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?

Tribalism has not faded over the past decade. Instead, new research reveals our politics has become ever-more polarised and fractious

On 23 June 2016, the British voter changed. Before that day, they picked a party, usually red or blue. By that morning, only two tribes mattered: remain or leave. And they kept mattering long, long after the result was declared. Rather than bin those short-lived and now stale allegiances, voters made them their personas. No longer a “Labour man” or a “Conservative family”, they became instead “remoaners” or “Brexiters”. Even today, 60% of Britons still identify themselves by where they scrawled a single cross in a one-off poll 10 years ago.

Ask about the difference Brexit has made and the answer normally concerns policy or high politics: how our economic trajectory has become bumpier, or how the Tories keep getting into punch-ups with each other. But it became so much bigger than Boris v Dave. The civil war blazed through the country, and recruited nearly all of us to one side or the other. The effects still ripple through our elections and media today.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Previous Labour voters in Yardley discuss issues including cost of living, public services and the Iran war

Almost two years into Keir Starmer’s government, the polls suggest that many swing voters, including some of those who voted Labour, are unimpressed with how the country is being run.

In the constituency of Birmingham Yardley, a focus group of eight previous Labour voters last week found support was now splintering in different directions, with one person considering going to Reform and several to the Greens. The group, convened by More in Common, had very little good to say about the government on the key issues.

A new book collects the acclaimed photojournalist’s images of everything from conflict zones to Donald Trump’s inner circle. He describes how his pursuit of truth even led to an unsettling encounter with the disgraced financier

It didn’t come as a great shock to Christopher Anderson to find out that his name was in the Epstein files. In 2015, he was assigned by New York magazine to photograph the American financier for a planned profile interview by the American journalist Michael Wolff.

“I didn’t know who Jeffrey Epstein was at all,” says Anderson. He admits that he often didn’t research the people he was photographing, and went into the job unaware that Epstein was a child sex offender who had been convicted in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor, and had served 13 months in a Palm Beach County jail in Florida. “What I knew was that this guy is a rich and powerful man connected to rich and powerful men.”

‘After every tour, I hate the sound of my voice,’ the actor and comedian says. Yet here he is, working on a new standup act and about to host Saturday Night Live. What does he have to talk about this time, apart from his stag do, fatherhood, the remake of The ’Burbs … ?

The day I meet Jack Whitehall in central London, it has just been announced that he will be hosting Saturday Night Live (SNL) this Saturday. He is also about to get married and his stag do, which was two days before our interview, has been meticulously documented by the tabloids. It feels like a lot, so his immaculate appearance – even his beard looks polished; you wouldn’t believe this man had ever been fall-over drunk – is baffling. He is 37, but doesn’t look markedly different from the baby-faced man of 23 who appeared on our screens in Jesse Armstrong’s and Sam Bain’s stinging student satire Fresh Meat. That series sealed his place as the country’s posh mascot on panel shows including Would I Lie to You?, Mock the Week, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and 8 Out of 10 Cats.

His last comedy tour ended in 2024 and the wait for his next, at the start of 2027, is his longest hiatus yet. “After every tour, I hate the sound of my own voice,” he says. From 2017 to 2024, “I did tours back to back. I’d run out of life experience. I’d talked about every fucking thing that had ever happened to me, I’d done every possible iteration of joke about my dad. In the interim three or four years, I’ve got engaged, I’m planning a wedding, I’ll have had some time in married life, I’ve had a daughter, I’m now the father of a toddler. It felt as if I had stuff to talk about again.”

When Putin invaded Ukraine, he raised murder to the level of national policy. I felt guilt by association. And I had to act

One morning in May 2025, I walked briskly down Bayswater Road along the northern edge of London’s Kensington Gardens until I reached the gates of the Russian embassy. Its formidable outer wall, already topped with razor wire, now had the additional protection of a crowd control barrier. But there was no crowd, just a lone man feebly protesting from the other side of the road. In the early days of the war, the embassy was besieged by angry protesters. Back then, you couldn’t walk down a British street without spotting the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. That time was long gone.

Feeling uneasy, I was ushered inside by a guard who patted me down and checked the contents of my backpack before pointing the way inside. I knew this routine from my previous visits. Even the guard – a friendly Nepali man who knew about three words of Russian – hadn’t changed in years. I used to come here to renew my Russian passport and, on one noteworthy occasion, in March 2000, to vote in the Russian presidential elections. This time, I had an altogether different purpose: I was here to renounce my Russian citizenship.

Masoud Pezeshkian says attacks would ‘render negotiations meaningless’, as Netanyahu warns Israel will continue strikes

• Middle East ceasefire in serious doubt as Israel assaults Lebanon and Iran blocks oil tankers

The UK foreign minister, Yvette Cooper, has said Lebanon must be included in any ceasefire agreement. In other remarks now being reported by Reuters, Cooper added that shipping through the strait of Hormuz must be toll-free.

Amid ceasefire talks, Tehran has proposed fees or tolls on vessels to safely pass through the strait. Donald Trump on Wednesday suggested the US and Iran could collect tolls in a joint venture, while the White House said the priority was reopening the strait without limitations.

And my principles and values made sure that our decisions were that we wouldn’t get involved in the action without a lawful basis, without a viable, thought-through plan.”

Beirut residents and officials say thousand-pound-bombs mainly hit civilians in mission dubbed ‘Operation Eternal Darkness’

• Middle East crisis – live updates

It took Israel only 10 minutes to carry out one of the worst mass-killings in Lebanon since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990.

Omar Rakha heard the war planes but did not feel the explosions; it was only when he woke up face down on the street, bleeding, that he understood what had happened. The building next to his in the Barbour neighbourhood of central Beirut had been destroyed by two Israeli bombs – he then ran through the flaming wreckage to find his sister, screaming.

Mark Rutte praises ‘very frank’ talks but declines to say if president discussed potential withdrawal from alliance

Mark Rutte, the secretary general of Nato, has said Donald Trump was “clearly disappointed” that the US’s allies had refused to join its war against Iran, following a closed-door meeting in Washington on Wednesday.

Speaking to CNN after his private meeting with the US president, Rutte declined to say directly whether Trump raised his threat to withdraw from the military alliance over the Iran war, but described the exchange as a “very frank, very open” discussion between “two good friends”.

John Healey says warship and aircraft forced Russia to abandon activity in North Sea in month-long operation

• UK politics live – latest updates

• Europe live – latest updates

A British warship and aircraft tracked and monitored Russian submarines trying to survey vital undersea infrastructure in the North Atlantic, ensuring they fled the area, the defence secretary, John Healey, has said.

Speaking at a Downing Street press conference, Healey said the UK operation lasted more than a month and saw a Royal Navy warship and P8 marine patrol aircraft “track and deter any malign activity” by three Russian submarines.

At least 42 others rescued after incident in strong currents off coast of Boulogne

Two men and two women have died after a small boat sank in the Channel between France and Britain, French local authorities have said.

They died after being swept away by strong currents while trying to board a dinghy, according to François-Xavier Lauch, the prefect of Pas-de-Calais. The dinghy was described as a taxi-boat, which travels along stretches of the northern French and Belgian coasts, picking up refugees and migrants along the shore.

Exclusive: Survey published days before election in which anti-EU Viktor Orbán risks being ousted after 16 years

• Europe live – latest updates

• Hungary elections: what is at stake and who is likely to win?

After years of relentless EU-bashing by their nationalist, illiberal prime minister, an overwhelming majority of Hungary’s voters back its membership of the bloc, and most – including many of Viktor Orbán’s voters – now want a new approach to Brussels.

Days before elections at which Orbán, who has consistently painted the EU as an enemy of the Hungarian people, risks being ousted after 16 years in power, a poll has shown a huge appetite for a recalibration of the country’s relations with the bloc.

Survivors of UK’s mother and baby home scandal welcome news after long campaign for recognition

• UK politics live – latest updates

The Church of England is expected to make a formal apology for its role in forced adoptions and the UK’s mother and baby home scandal.

Survivors of the scandal – in which hundreds of thousands of children were forcibly separated from their mothers – have welcomed the news after years of campaigning for recognition.

Wildlife film pioneer has died aged 74 ‘immersed in nature and surrounded by friends’, his representatives said

An award-winning wildlife cameraman renowned for his work with David Attenborough has died aged 74 while trekking in Nepal.

Doug Allan, described as a “true pioneer” of wildlife film-making, won several Bafta and Emmy awards and was principal camera operator on a number of BBC series including Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and The Blue Planet.

Green leader says PM should impose tougher sanctions on Israel and accuses country of acting in ‘completely uncontrolled way’

• UK politics live – latest updates

Zack Polanski has called on the government to tear up the UK-Israel trade agreement, after the Israeli strikes on Lebanon.

Polanski called for Keir Starmer to ban the US using UK airspace and said sanctions should be imposed on Israel, after accusing the nation of “behaving in a completely uncontrolled way”.

Enzo Conticello jailed for 27 months for ‘opportunistic’ theft of Givenchy handbag containing precious jewels

A man who stole a handbag containing a Fabergé egg and watch set valued at up to £2.2m has been jailed for more than two years.

Enzo Conticello, 29, took the Givenchy bag belonging to Rosie Dawson as she stood in the smoking area of the Dog and Duck pub in Soho, London, on 7 November 2024.

Charity says it dealt with 75 incidents last year involving 100 or more animals living in one property

The cost of living crisis and an increase in people experiencing mental health difficulties have led to a rising number of multi-animal rescues in England and Wales, an RSPCA superintendent has said.

The animal charity this week had to confirm that a shocking photograph of more than 250 poodle-cross dogs found at a property in the UK was not faked with artificial intelligence. The RSPCA took in 87 of the dogs and the remainder went to the Dogs Trust, another charity.

Record low levels of Antarctic sea ice is having grim consequences for penguins yet to grow waterproof feathers

The mass drowning of emperor penguin chicks as sea ice is melted by the climate crisis has led the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to declare the species officially in danger of extinction.

Emperor penguins rely on “fast” ice – sea ice that is firmly attached to the coast – for nine months of the year. It is where their fluffy chicks are hatched and grow until they have their waterproof feathers. Adults moult every year and also need a safe haven while their swimming feathers regrow.

Divisions between Washington and European capitals over Iran fuel concerns about US commitment to peace deal

As a ceasefire was declared in the Middle East, Volodymyr Zelenskyy sought to draw attention to the war in his own country, posting on social media that Ukraine had consistently pushed for a ceasefire in the war “being waged by Russia here, in Europe”.

Efforts to end the war in Ukraine have largely stalled since the Iran war began, with trilateral talks between Kyiv, Moscow and Washington, which had already yielded little, frozen since February 2026. The war, meanwhile, has continued, with air attacks on Ukrainian cities and heavy fighting on the battlefields as Russia launches a spring offensive.

Housing corporations are adopting rainwater storage in garden fences, reducing pressure during downpours and preserving water for times of drought

Good fences make good neighbours – but rain fences could make even better ones.

That is the hope of housing corporations in the Netherlands, which are adopting rainwater storage in their garden fences.

Forty years on from the release of their Victorialand album, we rank the Scottish band’s 20 best tracks, from goth beginnings to weightless masterpieces

At first, Cocteau Twins gave every impression of being a goth band: check out Wax and Wane’s Banshees-esque ambience – the guitar is very John McGeoch – flanged bass and drum machine. But the chorus soars out of the metaphorical cloud of dry ice, and Elizabeth Fraser’s voice is already outpacing her influences.

During my 43-year adventure I saw pubs close, standing on terraces return and big flags fly all over the country

By When Saturday Comes

It was bound to end like this: a long and arduous odyssey that started in 1982 on a crumbling terrace culminated on a grey, drizzly afternoon in December watching my team get hammered 3-0 in a brand spanking new stadium named in conjunction with an international commercial law firm. A glorious away win thanks to a last-minute winner would have been somehow too poetic. This was how it was meant to be, when I finally completed the 92.

As with that game at Everton, most games were as an away Nottingham Forest fan; others as a neutral. There is much I witnessed and learned from this ludicrous yet wholly fulfilling enterprise and the many miles travelled. For one thing, it used to be that one displayed allegiances by carefully trapping a scarf in the window, so it fluttered outside all the way. This has been replaced by the executive car sticker or personalised number plate and our society is much the worse for it.

The star returns as Ian Fletcher in this mockumentary from the makers of Twenty Twelve. But for every funny moment, there is a slightly off gag – and some truly woeful ones

It’s a Monday morning in Miami and Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) is in a meeting. The meeting has been set up to action another meeting, the outcome of which will be actioned – or at least consciously tabled – at a third, or possibly seventh, meeting. The meeting is also a meeting in a deeper sense, in that it is an opportunity for Ian, the “incoming director of integrity” at the organising body for world football (which, states the narrator, David Tennant, “we’re unable to name for legal reasons”), to establish his place in a corporate culture that is “irretrievably American”.

“Shall we begin?”, Ian asks his new colleagues. “Oh my God,” gasps the sustainability tsar, Sarah Campbell (Chelsey Crisp), pressing the palm of her hand swooningly to her breastbone. “Soooo British!”

In the final week of Rhik Samadder’s diary, he basked in the rosy glow – literally – after AI’s wall paint suggestion

• Sign up for AI for the People, a six-week newsletter course, here

Sometimes, when the hose of my vacuum cleaner knocks over a potted plant, adding a layer of drudgery to an already miserable chore, I feel ground down by domesticity. Futurity once promised us robot butlers. What happened?

The despair led me to this week’s quest. Can AI actually transform my day-to-day existence?

An ambitious ‘refaunation’ project is bringing the much-loved birds and other lost species back to the city’s national park

Images of the iconic blue-and-yellow macaw can be spotted all over Rio de Janeiro. Yet the real thing has been seen so rarely in the Brazilian city that some wondered if it ever really existed there at all.

The French explorer Jean de Léry first described an abundance of the giant, colourful parrots around Indigenous tribes in the 16th century, and the Austrian naturalist Johann Natterer sighted the Ara ararauna in the city in 1818.

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.”

Striking stories of the human impact from global events including the climate crisis, US aid cuts and drone wars. The World Press photo of the year and two finalists will be announced on 23 April

The US president’s cry-wolf threats are losing their effect while European leaders are, at last, shifting from sycophancy to opposition

Europeans are on what might be called “a journey” when it comes to the US-Israel war against Iran, now apparently in a ceasefire after Donald Trump’s 11th-hour U-turn, calling off, for the time being, his threat to annihilate Iranian civilisation. The crisis in the Middle East marks the latest painful step, after the shock of the US’s betrayal of Ukraine and Trump’s threat to seize Greenland, in Europe’s emancipation from Washington. The journey is not linear, and it is dreaded by most European leaders. But the direction of travel is undeniable.

Initially, most European politicians in power all but endorsed the illegal US and Israeli attack against Iran. If the sycophantic Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, stood at one end of the spectrum of European opinion and Pedro Sánchez at the other, most European governments were tacitly closer to Rutte’s embrace of Trump than to the Spanish prime minister’s principled opposition.

Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist

Everyone has a part to play in reducing our reliance on imported foods, but ministers must provide incentives

• Tim Lang is professor emeritus of food policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London

The British state has form on food security. It ignores it until there’s a crisis – and then it’s forced to do rapidly what could have been done better, if only food had been taken more seriously in the first place. We’re revisiting this truth today as the food system’s oil dependency is revealed by the US-Israel war on Iran. Oil transports the food from farm to fork. It’s turned into the fertilisers that have allowed food production to rise since the second world war. It takes us to the shops (unless we walk or cycle).

This dependency was also revealed when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and when oil hit $100 a barrel in 2008, and in the 1970s oil shock. When the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, called the big food retailers in last week, it showed they were aware of this impact but weren’t prepared for what to do.

Tim Lang is professor emeritus of food policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London

It’s worrying to watch Labour entertain Reform’s fantasies about fossil fuels. Only renewables will bring lower bills and higher energy security

Ed Miliband is facing a dilemma, apparently. Reform UK is suggesting new oil and gas licences in the North Sea as a way to cut fuel bills and they’re steadily gaining cheerleaders – not just in the media, but also in some trade unions.

Labour – having swept into power on a green-friendly manifesto, much of which has already been abandoned, but the kernel of which was to prioritise green over fossil energy – is in a bind. It’s plain that fresh exploration of the North Sea would run counter to the party’s every principle, and particularly those of Miliband, whose legacy will be his career-long commitment to the scrappy, dogged, surely often tedious and dispiriting legislative fight against climate breakdown. And yet, equally plainly, the pressure from Nigel Farage is only going to get more intense: he has framed the issue of North Sea oil and gas versus renewables as an elemental fight between the common man and the elites. The wokerati doesn’t care about your cost of living crisis, while the hard right does.

Iran, Minneapolis, Harvard and other Trump opponents have employed a similar strategy

An hour before Trump said he’d cause the death of a “whole civilization” if Iran didn’t open the strait of Hormuz, an Iranian official said the shipping channel would be reopened for two weeks if the United States stopped bombing Iran. The US has now stopped bombing Iran.

So we’re back to the status quo before Trump began his war. Only now, Iran can credibly threaten to close the strait if it doesn’t get what it wants from Trump – thereby causing havoc to the US and world economies. Trump’s only remaining bargaining chip is his threat of committing war crimes.

Medical coercion is alive and well in the US healthcare system – especially if you’re a Black patient giving birth

A harrowing recent ProPublica report tells the stories of two Black women in Florida who were forced to have cesarean sections despite clearly stating they didn’t want them – a reminder that medical coercion is alive and well in the American healthcare system.

In the case of Cherise Doyley, the state had filed an emergency petition. The state and hospital wanted to force Doyley to undergo a C-section “in the interest of her unborn child”, ProPublica reported. Doyley, who worked as a birthing doula, had been clear that she didn’t want a C-section unless there was an emergency. At an hours-long online court hearing conducted from her hospital bedside – while she was in labor – a judge ruled she could continue to labor, but if there were an emergency, the hospital could operate whether she wanted it or not. Hours later, she woke up to find herself being wheeled into surgery – doctors said the baby’s heart rate had dropped for seven minutes overnight – and she gave birth via C-section.

A highly alarming New Yorker feature on the machinations of Sam Altman drove me to test his AI for myself. The results were, well, highly alarming

A corollary of the truism “don’t sweat the small stuff” is, by implication, “do sweat the big stuff”, but it can be hard to pick which big stuff to sweat. For example: since the 1970s, as the world has worried about inflation and rolling geopolitics, the big stuff we should have been sweating more urgently was the climate crisis. Last year, the top trending search on Google in the US was “Charlie Kirk”, with several terms relating to the threat posed by Donald Trump also popular, when the focus should arguably have been the threat posed by AI.

Or, per my own Googling this week after reading Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s highly alarming lengthy piece in the New Yorker about the rise of artificial general intelligence: “Will I be a member of the permanent underclass and how can I make that not happen?”

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Do companies realise the misery caused when they take much-loved products off the market? I’m still in mourning for Izal Medicated toilet paper

I was sitting with Mrs Patmore from Downton Abbey in my car outside Langley station in Berkshire. This wasn’t a dream – this was real. To be fair, it wasn’t Mrs Patmore, it was my friend Lesley Nicol, who plays Mrs Patmore. Anyway, there we were, shooting the breeze on matters various, like our childhoods and stuff, when she mentioned something called a Jubbly. She has fond memories of this frozen drink/lolly offering. And I think we all have strong feelings about this kind of frozen drink/lolly offering from our childhood.

I base this very much on anecdote rather than data. My limited research has been inspired by an email I received from a Guardian reader called Bloss, from Marple near Stockport. Vastly overestimating my influence over anything, she implored me to use my influence to get Rose’s Lime Marmalade back on supermarket shelves. Her husband loves it, you see. She can get him Rose’s Lemon & Lime Marmalade, but for him, if she’ll pardon the slight pun, this just doesn’t cut it.

The Middle East’s best hope may be that the US president continues to rebadge strategic defeat as success

Both the US and Iran claimed victory on Wednesday morning. Both were lying. The two-week ceasefire announced by Donald Trump the night before is not the triumph that he declared. It may not be an end to the war, as welcome as the pause is, or even last the fortnight. Mr Trump said that Iran has gone through regime change. It has not. If anything, less experienced, less readable but more hardline figures are now in charge. He said that the strait of Hormuz would be open; Iran said that ships would pass through with permission, and at a price.

By Wednesday evening, Iranian state media said that the strait was closed after Israel unleashed a brutal assault on Lebanon: about 100 strikes in 10 minutes. Iran had insisted that Lebanon was part of the deal, while Mr Trump disagreed. This conflict has killed thousands in the region, including children, and left many more exhausted, terrified and traumatised, while the aggressors have openly boasted of their intent to commit war crimes.

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

Sadiq Khan has the right approach, but his critics are determined to see the capital as a fictionalised case study in lawlessness

London is much reviled by people who don’t live there. It has its share of social problems typical to a large metropolis, but it is unusual in having also a dystopian twin – a fallen city, overrun with violent criminals, located in the imagination of rightwing politicians and the online sources they consume.

The capital’s denigrators felt vindicated recently by scenes of disorder on Clapham High Street. Hundreds of young people, rallied on social media, mustered for a spontaneous gathering, which degenerated into a spree of antisocial behaviour. Images of the disorder were shared online as proof of the capital’s status as a no-go area. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, said that the unrest was symptomatic of “societal breakdown”.

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

Readers respond to warnings that female teachers are increasingly having to cope with misogynistic behaviour from male students

A quarter of female teachers have been the target of misogyny over the past 12 months (A ‘masculinity crisis’ is brewing in UK schools, union says, 4 April). In truth, this is a crisis that’s been building for years. Annoyingly, we had the chance to deal with this crisis when it was still impending.

Three years ago, headteachers started asking the Department for Education (DfE) for help when Andrew Tate and his mates started being named – and quoted – in classrooms. Its advice? Don’t engage. Educators were told not to discuss Tate’s views in personal, social, health and economic education lessons and the DfE refused to offer any training.

Readers respond to an article by Leah Harper on the environmental impact of the balloon boom and calls for a ban

I was pleased to read your article on the detrimental effects of balloons on the environment (The dark side of the balloon boom – is it time they were banned?, 2 April). I attend a yoga class on the first floor of a building in Chiswick, London, and I have been repeatedly disturbed by the sight of a helium balloon caught in a tree outside the window there.

Over the last 10 years, I have watched it metamorphose from a silvery helium balloon with a string into a grey, stringy mess that still hasn’t disappeared. Each time I see it, I despair that people still insist on so often buying balloons for celebrations without concern for the environmental impact that they will have once discarded.
Beatrix Chappell
London

No appeasement in Britain | Donald Trump’s new mantra | Fascinating obituary | The trouble with names | Spellchecker

Donald Trump says “We won’t want another Neville Chamberlain” (Trump uses Neville Chamberlain jibe to mock Starmer over stance on Iran, 6 April) – ie someone who does not stand up to tyrannical regimes and tries to appease them. Well, Donald, I am sure you are pleased that, so far, that is not happening in the UK, where our prime minister does seem to be standing up to such regimes by refusing to back the US-Israel attacks on Iran.
Dominic Rice
Sheffield

• President Trump used to have the mantra “Drill, baby, drill”. Now it seems to be “Kill, baby, kill”.
Rae Street
Littleborough, Greater Manchester

The government is cutting contributions at a critical stage in the campaign to eradicate the disease, writes Gillian Russell

It is extremely disheartening to read that after 2026, the UK government is to end its contributions to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), putting at risk the great efforts that have been made over the last 40 years to improve the health and wellbeing of children across the world (Polio virus detected in London days before ministers cut global eradication funding, 27 March).

The eradication of polio is a cornerstone of the humanitarian work of Rotary International (a GPEI partner). I am one of many Rotary members who have taken part in vaccination days in India and seen at first hand the dedication of local health workers in ensuring that all children are vaccinated.

️ Latest news from the first round at Augusta National
️ Official leaderboard | Follow us on Bluesky | Mail Scott

It may be very early doors, but for now, the old guard are in charge! Jose Maria Olazabal, winner in 1994 and 1999, rolls in a 15-footer for birdie on 2, then a big right-to-left swinger on 3, and the 60-year-old Spaniard leads the Masters! The only other man in red figures during these early moments? The 2009 winner Angel Cabrera, also with birdie at 2. Take a snapshot, because it won’t stay like this for long.

-2: Olazabal (3)
-1: Cabrera (3)

This week’s quarter-finals provided some classic action as this season’s competition hurtles towards its conclusion

Bayern Munich had not won at the Santiago Bernabéu since May 2001, when they beat Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final on their way to becoming European champions. . Tuesday night’s match changed all that. The 29th Champions League meeting between the teams lived up to its heavyweight billing, though Bayern, superior on the night, may rue their failure to add to their 2-1 lead. Real Madrid meanwhile could point to Manuel Neuer making nine saves – not bad for a 40-year-old. “We won’t win the competition without more of these kinds of performances,” said Bayern manager Vincent Kompany of his keeper. Big trophies are rarely won without great goalkeepers and Neuer continues to play like an all-time great. Bayern’s second goal was a trademark finish from Harry Kane, who made the difficult look easy. The goal will also have calmed England fans’ fears that their captain will arrive at the World Cup suffering from his usual summer malaise. A word too for Luis Díaz and Michael Olise, Bayern’s brilliant wingers whose performances brought back memories of the club’s modern greats Franck Ribéry and Arjen Robben. Kompany’s team were commanding in Madrid, but may fear the backlash from the 15-times champions, the kings of comebacks.

• ‘I see a lot of players come in and it’s too big for them’

• Maguire feels he is ‘one of best defenders in both boxes’

Harry Maguire believes the harder times he has experienced at Manchester United would have broken many players and says he has seen teammates find the Old Trafford spotlight too big to handle.

Maguire, who feels he is “arguably one of the best defenders in the world in both boxes”, this week signed a new one-year contract with the option of a further season. That extends a United career which began when the club paid a then world-record fee for a defender, £80m, to sign him from Leicester in 2019.

Tottenham are teetering on the verge, while The U’s have just dropped out of the automatic promotion places in League Two

Parents who’ve forgotten how exhausting young children are occasionally stop you and say: “The days are long, but the years are short.” Some reel – which is where I get all of my information these days – altered it slightly to say: “The days are long, but the weeks are also long,” which feels more accurate when you’re on your hands and knees on the kitchen floor picking up sticky rice with a wet wipe.

There are fewer saccharine Insta posts about football seasons feeling so arduously long and yet suddenly over at the same time. “Ah don’t you remember when it was the Carabao Cup first round – so cute.” This catches me out every year. Perhaps no one else is blindsided by football season by stealth, but here we are again: just a handful of games remaining to decide everything – and I’m not entirely sure how we’re at this stage.

• Gianpiero Lambiase set to join McLaren after 2027 season

• Verstappen has worked with Lambiase since 2016

Max Verstappen’s engineer Gianpiero Lambiase is to leave Red Bull to join McLaren in a shock move that throws further doubt on the four-time world champion’s future in Formula One.

Lambiase has worked with Verstappen since the Dutchman joined Red Bull in 2016 and has been at his side through the driver’s four titles, with the pair forging a close bond. Their radio interactions during races have been closely followed in what has been an enormously successful professional and personal relationship, sharing great joy and some blunt exchanges.

The New Zealand striker provides a welcome boost as Forest face crunch games in the league and in Europe

Nobody has scored more goals in the Europa League this season than Igor Jesus and yet the overwhelming source of interest surrounding Nottingham Forest on arrival in northern Portugal on Wednesday was another striker. Only Erling Haaland, Mohamed Salah and Alexander Isak outscored Chris Wood in the Premier League last season and the New Zealand frontman has been slowly building fitness and working towards a long-awaited first-team return.

All eyes were on Wood at last weekend’s interactive open-training session, staged at the City Ground. He has been ticking off different targets since knee surgery in December and at the end of last month the 34-year-old made a welcome goalscoring comeback 11 minutes into his return to action for Forest under-21s against Newcastle, in modest surroundings at Loughborough University’s stadium in front of a crowd totalling a couple of hundred: students, Forest fans, a few from the north-east.

Becoming heavyweight champions of the world may be beyond the ninth tier club but new chair Jon McClure hopes to bring team back to the city

“I told them if they bring a drum, I will buy them a pie,” was the message from the new Sheffield FC chair, Jon McClure, to young fans. The Reverend and the Makers frontman is Steel City born and raised, a Wednesday fan by nature and extremely proud of his home town’s history. Becoming involved with the world’s oldest club was an opportunity not to be missed, and McClure knows how to create some noise.

McClure wanted to link up with Sheffield FC eight years ago, but says he was not “in a mature enough position in my life to look after what’s essentially a kind of cultural and civic institution in the country and in Sheffield”. Since last month he has been at the heart of the ninth-tier club’s boardroom, part of a new minority ownership group alongside David Bianchi, the co-founder of Various Artists Management, reviewing the state of things and seeking improvement.

Alma Mana’o, the captain, reflects on their journey from a 21-0 defeat in 1998 to a place in the final round of qualification

The American Samoa women’s team has lived through a scarcely believable tale littered with upsets, and their story is still unfolding. At the end of last year, they entered a World Cup qualification tournament containing the lowest-ranked teams in the smallest federation, the Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). At 153rd in the world rankings, American Samoa ranked the lowest of the low. With an estimated population of 45,319, the island’s entire population would not sell out even the smallest stadium hosting Fifa’s showpiece event next year.

The national team’s captain, Alma Mana’o, talks of American Samoan culture as being “family is above all”. Multiple sets of sisters represent the team, something Mana’o relishes. “This is a family, we have got to get together, hold our sisters accountable and push each other,” she says. The Mana’o family hold the record for most family members to participate in Fifa events – “If we can’t win, we’re going to have the most kids!” Alma declares with a laugh – and American Samoa are out to prove there can be success in the family business.

This is an extract from our free email about women’s football, Moving the Goalposts. To get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions. Moving the Goalposts is delivered to your inboxes every Tuesday and Thursday.

I Am Maximus, the 2024 winner, heads to Aintree on Saturday as favourite to triumph again. Here is a look at the chances of all 34 contenders

One of two previous winners at the top of the weights and he backed up his 2024 success by pressing Nick Rockett all the way to the Elbow 12 months ago before finally crying enough. He had shown precious few hints of his National-winning form in two runs before that exceptional performance under top weight and has more to recommend him this year, having finished second in a Grade One in December and fifth in the Irish Gold Cup. In strict handicapping terms, he should probably find one or two too good, but Aintree aptitude is a serious weapon and another podium place is no forlorn hope.

Verdict: each-way hope on Aintree form, but no top-weight winner since 70s

Marine Conservation Society warns that fish numbers have reached dangerous point of decline

Consumers should “completely avoid” buying UK-caught cod, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) has said, as it warned that populations have reached a dangerous point of decline despite zero-catch recommendations.

The MCS, an environmental charity, publishes a Good Fish Guide to help consumers and businesses make sustainable seafood choices.

Finbar Sullivan, who ‘loved movies and making films’, had gone to London park to use new camera, says father

A film student who was stabbed to death in London’s Primrose Hill was a “beautiful, lovely, outgoing, loving” man, his father has said.

Finbar Sullivan, 21, was stabbed in a fight in the north London park in the early evening on Tuesday and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Artificial intelligence company cites high energy costs and regulation as reasons for putting Stargate project on hold

OpenAI has put plans for a landmark project to strengthen the UK’s AI capabilities on hold, citing high energy costs and regulation.

Stargate UK was a part of the landmark UK-US AI deal announced last September, in which US companies appeared to commit £31bn to the UK’s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to “mainline AI” into the British economy.

Almost 2,000 jobs will be created, with retailer vying to overtake Morrisons as Britain’s fifth largest supermarket

Lidl is to open 50 new UK stores in the year ahead as it aims to overtake Morrisons as the country’s fifth largest supermarket chain.

The German-owned retailer, which now has more than 1,000 British stores, said it planned to invest more than £600m in UK growth, creating almost 2,000 jobs as it expands its warehouse and logistic network to supply its new outlets.

Gas shortages and rising food prices mean many who came to the capital for work cannot afford to eat. Going home is now their only option

At 9am on a Saturday, 35-year-old Raju Prasad rushes through Anand Vihar railway station in Delhi, a heavy bag slung over his shoulder. Beside him, his wife clutches their youngest daughter with one arm and a white plastic bucket with the other. Their three other children trail behind – one dragging a trolley bag, the others holding on to whatever little they can manage. With Prasad’s brother, the family of seven is leaving for Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh.

They had moved to India’s capital nine months ago. The couple worked as ragpickers and were paid about 500 rupees a day (about £4), working long 10-hour shifts. But any dreams of building a more secure future in Delhi and sending their children to school have been lost, as rising food costs and the impact of the Middle East crisis on fuel availability and prices have meant the past few weeks have been a fight for basic survival. Now they are moving back to their village.

Use of glyphosate has risen 10-fold in 30 years, raising fears for public health

It was Scottish farmers in the 1980s who pioneered the practice of spraying glyphosate on their wheat just before harvest. Struggling in the damp glens to get their crop to dry evenly, they came up with the idea of accelerating the process by killing it a week or two before harvesting.

Glyphosate, then a revolutionary herbicide that killed everything plant-based but spared animal life, seemed perfect for the job. Soon the practice spread to wetter, colder agricultural regions around the world.

Legislative change backed by libertarian president makes it easier to extract metals in frozen parts of the Andes

Argentina’s congress has approved a bill promoted by the libertarian president, Javier Milei, that authorises mining in ecologically sensitive areas of glaciers and permafrost, outraging environmentalists.

The amendment to the “glacier law”, which was already approved by the senate in February, would make it easier to mine for metals such as copper, lithium and silver in frozen parts of the Andes mountains.

Record high set on Monday and raised on Tuesday, with 14.4GW of electricity generated in sunny spring weather

Britain’s sunny spring weather powered the grid to new solar energy records on two consecutive days this week.

Solar farms in England, Wales and Scotland generated 14.1GW of low-carbon electricity at lunchtime on Monday, surpassing the previous high of 14GW in July last year.

Analysis of six extreme heatwaves found when temperature and humidity were accounted for, all were potentially deadly for older people

Extreme heat is already creating “non-survivable” conditions for humans in heatwaves that have killed thousands and likely many more, according to new research that warns people are more susceptible to rising temperatures than first thought.

Scientists re-examined six extreme heatwaves between 2003 and 2024 and found that when temperature, humidity and the body’s ability to stay cool were accounted for, all were potentially deadly for older people.

Survey of 2,000 parents by Barnardo’s also finds almost half feel their child has missed opportunities due to cost

Four in 10 parents across the UK are struggling to afford essential items for the care of their newborn babies, according to research.

The survey of 2,000 parents with children aged under five by the charity Barnardo’s also found that almost half (49%) of parents felt that their child has missed out on opportunities to learn or play due to cost.

Council backs £700,000 plan to save historic landmark at former RAF base in the New Forest

A unique RAF watch office that has been crumbling for decades is to be turned into a smart hideaway home to be shared by holidaymakers – and the bats that already use it.

The Landmark Trust, which rescues at-risk buildings, has been given permission to convert the ruined property in Hampshire into a holiday retreat with four bedrooms and a roof terrace.

Proposal to help people heat two rooms, provide hot water and run key appliances without incurring more debt

In order to cut rising bills all UK households should receive a minimum amount of energy at rates subsidised by the government through North Sea taxes, a thinktank has suggested.

Providing all homes with enough energy to heat two rooms, provide hot water and run key appliances such as a fridge and washing machine, at rates frozen at current levels, would require a subsidy of about £4.5bn, according to the New Economics Foundation.

David Lammy says those affected by a heinous crime cannot be expected to engage with the justice system within the existing 28-day limit

Victims and bereaved families will be given six months to challenge “unduly lenient” sentences handed to criminals, under changes announced by David Lammy.

Relatives of murder victims campaigned for the government to scrap the 28-day time limit to submit a formal request after an offender is sentenced.

At the peak of the Israel-Gaza conflict, 10 children a day were losing one or both legs. For those who cross the border for medical help, physical recovery is only the start of their struggle

Ola Jamal, 36, was breastfeeding her two-month-old son, Zain, when the missile struck al-Nasr hospital in Gaza in November 2023. When the explosion hit the building, the shrapnel went through Jamal’s arm while she held her infant.

“I ran with my family to the hospital and stayed there to hide,” she says at a prosthetic centre in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. “We thought it would be safe because it’s a children’s hospital.”

A row of customised prosthetic limbs, labelled with the names of patients, lined up in a clinic wall

Loyalists rush to defend president for ‘outsmarting the critics’ but others decry deal as ‘a negative for our country’

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump’s acceptance of a two-week ceasefire in Iran has exposed fresh divisions in his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, with some supporters expressing vindication and others accusing the US president of betrayal.

The US and Iran both claimed victory after the two countries agreed to pause hostilities following more than a month of war. But the strait of Hormuz remained closed on Wednesday and fighting was still taking place as Israel launched its biggest attacks yet on Lebanon.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democrat leader, will use pro forma session to try to pass measure requiring president to withdraw US forces from Middle East

A reminder that on day two of the ceasefire, my colleagues are covering the latest at our dedicated Middle East blog. This includes the news that Iran will allow no more than 15 vessels a day to pass through the strait of Hormuz under the agreement with the US, according to Russia’s state TASS news agency, quoting an unnamed senior Iranian source as saying.

At the White House on Wednesday, Karoline Leavitt offered a muddled explanation about which proposal the administration agreed to with Iran, but said that the regime actually put forward a “more reasonable and entirely different and condensed plan to the president”. The press secretary also warned that any further disruption to the vital waterway is “completely unacceptable”.

Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi were arrested 7 March with alleged homemade devices at Gracie Mansion in New York

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox

Two teen alleged Islamic State supporters accused of trying to detonate explosive devices during a protest outside the home of New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, freely discussed how many people they might kill, with one remarking: “I want to start terror, bro,” according to an indictment unsealed on Tuesday.

The teenagers, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, were arrested on 7 March for allegedly igniting two improvised explosive devices during an anti-Islam protest outside Gracie Mansion. Authorities claim that Balat, 18, lit one device and threw it in the direction of the protesters.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Oil prices are still rising this morning, as markets question the durability of the ceasefire deal between the US and Iran.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, is now up by about 3% to $97.88 a barrel.

We’ve obviously had a very big shock in the last month or so, with the conflict breaking out in the Middle East, that has prompted, obviously, much greater market volatility. I mean, we all have to get up in the morning and find out what’s gone on overnight. At least we got up yesterday and found the world was still with us, but it obviously is very volatile. Yesterday was a good day in point to illustrate that.”

It’s a very good environmental argument, don’t get me wrong. But there is also an economic argument here as well, because it’s certainly the case for the UK that we are still reliant on gas quite often, but less than we used to be, as the marginal source of energy.

But the share of renewables has grown, and I know the UK government’s very focused on this question as to what we learn from the events we’re going through at the moment, what’s the right thing to do.”

After suspending routes owing to Iran war, airline will operate more direct flights to India and Kenya

• Middle East crisis – live updates

British Airways will offer a reduced flight schedule to the Middle East when it resumes services in July, and use the aircraft to operate more direct flights to India and Kenya.

The airline has currently suspended services to the region because of the Iran war, and plans to resume flights to Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, in mid-May, as well as services to Dubai, Doha and Tel Aviv on 1 July. It is cutting its Dubai flights from three – a day to one daily flight, and reducing services to Doha, Tel Aviv and Riyadh from two to one a day.

Situation still volatile as Tehran and Washington issue conflicting messages about opening of Hormuz channel

A plunge in the oil price, stock market rally and renewed hopes for the global economic outlook. After the announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the Iran war, the relief in financial markets was palpable. But it is far from absolute.

For the past six weeks, the economic damage had been steadily mounting, as the effective closure of the strait of Hormuz by Tehran triggered the worst energy crisis of the modern era.

Struggling pubs reel from rising business rates, wages and energy bills, with customers at limit of what they will pay

Nick Evans is staring in vain at columns of numbers, trying to make them add up to a profit. He is a co-owner of the Old Crown Coaching Inn in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, a pub and hotel whose rich history is etched into its crooked wooden beams and cosy snugs.

Oliver Cromwell stayed here in 1645. A room believed to have been used by the notoriously severe “hanging judge” Lord Jeffreys to condemn rebels now stages happier encounters: it is the honeymoon suite.

(Rough Trade)
Smoothing out the jump-cut chaos of his previous band, Cameron Picton brings entirely acoustic instrumentation to bear on these lovely, beguiling songs

In the middle of Hellfire, the final album by British art-rockers Black Midi, lurked a song called Still. It was easy to overlook. As you may recall, Hellfire was a rock opera that – even by the standards of rock operas, seldom the first place to look for a linear, elevator-pitch-friendly plot – made no sense whatsoever: there was some business about a boxing match, an actor who exploded on stage, and a set of army recruits with names such as Tristan Bongo and Mrs Gonorrhoea. It was admittedly difficult to pay attention to the narrative, distracted as one was by the sound of Black Midi continually doing their nut in their traditionally maximalist style: scrabbly riffs, jagged chords, free-blowing sax, bursts of noise, cocktail jazz interludes, Beefheartian rhythms, bursts of accordion, the sound of the kitchen sink being dragged into the studio etc. Amid all that, what price a sweetly lambent acoustic track, with a little country and a dab of bucolic Canterbury prog in its DNA, sung not by frontman Geordie Greep in one of his apparently fathomless array of funny voices, but by bassist Cameron Picton, a man possessed of an understated, guileless vocal style?

It’s hard not to think of Still when considering Picton’s first post-Black Midi album as My New Band Believe, recorded with a host of left-field and improv-friendly musicians, among them veteran drummer Steve Noble, once of skronky 80s post-punk hellraisers Rip Rig + Panic. While Greep’s 2024 solo debut The New Sound offered the full sonic smorgasbord familiar to Black Midi fans – all the sudden leaps from samba to heavy riffing and Zappa-ish jazz-rock your heart might desire – My New Band Believe’s eponymous debut could be read as an album that takes Still as its starting point.

Almeida theatre, London
Anya Reiss packs the marriage scandal plot with inspired ideas, from convincing talk of Instagram to a look at sexual dynamics in the crosshairs of contemporary capitalism

Who would Henrik Ibsen’s Nora be in 21st-century Britain? Would her husband, Torvald still be a bank manager and she his “little squirrel” housewife?

Transposing this drama of 19th-century proto-feminism into the present day is a tricky business, partly because the gendered confinements of Nora and Torvald’s “ideal” middle-class marriage are built on thoroughly old-fashioned values: a husband who prides himself as the sole breadwinner, a wife who would spark social scandal if she left her marital home. Adapter Anya Reiss does a heroic job of reimagining this story for modern times, and half pulls it off.

He plays a pastor on the run from a gang in this dysfunctional family sitcom. The cast is ace, with Taylor Ortega as the hilarious sister – and it has a blindsiding twist

There are, broadly speaking, two types of television shows: the ones that make stars and the ones made by stars. The former includes the ensemble productions that turn unknowns into household names – Bridgerton, Euphoria, Industry – as well as the labour-of-love projects that make their camera-ready creators scalding-hot industry property (Fleabag, I May Destroy You, Baby Reindeer). Schitt’s Creek, Dan Levy’s sitcom about a once-wealthy family forced to slum it in a dingy motel in the arse end of nowhere, belongs firmly in this category. Levy, 42, did have something of a leg-up in the entertainment world – he co-created the show with his father, American Pie’s Eugene Levy, who also played the clan’s clueless patriarch – yet for all intents and purposes Schitt’s Creek was a grassroots success story, debuting in 2015 on Canadian network CBC before gradually becoming a global hit after it was picked up by Netflix a couple of years later.

And what about the second kind? Well, these are the ones that couldn’t exist without the first: they are the post-breakthrough, difficult-second-projects made by freshly minted stars such as Levy, who have been handsomely rewarded for the popularity of their dazzling brainchild with a very lucrative streaming contract. Historically, these deals haven’t always seemed like the wisest investment: Amazon has reportedly paid Fleabag Creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge $100m, but a similar blockbuster is yet to materialise. Netflix have had a fraction more luck with Levy, who made a film for them in 2023 called Good Grief – although you suspect a melancholic indie movie wasn’t exactly what the platform was hoping for when they signed up the maker of a rambunctious family comedy for an eight-figure sum.

Big Mistakes is on Netflix

A group of neurodivergent and disabled young adults ask Stephen Fry the tough questions most others don’t dare to – and it makes for a truly liberating experience

As opening questions in celebrity interviews go, it’s a bold one. You can’t imagine Norton, Ross or Winkleman beginning with it. But the latest guest on The Assembly, Stephen Fry, is just settling into his chair when he’s given this as his starter: “You tried to kill yourself a couple of times. Are you happy to be alive now?”

The Assembly, of course, is not a standard chatshow. This is the one where a famous person is interrogated by a group of young adults with neurodivergence or learning disabilities, who are less inhibited by the ordinary protocols of TV interviews. Every question is simultaneously something no conventional interviewer would ever contemplate saying, and something we are immediately interested in seeing the guest react to. Celebs enter that bright, high-windowed room overlooking the Thames with a mix of joy and trepidation, knowing that the artifices and pretensions that usually protect them don’t apply here. “I’ve seen you guys,” says Fry on his way in. “Smiling assassins!”

The Assembly aired on ITV1 and is available on ITVX

Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page flirt their way through expected genre tropes in a watchable, if a little unspecific, slice of formulaic fantasy

You, Me & Tuscany is a perfectly wholesome and harmless meet-cute that starts by asking: “What if the Little Mermaid had a Lady and the Tramp-style hookup with the season one heart-throb from Bridgerton, spaghetti and all?”

Halle Bailey is Anna, hopelessly navigating life after the death of her mother, torn between the worlds of adult responsibility and inner child whimsy. A freelance hustle as a house sitter helps make ends meet, but her impulse to fully inhabit her clients’ lives constantly threatens her livelihood. A gig watching over a spectacular Central Park West apartment seems out of a dream. But it quickly goes awry when the lady of the house (Nia Vardalos in a sly cameo) returns early and catches Anna cosplaying as a Park Avenue princess in her premium lingerie. Embarrassed, Anna retreats into the arms of her bestie Claire (Aziza Scott of One of Them Days), the luxury hotel clerk whose barbed sisterly advice is well worth enduring for the one-liners and the potential discount on a short-term residency.

Succession meets The Borrowers in The Miniature Wife. Plus: Jane McDonald heads to Nashville seeking musical inspiration. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Atlantic

The German cleric who sparked the Reformation - and profoundly changed Europe – saw music as a divine gift. He almost certainly didn’t say ‘Why should the devil have all the best tunes?’, but he should have.

It is All Hallows’ Eve – Hallowe’en to you and me – in 1517. Martin Luther, a 33-year-old German priest and scholar, marches up to the church in Wittenberg and nails a document to the door. On the document, in Latin, are 95 statements, or theses, protesting against corruption in the church. Luther is particularly exercised by the practice of indulgences: whereby the rich can buy their way to heaven by lining the pockets of priests and the papacy here on earth. Much more fundamentally, he’s suggesting that everybody can have a direct and personal relationship with God without the mediation of the rituals and hierarchy of the church. The rebel priest is excommunicated for his trouble, and then summoned to a Diet (a church assembly) in the city of Worms. He’s declared a heretic and faces death by burning at the stake. There’s a dramatic escape involving disguise and a fake abduction – and the Reformation begins.

What has all this got to do with music? In Radio 3’s new series Key Changes, we’re looking at pivotal events over a thousand years of history which have changed the course of music. Luther’s Reformation was, for sure, one of these events. Luther was a musician himself. He knew music theory, he played the lute and the flute and he saw music as a divine gift “next to theology”. But some of his more fundamentalist adherents would like to have seen music off altogether: away with elaborate polyphony, mass settings and anthems – the unadorned word of scripture is enough!

Royal Albert Hall, London
On a tour playing Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister in full on alternate nights, Stuart Murdoch and co wittily reanimate their world of aesthetes and misfits

It’s a double 30th anniversary for Belle and Sebastian, whose first two albums, Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister, both came out in 1996. Not that most people heard Tigermilk back then: only 1,000 copies existed until its 1999 reissue. Taken together, though, they were a perfect introduction to frontman Stuart Murdoch’s private universe of aesthetes and misfits (like the girl in Expectations, “making life-size models of the Velvet Underground in clay”), as instantly inviting as the Smiths’ debut, Wes Anderson’s 90s movies or JD Salinger’s short stories.

The Glaswegians quickly became more diverse and extroverted but it was these two records, performed here in full over two nights, that made them cult worthy. As former bassist Stuart David says in the introductory film, they had a “slightly shambolic magic”.

The presenter wakes her family up by blasting out Cal Orff and gets the ick from Chris de Burgh, but which lyrically problematic rap banger is she a secret fan of?

The first song I fell in love with
When I was a teenager, I went to a charity shop in Basingstoke, just happened to buy Jolene by Dolly Parton, then played it non-stop.

The first single I bought
Save a Prayer by Duran Duran, from HMV in Reading. Simon Le Bon was gorgeous, wasn’t he? I liked Morten Harket from A-ha as well.

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
There is something eternally teenage about the trailblazing rocker, who can still deliver at her glam-era best – but her rambling reminiscences are a bit Alan Partridge

Suzi Quatro has a confession. At 75, age has taken its toll, she tells the Glasgow crowd. She has lost an inch in height and is now 5ft 1in. “But,” she grins, “I can still scream just as loud.” Proof comes during 48 Crash. It is a thrilling noise, the Suzi Q scream, a holler of swallow-the-world desire and a defining sound of the glam era. She has been screaming like that since she was a kid playing dance halls around Detroit. There is something eternally teenage about her, an innocent in black leather, so that even when she covers Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World, towards the end of the first of two sets, she drains the song of anger and floods it with galvanising sincerity.

While the opening hour is entertaining and well paced, the second, longer set is a mess of lesser material, tedious solos and drawn-out introductions of her eight-piece band. Worst is the stretch in which Quatro runs through her career with the aid of pictures: “Fifteen years on BBC Radio 2. I was up for broadcaster of the year at the Sony Radio awards.” Ever wondered what it would be like if Alan Partridge delivered a PowerPoint in the middle of a rock gig? Not great.

From an extraordinary debut inspired by a real-life breakdown to a creepy masterpiece, here’s a guide to the Scottish novelist’s works

Next week marks 20 years since the death of the Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist Muriel Spark. She was best known for her 22 novels – uncanny, astute and witty – beginning with her 1957 debut The Comforters. Here, James Bailey, the author of a new biography, Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, guides us through her oeuvre.

***

This unconventional exploration of Albert Speer’s duplicity during his Nazi years and into his rehabilitation is a masterful forewarning of the post-truth era

In April 1975, Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor whose efforts to track down Nazi war criminals had earned him the title of “Nazi hunter”, wrote a letter to Albert Speer, the Nazi war criminal. Wiesenthal thanked him for a psychology book Speer had sent him, and forwarded a copy of the French edition of his own memoir. Their decade-long correspondence also includes holiday postcards and birthday wishes. It ends with a personal note from Speer’s widow Margarete on her husband’s death in 1981, telling Wiesenthal how important their friendship had been to him.

Wiesenthal’s friendship was a private echo of the extraordinarily warm international welcome that Speer received as a public intellectual after his release from Spandau prison in 1966. Speer had served as minister of armaments in wartime Nazi Germany, and was found guilty of crimes against humanity; yet when he died, he was in London to promote his new book on the BBC.

In the midst of violent upheaval, the author and activist reminds us of the power and promise of transformation

In 2004, Rebecca Solnit released Hope in the Dark, a series of extended essays in response to the war in Iraq. Drawing on the resilience she saw after Hurricane Katrina, she offered a vision of solidarity and tenacity. The book experienced a sharp surge in popularity after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, selling out in short order. Returning to Hope in the Dark 10 years later, I remembered why it was so lauded. It is a slim, steady book full of sensible reminders about the limits of the intellect and the dangers of becoming poisoned by pessimism. “Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed,” Solnit wrote. Humility requires us to acknowledge that no matter how damningly certain the future may seem, it remains fundamentally unknowable. That’s where hope begins.

Her timely new book picks up this thread: “You do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking,” she tells us. Solnit has written more than a dozen books since 2004, but in format, design, and theme, The Beginning Comes After the End feels like the direct successor to Hope in the Dark: a novella-length essay broken into short but wide-ranging chapters that cite history, philosophy and contemporary writing, paying special note to moments of reparation and progress.

A magisterial history of one of the worst ever pandemics focuses on the individuals caught up in the chaos

In Venice, authorities tried to enforce social distancing by closing all the bars, and banning the sale of wine by merchant boats plying the canals. In Gloucester, the powers that be attempted to lock down the city by banning anyone travelling to and from Bristol, 40 miles south. But fights broke out among thirsty Italians, and Gloucester’s quarantine was broken – whether it was by people simply going on a trip to check their eyesight has, alas, gone unrecorded. In London, there was a dramatic rise in the sale of personal protective equipment, in the form of gloves.

The story of the Black Death, as historian Thomas Asbridge shows in this magisterial survey, contains many such echoes of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it also shows just how relatively lucky we were a few years ago. The plague was far more lethal, and in the areas it spread between 1346 and 1353 it killed half the population. About 100m died: it was, Asbridge remarks, “the most lethal natural disaster in human history”. If a pathogen with a similar case fatality rate were to erupt worldwide today, billions might die.

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

• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

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.

Curve, Leicester
Two prisoners escape their grim Buenos Aires jail into golden age fantasy sequences that elicit big belting showtunes from Anna-Jane Casey’s baddie

Kander and Ebb’s early-90s musical is having a moment. Next week, Bill Condon’s movie, starring Diego Luna, Tonatiuh and Jennifer Lopez, goes on general release. And here, touring to Bristol and Southampton, is a slick, earnest revival by director Paul Foster. Despite the sudden focus, this is a rarity: fans of the musical and the Manuel Puig novel on which it is based have had to wait since 1992 for a major new staging.

There are possible reasons for this. The setting in a Buenos Aires prison is one of them, although it is not simply that Kiss of the Spider Woman is grim. There are other musicals with grim settings: Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret among them. More than that, it is hard for a production to make it grim enough without distressing the audience. Yet the more of a sanitised Broadway version it becomes, the less the fantasy sequences seem like an escape.

Hampstead theatre, London
Michael Frayn’s cerebral drama of science and conscience returns with urgency – although this production struggles to ignite its emotional core

Paapa Essiedu recently spoke of reviving only those plays that speak to the present moment. Michael Frayn’s 1998 drama could not better fit that bill. A dangerous hard-right politician who threatens to wipe out an entire civilisation sits at the heart of this three-hander about pioneering atomic physics caught in the warp of political violence and warfare.

It is based on a real life meeting in 1941 between the Danish Niels Bohr (Richard Schiff) and the German Werner Heisenberg (Damien Molony), both brilliant quantum scientists on opposite sides during the second world war. The raging leader here is Hitler but echoes of Donald Trump could not be more resounding, given his recently expressed fantasy of genocide in his war with Iran.

Sadler’s Wells, London
This parody of courting rituals brings back its inaugural dancers 48 years on – ghosting their onstage choreography with footage of their younger selves, for a moving look at the passing of time

‘My name is Arthur, Arthur Rosenfeld. I’m nearly 74,” says the self-proclaimed “sprightly old geezer” on stage. “My name is Meryl Tankard. I’m 70,” says the woman next to him. Josephine, 76; Ed, 80; John, 79 … these are some of our dancers this evening, performing live on stage but also accompanied by the ghosts of their younger selves.

Kontakthof is the dance that keeps on giving. Created by the late Pina Bausch, German dance-theatre doyenne, in 1978, it’s set in a dance hall to songs of the 1930s. The piece is an oddly affecting parody of courting rituals and friction between the sexes – petty cruelties, intimidation, questions of consent. Like the nature documentary that briefly plays in the second half, it’s a detached observation of our species’ strange behaviour.

Kontakthof has been performed in multiple iterations, most memorably in London in 2010 with two casts, one a group of teenagers, the other a company of nonprofessionals over 65, putting completely different filters of experience on exactly the same steps. This latest version devised by Tankard, however, is special. These eight dancers (a ninth was unable to perform this evening) are all members of the original cast, reunited, dancing their old roles. The backdrop is the film of their 1978 performance, so they are mirrored by the spectres of their younger selves; time folded in on itself.

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

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

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

The 79th edition of the film festival will see work by Pedro Almodóvar, Hirokazu Kore-eda and László Nemes considered for the coveted Palme d’Or

Gillian Anderson, Rami Malek, Cara Delevingne and John Travolta are expected to walk the red carpet at Cannes this year, as the world’s most influential film festival unveiled an auteur-heavy lineup for its 79th edition.

Competing for the coveted Palme d’Or will be new films by heavyweights Pedro Almodóvar, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Paweł Pawlikowski, László Nemes and Asghar Farhadi.

The bestselling US novelist, who writes under a pseudonym and appears in public wearing a wig, said she’s ‘tired of this being secret’ as she announced her real name is Sara Cohen

The bestselling thriller writer known as Freida McFadden has revealed her real identity, ending years of speculation about the author behind a string of hugely popular novels.

McFadden, whose books include bestseller The Housemaid, appears in public in a wig and glasses and writes under a pseudonym. But the US author has now confirmed that her real name is Sara Cohen.

As the Artemis II astronauts return from the moon, we celebrate the science, suits and spirit of endeavour that took them there, all brought together in a colourful new book called Space Journal

It was the play that rocked a nation. The makers of the devastating drama, which transported theatre-goers from a Fife pub to a war zone, recall how it grew and grew

Within six months of its launch in 2006, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) produced a globe-conquering hit. Inspired by tragic events at Camp Dogwood in Iraq, Black Watch was a humane portrayal of young squaddies on the frontline. As a pool table transformed into a tank, the audience were transported from a Fife pub to a war zone where nothing was more heartbreaking than a letter from home.

Vicky Featherstone (founding artistic director): On my first day at NTS in 2004, I bought a Glasgow Herald. On the front page was an article saying Tony Blair was going to get rid of Scotland’s individual regiments and turn them into the Royal Regiment of Scotland. On page three, there was a sad story about three soldiers from the Black Watch regiment who had been blown up by an IED along with an Iraqi translator. In the gap between page one and page three was a story that had to be told. I called up Gregory Burke and said, “Will you follow this story?”

The weeks before the full spring bounty arrives are a perfect time to bring a lighter approach to winter crops, and make the most of frozen fruit and spring greens

• Sign up here for our weekly food newsletter, Feast

Spring may have firmly sprung – I write this with a view of vivid yellow forsythia blossom in next door’s garden, and the melodious warble of full-throated birdsong – but though the greenery may be flourishing in our gardens, it’s a different story at the farmers’ market. Despite a few spindly spears of asparagus and miniature jersey royals making an appearance on our Easter tables last weekend, the new season of British produce doesn’t kick off in earnest for another few weeks yet. That means we’re now heading into the so-called “hungry gap”, an annual quirk of our relatively northern latitude, when temperatures are too high for much winter veg such as kale and brassicas, but too low for the more delicate likes of peas and broad beans to ripen – let alone high-summer treats such as berries, squash and stone fruit.

Happily, many hardy winter crops store well, and are versatile enough to shake off their heavy winter coat of cream and butter in favour of a lighter treatment. The late Skye Gyngell gifted us a carrot, celery, farro and borlotti bean soup, Nigel Slater has an early spring laksa with purple sprouting broccoli (and some spinach, which I suspect you could use frozen), and Nicholas Balfe offers a ceviche with celeriac and a baked beetroot dish (pictured top) – both of which look just the thing to wake up your taste buds. If it stays salad weather, I’m also rather taken by the sound of Thomasina Miers’s purple sprouting broccoli with sunshine dressing. Then again, with a name like that, who wouldn’t be?

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

Whether you’re searching for volume, length or waterproof warpaint, we tested 40 mascaras (and applied up to 40 coats) to find the best for your makeup bag

• The best anti-ageing creams, serums and treatments

If you were allowed to pick only one makeup item to use for the rest of your life, what would you choose? Without a doubt, mine would be mascara. It’s the most transformative beauty staple. Defining your lashes has literally eye-opening results, making them appear bigger and brighter.

If the questions I’ve been asked as a beauty editor are anything to go by, even those who consider themselves low-maintenance usually own a mascara: requests for mascara recommendations are by far the most common. It seems no one is immune to how effortlessly eye-framing a few coats can be.

Best mascara overall:
Lancôme Lash Idôle Curl Goddess mascara

Best budget mascara:
L’Oréal Paris Extensionist Telescopic Mascara

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

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

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

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

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

• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The image of cream sherry is that of your gran’s favourite tipple, a drink from a bygone era. Is it time for a makeover?

By the time I knew her, my granny was in her whisky and water era, but my dad clearly remembers a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream in the drinks cupboard, ready to pour for friends after church in the 1970s. This is the enduring image of cream sherry, one that it has struggled to shake off. While other sherries – bone-dry fino and manzanilla (made by ageing palomino grapes under a yeast layer called flor), oxidative amontillado or oloroso, and sweet, single varietals such as pedro ximénez (PX) – have acquired new cachet among younger drinkers, not least because they’re relatively affordable, cream is the emblematic Little English tipple of a bygone time.

Britain was sherry’s biggest export market for several centuries – the word is said to hark back to importers’ inability to pronounce the J in Jerez, where this large, colourful family of fortified wines originates. So Jerez became “sherez” became “sherry” – and cream sherry was developed specifically for the tastes of Victorian drinkers. The iconic Harveys, for example, named after its Bristol-based wine merchant/importer, arrived in the 1860s and by the early 1970s was shifting a million cases of the stuff each year (sales have since dropped to a mere fraction of that).

A rather pastoral feel accompanies this week’s simple recipe for a nutty chocolate cake

Having been kept waiting for three hours, Dick Dewy leaves Miss Fancy Day snipping and sewing her blue dress. The plan is that he will return for her a quarter of an hour later, however, Dick convinces himself that he has been scandalously trifled with by Fancy and decides that, to punish her, he will not return. Instead, he leaps over the gate, pushes up the lane for two miles, takes a winding path called Snail-Creep, and crawls through the opening to the hazel grove in Grey’s Wood.

A creative way to use the core, leaves and all so that not one part of the cauli gets left behind

This recipe, adapted from one in my cookbook, is a very elaborate way to serve humble cauliflower cheese. The whole plant, including the leaves and core, is seasoned with nutmeg and roasted, and it’s then dressed with a satisfying layer of rich cheese sauce and grilled until charred and bubbling. Choose a cauliflower with plenty of leaves, because they go deliciously crisp when roasted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

At last … creative perfumes at half the cost of most niche fragrances, with a wide range of beautifully balanced options

The business of modern perfumery can stink. While I accept that the cost of everything is now troubling, large sections of the niche fragrance sector seemingly pluck their prices from the sky. It’s not unusual for a bottle costing £300-odd to launch without any accompanying explanation as to why. An unknown name, a needlessly quirky bottle, an egregious price tag – all serve to underline the assertion that this is a “niche” fragrance for people who take their scents seriously, who should be too in the know to question its calibre.

And so when I see a brand doing things honestly, authentically and with great care, I must give due credit. Essential Parfums is new to John Lewis (and available directly from the brand online) and its aim is to democratise creative perfumery. What this means in practice is an open brief to perfumers, who include such big hitters as Dominique Ropion and Anne Flipo; their total creative freedom; sustainable and mostly natural ingredient sourcing, development and manufacturing processes (using biotech, simple refillable bottles and cardboard packaging containing no glue or plastic); and a fair price – around £86 for a whopping 100ml, which, millilitre for millilitre, is less than half the cost of a pretty average designer fragrance enjoying little of the same treatment, and about a quarter of some of the nonsense I’m pitched regularly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cycle tour of the Sierra Nevada backcountry proves a bumpy but beautiful ride through cinematic scenery

When you get into a van with an Englishman, five Irishmen and a Scotsman, you know someone is going to end up looking silly. For the next few days, my aim is for it not to be me. The van is taking us from busy Málaga to remote Andalucía for four days of gravel biking, something I have never done and for which I am not sure I am cut out.

Most of my cycling experience is limited to a flat five-mile commute through London, or long-distance road touring holidays. I love sailing across smooth asphalt, and have always been slightly snobby about the rough stuff. Why bump along when you can glide?

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.

England’s largest forest has an aura reminiscent of parts of Canada or Finland. This year it celebrates its centenary with new trails and dark sky events

Deep in Kielder Forest, on the northern side of the vast Kielder Water stands Silvas Capitalis, a giant, two-storey timber head, one of the most striking of the 20 sculptures tucked between the pines. It’s an eerie sight, almost shocking; its mouth ajar, as if astounded by all it sees. It’s my first visit to Kielder, and my face has been wearing a similar expression since I stepped out of the car at the lakeside trying to take in the scale of the landscapes unfolding around me.

Kielder doesn’t look like England – at least, not the England I know. For a start, it’s vast; 250 sq miles (648 sq km), with 158m trees, mostly sitka spruce conifers planted by hand. And even though it’s a plantation, there’s a wilderness feel that reminds me of Finland or Canada; a great swathe of nature at its most intense. It’s a working forest, involving 500 full-time jobs (not including tourism) and 2026 marks the centenary of the very first plantings, when the UK was in need of timber reserves after the demands of the first world war.

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

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

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

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Welcome to the Guardian Thursday news quiz. Thanks to our illustration from Anaïs Mims, you must decide whether you are a neatly curled question mark of knowledge, or a miniature naughty dachshund of ignorance, cheerfully causing chaos and refusing to come when called, while balancing on a ball. Fifteen questions on topical headlines, pop culture and general knowledge await. There are no prizes, but we always enjoy hearing how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 242

This week Artemis II’s four-astronaut crew broke Apollo 13’s distance record, becoming the humans to travel the farthest from Earth. Now on their way home, the team has experienced tech malfunctions, views like no other and moments of intense emotion, all in under 10 days. To find out about all the highs and lows of the mission, Madeleine Finlay hears from the Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample

Artemis II crew describe ‘overwhelming’ emotions after soaring past the moon

Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod

Larger than any dog, let alone a house cat, the beast swaggered through the Dartmoor mist. My schoolfriends and I were entranced – until the adults who had slept through everything told us we were lying

I was 11, with a handful of friends on a school trip to Dartmoor. We’d set up our tents near the edge of a camp, which was mostly empty.

The first morning, our tent woke before the teachers. We stole out to find another group of boys already on the dewy grass, standing hands in pockets, together in nature. The sun was just coming up. The last of the night-time mist was peeling away.

Rachel Waters gave morphine to her dying mother to ease her in her final hours. Then came the murder charge

Rachel Waters was in her apartment in Queens, watching food reviews on YouTube, when a nurse called: her mother was dying.

She needed to get to the memory care facility in Evans, Georgia, immediately. A physician had said Marsha could die within hours.

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

The Lib Dems’ Sue Miller has spent most of her life trying to reduce the risk of nuclear war. And it’s not going well. Why are so few people talking about non-proliferation, let alone disarmament?

Almost the mildest remark that Sue Miller makes about nuclear weapons is also the scariest: “The last people to take a big interest in any of this were Gordon Brown and Margaret Beckett.” Those people seem such a long way away – Brown, of course, still campaigns valiantly against poverty, and Beckett is a working baroness, but as voices against the global buildup of nuclear arms, theirs are so historical as to be almost nostalgic.

Yet the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ symbolic representation of how near the world is to destroying itself, has never been closer to midnight than it is now: 85 seconds (and this was prior to the current war in Iran). Russia has been making thinly veiled threats of “tactical” use since its invasion of Ukraine, while its drone incursions into Nato nations have “heightened European threat perceptions” (as the bulletin puts it), without those perceptions driving anyone’s thoughts towards nuclear de-escalation, let alone disarmament. Meanwhile, non-nuclear European nations are talking about developing “nuclear latency” – building the ability to develop nuclear capacity at speed.

Sandra Laville has been reporting on England’s sewage crisis for years. She answered your questions on the water privatisation scandal.

Guardian environment correspondent Sandra Laville’s reporting on the sewage crisis in English water has helped to expose a scandal of privatisation that has created a swell of fury across the political divide.

Sandra has now finished answering your questions. Read the Q&A below.

The government has put the cost of renationalising water at £100bn. But this is a disputed figure. Academics working with the People’s Commission on the Water Sector say this figure is ‘serious scaremongering created on biased evidence’ which was paid for by water companies. It is based on the Regulatory Capital Value of companies as determined by Ofwat, not the” true and fair value in law”, which reflects losses from market failures, like the cost of pollution or the monopoly profits taken by shareholders and banks.

The route to renationalisation could come via the system set up legally when the companies were privatised. Under the law companies can be put into special administration if they are unable to pay debts, if they breach licence obligations, such as on sewage pollution, or failing to supply water, and if it is considered in the public interest to do so. Special administration is a form of temporary renationalisation.

This is the million dollar question! While tackling separation across the whole network at once is considered too disruptive and costly, particularly in urban environments, the chartered institute of water and environmental management says moving towards separated systems is their key focus to address urban pollution and storm water sewage releases. New developments, for example, are now mandated to have separate pipes for foul wastewater and surface water run off.

They also want to see the increased use of sustainable drainage systems like water butts, and storage basins for existing properties, to reduce the amount of runoff into the system. Keeping gardens rather than paving them over, and creating so called sponge cities is also key to tackling pollution.

The UK was described as the dirty man of Europe back in the 70s and 80s, due to levels of pollution. For example in coastal towns there were no water treatment plants to treat sewage, raw sewage was just pumped and dumped into the sea. It was only when the EU directives came in that the clean up began. Chief amongst these was the Urban Wastewater directive, the Water Framework directive, and the Bathing Water directive.

Since leaving the EU there have been fears that these pieces of legislation could be watered down. James Bevan, as CEO of the Environment Agency, talked about changing the Water Framework Directive, essentially to make it easier for rivers to pass tests for chemical and biological health. Currently no river is rated as in good overall health under the WFD where rivers have to pass both chemical and biological health tests.

The brassy actor’s performance in Death of a Salesman is the crown jewel in a life spent on stage. He says it could be his last Broadway role

“It’s, like, 10 minutes. I pee, I have a cup of tea, I put the jacket back on and I go out and fight my way to the death.”

The way Nathan Lane describes spending the intermission of Death of a Salesman – the nearly three-hour play in which his character flails and ultimately fails through an epic depression – reflects the actor’s own spirit: practical, lightly fatalistic, artfully hyperbolic and very, very funny. Today he is in fine form, nestled into a corner table in New York’s classic Upper West Side haunt Cafe Luxembourg. When I ask him if Salesman marks his first time performing at the Winter Garden Theatre, he responds without missing a beat: “Yes, except when I took over in Mame.”

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wake up to the top stories and what they mean – free to your inbox every weekday morning at 7am

Scroll less, understand more: sign up to receive our news email each weekday for clarity on the top stories in the UK and across the world.

Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you

Get smart, sustainable shopping advice from the Filter team straight to your inbox, every Sunday

The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.

A weekly email from our star chefs featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideas

Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from our star chefs, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent.

Sign up below to start receiving the best of our culinary journalism in one mouth-watering weekly email.

Upgrade your space today, with eight emails packed with tips to brighten up your home - whatever your budget

Embrace your space: the Guardian’s House to Home newsletter is bursting with tips and tricks to help you boost your bedroom and give your living room some love.

Sign up any time, and get eight emails direct to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world