An incident in which an autonomous OpenAI agent hacked a startup either confirms that the end is nigh – or that the product is just amazingly sophisticated

Throughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet. A crow on the battlefield. A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, attached to a news story. You know it’s not going to be good, right? You know that by the time you’ve read it, you’ll be begging to go back to the time when the worst thing that could happen to us at the hands of the techlords was just some democracy-subversion, or childhood destruction, usually followed by Mark Zuckerberg putting on a suit and claiming: “We will learn from this.”

Anyway: a lot of pictures of Sam Altman in the news of late. Most recently, this week, one darkened the skies alongside the tale of how an OpenAI autonomous agent went rogue during a supposedly sandboxed/guardrailed test, and hacked a major startup that functions as a repository of coding information. (I’m slightly obsessed with the fact that the startup in question is called Hugging Face, adding weight to my suspicion that some vast, tweely benign emoji is the last face humanity will see before it dies.)

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Women have half the seats at the top table for the first time, but Oxbridge maintains its grip

Andy Burnham has appointed the first cabinet of his premiership. Much has been made of how key allies of his predecessor, Keir Starmer, have been demoted or sacked, but what is the demographic makeup of the new team of senior ministers, and how does it differ from other governments?

Thanks to gen Z resellers and platforms like Depop, thrifting has lost its subcultural roots - and ballooned into a $350bn business

Vintage boutique owner Janelle Best has been rummaging in thrift shop bins since the 90s. When she started, she says, there was a stigma about it. “It was either you were a freak, or you were poor – and I was a freak.”

At first, she did it to source stage outfits while playing in psych-rock bands. Then, in 2005, she started “casually reselling” on eBay. Ten years later she was trading as Desert Stars Vintage at street markets, and by 2023 she had opened a showroom specializing in upmarket silk dresses in her Williamsburg apartment. Even just a few years ago, she says, she still put in the hours at places like Goodwill. The bins, she says, “were a field day. There were so many fucking bangers.” And then, thrifting became a social media craze, she says, “and the hell gates of high school students flooded in. Twelve people to each bin. Everyone fighting. Suddenly everyone’s a reseller, and instead of these kids intuitively knowing what’s good, they’re on their phones trying to figure out if it’s valuable.”

When Imran Perretta was young, he was abruptly pulled by police into a van for questioning. That experience, as well as the death of his mother, inspired him to make Ish, a coming-of-age tale set amongst the British Muslim community. He talks about trauma, designing toilets and making Luton look magnificent

Imran Perretta always knew that the title of his debut feature film would be “Ish” – short for Ishmail, the name of the 12-year-old boy from Luton at the heart of his story. Only later did people point out the similarity to other coming-of-age films with three letters in the title: Kes by Ken Loach, and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Now, as the reviews trickle in, the comparisons to Kes and Apu keep coming. Like them, Ish is a poetic film that grabs you by the heart and pulls you into a child’s perspective on the world.

The response has been lovely, says Perretta, and a relief. “It’s nice that people have compared Ish to those films rather than Kidulthood. I did worry about that.” Why, because it features kids speaking in slang and getting into scrapes? He nods. “I always say that I don’t read reviews, but of course I’ve read every single one. I can’t help myself. And we’ve been really lucky; the reviews have been amazing. A couple have been middling. Then you read them, and the subtext is: ‘I thought it was going to be like Kidulthood.’”

From being abused by staff and other travellers to being denied access to toilets, flying is an increasingly distressing and frustrating experience for many wheelchair users. Here, they share their stories

When Hannah Babalola boarded KLM flight 598 on 26 May, she was tired. A Paralympic athlete, she had been competing at an event in South Africa’s Cape Town, and was hoping there would be no hold ups on her journey back home to Chicago.

Babalola, 37, is well-travelled. A former wheelchair racer, she now competes in marathons and has flown to dozens of countries over the years without big problems.

(Atlantic)
How do you follow up the album that made you a star – and a caricature? In classic Charli style: with a pivot to guitar and a meta masterpiece about the instability of identity

After a decade spent trailblazing a unique kind of pop freedom from the genre’s fringes, A-list success seemed like the thing that might finally trap Charli xcx. Her 2024 club-rat opus Brat spawned memes, embarrassing political bandwagoning, Collins’ word of the year and possibly terminal damage to the bra industry. Its ludicrous cultural impact looked set to pickle her as a caricature of a Parliament-toting bad girl; the question of whether “Brat summer” could last – whether Charli could sustain the interest – was so rife she turned it into a mockumentary, The Moment. It made success look miserable: your creation turned cringe by execs wanting to milk their prize cow dry of every last acid-green drop.

Even for a pop star renowned for reinvention, it put a higher price on her next move. Pivot and risk losing new fans and looking wilfully contrarian. When Charli released the sub-two-minute single Rock Music, many heard it as a middle finger. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she drawls over guitars that buzzed like speakers weathering interference from a Nokia 5110, “so now we’re making rock music.” There were boring thinkpieces about the dancefloor being very much alive, actually (as if Charli had ever ridden culture for clout then binned it off), and about whether she was trying to eject fair-weather new fans. But the key to this cheeky song is surprisingly earnest: “Jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don’t it’s OK,” she sings naively, an affirmation to take creative leaps, and to come with Charli – or not, as you like – as she takes this one.

Rudakubana moved to psychiatric hospital after it was concluded he could not be safely managed in prison

The Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been accused of attempting to “manipulate the system” by the families of his victims, after it emerged he had been transferred from prison to a psychiatric hospital.

Rudakubana, 19, was jailed for life in January last year, with a minimum sentence of 52 years, for the murders of Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar.

Exclusive: Hampshire police data reveals 22 of 37 detained had been accused or convicted of intimate partner violence

Most people arrested during violent protests after the sentencing of Henry Nowak’s murderer had previously been reported to the police for domestic abuse, the Guardian can disclose.

Data released by Hampshire police under freedom of information laws shows that 22 of 37 people (59%) detained in Southampton after Vickrum Digwa was jailed for life have been reported for crimes associated with intimate partner violence.

PM, on his first day at new base, says it will create ‘that sense of a more balanced country, that big things can be done from here’

Andy Burnham has arrived by police convoy at No 10 North at Heron House in Manchester:

Andy Burnham was probably feeling left out of the “Celtic alliance”, after apparently telling John Swinney that Scottish independence was “off limits”.

French evacuees using hundreds of mobilised boats or the only road linking the area with the mainland as evacuation also ordered in areas near Spanish capital

Over in France, it’s not just the south-west that gets affected, but the country’s south-east regions are also being hard hit, AFP noted.

Dozens of fires flared up and are being fanned by the mistral wind around the historic village of Cotignac – officials saying around 25 houses had been destroyed since Tuesday.

While overall levy for UK is unchanged, sectors not covered by Turnberry deal face tougher competition

• Business live – latest updates

Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs has put UK businesses at a disadvantage against the EU even though the overall tariff for British goods has not changed, experts have said.

In the levies, announced late on Thursday and said to be aimed against countries that engage in forced labour, the EU’s previous 15% near blanket tariff is reduced to 10%, the same level as the tariff deal struck by Keir Starmer and Peter Mandelson last year.

Rightwing provocateur meets Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who says he expects talks with Donald Trump in Washington next week

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet Donald Trump in Washington next week, according to the rightwing US influencer Laura Loomer, amid signs the White House’s traditional hostility towards Ukraine is beginning to crumble.

In an interview with Loomer, Ukraine’s president said he is likely to attend Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral and also hold talks with Trump, which will take place as the latest version of the Russian sanctions bill makes its way through Congress.

Connor Read, who is married and has two children, was apprehended in June during residency permit interview

A British-born man who has lived in the US since he was nine years old has been held in an ICE detention facility for more than a month and a half under threat of deportation, it has been reported.

Connor Read, 29, was taken by ICE agents after he was invited to a green card (residency permit) interview in Tampa, Florida on 3 June, and separated from his wife, Jaelin, 25, and his twin sons Ryder and Ozzie, three.

Lib Dems call on PM to push for suspension of ‘bungled, malfunctioning’ system as overseas holiday travel peaks

Andy Burnham has been urged to lobby EU leaders directly to suspend the new entry-exit system, EES, as the peak weekend for overseas holidays begins.

About 2.2 million British holidaymakers are expected to head abroad between Friday and Monday, the majority to Europe, with all schools in the UK now on their summer break.

Other charges, including assault against Abraham Diaw, dropped as guilty plea averts trial

The R&B singer Chris Brown has pleaded guilty to affray after a confrontation at a central London club.

The 37-year-old had been facing trial later this year over an allegation he attacked a former friend with a bottle at the Tape private members’ club in Mayfair in 2023.

Reporting from some of the poorest seaside towns revealed how young people have been left isolated – but remain resilient and full of hope

If you were asked to summon up images of the coastline of England and Wales, you might think of sunny days, buckets, spades and carefree holidays. But for many young people growing up by the sea, decades of evidence tell a very different story. For them, rather than a picture-perfect horizon full of hope, the sea has become a boundary that swallows up opportunity.

With a 73% decline in funding for youth services in England over the past 12 years, and a lack of opportunities that has led to nearly 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds not in work, education or training (Neet), the situation for young people, especially in places of deprivation, has never seemed more desperate.

Kyiv’s attacks on Wildberries, country’s answer to Amazon, destroy goods made, sold, and bought by everyday Russians

Standing in front of a vast warehouse engulfed in flames outside Moscow, Tatyana Mikhailova watched as her entire stock of 4,000 fur coats, bought months in advance for the winter season, burned.

“It’s not just a warehouse that’s burning,” Mikhailova said in a video she shared on Instagram. “It’s the time you’ve invested, the immense stress you’ve endured, your money, and your last bit of hope. All I feel is emptiness.”

She paved the way for Bridgerton, lit up Black Mirror’s most joyful episode – and now she stars in a grisly supernatural horror about slavery. The Belle star talks about Possession, partying with Prince and why she loves to shake things up

Gugu Mbatha-Raw seems blissfully immune to the heat. London is pushing 40C on one of those heatwave mornings when everyone is wearing the weather: damp collars, flushed faces, hair slicked to foreheads. Arriving at the cafe of the central London hotel where we meet, however, the star looks as if she’s stepped in from an altogether different climate. Dressed in a pristine white linen two-piece, makeup free, hair scraped back, she carries herself with a composure that makes everyone else’s perspiration seem faintly melodramatic.

She is, in every sense of the word, cool. This impression is only reinforced as we settle in for some small talk and she mentions that she’s been to the hotel once before.

The singer-songwriter and Water from Your Eyes guitarist was unstoppably prolific, despite a growing dependence on substances. Now sober, he reflects on his new album and the songs that helped him turn his life round

For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to get through the day. There was plenty of it: dozens of self-produced albums and EPs uploaded – since his This Is Lorelei project launched in 2012 – to what was then a plucky, independent platform called Bandcamp. Now 35, he is perhaps the quintessential Bandcamp artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His peers treat him like a lost folk hero from a bygone era.

Amos is sitting in the basement of a cafe in Camden Town, north London, cradling an iced matcha; coffee makes him “feel like shit”, he says, and he no longer indulges such foibles. The title of one of those Bandcamp albums, OK N8, is tattooed on his knuckles. A friend inked it a few years ago, soon after Amos got sober. “Exactly when you’re not supposed to be making decisions like getting a tattoo on your hand,” he jokes. His active blue eyes dance around behind a golden-brown fringe and an unruly, woodchip beard. In a tough spot he will swing back in his chair and search for answers that always seem to be hiding beneath the table. But each time he stumbles upon the truth, he looks up with a hungry smile.

Versions of Amy Winehouse and hundreds of other musicians are generating millions for beleaguered UK venues. But what is the emotional toll for the imitators, and are they pushing out original artists?

As peak heatwave sun beams down on to a field in Derbyshire, Amy Winehouse tells the crowd she is in need of hydration – so Robbie Williams fetches her a drink. Elsewhere, members of the public stop the Beastie Boys for selfies, Fred Durst grooves along as Diana Ross covers Al Green, and shirtless teenagers form a circle pit during Korn as a woman sits knitting in a camping chair just behind them. James Brown and Prince turn out to be the same artist – just dressed up in different clothes.

These are all scenes from Replika festival last month, which won the Guinness world record for the biggest tribute festival, with 108 acts performing across a very sweaty weekend. The punning deserves an accolade of its own: acts included Catfishing the Bottlemen, Pearl Scam, Wrong Jovi and Iffy Clyro.

Approach focuses on rebuilding soil health, increasing biodiversity and restoring natural ecosystems

For the last few decades, the nutrient content of our crops has been declining. In the late 90s, the US Department of Agriculture found the vitamin C content of lemons had decreased by almost a third over the previous 22 years. Calcium in carrots, an important source especially for non-meat eaters, had reduced, on average, by more than a quarter. Vitamin A in bananas was down by 57%. The mineral content of wheat has declined by between 20-30% since the 1960s.

A number of reasons have been suggested for this worrying decline, ranging from new varieties of crop that are bred to grow quicker and bigger to the higher carbon dioxide levels in the air causing plants to produce more sugars and starches (they grow faster but they produce fewer nutrients). A wide range of fixes have been suggested, from GM crops to synthetic soil amendments, or underground farms.

‘Bulking’, or gaining weight on purpose to get stronger, challenged everything I was once taught to do with my body

I had been casually lifting weights for a few years when several things changed in quick succession.

First, my boyfriend proposed.

Our cartoonist looks back at the big stories and headline-generating characters at the biggest World Cup ever

• Buy a cartoon | Some of David’s favourite works

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

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

A low-key PM leaves the stage briskly, while a breathtaking athlete misses out on the attention he deserves

And so it was over. You normally get a bit more notice when a prime minister is about to deliver their resignation speech outside No 10. The buildup. The sense of occasion. Keir Starmer did things differently.

If Andy Burnham is minded to grasp the nettle, he will need to sell it to people like me. The right will call it a ‘death tax’ – why not a levy for ageing well?

One of the last things Andy Burnham did before entering Downing Street was to go and see his father.

Now living in a nursing home, Roy Burnham has Alzheimer’s and isn’t really aware of his son’s new job. But perhaps the prime minister wanted, in part, to try to explain why he might not be visiting so often in future.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

A new survey suggests voters are becoming more cynical and pessimistic. A few goodwill gestures from No 10 won’t change all that – but it’s a start

Who are we, the people Andy Burnham now governs? He inherits a miserable lot: grudging, angry pessimists, expecting the worst of all politicians, trusting no one to lead the country well, according to a long-running study. British folk feel the social contract is broken, they feel let down. Ignorant of basic facts, they are wilfully misled by malevolents.

Over half a century of taking their pulse, Ipsos has collected data on shifting attitudes for the mighty Understanding Society, the largest longitudinal household study in the world, run by the Institute for Social and Economic Research. By chance, this latest national portrait will be the benchmark for Burnham’s era. Here are his people: can he make them feel better? In the end, that’s the great purpose of all politics: you can have good policies, make improvements, do your honest best, as Keir Starmer tried, but if you don’t make the people feel it, then it’s a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, as Paul told the Corinthians. Can Burnham lift up their hearts, a bit?

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Sometimes, what matters isn’t your output but what you put into the process. Think of it like work v the gym

I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come at no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money. But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn’t they embrace their future?

The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.

The new PM’s localism agenda doesn’t stop the UK being one of the most centralised counties in Europe. Can you imagine Meloni in charge of social care or Macron discussing buses?

Was this a joke? Andy Burnham claimed on coming to office to be a localist. Not for the new prime minister the hotspots of the capital, of posh Downing Street and Whitehall. His were the squares of Manchester and the pavements of Wigan. The centre was the enemy of local democracy.

Yet his first week in office has been consumed by one gratuitous intervention in local government after another. He gatecrashed a Westminster rough-sleeping centre and proclaimed a policy to end homelessness. He then decided to cap local bus fares, cut local pub business rates and build more social houses. For good measure, he would create a new national care service.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

The US is aligning itself with dictators and autocrats to prevent those accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes from ever facing justice

Barely a month appears to go by without Donald Trump making a fresh attempt to destroy the international rules-based order. The US has pulled funding from dozens of international institutions, shut down USAID and withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. Nato may survive on paper, but Trump has made clear that he has little interest in coming to the aid of any ally that is attacked. The Board of Peace is clearly an attempt to sideline the United Nations.

But the state department’s announcement last week that it wishes to dismantle the international criminal court “brick by brick” could be Trump’s most frightening move of all.

Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer and a previous winner of the Orwell prize

The powerful politician was no stranger to controversy, but brazenly defying a ban on surrogacy that he had long defended was the last straw

Up until last week, Jens Spahn was, by all accounts, a model of political success in Germany. At just 22, he was elected to the Bundestag for the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), and rose steadily through the ranks of the party. He was a leading official in the finance ministry, led the ministry of health through Covid and, in 2025, became his party’s leader in parliament, arguably the second-most powerful post in the country. Controversies – and there were many in more than two decades in politics – did not seem to stymie his rise to power.

So when Spahn was made to resign after announcing that he had become a father after he and his husband used a surrogate mother in the US, there was a moment of disbelief among those who thought him a Teflon political operator immune to scandal. Why was surrogacy the issue that finally brought him down? That this was the final straw for his party revealed how, in the conservative Germany of today, reproductive politics can mark a red line.

Tania Roettger is a journalist based in Berlin

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

Sadiq Khan’s heat-ready plan for London is a sensible strategy for adaptation that should provide a roadmap for other cities

“Our ability to trust that our homes will keep us safe from the outside is under threat,” the geographer Sam Johnson-Schlee writes in Hot House, his recent book on how heat has transformed domestic life. This summer, high temperatures have become inescapable. People have coped with makeshift solutions: keeping curtains drawn, placing foil over windows or – for those who can afford one – plugging in an air-conditioning unit. Planning experts warn that, with only about half of councils requiring new buildings to include cooling strategies, many homes will become “death traps” as temperatures rise.

Britain’s homes weren’t built to cope with this. The country’s historically mild climate allowed developers to build houses without insulation, while industrialisation supplied plentiful coal to burn when temperatures dropped. Many homes are consequently drafty in winter and sweltering in summer. Unlike those in Mediterranean climates, British homes lack shutters and shaded communal spaces. While Ildefons Cerdà, Barcelona’s masterplanner, was designing housing blocks with cool courtyards and chamfered edges to allow breezes to flow, Britain’s Victorian builders were throwing up rows of terrace houses – many without cross-ventilation – and giving little thought to the movement of the sun.

A new Brussels study highlights the pace at which EU countries are ageing. A more informed public debate is overdue

Europe is ageing at pace as birthrates fall and people live longer. A new report by the European Commission, published this month, notes that 2012 marked the first year in which fewer people were born in EU countries than people died in them. By the middle of this century, nearly one in three EU residents will be 65 or older. The numbers of those over 80 will almost triple from 6% to 15%. The old continent is getting visibly greyer.

The transition to a “longevity society”, as the report’s authors describe it, is something to be celebrated. Many people are enjoying healthier, richer lives for longer, and redefining the meaning and possibilities of old age. But the statistics and direction of travel also point to immense social challenges, with implications for the way we work, intergenerational fairness and the future funding of care. Sadly, amid fraught and at times toxic debates about immigration and the cost of welfare, Europe’s politics is struggling to meet the moment.

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.

Focusing on Donald Trump’s defects risks making war appear as an aberration rather than as a recurring feature of American power, writes David Eaton. Plus letters from Blaine Stothard and Harvey Gilbert

Simon Tisdall’s article (Trump, not Iran, is the world’s greatest danger. He’s a one-man weapon of mass destruction, 18 July) is a forceful polemic, but it risks turning a structural problem into a personal one. If Donald Trump is uniquely reckless, that deserves criticism. Yet the article implies that America’s present predicament is chiefly the consequence of his character, rather than asking why successive administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, have repeatedly resorted to military intervention in the Middle East. To focus on Trump’s defects risks making war itself appear as an aberration rather than as a recurring feature of American power.

The same applies to the strait of Hormuz. Its strategic importance does not begin or end with one president. It reflects a global economic order that depends on secure energy supplies, trade routes and the projection of military power to guarantee them. That broader context is largely absent.

Lexi Ellingsworth of Stop Surrogacy Now UK responds to news that the rise in the use of surrogates abroad is leaving more babies at risk of becoming stateless

Your article (Rise in overseas surrogates ‘increases risk of stateless babies, 19 July) suggests that the solution lies in better regulation to make surrogacy safe and ethical. But regulation cannot remove the central ethical problem: every surrogacy arrangement begins with the deliberate separation of a newborn baby from their mother, who they have naturally bonded with throughout the pregnancy.

Regulation is also not able to eliminate the physical risks borne exclusively by surrogate mothers. A study in Canada has suggested that surrogate mothers are more likely to experience severe complications including postpartum haemorrhage and pre-eclampsia than women who conceived naturally or with IVF.

Humanitarian support keeps families buying food, shops trading and clinics open when crisis hits, says Abdullahi Nur Osman

Foreign Office figures showing that the UK will almost halve bilateral aid to Somalia by 2029 (Report, 16 July) come as families across the country brace for yet another climate emergency.

Forecasters are warning that rains in Somalia in October could bring catastrophic flooding, displacing thousands. The World Meteorological Organization has flagged a heightened risk of extreme rainfall, which will strike communities still recovering from a severe drought that has left 6 million people facing high levels of acute food insecurity.

Brian F Nattrass went to a festival to celebrate his 80th birthday, started dancing and suddenly felt ageless. Plus a letter from John Parry

Thanks for an inspiring and timely article (The rave secret: why middle-aged women are larging it – and seeing big health benefits, 20 July). My 37-year-old daughter recently invited me to a festival to celebrate my 80th birthday. There were raves each night for three nights in a row. I learned to dance in the late 50s and 60s, during the era of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. I used to absolutely love dancing and used to party in clubs well into my late 30s. But reading your article, I realised that I hadn’t danced in over 40 years!

When my daughter invited me to a festival, naturally I had all the self-doubts and concerns you mentioned in your article, including “internalised ageism”. But I love and trust my daughter. She said: “Dad, you’ll do great!” So I went, and I did – dancing with total strangers until 4-5am every night for three nights.

• All the action as the games get under way

• 10 things to look out for at Glasgow 2026 | Mail Taha

Boxing: England’s Lauren Mackie, in the women’s 54kg, punches through to the round of 16 with a unanimous victory against Kenya’s Amina Faki. DJ Khaled’s All I Do Is Win blasts around the ring.

This story has caught the eye, courtesy of Reuters:

The troubled Games looked doomed until Glasgow stepped in but this opening ceremony had plenty of feelgood factor

The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow opened on Thursday evening to the surreal sight of King Charles and Queen Camilla stepping out of a Tardis – and a mechanical Loch Ness monster roaring the first few bars of Flower of Scotland.

The Tardis was a nod to the fact that police boxes were designed by the Scottish architect Gilbert MacKenzie Trench. But the Doctor Who reference proved to be doubly apt given the Games faced being exterminated until Glasgow stepped in after Victoria pulled out due to financial pressures.

• Cecil Alexander is competing at Commonwealth Games

• Johnson-Thompson and Asher-Smith pull out of athletics

The Falkland Islands bowler Cecil Alexander called Argentina’s World Cup banner “disappointing” after his opening men’s singles match at the Commonwealth Games.

Alexander, 45, made the comments after a straight sets 10-3, 7-4 defeat by the former world No 1 Izzat Shameer Dzulkeple of Malaysia.

The 127.9km mountain stage starts at 2pm CEST / 1pm BST
Stage 18 report | share your thoughts with Tom via email

127km to go No rest for the wicked, we’re straight on to the category Col Bayard, a 4.8km drag at 7.2%.

There’s Christian Prudhomme popping out of the sunroof and waving his little yellow flag, we’re off.

• Klopp warns media to ‘leave my family in peace’

• Suggests role will be his final job in top-level football

Jürgen Klopp said he wants his team to “change a country” after being confirmed as Germany’s new manager, but threatened to stand down if his family are hounded by the media during his time in charge.

In a forthright first press conference upon his unveiling as Julian Nagelsmann’s replacement, Klopp also suggested the role will be his final job in top-level football and expressed regret about poking fun at his predecessor while working as a television pundit during the World Cup. He is tasked with reviving Germany, who lost to Paraguay in the last 32 and have not made the last 16 since winning the tournament in 2014.

• Golfer punished for flattening grass around shot

• American threatened to pull out of tournament

Bryson DeChambeau believes he would have been “right there for the Claret Jug” if he had not received a two-shot penalty in the Open Championship last week at Royal Birkdale.

DeChambeau made a positive start to last week’s tournament after opening with a 67 and then a 66 on Friday, but his second-round score was later adjusted to 68 after he was handed a retrospective two-stroke penalty at the 5th hole after a video review. The 32-year-old was punished after match officials ruled he had improved the area of his backswing by standing on and flattening some long grass.

Harrow schoolgirl eclipses legend Judit Polgar’s mark as youngest girl ever to defeat a grandmaster rated above 2600, then draws with a former 2700

England’s 11-year-old talent Bodhana Sivanandan scored her best individual result last Saturday, when the Harrow schoolgirl defeated France’s 2628-rated grandmaster Marc’Andria Maurizzi, 19, in the opening round of the Dole Trophy in Aix-en-Provence. Maurizzi was world under-20 junior champion in 2023 and is the current French champion.

Sivanandan had beaten two GMs previously, but neither was as eminent as Maurizzi, and her result is a new world age record for a girl to defeat a grandmaster rated over 2600. The Frenchman held the advantage for the first 27 moves but then blundered into a tactic which won his queen for inadequate compensation.

British heavyweights return to the ring this weekend and face low-risk opponents in run-up to long-trailed bout

Tyson Fury has won one fight in the past two years and nine months. Anthony Joshua, meanwhile, has enjoyed a solitary victory over the past two years and four months. Fury outpointed Arslanbek Makhmudov, the lumbering Russian heavyweight, in April while Joshua laboured through five torpid rounds before he finally cut loose and broke the jaw of Jake Paul, the former YouTuber, in December.

Their three defeats during this period are more vivid in the memory. Fury lost twice to Oleksandr Usyk – in May and December 2024 – while Joshua was knocked down four times and then stopped by Daniel Dubois inside five humiliating rounds in September that year. Despite the ravages of age, framed by yet another retirement for Fury and a traumatic period of inactivity for Joshua, they remain on course to fight each other in a showdown that will generate much more than $100m in November.

Several others seriously injured in attack that residents of Palestinian village say also involved Israeli military

Four Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed in a shooting in the northern West Bank, health officials have said, during what residents described as a settler attack also involving the Israeli military. Several more people were seriously injured.

The serious incident in the Palestinian village of Tell, near Nablus, is the deadliest attack in the West Bank this year and has the potential to lead to a series of reprisals between Israeli-backed settlers and Palestinian communities.

Sonam Wangchuk halts strike after receiving assurances parliament will address protesters’ concerns about exam system

The Indian “cockroach” activist Sonam Wangchuk has ended a 26-day hunger strike over an exam paper scandal that has spiralled into a wide-ranging, youth-led wave of demonstrations against Narendra Modi’s government.

Supporters, meanwhile, have called a nationwide day of protest on Friday.

Elle’s story is one of personal sacrifice, deciding to help people despite the risk of attack by the military. Her story reflects that of a healthcare system in peril

When Myanmar’s junta seized power in a 2021 coup, Elle* and a fellow doctor fled to the jungle to provide aid to the resistance movement, one of 45,000 healthcare workers to lend their support.

Elle does not regret her decision, she supports the pro-democracy movement and later married the doctor with whom she escaped, but years of sacrifice have taken a toll. She treats patients from refugee camps at a clinic but does not earn enough to send money back to support her parents in their old age, which is her greatest wish.

Landlords say high costs of running hospitality business outweigh potential savings of business rates discount

One of Andy Burnham’s first policy measures as prime minister is a 20% reduction in business rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues.

The policy, announced on Thursday, is part of a broader agenda to support the high street and will cost £100m.

Journalists urge attenders to confront president over media attacks, while Melanie Trump and JD Vance to be absent

Donald Trump will address a rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association (WCHA) dinner on Friday three months after the original event was abruptly halted after an armed assailant tried to storm it, with the alleged aim of assassinating him.

The rearranged dinner has been condemned as “hypocritical” by retired journalists and press freedom groups, who are urging the association to use it to confront Trump over his administration’s intensified attacks on the media.

Black-crowned night heron one of many species thriving at Holnicote Estate where river ‘reset’ has transformed area into lush oasis

A rare black-crowned night heron has been spotted on an estate in the south-west of England where an innovative river “reset” is transforming the area into an oasis for birdlife.

The heron was caught on camera in a jungly corner of the Holnicote Estate, where conservation experts have been restoring the landscape by allowing a river to return to its natural course.

Delegation sent to Brasília after gunmen from organised crime group enter homes in western Amazon Forest

Indigenous leaders on the Brazil-Peru border say their communities are being “taken hostage” by organised crime groups who are running rampant across the region, destroying Amazon Forest, building roads and trafficking drugs.

Earlier this month, masked men armed with semi-automatic weapons entered homes in Apiwtxa, a village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Territory, intimidating people and searching for targets.

In this week’s newsletter: the archipelago at the centre of the extreme weather phenomenon could help scientists predict how other marine ecosystems will adapt to our warming climate

• Don’t get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

The ocean waters around the Galápagos Islands are hot. Very hot. Observed for centuries in the Pacific by fishers, the El Niño weather phenomenon begins when the prevailing trade winds slow, allowing warm water to spread east along the coast of South America. Right now, the pattern is in full flow and will build from this year into next, likely bringing record temperatures to an already overheating world.

If 2026 is not the hottest year on record, 2027 surely will be – and the Galápagos archipelago is in the centre of this climate crisis.

‘It’s only going to get worse’: wildfires forcing firefighters to make impossible choices

Millions face long-term coastal flooding risk in UK without climate action, scientists warn

Slowdown in Arctic ice melt ends after largest winter decline on record

Researchers tracked mother-child pairs for up to 11 years, finding Pfas mixtures may affect developing guts

Prenatal and early life exposure to Pfas mixtures is probably linked to higher levels of intestinal inflammation in children, new first-of-its-kind research shows. Intestinal inflammation can cause irritable bowel diseases, like ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and colorectal cancer.

While Pfas has been linked to irritable bowel disease and intestinal inflammation in adults, the new peer-reviewed Mt Sinai study is the first to look at how the chemicals impact children during a critical developmental phase.

Exclusive: Westminster survey finds one in two staffers experiencing clinical levels of psychological distress

Staff employed by MPs are calling for urgently tightened security after reports of some being physically attacked and hundreds receiving threatening calls and messages.

A survey of more than 500 MPs’ staff members found that 78% had received threatening communication and nearly one in three fear for their own safety or that of colleagues.

Writing from year after gross indecency arrest challenges ‘isolated mathematician’ image, says Cambridge academic

When people think of Alan Turing, they might imagine he was arrogant, isolated, humourless, tortured. A better way of remembering the father of modern computing would be, an academic argues, as “playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex”.

The Cambridge University English literature professor Sarah Dillon has transcribed and studied a little-known short story that Turing wrote in the year after his arrest in Manchester for gross indecency.

Strategy will tackle ‘public health disaster’ that claims more lives than fire, flooding or knife crime

A national strategy to address the “public health disaster” of drowning has been launched in England – hours after two women died at an Essex beach, the latest in a surge of water-related tragedies.

Among the measures being considered are: providing every child in England with water safety education and swimming lessons; establishing how climate change can increase risks; and media campaigns to inform bystanders how to respond to a potential drowning.

Soaring temperatures fuel demand for air conditioners and outdoor goods, helping retailers beat expectations in June

• Business live – latest updates

Online sales reached their highest share of retail spending in five years last month as record heat fuelled demand for air conditioners, outdoor products and clothing.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the volume of retail sales in Great Britain rose 1% month on month in June, beating analysts’ expectations of a 0.3% decline, helped by hot weather and World Cup spending.

Detectives targeting dissident republicans stopped a vehicle containing explosives near Carrickmacross

Two people have been arrested after police in Ireland targeting dissident republicans intercepted an “extremely significant” bomb that was being transported in a vehicle near the border.

Members of the Garda Síochána’s special detective unit stopped the vehicle travelling on the N2 south of Carrickmacross, County Monaghan on Wednesday afternoon.

Wendy Faith and Alesi Diana Denise freed after five months in prison over allegations of engaging in same-sex activity

For five months, Wendy Faith and Alesi Diana Denise shared a small prison cell knowing that there was a possibility they might spend the rest of their lives there. Accused of engaging in same-sex activity, an offence under Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws, the two young women faced a life sentence.

Faith, a 22-year-old musician known as Torrero Bae, and Denise, 21, say they have been left “traumatised” by their arrest and detention, an ordeal that began with a police raid on their single rented room in Arua City, north-west Uganda, in February.

Irish politicians concerned about Daniel Tatlow-Devally’s treatment in jail want Micheál Martin to send observers to Ulm 5 trial

A cross-party delegation of Irish politicians has urged Dublin to send observers to a high-security trial of pro-Palestinian activists in Germany and to raise concerns about the Irish defendant’s detention when the German chancellor visits next week.

Mairéad Farrell of Sinn Féin, a member of the seven-member delegation, said she and her colleagues had attended the hearing in Stuttgart on Wednesday of the so-called Ulm 5 activists, who are facing charges over an attack on an Israeli arms company.

Team in Ohio finds swapping to electric has ‘very large’ impact, despite study being scaled back by Trump cuts

A US study has found a 70% drop in hospital admissions and days off from work or school when people with poorly controlled asthma had their gas stove and hob replaced with electric.

Ohio’s publicly owned MetroHealth began the study in December 2024 but funding was terminated early by the incoming Trump administration. It had been designed to investigate if replacing gas cooking improved asthma for 1,200 people living near Cleveland, Ohio.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

On the corporate front today, the consumer goods group Reckitt Benckiser has warned it will take a £175m hit from selling its business in Russia to local manufacturer Arnest Management.

The deal is part of Reckitt’s wider plans to transfer ownership of its operations in Russia, as many Western businesses have withdrawn from the country since its invasion of Ukraine.

Hospitality companies saw demand boosted by good weather, the FIFA World Cup and more domestic holidays, as high costs and uncertainty continued to deter some foreign travel.

However, overall services growth remained lacklustre amid cost-of-living pressures. Unusually for recent years, manufacturing is now growing faster than services, buoyed by rising exports.

Inflationary pressures clearly remain elevated, as the ongoing energy shock and supply squeeze from the war in the Middle East continues to add to existing business cost pressures from earlier government policies. These higher costs led to a further fall in employment, which has declined continuously since the Autumn 2024 Budget.

Business optimism about the year ahead improved, reflecting some relief at reduced geopolitical tensions during the survey period and the associated drop in oil prices. But with Middle East worries flaring up again in recent days, a sustained cooling in the price data and upturn in business confidence is by no means assured.”

Carmaker expects to sell 3% fewer vehicles this year as it pushes through a programme that could eliminate 100,000 roles

Volkswagen has reported a steep fall in profits and cut its revenue forecast amid a sales slump in China, as the German carmaker pushes through a brutal cost-cutting programme that includes axeing up to 100,000 jobs.

VW said it expects sales revenue to fall by up to 3% this year, a reversal of a previous forecast for a 3% increase on last year’s €321.9bn (£275.3bn), because of a sales slump in the highly competitive Chinese market.

Staley is latest high-profile figure to testify before House amid investigation into Epstein, convicted sex offender

Former Barclays boss Jes Staley appeared before by US lawmakers on Thursday in a closed-door interview about his past ties to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Staley, who spent more than three decades at JPMorgan Chase before joining Barclays in 2015, is the latest in a series of high-profile figures to appear in front of the House committee on oversight and reform as part of its investigation into Epstein, who died in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial over child sex-trafficking charges.

Firm told to treat third-party services that appear in its results in ‘fair and non-discriminatory manner’

Google has been fined a total of €890m (£760m) by the EU for breaches of online competition laws by its search and app store services.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Google had broken the Digital Markets Act by giving priority to its own services, such as shopping and hotel deals, in search results over those of its rivals.

Ryan Reynolds’ sarcastic superhero is rumoured to be in Avengers: Doomsday – but how is he going to fit in the MCU proper when he spent all of his previous film mocking it?

How do you solve a problem like Deadpool in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Deadpool & Wolverine found a way: rather than integrate the bloodthirsty, fourth-wall-breaking merc with a mouth into the rather more sanitised world of Thor, Iron Man and Spider-Man, Shawn Levy’s 2024 film chose to lampoon it from the outside instead. Why bother to make everyone’s favourite chimichanga-munching mutant fit when you can make the fact that he doesn’t the entire joke? Why become another cog in the Marvel machine when you can stand beside it, point out the loose screws and watch the box-office greenbacks roll in like it’s Christmas 2019?

Deadpool & Wolverine made $1.3bn worldwide, becoming the second highest grossing film of 2024 and the highest grossing R-rated film ever. But it did absolutely nothing to introduce Ryan Reynolds’ potty-mouthed antihero into the MCU, unless one counts the several thousand jokes about Kevin Feige. By the end of the movie, Deadpool seems no closer to becoming the saviour of Marvel than Happy Hogan is to wielding Mjolnir. He remains a sarcastic observer from the sidelines, less a vital MCU character than its resident heckler.

The overexposed actor falls flat in another disappointing vehicle that fails to make the most of its neat bachelor-party-with-a-twist concept

72 Hours is Kevin Hart’s midlife crisis comedy. He stars as Joe, a 40-year-old New York marketing executive whose once-reliable Midas touch has worn off. He’s no longer the office’s go-to translator of youth culture, yet he remains on the verge of a promotion – the final hurdle standing between him and happily-ever-after with his longtime girlfriend (Teyana Taylor), a doctor weighing an opportunity that could pull her away from the life they’ve built together in the city.

All the while, crude texts and memes flood his phone from a random group chat populated by a pack of twentysomething guys planning a bachelor party in Miami – an annoyance that quickly becomes his ticket back to relevance. Joe not only drops everything to join these perfect strangers for the weekend; he upgrades the whole affair, picks up the tab and supplies the booze in hopes of harvesting content for his struggling campaign. It would be a fine set-up if it weren’t such an obvious metaphor for Hart’s own showbiz career.

Miranda and Andy reunite to save Runway magazine in the jolly couture-drenched sequel, plus Scarlett Johansson’s moving comedy about a twinkly eyed 94-year-old liar

Miranda Priestly is back – and the last 20 years haven’t diminished the fashion magazine editor’s hauteur one iota. But in David Frankel’s couture-drenched comic sequel her former callow assistant, Anne Hathaway’s Andy, is now an award-winning investigative journalist. Hired by the owner to improve Runway’s reputation, she can take all that Meryl Streep’s disdainful Priestly throws at her. This time round, the main conflict is with the internet, as declining print sales and clickbait competition threaten the publication’s future. It’s a jolly, aspirational outing, buoyed by scene-stealers Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt, even if the gags are largely from the preloved rack.
Wednesday 29 July, Disney+

To mark the two-time Oscar nominee’s recent 50th birthday, we rate his finest screen roles – from hyper-British patricians and seething serpents, to ghastly Yanks, tragic codebreakers and sci-fi scoundrels

Benedict Cumberbatch does his considerable best opposite the equally prestigious Olivia Colman in this souped-up marital-breakdown dramedy, essentially remade from the 1989 movie with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. This time, though, it’s all about the Britons – indicating the supposed classiness of the affair. But the film is overwrought and unconvincing; it never convinces us that the couple were once passionately in love and now passionately in hate. The below-par script has the effect of bringing out an unrewarding kind of coldness in Cumberbatch, technically assured though he always is.

A gripping thriller about a female killer will fray all your nerve endings – plus a gorgeous documentary bidding farewell to the smash hit LGBTQ+ romance

On the face of it, this drama by Elizabeth Meriwether (New Girl, Dying for Sex) is a very traditional detective thriller. There’s a serial killer, murdering in inventive ways, with a flawed, gifted cop on their trail. However, they are both women with traumatic pasts involving domestic violence, so genre expectations are subverted and sympathies blurred. With her talent for manipulation and deadpan brutality, there’s something of Killing Eve’s Villanelle about Lola Petticrew’s killer. Emmy Rossum’s FBI agent Alice Black, meanwhile, is all raw nerve endings and self-destructive behaviour. The pair are on a collision course – but what justice might look like is hard to unpick. Gripping. Phil Harrison
Disney+, from Monday 27 July

(RCA/Cult)
Allying the crackpot strangeness of Julian Casablancas’ side projects with his band’s gift for pop minimalism, the New Yorkers are on playful, joyous form

Here’s a sentence no old-head Strokes fan wants to hear: to understand Reality Awaits, the stalwart NYC group’s seventh album and first in six years, you first have to understand the Voidz. Julian Casablancas’s other band has been taking up more and more of his time in recent years, much to the chagrin of fans who may have dipped into the group’s painfully, awkwardly proggy 2014 debut Tyranny and decided to just let the old legend have his fun (away from their own speakers, of course). Anyone who decided to listen further will have found that the Voidz have turned into a great, crowd-pleasing, safely experimental zone for Casablancas to pull out some of the most energised, goofy work of his career. If you’re thinking I come to this guy for cool, not goof, I don’t know what to tell you: this is a man who spends interviews discussing his theories about ancient Sumerian culture.

The 2018 Voidz record Virtue is a high point of Casablancas’s entire catalogue: a gentle stylistic mixed bag that covers winsome pop-rock, yacht rock, bedroom pop and much more. That album seemed to clear the decks for the Strokes’ last record, 2020’s The New Abnormal, on which they sounded the most like their 2001 selves since Is This It. That album is now the definitive Strokes album for gen Z – go to any Strokes show and watch the younger contingent light up during The Adults Are Talking – but it didn’t presage a long-term back-to-basics route for Casablancas and co. On Reality Awaits, by sheer force of will, he fuses the crackpot strangeness and, ahem, fondness for AutoTune of the Voidz with the Strokes’ minimalism and pop melodicism.

The New Orleans country-punk duo are on a hot streak, about to release their third album in a year, and the crunchy, literate hooks keep coming

From New Orleans
Recommended if you like Parquet Courts, Sheer Mag, Royal Headache
Up next Holy Cross Tigers out later this year

Not one but two of the year’s best albums so far are authored by a ragtag, deeply charismatic band from Louisiana named Twisted Teens, who bear Pynchonian names – Caspian Hollywell and RJ “Razor Ramone” Santos – a console steel guitar and, in Hollywell’s case, one of rock’s greatest, most soulful voices in many years. Virtuosic when it counts, ramshackle when necessary, Twisted Teens feel like they could slot nicely on to a bill with Parquet Courts and the late, great Royal Headache – crunchy, literary rock bands who seemed to shyly conceal their music’s anthemic nature.

Twisted Teens broke through earlier this year with their second album Blame the Clown, a set of 12 country-punk tracks that’s hooky and effusive enough to give any major-label pop record released this year a run for its money. A couple of weeks ago, they released its followup, the rangier and slightly more introspective Florida Water Blues, and before the year’s out they’ll have dropped Holy Cross Tigers, a release schedule befitting a band on a hot streak.

The pair’s origin story is foggy – the most one can glean from interviews is “they were neighbours, then Santos travelled cross-country to buy a steel guitar” – which feels appropriate for this kind of grimy, mythic music, which is raw and self-consciously handmade. Part of that feeling can be put down to Hollywell’s voice, a gritty and pockmarked thing which he uses to great effect, interspersing deadpan meditations on life and love with a rich, almighty howl that’s ostentatious but unpretentious. In other words, Twisted Teens are two of 2026’s true originals – a breakout band whose kooky, ultra-clarified vision outstrips the hype. Shaad D’Souza

BBCSSO/Woods/Wallfisch
Signum
The late pianist and composer deserves a wider audience for the edgy, lucid soundworld of his compositions

John McCabe, who died in 2015, made some important recordings of other people’s music – he championed Carl Nielsen, and his survey of the complete Haydn piano sonatas has held its place in the Decca catalogue for half a century – but when it comes to his own works there are still gaps to be filled. Alongside the Symphony No 2, completed in 1971, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Kenneth Woods here supply the overdue premiere recordings of McCabe’s 2007 cello concerto Songline and his 1978 Symphony No 3.

The Symphony No 2 is tense and edgy, musing on the cyclical nature of violence; the cello concerto, its title inspired by ancient Aboriginal pathways, is restless in a different, searching way, which the soloist Raphael Wallfisch captures eloquently. What is striking and gratifying about both is the lucidity of McCabe’s music, its textures remaining clearly defined through writing of enormous colour and scope. The Symphony No 3, Hommages, inhabits a lusher soundworld, densely weaving in nods to Haydn and Nielsen while also looking in other directions – one passage with muted strings and celeste could almost be Shostakovich reimagined by the Strauss of Der Rosenkavalier. Vividly energised and expressive throughout, the performances do all three works justice.

(Carrier)
US composer Keir GoGwilt’s collaborative album uses poetry and atonal music to trace the roots of Spain’s sarabande dance: a fascinating listen, though not easy

Classical music aficionados will be familiar with the stately form of the sarabande – a Spanish dance adopted into a languorous and tender musical style favoured by baroque composers such as Bach and Handel. For American composer Keir GoGwilt, however, the sarabande contains something far more radical. On his collaborative project The Zarabanda Variations, he enlists a 10-piece ensemble that combines free jazz with baroque strings and spoken-word poetry to delve into the colonial Latin American roots of the dance before it was popularised in 17th and 18th-century Spain.

On first listen, it’s hard to hear how this music could relate to the classical sarabande at all. Scrapes of atonal strings, clattering percussion, guttural vocalisations and sharp whistles create a cacophony of tension throughout, as if mirroring the passionate, whirling energy supposedly contained in the original forms of the dance. In fact, rather than creating a baroque sarabande fusion, GoGwilt’s compositions embrace its lesser-known historical references to produce something entirely new.

The American novelist and screenwriter’s memoir covers sex work, Virginia Woolf and Hollywood success

As an eight-year-old in comfortable, solid, suburban California, Michael Cunningham felt compelled to make art before he quite understood what it was, or could do: a painting of souls ascending to heaven, for example, in which paradise resembled the Griffith Park Observatory and the dead were all depicted in profile because their creator felt unequal to the challenge of full faces. There was also a cigar box covered in gold-sprayed macaroni and a clay representation of the animals on Noah’s Ark – anything, in fact, that would challenge the painting of a placid white chicken that hung in a gilt frame on his parents’ wall.

If Cunningham moved on fairly rapidly from the visual arts, either sparing or denying us the fruits of a more fully formed talent, it wasn’t because the impulse to create had withered. Rather, it was that the experience of making material art had functioned as a temporary outlet, being less painful, less embarrassing – both emotions he ascribes to his young, sensitive self – than attempting to capture the world in words.

The author on the power of folktales, being inspired by Ulysses – and the book that every woman should read

My earliest reading memory
The summer my middle sister was born, my mum and I would walk to the shops at Cherryvalley, in east Belfast, to do her messages, and she’d buy me the latest issue of Storyteller, illustrated tales from around the world. It came with a cassette tape of actors reading the stories, a ding to tell you when to turn the page. My favourite was a Japanese folktale called The Goblin Rat. I was only just two, but I listened to it, entranced and terrified, until I could recite it by heart.

My favourite book growing up
Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series. I first read them aged 10 – I’ve read the title book every midwinter since, and read them last year with my own then-10-year-old son. They tell a haunting story of the age-old battle between the forces of dark and light, weaving in Arthurian legend, shot through with an adult melancholy that makes them as compelling now as then.

After my 22-month-old child died, music and poetry brought catharsis and comfort

The day Renzo had his aneurysm, in the afternoon before it happened, I distinctly remember telling him that it was going to be a pleasure to watch him grow up. It seems ridiculous to write that here, the foreshadowing so on the nose as to be unbelievable. But it’s true. To him and my wife Allegra, I said, “I love our little family.” After the struggles around his birth, job loss, the pandemic, it felt, finally, like we had made it to the other side. We had, I suppose, just not how I envisioned it.

My friends Jayson and Stacy recommended I get to know David Kessler’s work. According to Harvard Business Review, Kessler is “the world’s foremost expert on grief”. He’d worked closely with Elisabeth Kübler-­Ross, who was the reigning expert on grief before her own death in 2004. A large part of Kübler-­Ross’s legacy is her classification of what she calls the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, as described in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. After you experience a death, she wrote, these stages can occur in any order, with one or more possibly not occurring at all. Just weeks after Renzo’s death, I’d tricked myself into thinking I had jumped all the way to acceptance when really I was trying to outrun anger and depression. Bargaining hasn’t been a big one for me, nor has denial. The facts have been pretty hard to ignore.

A portal opens from our modern world of data centres and interior design into a medieval fantasy realm, in this playfully surreal tale from the author of Eurotrash

A reclusive interior designer named Paul travels from his home in Orkney to the Norwegian coastal city of Stavanger for a most unusual commission. A data­centre housing a vast internet server is located by a fjord on the outskirts of the city, and a prestigious arts magazine is paying him a large sum of money to give it a makeover. They want him to paint the interiors white – “not just any white, but the perfect white, the singular white”. Shortly after he arrives, a freak weather event causes a power outage, and Paul goes missing; meanwhile the magazine’s jaded editor, Cohen, takes an overdose of barbiturates.

In alternate chapters a very different tale unfolds, set in a distant medieval world redolent of Norse mythology. A man, referred to only as “the stranger”, is nursed back to health by a nine-year-old girl who has shot him with an arrow after mistaking him for a deer. He is being pursued by a vengeful duke, and persuades the girl to join him on the run. Together they leave their plague-ridden town, traverse a barren wasteland and discover a subterranean stone city whose inhabitants live a communal existence, subsisting on seafood and kelp.

Going by the mantra, if you want to make someone laugh, make them cry first, the game’s developers have created a lonely magpie who fills the void by wreaking havoc

Amid the gleeful anarchy of Bad Magpie’s debut trailer, there’s a striking note of melancholy. The game’s protagonist – a wounded corvid that creates havoc wherever she goes – calls out forlornly as a flock of her kind passes above, with a conspicuous gap in their formation.

Milktooth games designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this particular image in her head for years. Lying in the grass one afternoon during the 2020 lockdowns, she looked up and saw a V-shaped pattern in the sky, poignantly incomplete. “It really stuck with me,” she says. “I posted about it online and someone told me about a ‘missing man’ formation, which is an aerial salute to a fallen pilot.”

Renovate rooms, investigate the supernatural and watch people burst into song in this surreal British ghost story

A young American man arrives in a dilapidated British seaside town to take on the renovations of an equally run-down hotel, inherited from a mysteriously absent father he never knew. His power tools talk to him in a Scottish accent, the local people speak in baffling slang, and occasionally people burst into song. Oh, and there are ghosts.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is a novel mix of genres – no bad thing in these times of sequels and remakes – but, according to the creative director of independent developers Friday Sundae, Anil Glendinning, it grew organically from a single goal: to tell a very British ghost story.

These days, I ‘collect’ birdsong and wild flowers, but it all started when my sons and I first set out to find Pikachu and pals

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

Believe it or not, Pokémon Go is 10 years old this month. The wildly successful smartphone game, which allows you to track down lovable creatures in the real world using GPS and augmented-reality technologies, has reportedly been downloaded 800m times across 150 countries and regions. A trillion Pokémon have been caught so far – and I have been responsible for a modest percentage of that figure.

When the game was first released, my sons and I spent many happy hours wandering the streets and parks of Frome searching for Jigglypuffs and Charizards, and the game’s social element, which lets you take on gym battles with other players in your vicinity, offered my autistic son a route to communicate with other children in a way he’d never been able to before.

Inspired by interactive theatre and fuelled by the motion capture tech used by VTubers, the vampire spies in Red Kiss have personality in spades

‘You look at the news and you’re like, ‘Another pointless war, another pointless bloodshed, another pointless genocide.’ And that can make you a bit hopeless.”

Roy van der Schilden, narrative designer and business director at Wispfire, speaks of a very human feeling. But the protagonist of its upcoming game Red Kiss can relate – despite being a vampire.

The terrifying visions of Richard Dadd, UFOs, aliens and Van Gogh’s troubled peasant woman – all in your weekly dispatch

Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam
Terrifying creatures of the night and surreal dreamscapes galore – and those are just the “sane” canvases this Victorian artist painted before he was confined to Bedlam, where his visions became truly unsettling.
• Royal Academy, London, 25 July to 25 October

The Yard theatre, London
Barbies, giant erections and exquisite craftsmanship combine in one of the year’s most outrageously funny and startingly original shows

Did someone say Jackie Collins, that doyenne of literary raunch and observer of human sexual dynamics? Fantastic! And an adaptation of her first novel, which revealed her formative interest in, and talent for, capturing the drama of love and sex within the bounds of patriarchy, and set in the world of showbusiness (albeit not in the Hollywood Hills but the leafy green film industry of swinging 60s Hampstead)? Great!

But played out in miniature, in a series of lit doll’s houses, and mainly acted by repurposed Barbie dolls. What? Who dreamed this up? An experimental adult Swedish company, Malmö Dockteater, and “adult” is quite the understatement. Directed by Erik Holmström, also puppet designer, the dolls come with pubic hair, gigantic erections and heavy, surround-sound breathing. In between the story of a marriage in the doldrums, infidelity and female ambition in an era of predatory film directors and savage casting couches (all conceived decades before Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo), there are eye-watering helpings of nudity, fellatio, cunnilingus, quickies and straight-up bonking. This is puppetry with balls in more ways than one, which makes the adult content in the current West End puppet production of Avenue Q look like The Muppet Christmas Carol.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Hofesh Shechter’s latest doesn’t break new ground, but its exceptional dancers throw themselves into a moody, pulse-quickening celebration of communal movement

It may be 38 years since the second summer of love, three decades since the dance music boom of the early 90s, but on the contemporary dance stage, rave is still peaking. In recent years, you’ve barely been able to move for dancers letting loose to repetitive beats, in tribal gatherings and transcendent ones.

Hofesh Shechter’s dance has always had that rhythmic pull of the dancefloor – he writes his own beat-driven music, after all – but while the early works were more angst-fuelled, now he seems happy to get lost in music. Shechter’s latest, In the Brain, has been developed from a piece called Cave made for Martha Graham Dance Company in 2022. It’s danced by his junior company, Shechter II, a collection of some of the best young dancers under 25, selected from around the world. They have that hungry energy of youth, and they lay it all out on the floor.

In the Brain is not an all-out party, though. It has its quiet moments, its slow build, its not-always-enlightening detours (into a brief swing dance, and a couples’ slow dance, to name two). The feel is subterranean, not least because of Tom Visser’s lighting. Visser is king of the dim glow in all its subtle shades – maximum atmosphere with minimum drama – and Shechter’s score is similarly dusky and moody, rather than party bangers. (There’s also additional music from German techno duo Âme.)

More than anything, In the Brain is recognisably Hofesh: the hunch of the shoulders, the arms raised to the sky, the ritualised groups moving as one – it’s a style that’s inspired many others. This piece isn’t rushing into new territory, but part of the appeal of Shechter’s choreography is that you can imagine it feels so good to dance it. There’s a tangible, visceral pleasure, whether that’s the thick, gloopy curves of movement or an almost violent exorcism, flinging out the body’s demons to a pounding bass. It’s dance that doesn’t seem drastically far from natural movement – so the viewer could feel themselves inside it – except there’s no way you could match the skill of these explosive performers. But the power is in the communal nature of the dance, the fellow-feeling, plugged into something bigger than oneself, surrendering to the universal heartbeat of the dancefloor.

• Until 25 July at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

With the British dance legend at the helm, this year’s themes ranged from quantum gravity to slightly muted geopolitics

The most memorable performance in the opening days of this year’s Venice Dance Biennale had barely any dance in it at all. Italian choreographer Andrea Salustri’s Invisible is built around movement, but it’s movement of light, air, water and sound waves, with Salustri and co-creator Alice Rende as shadowy figures conducting the elements. They brew up storms like Zeus and Poseidon, with flashing veins of light, sounds of pummelling rain (in fact small drips and bubbles amplified by powerful microphones) and an enormous amount of billowing smoke that ultimately whips itself into a spinning tornado.

Salustri, who won the Italian callout to create a new work for this year’s biennale, is a circus artist and philosophy graduate, and he is also a choreographer – a definition so much wider than one who devises dance. This year marks the 20th dedicated dance festival in Venice (dance was previously seen as part of the theatre or music programmes here until 1999, since when it has been an annual, then biennial, and now annual feature of Venice’s arts bonanza). In a talk to mark this anniversary, current artistic director Wayne McGregor was joined by four former directors to discuss their aims for the event. The question of “what dance is” kept arising as the ongoing line of inquiry, a question “so ordinary that it is still necessary somehow”, said choreographer Marie Chouinard.

A new film, Life Lines, put together by McGregor and filmmaker Ravi Deepres, compiles archive clips from festivals past, showing that the range of dance here has been vast and multifarious, from the fairly conventional to the theatrically wild. There’s clearly no single story of contemporary dance’s development, and McGregor’s theme for this year’s festival is Time Does Not Exist. Influenced by physicist Carlo Rovelli and the theory of quantum gravity, his is not a linear view of time, and without doubt, in dance (and in life), we carry our embodied pasts constantly into the present. That’s no more evident than in Soa Ratsifandrihana’s piece Fampitaha, Fampita, Fampitàna (meaning “comparison, transmission, rivalry” in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, from where the choreographer is from). It’s a piece about living in the diaspora and concerned with the sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, memories that link back home – especially the memories stored in our bodies, in songs, stories and dance steps. It’s a gentle piece, conversational between the three dancers and fabulous guitarist Joël Rabesolo, in the sense that like many conversations it meanders, then touches on the profound, then gets self-absorbed, connects again, tails off. But it has its moments.

Actor best known for the 1960s box-office smash Casino Royale

Joanna Pettet, who has died aged 83, was a British-born, Canadian-raised actor who found fame in the 1960s after just a handful of films, including the James Bond spoof Casino Royale.

The 1967 film drew lukewarm reviews for its parody of the “official” 007 movies and suffered from a production history that included five directors, but it became a box-office smash with expectant audiences. In it Pettet played Mata Bond, the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and the retired Sir James Bond (acted by David Niven, one of multiple 007s featured). She is seen performing an exotic dance in a Buddhist temple, where Niven signs her up as a spy. “Do I get an exploding briefcase and a secret transmitter?” asks Pettet, who described the role as “campy”.

Books belonging to the beloved creator of The Snowman and When the Wind Blows were donated by his estate after his death

The book collection of the creator of The Snowman and Fungus the Bogeyman has gone on sale at Oxfam’s Hove bookshop in East Sussex and online.

More than 1,000 books from the collection of Raymond Briggs, the beloved British author and cartoonist, were donated by his estate after his death aged 88 in 2022.

Shipwrecks, ice football and igloos for dogs … the digitisation of Frank Hurley’s photographs shows the heroic trek more clearly – and unlocks some remarkable new details

John McLay, one of the founders of the festival in Bath, contacted writers who had noted a lack of diversity in the programme to request they remove comments posted to social media

Bath children’s literature festival is facing criticism after its founder emailed authors asking them to delete social media posts about the festival’s lack of diversity in its 2026 programme.

Authors said that their comments criticising the festival for its lack of representation under a post on its Instagram page were deleted, with the original post later removed and comments limited on other posts.

Since I started doing search and rescue five years ago, I have found seven survivors. Sadly, the number I find dead is higher

In 2012, I was a student and had arrived in Taiwan from the Czech Republic. I soon discovered something that interested me far more than my studies: the mountains of Taiwan. I would leave the campus to explore untouched trails near Taipei. I was obsessed with old maps, often looking for routes that had vanished from modern ones, and hiking paths that no one had taken for decades.

I stayed in Taiwan because of my love for the mountains – there are more than 250 peaks that exceed 3,000 metres. Among the local hiking community, I became known for my speed and knowledge of remote regions.

Supportive and surprisingly cool for memory foam, Panda’s flagship topper gave our reviewer some of the best sleep she’s had all summer

• The best mattress toppers – tested

When I was struggling to sleep in a heatwave, diving into a 6ft slab of memory foam didn’t exactly sound like the answer. Memory foam is renowned for trapping heat, and the more “sinky” the foam, the more heat you’d expect it to trap. Less comfort layer, more boiled marshmallow.

However, the foam used by Panda in its flagship mattress topper genuinely seems to break the mould. It has the cosy feel of conventional memory foam, but it eased my night sweats so well when I tested the best mattress toppers in summer 2025 that I named it the “best cooling topper”, beating rivals filled with airy wool and microfibre.

They’re the foundation of a good routine, but which face wash does our beauty expert rate for oily, dry, or normal skin?

• How to build the perfect skincare routine

Choosing a cleanser can feel like Goldilocks’ task of searching for the perfect bowl of porridge – finding one that’s just right is rarely straightforward. Add in that our skin is constantly changing, due to hormones, the seasons and environmental stressors, and it’s easy to see why finding the ideal formula can be challenging.

Cleansers are often overlooked, but the right one is the basis of a good skincare routine. To understand what we should be looking for, I spoke with Dr Ahmed El Muntasar, GP and founder of the Aesthetics Doctor, who explained that the ideal formula depends entirely on skin type. “If someone is acne-prone or oily, I would usually recommend something more gel-based, because it helps break through excess oil more effectively,” he says. “Ingredients such as salicylic acid and niacinamide can also be helpful for those skin types.”

Best overall and best budget cleanser:
Cetaphil gentle exfoliating salicylic acid cleanser

Best cleanser if you can afford it:
Sarah Chapman Skinesis Ultimate Cleanse

Good taste doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Whether it’s designer-looking cutlery or affordable art, these clever buys start from £2 – but punch well above their price tag

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

You don’t need the budget of a boutique hotel to make your home look a bit more pulled together. It’s all down to knowing where to look, picking a few well-made objects, choosing good-quality fabrics and materials, and spotting timeless classics (or designs inspired by them) that won’t date too quickly.

Here are some tricks, hidden gems and affordable-but-stylish finds, from egg cups to art, that will elevate your space – and prove good taste and quality needn’t cost the earth.

Camping season has arrived, but which mattress is worth packing? Our expert rigorously tested 28 to find the best for durability and comfort

• The best camping chairs

Whether you love sleeping under the stars or only do so under duress, a decent camping mattress will at least help ensure you are well-rested and better equipped to handle the wider thrills and spills of outdoor living.

The days when your only choice was between a foam roll mat or a leaky airbed and foot pump are long gone. From self-inflating mattresses to lightweight sleeping pads and insulated airbeds, the comfort and portability of sleeping mats have dramatically improved. But with so many types of camping mattresses available, costing from tens to hundreds of pounds, it can be difficult to know where to start.

Best camping mattress overall:
Therm-a-Rest NeoLoft

Best budget camping mattress:
Decathlon Simond MT500 XL inflatable trekking mattress

From catnip to interactive, scented and all-natural teasers, here are the toys our reviewer’s panel of feline testers fell head over paws for

• The best gifts for cats and dogs

Watch a cat doing as they please in a garden, and you’ll witness a procession of behaviours passed down from their wild ancestors. They may crouch with ears pricked up at the sight or sound of birds in flight; rub against objects to leave their scent; chase buzzing, drowsing insects; or sniff a favourite plant with gusto. Regrettably, some will hunt and catch prey.

The best cat toys help any cat – indoor or outdoor – live out these behaviours safely, humanely, and often with their owner’s involvement. Having a few within paw’s reach is valuable to a pet cat’s fitness, mood and fundamental felinity.

Best cat toy overall:
Nature’s Goodies colourful long raffia tail teaser sticks

Best budget cat toy:
Pets at Home scrunchie ball

Orange wine and mezcal mingle in this smoky, Georgian-inspired drink

A smoky, refreshing highball inspired by Georgia’s amber wines and qvevri winemaking tradition (large clay vessels buried underground for fermentation). The mezcal works beautifully with the wine, which traditionally has structure and tannin from extended skin contact in those qvevri, and with the hint of citrus. The result is a cocktail that feels ancient and modern at the same time.

Jack Porter, DakaDaka, London W1

These bright, sharp Mexican iced treats are the perfect summer cooler – with a spiky kick

The first time I encountered paletas in Mexico, they felt strangely familiar. They reminded me of the iced treats of my Malaysian childhood: fruit-driven, brightly coloured and made less to indulge than to relieve the heat. What struck me most was the flavour logic shared by both countries, where sweetness is often enlivened with salt, chilli, tamarind or citrus, each sharpening the fruit in its own way and making it seem brighter, cooler and somehow more vivid. Paletas are rarely perfectly smooth; little pieces of fruit suspended in the ice give them texture and interest. These two paletas take different paths from the same base: pineapple – sharp, clean and bright with lime and ginger – and mango – sweeter, rounder and more indulgent, which I’ve spiked with chilli, lime and salt.

Iced tea doesn’t have to be the super sweet, sugar-packed mainstream brands – there are plenty of offerings ready to convert even the staunchest tea purist

As a very prescriptive tea drinker – piping hot “Stephen Fry” everyday Twinings, thank you, brewed strong with a dash of milk and no sugar under any circumstances – iced tea has always been lost on me. But there’s nothing like an unprecedented heatwave to encourage this sleepless mother to review her position on something as vital as tea.

Many of us associate iced tea with the American south, but legend has it that it was actually an English tea merchant who popularised it there. Richard Blechynden met countless visitors who were unwilling to drink hot tea in the summer heat of 1904’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition, so instead he served it over ice. With the American penchant for iced drinks being already well-documented (Mark Twain wrote that if there was one thing that could be called “American”, it was “the national devotion to ice-water”), it took off.

The classic Provencal stew, but with potato for ballast and topped with a cheesy herb crumb

We swapped the heatwave and melting pavements in Rome for a similar situation in London, which meant catching a train to Dorset felt something of a relief. Not that it wasn’t hot there too, but it was offset by the sea, a garden and a dark, cool house. The weather also meant that the always good July produce was superb and abundant: all the berries, cherries, peas, runner and french beans; but also potatoes, aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes and herbs – all of which go into this week’s recipe.

My template for ratatouille is a mix of Jane Grigson’s recipe in her Vegetable Book and Robert Carrier’s version in Great Dishes of the World, plus the advice from a French friend to cook the aubergine separately, either by deep-frying (by far the tastiest option), baking, or air frying. The benefit of this step is not just flavour; it ensures the aubergine holds its shape better, meaning distinct chunks in the final stew.

To stay open-hearted and optimistic, you need hope, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. That’s not the same as expectation

• Read more Leading questions

I’m nearly 30 and my first serious relationship just ended a month ago. It lasted eight months, she was my first girlfriend and first kiss, etc. She broke up with me in a very kind and respectful way, and I have been … OK, I guess.

The thing is, everyone has been saying to me, “But you must feel so much more confident now.” I don’t. My self-esteem and confidence wasn’t exactly soaring before I met her, but now I feel even less so. It just feels like most people are less tolerant or accepting of my shortcomings.

Fay likes to get a good spot and watch the support acts, but Odysseus would rather rock up for the main band. Who is hitting a false note? You decide

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

Fay likes to be on the front row but I think it’s overrated

A Harris’s hawk, she is capable of flying at more than 35mph, scouring the ground for prey, while also judging my footwear. The moments of connection with this wild creature are incredible

My children brought hawks into my life. My youngest son, especially, became fascinated by birds of prey at the age of six, drawing beautiful pictures and reciting endless facts to bird owners at various country shows.

Eventually I decided, why not? We live in the countryside, after all, on Anglesey (Ynys Môn). So, during Covid, Bird, the Harris’s hawk, came into our lives. We got her from a breeder after she hatched. It was perfect timing: I was home-schooling my three kids, and at 2pm every day, rain or shine, with a brilliant local falconer, we would set out on to the headland to watch her fly. It was beautiful to see. For years, my youngest never missed a day, no matter how cold.

A social media manager and a​ transport psychology ​researcher disagreed over Palestine Action, but who ​changed their view on the triple-loc​k?

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

Hugo, 21, Birmingham

Occupation Social media manager for the Conservative party

When the problem was finally sorted out in our new-build home, it increased my tariff by 19%

Residents in our new housing development are being billed for each other’s energy after the meters were mixed up.

I realised British Gas was sending bills for my energy to the developer of the estate instead of to me. I informed British Gas of my details when I moved in seven months ago.

They are out to steal your password to commit further fraud such as crypto scams or phishing attacks

You have had an X account for years, since it was known as Twitter. When an email arrives about a new login from a location nowhere near where you live, alarm bells begin to ring.

“We noticed a login to your account from a new device. Was this you?” the email asks.

I bought a wheelchair for my daughter, but she later died in hospital and the company refuses a refund

I bought a £435 wheelchair for my disabled daughter from my local Lifestyle & Mobility store.

She had been admitted to hospital for tests and I planned to use the chair to take her on outings when she was discharged.

Vibrant areas for young workers who plan to rent while saving for a deposit and then get on the property ladder

• The new 100% mortgages for first-time buyers

• Homes to rent before buying in cities

The common property rite of passage for graduates and career-focused first jobbers has changed over the past decade. Many careers used to start in London, and an early house-share would be followed by a first flat purchase, then a move to somewhere bigger.

However, the heavy burden of housing costs in the capital is making would-be first-time buyers stop and evaluate whether – even with London weighting on some wages – it is possible to get on the ladder there.

Experts weigh in on wellness culture’s obsession with natural fibers and the growing trend of people shunning plastic-based clothing

A few months ago, Lane Koch made a decision: she would purge her family’s closets of all plastic-based fabrics and replace them with natural fibers, such as cotton and linen.

Koch, a longtime Republican political strategist who was a senior staffer on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential campaign, has long avoided processed foods and rid her kitchen of plastic cookware about a decade ago. But, for all that she cared about what she put in her body, she told me she had paid little attention to what she put on her body.

Pioneering study linking noise pollution to Parkinson’s finds 3% increase in risk for every 11.5dB rise in noise levels

Long-term exposure to road traffic noise is associated with a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease, the biggest study of its kind has found.

Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disorder in which parts of the brain become damaged over time, affecting movement and balance.

People have found language for moodiest part of their menstrual cycles, and the right has seized on it

Emily Rae Detrick, a health coach, wants women to be more in touch with their menstrual cycle in its entirety. This, she said on an October episode of Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, a podcast popular among “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha) adherents, is “a way that you honor God and the way we were created”. It also serves her self-assigned mission to help “make America fertile again”.

In the episode and on social media, Detrick speaks at length about the luteal phase, the 14-ish days between ovulation and menstruation when women are more likely to experience irritability, bloating and food cravings. If a woman does not get pregnant after ovulating, or so Detrick’s line of thinking goes, her body becomes upset. “During the luteal phase, the reason why your stress threshold is so much lower is because this is the time your body would be incubating a potential baby,” she said. No baby, and you might turn into a frazzled, nagging shrew.

Experts say reducing ultra-processed foods can be challenging in a world built around convenience, but these strategies can help make it more manageable

I have been trying to eat fewer ultra-processed foods with my family for five years, and it has been challenging.

Many experts agree that ultra-processed foods (UPF) pose health risks, whether because of unhealthy ingredients, links to disease and environmental impacts, or replacing more nutritious foods. Thus, some consumers – including me – are interested in removing them from their daily diet.

Learn techniques: “Once you know how to saute, it doesn’t matter what you put in the pan.”

Develop knife skills: “If people want to get more comfortable in the kitchen, they should take a knife skills class. Those skills are a massive upscale for confidence in the kitchen.”

Know your taste: “Know what you like, then create that, because that’s the starting place. Don’t start by making miso brownies when the core is to make a really good brownie that you like, because then you’ll do it again.”

Whether you’re on a staycation or jetting away, drawstring trousers and clever layering will keep you cool

What does a grownup mermaid look like? It starts with the silhouette …

Before wild swimming was even a twinkle in the eye of the culture, and before ice plunging went viral on TikTok, there were mermaids. Mermaids are the original summer It girls. Who doesn’t want hair that looks great when it’s wet and salty, shell jewellery, killer sex appeal and a life of sun, sea and winding up sailors for kicks? These chicks know how to live.

Mermaidcore is this summer’s hottest style vibe. It is beach chic with a hot-sauce dash of brat energy. Every summer has its own off-duty avatar – tomato girl summer, anyone? – and 2026 is all about mermaids. For legal reasons, please note this column is not endorsing the luring of innocents to certain death. The vibe is Daryl Hannah in Splash, not selkies and sirens.

Surfboards, knee-length shorts, wetsuits, flip-flops: all have been seen on the catwalks this year. But what do actual surfers think of the trend? We went to Newquay to find out

Summer is here, and with it the annual scramble to decide what kind of season we’re supposed to be having. What will it be? On offer in 2026 are “freaky sandal summer”, which requires you to wear weird shoes, and “euromaxxing”, which is presumably about making the most of the easyJet sale without considering the environmental impact. Maybe “poet girl summer” is for you, whereby you listen to Gracie Abrams while wearing a silk camisole. Or simply “no mascara summer”, which I won’t spell out but sounds quite appealing.

The most plausible contender is “board short summer”, a phrase coined by Marie Claire, which broadly involves dressing like you surf even if you’ve never set foot on a board.

From Lily Collins at Wimbledon to the cast of Love Island, heels-averse cohort is stepping it up a notch

Gen Z, the flats-only generation, has finally succumbed to the heel – albeit a tiny one. Long vocally anti-heel, the cohort who were born between 1997 and 2012 have famously shunned millennials’ obsession with Jimmy Choos in favour of pancake-flat shoes, from the Adidas Samba “It-trainer” to the split-toe Margiela Tabi and so-called “French girl ballet flats”.

But they now appear to be embracing a potential gateway heel, typically measuring in the region of 1.5in (3.8cm) or the height of a triple-A battery.

From the Tiramisù World Cup in Italy to street food ‘battles’ in Newcastle, your culinary highlights range from the sublime to the delicious
• Tell us about a book that inspired you to travel – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

The town of Menton on the French Riviera is beautiful at any time of the year but becomes even more of a treat during the annual Lemon festival (Fête du Citron, 10-28 February 2027). Its microclimate, courtesy of the Alps to the north blocking colder winds, gives Menton lemons a distinct fragrance, flavour and quality that set them apart. For me, the event transformed a damp cold UK winter into a fortnight of colour, taste and light. There were food tastings, salads made with lemons, tarts, cakes and pies all full of zesty colour and flavour at stalls and markets in the town. There are sculptures made from citrus fruit, parades and exhibitions in the Golden Garden of Light (Jardins Biovès). More than a food festival, it’s a celebration of what nature can give to the world.
April

‘Legends cling like barnacles to these shores,’ says our local writer, who reveals how the lore of these craggy cliffs and beaches resonates with the Homeric classic

The incoming tide has made a labyrinth of the beach. As silvery rivulets spread across Culbin Sands to meet the mudflats, my walk becomes increasingly circuitous: weaving inland towards the pine forest, backtracking closer to the waves, skirting tidal pools and scaling dunes constantly resculpted by the North Sea breeze.

In this shapeshifting stretch of north-east Scotland’s Moray coast, there’s not another soul in sight, nothing to anchor me to the modern day. It’s easy, then, to imagine a longship bringing weary warriors ashore, or a band of man-eating giants marauding from the woodland. Which is exactly what happens here – on screen – in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey.

The seven inhabited isles off the North Sea coast, part of a Unesco world heritage site, are a sanctuary for wildlife – with great hotels and restaurants too

‘Can you hear that?” my guide Andrea Wellmeyer asks as I sink a little deeper into the wet ground, cold mud seeping between my toes. When the wind drops, I detect a faint but distinct crackling, similar to the rustle of a sweet wrapper or the bubbling of sparkling water. “That’s the Wattknistern,” she says, “a natural phenomenon caused by the tens of thousands of mud shrimp that live here.”

We’re standing in the Wadden Sea mudflats on Norderney, an island just off Germany’s North Sea coast. It’s Friday evening at low tide. In the town centre, bars are pumping with music, but here, just 15 minutes along the southern edge of the island, it’s a completely different story.

Almost all of the sandy stretches on the country’s 8,000km of coastline are run for profit. Now ‘free beach’ campaigners are fighting back against the mafia, the military and those profiteering from sun loungers and cocktails

Walking along Italian beaches is like strolling through a rainbow. The sand will be subdivided into colours: for 50 metres or so the perfectly spaced parasols and deck chairs will be all red, then they become orange, then yellow, green and so on.

These are the country’s famous bagni (lidos), formally known as concessioni balneari (bathing concessions). They’re simple but stylish. The sand is raked at dawn. The bar plays ambient music and serves negronis or fried squid. There will probably be a table-tennis table, or a beach volleyball area. Some have swimming pools.

A taster of the Guardian’s annual summer puzzles supplement

There are lots of rules about roses, with Instagram adding to the impression they are hard work. But they’re easy to keep when you know how

Does your Instagram shout at you? Mine does. Every time I open it up – albeit with increasing reluctance – someone I didn’t previously know existed is sharing a “hack”. It could be for stopping my toddler from throwing a fit in the supermarket or how to button a shirt so I look less old. It’s interesting when gardening suggestions are thrown into the mix. Sometimes they’re nonsense (see growing new spring onions from the bottoms of old ones in saucers of water), sometimes they’re so helpful I stash them away with the unfulfilled intention to watch back in the future.

Lately, I’m being shown a lot of stuff about roses. Specifically, deadheading them. Roses are one of those plants that seem more high-maintenance than they are; before I grew them I was convinced they were the preserve of those people who are so serious about gardening that they have a foam kneeler (I still don’t own one of these).

From an intricate bronze-like townhouse in Manchester to a sculptural property in the Essex countryside

A symbol of global inequalities and shifting geopolitical fortunes, some passports offer their holders far more freedom to travel than others

Passports can resemble abridged memoirs, their stamps telling romantic stories of wanderlust, freedom and belonging.

But they are also a symbol of global inequalities and shifting geopolitical fortunes. Passports from some places allow their holders to travel abroad simply by booking a flight and packing a bag. Others, however, entail booking an appointment at the nearest consulate, presenting documents to prove identity and financial means, then waiting weeks for a decision.

Anton Jäger has been lauded for his exceptional ability to make sense of these strange political times – and he’s only 32. The writer and academic explains why we’re living in an age of hyperpolitics

‘I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing Street on Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath all the cabinet gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about the immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate. Is this who we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the next; as passionate about the change we want as we are convinced that those who promise it are incapable of enacting it?

It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, is being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New York Times wrote, it’s “among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the political present in all its maddening strangeness”. Still, I think Jäger was surprised to have his honeymoon interrupted so I could interview him about it. Life comes at everyone quite fast in a hyperpolitical age.

New PM’s conversational tone is markedly different to his predecessor’s, but carries risk of sowing confusion

Before he became Britain’s prime minister, Andy Burnham promised to “do politics differently”. Just three days into his time in Downing Street, that approach is already being put to the test.

In the last two days, the prime minister has been accused of performing U-turns over raising the income tax threshold, raising taxes for higher earners and freezing private sector rents.

With the cost of holiday childcare rising and many parents juggling work with looking after children, we’d like to hear how you’re managing this summer

The summer holidays have begun, bringing the annual challenge many parents face in balancing work and looking after school-aged children. New research suggests arranging six weeks of holiday childcare can cost working parents up to £1,145 per child, while almost three-quarters of parents say the summer childcare juggle damages their career.

Are you paying for holiday clubs or childminders, relying on family and friends or working from home while caring for children? Are you taking annual leave, reducing your hours or working early mornings and late evenings to fit everything in?

Whether you’re part of a volunteer group or go out on solo clean-ups in the UK, we’d like to hear from you

Across the UK, people are getting together to clean up their local environments. Whether it be maintaining parkland, beaches, waterways or roadsides, we want to hear from the volunteers who are getting involved in the maintenance and preservation of their local areas.

Do you take part in weekly litter picking outings? Are you part of a group taking on the responsibility of keeping our beaches or rivers clean?

We would like to hear about the highs and lows of university clubs and societies

As a new academic year approaches, we would like to hear from students and recent graduates (five years ago or less) about their experiences of university clubs and societies that freshers might find instructive.

What was your best experience of a university club or society? And what was your worst?

We would love to hear about your workhorse appliances, why they’re so impressive and how long you’ve had them

An elderly couple in Gloucestershire are reportedly still using what is believed to be Britain’s oldest working fridge.

The Electrolux appliance was built in the 1930s and bought second-hand by their family in 1949, with the owners telling SWNS that it is “still going strong”.

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