About 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in employment, education or training – and the obstacles they face are bigger than ever. Those unemployed for a year or more explain how they are coping

Thomas doesn’t leave the house much. Apart from walking his dog, the only other excursion the 24-year-old regularly makes is a “humiliating” weekly trip to Iceland, where he stocks up on seven £1 frozen meals, usually an assortment of bland curries with the occasional garishly sweet, takeaway-style Chinese meal. “You’re going in and buying seven and the cashier is 100% thinking: oh, that’s one a day,” he says.

Half the time, he doesn’t bother eating them. “You just sit there and go: I don’t want it again. I’ve had it for two days on the trot.”

He’s the perfect comedian to cool down these incendiary times. As Philly Philly takes his Uh Oh standup show on tour, he talks about woke traps, lefty blindspots – and gen Z’s lurch to the right

Born in Stoke-on-Trent to a British mother and Chinese-Malaysian father then raised in Borneo and educated in Brunei, Bath and Cambridge, Phil Wang – or “Old Wang”, as he refers to himself mock-imperiously on stage – has certainly been around. Today, the 36-year-old standup with the pleasantly befuddled air is in a cafe near his home in London, wearing high-waisted baggy black trousers, a blue shirt, salmon-coloured New Balances and a baseball cap bearing the word “Chump”. Most significantly, he is sporting a moustache.

Wang went public with his face furniture two years ago but the upcoming tour of his new show, Uh Oh, will mark the first time he has taken it out on the road. Is the tache here for good? “Well, I’ve got five minutes of standup on it now,” he says over coffee. “Until I come up with a better five minutes, it’s staying.”

Politicians, social media and far-right agitators convinced people that migrant-targeting violence would solve all their problems

Within minutes of the footage going online – of a Black man stabbing a white man – there was a sense of inexorability to what came next in Northern Ireland.

The grievances, the social media platforms, the politicians’ doublespeak and the international cheerleaders all provided a fuse. On Monday night came the spark.

While he denies wrongdoing, Sullivan traded on the idea of womens’ bodies as consumable objects. His terrible era laid the ground for the 21st-century porn industry

There was a time, not so long ago, when female breasts appeared daily in some national newspapers. It was part of a culture that stripped and infantilised women, presenting very young “girls” with a nod and a wink, as though it was all a joke. Feminists who objected were dismissed as killjoys, even though the campaign against what became known as “Page 3” was ultimately successful.

This week’s Panorama programme revisited that era, focusing on the alleged activities of one man, David Sullivan, who made a fortune from sex shops and sleazy tabloid newspapers. The allegations against Sullivan, which he angrily denies, are that he “interviewed” young women at his mansion in Essex and demanded sex in return for furthering their careers as “glamour models”. The women’s stories were horrible.

Joan Smith is an author, journalist and a former chair of the mayor of London’s violence against women and girls board

She started as an activist. Now she is Mexico’s president. Has she stayed true to her ideals?

The president’s dressmaker works at home, down a narrow road in a working-class neighbourhood on the southernmost edge of Mexico City. There is no sign, just the house number marked in chalk on a rusted metal door. In the brightly lit, pink-walled room at the back of her modest house, Olivia Trujillo sits at her sewing machine, piecing together the president’s signature suits and dresses. Trujillo sews everything here, accompanied only by her family, three dogs, and one green parrot. Once finished, an assistant spirits away the items by motorcycle straight to the National Palace, where the president lives. Claudia Sheinbaum’s clothing – tailored from modest fabrics produced in Mexico and featuring Indigenous motifs – is one of the many ways that her administration communicates its slogan: “For the good of all, first the poor.”

The dressmaker has just one problem with the president. People who wear made-to-measure clothes normally sit for the tailor twice: first, to have their measurements taken, then a second time for final adjustments. “Not once has she done a fitting for me, never!” says Trujillo, an exacting and neatly turned-out woman in her 60s. She knows the president is busy. “Still,” she objects, “any normal woman does a fitting for important clothes, like their wedding dress.”

From marvelling at teenage wonderkids to tracking the world’s largest coffee pot, our team of writers outline their expectations for the jamboree in North America

• Use our Bracketology to click your way through the group stage and the knockouts to crown a champion

  
  

Spain and Portugal in the final, with Spain winning. I’ve played our Bracketology game 20 times and gotten 20 different paths but Spain always end up winning. Alexander Abnos

Force disperses crowd of 300 people who burned truck and reportedly planned to target hotel hosting migrants

Police have used water cannon against rioters in Northern Ireland during a second night of anti-immigration protests.

It dispersed a crowd of about 300 people who burned a truck and threw bricks and petrol bombs close to the Sandyknowes roundabout near Newtownabbey, eight miles north of Belfast.

US launches second round of airstrikes on Iran, and Tehran responds by targeting Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan

• US strikes Iran for second day, as ceasefire appears close to collapse

Kuwait’s civil aviation authority has announced that air traffic has resumed after it was suspended due to Iranian attacks.

Officials earlier announced that some flights were being diverted to alternative airports, after Kuwait said its air defences were firing at aerial targets.

It was the day when Thomas Tuchel showed his hand for England’s World Cup opener against Croatia in Dallas next Wednesday and his players hinted at what can happen when they play with intensity and slick connections.

The paucity of the opposition had to be considered. Costa Rica barely even saw the ball; it was entirely a rearguard effort from them. But there was nevertheless encouragement for Tuchel, who went strong with his line-up, the occasion framed, really, by who he picked at the outset.

The UCL study also found physically punished children were more likely to struggle in school

Children smacked by their parents struggle to get good exam results and are more likely to bully others, causing a negative impact on society, according to new research calling for smacking to be banned.

The study by University College London (UCL) found that children in England who were physically punished at the ages of three, five and seven were significantly less likely to pass GCSE exams compared with other children, even after factors such as family background were taken into account.

Whistleblowers from Mitie allege some employees have made offensive remarks or liked abusive social media posts

One of the government’s key contractors has launched an investigation into allegations of racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and hate speech among staff working in immigration removal centres, the Guardian has learned.

Whistleblowers from the company, Mitie, have alleged that some staff members working in immigration removal centres and deporting migrants have made offensive comments at work and in social media posts.

Singer and actor has denied all charges after more than 20 women came forward with allegations going back to the 1990s

The French singer Patrick Bruel has been charged with rape and sexual assault in one of the biggest #MeToo cases in the French music industry.

The 67-year-old, a major figure in French pop culture, was placed under formal investigation over several cases that included alleged rape, attempted rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Analysis pinpoints areas most vulnerable to hotter, drier weather causing ground to shrink and drag foundations down

Millions of homes are at risk from climate-related subsidence, according toan analysis by the British Geological Survey (BGS).

As hotter, drier summers driven by global heating become more frequent, the ground under houses can shrink and drag down a property’s foundations. The most vulnerable areas include London, Essex, Kent and a tranche of land from Oxford up to the Wash on England’s east coast, according to scientists, who say mitigation measures will be needed.

New name, Bristol Dockyards, and museum revamp aimed at becoming more rooted in community, says chief executive

One of the UK’s maritime landmarks is being renamed as part of a drive to make it “cooler” and more inclusive.

For a decade, the dockland site in Bristol that houses the ocean liner SS Great Britain, which was designed by the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, has been promoted as Brunel’s SS Great Britain.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh was the only passenger to survive the incident in June 2025, which killed 260 people

The only survivor of the Air India plane crash that killed 260 people in June 2025 has called for “honesty, transparency and answers” a year on from the disaster, and spoken about his “significant psychological scars” and financial hardship.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a British national, has previously described his fate as a “miracle” after being the only person to survive the incident, in which a Boeing 787 Dreamliner struck a medical college shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad airport.

Remote aircraft targeting supply traffic on route connecting occupied regions to Russia

Russian forces call it the “Novorossiya” route, the crucial main supply line that snakes through the Ukrainian territories under Moscow’s occupation, linking Rostov-on-Don in Russia to Melitopol, Mariupol and Crimea via the Sea of Azov coastline.

In recent months, however, Ukrainian forces have given the R-280 a new name – “the highway of death” – in reference to the Ukrainian drones that dominate the airspace above the road, hunting down convoys of Russian military traffic.

The military junta has detained thousands of political prisoners since the 2021 coup, and a pattern of gender-based abuses is becoming clear

In August 2021, news spread across a Myanmar protesters’ network that Thazin*, an activist and former university student, had been killed. The protest she attended that summer in Mandalay had been broken up by soldiers shooting and driving cars into the crowds.

Most of the demonstrators were able to jump on to their motorcycles and flee. Thazin was not among them, and word spread that a young woman had been seen shot dead.

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

The men’s Fifa World Cup starts today, and the challenge before the quiz master is to stay up all night every night watching tons of meaningless group matches between the likes of Syldavia and Borduria to keep up a record of not having missed a single World Cup game since 1978, while also continuing to function as a normal living member of society, rather than as an exhausted zombie.

The challenge before you, however, is simple: 15 questions on topical news, general knowledge and popular culture. There are no prizes, but equally you don’t have to stay up for a 3am kick-off. Have fun. Allons-y!

Savour the glorious sound of mussels popping open and finish cooking the pasta in the shellfish liquor really to ramp up the flavour

If you put your ear close (but not too close) to a covered pan full of mussels, olive oil, garlic and a bit of white wine (not too much) over a lively heat, you will hear the sound – a cross between a crack, or that of a rip and an unzipping – of the mussels opening. To begin with, it’s intermittent, so you lift and look under the lid to reassure yourself that they are indeed starting to open … But there are only a few, so the lid goes back on. You shake the pan until, like popcorn, the mussels are off – crack, rip, unzip – at which point, get the lid off and the mussels out, so you can admire the liquor. Taste to see how salty it is and measure how much you have: you want about 200ml, so take some out, reduce or add water to get the proportions and taste to your liking.

Spaghetti (or linguine) with mussels is a recipe that benefits from finishing the cooking of the pasta in the sauce, which is also a great technique to know generally, because it can be applied to countless pasta recipes. The benefits of finishing the cooking in the sauce (or broth) are: deep flavour (because the pasta absorbs and gets completely coated in the sauce), shine and a slightly thickened sauce, thanks to the starch that seeps from the pasta and combines with the fat.

Reform UK leader has been unusually quiet in recent weeks – at great cost to the party during a crucial byelection

Fake images of Nigel Farage have been ubiquitous online lately – but the real politician has proved far more elusive since it was revealed seven weeks ago that he took a £5m personal gift from a crypto billionaire.

And while an AI-generated depiction of the Reform UK leader was falsely shown getting violent on BBC’s Question Time, Farage has been largely avoiding the TV studios where he might face questions over the cash.

Follow the folklore and you will discover a landscape full of wonder and powerful women – from a fearsome Scottish warrioress to the first queen of a united England

It’s just past midday and I appear to be inside a rain cloud. Soaked to the skin, my walking boots squelching through tufts of grass and black bog mud, I can hear hundreds of streams rolling off this wide mid-Wales peak, each vying to be the fastest. I’ve hiked around more than 8 miles (13km) of Hafren Forest trails to the top of Mount Pumlumon Fawr (Plynlimon), to reach a wooden post carved with the words Source of the Severn. And I’m here, alone, because I’m hoping to meet a river goddess.

It’s perhaps not as strange as it first sounds. Starting about 150 years ago, the folklorist John Rhys travelled across Wales to archive as many local myths as possible, and among them was the very tale that brought me to this peak: the story of the birth of the River Severn, in which three sisters – Hafren (Severn), Rheidolyn (Rheidol) and Gwy (Wye) – each choose their own route to the sea. My trip to the river’s source was itself a moment of mythically inspired travel, something that has been common practice in the British Isles for as long as we’ve told stories, not least as a means of passing them on.

Island may soon be called Naoero – an Indigenous name that honours the country’s heritage and identity

Nauru, the world’s smallest republic, may soon make a big change: renaming itself “Naoero”.

The switch would “more faithfully honour our nation’s heritage, our language, and our identity”, said the president of the Pacific microstate, David Adeang, in a speech to parliament in January.

This impressive and charismatic debut novel revisits an actor and a director over various collaborations

The central characters of Frida Slattery As Herself, Ana Kinsella’s debut novel, are the eponymous Frida, 23 when the novel opens, and John Reddan, five years older. Both live in Dublin. Frida loves acting but has never had a significant role, and didn’t even get into drama school. John is a writer-director who has just had a play put on at a “real theatre”. What’s compelling about Frida is not necessarily what she says, thinks or does, but the way she is, and a large part of that lies in the physicality Kinsella writes into her. Frida, we learn, is “addicted” to the theatre. “Every time she came off stage she felt like a prizefighter. The curtain fell in the community theatre and there she was, rolling her neck, bobbing on her feet.”

However, Frida’s acting aspirations are going nowhere. She eventually confides in her friend Catherine, who at university was a much more successful actor in student productions, but now has a proper job (“She owned an espresso machine and Frida lived in a bedsit”). “I just want something to happen,” Frida says. Catherine introduces Frida to John. They meet in Kehoe’s pub, then he asks Frida to accompany him on an errand which turns into a long, mystifying walk through Dublin, during which he interviews her. She asks in return what he is working on: “Are there any roles for women in their early twenties?” To which he responds, “Is that how you think of yourself, Frida? As nothing more than ‘a woman in her early twenties’?”

When the best referee in Africa is barred from working at the World Cup after being denied entry at the border, claims of this being an inclusive tournament ring hollow.

Omar Abdulkadir Artan was supposed to make history this week, becoming the first Somali referee to officiate at a World Cup, instead, he is watching from home.

In this video, Morgan Ofori digs into a historic year for African nations against the backdrop of US travel bans.

As ICE-style deportation rules come into force, the unsavoury circle the EU wants migrant deals with includes the Afghan regime. This is a nadir

I sometimes think of the former EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson, who just six years ago spoke of crafting a European migration policy with “cool heads and warm hearts”. What’s happened since is the exact opposite.

Governments across Europe – with the exception of Spain – are cracking down harder than ever before on migrants through measures they once dismissed as politically toxic. It is a dream come true not only for the EU’s far right but also for mainstream conservatives and centre-left politicians such as Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen.

Reform leader’s unwillingness to answer questions on £5m ‘donation’ leaves Dicky to serve up not-so-special guests

It’s been 50 days since the last Reform press conference. In Nigel Farage time, that’s at least five California marriages. He has been known to do two, sometimes three, pressers in a week.

Not because he has anything important to say, but because he is impossibly needy. Nige is a man who usually only knows he’s alive if there’s a camera recording his every movement and utterance. His narcissism demands constant attention.

Enough is enough. Either give us a simple squeezy bottle that actually works or bring back the tried-and-tested solid bars

Even as I pick it off the shelf, I know it will let me down. I rate the chances of it working no better than 50/50. So why do I buy it, when the dead hand of impending disappointment taps so insistently on my shoulder? I speak of something so simple, so common and so mundane that this must be the very reason we keep buying the wretched things even though at least half the time they don’t work. They’re too trivial to make a fuss about. This must change. We must fight back.

I speak of pump-action dispensers on small plastic vessels of liquid soap, hand creams and a whole range of products that, in most cases, will not end up being dispensed via the dispensers with which they are supplied.

This year’s events will be a mélange of Trumpian egotism, Maga populism and Christian nationalism

Musicians who dropped out of the Great American State Fair said they were tricked.

“I HAVE INFORMED MY AGENTS THAT I WILL NOT BE PERFORMING AT THE FREEDOM 250 EVENT,” wrote the rapper Young MC on Facebook of the first major celebration of the US’s 250th birthday. “The artists were never told about any political involvement with the event. And despite the claims by the organizers that the event is nonpartisan, SPIN magazine describes it as ‘Trump-backed.’” The country singer Martina McBride said that the organizers’ description of the event as nonpartisan “turned out to be misleading”.

In the UK – and across the west - incendiary language and white supremacist policies are entering the political mainstream

What qualifies as too rightwing these days? It’s a question I’ve considered often in recent years. But it takes on even greater urgency when contemplating the rise of Restore Britain. Founded by multimillionaire businessman and former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, the party enjoys the active support of far-right tech bro Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. If Nigel Farage strikes you as a wet liberal, then Restore Britain may be the party you’ve been waiting for.

Its mission, it says, is to “reverse mass migration”. That means deporting not just undocumented migrants but “legally resident foreign nationals” who live in social housing, claim benefits or supposedly “fail to integrate” – a strikingly elastic category. Lowe himself declares that “millions and millions” need to leave or be made to leave. Officials and politicians “who knowingly placed dangerous third world savages in our communities” will be imprisoned.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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

For most, what we see in real life is mundane. But those who wish to fan the flames of anti-immigrant feeling share a different image online

It was the summer of 2024 when it all decisively started, with the horrific murders in Southport, countrywide violence and Elon Musk’s observation that a British civil war was somehow “inevitable”. A year later came a hot season of flags on lamp-posts, protests outside hotels used to accommodate asylum seekers, the ubiquitous use of the word “tinderbox” and constant predictions of widespread riots that never actually materialised. Now here we are again, in the aftermath of the awful murder, and treatment by the police, of Henry Nowak and frightening violence and arson in Belfast, and the civil war predictions seem to be increasing by the hour.

The archive of such material is already bulging. In August 2024, amid the riots, a YouGov poll found that 32% of people thought a UK civil war was either “very” or “somewhat” likely. A year later, Dominic Cummings said the UK was only “random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control”. Even Labour’s Lisa Nandy offered the opinion that the north of England was so tense “it could go up in flames”.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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

We’re thinking about the crisis facing pollinators all wrong. And we’ve come to a crucial moment

Last winter, commercial beekeepers lost more than 60% of their colonies – their worst losses on record. We tend to blame bee losses on separate, singular threats: pests, pesticides, habitat loss or extreme weather. But we’ve been thinking about bee losses wrong.

The real culprit is our industrial food system.

Violence on the streets of Northern Ireland is the real-world expression of a sinister mechanism that goes unchecked online

Masked men who drive terrorised families out of their homes cannot be called protesters, since the word implies legitimate grievance. The outbreak of racist violence in Northern Ireland this week is connected to the politics of migration, but not in the way that the mob and those who incited it claim.

The ostensible trigger was a brutal assault, partially captured on video. A man of Sudanese origin has been charged with attempted murder. The footage was widely shared online. The attack was depicted as part of a wider threat to white Britons by foreign “invaders”. Far-right agitators summoned vengeful crowds. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the activist who campaigns as Tommy Robinson, was instrumental in this process. So was Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, whose platform helped mobilise racist fury.

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.

Rows over US visas and excessive ticket prices have overshadowed flawed tournament preparations. But fans will still hope for a gripping spectacle

One hundred and four matches involving 48 competing nations, to be played in 16 venues across a continent and four time zones: the sheer scale of the men’s World Cup in Canada, the United States and Mexico, which begins on Thursday and ends on 19 July, makes it easily the biggest and longest football tournament ever staged.

Whether it will ultimately be judged the greatest in sporting terms will depend on the 1,248 players competing in gruelling conditions, ranging from the heat of Houston to the high altitude of Guadalajara. But after a lead-up marred by hubristic hype, visa rows and the eye-watering cost of buying tickets for games, for many people it will be a relief when Mexico finally kick off against South Africa in the Estadio Azteca on Thursday evening.

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 an article by George Monbiot on the companies cashing in on unregulated children’s homes in England

Regarding George Monbiot’s article (Horrific, unregulated, and very profitable. The companies making cash from England’s children in care, 5 June), several years ago, as a newly elected councillor, I was shocked by the high cost of placing children in private residential care. When I discussed this with friends and family, their reaction was largely one of disbelief that this had been allowed to persist.

This situation highlights a widespread “robber baron” mentality that has been allowed to develop under the guise of the presumed efficiency of the private sector. Too often, this has become an opportunity for significant profit extraction from the delivery of crucial public services. As highlighted in Monbiot’s article, the adoption of such a model in the care of some of society’s most vulnerable is especially distressing and underscores the need for prompt policy reform. However, this is not a recent development, and substantive action from the government has yet to materialise.

If the UN has no need of Germany’s voice or influence, it may have no need of its large funding contribution either, writes Michael Pfeiffer

Germany has failed, for the first time, in its bid for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations security council (‘Embarrassing’: pressure on Merz after Germany’s failure to win UN security council seat, 4 June). In New York, the federal republic was defeated by Austria and Portugal – and by a clear margin.

Did the countries that withheld their votes from Germany pause for even a moment to consider the consequences? Did they ask themselves whether it was wise to subject the second‑largest contributor to the UN – responsible for 5.27% of all state contributions – to such a public rebuff? Evidently not. Otherwise Germany would hardly have been so demonstratively humiliated.

Prof Kathy Willis responds to research showing that the poorest areas in the country face the deepest cuts to green spaces

The new research covered in your report (England’s poorest areas face deepest cuts to green space under planning law changes, report finds, 4 June) highlights the stark inequalities that exist across England when it comes to accessing nature-rich places and unlocking the many health, wellbeing and economic benefits that they can provide.

In short, the research has found that if you live in the poorest places in England, you are likely to have less or no access to nature. This is set to get worse because of government policy changes.

Dr Penelope Jackson, Sue Lewis and Fiona Willan respond to an article and letters on art overload

I read with interest your article (The hill I will die on: Let me tell you the one big problem with art galleries. There’s too much art, 30 May) and the follow-up letters (5 June) full of advice from readers. Everyone will have an opinion on how to visit an art gallery. Clearly, trying not to view everything on show is key here. But what people have failed to grasp is that if galleries don’t show a vast amount of their collection, they are criticised.

For example, the National Gallery in London hangs about 40% of its collection, which is more than others such as Tate Britain, which has a tiny fraction on show at any given time. And the National Portrait Gallery would struggle to hang its entire collection. Galleries and museums are caught between a rock and hard place. They try to show as much as is logistically possible, but that doesn’t mean visitors have to eyeball each one. We should, however, be grateful that these cultural institutions collect and try to showcase as much as possible, for we don’t all like the same things.
Dr Penelope Jackson
Tauranga, New Zealand

Fifa president has prostrated the organisation before Donald Trump and lost control of his own tournament as a result

Even the Nazis tried to tone things down a bit. Before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, acutely conscious of how it might be perceived by foreign visitors, the Third Reich tried to soften some of its harder, more intolerant edges. Antisemitic signs and images were removed from shops and other public places. Der Stürmer was removed from newspaper kiosks. Paragraph 175, the country’s strict anti‑homosexuality law, was temporarily suspended.

By contrast, the 2026 men’s World Cup is being co-hosted in a country utterly indifferent to what a foreign visitor might think of it. In this respect, the US of Donald Trump is tonally different to any host of a major sporting event that has preceded it: a country that actively wants you to see the darkness in its heart, the inhumanity at its core, that gets off on your revulsion.

Midfielder delivered complete performance against Costa Rica that should make up Thomas Tuchel’s mind for him

It only took eight seconds for Jude Bellingham to steal the lightning’s thunder. Given the nod over Morgan Rogers, Bellingham set the tone for England when their friendly against Costa Rica finally got under way. The No 10 pressed from the front, racing to charge down a clearance from Darril Araya, and was key to the way that Thomas Tuchel’s side made light of the unpredictable Florida weather by imposing themselves on inferior opposition from the first whistle.

The skies had cleared by the time the game kicked off an hour later than advertised. The torrential downpour earlier in the day arrived after a three-week drought in Orlando, giving England a taste of what they can expect at the World Cup. Will they cope with the ups and downs of an American summer? Here at the agreeably compact Inter&Co Stadium, Tuchel had an encouraging response. The lineup looked close to the one that will face Croatia in Group L on 17 June and, after last Saturday’s glorified training exercise against New Zealand, there was a sense of England’s level rising as they eased to a 3-0 win against Costa Rica.

Antoine Semenyo will need help from his supporting cast but there is plenty of excitement about a 20-year-old midfielder likened to Michael Essien

This article is part of the Guardian’s 2026 World Cup Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 48 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from three countries each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 11 June.

• Knicks erase 29-point deficit to win Game 4

• Anunoby scores winner with 2.3 seconds left

• New York take commanding 3-1 Finals lead

The New York Knicks stared into the abyss and somehow found a way out.

Facing a 29-point deficit in front of a shell-shocked Madison Square Garden crowd, New York completed the largest comeback in NBA finals history on Wednesday night when OG Anunoby’s tip-in off a Jalen Brunson missed three with 1.2 seconds left made the difference in a 107-106 win over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 4. The Knicks are within one win of their first NBA championship in 53 years.

• Cooper Lutkenhaus, 17, wins 800m by 0.01sec

• Gout Gout sixth; Tebogo says: ‘He has a long way to go’

There are few venues more deeply embedded into track and field’s soul than the Bislett Stadion. An extraordinary 70 world records have been set here. Plenty of reputations have been made. Plenty more left frayed, too.

And so it proved again as the brilliant 17-year-old American Cooper Lutkenhaus added to his staggering résumé by taking down the Olympic 800m champion, Emmanuel ­Wanyonyi, with a race for the ages in Oslo. But another, the Australian star Gout Gout, learned what it is like in the big leagues.

• Manager keen to spend more time with family

• Ipswich chair Mark Ashton ‘gutted’ by decision

Kieran McKenna has stepped down as Ipswich’s manager after four and a half years in charge of the Suffolk club, who will return to the Premier League next season.

The 40-year-old will take a break from management and is understood not to have a position lined up. McKenna had been linked with the vacant job at Fulham, who held an interest in him, but his departure is linked with a desire to recharge and spend more time with his family.

• City intensify their pursuit of England midfielder

• Forest want fee to match British record £125m for Isak

Manchester City have made a second bid worth £122m for Elliot Anderson which has been rejected by Nottingham Forest, who want a British record transfer fee of £125m before any add-ons for the England midfielder.

City’s offer follows an initial bid of £80m for the 23-year-old and is worth a guaranteed £106m plus £16m in potential add-ons. This would break the club’s record transfer of £100m paid to Aston Villa for Jack Grealish in August 2021.

• Stokes in talks with agent and advisers over his future

• Atkinson also left out, with Baker and Archer set to play

Joe Root will captain England in next week’s second Test against New Zealand after Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson were left out of the squad for breaking the team curfew as they celebrated victory in the first game of the series on Sunday night.

While the England & Wales Cricket Board continues its investigation into that incident Stokes, the team’s full-time captain, is being given some time to consider his future. He is reported to have spent Wednesday in meetings with his agent and advisers debating whether to stand down as captain permanently, or to end his international career completely. He may still choose to do neither, with the former England captain Michael Vaughan having joined those backing him to stay. “Yes, he broke a curfew,” Vaughan said. “Is that a sacking offence as England’s Test captain? I don’t think so. A short suspension would be fine, but this is not a big enough incident over which to lose the captaincy.”

• Changes will address energy management issues

• Verstappen one of most outspoken critics of current rules

The key players in Formula One have come to an agreement to settle the proposed changes to the sport’s engines for the 2027 and 2028 seasons. These have been seen as crucial in addressing widespread driver dissatisfaction with the current formula, not least for the four-time champion Max Verstappen who has repeatedly threatened to leave the sport owing to how unhappy he is with the current engine rules.

Verstappen has been particularly outspoken, declaring the rules “anti-racing”, but he has been far from alone. The FIA, teams, engine manufacturers and F1’s owners have since been in discussions looking at ways to address the issue. Notably their resolution does not reach the minimum scale of improvement Verstappen believed was needed until 2028.

• Mboko forced to retire in singles match at Queen’s

• Duo are due to play next on Thursday evening

The future of Victoria Mboko’s doubles partnership with Serena Williams was plunged into doubt after the Canadian was forced to retire in her opening singles match at the HSBC Championships in London.

Williams, 44, made her comeback to tennis on Tuesday, securing a win alongside Mboko in their first doubles match. The duo beat Nicole Melichar-Martinez and Erin Routliffe, and are scheduled to face Leylah Fernandez and Laura Siegemund on Thursday evening at Queen’s Club.

• Sciver-Brunt back to ‘normal self’ with half-century

• Jones: ‘I feel everything has been ticked off’

England’s World Cup preparations concluded with a five-run win in their final warm-up against India at Cardiff, in what will be a vital confidence-booster before their tournament opener against Sri Lanka on Friday evening.

England hit 171 for six, including a half-century from Nat Sciver-Brunt – the most time the England captain has spent at the crease since she suffered a calf injury six weeks ago. “She looks back to her normal self after a little bit of a break,” her teammate Amy Jones said, after sharing a 70-run partnership with her skipper. “It was great to see her whacking it everywhere.”

• Quarterback has two years added to his deal

• Contract will last until Mahomes is 38

The Kansas City Chiefs and their starting quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, have agreed to a restructured contract that adds two years to his deal and pushes his total compensation past a half-billion dollars, according to sources.

Mahomes signed a 10-year, $450m contract in 2020 that set a benchmark not only for the quarterback position but for any NFL player. The latest extension ties the two-time MVP to the Chiefs through the 2033 season, when Mahomes will be 38, and it comes in at $504.75m, with incentives and escalators that could push the value beyond $520m.

NHS bosses urge all hospitals in England to use ‘digital triage’ process to combat overcrowding in emergency services

Patients who turn up at A&E with non-urgent ailments could be told to come back another time under NHS plans to stop hospitals becoming overcrowded and avoid the service’s usual winter crisis.

Eighteen hospitals in England are already using “digital triage assessment” to help A&E staff decide which patients need to be seen right away or be dealt with in another way. If patients do need urgent care they are treated at once in the usual way. But if they have more minor ailments and can wait, they are told to come back later that day or the next day, or are referred to a community-based service, such as a GP or pharmacy.

Prime minister is ‘hellbent’ on fighting any contest, even if his future may be out of his hands, sources say

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer’s closest aides are “war-gaming” how to win a leadership contest ahead of Andy Burnham’s much-anticipated return to Westminster if he wins the Makerfield byelection, the Guardian understands.

Downing Street sources said the prime minister had taken the last fortnight to think seriously about his future but was now “hellbent” on fighting any contest. His team is working through various scenarios, including sacking ministers who publicly support Burnham.

Massive blaze in eight high-rise apartment blocks killed 168 people in one of the world’s deadliest residential building fires

Hong Kong has filed manslaughter charges against several people and companies over the world’s deadliest residential building fire in decades, which killed 168 people at a public housing estate last year.

The massive blaze, which engulfed seven of the eight high-rise apartment blocks at the Wang Fuk Court estate in November, prompted a months-long investigation into the cause.

Footage appears to contradict Israeli military’s account of killing of seven-month-old Sam Abu Haikal in West Bank

Footage has emerged that appears to contradict the Israeli military’s account of the shooting that killed seven-month-old Sam Abu Haikal in his mother’s arms, showing the family’s car slowing near a military post before soldiers opened fire.

On Friday, the killing of the infant by Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank caused outrage, after soldiers opened fire on the family’s vehicle despite it having complied with an order to stop. Sam was killed and his mother, Daniyah Abu Haikal, and father, Fahed Abu Haikal, were both injured.

Before the conflict began, inflation was at 2.4%, but the closure of the strait of Hormuz has affected energy prices

Donald Trump said “I love the inflation” after new data showed that inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high.

Speaking from the White House on Wednesday, the US president said that he was not concerned about inflation because of recent developments in the conflict.

Under US rules, even a distant strike can suspend a game – and some will take place in Florida, the thunderstorm state

Hot weather will be a major concern at the World Cup, but lightning may also prove a particular problem. Under US safety regulations, a strike within 10 miles (16km) of a stadium triggers a 30-minute suspension of the game, during which players must leave the pitch.

The size of the safety zone was dictated by research on the distance that lightning can strike from a storm even with no clouds overhead. This is more than a theoretical risk. During a game in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998, an entire team was killed by a single bolt of lightning. There have been many other deadly incidents.

Some remains found in Diamantina fracture zone date back more than 5m years and reveal species and ecosystems unknown to science

The oldest, deepest and most extensive whale graveyard yet discovered has been found in the south-eastern Indian Ocean, with fossils dating back more than 5m years.

Whale falls – the term for dead whales that sink to the ocean floor – are not uncommon, but most have been found at depths of less than 4km (2.5 miles). By contrast, the newly discovered necropolis reaches depths of more than 7km, and extends hundreds of miles across the sea floor.

Critically endangered Tapanuli orangutan population falls after heavy rain and landslides, fuelled by climate crisis, in North Sumatra

Extreme rainfall and landslides fuelled by the climate crisis killed 7% of the remaining population of the world’s rarest great ape, a study has found, prompting fears for the species’ survival.

The research suggests 58 out of the remaining 800 critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans (Pongo tapanuliensis) were killed after more than 1,000mm (39in) of rain fell over four days in Indonesia’s North Sumatra province in November 2025. This equates to 11% of the local population and 7% of the entire species.

Crops and flowers rely on them for survival, but wild bees are declining – and crucial nutrients will go missing from our diets as a result

There are few ways in and out of Nepal’s Jumla district. The Karnali highway, considered one of the world’s most dangerous roads, provides the only land link, splicing through the Himalayas to connect Jumla’s terraced valleys to the rest of the country. As such, the 120,000 people that live there are almost entirely self-sufficient, with most of them eating and selling what they grow.

It’s a tenuous existence, plagued by food insecurity and malnutrition. In recent years, local beekeepers have bemoaned languishing hives and dwindling honey production, observing that roughly half of their bees seem to have vanished over the past decade. These concerns, however, ignore an even more insidious impact.

Lucy Rigby tells MPs heavily subsidised system gives the government the right to alter terms of existing agreements

Ministers have rejected accusations that recent changes to student loans are unfair, arguing that they are so heavily subsidised that the government has the right to alter their terms.

Pressure has been intensifying on the UK government to reform the student loans system but the chief secretary to the Treasury, Lucy Rigby, told MPs on Wednesday that less than half of young people go to university, and the government had to bear in mind “fairness to taxpayers as a whole”.

Mohammad Tajik and Alnour Ali, who steered boats on Channel crossings, are first to be sentenced under new law

Two men have been jailed under the new offence of endangering others during a journey at sea.

The two men who were steering small boats are the first to be sentenced under the law, which came into force in January as part of government efforts to counter small-boat crossings.

Awards for prose, children’s writing and poetry, for writers of colour in UK and Ireland, come with £1,000

Diana Evans has won this year’s Jhalak prose prize for I Want to Talk to You, a nonfiction collection on subjects ranging from Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison to lockdowns and the British monarchy.

The book, described as a “pleasure and an invigoration” by the Guardian’s reviewer Alex Clark, was announced as the 10th winner at a reception on Wednesday evening.

Enfield council in north London took legal action against restaurant chain after outrage over damage to tree

The UK restaurant chain Toby Carvery has settled a legal dispute over taking a chainsaw to an ancient oak tree without permission, by agreeing to pay to restore a lost orchard.

The unauthorised partial felling of the 500-year-old oak next to a Toby Carvery car park in Whitewebbs Park, Enfield, north London, in April last year, prompted widespread public outrage and questions in parliament.

Man accused of sedating and filming abuse of partner had contact with Pelicot, who was jailed for drugging wife and inviting men to rape her

A bodyguard from Lyon is to go on trial for allegedly sedating and raping his partner after he was in contact online with Dominique Pelicot, who was convicted of drugging and raping his own wife, Gisèle Pelicot.

Pelicot, one of the worst sex offenders in modern French history, is serving 20 years in prison after he was found guilty of drugging his then wife and inviting dozens of men to rape her in their home in the south of France over almost a decade. He and 50 other men were found guilty after the biggest rape trial in French history in 2024.

As completion of 144-year basilica nears, questions swirl over resemblance of church to architect’s original plans

It has been a long wait but 144 years after work began, Pope Leo XIV has blessed the recently completed central tower of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família church in the presence of members of the Spanish royal family, the prime minister and hundreds of bishops.

With the completion of the Jesus Christ tower, the tallest of 18 in the temple, the basilica has reached its full height of 172.5 metres. It is now not only the world’s tallest church but Barcelona’s tallest building. It was consecrated in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI.

Legislation would exempt platforms that can prove they have safeguards for children in place

Canada’s government has introduced legislation to parliament that could ban children younger than 16 from having social media accounts unless the companies show they can make their platforms safe.

Ottawa is joining a growing global effort to tighten online safety. Canadian government officials said social media platforms can obtain an exemption if they have put in place sufficient safeguards.

Incredulous Italians ask if they should bring grandparents to beach to stay safe, after unpopular move in Villasimìus

Umbrellas have been banned on a beach in Sardinia for anyone between the ages of 10 and 65 in the latest flashpoint in Italy’s long-running beach disputes.

The measure was among several imposed by local authorities at Punta Molentis beach in Villasimìus, on Sardinia’s south-east coast, as part of an initiative to protect its pristine environment.

Exemptions being considered after March announcement of measures to support domestic steel production

Ministers are expected to drop some planned tariffs on foreign steel after UK manufacturers said the measures would significantly increase their costs.

Representatives of the Department for Business and Trade are meeting leaders of steel trading business groups on Wednesday and Thursday with a view to finalising details of a reprieve for certain industries.

Research suggests households that include a GLP-1 user collectively spent £780m less on grocery bills

• Business live – latest updates

Weight-loss drugs are saving users’ households more than £400 a year on grocery bills, according to a survey, which found use of GLP-1s has nearly tripled in the past two years to 1.9 million adults.

More than 6.3% of households in Great Britain now include at least one GLP-1 user, according to the research by Worldpanel by Numerator. This marks a sharp rise from 4.1% of households in 2025 and 2.3% in 2024.

Fashion and sportswear group, which owns 26% of the German luxury brand, is now seeking full control

Mike Ashley’s retail group, Frasers, has launched a near-€2bn takeover offer for the German luxury fashion brand Hugo Boss.

The fashion and sportswear group, which owns 26% of Hugo Boss, said it is offering to pay about €1.98bn (£1.73bn) for the remainder of the business to take full control.

EV maker aims to overtake Toyota, as it plans to spend £1.8bn to build five-minute flash chargers in Europe

• Business live – latest updates

The Chinese car company BYD has said it aims to be the world’s biggest automaker within the next five years.

Targeting Toyota’s long-held top spot, BYD’s founder and chair, Wang Chuanfu said he was confident it could overtake global rivals through rapid advances in battery technology and fast charging, as well as growing production overseas, including Europe.

J Balvin and Tyla perform at the first one in Mexico City. Plus: did James Dean create a new model of vulnerable masculinity? Here’s what to watch this evening

6.15pm, ITV1
Is it coming home? At this point, even asking that feels like a jinx. But here we go, with a summer of very inconveniently timed games between a whopping 48 teams. Three ceremonies will kick the tournament off, starting with one in Mexico City Stadium, where J Balvin and Tyla will perform. The Toronto and LA events follow on Friday. Hollie Richardson

Production fusing the band’s sixth album and Shakespeare’s masterpiece will open at the Barbican later this year

Hamlet Hail to the Thief, an acclaimed stage production fusing Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead’s sixth album, is to open at the Barbican theatre in London this autumn.

The show had its world premiere at Aviva Studios in Manchester last year and then ran at the Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is a co-production between Factory International and the Royal Shakespeare Company and was co-created by Radiohead frontman, Thom Yorke, and the directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones. Yorke reworked the 2003 album, which is performed live on stage by a cast of musicians and actors, the lyrics reinforcing themes of grief, despair and paranoia in the play.

‘The tabloids will always try to sensationalise. But it was 6.30pm. If Kate really had been falling out the door blind drunk, it’s not a picture I’d particularly want to take’

I have photographed Kate Moss a fair few times. The first time was probably around 1990, during the Johnny Depp days. I also shot her with Jefferson Hack and many of her other boyfriends, but it was only on official occasions, Topshop launches and things like that.

There was a period when whatever she did, 200 photographers would turn up. For her 33rd birthday, I was asked to cover her party at the Dorchester hotel. Then I got a call saying she was at the Donmar Warehouse theatre watching a matinee of a play with Rhys Ifans in it. “Could I go over there and get a picture of her leaving before arriving at the birthday party?” When I got there, there must have been 200-250 people outside. They had the front door surrounded – photographers, camera crews, fans, you name it. It was absolutely packed. I quickly realised that getting a decent picture was going to be very difficult.

Oscar winner Mikey Madison and Jeremy Strong to star in film focused on fallout from whistleblower Frances Haugen

The first trailer for Aaron Sorkin’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to The Social Network has landed.

The Social Reckoning has been described as a film that isn’t a “straight sequel” but one that will still revisit Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Many muscly boys cavort in board shorts in this cute bit of escapist tosh set by a beautiful lake. Think The Summer I Turned Pretty in big girl pants

Persephone Fraser (Sadie Soverall) is sad. “My whole world is filled with regret because of the choices I made,” she says forlornly as she clutches an oversized coffee cup, while standing at best friend Chantal (Aurora Perrineau)’s marble kitchen island. Regret? How can this be? Even Persephone – or Percy, for short (“it’s easier”) – is perplexed. After all, she splutters, shrugging her cashmered shoulders at the gosh-darn inexplicability of it all, “I have one of the only remaining jobs in journalism, I have a cute apartment and I have hot men to hook up with!” Yet still; guffaws come there none. Percy needs closure. “I can’t move on and I know I have to,” she whimpers as the soundtrack reaches tearfully for its acoustic guitar. The answer? “I need to say goodbye [TWANG] … to Barry’s Bay.”

And with that we’re off. Specifically, we’re off to Barry’s Bay, the dinky Ontario lakeside town that is both the source of Percy’s turmoil and the picturesque setting for the barrel of escapist tosh that is Every Year After.

There’s just one day to go till it all kicks off in Canada, Mexico and the US. Here’s the best TV and film to get you into the mood for the biggest football tournament in history

They think it’s all over your TV. It is now. When the 2026 Fifa World Cup kicks off on Thursday night, it will dominate the small screen schedules for more than a month. Fans of the beautiful game will be thrilled. Naysayers less so. But what can we watch while waiting for football fever to fully take hold? Here’s our XI-strong selection of films, dramas and documentaries to get you in the mood …

As the musician and producer reaches 82, a new documentary reveals his life working with everyone from James Taylor to Carole King to Paul McCartney

Peter Asher didn’t want to do this interview. He had the same reaction several years ago when directors Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller approached him about making a documentary about his life and career. “I don’t think so,” he recalled telling them in our interview, which wound up taking place only after several entreaties from the film’s publicist that he do this one sit-down. “My life has been startlingly devoid of the standard rock’n’roll drug-and-sex dramas,” Asher said. “So I thought a documentary about me isn’t something people will want to see. It sounds boring.”

On the contrary, Asher’s story stands among the most dramatic and consequential in music history, spurred by achievements that shifted the course of pop more than once. Through Asher’s pivotal role in the lives of stars like James Taylor and Carole King, he played a key role in instigating the soft revolution that allowed singer-songwriters to dominate the charts in the 70s. He’s also partly responsible for the so-called “LA sound”, epitomized by the pristine albums he produced for stars like Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. At the same time, he raised the profile of the studio musicians he employed so dramatically, affecting how average listeners understood and appreciated the instruments they heard on the albums they loved. Small wonder the documentary on his life is titled Everywhere Man.

The musician first visited Aldeburgh as a teenage fanboy. Now, he is at the centre of this year’s festival as its featured artist – and he’s opening with his favourite opera

Ryan Wigglesworth cuts a confident figure striding through the Royal Academy of Music in London. He’s been a professor here since 2019 – juggling his duties with his role as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, guest conducting internationally, regular recitals as a pianist, and a busy schedule as a composer. Oh, and he’s also the father of three “boisterous” young children, whose sleepless antics have left him bleary and clutching his coffee this morning.

He sits at the head of the long table in the Academy’s oak-panelled boardroom, looking perfectly at home. Was he inevitably going to end up here?

As he publishes a memoir, the pioneering guitarist talks about rejecting spandex and hair metal, his fears for breakthrough hit Black Hole Sun – and completing nine unfinished Soundgarden songs

Kim Thayil has always felt like an outsider. For example: the Soundgarden guitarist has lived in Seattle, a city infamously addicted to coffee, for more than four decades, but only started drinking the stuff himself during lockdown. “I was pretty against-the-grain to my Seattle friends, who always wanted to meet up at coffee shops,” he grins, cradling a freshly brewed cup of java in his kitchen. “My girlfriend in the 80s and 90s even worked at the original branch of Starbucks and made coffee with a French press every morning. But I drank tea, because my parents are Indian.”

Thayil’s Indian heritage also set him apart from his peers. In his new memoir, A Screaming Life, he writes that when he and bassist Hiro Yamamoto formed Soundgarden in 1984, the group was “two-thirds Asian”, and that “as liberal and accepting as the punk scene was, it was still largely white, and I was ever aware of that”. Nevertheless, Soundgarden went on to become pioneers of Seattle’s grunge movement, a multiplatinum-selling, critically acclaimed, Grammy-winning group whose breakthrough hit, Black Hole Sun, transcended their gnarly milieu to become an enduring anthem.

From Thundercat’s all-star funk to Kacey Musgraves’ hymns to solitude, we look at some of our favourite music of the last six months from across the pop spectrum

• Listen to a Spotify playlist of every album here

This account of the Islamic Republic and its discontents told via six contrasting lives should be required reading

It’s difficult in 2026 to talk about Iran without confronting a lot of crude certainty. The average non-Iranian gets their information in snippets, filtered by algorithms. The Iranian diaspora is too fractured and traumatised to educate everyone. And the regime has muffled the voices inside its borders, responding to every major uprising with internet blackouts that hide both the people’s rage and its own violent response. Meanwhile, its own network of misinformation spreads lies – that protesters are foreign instruments, that the unrest is manufactured by outsiders – exploiting legitimate western anxieties about intervention, Islamophobia, sanctions, oil and Israeli imperialism.

Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati’s powerful history of the Islamic republic is a badly needed corrective because it is at once an engrossing story and a balanced, meticulously researched primer on modern Iran (the clearest I’ve ever read). And it is dramatic, personal and often heartbreaking, told through six lives lived at the forefront of the Iranian people’s almost five-decade struggle with a corrupt regime that has stolen their freedoms, votes and many thousands of their lives.

There are some advantages to being an older debutant, including knowing what it’s like to fail and not having your new novel overshadowed by early literary promise

Recently I was at a film event where I was introduced to a big producer by a very nice actor. The actor said, “this is Patrick, he has a debut novel coming out soon.”

The producer looked me up and down and said, “You took your time.”

A young woman begins a career in the adult industry while, 30 years later, her friend tries to find out what happened to her, in an addictive, twist-filled story

Just as there is a lack of pornography made by women, there is a lack of books about making pornography written by women. Recent nonfiction titles such as Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History and Fiona Vera-Gray’s Women on Porn have sought to address the silence and moral confusion, while Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles imagined a student mum paying her way with OnlyFans.

Now Allie Rowbottom, author of a memoir, Jell-O Girls, and a novel, Aesthetica, braves the dicey terrain in her sleazy, cinematic second novel. Published into a contemporary landscape where algorithms promote increasingly extreme content, Lovers XXX takes us to the so-called golden age of the Los Angeles porn industry, through the eyes of two teenage runaways who trade troubled homes for big-city dreams.

This bleak but brilliant tale of enigmatic alien entities and slow social collapse exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now

M John Harrison’s prose has thrilled me since I was a teen. It has thrilled others, too, including Angela Carter, Deborah Levy and Robert Macfarlane, but snobbery about the genres in which he made his mark – science fiction and fantasy – has hindered the respect his achievement deserves. His rigorously realistic novel Climbers, published in 1989, looked as though it might change that, but subsequent work has remained genre-fluid and uncompromisingly peculiar.

In the 1970s and 80s, he wrote stories about Viriconium, a fabled city crumbling into decadence and anarchy. These swashbuckling yet sinister tales functioned as escapist adventures for readers who preferred a far-flung nightmare to the contemporary humdrum. But in the 21st century, the world we inhabit has become utterly fantastical and Harrison has no need to revisit Viriconium; his anarchic, disintegrated metropolis is London and The End of Everything is set in an unnamed town on the Kent coast.

From horror galore to Chinese action games, the key trends, trailers and surprises from Summer Game Fest’s many, many hours of streams and broadcasts

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

Did you spend hours of your weekend watching a relentless series of video game adverts? No? I don’t blame you – Summer Game Fest, the collection of livestreams that has arisen in place of the giant annual E3 video game expo in Los Angeles, is extremely overwhelming. There are the bigger, longer shows: the PlayStation and Xbox streams, the main SGF show hosted by Geoff Keighley and Lucy James, Future’s duet of the Future Games Show and the PC Gaming Show. Each show is two hours long. Then there are all the indie showcases: cosy games, women-led games, Black voices in gaming, Day of the Devs. Between them, they show off hundreds of games that might pique your interest.

I picked out exactly 34 highlights here: the biggest news, the most interesting-looking smaller games. But from the barrage of trailers I was also able to discern some trends. Here’s what we can learn.

Hundreds of video games were shown at June’s annual bonanza. After watching more than 15 hours of showcases, our video games editor picks the highlights

The sequel to a revered 2014 horror game from British developer Creative Assembly: this time you must evade the xenomorph on the surface of a storm-ravaged colony world.

Released just before the World Cup kicks off, this upstart football game is positioning itself as a credible alternative to EA Sports FC

This month something extremely unusual happened in the video game world: someone launched a new football game. It used to be that the market could support a vast array of contenders, from arcade kickabouts such as Super Sidekicks and Hat Trick Hero, to serious simulations named Actua Soccer or This Is Football, to eccentric oddities such as Namco’s LiberoGrande which made you experience the whole match as a single onfield player.

For the past decade plus, however, the scene has been dominated EA’s Fifa series, now EA Sports FC. With the exception of Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, now eFootball, there have been few competitors – and few plucky upstarts.

90s PlayStation fans, rejoice: California studio Toys for Bob is making Spyro: Realms Beyond, intended to ‘inspire love, joy and laughter’

As the gaming mascots of millennial childhood have been resuscitated one by one for a nostalgic audience, one has remained notably absent: 1990s PlayStation hero Spyro. A new game starring the purple dragon was announced at tonight’s Xbox Game Showcase – the first original title since 2008. Called Spyro: A Realm Beyond, it is being developed by studio Toys for Bob in California and will be released in spring 2027 on Xbox, PlayStation 5, PC and Nintendo Switch 2.

It features a freshly redesigned Spyro with his trademark quiff, voiced by Tom Kenny, the original star of the games. Unlike in the original Spyro titles, players will be able to take flight at any time. “[We’re] leaning into the true capabilities of being a dragon,” explains creative director Lou Studdert. “It’s really engaging … the player is making decisions how they fly. They are diving down to sustain speed. They are using fire-breath to light campfires, to create an updraft to get lift before flapping their wings.”

Hampstead theatre, London
Joshua Harmon studies his family’s fraught matriarchal relations in this thoughtful drama

In an empathetic act of theatrical archivism, American playwright Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews) follows the shifting, sinking relationship between his mother and grandmother. Tracing the family’s fractures back through Harmon’s life, We Had a World is a thoughtful if sedate staging of duty, care and the relational ties that can’t be shaken loose.

Renee (Suzanne Bertish) is a far better grandmother than she ever was a mother. Bertish sparkles in the freewheeling role, in turns elegant and generous, then petulant and sour. Anna Francolini has the more austere role as Josh’s mother, Ellen: sharp and stubborn, but never less than bursting with love for her son (played with sweet sincerity by Ryan Kopel). When Josh learns why his mum finds her mum so difficult to love, his relationship with his grandmother is recontextualised, and he is stuck in the middle of their war.

From his deathbed photographs of his former lover to a face emerging from dirt, New Yorker David Wojnarowicz is the festival standout, although Renèe Helèna Browne’s film about cows contains multitudes

Setting the mood for this year’s Glasgow International (GI) is a show dedicated to David Wojnarowicz – artist, writer and fixture of the 1980s East Village scene. Including paintings, photographs and video works, it is arranged inside a Georgian terrace house so decayed that you can see through perforations in the building’s fabric. Stoop to peer between crumbling bricks and you’ll see a reproduction of a mural of a cow’s head that Wojnarowicz painted in the New York piers. On the top floor, Wojnarowicz’s deathbed photographs of his former lover Peter Hujar occupy one elegiac wall. Look up. Through the splintered ceiling play fragments of a film unfinished at Wojnarowicz’s death, in 1992, aged 37.

Sometimes the artist’s voice permeates the friable architecture, emanating from the soundtrack to Itsofomo (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) playing on a box TV. “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg,” he declaims with spitting fury. The words had specific context – New York during the Aids epidemic – nevertheless Wojnarowicz’s rage at a system that failed to serve or preserve him feels emblematic.

Almeida theatre, London
Carmen Nasr’s adaptation of the film set during the Iran-Iraq war is searing enough to feel like a 2026 livestream

Reprimanded for wearing her headscarf too loosely, Shideh, a former medical student in Tehran, is warned: “A woman should be more scared of exposing herself than anything else.”

Shideh has other concerns. It is 1988, the height of the Iran-Iraq war, and her husband is on the frontline, leaving her to raise their seven-year-old daughter. Shideh’s ambitions to become a doctor have been torpedoed by accusations of political activity during the Iranian revolution. There are also regular air raids to contend with. Scarier than any bomb, though, is the prospect that a djinn – a malevolent spirit – may be preying on her family.

Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London
To help her digest the grief of her mother’s death, a woman conjures the celebrity cook in this show written by Emily Rose Simons

A musical about Nigella Lawson makes sense – after all, the creamy-voiced, innuendo-spouting domestic goddess almost feels like a theatrical creation. Then again, inserting her indelible force into a production comes with challenges, especially when she isn’t the only star of the show – as in this fun but flawed two-hander written by Emily Rose Simons.

Anna’s estranged mother has just died and she is ignoring calls from her dad, who left when Anna was a child. As she opens his favourite cookbook, Nigella’s How to Eat, its exuberant author emerges from a spangly kitchen cupboard to help Anna process her grief, reconnect with her father and better care for herself – all by learning to cook.

At Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London, until 28 June

Stranger Things actor makes first public comments about his ex’s revealing hit album which tracks the dissolution of a relationship

David Harbour has spoken about his ex Lily Allen’s tell-all album West End Girl for the first time in a new interview.

The Stranger Things actor, who is on the Emmys trail for the HBO crime drama DTF St Louis, separated from the singer in early 2025 after they married in 2020. The couple filed for divorce months after their separation.

Plaque installed at actor’s former home in Pimlico, central London, where he lived from the age of five to 12

Laurence Olivier has joined David Garrick, Henry Irving, Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward in having an English Heritage blue plaque outside his former London home.

Ian McKellen unveiled the plaque at 22 Lupus Street in Pimlico, where Olivier lived from the age of five to 12 and discovered a talent for acting under the watchful eye of his father, a curate at St Saviour’s church across the road.

The lowest ever viewing figures, an identity crisis for the show and a confusing Billie Piper-based cliffhanger – whoever takes on the BBC fantasy drama has quite the job on their hands …

The announcement that the BBC has abandoned the planned Doctor Who Christmas special, and is ending its partnership with showrunner Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf production company, will not have come as much of a surprise to many fans. It has been rumoured for some time. Aside from the gossip, the fact that no filming appeared to have taken place for a programme that traditionally requires a lengthy post-production process had already suggested something was up.

The BBC has said the show remains an important part of its portfolio, stating it wants to ensure that “when the Tardis lands once more, it does so in all its glory”. While it isn’t inconceivable that Bad Wolf might bid to make the show under a new regime, Davies appears to have hung up his Tardis keys for good, posting on Instagram: “Now I’m as excited as anyone to see what comes next!”

Sarah Wynn-Williams remained silent during her hour-long appearance, but sales of Careless People have since increased by more than 300%

Sales of the whistleblowing memoir Careless People increased by more than 300% in the UK the week after its author was “silenced” during an appearance at Hay festival following legal action by Meta, the subject of the book.

Sarah Wynn-Williams – who between 2011 and 2017 served as the director of global public policy at what was then called Facebook – sat on stage but did not speak during her hour-long appearance on 31 May on the advice of her lawyer. She appeared alongside the journalist Carole Cadwalladr and academic Tim Wu.

Ever since the Post Modern Times cafe in Minneapolis ditched its price list, half the customers have chosen not to pay. It’s still making a profit

Name: Pay what you wish.

Age: Popular since the 00s, but dating back to at least the 80s.

The clock is ticking to take advantage of this valuable UK scheme, as the benefits are to be restricted from April 2029

Millions of workers are able to take advantage of a scheme that allows them to boost their pension and pay less tax, and experts are urging people to “max out” this valuable perk before the rules are tightened.

Salary sacrifice lets you exchange some of your wages for a different benefit from your employer, such as a company car – or, in this case, pension contributions. You will then pay less tax and national insurance (NI) on your lower salary.

Whether it’s Harry Styles’s retro tailoring, CMAT’s joyful mash-ups or Metallica’s silver tones, here’s how to nail concert dressing – without looking like a tribute act

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s June style essentials

Over the past few years, dressing to see your favourite artists live has moved on from just throwing on a band tee and calling it a day. With ticket prices higher than ever, concerts are special events; as a result, there’s been a noticeable shift towards dressing up. Fans are embracing intricate looks inspired by the live shows, songs, albums and even obscure references only the most hardcore listeners would understand. With this, the question of “what to wear” has never felt more important.

The good news? You don’t need to turn up in a full costume to feel part of that experience. There are subtle ways you can channel your favourite artist’s aesthetic while still wearing something that works beyond the venue doors. Here’s how.

Whether it’s water-saving showerheads or natural sponges, these easy swaps cut waste and make your bathroom a little kinder to the planet

• The best refillable beauty products for a sustainable routine

As a sustainability journalist, I’ve often despaired at how unsustainable our bathrooms are – from water use to plastic bottles to chemical-heavy cleaners. However, there are ways to reduce their carbon footprint. As water becomes increasingly precious, hacks for our loos that cap its usage are useful, as are smart showerheads that cut down on water, particularly as baths these days feel like a guilty indulgence.

Swap plastic-packaged and chemical-loaded products, such as bleach and multipurpose sprays, for eco-friendly ones, and buy secondhand good-as-new fixtures. From bamboo loo roll to solid shampoo bars, here are my tips for a more planet-friendly bathroom.

Our writer found a surprisingly effective way to cut down his smartphone use. Plus, what to eat while watching the World Cup – inspired by all 48 teams

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

I recently learned through Apple’s Screen Time app that I was spending about eight hours a week on my phone browsing Reddit and Instagram. That’s 17.3 days a year spent consuming entertaining but ultimately pointless fluff. So my piece looking for solutions for phone addicts was highly personal.

The warning signs are if your phone is the first thing you look at in the morning and the last thing you look at in bed, says Prof Marcantonio Spada, emeritus professor of addictive behaviours and mental health at London South Bank University and chief clinical officer at Onebright, who I spoke to for my article.

Swimwear season is upon us – so here’s our pick of the most flattering, practical and comfortable costumes

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s June essentials

The trick with swimwear shopping is to stick to well-established criteria. Your priorities, of course, are comfort, support, coverage and price. But while your demure black one-piece might cover those bases, you shouldn’t settle for a costume that does the bare minimum.

Take tummy control swimwear. If you want support in that area, you don’t have to avoid bikinis. Try a high waist pair with a built-in control panel, or a tank top. Ruching is fairly standard these days (as is a tie at the side) and does the trick by tucking everything away. If in doubt, wear something printed to distract.

A viral trend based on an eastern classic, this rolled, multilayered dish is a fun way to use up wilting leaves that also looks impressive on the table

When I started looking into the idea of a lettuce omelette, mainly to use up leftover dressed salad, I soon found out that it’s something of a social media trend, as well as a classic Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese dish. In the trending recipe, the egg whites and yolks are often separated, then the whites are mixed with lettuce and cooked first. This is rolled, then the yolks go into the same pan and, once they’re set, they’re rolled around the whites to make a beautiful, multilayered omelette with a white-green interior and a golden outside. It’s a great way to use up dressed salad, but fresh or wilted leaves will work, too, if those are all you have. I prefer bitter and spicy leaves such as mustard, mizuna and rocket, but everything works. Iceberg, for instance, is often used in modern Chinese recipes. Serve this plain, or with crispy chilli oil, soy sauce flavoured with minced garlic and ginger, miso mayo, or all three. To make miso mayo, mix 60g mayonnaise with a tablespoon of white miso paste, then stir in an optional teaspoon of sesame oil, some finely grated garlic and ginger, and a squeeze of lemon.

An unusual frittata with a risotto base, and a simple but delicious salad combination that’s sure to be a big hit

I love this salad – the combination of soft, juicy chicken, crisp leaves and anchovy croutons is so delicious. We serve it on the terrace at my restaurant and, when the sun is shining, it is the biggest seller by a country mile. But, first, an unusual frittata, which is essentially a risotto base with asparagus: it’s not difficult to make and is perfect for lunch, and even better as part of a picnic.

Once mocked internationally, the UK became a gastronomic hotspot in recent decades – London was hailed as the foodie capital of the world. Now many Michelin-starred restaurants have closed and the rot is spreading

It’s 9am on a weekday morning and although I’ve just finished my porridge, the chef Richard Wilkins is making my mouth water. “My signature dish is soft Scottish langoustines wrapped in very thin, crispy pastry, served with Japanese sushi rice and a langoustine bisque.”

His other specialities include turbot in a spinach and champagne sauce, buttery wagyu steak with English peas, and raspberry millefeuille. Sadly, I won’t be able to sample any of them and neither will anyone else. At the end of April, Wilkins took the painful decision to close his west London Michelin-listed Restaurant 104 after seven years.

Keep things simple, outsource and prep ahead where you can, and never forget the golden rule of canapes …

My daughter is getting married: what vegetarian and vegan canapes can I make at least a day ahead?
Sue, by email
“Canapes need to be no more than two mouthfuls,” says Barney Desmazery, author of One Dish Four Ways, “unless you’re going to provide something to eat them from, but in my book they’re then no longer canapes.”

You’ll not want anything too labour-intensive. “Sue is going to be making them tens or hundreds of times over, so outsourcing some work with store-bought ingredients is an easy win,” says Richard Makin, AKA School Night Vegan and author of Stress-Free Dinners. Also remember that, as with most things in life, less is usually more: “Good ingredients always triumph over complicated recipes,” says Desmazery, who recalls a wedding he once attended in Liguria, Italy: “There was a round of aged parmesan with knives for guests to break off shards, and that was great.” Granted, parmesan isn’t one for Sue’s vegetarian/vegan spread, but you get the idea.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Up there by myself, I decided life might be best on my own. That thought has shaped my travel and relationships ever since

I grew up in Kenya and was nine when we went camping by the beach in Mombasa, with two other families. The constant games and laughter were new to me, as we were a quiet, rather insular family. I went bodyboarding, watched crabs emerge from holes in the sand, climbed all over rusty cannons in the old fort and bought colourful strips of kanga fabric in the market to make sarongs.

One day, my father asked some fishers to take us to the reef in their canoes. It was a good mile offshore: I wanted to stay behind with Mum, but Dad fixed me with a look and said: “You’ve got no sense of adventure, have you?” Then I knew I had to go, clambering shakily into the wobbly wooden construction, clinging on to the sides for dear life.

Like many couples, my husband and I bickered over who would do what and who did more. We came up with a radical solution

It was when my second child was born in 2021 that I realised I needed a new system for parenting. We were coming out of lockdown, and I was tired and overwhelmed. During the pandemic, my husband and I had built our own mini unit in the UK, as our families lived in the US. I had decided to start my own literary agency as soon as my daughter was old enough to start nursery at six months. It wasn’t ideal timing, but I wanted to start as soon as possible.

I approached finding a parenting system the way I think many women of my generation do, with the same intensity that we would have approached a school dissertation. I decided to crowdsource my research: I watched videos of home-schooling mums in the US demonstrating their morning routines, I read every parenting book I could, I listened to podcasters interviewing mothers who seemingly “had it all”, and listened to others who argued that “having it all” was impossible.

Chronicling your humdrum, solitary life has become an online trend. It’s certainly perplexing. Is it also empowering?

Name: Loneliness influencers.

Age: A few months old.

He walked out of his way to get me on to the right street, then handed me the brolly saying, ‘Here, you take this’

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

It was bucketing down, absolutely pouring. I was on my way to a birthday dinner but got lost in central Sydney’s labyrinth of streets, so I ducked into an internet cafe to look up directions to the restaurant. I then wrote those directions down by hand – such were the times!

As I stepped out of the cafe, I realised just how bad the weather had become and how ill-prepared I was for the rain. As I stood waiting to cross the road, swiftly getting wet, a man waiting for the lights in the opposite direction offered up his big rainbow umbrella to share. I gratefully accepted and, still a little unsure of where I was going, asked if he knew the way to the restaurant.

Also: Anthropic advocates for a ‘pause’ on AI advancement – days after filing to go public on the US stock market

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the US tech editor at the Guardian. Today we’re discussing Donald Trump’s neediness for AI and the contradictions of Anthropic’s safety-first posture.

OpenAI confidentially files for initial public offering on US stock market

Apple debuts revamped ‘Siri AI’ and new child safety features for iPhones and iPads

The Guardian view on children and the internet: rolling back big tech’s untrammelled power | Editorial

Silicon Valley including Meta has embraced Maga politics, says Nick Clegg

Bernie Sanders’ AI sovereign wealth fund plan is good. But we think this is better | Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier

Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land

Billions spent and hypothetical returns: the AI boom explained with six charts

‘A driver of political violence’: how the breakneck AI boom is fueling anti-tech extremism

The line is vital for our elderly relative’s care, but after 20 calls BT seems unable to resolve the problem

My elderly aunt, who lives alone, has been unable to receive incoming calls for more than two months after BT switched her analogue service to Digital Voice.

Her care is overseen by a rota of relatives who check on her and arrange medical appointments and in-home help.

Bereaved relatives have been bombarded with calls, emails and letters addressed to the deceased

ScottishPower sent a debt collection letter to my house demanding £130 owing on my late brother’s gas account. I am his sole executor and had informed it of his death.

The company, meanwhile, owed a £430 credit on his electricity account. It eventually paid this with a cheque issued in my late brother’s name, which could not therefore be cashed.

Buyers are ripped off after assuming online stores were genuine because they are recommended by an AI tool

You want to buy a new bag and so you ask ChatGPT for help. You have always liked Russell & Bromley so you ask ChatGPT what is popular there at the moment.

The artificial intelligence (AI) assistant gives you cross body, shoulder, casual and formal options with the prices listed beside them. You click through from the sources to what looks like the official Russell & Bromley site and buy your new bag, which is conveniently on sale.

Influencers often brand sugar as inherently harmful – but not all sweet foods are created equal

‘It’s a common myth,” says Dr Emily Leeming, a dietitian at King’s College London – and one that thrives on social media. The confusion, she says, often comes from people cutting out sugary foods and feeling better. But that can be because removing ultra-processed sweet treats improves the overall quality of a diet (making more room for wholefoods).

Leeming says influencers who call sugar “toxic” often see it as inherently harmful – solely responsible for weight gain, poor blood sugar control and heart problems. But in controlled studies where calorie intake is kept the same, diets high in sugar don’t appear to worsen weight loss, metabolism or key health markers. “It’s not ideal nutritionally if you’re missing out on fruits, vegetables and whole grains,” Leeming says, “but sugar isn’t in itself directly harmful in that context.”

Doctors say diagnosis is usually clinical and doesn’t rely on a blood test, with symptoms often starting in the mid-40s

There’s a special frisson to period changes in your mid-forties. Every deviation from your usual pattern can feel like a harbinger of the menopause transition, also known as perimenopause.

One might spend years staring at their underwear, wondering: am I or aren’t I?

Keren Landman MD is an independent health reporter who is also trained as an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist, with experience serving as a disease detective at the CDC and conducting HIV and malaria research in resource-poor countries. Her public health newsletter is called Landmansplained

Drug that stops cancer cells hiding and a breakthrough for pancreatic cancer among highlights from Asco conference – but there were also notes of caution

Doctors, scientists and researchers shared new research about ways to tackle cancer at the 2026 American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco) annual meeting, the world’s largest cancer conference.

The event in Chicago, attended by 40,000 health professionals, featured more than 200 sessions and 2,700 poster presentations on this year’s theme, “the science and practice of translation: improving cancer outcomes worldwide”. Here are the five biggest takeaways.

As demand for cobalt, gold and other minerals grows, mining is accelerating deforestation in the Congo basin – and increasing the risk of deadly Ebola outbreaks

For decades after the discovery of Ebolavirus in 1976, outbreaks of the disease were relatively small and contained, affecting a few hundred people at most.

Not any more. In recent years, outbreaks of Ebola have been much larger, affecting thousands and even tens of thousands of people across multiple countries. The 2014 outbreak of Ebola in west Africa infected more than 28,000 people in 10 countries on three continents. The current eruption, which began in early May and shows no signs of abating, has caused 363 confirmed cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has crossed into Uganda.

Sonia Shah is the author of five books including Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, and writes the newsletter Cross Pollinations on Substack

More customers are seeking out meticulous e-file manicures, but there are concerns about the risk of infection with the cuticle-raising beauty treatment

A drill with a speed of 35,000 revolutions per minute sits on Alina Huck’s orderly work station. The drill bit is the length of an almond, and as soon as it touches the client’s nail it whips up a fine dust of dead skin.

“It’s definitely a satisfying experience,” says Huck, a Sydney-based nail technician who has spent nearly a decade specialising in e-file manicures, also known as Russian manicures.

When the singer got married in London last month, her skirt suit made headlines. But she was hardly the first to reject tradition. Here are the stories behind some other beautiful but unconventional outfits

For some people, wearing a big white dress on their wedding day feels as key as the rings. For others, less so.

When Dua Lipa wore a Schiaparelli couture white skirt suit as she wed the actor Callum Turner in London last month, she joined a long line of women who have opted for a suit. Not least Bianca Jagger, whom Lipa was speculated to be emulating – the model and activist caused a stir when she got hitched to Mick Jagger in 1971, wearing a Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking jacket and bias-cut skirt.

Want to keep your makeup in place but always end up looking shiny? These sprays have a blurry finish that flatters everyone

I don’t know how any makeup wearer lives without setting spray, but for oily skins I do recognise it has pitfalls as well as many benefits.

Setting spray keeps makeup in place when warm weather might otherwise melt it away, and allows for creamier, more flattering products to be used in place of powders. But it also cuts through the dusty look of any powdery makeup to give it a softer, more youthful finish.

From France’s catwalk looks to Virgil van Dijk’s classic approach, these are the teams and players to watch

The 2026 World Cup may not kick off until Thursday, but the fashion tournament has already begun, as teams arrive at training camps across the US.

Fashion moments range from the outfits players wear to get to training, to the suits worn on planes and their training gear. The French team’s training camp in Clairefontaine became something of a catwalk this week thanks to the style of players such as Jules Koundé and Kylian Mbappé. Meanwhile, brands including Loewe, Gabriela Hearst, Patta and the rapper Drake’s Nocta have worked with teams on suiting and training gear.

Affordable, family-friendly and largely flat, the Lelångenleden is a gateway to an otherworldly wilderness with wild swimming, canoes and cabins as part the ride

Imagine the Swedish landscape and a stereotypical scene of idyllic red cottages with white trim, foregrounded by a lake of glimmering blue, might spring to mind. Beyond perhaps, adding depth, lies a band of birch and spruce, and a midsummer view of wooded islands.

Now, add to this image the sight of two half-naked men lunging from a tiny sauna cabin into the cold shock of a lake. One screams. The other ducks his head under, pops up, shivers, then does it again. His skin has the pinkish tinge of salmon, but he’s smiling.

Matosinhos was built on fish, but today its retro seafood restaurants and canneries sit alongside great art spaces, museums and landmark architecture

This once declining industrial city is on the up, but not so much that it has been ruined – yet. See it now, mid-gentrification, before its humble seafood restaurants become overpriced and its beautifully curated museums and galleries overrun.

The newly designated Joyce Country and Western Lakes Unesco Geopark in Galway and Mayo celebrates a 700-million-year geological history that has produced a unique terrain and rich cultural heritage

‘If you take all these springs together in terms of flow, it’s by far the largest in Ireland, and one of the biggest systems in the world,” said Dr Benjamin Thébaudeau, geologist for the newly designated Unesco Joyce Country and Western Lakes Geopark in western Ireland.

Over a few days, I discovered that this massive system of limestone springs and caves is the engine that drives this landscape, in the same way as an underground train network powers a city. It’s a place where rivers disappear into limestone fissures and subterranean lakes, and where roads twist through drowned valleys beneath mountains shaped by fire and ice.

Rallying the kids can be chaotic and frustrating, but from Interrailing all the way to Turkey to Vespa rides in Naples, these trips brought families together

Finland has been named the world’s happiest country for nine years running, but arriving in Helsinki, dishevelled from one of my first flights with my nine-month-old baby, I was less interested in national rankings and more in having a nice nap. My husband, Jake, and I had emerged from the fog of newborn life and the idea of a holiday felt possible again. My ambitions were small: a sunset beer, a walk in the woods, reading a few pages of my book uninterrupted.

In an age of spiritual isolation, witches are flocking to the woods of Ireland and elsewhere to form covens of ‘sisterhood’

On the floor of a sun-drenched room in a 200-year-old Irish estate, a group of 15 witches gather to commune with the spirits. Everyone has someone they want to talk to – dead ancestors, forest fairies, the witches who came before them – and the room has the same expectant charge as the first day of school. Some of the witches wear long black capes and bandannas. Some wear Columbia fleeces, spaghetti-strap tank tops and Adidas sneakers.

Isabella Ferrari, known as Penny the Witch, guides the women as they make divination maps, sheets of paper covered with “yeses” and “nos” that work like Ouija boards: the witches ask their questions and the spirits guide the crystal pendulums in their hands towards the answer. One of the women, Tara Monte, screeches as her pendulum begins circling uncontrollably. “Isabella, do I stop this? Someone really wants to talk to me.” Later, she will confess she believes it was her archangel Michael letting her know yes, her parents were proud of her. Yes, they still loved her.

The socially relaxed city has seen a cautious feminist revival despite authorities’ growing alarm at women who shun traditional roles

In a small, unassuming bookstore in south-west China, a discreet community of women dream of a more equal future. Here in Chengdu, 42-year-old Shen Shen runs one of the country’s leading feminist bookstores.

“The world doesn’t lack bookstores for men,” she says, surrounded by piles of volumes by authors including Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir and Chizuko Ueno.

Few things are more feared than a dementia diagnosis. Now people living with the condition are fighting against damaging stereotypes and demanding proper medical support

When Maxine Linnell, 78, a retired psychotherapist living in Leicestershire, learned that she had dementia four years ago, the diagnosis proved less challenging than some people’s reactions. “What was striking was how many people’s attitudes changed almost immediately … they stop seeing you as a person and see only dementia, some professionals included. Like this is the end and everything after will be devastating.”

The assumption that you go overnight from diagnosis to late-stage dementia isn’t confined to family and friends. Julie Hayden, a nurse and social worker from Yorkshire, was diagnosed nine years ago at the age of 54, long after sensing that something was wrong but being constantly told that it was depression or menopause; her doctors still associated dementia with old age and didn’t consider that she might have had young onset. “At the point of diagnosis,” she recalls, “most of us are told: ‘Well, it’s dementia, nothing we can do about that. Best go away and get your end of life affairs in order.’”

She starred in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, had to stoop when she danced with Fred Astaire, then became world-famous – and a gay icon – in the original Batman series. But her life behind the scenes has been just as interesting ...

Julie Newmar is showing me her secret garden: an oasis of greenery around her house in Brentwood, Los Angeles, that is crammed with trees, flowers, sculptures and labyrinthine paths. It feels like a little piece of old-school Hollywood, untouched by the world outside. “Here, try one,” Newmar says as she leans over from her mobility scooter and picks me a blueberry from a bush. “Isn’t that nice?” It’s a well-maintained jungle of begonias, jasmine, geraniums, fruit trees, and above all, roses. She has 90 varieties, she says, including one named after her. “That one’s Marilyn Monroe,” she says, pointing out a creamy pink one. “Doesn’t it look like her flesh?” Monroe’s former house is just up the road, she mentions. Newmar has lived here for decades with her son, John, who has Down’s syndrome. They spend a lot of time out here.

“I would say my life is about beauty,” Newmar says. “I want to be a beautiful old woman; beauty in the garden; beauty in your behaviour, in your treatment of others. Because we all know that life’s a circle. All this stuff comes back. And in my 90s now, one has evolved. Big things happen now and they’re more in the metaphysical, they’re in the ‘what can I do for others?’ Because I’ve already done it for myself.”

There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class. Do they feel supported? In Walthamstow, east London, we meet a group of carers as they are collected for a rare night off that brings a sense of community and a glimpse of fun for a few hours every few weeks. It’s hosted by Satvinder, a tenacious council worker who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough and provides them crucial emotional support.

This film is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them.

First lady and affected families in audience for highly charged performance of excerpts of Mothers of Kherson

It was hard to imagine an opera with a subject more potentially traumatic – or cathartic – for the assembled audience. The occasion, in the grand and gilded spaces of the National Opera of Ukraine, in Kyiv, was the premiere of excerpts of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers – a continuing, raw story of real-life loss and agony.

The opera was originally intended to be about the Maidan protests of 2013-14. But the American librettist George Brant, the author of the hit play Grounded, switched course in 2023 when the stories of abducted children hit the news.

Featuring cover bands, walking tours and the poet laureate as DJ, The Fall: Futures and Pasts is the ultimate Fall fan experience. But can our writer get through Eat Y’Self Fitter at karaoke?

There has never been a group like the Fall. I use the word “group” advisedly, as I once made the mistake of calling them a “band” in the presence of Mark E Smith. The combustible singer immediately admonished me on the basis that a band was something that you’d get in Blackpool.

The irreplaceable Smith died in 2018 at the age of 60, immediately bringing to an end the group that he fronted for his entire adult life. The legend of the Fall lives on, though. They have arguably never been bigger, with interest maintained by a slew of reissues, multiple spinoff groups, a variety of podcasts and a steady stream of books; the nine-track Post Script, billed as the band’s “official final album” by former manager Ed Blaney, was announced last week and slated for a September release. So it’s an opportune time for The Fall: Futures and Pasts, a three-day all-Fall festival held at Manchester’s Band on the Wall venue last weekend, celebrating 50 years of the group and attracting fans from as far afield as Australia and the US.

We would like to hear from people who have been affected by the disorder following anti-immigration protests on Tuesday night

Violence erupted in Belfast on Tuesday night after protests against immigration in response to a stabbing attack that was captured in a graphic video.

Police charged a 30-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan with attempted murder in connection with an attack in north Belfast on Monday night that left a man critically injured and prompted widespread condemnation. The suspect is to appear at Belfast magistrates court on Wednesday.

With ministers considering measures that could include restrictions on under-16s’ access to social media, we would like to hear from parents and carers about what changes they want to see

The UK government is expected to announce new measures to protect children online, as ministers examine the impact of Australia’s world-first social media ban for under-16s, six months after it came into force.

We’d like to hear from parents and carers about their views on a potential social media ban or other restrictions.

We would like to hear about the holidays reads you’d recommend

Summer is here, which means lazy days at the beach or the pool with a great book by your side.

We would love to hear from people about their favourite beach reads. What books have you loved reading on holiday? What are the page turners that you keep returning to every summer and always recommend to friends? We would love to hear what books these are and why they make a great beach read.

How has the search for work been for you? How many job applications have you made?

The number of young people not in work or education in Britain could rise to 1.25 million by the early 2030s without urgent government action, a landmark report has warned.

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

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