because it happens around here a lot. It would have been the third case I’ve spotted in a matter of weeks. The first was proudly pointed out to me by the owner; the second I only saw in the aftermath – a bare row of jagged stumps where there used to be dense leaves. But this time, I realised they had bigger plans: when the hedge was out, they kept digging, clearing away bushes, plants, trees, every inch of anything that ever lived there. By evening, all that remained was a scraped-back trench of bare earth and a skip full of uprooted branches, skeins of ivy, clumps of grass. In the space of one beautiful warm April day, what used to be a garden is not any more.

A new study finds that having children leaves your emotional wellbeing unchanged – but the truth is so much more complicated than that

Does having children make you happier? Apparently not, according to a new study published in Evolutionary Psychology which, despite involving more than 5,000 participants in 10 countries, including Britain, could find no strong evidence that parenthood led to a measurable increase in positive emotions. The researchers, led by Menelaos Apostolou of the University of Nicosia, looked at both hedonic wellbeing (day-to-day emotional states such as joy, sadness and loneliness) and eudaimonic wellbeing (a feeling of purpose and meaning). With the exception of mothers in Greece, who felt a greater sense of the latter, there was no statistically significant difference between parents and non-parents, suggesting that becoming a parent leaves your emotional wellbeing largely unchanged.

This was seen as surprising, but is it, truly? I love my son and being his mother has given my life great joy and meaning, but that is not to say that my life has more joy and meaning than that of someone without children. To an extent, comparing my life as a mother with the life of a stranger without children is meaningless: children are not appendages whose presence or absence reveal a static emotional state. The only way you could truly get the data would be by having access to the two timelines. In one, you had children, in the other, you didn’t. The parallel selves would each complete a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) questionnaire which could then be compared.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

I have seen up close the fallout of the disastrous policing decisions May made as home secretary. We urgently need to restore the force to what it once was

• Dal Babu is a former chief superintendent in the Metropolitan police

No, the world isn’t going to hell in a handcart. But yes, a good many items are being stolen – in plain view, with apparent impunity – from the shelves at Tesco, M&S and all the major high-street stores.

It’s a huge loss for the shops, and as political types discuss whether Britain is broken, a hot potato: a coming-to-a-store-near-you symbol of a nation in which so many feel that law and order is just a US cop show on Channel 5.

Dal Babu is a former chief superintendent in the Metropolitan police

A mass movement defending immigrants has slowed the Trump administration’s abuses

Resistance, in physics, is the force that hinders the flow of charged electrons as they zigzag from point to point. Resistance doesn’t stop the flow of electricity. Instead, it causes heat.

Popular resistance works the same way. It obstructs and slows the government’s business, creating political heat and slowing it further.

An American blockade in the strait of Hormuz raises energy-market dangers after failed negotiations – pushing a fragile ceasefire closer to collapse

As the US vice-president, JD Vance, took to a podium in Pakistan after 21 hours of diplomacy and said no deal had been reached to end the war with Iran, his boss Donald Trump was in Miami watching a mixed martial arts fight. The contrast was stark. Just when the outcome of a war and the stability of global markets hung in the balance, the president chose spectacle over engagement. Mr Trump may intend to project strength. But the impression he creates – in Tehran and among America’s allies – is of a president less interested in the substance of diplomacy than in the politics surrounding it.

The talks in Islamabad didn’t fail accidentally; the US and Iran were talking past each other. Washington’s position is that Iran must abandon its capacity to develop a nuclear weapon, while Tehran insists it is not seeking one and has the right to a civilian nuclear programme. The US vice-president’s “final and best offer” would have required Iran to give up that capacity altogether – terms that looked less like the basis of a negotiation than an attempt to impose the conditions of victory.

In both Republican and Democratic states, scepticism and hostility towards an unregulated construction boom is growing

When blue-collar Trump voters and Maga-friendly midwest states join the same cause as Bernie Sanders and liberal California teachers, something novel is afoot. Last month it was the turn of the Republican party in Texas to express forthright opposition to the construction of datacentres for artificial intelligence, pending adequate environmental safeguards for local communities. Across the United States, similar campaigns are being waged, as voters from across the political spectrum rail against the outsize influence and power of big tech.

For the White House, which has made the rapid rollout of datacentres a priority in its AI action plan, the scale of the protests is an unwelcome surprise. One of Donald Trump’s first acts on returning to office was to authorise the deregulated “build, baby, build” approach demanded by the Silicon Valley backers who helped to fund his campaign. Industry giants such Amazon and Microsoft are driving an estimated $710bn worth of investment in datacentres this year, as they stake their future on staying ahead in the AI race.

Readers respond to Reform UK’s threat to deny visas to citizens of countries seeking compensation for slavery

It is not necessary to agree with the slavery reparations movement in order to see through the crude and threadbare logic of Zia Yusuf’s tirade against it (Reform UK would stop visas for people from countries seeking slavery reparations, 7 April). Britain’s prominent role in ending the slave trade and subsequently slavery neither absolves its involvement in those enterprises nor erases their effects. Endless reiteration of it does, however, encourage a sentimental attachment to a single, insular version of history.

Similarly, to claim that advocates for reparations are using history “as a weapon to drain our treasury” is a wilful misrepresentation, designed to jolt the indignant reflexes of Reform UK supporters too lazy to engage with extensive argument.

James Kyle responds to an article by Keir Starmer on supporting the less well off in society

For the most part in his recent article (Workers, pensioners and children: all better off. Ignore the critics – we really are standing up for working people, 5 April), Keir Starmer rightly flags up the introduction of policies supporting the less well off in this society. However, I believe it was an ill-considered move to include the statement about increasing the state pension. As a pensioner I am not seeing a straightforward improvement and instead seeing a policy that is reducing the benefit of those increases.

The triple lock, established by a Conservative–Liberal Democrat government in 2010, was designed to ensure that pensioners who had made tax and national insurance contributions throughout their working lives did not see their pension watered down. However, under the current approach this is actually being undermined. The outcome of freezing the personal allowance means that a significant and increasing proportion of pensioners, based on pension-related income alone, will have to pay tax, thus offsetting the intended benefit of the triple lock. This is made worse for any pensioner with even a small amount of additional income, and will become more burdensome as the personal allowance freeze continues into subsequent years.

As Stella Creasy’s experience shows, these encounters follow a pattern typically comprising seven elements, writes Dr Susan Watson

Reading Stella Creasy’s piece about the online abuse she received after sharing an image of herself enjoying a silent disco in her constituency filled me with a mix of anger and weary understanding (When I get abused just for dancing, it shows how far hatred of politicians has gone, 7 April).

My own research in this area, which now spans almost a decade, has consistently shown that women working across the public sphere are targeted with misogynistic online abuse, and that what happens in digital spaces echoes other forms of gender‑based violence.

Jess Bassett was frustrated to find chips with everything on a recent holiday, but Brittany Ferries’ offering on the return trip was a delightful surprise

Ellie Violet Bramley’s efforts to find the perfect kids menu resonated deeply with me as a mum just back from a trip to France, where every child’s option was nuggets, burger or fish with chips (‘Before I can stop her, my daughter is licking crumbs from the table’: my search for the perfect kids’ menu, 7 April).

Perhaps naively, I’d imagined a better offering from our French counterparts, but staying in a popular ski resort at Easter, I concluded that maybe they knew who they were catering for.

De Zerbi looks past Simons, Arsenal fans are not helping their team and Ngumoha can give PSG something to think about

Football is such that, when you’re down, there’s a good chance the game boots you in the solar plexus, and that’s exactly what happened to Tottenham at the Stadium of Light, Sunderland’s winner coming by way of a deflection. But you can also take steps to help yourself and, though Roberto De Zerbi’s midfield setup made some sense – he picked three hard-runners in order to compete with Sunderland’s physicality – even pre-match, it wasn’t clear who would create their chances. It’s true that Dejan Kulusevski, James Maddison and Mohammed Kudus are out injured, but in that context, it is surely even more important a place in the XI, whether in midfield or out wide, be found for Xavi Simons, left on the sidelines until the 85th minute. Simons is not perfect, but of the players De Zerbi has available he is the only one with the imagination and technique to make things happen. He may lack physicality, but what Spurs need more than anything is quality. Daniel Harris

Match report: Sunderland 1-0 Tottenham

Match report: Arsenal 1-2 Bournemouth

Match report: Chelsea 0-3 Manchester City

City improve in good weather, says Guardiola

• Northern Irishman vows not to rest on laurels after his sixth major win

• Player ‘not as emotional’ as last year but revels in ‘amazing’ win

Rory McIlroy has warned the rest of elite golf he will set further, lofty goals in his sport after a successful defence of the Masters.

McIlroy prevailed at Augusta National by a shot over Scottie Scheffler, meaning the Northern Irishman becomes just the fourth golfer in history to win the tournament back-to-back. While McIlroy will cherish his win, he has no plans to rest on his laurels.

Wales and Scotland produced drama at the Principality Stadium while England and Ireland drew a record crowd as the tournament began at major venues

Sporting theatre reached Shakespearean heights at the Principality Stadium on Saturday as Wales and Scotland produced the best match of the opening Women’s Six Nations weekend. Welsh hearts broke seven minutes past the full 80 as Scotland managed to get a comeback win over the line. The fixture had sensational tries and late drama, and played out on BBC Two. The only thing missing was the type of crowd that such a thriller deserved.

Wales hosted the game at the national stadium, the only one taking place there during this year’s tournament, watched by 10,569 supporters. The number is a record for a fixture between the two teams in Wales but if it had been held next door at Cardiff Arms Park, which has an official capacity of just over 12,000, or at Cardiff City Stadium, which holds about 33,000 and is hosting Wales men v Fiji in July, the atmosphere would have translated better to the players as well as to those watching at home.

Kara Nortman talks Monarch Collective’s sports ownership portfolio and potential investment in England

Many Women’s Super League clubs are treated as “an afterthought” by their owners according to Kara Nortman, the co-founder of the women’s sport investment fund Monarch Collective and Angel City FC.

Monarch last month became the first women’s multi-sport group by buying a minority stake in Cleveland WNBA, the basketball franchise joining an ownership portfolio that includes the NWSL teams San Diego Wave and Boston Legacy, and the German club Viktoria Berlin.

The two-time Grand National winner is surely second only to ‘Rummy’ and will be a strong favourite at Aintree in 2027

Relentless drama, no significant injuries to any of the 34 runners and a winner who inked himself on to the exclusive list of Aintree legends with the possibility of better to come next year. Saturday’s Grand National produced everything racing could realistically hope for and more, and if I Am Maximus can stay sound and return to Aintree in 2027 for a fourth run in the race, it promises to be one of the highlights of the sporting year.

There was a 45-year wait for the next dual Grand National winner after Red Rum’s second success in 1974. Now, seven years after Tiger Roll’s second victory, I Am Maximus is only the third horse since the mid 1930s to register win number two, and the first since the peerless “Rummy” to win in nonconsecutive years. Having also finished a close second in 2025, he is arguably already second only to Red Rum in the list of all-time Aintree greats. He is a marketing person’s dream: a sporting hero who carries a gladiatorial name into combat, always rises to the challenge in the most famous race of the year, and won’t overturn his car or pick a fight in a nightclub.

Manchester City’s unbeaten April record in the past four years bodes well for their end-of-season pursuit for glory

“I have a particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. I may stumble a little in the autumn. I may get a little caustic with a TV camera crew or sarcastically applaud a referee. But I will pursue you. I will hunt you down. I will, in all likelihood, narrowly pip you to the line in an agonising title chase.”

Welcome to Pep in April, the franchise. In which a furiously intense, bald, skinny man becomes a serial springtime league title avenger. At the finish of what was by the end a celebratory, one-hand-on-the-wheel 3-0 win at Stamford Bridge, Manchester City’s record in April in the past four years reads: played 23, won 19, drawn four across all competitions.

‘It’s either him or I’m out,’ Fury said of his British heavyweight rival after outclassing Arslanbek Makhmudov

Just before midnight on Saturday, an hour after the first victory of his latest comeback, Tyson Fury paused in the midst of a familiar monologue about a predictable subject. He had just outclassed Arslanbek Makhmudov, the tough but limited Russian heavyweight, over 12 one‑sided rounds. But Fury wanted to talk only about Anthony Joshua and whether or not he and his old British rival would ever fight each other.

In the lavish depths of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Fury sounded perplexed: “Ten years in the making and still, after all this time, there’s uncertainty if this fight’s gonna happen next. I’ve no idea. I hope so but you can’t force someone to do something.”

Last April Newcastle brought the thrills against Crystal Palace, putting five past Oliver Glasner’s side at St James’ Park, the victory closed by an Alexander Isak special. How things have changed. At Selhurst Park this time round, the visitors succumbed to a third successive defeat, Jean-Philippe Mateta’s penalty in injury time adding to the misery for Eddie Howe and his team.

William Osula’s close-range finish before half-time, against the run of play, had put Newcastle in front if not in control. They looked short of rhythm even with the lead, still on the mend from sapping defeats last month by Barcelona and, crucially, Sunderland.

• Midfielder expected to earn £120,000 a week

• New deal marks turnaround for Mainoo under Carrick

Michael Carrick has indicated Kobbie Mainoo is moving closer to signing a new contract with Manchester United, saying negotiations are “in a good place”. The 20-year-old, whose deal expires in the summer of 2027, is expected to earn about £120,000 a week, a marked increase on his current terms, which are in the region of £25,000 a week.

“It’s getting closer, so we’re positive about that,” said Carrick. “We’re calm with it, but we’re positive with it and time will tell how it goes. But at the moment, we are in a good place.”

Ministers admit carer’s allowance penalties will continue while review of more than 200,000 cases is carried out

Thousands of unpaid carers will continue to be hit with hefty and potentially unfair benefit repayment demands, it has emerged, as a government initiative gets under way to fix welfare injustices that have drawn comparison to the Post Office scandal.

Ministers will on Monday launch an audit of more than 200,000 historical carer’s allowance benefit cases, with an estimated 25,000 carers issued with unlawful overpayments since 2015 likely to see their repayment debts cancelled or reduced as a result.

Ukraine records more than 2,000 violations, Russia claims 1,900. Zelenskyy congratulates Hungary’s Péter Magyar. What we know on day 1,510

A ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine to mark the Orthodox Easter formally expired on Monday, with both sides having accused each other of thousands of violations, despite a lull in Russian air raids. The truce lasted 32 hours, from 4pm (1300 GMT) on Saturday until the end of the day on Sunday. Both sides had agreed to observe the ceasefire, which the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, ordered on Thursday and which his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, proposed more than a week earlier. But as with a similar agreement last year, only relative calm reigned along the 1,200km (745-mile) frontline.

The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said on Sunday it had recorded 2,299 ceasefire violations by 7am, including assaults, shelling and small drone launches. It said in the statement that the use of long-range drones, missiles or guided bombs had not been reported. A Ukrainian military officer told the Associated Press on Saturday that Russian forces had continued to attack their positions.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday it had recorded 1,971 ceasefire violations by Ukrainian forces, including drone strikes. The head of Russia’s Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said rescuers had uncovered the bodies of two civilians who were killed in a Ukrainian attack on Saturday afternoon.

Zelenskyy congratulated Hungary’s Péter Magyar on his “resounding victory” in parliamentary elections on Sunday, pledging to work with the country’s new leadership “for the benefit of both nations”. “Congratulations to [Péter Magyar] and the TISZA party on their resounding victory … We are ready for meetings and joint constructive work for the benefit of both nations, as well as peace, security, and stability in Europe,” the Ukrainian president said on X.

The EU will be waiting to see how Magyar changes Hungary’s approach to Ukraine. Orbán repeatedly frustrated EU efforts to support the neighbouring country in its war against Russia’s full-scale invasion, while cultivating close ties to Putin and refusing to end Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy imports.

The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Sunday that Russian troops still needed to take control of 17-18% of Ukraine’s disputed Donetsk region, the state news agency Tass reported. Russian forces would continue fighting in Ukraine after the Orthodox Easter truce ended, he said.

Pjotr Sauer travelled to Bucha to report on the Ukrainians drawn in online by Russian intelligence services, promised money or coerced into carrying out sabotage attacks against their own country.

Mauritian foreign minister pledges to ‘spare no effort’ to regain control of islands, as US fails to give approval of deal

A senior official in Mauritius’ government has vowed that the Chagos Islands will be “decolonised” after Keir Starmer was forced to shelve legislation to hand the islands back to Mauritius.

On Friday, UK government officials acknowledged that they had run out of time to pass legislation within the current parliamentary session, which ends in the coming weeks, after a lack of support from Donald Trump.

Campaigners welcome first update of school food standards in 13 years, which aims to help lower obesity rates

The government is to announce an overhaul to school food standards in England that will lead to calorific classics such as fish and chips and steamed sponges being banned.

The new rules of the first major update to school food standards in 13 years will apply from September. They are part of efforts to lower the rates of childhood obesity, with data for 2024 released by the NHS in January showing that 24% of nursery and primary school children were overweight or living with obesity.

Police arrest man, 37, on suspicion of being in charge of dog dangerously out of control and causing injury resulting in death

A 19-year-old woman who died after a dog attack in Essex has been named by police as Jamie-Lea Biscoe.

Police said the victim was found with serious injuries after emergency services were called to a property in Leaden Roding at 10.45pm on Friday. Biscoe was pronounced dead at the scene.

A 37-year-old man from Dunmow, who was arrested on suspicion of being in charge of a dog dangerously out of control and causing injury resulting in death, has been bailed until July while inquiries continue, Essex police said on Sunday.

The canine, which was a family pet and believed to be a lurcher crossbreed, was seized and tests are under way to formally establish the dog’s breed, the force added.

Assistant chief constable Stuart Hooper said: “Our thoughts remain with all those who knew and loved Jamie-Lea. Her young life has been so tragically cut short.

“Our detectives are continuing to work around the clock to establish exactly what happened and specialist officers are continuing to support Jamie-Lea’s family.

“This is unimaginable for her loved ones and friends and, as such, I would ask people to respect their grief and privacy at this extremely difficult time.

“Our officers remain at the scene and anyone with concerns or information can speak with them there or contact us in the usual way.”

A post-mortem examination is due to take place on Sunday, police said.

Anyone with information that could assist the investigation has been asked to contact Essex police through their website or anonymously through Crimestoppers.

On Thursday, a three-month-old baby died in a suspected dog attack at a property in Redcar, North Yorkshire.

The baby girl is believed to have died as a result of a dog bite in the Dormanstown area and a woman, aged 31, was treated in hospital for an injury to her arm from a bite, police said.

Armed officers destroyed one dog that had gone on to the street and a second recovered by police has since been destroyed.

A man, aged 45, was arrested on suspicion of being in charge of a dog dangerously out of control causing injury resulting in death and was released on conditional bail.

Study identified eight areas that can sustain a population and government has given £1m for recovery programme

“The world is grown so bad that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.” So wrote Shakespeare in Richard III, in a line of social commentary that feels ever more relevant with age.

A note of good news then, in a world of so much bad, that the eagles the Bard was probably referring to could finally be reintroduced to England after more than 150 years.

Cyclone crossed coast near Maketu peninsula, packing destructive winds exceeding 130km/h (80 mph), heavy rain and large swells

Cyclone Vaianu made landfall in New Zealand’s North Island on Sunday, triggering floods, power outages and forcing hundreds to evacuate.

The cyclone crossed the coast near the Maketu peninsula, packing destructive winds exceeding 130km/h (80 mph), heavy rain and large swells, national weather provider MetService said, describing Vaianu as a “life-threatening” system.

Iran war drives demand for solar panels, heat pumps and EVs, with energy bills expected to rise 18% from July

British households are turning to green home energy upgrades in record numbers to try to keep bills down as the Iran crisis sends global oil and gas prices soaring, data from leading energy suppliers suggests.

Figures show demand for solar panels, electric vehicles and heat pumps in Great Britain has leapt since the war began on 28 February, as households brace for a sharp increase in monthly payments when the next energy price cap takes effect in the summer.

On Monday, a public inquiry will reopen, nine years after the plan was proposed and a toxic local battle began

When Fidelma O’Kane retired more than a decade ago from her career as a social worker and lecturer, she thought she would be “travelling and having a glass of wine and eating chocolate and reading books” while based in the quiet, hilly corner of rural County Tyrone where she has lived almost all her life.

It didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, an idle remark from a neighbour would set O’Kane on a path that would become an all-consuming mission. A mining company, the neighbour told her, was planning to drill for long-rumoured reserves of gold in the Sperrins, the low peatland mountain range in Northern Ireland where O’Kane’s family has lived for generations.

Exclusive: Health secretary warns of dangers of protest vote as he pitches NHS as key elections battleground

Voters in May’s local and devolved elections risk putting the NHS in jeopardy if they vote for populist parties, Wes Streeting has said, as he sought to make the health service a key battleground.

“The founding principles of the NHS are at greater threat than at any time since the NHS was founded in 1948,” the health secretary said.

Victim in her 20s was attacked after leaving Labyrinth Epsom nightclub between 2am and 4am on Saturday

A woman was raped by several men outside a church after leaving a nightclub in Surrey, police said.

The woman in her 20s reported she was attacked after being followed leaving Labyrinth Epsom between 2am and 4am on Saturday.

Musician says he wanted to attend the protest despite the consequences a potential arrest could have on his music career

Massive Attack frontman Robert Del Naja has been arrested on suspicion of showing support for a proscribed organisation after attending a mass protest against the ban on Palestine Action in central London on Saturday.

Del Naja, also known as 3D, was among hundreds of fellow demonstrators in Trafalgar Square on Saturday afternoon, holding a sign that read “I Oppose Genocide, I Support Palestine Action”.

Mo-Rez reduced or eliminated tumours in over 60% of patients and is expected to be a blockbuster drug

GSK has revealed positive results for a treatment for gynaecological cancers as its chief executive, Luke Miels, seeks to speed up drug development at the group.

The company said that in an early-stage trial Mocertatug Rezetecan, known as Mo-Rez, shrank or eliminated tumours in 62% of patients with ovarian cancer where chemotherapy had failed, and in 67% of those with endometrial cancer.

Democratic congressman, running to replace Gavin Newsom, has faced multiple accusations

Representative Eric Swalwell, the Democratic frontrunner in the fiercely contested race to be governor of California, has suspended his campaign amid a series of sexual assault and misconduct allegations by a former staff member and at least three other women.

The woman who worked for Swalwell said the California congressman had sexually assaulted her twice when she was too inebriated to consent, according to a report by the San Francisco Chronicle, which was published on Friday.

Number of tickets to win Tête de Femme will be capped at 120,000 and proceeds will go to Alzheimer’s research

A raffle in France is offering the chance to win a portrait by Pablo Picasso for the price of a €100 (£87) ticket, with proceeds going to Alzheimer’s research.

Picasso painted the gouache-on-paper Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman) in 1941. The raffle organisers’ online sales platform says the number of tickets will be capped at 120,000, meaning the draw could net €12m if they are all sold.

US senator appears at Manhattan rally alongside New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, who cautioned that AI is ‘coming for human jobs’

Bernie Sanders has sounded an alarm over the US economy, warning “the worst is yet to come” unless workers overcome a “ruling class” of billionaires.

The US senator spoke at a rally in Manhattan on Sunday alongside Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, who cautioned that artificial intelligence was “coming for human jobs” amid mounting concern over the technology’s rapid development.

Astronauts make first remarks at jubilant welcome home event in Houston after their record-breaking mission

Still marveling over their moon mission, the Artemis II astronauts received a thunderous welcome home on Saturday from the hundreds of colleagues who took part in setting a record for deep space travel during the US space agency Nasa’s lunar comeback.

The crew of four arrived at Ellington Field near Nasa’s Johnson Space Center and Mission Control in Houston, flying in from San Diego, where they had splashed down just offshore the evening before.

Exclusive: US state is targeting corporate heavyweights in the UK with subsidies and incentives

• Y’all Street: Bullish Dallas aims to steal New York’s crown

The US state of Texas is putting UK businesses in its crosshairs with the launch this month of a dedicated London office to lure jobs and investment to the low-tax Lone Star State.

Texas recently secured approval for the new site, adding to a growing list of international offices from which it can try to draw corporate heavyweights across its borders.

The firm says it withheld an AI model on cybersecurity grounds but sceptics say this was hype to lure investment

This week, the AI company Anthropic said it had created an AI model so powerful that, out of a sense of overwhelming responsibility, it was not going to release it to the public.

The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, summoned the heads of major banks for a chat about the model, Mythos. The Reform UK MP Danny Kruger wrote a letter to the government urging it to “engage with AI firm Anthropic whose new frontier model Claude Mythos could present catastrophic cybersecurity risks to the UK”. X went wild.

Estate agents say rising mortgage costs have created a mood of fear, with Canterbury among the cities being hit

• Have you lost a mortgage deal or seen your rate rise?

On a warm, spring morning in Canterbury, the cobbled streets are buzzing with activity and the white Tudor houses gleam in the sun.

It is a scene that seems far removed from events in the Middle East, but the conflict is undermining business and consumer confidence – rattling the city’s housing market just as the spring selling season began.

A Guardian investigation reveals how the prediction market can shape news – and how it rules on ‘the truth’

“Horekunden” was rapidly losing patience.

His frustration was with the Institute for the Study of War, a US thinktank which produces a daily map of the frontline in Ukraine.

One of 17 children, she lived in a shack and devoted herself to needlework. Now her dazzling creations – showing everything from giant feet in Africa to the ‘fallen woman’ of Babylon – are being rediscovered

Elizabeth Allen lived at the end of a steep, muddy track in a dilapidated hut with a notice on the door that read: “Knock very loudly.” One day in the winter of 1965, the artist Patrick Heron did just that – and overnight Allen, then in her 80s, became lauded as a luminary of the art world. There were exhibitions across Britain, not to mention in New York, Los Angeles and Barcelona. The Guardian called her “a remarkable colourist”, adding that “Klee and Matisse would undoubtedly have been impressed”.

One of Allen’s pieces, 1966’s The Great Swan Song, reflects the surprise she felt at this flurry of fame after a life lived in total obscurity. This textile work features a black bird stitched into a cobalt-blue pond fringed by brown-leafed trees. The bird’s red eyes are gazing up at a vermilion sky, while a patchwork piece of bright green striped cloth seems to represent Allen’s hut.

As ordinary people express their feelings for loved ones by singing in public, not even Alison Hammond can make sense of it all. It begs the question: what exactly is this cack?

It’s a rainy afternoon in Liverpool and Alison Hammond is describing her latest TV series while standing outside a branch of NatWest. “We’re inviting extraordinary people to sing the one song that means the most to them and tells their incredible story,” she shouts, blinking at us through her transparent umbrella. “Travelling across Britain, the Your Song stage will showcase amazing songs sung by remarkable people.” Is there a prize attached to this cavalcade? There is. Those deemed sufficiently extraordinary, incredible, amazing or remarkable by the judges Paloma Faith and “Eurovision legend Sam Ryder” will win the chance to perform at an abstract “once in a lifetime concert” to be held “London’s iconic Hackney Empire”.

A montage of coming attractions does little to avert the mounting sense of unease: Paloma Faith weeping as she embraces a singer in a waterproof poncho; a man shouting “I’m 90 years old!” at the wrong camera; Hammond laughing into a succession of pensioners’ faces while swaddled in a cow-patterned coat. Here, clearly, is a show prepared to meet the very specific demands of the Sunday evening schedules. Sunday evening is, after all, sacrosanct. It is the land of Esther Rantzen and Harry Secombe: any singing show that nudges its slipper into such hallowed pastures must be prepared to turn up the thermostat and dial down the thinking accordingly. And Your Song does that – to a level that could reasonably be described as nightmarish.

Buckle up for this third and final outing of the divisive high school drama series. Plus, the final episode of deadly comedy DTF St Louis. Here’s what to watch this evening

Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic

Beneath painted skies and birdsong, film-maker Nathalie Berger’s observational documentary exposes hidden labour and quiet turmoil

In the main hall of the Lantern, a retirement home in Ohio’s Chagrin valley, the ceiling consists of glass panels painted to resemble blue skies. The chirping of birds wafts through the corridors, styled after the front porches of typical mid-century houses, except these are all indoors. Like the lighted roof, the sounds of nature are entirely artificial. For the residents of this care facility, such designs seek to inspire feelings of calm and familiarity, yet they also induce an atmosphere of uncanniness. Exploring the parallel worlds of the inhabitants and their caregivers, Nathalie Berger’s observational documentary finds real love and care in this strange simulacrum of home.

Captured in static vignettes, life at the Lantern appears quite tranquil. The retirees live together in a kind of resigned harmony. Some are bewildered as to why they are in a care home; others are confused about where they are. The temporary moments of crisis are framed with a sobering matter-of-factness, laying bare the inhabitants’ quiet turmoil.

Fanning is a young single mother who makes adult content in this hilarious series. It is smart, sexy and bold – and Pfeiffer is unmissable as her ex-Hooters-waitress mother

I promise, it’s the title that drew me in. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a new Apple TV show (out Wednesday), starring Elle Fanning as a single mum who becomes an OnlyFans model. It joins a niche canon of similarly blunt titles about generic obstacles. To wit: Fleishman Is in Trouble; Big Trouble in Little China. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is better, though. Check out the assonance, the rhythm. It has great mouthfeel, to borrow a word from food reviewing, one I instantly regret.

Our hero, Margo Millet, is a first-year college student who falls pregnant by her professor. The married academic tells her to get an abortion; her friends agree with him. She has the baby. She drops out of college, falls into money troubles. She attempts to fall out of them by joining the notorious content creation platform. She does nude video shoots, in the character of a sexy alien. If none of this inflames you, can I interest you in Nick Offerman as Margo’s pro-wrestler, drug-addicted father? Or Michelle Pfeiffer as her blue collar, ex-Hooters-waitress mother? No? Are you dead?

In this week’s newsletter: From forgotten gems to cult curios, these shows quietly shaped our viewing habits, and some of TV’s most charming oddballs deserve your attention

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The quizshow will never die. Nuclear war could rid the earth of all living creatures bar the cockroaches and still, a shiny floored half-hourer hosted by Stephen Mulhern will somehow be airing on the emergency broadcast system. Quizshows have been airing on British screens since 1938, when a televised spelling bee was broadcast on the BBC, and they have remained remarkably resilient. Today they seem a good accompaniment to an era where everyone seems to be tapping away at puzzles on their phone.

Scroll down the channel guide of your TV and it won’t be long until you find a quizshow (and that one will almost certainly be The Chase). The format remains completely irresistible to commissioners. Relatively cheap and endlessly replicable, it serves as perfect filler for teatime TV. If one fiendishly high-concept quiz doesn’t catch fire it can be quietly cancelled without too much bother, knowing another will be conjured up in short order. If it really catches fire, in the manner of Pointless, Tipping Point or The 1% Club, primetime and the hallowed celebrity special awaits. And if it really catches fire, then well, you have something that can trundle on for decades (The Chase is now almost old enough to vote) before being regurgitated endlessly in repeat form on Challenge.

How to Fail’s Elizabeth Day and historian Dan Jones dissect the mistakes of Richard VIII and Anne Boleyn. Plus, Kylie Jenner lets her guard down to Kid Cudi

How to Fail’s Elizabeth Day teams up with historian Dan Jones for this new series about screw-ups from times gone by. Fast forward through the university reunion (they were at Cambridge together) and it quickly gets entertaining. Their first episode challenges Shakespeare’s vision of a villainous Richard III, while a future episode will consider the “Ross and Rachel of early modern history”, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Royal Festival Hall, London
Young performers brought tremendous quality and personal touches to a concert of works from Wagner to pop star Jacob Collier, under the focused guidance of new principal conductor Alpesh Chauhan

There’s always more at an NYO concert. More players: 160 this time, crammed on to a platform that seems full with half that number. More of the energy that comes with the fact that, for every player, this is a very special occasion. And, in recent seasons, more stuff to remind us that these are teenagers, not hard-bitten professionals.

This time there was a semi-choreographed walk-on to a mashup of Raye and Chaka Khan, with the percussion taking the lead and the assembled orchestra eventually joining in. There was a short speech from one of the players before each work – somewhere between pointing out a personal connection with the music and giving superfluous justification for its inclusion. And as an encore – sung, not played – there was Jacob Collier’s Something Heavy, with a bit more choreography.

Pushing his winsome songwriting into rootsier territory with a little help from co-producer MJ Lenderman, the New Yorker’s debut album is primed to soundtrack your summer

From New York City, New York
Recommended if you like The Clean, This is Lorelei, The Feelies
Up next Debut album Hercules out 10 July

Tracey Nelson’s self-titled 2025 debut EP was one of the year’s best lesser-heard gems: Five tracks of sparkling, winsome indie-rock that recalled classic antipodean jangle bands the Clean, Twerps and Dick Diver. Tracks such as New Years Flowers and Just Shoot Me Now suggested that Austin Noll – the NYC-based singer-songwriter behind the project – was a classicist with a keen sense for bright melodies and self-deprecating one-liners.

(New Year)
Londoner Alex Peringer breaks from his intriguing and outlandish dance music with this debut album of charming bedroom-pop ballads

A decade ago, Londoner Alex Peringer intrigued underground club circles with his outlandish take on dance music. Structured around dizzying time signatures and wry tales of unfulfilling lovers and pills gone wrong, his tracks referenced everything from UK funky to new wave and sea shanties. Then came several years of near silence – now broken by this self-released debut album, How Long Has It Been? The record acknowledges this break not just in the title, but also in its sound. On first listen, it couldn’t seem more different to Peringer’s early work, with those discordant constructions now replaced by the warm tinkering of the Rhodes electric piano and ostensibly earnest sentiment. But traces of that eccentricity still linger in this collection of atmospheric bedroom-pop ballads.

The record takes winter as its theme, though it feels fitting for this transitional time of year, with its stories of introspection and dodgy weather set against soft, simple arrangements. A handful of subtly wonky elements stop it from sounding overly polished or guileless: Before and After slips in a reference to a “fateful bong”; on the dreamy duet Two Lovers, glitches cut through the twinkling keys and mumblecore guest vocals. Elsewhere, the chords waver on Black Keys, one of several gorgeous and forlorn instrumentals.

It’s a high-wire act and the risk of an embarrassing failure can weigh heavily – but that’s no reason to avoid writing about sex, argues Black Bag author Luke Kennard

Are straight male writers scared of writing about sex? If you read modern fiction it’s hard to conclude otherwise. Maybe we’re worried that the very presence of a sex scene in our book would feel somehow exploitative or gratuitous. Or maybe we feel our gender has simply said enough on the subject so we should shut up.

Women writing about straight relationships don’t seem as nervous. In fact, sex is often a central element of narrative, and of nuanced portrayals of masculinity; from the slow-burn tenderness and awkwardness of intimacy in Sally Rooney’s work, to the surreal celebrations of and lamentations for the erotic in Diane Williams’s extraordinary short stories.

New technologies of reproduction are plundering the art world – and getting away with it

In 2026, its easy to see why generative AI is bad. The internet has nicknamed its excretions “slop”. The CEOs of AI companies prance about on stage like supervillains, bragging that their products will eliminate vast swathes of work. Generative AI requires sacrificing the world’s water to feed its hideous data centres. Around the globe, chatbots induce schizophrenic delusions and urge teens to kill themselves – all while turning users brains to mush.

Who could have predicted this? Artists, that’s who.

The South African author on discovering Colette, being inspired by JG Ballard, and the subversive joys of Asako Yuzuki

My earliest reading memory
The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss, particularly the little red fan the cat holds in the tip of its tail. At the age of five, I was reading The Famous Five, getting to grips with Enid Blyton’s most complex characters, Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin. I was born in apartheid South Africa. The children in the Famous Five series had no human rights problems and it is set in Dorset, a landscape that was totally unknown to me. My bedroom window in Johannesburg looked out on a garden of bone-white grass and a peach tree.

My favourite book growing up
I was delighted to move on to the imaginative sophistication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. CS Lewis’s lucky strike was to come up with the idea that a wardrobe was the portal to another world. Although she terrified me, I wanted to meet the White Witch, who rode on a sleigh pulled by white reindeer.

A Stoic philosopher navigates midlife in this madcap comedy from the author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette

What would Marcus Aurelius have made of the Kardashians? Would Seneca have been amused by mindfulness apps? These were questions I had never consciously pondered before reading Maria Semple’s new novel. Neither, in my irrational and unvirtuous state, had I spent much time considering the application of Stoic philosophy to any other key aspects of modern life.

Semple, best known for her exuberant, ingenious bestseller Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, here presents us with Adora Hazzard, Stoic philosopher and divorcee. Adora lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side, spending her days tutoring the twin sons of an old-money family in philosophy and seeking to live according to Stoic virtues, without recourse to destabilising “externals”. But her settled life is soon disrupted by that most classic of externals, the handsome stranger. “Curse these alluring men who throw us off our game!” (Marcus Aurelius, paraphrased.)

As The Super Mario Galaxy Movie storms the box office, we look back at the best forgotten games inspired by Tetris, Lemmings and … vitamins?

It should be no surprise that the latest Super Mario movie is smashing box office records – despite the, let’s say mixed, reviews. Nintendo’s iconic plumber has been a pop culture staple for 45 years, starring in some of the bestselling video games ever made, from the original Donkey Kong through to the joyous Super Mario Bros Wonder and the chaotic Mario Kart World.

But as with any storied showbiz career, there have been some lesser works. Who can forget – or actually remember – Hotel Mario, a door-shutting puzzle game for the doomed Philips CD-i console? Or what about Mario Teaches Typing, a 1992 educational game for the PC in which players navigate the Mushroom Kingdom by … correctly inputting words. Yet there have also been genuine treasures lost along the way. Here, then, are seven of our favourite much-overlooked Mario odysseys.

As real astronauts vanish behind the moon, games have long tried to evoke the fragile quiet of drifting through space

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Last week’s launch of the Artemis II space mission was a stunning spectacle, the 17-storey-high rockets erupting into cacophonous life before wrenching the craft through the Earth’s atmosphere. But the images that have come since hold just as much impact: the tiny Orion craft and its four-person crew drifting silently through space, further and further from home.

In his autobiography, the Apollo astronaut Michael Collins described this feeling perfectly. Left in the command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on the lunar surface, he wrote: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soho theatre, London
In his show You Wait. Time Passes, the comedian energetically distils his approach to pursuing futile creative choices with philosophy and silly jokes thrown in

How do you know that you’re an artist? Have you made the right choices in life? Pertinent questions, these, especially if you’ve spent decades on the fringes of (in Joz Norris’s case) leftfield comedy, far from the trappings of fame and glory. Norris, with a sweatband marked “Artist” wrapped around his brow, addresses these concerns and more in his latest maverick confection You Wait. Time Passes, albeit with as little self-seriousness as it’s possible to muster. It’s a show exploring the choice to make extravagantly silly art that is itself extravagantly silly.

I admired it immensely, without enjoying every single moment. To begin with, and again latterly, its zaniness felt a bit strenuous, as Norris presents himself to us in sort-of character as an unhinged, self-absorbed guru figure, imparting life lessons in the buildup to his Big Reveal, “the grand unveiling of my life’s work” – in a box, on a pillar, upstage. There is a seat reserved for his estranged wife: this’ll show her! We hear about their breakup, and piece together a picture of our host’s glaring inadequacies as a family man. We see snippets of the career (comedian, actor, magician…) this alt-Norris has enjoyed until now, and a section on his bid to become Google’s number one Joz. A later dialogue with his erratic AI girlfriend includes lots of funny back-and-forth in the controlling/collapsing manner of a latter-day Rik Mayall.

Brixton House, London
Five writers contribute fizzing ideas aplenty to this play exploring questions of Latinx identity in Britain, while also attempting to deliver an undercover drama

There’s no shortage of creative ambition in Valentina Andrade, Elizabeth Alvarado, Lucy Wray, Tommy Ross-Williams and Joana Nastari’s play exploring the experiences of Latinx women in modern London. In the style of a pop concert, four shadowy figures pose to the pulse of techno beats mixed with options from the UK census. “White, Black, Asian, Mixed,” it says – Latinx is notably absent.

Then comes a clash of identities inside what looks like a giant hairband. Notting Hill carnival or Rio carnival? Brazilian bikini or swimming costume? The actors stretch the elastic in different directions in an image that depicts the constant push and pull of feeling like you belong to two places at once. Later, the audience is asked to answer questions from the British citizen test; of course, barely anyone knows the answers.

Arcola theatre, London
Writer Ken Ludwig’s heartfelt and funny romcom draws the audience into every step of Jack and Louise’s developing affection, their longing deepened by physical separation

This epistolary story of two people looking for love is the ultimate antithesis to the modern-day dating app. Set in a time when a message was less a flighty ping away, more as slow as the postal service, it is a delightful romcom through letters. It features Jack (Preston Nyman) and Louise (Eva Feiler), who begin writing to each other because family members think they might make a match. It is 1942, Jack is a military doctor tending to burns and amputations while Louise is a dancer trying to break into Broadway musicals.

It goes from stiff opening courtship to a chalk-and-cheese meeting of minds and then develops into a genuine relationship, all without either having met, the first date forever being deferred because Jack can’t get leave, or Louise is in a touring show.

York Hall, London
Directed with gangsterish overtones by Mark Ravenhill, the tempered musical weight of this lean production of the Strauss classic brings greater focus on the roles’ contrasting dramas

The programme bills it “Strauss’s MOST DANGEROUS opera”. The company’s website advertises a “20th-century palate cleanser”, which – given the work’s relentless intensity – is presumably a joke, But perhaps they’ve earned it. Strauss’s Salome is the latest venture from Regents Opera, the wildly ambitious fringe company that last year mounted Wagner’s entire Ring cycle in a historic East End boxing venue with an orchestra of only 18 musicians, to against-the-odds critical acclaim.

Back in York Hall, Regents Opera has now mustered a 24-piece ensemble. Seated at the far end of the space from most of the audience and playing a custom arrangement by Nigel Shore, the orchestra sounded somewhat defanged. Despite conductor Ben Woodward’s seemingly boundless energy, there was no possibility of capturing Strauss’s most luxuriant string textures with so few players and the contrast between the score’s vast climaxes and its creepiest, emptiest moments was limited. What emerged instead was an unusual degree of clarity – not to mention a built-in balance aid for the singers, who also benefited from a 20-metre head start on the instrumentalists thanks to the runway-style stage protruding through the audience.

On productions ranging from Les Liaisons Dangereuses to John Proctor Is the Villain, an army of technical wizards help ensure London’s stage productions are believable and spectacular

What does it take to create a giant chandelier on stage, decked out with more than 100 perfectly balanced, flickering candles? What about a disco floor that dazzles the audience in a play’s final moments but is hidden from view until then? On the eve of the 50th Olivier awards, we meet the artists, apprentices, engineers and designers behind some of London’s most memorable theatrical moments this year.

***

Aidan Turner, Lucia Chocarro and Monica Barbaro in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, London

The Place, London
This double bill from choreographers James Pett and Travis Clausen-Knight features fluent steps, tension and expression, but their expressed human connection to an AI-driven world was hard to discern

There’s a particular look you see on dancers sometimes, as if taking a slow, deep inhalation of something expensive, unfixed gaze, slightly furrowed brow. It’s hard to describe – you know it when you see it – but what it signals is emotional gravitas. It’s often coupled with portentous or overtly emotive music. Both of these things appear in PCK Dance’s double bill Into the Light, along with other signifiers: dark and ominous atmosphere, even an overwritten blurb in the programme.

The thing is, choreographic duo James Pett and Travis Clausen-Knight don’t need this heavy-handed help, which can drown out the subtleties of the dance, because they are actually really good crafters of movement. The pair are former members of Company Wayne McGregor who’ve been picking up steam as choreographers, and you can see that pedigree in their strong, slick, finessed dancing (and the way their legs whip into the air at extreme angles). They have a talent for stringing together steps in fast but clear sequences packed with movement, like the chatter of a motoring brain. It’s made with fluency and attention to form.

Empire Polo Club, Indio, California
For a reportedly record-breaking amount of money, the increasingly reclusive star proves his voice is still golden in a headliner performance light on enthusiasm

Throughout the Strokes’ main stage set on Saturday evening, you could see them: fans, many of them women, unaffected by the New York indie rockers as they pushed forward through the crowd to stake out spots hours in advance for the night’s closer, Justin Bieber. “I know why you’re here … JUSTIN BIEBER!” the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas joked, sort of, between songs. “We’re happy to lube you up for him.”

Perhaps Casablancas picked up on an anxious energy from the crowd: the chance to see Bieber in a Coachella primetime slot seemed at once inevitable and improbable. Save a stripped-down Grammys performance and two very selective LA warm-up shows, the 32-year-old pop star had not performed publicly in over four years, since cancelling his 2022 Justice World Tour amid a host of health issues. Maybe it’s because vulnerability is an established element of a performer who, for years, appeared dead behind the eyes in public, or the fact that Bieber recently ditched the managerial framework that guided his rocky career, or the lingering sting of Frank Ocean’s disastrous headliner set in 2023, when a generationally beloved artist with little recent performance experience cracked under the pressure: few Coachella headliner sets have generated this much buzz – Saturday broke Coachella’s single-day ticket record – and perhaps this much parasocial concern.

The ‘Council of Andrews’ started as a bit of fun – but has led to friendships, financial help and even fiances…

It’s a rough time to be called Andrew. In recent years, notorious figures such as Andrew Tate and the former prince have dominated the headlines, giving us a bad name. Even the CEO caught up in that Coldplay scandal was an Andy. It’s been a bad run. As an Andrew myself, I wanted to unearth some better representatives, so I recently set out on a mission: to find some fellow Andrews doing good in the world.

That’s how I stumbled upon thousands of Andrews at once.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

• This week’s question: what would the world look like if people didn’t make mistakes?

I always say please and thank you to my Alexa. Why is this? I am sure it doesn’t care. Is it worth being polite to artificial assistants? Alison Williams, Toronto

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Whether you want budget, organic or vegan, these are the best meal delivery services from our writer’s test of nine

• The best chef’s knives – tested

Recipe box services are the best thing to happen to time-poor foodies since, well, sliced bread. They’re cheaper than a takeaway, often less processed than a ready meal, and much more culinarily adventurous than beans on toast.

You have to do the actual cooking, but not the shopping. Recipe boxes contain every ingredient you need (well, most do), often in the exact measurements required. “Meal kits” cut hassle even further by including preprepared stocks, sauces and other flavour bombs, plus ready-chopped veg. All you have to do is put them together following the steps in the recipe, which can take less time than queueing at a supermarket checkout.

They’re pricier than the competition, but have key features: the music doesn’t skitter when you step out of Bluetooth range and they can handle water and dust

• How do Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 compare against hearing aids? I put them to the test

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Over the past eight years, I’ve reviewed dozens of portable speakers from every top brand. And I can confidently say that Sonos makes three of the best portable speakers of them all.

There’s Sonos Play, the brand’s newest portable and the Goldilocks of its lineup in size, sound and features. The Roam 2, a Toblerone-shaped speaker that’s small enough to go anywhere. And the Move 2, a powerhouse that doesn’t sacrifice bass performance.

The little one:
Sonos Roam 2

Floss without the faff with our expert-tested water flossers, from travel-size models to countertop jets

• The best electric toothbrushes, tested

There isn’t much I miss from my pre-Invisalign “gappy teeth” days, but it was far more difficult for food and plaque to get stuck in the gaps – something I took for granted at the time. Using floss between my pre-braces teeth was easy, but ultimately pointless, like using a pipe cleaner to buff the Dartford Tunnel.

With all the gaps closed, that’s no longer the case, and my water flosser has become a welcome part of my dental routine. A water flosser fires an intense jet of water between the teeth to dislodge debris and leave your mouth feeling fresher.

Best water flosser overall:
Waterpik Ultra Professional

Best budget water flosser:
Operan Cordless Oral Irrigator

Our seasoned traveller braved obstacles and mud to put the best cabin bags to the test – from hard-shell to budget, wheeled to lightweight

• The best travel pillows, tested

Let’s start by saying that if you can avoid taking a flight, that would be best. Aviation accounts for 2.5% of global carbon emissions – and the levels released by aircraft could double or triple by 2050.

Regrettably, you can’t always reach your destination by rail, sea or hot-air balloon. If flying is unavoidable, one way to reduce your carbon footprint is to take a cabin bag, rather than hold luggage. This encourages you to pack less, so your baggage is lighter, and less fuel is required to spirit it through the stratosphere. If that doesn’t move you, consider that you’ll also pay lower fees to the airline.

Best cabin bag overall:
July Carry On luggage

Best budget cabin bag:
Tripp Holiday 8 cabin suitcase

The bold, lively and versatile flavours of the Yemeni spice mix bring out the natural earthiness of roast vegetables

Hawaij is a Yemeni spice mix that came into my life during my time at the Palomar in London, and it has not left my spice cupboard ever since. It’s a mix of turmeric, black pepper, cardamom and ground coriander, giving it an earthy, vegetal flavour, and it’s traditionally used in soups and stews; it’s also a key component in zhoug, a spicy coriander and chilli sauce. It’s one of the most enlivening and versatile spice mixes I know, and should be your forever companion, too.

Your guilty-pleasure, late-night snack, minus the guilt, in nine easy steps.

Let’s be honest, fried chicken is one of those things that’s almost always good, but making it yourself has the benefit of allowing you to be sure of the provenance of the meat. Where fast-food restaurants tend to rely on pressure fryers for a juicy result, at home I brine the meat first using buttermilk – its slight acidity will also have a tenderising effect. Double win.

Prep 5 min
Marinate 4 hr+
Cook 40 min
Serves 2-3

The British may not have the most sophisticated palates, but we are adorable in our culinary urges

As we sit awaiting the beef rib trolley in the Grand Divan dining room at the whoppingly sized Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, we fizz with ideas of how to describe its wildly unfettered quaintness. “It’s all a bit Hogwarts, isn’t it?” I say to my friend Hugh.

He’s been four times already, but then, Simpson’s is that kind of place: a handy-as-heck, posh canteen a short stroll from Covent Garden. There’s a twinkly, ye olde cocktail bar upstairs as well as Romano’s with its more European-style menu. But, for now, let’s concentrate on the Grand Divan. “It’s all very Samuel Pepys’ London,” Hugh says.

A vegetarian noodle stir-fry full of vigour and flavour

I love going to my local Chinese supermarket; it’s like being at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, where the world (and ergo my mealtimes) are full of wild possibilities and new travels for my tastebuds. A new favourite ingredient is rose red beancurd, so called because it’s red and fermented in a combination of red yeast and rose petals. The overall effect in this noodle recipe, a take on the Thai street food dish, suki hang, is that it imparts a delicious char siu flavour when cooked, which is a lot of magic for a single ingredient.

A university researcher and a property manager may have found (some) common ground on leaving the EU – but what about affordable homes?

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

Graham, 76, Pangbourne

Occupation Property manager

Studying on different continents is a challenge for Veronika and Fabio … Can their young love go the distance?

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

There have been days when we’ve been on the phone for 10 hours at a stretch

When I’ve flown back to see her, we’ve tried to make up for lost time

Turn your attention to your internal landscape rather than the next building project. Make your next project yourself

My wife and I are in our late 60s. The past 20 years have felt like treading water, as all my funds are tied up in a property that, for complex reasons, I am unable to sell. We are both creative. Over the past year or so I’ve made some improvements to our house, things that make people say wow. I enjoy seeing their pleasure, but their praise isn’t hugely important to me. In fact, I am somewhat reclusive. I do not enjoy being part of a wider community and I’m content with a handful of close friends.

Last year my father died, and after a period of despair, during which I found myself contemplating suicide (I did not share this with my wife), I turned first to Samaritans, then a therapist.

Alda feels Rachel should follow jewellery ‘rules’, but Rachel likes to mix things up. You decide whose argument rings true
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I know she’s expressing herself, but when you mix everything up, it looks thrown together and cheap

They’re not Alda’s hands to worry about – I like my mismatched mess. Why does it matter to her?

Fraudsters send emails claiming storage is full or nearly full, then trick people into clicking on links that can expose bank and personal details

For a while you’ve been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full”. They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take aren’t being uploaded.

You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of 99p a month for more storage. But it seems that you can’t keep putting off the inevitable: you have received an email which says your iCloud account has been blockedand your photos and videos will be deleted very soon. To keep them you need to upgrade immediately, it says.

All children born in the UK between September 2002 and January 2011 have a CTF – but £1bn has not been claimed

At some point in the midst of 2009 I made a decision that would change my son’s life: I started paying £10 a month into his child trust fund account.

It didn’t seem like much but, almost 18 years later, thanks to the performance of the stock market and the original government payment, he’s about to get about £10,000. At first he had no idea what to do next, financially, and he’s not alone.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The interiors guru talks museum shops, sake and loft insulation with the Filter

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Michelle Ogundehin, former editor-in-chief of Elle Decoration magazine, is the head judge on the BBC’s Interior Design Masters and co-host of Grand Designs: House of the Year. She trained as an architect and also works as a commentator and consultant, as well as being a trustee of the Design Museum.

Her bestselling first book, Happy Inside, explores how home shapes health and happiness; her forthcoming book (spring 2027), Your Powerful Home: 4 Steps to a Home that Heals, looks at your home as a partner in your wellbeing, an ethos she shares through her Happy Insiders Club, which offers guided monthly coaching.

From a modernist townhouse in London to a historic farmhouse overlooking Bridgewater canal

TikTok users increasingly say the app has steered them toward diagnosing medical problems not yet identified

Malina Lee, a 31-year-old wedding baker based in San Antonio, Texas, joined TikTok during the Covid pandemic lockdowns in 2020. Like many people at the time, she was bored and began using the platform to pass the time and advertise her business. She didn’t expect a cancer diagnosis.

Four years after Lee joined the app, a commenter with the username “PickleFart” told her that her neck looked asymmetrical in a way that could suggest she had a goiter – an enlarged thyroid gland – and that she should get it checked out. The anonymous amateur clinician turned out to be right – Lee had thyroid cancer, received treatment quickly, and, less than a year later, was cancer free.

Data on almost 28,000 patients suggests understanding gene variations could improve treatments for obesity

Scientists have discovered how genetics may help explain why weight-loss jabs work better for some people than others.

Variations in two genes involved in gut hormone pathways, which regulate appetite and digestion, may help account for different weight-loss results or side-effects when taking glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP1) medicines.

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

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

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

Oxford team’s technology picked up danger signs with 86% accuracy in study of 72,000 patients in England

Oxford scientists have developed a simple AI tool that can predict the risk of heart failure five years before it develops.

More than 60 million people worldwide have the condition in which the heart cannot pump blood around the body as well as it should. Spotting cases before they develop into heart failure would be a big step forward, experts say. Doctors could prepare better for and manage the condition at an earlier stage or even prevent it entirely.

Designer who left fashion house in January said to be considering options for his 40% stake ahead of talks with lenders

Stefano Gabbana left his post as the chair of Dolce & Gabbana at the start of this year, the fashion house he co-founded with his then partner, Domenico Dolce, has said.

The Italian luxury brand said Gabbana had tendered his resignation, effective as of 1 January, “as part of a natural evolution of its organisational structure and governance”.

Don’t save them for holidays – with the right styling white trousers will be the linchpin of your spring wardrobe

Her rare cover appearance with Meryl Streep may be to promote The Devil Wears Prada sequel, but it also marks a shift from elusive editor to carefully curated personal brand

In the world of magazines, when someone announces they’re leaving a job, their colleagues will traditionally present them with their own personalised mock-up of the magazine’s front cover. Perhaps their face is superimposed on the body of a previous celebrity cover star. There are probably some witty cover lines referencing memorable office moments or their favourite snacks. It’s a rite of passage – and this week, Anna Wintour was bestowed with her very own cover. But instead of a jokey imitation bidding her adieu, it was the real, glossy deal, coming to a newsstand near you on 28 April.

In a somewhat surprising effort to promote the forthcoming The Devil Wears Prada 2, Vogue’s May issue sees Wintour share the cover with Meryl Streep, whose steely Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of the fictional title Runway, is said to have been inspired by Wintour. “Seeing Double. When Miranda met Anna” reads the cover line. While Wintour has fronted various industry titles, including Interview in 1993 and Ad Week in 2017, it’s the first time an editor has placed themselves as the subject. In another fun twist, both Wintour and Streep are wearing Prada.

After decades of focusing on faces, manufacturers, beauticians and surgeons are offering us younger-looking hands. Is this more about money or scientific progress?

I lay my hands on the table, palms down, for inspection. I’m in the consulting room of the president of the British College of Aesthetic Medicine (BCAM) in London. Like most people, I use my hands a lot. I type for hours a day. I go bouldering, which means I have a lot of calluses. I cook, clean, cup my chin while staring out the window. What I’ve never done is to look at my hands as objects of interest in their own right. They’re an afterthought. The means to an end. But now that Dr Sophie Shotter has picked them up in hers and is weighing my flesh and pushing at the skin with her thumbs to see how it moves, I can see faint ripples of diamonds, the texture of crepe paper.

“Your facial skin is very clear, very smooth. When we look at your hands, you’ve got a bit more of that laxity going on,” Shotter says. “You don’t have pigmentation. You’re not covered in sunspots. But the veins and tendons testify to a loss of volume. The extreme end of that is one day we get what people describe as ‘old lady hands’ – significant volume loss with skin fragility overlying it.”

On the north coast of Spain you can see some of the world’s oldest art, explore a stunning medieval village, then watch surfers ride Atlantic swells

Exploring the area west of Santander feels like being in a time machine. Within a half-hour drive of the Cantabrian capital on Spain’s green northern coast, you can stumble upon prehistoric cave art, a perfectly preserved medieval town and a laid-back beach resort.

When I began my weekend trip, it was raining, so my journey started in the Upper Paleolithic period, at the Cave of Altamira, a Unesco world heritage site, staring up at some of the oldest art on Earth. Well, almost. The original cave was largely closed to the public decades ago to protect the fragile paintings, so we were inside the Neocueva, a painstakingly reconstructed replica built beside it that costs just €3 to enter.

While Málaga battles overtourism down the coast, this ‘forgotten’ working port city revels in its outsider status

Perched high on the battlements of Almería’s 10th-century Alcazaba, looking over the mosaic of flat roofs tumbling down to the sea, I’m reminded of author Gerald Brenan’s travel classic South from Granada, and his impression upon arriving in Almería in 1920: “Certainly, it seemed that the sea was doubly Mediterranean here, and the city … contained within it echoes of distant civilisations.”

A British adventurer, Hispanist and fringe member of the Bloomsbury group, Brenan had walked to Almería from where he was living near Granada, apparently to buy extra furniture in preparation for a visit from Virginia Woolf and friends. A century later, my journey here in a 30-year-old van from London is somewhat less notable, but as I marvel at the almost surreal incandescence of the Med, and the maze of ancient streets below me, I too am aware of a sensation of time travel.

Your top off-the-beaten track discoveries, from gorges in Galicia to vineyards in La Rioja
• Tell us about a trip to Italy – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Recently travelling from Madrid to San Sebastián, we spent three days in picturesque Briñas in La Rioja, staying at the beautiful Finca Torre de Briñas (doubles from €189 B&B). The neighbouring town, Haro, reached via a 40-minute walk by the Ebro River, hosts several of the largest wine producers in the region (CVNE and Muga are recommended). You can stop in and sample them, before heading into the town centre, which has several tapas spots to fuel the walk back to the hotel. Bliss.
Tom Dickson

In the sparsely populated Queen Charlotte Sound, tourists can accompany the skipper-come-postman as parcels are dropped off via the scenic route. No heart rate check required

For a travel destination famous for offering the adrenaline rush of extreme sports, from bungee jumping to the parachute drop, it’s an unlikely tourist activity – but an irresistible one. If you’re travelling in New Zealand, don’t miss out on the chance to deliver the mail. By boat.

It happens in the Queen Charlotte Sound, part of the Marlborough Sounds in the stretch of water that separates New Zealand’s North and South Islands. For over 160 years, New Zealand Post has ensured the handful of families who live on the bays and inlets of the sound receive the same mail service as every other resident of the country, no matter that they live in isolated homes accessible only by boat. Six days a week, the mailboat leaves from Picton, the skipper doubling as postman for the three- or four-hour voyage – and these days passengers can come along for the ride.

A trio of tricky teasers

Tanya Khovanova is a luminary of the recreational mathematics scene. She is one of its foremost bloggers and also runs Number Gossip, a site where you can submit a number and she “will tell you everything you want to know about it but were afraid to ask.”

Tanya has now written her first book, Mathematical Puzzles and Curiosities, in collaboration with two other puzzle enthusiasts, Ivo David and Yogev Shpilman. It’s packed with fantastic new puzzles and twists on old ones.

Researchers say ‘magic mushrooms’ can help with traumatic symptoms, but urge caution as states expand access

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After three combat deployments in Afghanistan, during which he suffered traumatic brain injuries from concussive blasts, army ranger Jesse Gould developed post-traumatic stress disorder and said he “drank almost every night to cope”.

In times of hardship, veterans sometimes turn to “medication and talk therapy, but it tends to be more of a maintenance program than actually overcoming it”, Gould said, but added that at age 28, “I was still very young. I didn’t want to be on medication the rest of my life.”

The physicist, BBC presenter and author on snowflakes, art v science and the time Paul McCartney quizzed him about one of Saturn’s moons

What is the inspiration behind your latest live show, Emergence?

It came from a book that I’ve loved for years: The Six-Cornered Snowflake by Johannes Kepler. Kepler is most famous for his laws of planetary motion in and around 1610, but he wrote this little book about New Year’s Eve in 1609, when he was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague in a snowstorm. He was going to his benefactor’s house and he hadn’t bought him a present. So he writes this beautiful little book about looking at the snowflakes landing on his arm and thinking about the symmetry of them and asking, why are they six-sided?

I am settling in for my usual haircut when, before I know it, my wife and the hairdresser are signing me up for a ‘treatment’

In the beginning I used not to be able to tell Kelly and Hayley – the identical twin hairdressers who came to the house appointments – apart. Eventually my wife furnished me with a handy mnemonic: Kelly cuts, Hayley highlights. From then on, I knew them by their tools.

I don’t need that crutch any more: since my wife decided to go grey, we only have Kelly. She arrived at 11, and I am already in the chair, hair wet, a towel over my shoulders. Kelly is on her phone. My wife is sitting across the table from me.

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

War with Iran has brought 15 American sites across the UK countryside firmly into the spotlight

They are dotted across the UK countryside, often obscured from public view behind highly secured perimeter fences. Technically, they are on British soil, and misleadingly most have “Royal Air Force” in their name.

But in many respects, these military outposts are under the control of the US president and commander-in-chief.

Industry experts say booking of controversial US rapper was calculated risk that has implications for all festivals

The fallout over Wireless announcing Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) as its 2026 headliner was both swift and considerable.

Last Sunday, major sponsors of the three-day festival, including Pepsi and Diageo, began to withdraw their involvement in the face of a significant backlash to Ye’s shocking pronouncements on the Jewish community and the Holocaust. UK Jewish groups threatened to protest if the shows went ahead. Keir Starmer called the decision to book the rapper who wrote a song titled Heil Hitler “deeply concerning”.

Rights groups fear tactic of ‘domicide’ trialled in Gaza, where entire areas are made uninhabitable, is being used again

The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations.

The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims.

Have you been affected by the recent rise in mortgage rates? What will this mean for you?

The crisis in the Middle East is also being felt far beyond the region, with the conflict undermining broader business and consumer confidence.

One aspect of this has been the impact on the UK mortgage market.

We’d like to hear about the local election leaflets you’ve received from political parties in your area

Have you received local election leaflets through your door? We’d like to see them. In an era of political turmoil, we’re particularly interested to see who each political party sees as their rival in their local area.

You can tell us about the leaflets you’ve received – and share pictures of them – below.

If you’re living or working in the region and have been impacted by the US-Israel conflict with Iran, we would like to hear from you

With Iran and the US agreeing to a two-week conditional ceasefire, we would like to hear how people living, working or travelling in the Middle East have been affected by the conflict.

Whether you are in the region or impacted in other ways, please get in touch.

With shipping routes disrupted and tensions rising across the region we want to hear from maritime workers, sailors and port workers and others working at sea who are affected

The conflict in the Middle East continues to disrupt shipping across the region, including in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s busiest maritime routes.

The US and Iran have agreed to a provisional two-week ceasefire, which includes a temporary reopening of the strait. But maritime traffic through the narrow channel linking the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman remains affected, with vessels still facing delays, diversions and heightened security risks as the situation evolves.

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