In the 1980s, she had to show her work in a corridor by the ICA’s toilet. Now she’s representing Britain at the ‘art Olympics’. So is the artist feeling a bit establishment? Quite the reverse

The Venice Biennale opening is just days away but Lubaina Himid isn’t in a rush. The artist, who will represent Britain at the “Olympics of art”, is at home in Preston, where there’s an air of calm. Her wife and frequent collaborator Magda Stawarska is making a pot of tea. Gardeners are moving paving slabs in the back yard.

We wander around her beautiful Victorian terrace to the house directly behind. Himid bought it, knocked down a wall between the two properties and has almost finished turning it into a studio. It’s airy, light-filled and serene. Works on canvas are dotted around; paintbrushes sit neatly in custom-made cabinetry. Everything is in its right place.

Decades of advice on what to eat and what not to might have been missing one key ingredient, according to new research

Reduce your calories. Eat more vegetables. Limit soft drinks and junk foods. For years, even decades, this has been the advice for those wanting a healthy body weight, lower blood pressure and better markers of metabolic health. Most weight-loss advice has focused on either what to eat (and what to avoid), or how much to eat. Think of dietary pyramids produced by government agencies, calories on food packaging and meals, and typical nutritional advice.

It’s all true, to a certain extent: it’s obviously better to eat a healthier, nutritionally balanced diet, and yes, lower body weight is broadly linked to reducing calories. But this type of approach can be hard to sustain. Even as a personal trainer who knows what I “should” be eating according to government dietary advice and has heard too much about calorie deficits, I take a slightly different approach to food. I think we need to bring nuance and a balanced approach to food and what we eat.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

My girlfriends and I have more fun, more adventures, more independence than ever before. And as for the sex …

I met my boyfriend when he was playing Bach in the park. I was taking my usual jog past London zoo and around the Regent’s Park boating lake when I was stopped in my tracks by the most beautiful music. Wafting across the rose garden was an exquisite guitar rendition of Bach’s prelude in E major. When the final notes hung in the air like gossamer, I congratulated the musician. A twinkly-eyed bloke smiled up at me. “Ah, no bother,” he said in a soft Irish burr.

At the sound of his mellifluous, velvety voice, my heart beat so loudly I felt as though it was coming through stereo speakers. His eyes seemed to smoke their way into me. I stared at him for what I estimate to be about, oh, a decade, but was probably only two seconds, before asking him for coffee. Pathetic, I know. A romcom “meet-cute” like this is not just cheesy; it’s deep-fried Brie in a bechamel sauce on a bed of melted cheddar.

The Room Next Door star on overnight success, ‘sneaky follows’ from politicians and how internet commenting has dragged society down

How did you get into comedy?
I was submitting sketches to Spitting Image when I was 17 and making my own sketches pre-internet. But I guess in terms of my actual break, that didn’t happen until [online political sketch series] The Room Next Door.

Was that an overnight success?
I was watching a particularly bad interview with Boris Johnson and jotted down the concept of an adviser next door who was pulling his hair out over what was being said. I then filmed it after dinner, posted it before I went to bed and the next morning it was in the millions. So that is literally an overnight success, isn’t it?

One in four late-night venues went out of business between 2020 and 2025. Those that remain are struggling to pull in customers. Maybe a night out in Birminghan will reveal why

The £5 entry is a good start. So is the loud, lively music booming down the nightclub’s stairway. But when I finally reach the dancefloor, hidden behind a curtain, my hopes for a wild night out in Birmingham are dashed. Despite the roving disco lights and blaring pop bangers, it is entirely empty, aside from a few bartenders milling around, tending to no one.

This isn’t 9pm on a random Tuesday. I am hitting the town on Saturday night, when the city’s bars and clubs should be in full swing, but Birmingham is looking like a bust.

In December 1982, South African Rodney Wilkinson walked four bombs into Koeberg power station – the crown jewel of the apartheid state – pulled the pins and then left on his bicycle. How did he do it?

At 21, Rodney Wilkinson was the best fencer in South Africa: national champion in foil and sabre, second in epee. He had toured Europe and Argentina. He had not stood on the Olympic podium, because South Africa was banned. The apartheid state had taken that from him, along with everything else it took from everyone.

One evening in August 1971, Wilkinson stood in the gym at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, foil in hand. He was facing his coach Vincent Bonfil, a 25-year-old Englishman who had represented Britain as a reserve at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, and who was now in Johannesburg finishing a master’s thesis in metallurgy. They were working on a technique in which both fencers lunge simultaneously, and the one who reads the other’s move a split second earlier wins the point. They came at each other. Wilkinson’s foil caught the edge of Bonfil’s sleeve. There was a pop.

Iranian speaker says ‘new equation of the strait of Hormuz is in the process of being solidified’

• Donald Trump sends warships to break Iran’s strait of Hormuz blockade

Iran had “no pre-planned programme” to attack oil facilities in the UAE, Iranian state TV quoted a military official as saying, after the UAE blamed Iran for a drone strike at an energy installation in Fujairah (see post at 09.20 for more details).

“What happened was the product of the US military’s adventurism to create a passage for ships to illegally pass through” the strait of Hormuz, the official said. “The US military must be held accountable for it.”

Steve Reed urges MPs not to move against Keir Starmer and says most people are ‘sick and tired of all this psychodrama’

Labour should not be “doomscrolling” through leaders like the Conservatives, the communities secretary, Steve Reed, has said, urging MPs not to move against Keir Starmer after the May elections.

MPs who fear Starmer cannot lead the party into the next general election because of his unpopularity are understood to have been discussing whether to lay out a timetable for his departure to present to the prime minister.

The prime minister said the attack in Golders Green is ‘part of a pattern of rising antisemitism’ in the country

Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, posted these on social media this morning. They seem to be a response at least in part to the antisemitism attack ad launched by Labour yesterday. (See 8.41am and 9.16am.)

When you see the relentless attacks from other parties on the Greens across the media remember this:

They hate our plan to end Rip Off Britain.

It’s not going to work.

They have deep pockets.

I speak to a lot of my fellow MPs, of course I do, all the time, but also council leaders, and they’re sick and tired of all this psychodrama … The whole notion that we would copy the Conservatives and go doomscrolling through leaders in a way that means the government is completely incapable of dealing with the things that matter to most of the British public is absolute nonsense, and I’m not going to engage in it, and most of our MPs would not engage in that either.

Event chairs Nicole Kidman, Beyoncé, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour have guests dress to the theme ‘Fashion is art’ at the event controversially funded by new honorary chairs Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos

WHO says seven confirmed or suspected cases of hantavirus on MV Hondius, including three passengers who died

• What is hantavirus, the infection thought to have killed three on cruise ship?

A British crew member was in need of urgent medical care and a passenger from the UK remained in a critical but stable condition following a suspected outbreak of hantavirus on a luxury cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Three people have died and medics on Monday were scrambling to evacuate two others from the MV Hondius, which set off in March from southern Argentina carrying 149 people from 23 countries. The crisis emerged late on Sunday after the World Health Organization (WHO) said it was investigating a suspected outbreak.

Quintessentially almost quadrupled staff in Middle East and Asia less than year before wealthy began to flee Gulf

The embattled luxury concierge service co-founded by Queen Camilla’s nephew Ben Elliot embarked on what appeared to be an inopportune hiring spree in the Middle East and Asia before wealthy individuals began fleeing the region because of the US-Israel war on Iran.

Quintessentially almost quadrupled staff in the regions from 22 to 84 during its financial year to 30 April 2025, according to newly released annual accounts, which again reported multimillion-pound losses and warned of “material uncertainty” about its future.

Party leader says vote for Labour or Greens in closely run seats will result in Reform victory at local elections

Voters in the home counties will “regret it for a long time” if they do not back the Liberal Democrats and wake up to a Reform-led council, Ed Davey has said.

The Lib Dems leader has identified five councils – East Surrey, West Surrey, Hampshire, West Sussex and Huntingdonshire – where his party could win overall control, as well as swathes of the former “blue wall” where Davey said it was a “straight fight” between his party and Reform at the English local elections.

‘Russia could cease fire at any moment, and this would stop the war,’ Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in sharp criticism of Putin

Another big topic of the Yerevan summits – which continue today after an earlier meeting of the European Political Community over the bank holiday weekend – is the UK’s willingness to join the EU’s €90bn loan for Ukraine.

Prime minister Keir Starmer has said the benefit of joining the European Union’s scheme for Ukraine “outweighs the cost” as he argued the continent must move at pace to bolster its own defence.

“There is more tension in the alliances than there should be and it’s very important that we therefore face up to this as a group of countries together.”

Plans to install traffic lights on Clachan Bridge will ruin tourist attraction and endanger pedestrians, critics warn

Traffic lights are to be installed beside the scenic Clachan Bridge on Scotland’s wild Argyll coast despite fears it will be a “desecration” of a nationally-significant heritage site.

Known since the early 19th century as the “Bridge over the Atlantic”, the 233-year-old crossing from the mainland to the Isle of Seil attracts visitors eager to boast of their trans-oceanic journey, but there are concerns motorists on green will soon act aggressively towards pedestrians on what is a much-photographed landmark.

WhatsApp group has bought tens of thousands of meals for people via Facebook page

Carl used to own pubs – several of them – and a string of hotels. Then two years ago, rising costs forced him into bankruptcy. Now he sleeps on the beach in summer, and in winter sits in an all-night McDonald’s nursing a single cup of coffee.

Carl’s daughters are in a different part of the country with his ex-wife. To maintain the illusion that he lives a normal life, Carl is careful only to video-call them from the local Wetherspoon’s with a meal and a drink carefully positioned in shot. That way, he reasons, he looks like a man with somewhere to be.

Ministers have committed to changing rules for children, but how this will take shape is still up for debate

The UK government committed last week to either implementing a ban on under-16s accessing social media or imposing restrictions on children’s use of those platforms.

A consultation is already under way on whether to impose limits and the announcement confirms that curbs will be introduced. Here are some of the restrictions that could be brought in.

Rayner and Burnham are trying to gain markets’ confidence amid concerns they could loosen fiscal rules if they replace Starmer

Who calls the shots on the bin collections in Sunderland, potholes in Hackney, or schools in Cardiff is not normally of interest to City traders in the multitrillion-pound sovereign bond market.

But for those dealing in UK government debt, Thursday’s local and devolved government elections are significantly more important than usual, amid speculation that a dire showing for Keir Starmer’s Labour party could topple him as prime minister.

The Cuban-American artist likes to paint pretty young white men – inspired by his fascination with Holden Caulfield. So why do his portraits have a sinister edge?

Hernan Bas has been living in Venice this year, painting tourists. He’s aware of the ironies. (He is the kind of tourist, he tells me, who started looking at Venetian property prices, oh, about a week into his stay.) The Cuban-American artist is from Miami, and he knows about mass tourism all too intimately: he lives in an neighbourhood that has now been so thoroughly colonised by Airbnbs that when he comes home from the airport, taxi drivers ask him where he’s visiting from, and he has to explain that no, this is his own house.

Here – his studio looking out over the lulling lap of the lagoon – he can be the tourist as innocent, as amnesiac, drinking in the beauties of the city and forgetting about the violence and catastrophe unfurling beyond. “I can pretend nothing’s happening in the world. And I’ve done a very, very good job of that for the last seven weeks,” he tells me when we meet in the spring. For a moment his mind drifts back despairingly to his home town and the fraught politics of his country. “It was so mind boggling how much the Latin community went for Trump, and now everyone is eating dirt because they’re hiding from ICE,” he says. “Those same people who were gung ho for Trump are now getting deported.”

Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary wants to bring the epic poem to the big screen using the power of artificial intelligence. It can’t be any good

The thing about unfilmable works of literature is that most of them eventually turn out to be quite filmable after all. The Lord of the Rings was a bit of a mess when shot in rotoscope on a minuscule budget by the guy who filmed Fritz the Cat; it won Oscars when handed to Peter Jackson, given the GDP of a small nation and a visual effects department the size of Gondor. The 1984 version of Dune was a disappointment, despite the presence of David Lynch in the director’s chair, largely because all that gleaming, tawdry galactic opulence couldn’t make up for the comprehensively bad acting, clotted exposition and obsession with freaky heart plugs. And yet the 2021 adaptation from Denis Villeneuve ended up being a tour de force of masterly restraint and monolithic scale.

Milton’s Paradise Lost? The 17th-century epic poem has always felt like an outlier, a work of literature too religiously inspired to be filmed purely as a work of fantasy, yet too riotously bonkers to be treated with puritanical reverence. It contains more drama than the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in every line of thunderous God-baiting iambic pentameter. And now Roger Avary, co-writer of Pulp Fiction and director of Killing Zoe and The Rules of Attraction, wants to bring it to the big screen using the power of AI.

I’ve received 77 unpaid PCNs from TfL but it won’t accept they weren’t from my vehicle

Someone cloned my car number plate back in October and racked up £8,500 in Ulez fines. I appealed, but this was rejected.

Unfortunately, the cloned car is the same make, model and colour as mine. I’ve now received 17 “order for recovery of unpaid penalty charge” notices from Transport for London (TfL). The bailiffs will arrive next week, according to their letters.

Carrom, a game in which players flick counters into pockets on a board, has drawn hundreds to events across the UK

On a Monday evening in the upstairs room of Dishoom Permit Room in Notting Hill, the atmosphere is already crackling before the games night begins. Chai is poured and passed around, chalk is dusted across wooden boards, and the sharp click of counters striking the surface cuts through the noise of conversation.

At one table, Uneeb Khalid, 39, and his friend Varun Solan, 43, are deep in conversation about artificial intelligence while flicking small counters across a wooden board. Later, they reach the final round – and finish in second place.

An exodus of workers will be damaging – and electoral change might help Britain escape instability and low growth

While all eyes are on the Middle East and the risk of a global recession, a possible scenario with significant downside risk for the UK economy after the next general election is building: the impact of anti-immigration policies.

We do not know enough about the actual policy changes a Reform UK-led government would impose, but if we get forced repatriation (including of some who were born in Britain) combined with a climate of fear, the economic disruption could be highly significant.

The Renters’ Right Act has finally given tenants in England more security over their housing, but landlords still hold the upper hand when setting rents

You never welcome an email from your landlord, or in my case, my landlord’s agent. I happened to be in an airport waiting for a flight when something landed in my inbox that made my stomach drop. Two words popped out in the subject line: “Section 21”.

Miles from home, staring at my phone, I felt useless and despondent at being served a no-fault eviction notice days before the new Renters’ Right Act made them illegal at the start of May. Once a feature of England’s rental market, section 21s had allowed landlords to force tenants out of their homes with only a minimum of two months’ notice. Presumably not wanting the hassle of having to use a section 8 notice – citing one or more legal grounds to end a tenancy – my landlord evicted me at the 11th hour.

George Francis Lee is a recipient of the 2025/26 Scott Trust Bursary

The film’s villain is a conniving tech oligarch seeking to buy his way into fashion’s inner circle. Sound familiar?

In The Devil Wears Prada 2, we’re introduced to a very different Miranda Priestly. There was a time where the all-powerful queen of fashion – who is played by Meryl Streep and based on Vogue’s longest-serving editor, Anna Wintour – could end careers with a glance. But this time, she spends most of the movie taking orders herself. First, we see her at the behest of advertisers, then publishing magnate Irv Ravitz and his irritating nepo baby son. And it isn’t long before Benji Barnes, an eccentric billionaire, shows up and threatens to dismantle the excellence she has spent her entire career championing.

In the film, Benji is played – scarily well, I should add – by Justin Theroux. After a high-profile divorce, he has had a “glow-up”, which loosely translates to losing weight and boasting a deep mahogany tan. Post-divorce, he is now in a relationship with Emily – Miranda’s acerbic former assistant, played by the scene-stealing Emily Blunt, who is described as “every girl who ignored him in high school”. Benji’s inclusion in the story feels representative of the wider media landscape, where the whims of billionaires decide which parts of the old, pre-social media world get to survive. And for Emily, she’s learning that being associated with someone so powerful has the potential to help her finally step out of Miranda’s shadow. The romance between these diametric opposites – Type A fashion queen and a nerd who grew up to become one of the world’s richest men – provides a stream of comic relief. But beyond the laughs are a deeper – and bleaker – statement about how people with enough money can buy cultural power.

While the doping-friendly event does not seem keen on journalistic interrogation, here’s what needs to be asked

The plan to fly to Las Vegas to cover what the Enhanced Games claims is the “next frontier of human performance” ended with a short email sent at 7.02pm on Friday. “After careful consideration, we are unable to approve your media credential request for this year’s event,” it said. “Due to the high volume of applications and limited media capacity, we could not accommodate all requests … thank you again for your interest and understanding.”

Admittedly, the rejection didn’t come entirely out of the blue. Unlike most sports organisations, the Enhanced Games had a pre-screening process which led to a nice PR man calling me a few days beforehand. His opening gambit? To point out the Guardian’s negativity towards the event (“Grotesque” – Barney Ronay; “Showcasing so much of the wrongness of the age” – Marina Hyde; “Competitors run the risk of their libido being ‘killed off’, leading experts have warned” – Sean Ingle).

Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism project is still a work in progress. But the future of centre-left politics in Britain may rely on its promise of ‘rolling back the 80s’

In the summer of 1987, as life in Britain was being steadily reshaped by Margaret Thatcher, I landed a temporary job as an electrician’s mate in a steel-drum factory. I was a truly useless assistant, and justified my existence by singing songs to entertain my boss as he worked. As I recall, by the time I left Stuart had come round to quite liking Bob Dylan, but still had no time for the gothic gloominess of the early Cure.

While I handed him tools he didn’t need, and failed to locate the ones he did, we occasionally talked about politics. Stuart was a gentle man in his mid-20s, already married and hoping to buy a house. He was also, it turned out, a cautious believer in Thatcher’s promise of a “people’s capitalism” in which working people would get a piece of the action. Prior to my coming to “help” him, he was one of the millions who had responded to the previous year’s Tell Sid ad campaign and bought shares in newly privatised British Gas.

What’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf playing at with his new policy? Is it about pushing Labour further to the right, or just an attempt to ramp up rage and resentment?

All parties struggle to invest local elections with meaning, because no party can alter the consequences of what is coming up to two decades of austerity. They can promise they’ll work hard for local people, and many of them will, but they can’t change the maths of inadequate funding and soaring social care costs. All they can do is hope to exist in an affluent enough area.

Instead, the results are taken as a popularity contest, which – if things go your way – will hopefully supply enough buoyancy to last into a general election, and, if things don’t, will hopefully evaporate.

As Russian aggression continues and Trump’s US threatens Nato, it is even more vital for a unified defence of the continent

As we mark the 81st anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe this Friday, 8 May, it’s clear that Germany will again be the leading European military power.

Already next year its defence spending will be as much as that of France and Britain combined – and it is projected to be significantly larger by 2030. The German government’s declared goal is to have the strongest conventional army in Europe. True, France and Britain have nuclear weapons, but that means less money to spend on the rest of defence. So the question is not, will this happen? Barring unforeseen developments, it will. The question, particularly on this solemn anniversary, is: how can we ensure that this time the growth of German military power is a positive development for all of Europe?

Party divisions over energy have deepened, but the need to move beyond fossil fuels has never been clearer

Energy has not been a prominent subject for discussion in the run-up to Thursday’s UK elections. In England this is logical enough, since the big policy decisions are taken by ministers in Westminster, not at council meetings. But the stances adopted by the new governments in Scotland and Wales matter a great deal. They will have an influence beyond their borders, helping to shape the national climate debate in the coming years.

In both nations, as in England, divisions have deepened as Conservatives have moved away from support for net zero and Reform UK has ramped up its opposition to renewables. Among Scottish parties, only the Greens are categorically against new fossil‑fuel developments in the North Sea. Under John Swinney, the Scottish National party’s earlier opposition to the Rosebank oilfield has softened in advance of the upcoming decision over whether it should go ahead. Scottish Labour, by contrast, has thrown its weight behind new nuclear power.

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.

The announcement of the withdrawal of thousands of US troops from Germany underlines the urgency of a pan-European defence strategy

As Donald Trump’s second term has become overshadowed by plunging poll ratings and an illegal, ill-advised war in the Middle East, European governments have regularly been singled out to bear the brunt of the US president’s growing frustration. Sir Keir Starmer’s refusal to militarily back the attack on Iran led to unfavourable comparisons to both Winston Churchill and King Charles. “Unfriendly” Spain has been threatened with a trade embargo for similar reasons. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, previously seen as a key political ally, has also been on the receiving end. “I’m shocked by her,” Mr Trump said last month. “I thought she had courage. I was wrong.”

Currently it is Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who finds himself in Washington’s crosshairs. In the wake of Mr Merz’s accurate observation that the US has no convincing strategy on Iran, the Pentagon has announced the future withdrawal of 5,000 US troops from bases in Germany. Vital long-range weapons are also to be withheld as American military stockpiles are depleted by events in the Middle East. For good measure, Mr Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on European car manufacturers to 25% – a measure that would hit Germany hardest.

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.

Danielle Hamm on the important perspectives that emerged from England’s first citizens’ jury. Plus letters from Libby Sallnow and Richard Smith, and Dr Pamela Fisher

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics is an independent research and policy centre that aims to put ethics at the centre of decision-making about bioscience and health so that we all benefit. We agree that public views should be central to the debate on assisted dying (Editorial, 29 April). This is why we commissioned England’s first citizens’ jury on assisted dying in 2024, which produced rich and independent evidence about what the English public think about assisted dying, and the ethical, social and practical considerations that underpin their views.

Over eight weeks, 30 jurors – who were reflective of the demographic makeup of the English population – spent a total of 24 hours hearing evidence from experts, engaging with perspectives from all sides of the debate, and deliberating in groups.

Screening at the six-week check and signposting to services could prevent suffering and save lives, write Fiona Challacombe, Diana Wilson and Maria Bavetta

We were glad that the story of Kimberley Nixon was highlighted in your article and commend her openness about the devastating nature of perinatal OCD (‘This is so taboo’: Kimberley Nixon on the hell of perinatal OCD – and how she survived it, 28 April). Experiencing vivid unwanted intrusive thoughts, images and urges of accidentally or deliberately harming your infant can be hugely distressing, isolating and often misunderstood. Intrusions and compulsions can take, or indeed steal, hours a day, and can make women feel as if they are the worst mothers possible.

In severe cases, women can feel that ending their lives is the only course of action. We have been activists and researchers in perinatal OCD for 20 years and are aware of the issues of lack of recognition, misdiagnosis, inappropriate safeguarding procedures being activated and difficulties in accessing effective therapy.

Dr Sean Hanley responds to an editorial on the collapse of social democratic parties as rightwing nationalism flourishes

Your editorial on the politics of central Europe (28 April) rightly notes the collapse of many traditional centre-left parties. But its explanation is incomplete and oddly exceptionalist.

Much of what you describe – the erosion of social democratic parties after market liberalisation, the political aftershocks of the financial crisis, migration-driven cultural conflict and the drift of older and less metropolitan voters towards variegated forms of populism – is visible across much of western Europe. These are not uniquely eastern pathologies.

Readers respond to an editorial about technology’s impact on children’s wellbeing, saying that many schools increasingly rely on iPads as teaching aids

As a parent of two primary schoolchildren, I read your article with recognition and concern (The Guardian view on screens in schools: big tech is finally under the microscope, 27 April). Our school has recently introduced a one-to-one iPad scheme, and almost all of the children’s work now seems to be completed on iPads. At the same time, parents are expected to manage multiple, and often poorly designed, apps for communication, payments and even recording children’s reading.

Many parents are increasingly uneasy about this shift. Schools in the trust appear to be increasing screen time at precisely the moment when there is little clear evidence of any overall benefit for children. Meanwhile, there is growing evidence of the downsides: distraction, reduced concentration, difficulty sustaining attention away from devices and poorer literacy and learning outcomes.

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Sluggish Manchester City failed to get the win they needed and have left themselves with a lot to do to regain title

Bedlam here, utter bedlam – particularly the finish when Jérémy Doku’s 97th-minute right-foot curler grabbed Manchester City a 3-3 draw with Everton.

Yet, the bottom line is this: the result places one Arsenal hand on the Premier League trophy, and City no longer control whether the other hand will join it.

• Wu claims title 18-17 with decisive break of 85

• The 22-year-old is the second-youngest champion ever

As the ticker tape rained down on Wu Yize and the Chinese flag was draped over the shoulders of snooker’s newest superstar as he clutched the game’s most famous prize, it was hard not to imagine that this sport was changing in front of our eyes for ever.

If Zhao Xintong broke through the glass ceiling for 12 months ago, then the exploits of China’s newest Crucible king may have just shattered it into a thousand pieces. The boy who came to England with his father as a 16-year-old to pursue his dreams, living in a windowless flat in Sheffield, is now the champion of the world.

A first Champions League final in 20 years is within touching distance, but a difficult tie is not over yet

Mikel Arteta can be forgiven for never missing the chance to remind everyone that these are unprecedented times for Arsenal. As his side prepares to face Atlético Madrid in the decisive act of their second successive Champions League semi-final, it is easy to forget that they have only reached this stage on four occasions in their entire history.

But 20 years after Arsène Wenger’s team edged past Villarreal in the last European match to be played at Highbury, Arsenal have their best opportunity since then to reach a second final after a campaign where they have swept all before them. The 1-1 draw in last week’s first leg in Madrid made it 13 matches unbeaten in this year’s Champions League – the only club to have achieved that feat – and also matched Wenger’s longest run without a defeat in Europe’s premier competition.

Having overseen a historic return to the Premier League, businessman is now aiming his sights even higher

Doug King is discussing the night Coventry clinched promotion to the Premier League after 25 years away. He had a tear in his eye when the moment arrived at Blackburn and, after eventually exiting the Ewood Park boardroom, the champagne flowing, the straight-talking owner worth hundreds of millions hunkered down at a Travelodge adjacent to a service station on the M65. “It was ... noisy,” he says, taking a second to land on the best adjective, “because all I could hear pretty much all night was: ‘We are Premier League.’”

It has led King to feel like a party planner of late. The biggest one yet was Monday’s open-top bus parade which started on Jimmy Hill Way, named after the manager who in 1967 led the club into the top flight for the first time. After Coventry were crowned champions last month, King guzzled from the trophy. “I didn’t think the lid would come off, so we had to make the most of that,” he says with a smile.

The Essex and South Africa spinner has taken more Championship wickets than anyone else since arriving in 2017 – but says 18 teams can reward mediocrity

For 10 seasons, few have earned the right to comment on English cricket more than Simon Harmer. Because for 10 seasons, no one has taken more County Championship wickets than the South African off-spinner who arrived at Essex in 2017 on a six-month contract, his international career stalled and his options narrowing fast.

He has since become one of the great imports of the English game: 522 first-class wickets and counting for Essex, two County Championship titles, a Bob Willis Trophy, a return to South Africa’s Test side and, perhaps most importantly, contentment. “My journey has been bumpy,” Harmer says from a sun-drenched beer garden near the Oval. “I can say now that I’m at peace with it.”

A three-horse race has witnessed a faller. This most magical of Hearts seasons has edged closer to delivering the ultimate prize, an outcome that would shake Scottish football to its very foundations.

This was a game Rangers and their manager, Danny Röhl, dare not lose. They did, courtesy of a stirring second-half comeback from Hearts. Rangers now trail the Edinburgh club by seven points. The Hearts lead over Celtic has been restored to three with the same number of fixtures to play.

• Chelsea lose six in a row for first time since 1993

• ‘We were nowhere near the level we needed to be’

Chelsea’s interim head coach, Calum McFarlane, admitted the opening 15 minutes of his side’s home defeat by Nottingham Forest were “not acceptable” as Chelsea lost a sixth consecutive Premier League match for the first time since 1993.

A second-minute header from Taiwo Awoniyi was followed by an Igor Jesus penalty in the 15th minute to leave Vítor Pereira’s second-string side able to keep their hosts at arm’s length throughout the contest. Awoniyi’s second later in the game ultimately sealed three crucial points for Forest in their battle against relegation.

• Norris and Piastri call for long-term changes to sport

• Mercedes’ Wolff suggests battery needs to remain

Formula One is under increasing pressure to consider immediate changes and the long-term future of its new engines, with the world champion, Lando Norris, reiterating after the Miami Grand Prix that the only answer to address the sport-wide dissatisfaction was to “get rid of the battery”.

At the race in Florida, which was won by Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli, with Norris second, F1 and the FIA had brought in fresh regulations to address unhappiness and safety concerns prompted by the pivotal role energy management plays under the new 2026 formula.

With Saudi investment drying up, one of LIV’s highest-profile recruits may be having second thoughts as Australian officials call for the global golf ecosystem to come together

He was Australian golf’s shining light, a likeable everyman whose career has found the rough. Now, Cameron Smith “may be rethinking” his decision to stick with LIV Golf, according to the head of the PGA of Australia, after Saudi Arabian investors withdrew funding from the upstart tour.

The entire Australian golf sector is wrestling with what a future without LIV – or with a fiscally restrained LIV-lite – might look like, as the South Australia government pushes on with spending $45m for an upgrade to a course still scheduled to host a LIV tournament from 2028.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

• HSBC profits fall amid $400m fraud-related charge and Iran war

• Australia hikes interest rates to 4.35% in blow to mortgage holders

Those credit losses have “overshadowed” HSBC’s results in the last quarter, reports Will Howlett, financials analyst at Quilter Cheviot:

HSBC’s quarter was dominated by a sharp and unexpected jump in credit losses, which took the shine off otherwise solid trading and pushed profits just below expectations. A $400m fraud-related loss in the UK drove a marked rise in bad loan charges and has put fresh focus on the risks sitting within more complex lending, even as the rest of the loan book remains stable.

Profits were broadly flat on last year, as higher income was absorbed by rising costs and credit charges. Revenues grew 4%, slightly ahead of expectations, helped mainly by fees rather than interest income. Wealth management continued to perform well, though growth has slowed from last year’s pace.

“HSBC’s results always bring more of an international flavour than its UK peers. Unfortunately that means the Hormuz crisis looms large in the results, casting a shadow over an otherwise solid set of numbers.

The theme is grimly familiar to investors; were it not for the crisis, earnings outlooks would be much rosier. The warnings around the economic impact will only continue to grow the longer the situation remains unresolved.”

Government’s anti-slavery commissioner says traffickers are exploiting a growing pipeline of vulnerability

Slavery in the UK is at record levels and is expected to worsen over the next decade, the government’s independent anti-slavery commissioner has warned.

According to the number of referrals to the national referral mechanism, which assesses potential victims of slavery and provides support to victims, numbers have almost doubled in the last five years from 12,691 referrals in 2021 to 23,411 in 2025, the highest ever number.

Project to refurbish ‘Angels’ hailed huge success as dean says it will ‘lift spirits and rekindle hope’

Sam Kelly admitted there had been some nights of broken sleep as he led a two-year project to restore one of Salisbury Cathedral’s treasures, a stained-glass window by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.

“It would be wrong to say I didn’t lie awake sometimes,” said the head glazier. “You are working on something that is very precious and if it fell on the floor, it would be very bad.”

Trailer offers glimpses of Matt Damon as mythological hero Odysseus, Tom Holland as his son Telemachus and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Penelope

The first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey has been released.

Starring Matt Damon as mythological hero Odysseus, the epic film retells the story of Odysseus’ 10-year voyage back to his homeland of Ithaca after the Greek victory at the siege of Troy.

Other fireworks manufacturers in Liuyang, in central Hunan province, ordered to halt production after deadly blast

An explosion at a fireworks plant in a central Chinese province has killed at least 26 people and injured 61, prompting the halting of all firework manufacturing near the site.

The blast occurred in the city of Changsha, in Hunan province, on Monday afternoon, China’s official news agency Xinhua said. China Daily said the plant was operated by the Huasheng Fireworks Manufacturing and Display Co in the Changsha-administered, county-level city of Liuyang.

Exclusive: ‘Fish sludge’ in coastal waters now has nutrient levels equivalent to those in untreated effluent of country the size of Australia, report finds

Norwegian fish farms are filling fjords and other coastal waters with nutrient pollution equivalent to the raw sewage of tens of millions of people each year, a report has found.

Norway is the largest farmed salmon producer in the world, and nutrients in fish feed are excreted directly into coastal waters. Analysis from the Sunstone Institute found that Norwegian aquaculture released 75,000 tonnes of nitrogen, 13,000 tonnes of phosphorus and 360,000 tonnes of organic carbon in 2025.

Tugboat tows carcass of ‘leviathan proportions’ 20km from Era beach to Bellambi boat ramp, attracting sharks, says councillor demanding inquiry

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Fishers, surfers and divers say they should have been warned about the towing of a huge whale carcass along a 20km stretch of coast south of Sydney, which resulted in increased shark activity.

A Wollongong City councillor is demanding a review into the operation to remove the sperm whale from a remote beach in the Royal national park last week.

Louisiana’s cultural hotspot could be surrounded by Gulf of Mexico before end of this century, authors say

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.

Buxton, Derbyshire: A glimpse of gloop in the water, a hasty net purchase, and it was confirmed – palmate newts have moved in. But how long had they been there?

It has been a source of excitement for weeks that we have found ourselves custodians of newts. Judging by the numbers present and the age of our pond, they have probably been here at least a decade. Yet neither our neighbours nor our predecessors at the address knew of any.

I happened to notice a gloop of air rise at the pond surface. That glimpse triggered a few minutes’ scrutiny, and lo, there it was: a palmate newt. It led to a hasty net purchase. Several days later, at the first speculative sweep of the mesh, with which we had hoped to catch at least a single example, it came up with nine. They have been the talk of the house ever since.

Counter-terror police investigate latest incident after series of attacks on Jewish-linked premises

Two people have been arrested as part of a counter-terrorism investigation into a suspected arson attack at a memorial wall in Golders Green.

A 46-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman were arrested at an address in Romford, east London, where officers were also carrying out searches, the Metropolitan police said.

Beef and olive oil costs increase the most as climate and energy shocks drive inflation, research suggests

Food prices are on track to be 50% higher in November than at the start of the cost of living crisis in 2021, research suggests.

Climate and energy shocks have driven an almost quadrupling of the pace of food price growth, according to research from the thinktank Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), with costs rising in five years at about the same rate as they had over the previous two decades.

Bamber, 65, has long used press interviews to campaign against convictions for murder of five family members

Jeremy Bamber, who has served more than 40 years in prison for murdering five members of his family, has been banned from communicating with the media.

Bamber was convicted in 1986 by a 10-2 majority of shooting his adoptive mother and father, his sister and her six-year-old twins at the parents’ family farmhouse in Essex a year earlier. He has always protested his innocence.

Authority says workers and councillors ‘threatened for explaining the council’s position’ as union jack and St George’s flags taken down

Residents, council staff and councillors have been subject to rising “abuse, harassment and intimidation” directly linked to the removal of unauthorised flags, a local authority has said.

Shropshire council said it had recorded a rise in reports of abuse with staff and members “being threatened for explaining the council’s position” on the removal of flags and when they attempt to do so – “even in day-to-day work to repair street lighting”.

Cole Allen was isolated from other inmates, denied a Bible and placed on suicide watch despite showing no suicidal tendencies

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A US judge on Monday apologized to the man accused of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump for the “legally deficient” treatment he has faced in a Washington DC, jail, including being placed on suicide watch, separated from other inmates and denied a Bible.

The US magistrate judge Zia Faruqui said he was disturbed by the conditions for Cole Allen, who allegedly fired a shotgun during a foiled attack on Trump and senior officials in his administration at a 25 April press gala. The judge said the conditions were inappropriate for a person with no criminal history.

Robert Cyr Jr, a US navy airman, had gone missing in 1944 when his seaplane crashed in the Segond channel

The remains of a US military aviator who went missing after his crew crashed during the second world war were recovered and identified through DNA analysis and his family recently laid him to rest in Florida, according to officials.

US navy airman Robert Cyr Jr’s burial in Clearwater, Florida, brought to an end a decades-long saga that began on 22 January 1944, when he and eight fellow crewmates crashed while they were aboard a seaplane as it took off in the Segond channel in what is now the south Pacific’s Republic of Vanuatu.

Vladimir Putin wants empty skies on Friday and Saturday to celebrate Victory Day; Ukrainian president says guns can fall silent by Wednesday if Russia reciprocates. What we know on day 1,532

A suspect has been apprehended, but detectives say little is known about their motivation at this stage

At least two people have been killed and several injured after a driver in an SUV ploughed into a crowd in the centre of Leipzig in eastern Germany, the city’s mayor has said.

“The police have apprehended the suspected assailant,” Burkhard Jung said on Monday, adding that the authorities had the scene in a pedestrian zone under control. “We still don’t really know the motivation. We don’t know anything about the perpetrator.”

Exclusive: Worker pointed to Iran war and Pentagon’s Anthropic feud as indications the department is ‘not a responsible partner’

Workers developing Google’s artificial intelligence products in the UK have voted to unionize, in part out of concerns about a deal between the company and the US military that was announced last week.

In a letter slated to go to management on Tuesday and shared exclusively with the Guardian, workers at Google DeepMind, the company’s AI research laboratory, requested recognition of the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives of the lab’s UK-based staff.

Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison agrees to sell 49% stake as it attempts to reshape its portfolio

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Vodafone is to take full control of the UK’s biggest mobile operator in a £4.3bn buyout deal with the Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison.

The billionaire Li Ka-shing’s business said it had agreed to sell its 49% stake in VodafoneThree – a network with more than 27 million subscribers – to its partner Vodafone.

Musk won’t have to give up any money he allegedly saved from delaying disclosure of initial purchase of Twitter stock

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Elon Musk settled the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil lawsuit accusing the world’s richest person of waiting too long in 2022 to disclose his initial purchases of stock in Twitter, now known as X.

A trust in Musk’s name will pay a $1.5m civil penalty, without admitting wrongdoing. Musk won’t have to give up any money he allegedly saved from the delay.

Ryan Cohen said he didn’t understand questions about how the video games retailer could afford its $55.5bn bid

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GameStop’s shares fell more than 10% on Monday as questions emerged about how the company would finance its surprise $55.5bn bid for eBay.

In an interview with CNBC, Ryan Cohen, GameStop’s CEO, skirted repeated inquiries about how the video games retailer could afford the deal, saying he didn’t understand the questions.

Ferocity of women’s sport juxtaposed with cosy homes and pretty snow scenes in TV series gaining wider recognition

The concept of sisu – used to refer to guts or inner strength – is often talked about as the source of Finnish happiness.

And Guts, a hit Finnish TV series about top female cross-country skiers, makes it clear from the beginning that any happiness in this psychodrama is going to be exceptionally hard-won.

From gigantic goat hair costumes to small hidden rooms in houses, this year’s photography festival takes a turn for the spectral

Sally Lindsay and Jill Halfpenny are incapable of hitting a false note in this tale of a daytime TV presenter being stalked. It’s full of twists and turns – even if it isn’t wildly sophisticated

The new Channel 5 (I know! Me too – but yes, it’s still around) thriller Number One Fan stars two Coronation Street graduates from back in the days when the soap was still good. My peak Corrie-watching years were early 90s to early 00s. Which means I was there when it looked like the crowns were about to pass from queens such as Rita, Vera and Bet Lynch to their honourable successors, like Shelley Unwin, Karen McDonald, Fiz – and maybe to a younger Battersby or two, if the family learned to stop yelling and give us a bit more northern wit. Alas, their reign was brief and now there is no question that Coronation Street is worse than it has ever been. We do not have time to get into this now. Suffice to say: the presence of Sally Lindsay (Shelley, as was) and Jill Halfpenny (Rebecca Hopkins, of the same era, as love interest for Martin Platt) is enough to assure you of a good time.

Here, Halfpenny plays Lucy Logan, a beloved daytime TV presenter with her own, mildly emetic show, a sponsorship deal for her onscreen wardrobe, and a new line of pampering products coming out under her name, in partnership with a brand-friendly charity. Apart from the monthly box of expensive truffles that are actually made of manure (I want to know who bit into the first one and discovered this; a bad work experience week for someone, I reckon) sent by an unknown non-admirer, life is good.

A wild true-crime tale. Plus Jamie Oliver’s ultimate barbecue and a gruelling trek with Bear Grylls and Matthew McConaughey. Here’s what to watch this evening

9.45pm, BBC Two
This heart-racing, three-part documentary tells the wild story of a casino bomb and the man behind it. In 1980, a ticking timebomb using 1,000lb of dynamite was wheeled through Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, with a note demanding $3m (£2.2m) attached to it. It was so sophisticated that, as one bomb squad member who was there remembers in the first episode, “all the usual techniques were thrown out of the window”. Hollie Richardson

With its striking images and experimental soundtrack, artist Aura Satz’s film is an endurance test that might work better in a gallery

This film from the London-based artist Aura Satz is an exploration of sirens – as in the warning devices, not the mythical creatures that lure unsuspecting men to their doom. Really it’s an art film, and might have been more at home in a gallery where audiences would be able to engage with its striking images and experimental soundtrack for as long as the mood takes them. As a feature-film experience it becomes an endurance test, a battle to pay attention and concentrate for the whole thing.

It opens with a drone shot of a huge siren in the middle of what looks like a residential neighbourhood, ready to alert residents to heaven knows what threat. Over the top, a shrill, insinuating track from composer Laurie Spiegel buzzes with the nagging whine of an electronic mosquito. There are some interesting ideas here. British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla muses on the role of sirens in the 2011 Arab spring protests, and we learn that in Palestine loudspeakers in mosque minarets sound a siren every year on Nakba day – one second for every year that has passed since Palestinians were displaced from their homeland after the creation of the state of Israel.

A whiff of David Fincher’s Seven lingers in the air but this moody crime drama from David Lipper is devoid of clever twists

‘We got a serial killer,” announces a policeman in this retro 1990s-style thriller directed by David Lipper; evidence has comes back that an enigmatic, super-clever suspect (played by Dylan Sprouse) has the blood of three different people on his clothing. (But if the victims were all killed at roughly the same time, wouldn’t that make him a mass murderer?) It’s best not to get too hung up on nomenclature or to think too hard about anything here – like how can one character predict that an ordinary pen would get left behind in a room to serve as a convenient murder weapon? Just go with the throwback vibe, the moody underlit cinematography, and growling subsonic score. Even the faces vaguely recall B- and C-movie fodder from the 1990s/early 2000s including Josh Duhamel and Til Schweiger, here playing a retiring police detective and his mysteriously German commanding officer, respectively.

Duhamel’s Shaw is nominally the protagonist here, although he’s consistently upstaged by Sprouse’s blood-splattered murderer, called AJ, who pulls out the unsettling high-pitched giggles and evil smirks we’ve come to expect from our movie killers. It turns out that AJ has left a trail of clues leading to each of his recent murders that Shaw must unravel if he’s to find his own teenage son (Corbin Pitts), who AJ has locked up in some underground lair with only hours left until he runs out of air.

Milton Court, London
The four siblings start with Webern before ditching traditional instruments for mics, voices, percussion and oud

‘We’ve done many concerts, but this is the first time I’m stressed,” the first violin confesses with a grin, lowering his instrument before a single note has sounded. But before he can launch into the story he’s interrupted by the cellist. “We’re actually supposed to play first!” she chides.

A string quartet is often compared to a four-way marriage. But what if the dynamic was closer to four siblings? One group that doesn’t need to imagine the answer is the Saad family: brothers Omar, Mostafa and Gandhi, and sister Tibah – AKA the Galilee String Quartet.

The Paddington star narrates an eerie adaptation of an Arthur Conan Doyle classic. Plus a worrying series about the US tech company at the heart of the NHS

Whether made by human hand or shady algorithm, emotion-based playlists are everywhere. But if you’re looking for a superior soundtrack to ‘all the feels’, get your ears round these selections from our music writers

Music might be the greatest mood enhancer in the world: it’s certainly hard to think of another art form that can so effectively tip a feeling of happiness into euphoria or create a suitably gloomy space in which to wallow in melancholy. There have always been albums designed to evoke a certain mood, from Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely to Essential Chill Out Vol 2. But in recent years, we seem to have become more interested in the relationship between music and mood. Streaming services are thick with mood-based playlists. There appear to be hundreds of the things on Spotify, from the straightforward (Happy Vibes) to the vague (All the Feels), and they appear to have struck a nerve: Spotify’s own curated mood playlists are now vastly outnumbered by user-generated ones, soundtracking everything from Friday at the Office to – I swear I’m not making this up – Losing Someone to Suicide.

There are those who have detected something sinister in all this. Liz Pelly’s 2025 book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist suggests that the Spotify’s seeming obsession with mood-based playlists is linked to its focus on what it calls “lean-back consumers” – not ardent music fans, but the kind of people who would once have turned the radio on in the morning and left it burbling quietly away all day. These playlists, Pelly suggests, exist as a latterday equivalent of muzak, designed to be as unobtrusive, unsurprising and unadventurous as possible, to seamlessly play in the background without really being noticed.

The East 17 man knows his 90s bangers but once inadvertently cleared a dancefloor. And what song gets him on the exercise bike in a morning?

The first single I bought
Shut Up by Madness, from a record shop on Hoe Street in Walthamstow, London. It gave me a kind of independence in the world when I could choose what I wanted. And as a nine-year-old, you could find 10p down the back of the sofa and get a Madness badge at the market to stick on your coat.

The song I do at karaoke
I’ve only done karaoke once, really loud and absolutely inebriated on sake in Japan. I’d had a few and thought: “This isn’t really doing much”, then it hit me like a hammer. That was a messy night. If I had to do karaoke now, I’d do East 17’s House of Love, because at least I’d remember the words.

Eerie omens haunt this absorbing group portrait set over six months in an English village

Sitting stoned on a hill above his village, a young man muses on his place in the world. Connor is proud to have fenced pastures while his mates have been away at university. But it’s overwhelming to think of all their lives being equally real and urgent. Are they part of the same story or separate ones? A phrase comes to him from a book he hated at school: something about “the roar on the other side of silence”. In this fine, subtle and strange novel from one of the most probing writers of contemporary rural life, Melissa Harrison earns that nod to George Eliot, whose words she gives to an anxious and ecstatic labourer clutching a can of Fanta.

The Given World follows the inhabitants of one village in a river valley, a place “as old as anywhere”, for six months between the equinoxes of a year. The time is now, or an imminent future when the seasons seem to have “ceased their metronome”. At first, the central figure appears to be Clare, who knows each flagstone of the ancient priory that has been the centre of her life. The six months are her dying time, from diagnosis to last thoughts. But, in a way that pays tribute to the solitary Clare’s understanding of interconnectedness, the novel goes out from the priory to trace a web of lives. In the breezeblock bungalow next door, a desperate farmer tunes in at dawn to American evangelists on the radio. Like Saj the postman, we call at addresses where literary fiction rarely bothers to ring the bell.

A young pregnant woman is assailed by dark visions of sisterhood in a novel splicing eco-horror, cosmic distress and ideas of the monstrous feminine

Realism, contrary to appearances, isn’t a form closed off to horror. The stories in ’Pemi Aguda’s debut collection, Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 US National Book award, rivetingly bore out this fact. Neither strictly realistic nor wholly supernatural, they seized on ordinary events pulsing with sinister possibility: a mother distraught at her inability to produce milk for her newborn wonders whether her unresolved feelings over her husband’s infidelity might have poisoned her body; a young woman prone to violence fears she is inhabited by the spirit of a wicked ancestor; a driver who runs over a pedestrian can’t shake off the feeling that her own daughter will be next to die. One Leg on Earth, as the title suggests, is similarly a liminal creature, although it flirts more openly and ingeniously with darkness. It follows a young woman, Yosoye Bakare, newly arrived in Lagos to intern at an architecture firm involved with building Omi City, a state-of-the-art enclave on land reclaimed from the sea.

Away from home, Yosoye is hungry for adventure. Out on a stroll one night, she slips into a cruddy bar, allows a man to buy her a drink, and goes to a cheap motel where they have ravenous sex without protection. Across the city, pregnant women are inexplicably throwing themselves into open water. But when Yosoye learns she is expecting, she decides to keep the baby. “It was hard to explain to someone who hadn’t spent their whole life trying to belong, to be inside – the joke, the anecdote – that the promise of another being that would be just theirs, that would, yes, belong to them, was like cold water on the tongue after hours of trekking under the Lagos sun.”

Her philosophical approach to therapy has become a global phenomenon, and inspired a new book. Could a session with her change Sophie McBain’s life?

The existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen moved to the UK inspired by RD Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist who said insanity is a “perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. It was 1977 and Van Deurzen, who is Dutch and had studied philosophy and psychology in France, found work with the Arbours Association in London, a therapeutic community based on Laing’s ideas, in which people in crisis, psychiatrists and therapists lived together as equals. It was a rude awakening.

Arbours aimed to create space for people to “explore their madness”. “Now that was a very interesting idea,” Van Duerzen says, “but in practice it meant that people self-medicated, with alcohol and pot, and it was not a happy situation.” The residents were often very depressed or psychotic, and it was common to be woken up at night because someone was seeing things or had become suicidal. Van Deurzen came to believe that anti-psychiatry had “lost courage”: it had proposed a different way of thinking about madness, but having released people from asylums and taken them off neuroleptic drugs, it was “kind of leaving them to it”. “And this is what I realised wasn’t good enough,” she says. When people are experiencing a mental health crisis, they need help to make sense of what has happened to them, and to find their way to healing. “From that moment on I just knew: nobody’s doing this. I’m going to have to do it myself,” she says.

From 1980s Cincinnati into the interstellar darkness, the stories of four women interconnect across the centuries in a gentle hymn to found families

This is the kind of book you pitch by analogy: JG Ballard meets Gabrielle Zevin; Isaac Asimov meets Stephen Chbosky; Ready Player One meets Love, Simon (replete with ferris wheel). I’ve been describing it to friends as a YA Kazuo Ishiguro set adrift in Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. It turns out I have two kinds of friends: those who hear that description as praise, and those who heed it as a warning.

Novels that demand comparisons rarely survive them. This one does (though it could do without that mawkish ferris wheel). American author Portia Elan’s debut is a gentle hymn to found families – the kin we choose rather than inherit – and it’s fitting that it reads that way, assembled from allegiances. Elan knows what her characters will discover: stories are how we claim one another.

More than a quarter of 20- to 34-year-olds still live with their parents. No wonder they are escaping into virtual properties that they can decorate and furnish as they like

Name: Cosy gaming.

Age: Has its origins in social simulation games such as Harvest Moon (1996) and The Sims (2000).

Meeting ‘my people’ – video gamers with very long memories – took me back to an era of machine play that lacked megabytes but had far more tangible presence

I want to tell you about the game that has made me the happiest this month. It’s a game I didn’t complete. It’s a game I didn’t even start. I just held it. And smiled. I have played the game before, but not for many years. Forty of them to be precise.

The game is Daley Thompson’s Super Test for the ZX Spectrum.

Hitman developer IO Interactive’s pluralistic take on the British secret agent – his first video-game outing in almost 15 years – promises a Bond for all eras. Here’s what you need to know

If you want to tell the tale of a young James Bond, you first need to pick which James Bond he’s going to grow into. This was the task handed to Hitman developer IO Interactive, the studio taking digital custody of the spy in 007 First Light, Bond’s first video game in almost 15 years. So what’s it to be? Will their agent take baby steps towards Sean Connery’s gruff masculinity, or is he practising Roger Moore’s arched eyebrow in the bathroom mirror? That’s if he’s a “movie” Bond at all. For a generation of gamers, the character exists most vividly as a hand at the bottom of the screen in GoldenEye 007.

As it turns out, 007 First Light’s Bond, depicted by Patrick Gibson (cornering a specific market, having played the serial killer-to-be in the Dexter origins show) is an amalgam: the facial scar is an Ian Fleming detail, but the sweet-talking charm is straight from the Pierce Brosnan playbook, and the second you barge a goon into a bookcase you know someone’s been studying Casino Royale on a loop. Trying to devise a Bond for all fandoms could risk satisfying none, but in the demo we played, the performance works. Crucially, Gibson brings an outsider’s unease that’s all his own, anchored by the arrogance that’ll one day be weaponised by MI6.

PC; Grey Alien Games, Night Signal Entertainment
An innocent-looking charity shop find draws you into a compulsive world of demons, ogres and retro delights

For a while in the mid-1990s, meta horror movies were the genre everyone was talking about. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Scream, the Blair Witch Project – these films simultaneously examined and exploited genre conventions, seeking to scare audiences while also distancing them from the narrative action. You didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp in shock, you weren’t sure what was story or what was framing. Did that just happen or was it a dream sequence? You just had to go with it.

Now developers Grey Alien Games and Night Signal Entertainment have brought this multilayered approach to the card game solitaire, infusing a straightforward puzzler with a bloody gush of meta meaning and a dollop of nostalgia just for the self-reflexive hell of it. In Forbidden Solitaire, lead character Will Roberta picks up an old 1990s game called, yes, Forbidden Solitaire, in a charity shop vaguely recalling some internet myth about it being cursed. He discovers that the game is a sort of narrative card-battler set in a haunted dungeon filled with monsters and treasure – and then you, the player, are transported from his computer desktop into the game. So you’re both him and you.

Arts Collective, Northampton
An overdue celebration in her home town of this funny, direct, critical, satirical conceptualist shows her spiky social commentary is as fresh and relevant as ever

Rose Finn-Kelcey wanted to make art that was neither pompous nor condescending. Those are pretty rare ideals in conceptualism, where pomposity and condescension come with the territory, but Finn-Kelcey was a pretty rare artist.

This show in Northampton’s brand new £5m art centre – a very colourful retrofit of the historic municipal offices and town hall annexe, filled with artist studios – is a homecoming. Finn-Kelcey was born here in 1945 and grew up on a nearby farm, but spent the 1970s onwards causing a big old feminist ruckus with all sorts of art pranks, installations, performances, videos and photography in London before her death from motor neurone disease in 2014.

Soho theatre, London
Directed with swagger and finesse by Matthew Xia, Dave Harris’s play explores sex, pleasure, parenthood and what makes a man

There are two kinds of people in the world – those who, given a paddle to signal willingness for audience participation at a play set in a strip club, will raise it high, and then there’s me. The crowd arrived hyped for Dave Harris’s Tender – my neighbour waved her paddle through the pre-show playlist – but it’s not really about rambunctious bump and grind. Instead, Harris delves into modern masculinity: hard bodies, squishy hearts.

The Dancing Bears is a down at heel club in New Jersey. Two young dudes and a non-dancing daddy work their teddy-bear heads and neon-green jocks for a dwindling crowd of middle-school teachers and recovering divorcees. Monster-schlonged rivals are stealing their punters and then Geoff has an onstage panic attack. Bear down!

Linbury theatre, London
The Jette Parker Artists ran the full spectrum from sombre lyricism to frenzied satire via divorce drama in works by Elizabeth Maconchy, Charlotte Bray and Elena Langer

Tales of Love and Loss: the title made this triple bill of English-language one-acters from the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Artists sound like something very serious. In fact, it sent us out laughing.

Admittedly, after the first work the mood could only lighten. Elizabeth Maconchy’s 1961 two-hander The Departure, last staged in 2007, begins with a woman watching a funeral through her bedroom window; when her husband comes home she realises it is her own death that is being mourned, and that she is there to say farewell. Directed by Talia Stern, in a 1960s set designed by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita, it flirted with melodrama, especially in the flashing-light effects as she remembered the fatal car crash, and the ending, with the sound of a baby crying, felt mawkish. Still, Maconchy’s music, sombre yet lyrically expansive in a way that made it feel like the orchestra was bigger than the 14-strong Britten Sinfonia, made an impressive vocal showcase for the mezzo-soprano Ellen Pearson and baritone Sam Hird.

Milton Court, London
The Venezuelan pianist was mercurial and dazzling in this Spanish-themed recital including Chopin, Scarlatti and Albéniz adding improvisational mastery with a Purcellian take on Here Comes the Sun

Mozart did it. Liszt, famously, too. You could hardly stop Bach and Messiaen – even Boulez dabbled. But at some stage improvisation disappeared from the concert platform; experimentation became something to do privately and in advance rather than in public and in real time. Unless you’re Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero, who has spent a career reinstating the art on the concert platform.

So far Montero’s three-concert residency at the Barbican hasn’t yielded an opportunity – not so much as a cadenza – so I suspect many of the substantial audience for her solo recital were there in hopes of hearing more than just the advertised programme.

Iranian visual journalist Parisa Azadi set her images alight in response to January’s violent repression by the regime, not to erase them, but to convey ‘rage, grief and refusal’

In September 2022, as revolution spread across Iran, I witnessed it from Dubai through the unstable glow of phone screens. Raw videos surfaced daily before disappearing into internet blackouts: women burning their hijabs, young men wounded by metal pellets, teenagers dragged into unmarked vans.

Unable to return safely to Iran, where I had spent six years documenting life under repression, I felt helpless. This work emerged from that pain and is both testimony and absence: the public violence of the state and my private, long-distance bearing witness.

Ashley MacIsaac, who is seeking $1.5m in civil lawsuit, says inaccurate information led to concert cancellation

An acclaimed Canadian fiddle player has launched a $1.5m civil lawsuit against Google, alleging that the online giant defamed him by falsely identifying him as a sex offender in an AI-generated summary of his life and career.

Ashley MacIsaac, a three-time Juno award-winning musician, filed the claim in the Ontario superior court of justice, asserting that Google was liable for the “foreseeable republication” of its AI-generated Overview feature, which previously published defamatory claims that he had been convicted of multiple criminal offences, including the sexual assault of a woman, internet luring involving a child with the intention of sexual assaulting the child, and assault causing bodily harm.

‘The man is the establishment, I suppose, the military industrial complex. A few year later, when we played it live, we added a loop of Bill Hicks saying: “All governments are liars and murderers”’

Gruff was the first person I ever met who could just churn out songs – good, catchy ones. I joined his band Ffa Coffi Pawb, but by 1992 they’d split and Gruff and I were living in Cardiff, as were Bunf, Guto and my brother Cian, the other future Furries. We started out doing techno sets, and I had a little home studio where we demoed ideas for songs. Our first singer, the actor Rhys Ifans, slept on a mattress in the corner.

The 80-year-old singer will not be performing rescheduled dates in September but assured fans she is receiving treatment and ‘improving every day’

Dolly Parton has canceled her Las Vegas residency over ongoing health issues.

The 80-year-old singer had originally been scheduled to perform six shows at Caesar’s Palace last December but moved the dates to September 2026. She has now announced on social media that she won’t be able to perform as planned.

As a cheap, easy solution for when you’re away from home for a few days, it quietly does its job

The problem
Going away for a week and leaving your plants to fend for themselves is a specific kind of anxiety. You water thoroughly before you leave, move them out of direct sunlight, group them together and then spend your holiday picturing a wilted peace lily.

The hack
One hack suggests wrapping damp towels around the base and sides of your pots, creating a slow-release moisture jacket that keeps the root zone cooler and hydrated, while also acting as an insulating layer that slows evaporation from the soil surface. Unlike wicking systems that actively draw water in, this is purely about retention – holding on to the moisture that’s already there.

This traditional neighbourhood ‘across the river’ is where the city’s creatives are heading as the centre heats up

Madrid’s current boomtown dynamics are driving the city centre way upmarket, pushing the average punter to outer barrios in search of cheaper rent. As seen in New York and elsewhere, the creative class is moving too – crossing the River Manzanares to open studios in the former factories and metalworks of Carabanchel. Now the city’s most populous district, this used to be a separate municipality, which was annexed to the capital in 1948 and built up into canyons of high-rise flats to house the postwar influx from the provinces, and later from Latin America.

Whether it’s a new season scent or a springy running shoe, your April favourites show you’re ready for a fresh start

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It’s easy to feel hopeful in spring, with blossom all around and sunny days bringing the promise of summer ahead. It feels like a fresh start, and it’s clear from your favourite things in April that you’re looking for rejuvenation.

Maybe that’s a new scent, or a cabin bag for a holiday. Perhaps it’s a health reset, with a pair of running shoes to kickstart better habits, or a celebrity-endorsed supplement. You’ve also loved sub-£20 skincare basics and high-street looks inspired by Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel. Here are your favourite things from April.

Peonies, padel rackets and a genuinely good low-alcohol wine … whatever your plans this bank holiday, we’ve rounded up our top spring essentials so you can make the most of it

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The weather may or may not play ball, but a spring bank holiday is a reason to kick back, get outside and get together with friends.

To help you make the most of the long weekend, we’ve rounded up some of our most-loved seasonal favourites. Whether it’s tools to spruce up your outdoor space, tipples to sip in the garden, a fake tan to jump-start your summer skin or fashion to take you from spring to summer, here are some of our favourite springtime products.

Most suitcases look hardwearing, but which ones actually are? We dropped bestselling brands’ luggage from a ladder to find out …

• The best carry-on luggage

A suitcase is like the portrait in the traveller’s attic, accumulating more than its fair share of knocks and scrapes while we refresh ourselves on the road. We trundle them over cobbles, see them tumble from luggage racks on the train – and if we choose to fly, there’s a fair chance they’ll be mishandled before we reunite at the carousel.

For our testing, we pushed eight suitcases to the limit by dropping them on to a hard surface, as if they’d been fumbled by a baggage handler. Air travel is especially tough on suitcases, so you might get away with choosing a less-resilient case if you make the climate-conscious choice to travel by rail or sea.

Best suitcase overall:
Away the Large

Best budget suitcase:
Tripp Holiday 8 Large

I spent a month testing anti-consumption strategies, from cash stuffing to ditching Amazon Prime, to find the ones that genuinely cut my spending

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I’m pretty careful with money, I say as I trip over piles of Amazon Prime boxes. I’ve never really been the shopping type, I insist as I stare at drawers groaning with unworn Asos clothes. Look how much I care about the environment, I tell myself as I click “buy now” on yet another battery charger I bought to replace the one, two or five I’ve lost around the house somewhere.

You don’t have to be a shopaholic to be drowning in stuff. All it takes is an averagely mindless approach to impulse buying, until one day your home is heaving with a personal landfill of tat.

Cheesy vegetarian sliders with pickles and slaw, and caramelised cheesy cabbage wedges

Cabbage is one of my favourite ingredients. I love it for its versatility, and also because it’s nutritious and incredibly satisfying to cook with. I’ve been putting cabbage on my menus for more than two decades now, and at Our Farm in Cartmel, Cumbria, we grow hundreds of varieties to use across my restaurants’ kitchens throughout the year. For me, cabbage has always been one of the real heroes in the kitchen, and today’s recipes are about creating generous, seasonal dishes to share with it at their centre.

Oozy and creamy like a good risotto, this is the perfect midweek taste of Greece

For me, it isn’t really spring until the first May bank holiday; the days are longer, the flowers are out, and an abundance of green graces our shelves. This spanakopita orzo is a celebration of all things light, bright and spring. It’s a great weeknight dinner that will instantly transport you to Greece.

Mexican spring soup followed by black bean and three-cheese quesadilla

I have always loved the evident (though not proven) link between how foodie a country is and its love of soups. In Mexico, where nose-to-tail eating is a given, broths maintain a steadying presence in any self-respecting cantina, and soups are commonplace on most menus. We don’t eat a crazy amount of meat at home, but having homemade stock in the freezer is an ingenious fast track to flavour and goodness. Here, whether your stock is chicken or vegetable, homemade or shop-bought, the joy is in the gentle spicing, a scattering of herbs, zingy tomatillos and some lovely spring leaves.

Jamie Oliver’s head of restaurants is optimistic about new recipe of smaller site, slimmed-down menu and no burgers

When Jamie’s Italian crashed and burned in 2019, with the company in £83m of debt and causing 1,000 job losses, no one imagined the celebrity chef would try again.

But seven years later, Jamie Oliver has opened a flagship site under the same name in Leicester Square in central London, and believes he has a new recipe for success: a smaller restaurant with a slimmed-down menu, which features cheaper cuts of meat and no burgers.

I always knew my Vietnamese pot-bellied pig was smart and special – and he has brought love, chaos and happiness into my life

We have lots of animals in our home in Sacramento, California – a dog, two chicks, a pigeon, a bearded dragon, three rats and two rescue cows. But our pig, Merlin, is special.

I had a pig obsession for a while. I remember going to visit some animal sanctuaries and getting emotional when I saw the pigs. There’s just something about them that I felt a connection to. I knew how smart they were. I remember telling myself that one day I’d have a pig.

Linda lost her sexual appetite after a hysterectomy, but making a list of sex cues with partner Elias helped her regain her desire
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Since everything on the list is something we both like, when he sends me a suggestion it turns me on

He didn’t just shout me a drink, he made me feel understood and seen. I’ve never forgotten his gesture

I had picked up a box of books at work when my back just went – I have never experienced pain like that in my life. I was off work for weeks, consumed by the agony of it and barely able to move. In desperation, I tried every treatment I could – massage, physiotherapy, herbal compresses. You name it, I’d given it a go.

On one such Hail Mary mission I went to a back pain clinic, where my lower back was injected with anaesthetic. The treatment was so painful, I left in tears. I remember walking out in such a state and thinking, “How am I even going to get myself home?” As I stumbled along, it occurred to me that I needed something to calm myself down. Spotting a chocolate shop, I stepped inside.

Her actions may be numbing pain she feels in other areas of her life, so you must approach the issue thoughtfully

My mother is in her 70s and addicted to playing video games such as Tetris, many different versions of solitaire and slot machine gambling games.

In the 1990s my parents bought a desktop computer and my mum started to play mostly card games on it for hours. As technology has progressed, she moved to a laptop and now a smartphone. When my sisters and I were younger, we used to joke about her gaming, but we’ve come to realise it has affected our relationships as she has never been emotionally available. When I’m with Mum now, she always has her phone in her hand and will be playing a game even when I’m talking to her. I never feel I have her full attention. She is like this with other family members too and it’s become a bit of a family joke.

Charges set out in a new contract for Aver Healthcare’s homes appear to contradict advice from the regulator

I hold power of attorney for my aunt who is in a care home run by Avery Healthcare. Avery recently sent relatives its new contract, which states that care home fees are payable for 14 days after a resident’s death, and levies an upfront £595 charge for “dilapidations” (damage or wear and tear).

These charges contradict advice given by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and are probably unenforceable.

After subscribing to the Claude chatbot, mystery payments started to appear on one family’s credit card bill. They are not alone

David Duggan* was so impressed with the ability of the Claude chatbot to answer medical questions and organise family life, that a $20-a-month (£15) subscription seemed like money well spent.

But then his wife spotted two $200 payments on his credit card bill for gift cards to use the artificial intelligence tool.

Rural dwellers reveal failings in backup plans, as campaigners call for deadline to be extended from 2027 to 2030

“Every time there is a power failure I lose all means of communication with the outside world,” says Robert Dewar of life in a remote village in the Scottish Highlands since the landlines were transferred from the old copper cable network to broadband connections.

Blackouts also knock out the village’s mobile phone signal. “Our most recent power cut lasted for 42 hours,” Dewar says. The interruption outlasted his five-hour emergency backup battery. “If I had had a heart attack there is damn all I could have done about it, except compose myself, say my prayers, and await the outcome.”

From a quintessential ‘chocolate box’ cottage to part of a grand stately home

Our lungs have evolved to heal from damage, but some smokers will suffer irreversible effects

It used to be thought that the lungs couldn’t regenerate,” says Dr Charlotte Dean, head of the lung development and disease group at Imperial College London. “But we know now that’s not the case. Broadly speaking, they can repair when you quit smoking.”

Smoking is in effect damaging your lungs, Dean says, and the lungs have a substantial capacity to heal themselves. They have evolved to cope with pollution or getting infected by bacteria or viruses. “Because they’re so vital – you can’t survive without your lungs – they needed to have this capacity,” she says.

For years we have been told the best way to get fitter and stronger is to lift something heavy, whether that’s a barbell or our own bodyweight. What if how we put it down was just as important?

We all love a power move, such as running, jumping, throwing balls, swinging kettlebells or scaling walls. In comparison, deliberate, controlled movement can seem a bit boring. But this slower side of exercise is frequently safer and less physically demanding than its more showy rival. And according to the latest research, one form of it is more effective than it has traditionally been given credit for.

“Eccentric exercise training provides numerous benefits for physical fitness and overall health, making it suitable for a wide range of individuals,” Prof Kazunori Nosaka writes in a new paper published in the Journal of Sport and Health Science. It “offers unique advantages over concentric or isometric exercise, particularly in promoting neuromuscular adaptations”.

Gemma Correll has suffered from anxiety and depression disorders since childhood, and at 16 she discovered a magical elixir that promised to make her feel better. In this extract from her new book, she shows how that promise was broken

In 2018, I was in my 30s and living in Oakland, California, having moved there from the UK in 2015. I had always struggled with anxiety and panic attacks, but I was doing fairly well – until suddenly I wasn’t. I started having back-to-back panic attacks, wandering the streets of Oakland and nearby Berkeley in a desperate attempt to shake them, without success.

Can a sentence affect the course of your life? Five authors reveal the interactions that transformed the way they saw themselves – and the world

When I was 14, I had to start a new school. I wasn’t great at starting new schools, even though I had done so quite a few times – once for my dad’s work, once because I wasn’t fitting in at my primary school and once because my parents didn’t like the teachers. Of course, 14 is possibly the most awkward of all the ages to start a new anything. Anyway, it was halfway through the first term at the new school in Newark, Nottinghamshire, and I was taken aside by my history teacher, Mr Philips, at the end of a lesson. He didn’t like me very much. To be fair, I was probably hard to like, from a teacher’s perspective. I had trouble concentrating, I stared out of windows, I clowned around. However, it is difficult to explain the shock to my self-conscious teenage soul when he told me, “I think it would be a good idea for you to join a special needs class.” Now, for context, the year was 1989, and in my state comprehensive at that time the idea of being “special needs” was akin to being given a leprosy bell or being marked with a cross for the plague. It was a binary system. You were either “normal” or you were “special needs”. To make matters worse, I was told that another teacher – my art teacher – had come to a similar assessment.

There are many online techniques for self-cutting a fringe – but would I end up looking like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction or a low-budget Grimes?

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I have had a fringe since I was 15 years old. I will never forget this life-altering haircut. For years before it I had been suffering lingering effects from a bob cut I received unwillingly in primary school.

You were not a cool person if you had a bob as an adolescent in the early 2000s. But finally my hair had grown sufficiently for styling and I got it cut to sit neatly on my shoulders with front bangs.

Wilson is not the first high profile respondent to change her wardrobe for court, but fashion can also help plaintiffs express themselves when speech is constrained

Pitch Perfect star Rebel Wilson is being sued for defamation by actor Charlotte MacInnes. The trial has seen Wilson arrive in court wearing various iterations of white button-down shirt beneath neutral knitwear or suiting, paired with cropped black trousers and heels. Similar to the undeniably demure, court-appropriate uniform she also adopted during her trial against Bauer Media in the 2010s, her courtroom aesthetic sits in stark contrast to her usual glittery, vivacious style.

This isn’t the first time a celebrity’s courtroom look has diverged from their regular wardrobe. While it shouldn’t materially affect the outcome of a case, famous or not, how one presents at trial can carry real consequences.

There’s more to this classic look than simply wearing your nightwear as daywear. Try it with a T-shirt or a silky bomber – and always with a slick of lipstick

Jennifer Rauchet, wife of Pete Hegseth, caused partisan uproar by supposedly wearing a bargain dress to the formal event – but what it says about our attitudes to fast fashion is more interesting

Although far less important than the political violence at the White House correspondent’s dinner in Washington over the weekend, the sartorial choices of the Maga administration are now getting airtime – and one dress is causing a particular furore.

It is being reported that Jennifer Rauchet, wife of the US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, wore what appeared to resemble a gown listed on Shein for $42 (and similar to another on Temu for half the price).

After decades in the shadows, the residents of this historic quarter came together to launch local businesses and make the area an attractive proposition once more

My favourite way to enter Rione Sanità is by elevator: descending from a bridge into cobblestoned streets buzzing with mopeds and flanked by opulent but decaying 18th-century palazzi. Through the grand doorways of these once noble palaces are courtyards where bakers, butchers, cobblers and the odd contraband cigarette vendor do business.

This buzzy quarter is best enjoyed on one of the many tree-lined terraces, eating gourmet wraps, sipping bio wine and listening to live jazz

Named for its 19th-century neoclassical church, Notre-Dame du Mont was once a site where sailors who’d survived shipwrecks and storms made offerings of thanks. Now locals and visitors make a pilgrimage to this vibrant quarter for its restaurants, indie shops and street art. Voted Time Out’s coolest neighbourhood in the world in 2024, Notre-Dame du Mont has retained its laid-back charm while continuing to grow, stretching south on Rue de Lodi. Since December 2025, the church’s parvis has been pedestrianised. Removing the urban roar of scooters has returned the quarter to its village-like ambience – best enjoyed on one of the many tree-lined terraces.

It once housed the fanciest shops and restaurants in Greece’s capital city – then it crashed. Now the area is reborn as a vibrant, multicultural neighbourhood

After my father’s will banned me and my siblings from his funeral, I wrote a novel about some brothers and sisters stealing their dad in his coffin. The emotions were drawn from my painful experiences, but I invented the characters and the tragi-comic narrative in Stealing Dad. Despite growing up in England, I’ve lived in and written about Athens for 25 years, and it came naturally to create several Greek characters. Alekos is a wild sculptor who dies in London, and his daughter Iris (one of seven dispersed half-siblings) lives off Victoria Square – one of Athens’ most fascinating corners.

In the 1960s, Plateia Viktorias was a fashionable neighbourhood with the fanciest restaurants, shops and theatres. Townhouses from the interwar period were being demolished and Athenians were occupying the new six-storey apartment blocks so fast that construction dust and the constant drilling were the main problem. Today, through wrought-iron and glass doors, elegant, marble-lined halls reveal concierges’ desks and traces of a vanished bourgeois life.

These are the less explored corners of Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin and Porto that you’ve ‘stumbled into and ended up staying’

• Tell us about a great trip in the UK – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

When friends came to visit while I was studying in Berlin or I wanted to flaneur through the city, I would go to Maybachufer, a neighbourhood in the Neukölln district. Wander from U-Bahn station Kottbusser Tor in the direction of the Landwehrkanal and peruse the multicultural market taking place Tuesdays and Fridays. You can also attempt to haggle in your best German at the fortnightly Sunday flea market. Useful phrase: das ist zu teuer für mich (that’s too expensive for me). Stop for a bite to eat (or an Aperol spritz) alfresco at buzzing La Maison and spend the afternoon sat by the canal next to the Admiralbrücke historic wrought iron bridge, or at the nearby independent cinema Moviemento, which shows a wide variety of English-subtitled films. End the day with a döner kebap from one of the many takeaways or restaurants nearby and a trip to one (or more) of the local bars: Multilayerladen for its laid-back, homely aesthetic or Soulcat Music Bar for 50s and 60s music on vinyl.
Kitty

The world often feels dominated by sadness and doomscrolling. But fun is still possible – and necessary. Here are tried and tested ways to enjoy yourself

Cartwheel. On the day we scattered my father’s ashes, we lightened the mood with some competitive gymnastics. I don’t know how it started, but in attempting a cartwheel, I was shocked at my own creeping decrepitude. Over the last year, I’ve been watching online tutorials and practising – and I can do a passable cartwheel now. For that joyful split-second, upside down and wheeling, I’m reconnected with my eight-year-old self. Emine Saner

Have a kitchen disco. Never underestimate the fun ready to burst out of your kitchen. The crucial ingredient? Good music, played loudly. Parcels are my new favourite – the whole family have become superfans since last summer’s awesome Glastonbury set. Tieduprightnow, Gamesofluck, IknowhowIfeel, Hideout, Safeandsound – so many danceable, joyful tracks. Patrick Barkham

The emo kings on growing up in Arizona, making it big, and Jim’s annoying wake-up calls

Jimmy Eat World are an alternative rock band from Mesa, east of Phoenix, Arizona. Formed by vocalist and guitarist Jim Adkins, guitarist Tom Linton, bassist Rick Burch and drummer Zach Lind in 1993, they have released 10 albums – including their 2001 breakthrough record, Bleed American. Its hit single, The Middle, peaked at No 5 in the US Hot 100 chart; it has now had more than 1bn streams. The band mark the 25th anniversary of the album with a series of shows this summer including UK appearances in August in Halifax, Cardiff and Crystal Palace Bowl, London.

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

This week’s question: The inside of my cardigans never become bobbled. Can’t the pieces be sewn together inside out?

I must admit to cracking a smile when I read the story about the revolting result of a tofu spill last month in Missouri. About 18,000kg (40,000lb) of extra-firm tofu was left to rot for three weeks after a road accident – no one was hurt – turned into an insurance dispute. Local officials described the smell as “unforgettable” and “like a dead animal, but worse”. So, what are history’s greatest bad smells? Liz Prior, Southampton

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Cheshire villagers are letting lawns grow wild to improve diversity and reconnect with nature on their doorstep

Ian Waddington was crouched in his garden last summer, inspecting loose paving, when he lifted a slab and spotted something extraordinary: a tiny field mouse nestled in a hollow, feeding four babies – each half the size of his little finger. “It was astonishing. Like life in miniature,” he says.

After decades in the construction industry, the 86-year-old has found a new passion in retirement – nature. The discovery of the field mice made him realise his garden could be a thriving habitat for animal and plant life. This year, Waddington joined the No Mow May movement and allowed his garden grow wild through spring.

Police got several matches during trial in London borough – but where some see progress on crime, others see violation of privacy

• AI facial recognition oversight lagging far behind technology, watchdogs warn

• Shoppers falsely identified by facial recognition

• How does live facial recognition work?

It happened in a flash outside Barclays in Croydon town centre. A digital trap snapped shut around one of Britain’s thousands of wanted criminals. In little over a minute, a combination of high-definition cameras, automated AI face scanning and half a dozen police officers had run a wanted man to ground.

After the handcuffs clicked shut, the Metropolitan police’s controversial live facial recognition (LFR) cameras had chalked up another arrest: the fifth in 45 minutes on a regular Thursday morning.

Public records and private papers reveal compassion and tacit acceptance before ‘moral panic’ took hold in the 1950s and 1960s

Northern Ireland carved a grim reputation for homophobia for over half a century, a record of intolerance and bigotry so baroque it was turned into an opera.

In the 1970s, Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and Free Presbyterian church, led a “save Ulster from sodomy” crusade to resist the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

When Vadym Lietunov spotted a fortified position after his own had been blown up, he didn’t realise it belonged to the enemy

The bombing began the morning after Vadym Lietunov arrived on the frontline. It went on for six or seven hours each day. The Russians hit the dugout where he was sheltering with kamikaze drones and mortars. After every strike, Lietunov and another Ukrainian soldier, Sasha, repaired the damage, extinguishing fires with bottles of urine and shoving clay-filled sacks back into position. “The enemy knew we were there. It was trying to kill us,” he said.

In late February Russian drone operators tried a new tactic. They sent in a Molniya drone carrying an anti-tank mine. It exploded next to the entrance, leaving the two soldiers concussed and shaking. There were several similar attacks before Lietunov heard an ominous buzz. This time, a mine fell on top of their foxhole. “I look up and we’ve got no roof. It blew everything up,” he recalled.

If you’ve changed your holiday plans, we’d like to hear from you

Rising fuel prices, aviation fuel prices, and changes to travel rules such as the new EU border system, EES, are causing some holidaymakers to reconsider their travel plans. Holiday companies have predicted an increase in bookings for UK summer breaks after a jump in interest from Britons fearful of flight cancellations linked to the Iran war.

Have you changed your summer holiday plans in light of recent world events? We’d like to hear from you.

We’d like to hear how you’re adapting your expenditure as the cost of living rises amid the conflict in the Middle East

Rising prices and economic uncertainty linked to the conflict in the Middle East are putting pressure on household budgets across the world.

The International Monetary Fund has warned the conflict is pushing up the cost of energy and food, increasing borrowing costs and weighing on economic growth. Surveys suggest millions of households are already making changes to cope – cutting back, dipping into savings or taking on debt.

What was your experience? Have you found another place to rent?

Solicitors have said they were inundated with requests to serve last-minute section 21 no-fault evictions prior to the Renters’ Rights Act, which came into force in England today.

Citizens Advice said thousands of people facing a no-fault eviction had approached it for help in the last month.

As David Attenbourugh turns 100 years old, we would like to hear your memories over the years – including any encounters you’ve had with him in the wild

As David Attenborough turns 100 years old on 8 May, we would like to hear your memories of the great naturalist and broadcaster over the years – including any encounters you’ve had with him in the wild.

What is your standout memory of Attenborough? Have you ever met him? You can share your stories – and pictures – below.

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