From north-east Scotland to Romford, London, what do those who spoke to the Guardian during the referendum campaign make of how it all panned out?

The Guardian has revisited five bellwether constituencies we reported on during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, and asked those we spoke to at the time how they now feel about Brexit a decade on from the vote.

From frontline reporting to a trailblazing comic novel and a prophetic dystopia, which of Eric Blair’s books is the best?

Imagination was not George Orwell’s forte. In each novel the protagonist is to some extent an Orwell surrogate doing things that Orwell did in places where Orwell had been. Here, somewhat unconvincingly, the author’s representative is a repressed young woman, Dorothy Hare, who loses her memory, identity and faith. Orwell considered it “tripe” except for the dream-like, polyphonic chapter where Dorothy sleeps rough in Trafalgar Square – a fascinating legacy of his youthful infatuation with James Joyce.

The story of the therapy ferret used to kill rats at Wetherby young offenders institution raises question after question. Not least: is this any place for humans, whatever they have done?

‘Concerns over therapy ferrets used to kill rats at UK’s largest children’s prison” was how the Guardian’s own headline reported recent events at Wetherby young offenders institution in West Yorkshire. “Concerns” felt pretty mild, and I’d have preferred to hear it was a panic or at least a flat spin.

I hoped that it had happened out of sight, since it is no small thing to watch one animal kill another, but that hope was immediately dashed by the detail that not only did the ferret attack the rat in front of its young inmate handler, according to a complaint from the Prison Officers’ Association, but it didn’t even finish the job. The grim scene ended with a prison officer stomping on the injured rat, prompting the National Ferret Welfare Society to side with both rat and ferret, in the statement: “We cannot condone the stamping to death of any animal in any situation.”

As a kid, I did my best to avoid exercise. As an adult, I endured it for the sake of my health. Then I set myself a clear goal – and motivation was no longer an issue

It’s fair to say I don’t come from a long line of athletes. When I was growing up in the 1990s, sport was something other people did; we were not a family who cycled, much less jogged. In PE I was the wheezing child hiding behind the bins, pretending I’d twisted an ankle. When I contemplated working out – not often – I had the vague idea it was supposed to turn my body into something other people might find attractive.

I evolved from an unsporty child into an unsporty adult. Occasionally, mostly in an attempt to lose weight without having to stop eating croissants, I would attempt something like Couch to 5K, which I’d either abandon after a couple of sessions or see through to the bitter end out of the perverse determination to prove I’d been right all along: exercise was a mug’s game and endorphins an invention of Big Wellness.

From gritty criminals to teens coming to terms with their identity, pride month sees Guardian writers on their most beloved queer characters

Forget about dimly lit period dramas where miserable women with no access to electricity gently sob in their heaving corsets and accidentally-on-purpose brush hands in the trembling candlelight; overblown, bombastic heist-capers and brooding, butch anti-heroes are far more up my street when it comes to lesbian cinema. What, after all, could be more intensely gay than immediately committing to a life of crime with someone you’ve only just set eyes on? My favourite of the entire bunch has to be the swaggering ex-con turned plumber Corky, who helps to save Violet from the clutches of her mob boss husband in 1996’s cult classic Bound. Though we first meet Corky trussed up in a literal closet, the metaphor doesn’t play out how you might expect: unapologetic and visible in a time when few films explored queerness full stop, she flexes a labrys tattoo, spends her down time swigging beer in grotty dive bars, and eventually drives off into the sunset, her new partner-in-crime in tow, in a beaten-up Chevy pick-up. The sheer simplicity of Corky as a queer heartthrob was, somehow, ridiculously ahead of its time, and her magnetic influence has played out everywhere from Bottoms to Love Lies Bleeding. El Hunt

An emotional Keir Starmer announced his resignation as prime minister and Labour leader on Monday morning, less than two years after he won a huge majority at the general election. The question now is who will replace him: will Andy Burnham sweep into No 10 uncontested? And can he make a difference where Starmer failed?

New Makerfield MP could get keys to No 10 unopposed after British prime minister’s resignation paves way for successor

• Who is Andy Burnham, the ‘man of the people’ likely to be next UK prime minister?

Keir Starmer has finally bowed to intense pressure to stand down as British prime minister as he conceded that he was no longer the right man to lead the country, leaving Andy Burnham all but certain to succeed him.

In an extraordinary day at Westminster, Starmer announced a timetable for his departure after months of growing discontent among Labour MPs and cabinet ministers, many unnerved by the threat from Reform UK before the next general election.

Burnham will begin to set out his policies next week with a series of speeches to demonstrate a symbolic shift from Starmer’s government, starting with the economy and devolution.

He is considering appointing Ed Miliband as chancellor in order to challenge Treasury orthodoxy but has not made a final decision. Sources said Burnham was aware of the potential risks with business and the unions opposed to the move, but could be prepared to make the argument.

Shabana Mahmood is expected to stay at the Home Office after the former Greater Manchester mayor praised the home secretary for “facing up” to the big issues on immigration during the byelection campaign.

Wes Streeting could be appointed to one of the top cabinet jobs, but did “not come with any leverage” to discussions, as campaign sources rejected his claims he had the numbers to run. Others have argued for him to be appointed chancellor to reassure the markets.

Starmer loyalists are still seeking a candidate who could stand against Burnham – depending on whether Miliband was chancellor. Darren Jones has been touted as a possibility, and although sources said he was not organising a run, they stopped short of a categorical denial.

PM’s demise after landslide victory two years ago points to an increasingly volatile and impatient electorate

Historians will puzzle over this one. Of the six prime ministers that have led Britain over the last decade, with a seventh now on the way, it will be the fall of Keir Starmer that will most perplex the political analysts of the future.

They will ponder a man who won a landslide victory in July 2024 only to be pushed out less than two years later, having started no illegal wars, having triggered no grave economic crises, having been accused of no scandalous act of corruption.

What can we learn from the prime minister’s address in Downing Street and the people looking on? By Ben Quinn Photograph Sean Smith

Keir Starmer announced his intention to resign as Britain’s prime minister in a short speech on Monday morning.

Apart from the rain which poured down on his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, the scene was reminiscent of that which unfolded just under two years ago when the Conservative prime minister resigned.

PM said Labour had turned economy around – but his record on growth and unemployment appears mixed

Keir Starmer used his leaving speech to lay out a long list of Labour’s achievements in office – but his economic legacy appears mixed, with sluggish UK growth and higher employment costs.

The prime minister said his government had turned around an ailing economy, after 14 years of austerity. He said plans by the previous Tory administration to cut investment had been reversed and economic growth was the highest in the G7.

New Makerfield MP could get keys to No 10 sooner than his team would have liked – but he will need to deliver fast to succeed

• UK politics live – latest updates

It was 3.30am, just after the Wigan returning officer had read out Andy Burnham’s 9,231 majority, and a close adviser to Burnham texted: “We will need to be ready a lot sooner than we thought.”

Keir Starmer resigned on Monday before Burnham was even sworn in as an MP. Wes Streeting was out of the race an hour later. Burnham travelled down on the Avanti West Coast – yet to be nationalised – to Euston on a train that was delayed by 21 minutes. But everything else about the transition will be whiplash fast.

Expected successor to Keir Starmer has promised to understand voters outside London and those who feel unheard

In the story that Andy Burnham tells about himself, “the turning point” in his political life came in 2009 when he was booed at a football ground in the north-west of England. He had been an ideologically reliable middle-ranking minister under Tony Blair, the centrist New Labour prime minister between 1997 and 2007, and had gone on to be appointed as secretary of state for culture, media and sport under Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown.

On the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster – the fatal crowd crush that killed 97 Liverpool fans in 1989 – Burnham was representing Brown’s administration at Anfield, Liverpool’s famous stadium. But as he began to offer his words of condolence into a microphone on the pitch, the then 39-year-old minister’s speech was interrupted by loud and angry calls from the stands for justice for those who had been killed due to no fault of their own. A series of British governments had refused demands for a public inquiry into the disaster.

Analysts say foreign policy was an ‘area of relative strength’ for the prime minister – but goodwill with the White House soon evaporated

Keir Starmer inherited two wars and a country disconnected from the EU when he arrived in Downing Street – and that was before Donald Trump crash-landed at the White House and undermined the foundations of the UK’s most important alliance.

It was a context that would have tested any prime minister, though in many respects Starmer negotiated it carefully. But longer-term questions of Britain’s security remain unresolved, and the UK’s place in the world is less certain.

May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and now Starmer: each one was brought low for a reason. But what if the deeper problem is the office itself?

They were times in which prime ministers seemed to be on their way out as soon as they’d arrived. The big strategic decisions the country faced were ducked or postponed. The public finances repeatedly wobbled, yet efforts to rationalise the tax system faltered in the face of vested interests, including farmers. Reforms to social security were trumpeted before being diluted. The whole business of politics was animated by rancour and rivalry, rather than practical action. All the while, populists waited in the wings.

This is not a sneak peak into a future history book about today’s Britain, but a description of the French fourth republic, which staggered after a difficult birth in 1946 until 1958, when the exhausted regime ceded the authority to create a new order to Gen Charles de Gaulle, effectively putting itself out of its misery.

Former DUP leader convicted of 18 offences against two victims after high-profile trial that gripped Northern Ireland

• ‘A sinful nature’: how Jeffrey Donaldson was unmasked as a sexual predator

Jeffrey Donaldson has been found guilty of 18 sexual offences against two victims who were children at the time of the abuse more than 30 years ago.

The former Democratic Unionist party (DUP) leader was remanded into immediate custody after a jury at Newry crown court on Monday convicted him of 18 offences including rape, indecent assault and gross indecency. The judge, Paul Ramsey, said a “lengthy” prison sentence was inevitable.

UK Health Security Agency also issues red heat alert for six English regions, indicating risk to life even for the healthy

Met Office forecasters have issued a rare red weather warning for Wednesday and Thursday in the face of extreme heat and humidity, while a red heat health alert has been issued in England indicating “a risk to life for even the healthy population”.

The weather warning covers southern Wales as far west as Swansea, and an area of England that includes London and runs from the inland areas of Kent across to Somerset, as far north-west as Birmingham, and as far north-east as southern Cambridgeshire.

Barrister who was given material produced by Garfield AI says advocacy at trial ‘remained fundamentally human’

An artificial intelligence law firm has won a case in an English court, in what is believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer.

A freelance HR consultant, Tamires Camal Taquidir, paid the firm, Garfield AI, about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000.

Technology to be used in six more areas next year as critics say tens of thousands of people will be forced into ‘digital police lineup’

The Metropolitan police is to expand its use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology, first into London’s West End by Christmas and then into a further six areas next year.

The new cameras will be fixed, and could be attached to street furniture such as lamp-posts. Critics said the new plans mean tens of thousands of people will be forced into a “digital police lineup”.

⚽️ World Cup kick-off: 5pm ET/10pm BST/7am AEST
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Email Tim

And here’s our reporter at the game, Paul MacInnes. “Ground already packed for a match that has been highly anticipated in Philly,” he writes. “The French are here is big numbers (I followed a load of them to the ground today) but the Iraqi contingent is hardly to be sniffed at. They’ve packed out the stand behind one goal, and have been visible all over the city for the past few days.

“Just quickly, but the pre-match has been a weird one. Big load of load music and two hype merchants in the stands getting everyone up. But not all attempts have proven equal. There was a big cheer for the players as the teams were read out (and especially Mbappé) but not so much interaction when the call went up for everyone to ‘Join us in a round of applause for peace!’. I can only imagine Gianni Infantino will be saddened when he hears the news.”

Arrests are part of Operation Perth investigation into failures in NHS trust’s maternity services

Two men have been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in the running of a mortuary service at a hospital trust at the centre of the NHS’s largest inquiry into maternity services.

Nottingham University hospitals (NUH) NHS trust will be the focus of a major report on Wednesday into how failings led to the deaths of babies and serious harm to families.

Move for greater prominence on social media comes as ministers warn online misinformation risk becoming ‘existential for our democracy’

Plans to hand established broadcasters and media companies greater prominence on digital platforms such as YouTube and TikTok have been unveiled, as ministers warned online misinformation risked becoming “existential for our democracy”.

In proposals that set up a new clash with global tech companies, content from the likes of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 would have to be awarded more promotion by their algorithms – with special rules considered for times of social unrest or crisis.

Lewis Hawkes, 36, charged with five counts of attempted murder ‘aggravated by reason of having a terrorist connection’

A 36-year-old man has been charged with five counts of attempted murder “aggravated by reason of having a terrorist connection” after a series of attacks in Edinburgh last Friday.

Lewis Hawkes has also been charged with assault and robbery, two counts of breach of the peace and two counts of culpable and reckless conduct, all of which were also aggravated by reason of a terrorist connection.

President says ‘vandals’ to blame for algae blooms and peeling paint as $14m renovation to undergo further repairs

The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is set to be drained again after Donald Trump said on Monday – without providing proof – that five people were arrested for vandalism and five more are under investigation in connection to the algae blooms and peeling paint that appeared weeks after his ill-fated $14m renovation attempt.

“It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and refix it. They went in there with a knife,” Trump told reporters, describing what he first said was a 290- to 300ft slit in the paint but then later amended to a 350ft slit. He also said someone had put fertilizer into the water, which caused the algae to grow.

Guardian news editor David Batty spent years longing to meet his birth mother. But his reunion with the woman who had been forced to give him up was far from a fairytale ending. He explains why the legacy of forced adoption continues to cast such a long shadow

David Batty was seven years old when he was told he had been adopted. Years later, after learning more about his birth parents, he wanted to meet them. But when he was reunited with his mother, who had been forced to give him up, their relationship became strained.

David tells Annie Kelly how he came to be one of tens of thousands of children whose birth mothers were coerced into relinquishing them for adoption, often in the name of child’s “moral welfare”. The Church of England has apologised for its role in forced adoptions, and the government has indicated it will follow suit.

Trump-admiring Abelardo de la Espriella has vowed to ‘disembowel’ the left and kill criminals like ‘rats and cockroaches’

When more than 20 women accused a Colombian evangelical pastor in 2012 of sexually abusing them, the defendant’s lawyer sought to discredit the allegations by telling the court that they were “trepadoras” – a pejorative term meaning social climbers.

He ultimately secured his client’s acquittal – although the case remains under review by the supreme court – but footage of the remark resurfaced during Colombia’s presidential campaign, sparking outrage among many progressive voters.

After two forgettable seasons, the Game of Thrones prequel finally comes into its own – blazing back on to our screens with the most epic dragon-based smackdown imaginable. Fans can breathe a fiery sigh of relief!

Ah yes, House of the Dragon! Unlikely as it is that a megabucks Game of Thrones prequel with a blue-chip cast could be forgettable, in its first two seasons HotD did not help itself, with the first either killing off its best characters too soon or recasting them to accommodate bewildering time jumps, and the second building and building to nothing. It returns for a third run without much wind in its dragon wings.

Breathe a fiery sigh of relief, then, at the news that this show has found its focus. The start of season three is a fine epic, balancing big battles with sharp two-hander scenes where dominance shifts and fatal personality flaws are forced out. Add the odd new face and a blast of comic relief here and there and you have proper Thrones.

Mobility can’t be tracked on a leaderboard, but it can help you feel better and make daily tasks easier

Fitness is often measured through numbers: how much weight a person can lift, or how fast or far they can run. But one important metric is harder to quantify: mobility.

Mobility gets overlooked, because the relevant exercises do not “have the instant visual appeal of traditional workouts”, says Tyler McDonald, certified personal trainer and senior brand manager for the National Academy of Sports Medicine.

How to start meditating

How to start weightlifting

How to start budgeting

How to start running

90/90 hip switches: Sit on the floor with the front leg bent at a 90-degree angle (thigh out in front of you and calf perpendicular to you) and the back leg bent at a 90-degree angle (thigh out to the side, calf roughly parallel to you). Slowly rotate your knees to the opposite side without lifting your feet off the floor. “This is fantastic for opening tight hips,” McDonald says.

Cat-cow stretch. With your hands and knees on the ground, arch your back towards the ceiling, dropping your head between your arms. Then, slowly drop your back and raise your head and glutes towards the ceiling. This helps with spine mobility.

World’s greatest stretch. Yes, this stretch has quite the name, but for good reason. Start in a plank. Bring the right leg forward into a low lunge position. Stretch the right arm overhead towards the ceiling, twisting the upper body. Then, bring the right hand behind the head and attempt to touch the ground with the right elbow. “It hits your hips, hamstrings and upper back all at once, making it incredibly efficient,” says McDonald.

Rapping in Spanish used to be a hard sell to Britons – but the Puerto Rican star is making the Latin American community visible

At the Seven Sisters Latin Village in north London, construction is under way.

The market, which has become a centre for the British Latino community and has fought off a long battle against redevelopment, is paying homage to the biggest Latino star on the planet: Bad Bunny (real name Benito Martínez Ocasio).

‘I thought I could regain some power by writing a celebration of debauchery that was so brazenly sexual it would infuriate the people who insulted me’

Nancy Boy was about reclaiming the homophobic insults that were hurled at me every time I went out because I had long hair and wore eyeliner and nail polish. I’d walk into a bar and people would react vociferously, or guys would think I was a girl then get really aggressive when they found out my name was Brian. I thought I could regain some power by writing a celebration of debauchery that was so brazenly sexual it would piss off the people who insulted me even more.

A man of modest tastes, the departing PM excelled in dad chic. His hair, however, had an Instagram account all of its own

It will be little consolation to Keir Starmer, who had loftier ambitions for his term of office, that he made a good fist of the tricky brief of prime ministerial style. “He had good hair” is not the legacy he hoped for. But we are where we are.

Starmer’s prime ministerial look was smart, but unpretentious and unflashy. He looks good in a dark suit, which is a bonus in this job. His suits – often bought from Charles Tyrwhitt, where a standard price tag comes in at a typically restrained, Starmer-esque £350 – were well fitted, although menswear pedants pointed out that the sleeves were a little long. (A jacket sleeve should expose a half inch of shirt cuff, leaving the hands visible.) No flashy Rolex, either: Starmer’s watch of choice is a sensible Tissot, which costs about £320.

The president posted a picture of a blond woman on Truth Social – but it wasn’t Ivanka or Tiffany

Name: Donald Trump’s great daughter.

Age: Unknown.

Whether it’s a casserole dish or art inspired by the city they studied in, these are the gifts recent graduates told us they loved the most

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There’s considerable pride to be taken from graduating, and it’s a moment friends and family are often eager to mark with a gift. But what presents best cement this major milestone? As leaving celebrations of all stripes approach, we asked recent graduates to tell us about what they loved receiving, from the sentimental to the practical.

“When I graduated from York, my parents treated me to a meal at a restaurant I’d had my eye on since starting my course,” says reader Toby Beer, a biology graduate. “It was a brilliant send-off to celebrate my time in Yorkshire.”

It had to be Lionel Messi, it had to be on this day and perhaps it even needed to be in Dallas too. History was created in the way he knows best, a clinical left-footed flourish setting him out on his own as the World Cup’s highest goalscorer of all time. An occasion that already throbbed with an epic, cinematic quality had its moment for the ages and the genius who served it up will surely provide even more. A first golden boot would not be the worst present for an icon who turns 39 on Wednesday.

Nobody should expect anything less because Messi has no idea how to stop. Four minutes into added time this match was dying, a competent but blunt Austria showing no sign of dampening the mood. This was already Messi’s day, goal number 17 coming late in the first half and rarely looking anything but the winner in an otherwise unremarkable contest. Well, make that 18. There has never been a finer player because there has never been a brighter footballing mind, one that has been thoroughly exercised across a career spanning more than two decades but simply refuses to dull.

⚽️ World Cup kick-off: 8pm ET/1am BST/10am AEST
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Email Jeff

Jeff will be here shortly, in the mean time here’s Jonathan Wilson on a big tournament for African teams:

On Monday evening local time at New York New Jersey Stadium, Senegal will face Norway in a game that is not only crucial in terms of who qualifies from Group I, but will go a long way in determining how African performance at this World Cup is viewed. This is not entirely fair – nobody can seriously doubt that Senegal are an extremely adept side, and it may be that the court of arbitration for sport decides that they are indeed the reigning African champions – but there is a sense that Africa could do with a big performance.

Head coach wants players to use energy in the right spaces and is also getting the best out of an in-form Harry Kane

It didn’t take long for one wag in the travelling England caravan to come up with a deeply inappropriate nickname for that jazzed-up high-energy start to the second-half performance in Dallas last Wednesday. That name was: Packetball.

The word packet is, the Urban Dictionary confirms, slang for a small sachet of the same illegal and wholly inadvisable stimulant that was discovered in more than half of the Wembley Stadium toilets by a newspaper investigation after a home qualifier during the Southgate era.

French media outlet distanced itself from criticism of Doku’s plan to fly back from World Cup for birth of first child

The French media outlet L’Équipe has apologised to the Belgian footballer Jérémy Doku after he was criticised by one of its pundits for saying he would leave the World Cup to be present at the birth of his first child.

The Belgian football federation said Doku had made it back to London in time to be with his wife, Shireen, who gave birth to a boy called Praise ⁠on Monday.

• Rade Bogdanovic made comments on public broadcaster

• Former player and broadcaster apologises for statement

The former Yugoslavia and Atlético Madrid striker Rade Bogdanovic has sparked controversy on Serbian TV after saying that “Black players lack concentration beyond 60 to 80 minutes” during the Belgium v Iran World Cup match.

Bogdanovic, 56, made the comment on a World Cup programme aired by Serbia’s public broadcaster (RTS) late on Sunday night while discussing the 66th-minute red card shown to the Belgium defender Nathan Ngoy.

The PM is another butterfly broken on the wheel of the public gaze, not quite ready to accept his own limitations

• UK politics live – latest updates

They think it’s all over. It is now … It was all done with comparatively little fuss. No operational note sent out to the media. No timings given to the broadcasters. Just a small flurry of activity in the street outside No 10. Microphones and loudspeakers set up. Then the Podium of Doom. It was almost as if Keir Starmer was a little embarrassed about what was happening. Wanted as few people as possible to witness his departure.

Shortly before 9.30am, Downing Street staffers and a handful of cabinet ministers assembled to say goodbye. The Unhappy Few. The last remaining loyalists. David Lammy, Darren Jones, Richard Hermer and Douglas Alexander. No sign of Rachel Reeves. Maybe she had headed up to Manchester the night before so she could come back down with Andy Burnham on Monday morning. “What are the chances of meeting like this?”

The legendary music executive signed everyone from Patti Smith to Barry Manilow and changed the industry forever

• Clive Davis: music industry executive who signed Whitney Houston and Bruce Springsteen dies aged 94

• Clive Davis: a life in pictures from Diana Ross to Aretha Franklin

Clive Davis always claimed that his life in the music business was really kickstarted when he chose to attend the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival: it was there he saw Janis Joplin and her band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and immediately bought their contract for $200,000, the first really high-profile signing of his career. But Davis was an unlikely fit at the most high-profile event of the Summer of Love: he was a Harvard-educated lawyer who had been “shocked” when a restructuring of Columbia Records saw him promoted from general counsel to the company’s president. He was sharp enough to spot which way the pop cultural wind was blowing – “a revolution in culture and philosophy”, he later recalled, “the Haight-Ashbury scene, with love peace and flowers” – but he was no one’s idea of a hippy. Amid a sea of paisley, batik, love beads and bells, Davis turned up to the festival clad in “khaki pants and a tennis sweater”.

It was an image he would often recall for comic effect – “I was the costumed freak surrounded by everyone with flowers in their hair” – but there was something rather telling about it too: Davis’s skill as what used to be called a record man lay in his ability to balance the progressive with the traditional. He turned one wing of Columbia into something of a home for artists associated with the burgeoning counterculture, swiftly signing Santana, Blood Sweat and Tears, the Electric Flag and the wonderful psychedelic soul band the Chambers Brothers. But he never lost sight of the other side of the company, which dealt lucratively in soundtracks and easy listening and was home to Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett: at one juncture, he found himself simultaneously attempting to renegotiate the contracts of Bob Dylan and Andy Williams. When he founded Arista Records in 1974, he did exactly the same thing: it was a label that provided a home for both Patti Smith and Barry Manilow.

His government was directionless and confused, and from that murk emerged the Peter Mandelson scandal

On a bone-chillingly cold morning in January, it felt as if I had suddenly found at least part of the reason for Keir Starmer’s chronic unpopularity. I was in the Mancunian constituency of Gorton and Denton, where the prime minister and his people’s decision to block Andy Burnham from standing was about to hand victory to the Green party. More specifically, I was in a forlorn covered market about to be regenerated into a “food and drink cluster”, talking to a sixtysomething man nursing a mug of tea.

What, I wondered, did he think of the man at the top? He gave me roughly the same answer that I’d heard from a lot of my other interviewees: “I really don’t like him at all.” But like most other people I met that day, he couldn’t quite explain what fired his antipathy, which seemed to make it worse. His face scrunched into a mixture of scepticism and exasperation. “I don’t know why – I just don’t,” he said. The most specific answer I got from anyone else was: “He hasn’t done what he said he’d do.” So there it was: as well as a modern tendency to loathe politicians that regularly seems arbitrary, whipped-up and way over the top, a sense that Starmer’s sheer blankness – his painful lack of clarity and the absence of a halfway coherent story about his own government – was making a lot of people dislike and mistrust him all the more.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Negotiations with Reykjavík risk being bogged down by rigid accession rules. For strategic reasons, Brussels has to learn how to bend a little

Iceland is preparing for a referendum this summer on whether to restart negotiations with the EU about joining the bloc. If voters approve, the government in Reykjavík could complete talks for the country to become the EU’s 28th member state. Iceland is already part of the Schengen passport-free area, and has access to the EU single market through the European Economic Area, meaning that much of the regulatory groundwork for its integration is already done.

Yet the conversation about a possible Icelandic application for EU membership reveals a deeper issue: the European Union must rethink its own future admission of like-minded democracies as a geopolitical necessity.

Valérie Hayer is a French MEP and leader of the Renew Europe parliamentary group

As prime minister, Starmer acted with dignity. What a pity that those Labour colleagues who ousted him could not do the same

The toppling by his colleagues of Britain’s prime minister is humiliating, not only for Keir Starmer but for parliamentary democracy. It is a rejection of the electorate, which chose a party with Starmer at its head, and of Labour’s manifesto of less than two years ago, all in favour someone who, until last week, had not been an MP since 2017. Andy Burnham’s sole claim to Downing Street is that he is currently preferred by most Labour MPs. Two years ago, the same was true of Starmer. What has gone so wrong?

The reason Britain is now about to have its seventh prime minister in 10 years is rooted in the House of Commons’ behaviour as a frequently whimsical appointments board. Those sent to Westminster are entitled to do as they choose, but in recent history they have undertaken to honour the pledges given to their voters at election time. Starmer in 2024 presented a moderate Labour programme and has been struggling to enact it, often against a backdrop of hostile economic forces and declining public services. He could at least reasonably expect loyalty from his MPs.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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

Castlelake’s offer does not feel close to a knockout price – and it still needs to get shareholders (and Stelios) onboard

• US firm goes public with £4.7bn proposal to buy easyJet

It’s an obvious tactic for a would-be bidder to deploy when its offers have been rejected three times by the target’s board of directors: go public with the proposed terms and hope the shareholders demand new talks.

Castlelake’s playbook at easyJet is standard stuff and, since the “put up or shut up” bid deadline falls at end of this week, it had to try something. In its dream scenario, Stelios Haji-Ioannou would launch one of his old-style rockets at the easyJet board to shake things up. However, the airline’s founder and still 15% shareholder (with his family) has said nothing so far in support of either side.

As prime minister, he would have a unique chance to turn the world’s most bureaucratic health service into its most innovative one

If Andy Burnham moves from Manchester to No 10, he will be the first prime minister to have been health secretary in the history of the NHS. What might that mean for the troubled service? His commitment to social care is well known. But when the Treasury tells him there is no money, he is going to have to think hard about how to make his mark.

The UK now spends the fifth most of any OECD economy when it comes to government health spending as a proportion of GDP. That’s why health service insiders no longer say the issue is money but productivity. They have been puzzling over why, since 2020, the total number of staff across NHS England has grown by 20% but activity has only gone up by 10%. That’s part of the reason why waiting lists have remained stubbornly high and a significant part of the progress made in reducing them has come from “list cleaning” – removing people from lists who no longer need treatment – rather than actual increases in activity.

Jeremy Hunt served as secretary of state for health, later secretary of state for health and social care, from 2012 to 2018

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Keir Starmer won power but never explained Britain’s crisis. The new MP for Makerfield offers a sharper diagnosis – and one that voters can understand

Political careers often end when circumstances demand qualities that a politician cannot supply. That seems especially true of Sir Keir Starmer. On Monday, he stepped down as Labour leader, hours before Andy Burnham arrived at Westminster to take his seat as MP for Makerfield.

Sir Keir’s achievements were real. He won a large parliamentary majority in 2024, provided more cash for the NHS and was steadfast in his support of Ukraine. He undoubtedly restored a measure of seriousness after years of Tory psychodrama. But the 2024 victory was always more brittle than it seemed: Labour’s vote actually fell from 2019 and Nigel Farage’s decision to stand candidates in 2024 fractured rightwing votes. Sir Keir won power; he did not change the political weather.

The work of one of Italy’s greatest scholars focused on ordinary lives oppressed by power and prejudice. That approach resonates today

Reflecting on the genesis of his most famous work, Carlo Ginzburg wrote that by immersing himself in the trial of a 16th-century miller burned by the Roman Inquisition, he turned a possible footnote into a book. Fifty years on, after being translated around the world, The Cheese and The Worms still stands as a supreme exemplar of historical research devoted to the lives of “the persecuted and the vanquished”.

Ginzburg’s death last week, at the age of 87, means that one of the last living links with a remarkable postwar generation of historians has gone. In its passion for reconstructing the fabric of lives previously thought too marginal to bother with, his writing had affinities with EP Thompson’s “history from below” movement and the Annales school in France. As the rise of 21st-century authoritarianism creates new generations of scapegoats and misfits, the approach of one of Italy’s greatest scholars speaks directly to our times.

Readers react to the news that Keir Starmer is to step down as prime minister, with Andy Burnham his most likely successor

What an enormous betrayal. A whole load of selfish MPs, opportunist cabinet members and self-seeking lightweights have destroyed the work of a decent, rational and honest man and prime minister. As a member of the Labour party since 1959, for the first time I am profoundly disappointed by our collective behaviour. We are now going to have a drastic change of government.

Ministers will be changed, policies will change, but will have no time to mature. After two more years, the country will move to the chaotic right. Nothing will have been achieved by this mess. Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner, and their turncoat supporters, will all have played a part in sending the Labour party into the political wilderness for a generation to come.
Arthur Gould
Loughborough, Leicestershire

Dr Denis MacShane says Labour figures were willing to break ranks over Europe, and implores Conservatives to tell the truth about Brexit. Plus a letter from Zhengli Zhou

Timothy Garton-Ash is right to be worried that Brexit Britain’s political class is now monolingual, with very little personal contact with deciders in the EU (If the UK wants to rejoin the European Union, it first needs to understand it, 15 June).

He lists pro-EU forces in politics and polls, but it is an error to assume that politicians will not buckle and bend faced with the united onslaught of media Europhobia, especially the Musk-Vance bottomless purses to campaign on behalf of Donald Trump against Europe.

As well as a government apology, parents, charities and mother and baby homes should take responsibility, writes Christine Hayes

The adoption of babies in the 1960s and 70s has become a hot topic again (Forced adoption survivors to get full apology from UK government, says Phillipson, 17 June). As an adoption social worker at that time, I remember the trauma suffered by birth parents when their babies were removed for adoption. However, I’m afraid that the parents of these women cannot be let off the hook.

Young women and girls who became pregnant outside of marriage were told by their parents that they had brought shame on the family, and that they were to go away and not return until the baby was no longer with them. This was the norm in society then, and children’s charities played a big part. Mother and baby homes were carrying out what society requested.

Michael Pyke says those sitting on piles of unearned wealth should be willing to help out a less fortunate generation

Your correspondent asserts that the increase in the value of his house since he bought it “just about covers all associated costs over that time” (Letters, 15 June). If that is true he has been remarkably unlucky. A house bought in 1965 for £3,500 would now be worth around £87,500 had its value simply kept pace with the rate of inflation, rather than its current market value of £350,000. A house that cost £20,000 in 1975 would now be worth around £220,000 instead of £900,000.

It is hard to imagine what “associated costs” would come anywhere near such huge increases in value. As for the idea that anyone could buy a house if they avoided “fancy holidays”, “£50,000 weddings” and “ridiculous £90,000 cars” (cars costing this much made up, at most, 0.75% of new registrations last year), this kind of thinking was parodied in the novels of Charles Dickens.

• Champions expected to make an approach for forward

• Fee could be around £100m for Villa’s England player

Arsenal are expected to make an approach to sign Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa after identifying the England forward as their primary transfer target this summer.

The Premier League champions want to strengthen Mikel Arteta’s squad and are hopeful of bringing Rogers to north London, although he could cost up to £100m. Talks with Villa have yet to commence but they are expected to make contact in the coming weeks. The former European champions do not want to sell the 23-year-old, who also has interest from Chelsea and others, but Arsenal are confident of doing a deal.

• Argentina forward wants to ‘fulfil dream’ by departing

• Barcelona, Real Madrid and PSG linked with 26-year-old

Julián Alvarez has said he wants to ⁠leave Atlético Madrid to “fulfil his dream” following reported interest from Barcelona, Real Madrid ⁠and Paris Saint-⁠Germain.

“I ​spoke with people at the club [Atlético], with those I had to speak with, ⁠and the best thing for everyone is a transfer and I want to fulfil ⁠my dream,” Alvarez said after Argentina’s World Cup Group ​J win over Austria.

• Draper defeats Marcos Giron 6-4, 7-6 (5) in first round

• Murray in player box alongside fellow coach Trotman

An amusing question at the beginning of this new, hopeful chapter in Jack Draper’s career was tendered to the 24-year-old without hesitation before his return to competition in Eastbourne this week. In the heat of a dispiriting, stressful battle on court, when things are going badly and he might need to discharge some of his tension, would he ever allow himself to scream at Andy Murray?

The prospect of hollering expletives at his idol, friend and new coach drew laughter from Draper. Then he shook his head: “I don’t think so,” Draper said. “Maybe a few times I’ve said something to my team but it’s mainly anger at myself. I’ve never been someone who goes off at my team, because I have a great relationship with all of them. I have too much respect for Andy and Trots [James Trotman, his other coach] to be doing that.”

• Caluori, Fisilau, Janse van Rensburg, Sela, Kloska selected

• Fin Smith says he had to ‘fake’ confidence after Lions tour

At some stage there will be better times ahead for English rugby. They have an encouraging amount of young talent, a decent age profile and another 15 months to develop prior to the 2027 Rugby World Cup. Get it right – and they have a more than promising draw – and the sunlit uplands could yet be glimpsed in Australia next year.

That, at least, is the cosy scenario. First, though, there is the equivalent of a precarious looking rope bridge to be crossed by those named in Steve Borthwick’s squad for this summer’s inaugural leg of the Nations Championship. Three Tests in three continents in successive weeks with a squad lacking its regular captain and on a four-match losing streak is not the idyllic travel brochure it might have been.

The major winner has rebuilt both his swing and confidence and learned to function without the approval of the masses

On the evening before he won the US Open for a second time in four years, Wyndham Clark marched up the 18th fairway at Shinnecock Hills to put the finishing touches on a third round that would leave him six shots clear of the field. He had spent the past three days patiently defanging one of the crown jewels of American golf, building the third-largest 54-hole advantage held by a US Open leader since the second world war. The title was his to lose.

Yet when Clark arrived at the final green on Saturday bathed in golden-hour light, one thing was conspicuously absent: the crowd. Most of the spectators had left or were leaving and the grandstands around the green were only thinly populated. It was a remarkably muted backdrop for America’s once-and-future champion golfer as he stood on the doorstep of a rare wire-to-wire US Open victory.

Other measures include Washington lifting sanctions on Tehran’s oil exports and reopening the strait of Hormuz

Iran has agreed to allow UN nuclear inspectors back into the country as part of an agreement under which Washington will lift sanctions on Tehran’s oil exports and the strait of Hormuz will reopen, the US vice-president, JD Vance, has said.

Long-term independent monitoring of Iran’s nuclear programme, which it says is for energy purposes only, was in effect halted last summer after Israel and the US attacked the country. Tehran suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in response to strikes on its nuclear facilities.

President did not provide evidence that ‘knife’ and ‘fertilizer’ were used to cause algae bloom and cut that keeps growing in the telling

• Trump’s reflecting pool claims factchecked

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California sued the Environmental Protection ⁠Agency ⁠on ​Monday after the agency sent Congress landmark state vehicle emissions rules for ⁠potential repeal, Reuters reports.

According to the EPA, waivers under ‌the Clean Air Act ‌for California environmental regulations that had been approved under prior Democratic administrations should have been sent to lawmakers ‌under the Congressional Review Act.

Observations suggest comet spent billions of years on ‘vast unimaginable trajectories’ around our galaxy

An interstellar comet that blazed past the sun last year could be nearly three times older than our solar system and is unlike anything ever before seen in our cosmic back yard, astronomers said on Monday.

The comet 3I/Atlas is just the third visitor from beyond our solar system that humanity has ever observed, its unusual brightness offering scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study something that came from elsewhere in the galaxy.

Company wants to sell objects despite agreements to only display them at museums and traveling exhibitions

A plan to auction more than 100 artifacts salvaged from the wreckage of the Titanic – including personal belongings, currency, kitchen items and decor – is facing pushback from the US government, according to newly unsealed court documents.

RMS Titanic Inc, the company that owns exclusive salvage rights to the famous wreck deep in the North Atlantic, wants to sell the artifacts for the first time despite previous agreements to only display them at museums and traveling exhibitions.

Firms including BP and 7-Eleven accused of coordinating prices to ‘wring more money from pockets of consumers’

Gas ⁠station ​operators including BP, Circle K, Marathon, 7-Eleven, Walmart and Albertsons were sued on Monday by California drivers ⁠who accused them of using artificial intelligence to boost prices at the pump.

According to a proposed class action, the defendants ⁠violated California’s main antitrust law, the Cartwright Act, by using an AI-based tool that ​uses data from competing gas ‌stations to “coordinate high prices ‌and wring more money from the pockets of consumers”.

Prime minister was forced to row back on some policies despite strong support among voters for climate action

Keir Starmer has faced a problem no Labour government has needed to deal with before. His energy and climate policies – core to solving the cost of living crisis – have come under attack from opposition parties, which have made dismantling the agenda one of their top priorities, second only to immigration, in their pitch to voters.

This is new in British politics, where a cross-party consensus on the climate and environment has held at least since the days of Margaret Thatcher. She warned the UN of the climate crisis in 1988; David Cameron in 2006 urged voters to “vote blue, go green”; Theresa May enshrined in law the requirement to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; Boris Johnson championed the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2021; even Rishi Sunak only tried a partial rollback of green policies as a last desperate throw before calling an election.

Forced to stay home or switch jobs, working mothers are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis as classes go online for weeks or months at a time

Outside, the temperature has passed 41C (105.8F). Inside Sakshi Katyal’s city apartment, the air conditioner is blasting but it does little to relieve the stress of balancing housework and helping her five-year-old log in on a laptop to online classes. Her daughter’s school closed in May and Katyal is not clear when it will reopen. Probably not till the autumn.

Schools across Delhi and in about half of India’s 28 states have been ordered to close from mid-May until the end of June, when in many places the summer break starts. There is no official record of closures in past years but the Guardian has spoken to school officials who say the number of days schools are shut for because of the heat has risen sharply. The impact on families, especially on working women, has been huge.

A national heatwave plan has been activated to help people stay cool during the Netherlands’ increasingly hot summers

Households in Amsterdam are being urged to hang their curtains outside their windows as health experts recommend simple hacks to moderate the heatwave rolling across the Netherlands, where homes were built for old-fashioned damp and coldish northern European weather.

In a viral social media post last week, Eline Coolen, the heat coordinator at the city’s public health institute, urged sweaty city-dwellers to rig up temporary curtain rails or drape curtains or sheets outside to stop the sun’s rays reaching their large windows.

UN’s World Food Programme and agriculture agency issue joint appeal for funds to avert global hunger crisis before it happens

Adugna Woyessa was a little boy the first time drought tore his country apart. As harvests failed in rain-starved regions of Ethiopia in the early 1970s, and his school turned a classroom into a grain store for farmers to send aid, he had no idea that scientists were beginning to connect the force parching its fields with cyclical shifts in trade winds that had long supercharged violent weather from South America to Australia.

The now notorious El Niño – Spanish for “little boy” – was named by fishers in the Pacific in the 1800s, but it was not until the 1970s that scientists understood its global nature and began to piece together the historical impact of the natural weather pattern characterised by hot years and brutal extremes.

Guilty pleas span three-year period, including sexually assaulting her with another man in 2024

A man accused of conspiring with others to drug and rape his unconscious wife has admitted sexually assaulting her over a period of three years.

The man, in his 60s, pleaded guilty to two counts of rape and 10 sexual offences at Minshull Street crown court in Manchester.

Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers, linked to the Scattered Spider hacking group, change pleas on first day of trial

Two British cybercriminals from the Scattered Spider hacking group have pleaded guilty to a cyber-attack on Transport for London in 2024 that cost £39m and affected 10 million people.

Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 18, pleaded guilty to offences under the Computer Misuse Act at Woolwich crown court on Monday.

Head of Greater Manchester force rejects claims of anti-white bias but says he understands where it comes from

Policing in Britain has “adopted the language of activism” and official guidance has “over-corrected” to combat accusations of racism, one of the UK’s most senior officers has said.

Sir Stephen Watson, the chief constable of Greater Manchester police, said he did not believe that “two-tier policing” existed or that forces were biased against white people.

People smugglers have been using lorries to bring people deported to France under the deal back to the UK

The UK and France have been forced to rewrite the “one in, one out” deal because of concerns over the numbers of people re-entering the UK after being removed to the continent.

The original treaty said people arriving in small boats could be returned to France. But people smugglers have used lorries to bring people who had been deported to France under the deal back to the UK.

Davis, who discovered many of the defining musicians of the 20th century and helmed major record labels, said he ‘never’ tired of the music business

• Clive Davis predicted music’s biggest stars like no one else

• Clive Davis: a life in pictures from Diana Ross to Aretha Franklin

The famed US music industry executive and record producer Clive Davis has died aged 94, his family has confirmed.

He had recently been hospitalised with respiratory problems and was recovering at home. He had also been diagnosed with neurological condition Bell’s palsy in 2021.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says strikes on oil facilities part of ‘long-range sanctions’ intended to isolate the territory

Ukraine has stepped up its strikes on Crimea as part of a strategy to isolate the occupied peninsula from mainland Russia and raise the cost of the occupation.

On Sunday, Russian-installed authorities suspended civilian fuel sales until at least Wednesday, a move that underscored Ukraine’s growing ability to disrupt supply lines linking Crimea to Russia.

José Luis Ábalos found to have taken bribes on Covid-era public contracts in damaging blow to Pedro Sánchez

Spain’s supreme court has jailed the former transport minister José Luis Ábalos for 24 years for taking bribes on public contracts for sanitary equipment such as ‌face masks during the Covid pandemic.

Ábalos’s aide, Koldo García, was jailed for 19 years in a trial that is one of several scandals to have enveloped the government of Pedro Sánchez over recent months.

Military evades sanctions by using hobbyists’ motorised aircraft to bomb civilians in opposition-held territory

They appear after midnight, slowly crossing Myanmar’s skies. The motorised paragliders are improvised aircraft, suspending small metal frames from brightly coloured sails. They drift over a patchwork of villages, farmland, forests and winding rivers.

Each “paramotor” has two or three soldiers strapped in – one piloting, the others holding the bombs. Their craft are powered through the sky by small, rattling engine propellers, heading towards the lowland villages. Finally, switching their engines off to glide low and near silently through the dark, the men throw their explosives.

Signal agencies in Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada sound alarm after Trump blocks foreign nationals from Anthropic’s Fable AI model

Powerful AI models capable of devastating new cyber attacks on governments and businesses are mere months away, intelligence agencies for the Five Eyes have warned in a rare joint statement, urging leaders to “act now”.

The surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called Fable.

Investment company Castlelake made bid public for shareholders to evaluate but carrier describes offer as ‘cheap’

• Nils Pratley: EasyJet bidder is still offering less than a full ticket

The US investment firm trying to buy easyJet has gone public with its latest £4.7bn takeover proposal for the budget airline, its third and latest offer to be rejected.

Castlelake said on Monday that an all-cash offer of 625p a share, valuing easyJet at just over £4.7bn, had been rejected by the airline’s board on Sunday, after previous offers at 560p and 600p.

Babcock reports underlying operating profits down 19%, with frigate-building programme making a loss

• Business live – latest updates

One of the UK’s biggest defence contractors has blamed Brexit and Covid among a catalogue of problems to beset an important contract for the Royal Navy, which led its annual profits to plunge.

Profits at Babcock International fell by almost a fifth in the year to the end of March, as the firm reported a £140m charge on its contract to build five Type 31 frigates for the Royal Navy.

Investigation finds AI content that purports to show genuine customers, prompting calls for greater transparency

Brands promoting their products online are quietly deploying AI-generated influencers on social media, an investigation has found, prompting calls for greater transparency.

The findings suggest companies are increasingly turning to AI-generated content that purports to show genuine customer experiences while giving no obvious indication that the people featured are not real.

The writer made headlines when she accused the world’s wealthiest man of lacking joy, culture, a sense of beauty … Meanwhile, her own life has been an attempt to understand and explain the world. She talks us through her latest book

‘Many people, including myself, spend a lot of time thinking about the past. And if you’re living in the same house you were living in with a spouse, the spouse is all around. Nonetheless, it’s not healthy to live in the past; I think we all know that.” Joyce Carol Oates is speaking to me from a book-lined room – one that makes you finally understand what “den” means – at her home in Princeton, New Jersey. She teaches at Princeton University as well as teaching advanced creative writing at Rutgers, also in New Jersey.

The author turned 88 this month, but she looks little changed from the 1960s, when she came to prominence: weightless like a sprite, focused and serious like a librarian. She has been a prolific writer, with more than 60 novels and many volumes of short stories to her name, earning her five Pulitzer prize nominations and a National Book award, among others, since the start of her career. Blonde, a haunting, fictionalised account of the life of Marilyn Monroe, Them, part of the Wonderland quartet, and Zombie, loosely based on the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, are often name-checked as career highs, but her consistency is striking. When she wanted to write mysteries, she did so under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. Her works of nonfiction, mainly criticism and memoir, would constitute a career on their own.

Laborious and bombastic thriller set in a forest where a maniacal woodsman and a cast of irritating victims converge with gory results

No low-budget horror movie can apparently now be greenlighted without featuring the obligatory posse of supremely irritating victims ripe for the culling. Pitfall director James Kondelik is evidently unbothered that this might make his bloody agenda too blatant; even his “sympathetic” characters – a pair of grieving siblings on a wilderness trip to commemorate their parents – bleat out their issues at such length that it’s sweet relief when a maniac woodsman (played by former UFC fighter Randy Couture) arrives to shut them up in a laborious and bombastic survival horror.

Pitfall plays a bit as if the cast of Friends had strayed into Deliverance. Ashley (Alexandra Essoe) and her brother Scott (Marshall Williams) are returning several years later to the forest location where their parents died in a car accident after hitting a deer. Their respective other halves, Charlie (Matt Hamilton) and Gwen (Jordan Claire Robbins), are in tow – as well as carping spare wheel Lars (Richard Harmon). But Scott and Charlie’s credentials as outdoorsmen are rumbled when, fleeing from wolves, the former falls into a spiked hunting pit of the type he’d warned everyone to avoid a few hours earlier.

After Benita Raphan took her own life in 2021, director and friend Berliner spent years poring over her unfinished work to create a documentary unlike anything else

This is a one-of-a-kind documentary that has been coaxed and cut together by veteran film-maker Alan Berliner (Intimate Stranger, First Cousin Once Removed), who also serves as its narrator – but most of its graphics, footage and imagery were made by film-maker Benita Raphan, also the subject of the film. As such, it’s not exactly a collaboration since Raphan took her own life in 2021, for reasons the film gently tries to untangle. Nevertheless, Berliner commits to creating in this film something that limns the fragile spirit, startling originality and dogged, and indeed doggy, kindness of his canine-loving late friend.

In the process, Berliner has completed the unfinished film she was worrying over when she died but at the same time makes something entirely new; it might be called a tribute perhaps, or a bio-pastiche, or maybe a found-footage cinematic seance. Any way you slice and dice it, it’s a strangely entrancing work, an “irregular verb” like its subject, as she was described by her mother Roslyn in her New York Times obituary.

The latest in our series of writers highlighting their comfort films is a look at an endlessly quotable antidote to bro-focused comedies

At this year’s Oscars ceremony, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne and Ellie Kemper lined up on stage to celebrate 15 years of Bridesmaids. Frankly, as awards bits go it was a little hard to watch, and the lineup was missing Wendi McLendon-Covey (recovering from a neck lift, naturally), but I had a small thrill seeing them together anyway: Bridesmaids has been my comfort film for almost half my life.

Bridesmaids, written by Wiig and Annie Mumolo and directed by Paul Feig, arrived in a confetti shower in 2011. It follows Annie (Wiig) – already in a fragile state following the collapse of her bakery, her relationship and her living situation – as she navigates being maid of honour for her best friend Lillian (Rudolph). We don’t see much of Dougie, Lillian’s fiance: it’s Annie and Lillian’s relationship that takes centre stage here. They have the sort of friendship it seems impossible to break, built on years of love, shared tastes and endless inside jokes – that is, until the wedding planning begins, and Annie finds herself ill-equipped to lead the motley crew of bridesmaids Lillian has assembled in the run-up to the wedding. No one poses a greater threat to the friendship or Annie’s headspace than Helen (Byrne), the perfectly manicured wife of Dougie’s boss. Helen is everything Annie is not: pristine, well-connected and apparently excellent at organising bachelorette parties. They clash constantly, with increasingly messy results.

Prepare yourself for more epic battles in House of the Dragon. Plus: an art-inspired murderer is on the loose in French crime thriller Polar Park

9pm, Sky Atlantic
It’s easy to forget what last happened in the disappointingly dull Game of Thrones prequel two years ago. But the bloodiest naval battle in Westeros history – the Battle of the Gullet – actually kicks season three off with a bang. The Targaryen civil war finally gets into full gory swing, with Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) orchestrating their moves for the Iron Throne. Yes, there are still too many dislikable characters moping around, and it’s not a great sign when the only one you feel anything for is a fire-breathing dragon. But there’s no denying the wow factor of epic sword clashes like this one – and there are plenty more promised ahead. Plus added James Norton! Hollie Richardson

Various venues, Suffolk
The second weekend boasted brand new music by Davies and Waley-Cohen, the premiere of Alex Ho and Rockey Sun Keting’s Chronicle, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with Kevin Edusei on exhilarating form

Percussionists are classical music’s original multitaskers. But even by their standards, Colin Currie is a virtuosic outlier. For portions of the world premiere of Tansy Davies’s percussion concerto Earth Works, Currie sat almost motionless at the kit except from the elbow down, as he sent a complex, glitchy weave of cymbal and drum skittering across an orchestral texture that ran on an altogether more monumental timescale. An arm shot out from behind a screen of tubular bells to reach a hi-hat cymbal amid an invisible juggling act dominated by what sounded like cowbells. There was a passage centred on an upturned dustbin and a tiny gong that might have been a small dangling frying pan. There were multiple just-in-time dashes back to a drumkit.

Behind Currie, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales looped melodic cells and exposed strata of flutter-tongued brass and delicate veils of strings, thick wodges of double bass, searing woodwind and elemental rumbles of orchestral percussion rolling across the stage.

The 44th president’s latest podcast is a slick, excellently researched look at the post-slavery period in the US. Plus, a troubling foray into the world of swinging

Who would have thought, back in 2008, that Barack Obama (pictured above) would become one of podcasting’s biggest movers and shakers? The former president is front and centre of this series on the post-slavery period in the US, a collaboration with Malcolm Gladwell for Audible and the History Channel. It’s slick and excellently researched, but it’s the calibre of conversation and careful dot-joining that make it so compelling. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

The disco-pop great salutes the sexiness of Marvin Gaye and the spirituality of Amazing Grace. But which of her own hits does she sing at karaoke?

The first song I fell in love with
I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, with five brothers and one sister, so there was always music in the house. I remember my mom singing Willow Weep for Me when I was five or six. There was something about the sadness in it that really moved me.

The first single I bought
I heard Why Do Fools Fall in Love by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers on the radio and bought it from a local record store. I was singing in the hallway of our building when a neighbour leaned over and asked: “Gloria, was that you singing?” She thought it was the radio. That was the moment I decided I was going to be a singer.

Hearing their in-your-face banger was a turning point for me – and I’ve never looked back

At the end of 2011, party season was under way but I was in no mood for festivities. Two years into fertility treatment, my body was pumped full of synthetic hormones and felt like a pin cushion, while my head was filled with both the fragile hope of having a baby, and the exhaustion of failed clinical attempts to do so.

I was in my late 20s. I met my husband when I was 22; we got married when I was 25. “I want to have kids young,” I’d told him. It was a feeling I’d harboured since my teenage years. But I’d also had the nagging sense that it might not come easily to me. As it turned out, my intuition was right. Approaching 28, I was a regular on the infertility merry-go-round.

A vivid and entertaining polemic on the economics of the tech revolution, filled with righteous ire

As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt  could tell you, AI is a hard sell these days. Last month, he tried talking up the AI revolution during a commencement address at the University of Arizona and was loudly booed by students about to enter an AI-ravaged job market. His discombobulation was telling.

Schmidt is not the only AI booster to crash out with students recently as the popular backlash grows. Every week brings a new story about some writer, publisher or academic who has torched their reputation by using an unreliable chatbot. Most US voters are opposed to the construction of vast, resource-guzzling new datacentres. A majority believe AI will negatively impact not just jobs but creativity and human relationships. In some quarters, saying that AI has any benefits at all is akin to saying that biological warfare gets a bad rap. As a New York Times column put it: “AI populism is here. And no one is ready.”

At 80, SF author M John Harrison is producing some of his best work. He talks about finding his voice, alien intelligence and the advice from Iain Banks that still spurs him on

Three years ago, in a greasy spoon on the fringes of the City of London, M John Harrison – Mike to his friends – told me about the novel he was working on. Rather than describing its plot or characters, he spoke purely about the challenge the book presented to him as a writer. With this one, he said, he wanted to push things as far as they could go.

Now that book, The End of Everything – his 13th novel – is about to be published. It describes a disintegrating Britain in which the iGhetti – monstrously sized, extremely powerful and strange lifeforms that look like powdery, slow-motion explosions – rule the country and possibly the world. Or do they? In its unwillingness to divulge any more than its characters know, which isn’t much, the novel is more alien evasion than invasion.

This bold debut about a woman finding healing after a late miscarriage is written with utter conviction

Birth. “A detaching, a loosening of something, then the pain of it.” A small, curled and crinkled creature is wrested from that pain. But then, instead of the long-awaited cry of a newborn: silence.

This is the background of Anna Goldreich’s highly accomplished, calmly devastating first novel The Leveret, a book that asks us to see late miscarriage as the death it feels like for many mothers. Since this miscarriage, six months ago, Clare has felt everyone, including her partner Phoebe, impatiently expecting her to get on with her life. But she remains floored by loss, stuck waiting for that first cry.

This study of the struggle for rights includes incredible personal stories that we should all be more familiar with

You could take two outwardly contradictory lessons from the historian David Turner’s new book on disability in the UK. First, that alarmingly little has changed for disabled people since the beginning of the modern age (the book’s first few stories, of 17th-century men and women having to prove they were disabled enough to receive parish support to avoid starvation, will be familiar to anyone who has tried to claim the personal independence payment). And second, that absolutely everything has changed - from the closing of asylums to the advent of prosthetics to the eventual, belated enshrining of disability rights in law.

But the central argument of Disability helps to reconcile these two narratives into a coherent whole. Turner, a professor at Swansea University, shows that while public and political attitudes to disability have remained poor, disabled people have challenged them at every stage, wresting progress out of even the most unpromising circumstances. This is not a story of rights and dignity bestowed from on high, but of the people and communities clawing them into being.

As phrases like easter eggs and looksmaxxing enter everyday language, what other words from the world of video games might soon be mainstream?

Twenty years ago, video games were seen as a niche hobby dominated by hardcore enthusiasts, tucked away in obscure online forums and gaming meet-ups. Back then, the idea that governments would use footage from Call of Duty and gaming terms such as “killstreaks” as war propaganda would have been absurd. Then the 2010s happened: nerd culture popularised, previously online-only spaces began to meld with the real world, and gaming went mainstream.

Now, gaming references have entered common parlance – at the end of 2024, video game terms including “cheat code” and “cutscene” were even added to the Oxford English Dictionary – and they increasingly crop up in politics, too. Earlier this year, the official White House X account posted footage of military strikes on Iran interspersed with footage from the video game Grand Theft Auto. Six days later, another video was posted, this time interspersing military footage with clips from Nintendo’s 2006 game Wii Sports. Video game references aren’t reserved for the political right, either: in February 2026, Democrat representative of New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quipped, “Why does this guy always talk like a World of Warcraft npc [non-player character]?” in response to a post on X by Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff.

When a company decided to shut down an online game’s servers, there wasn’t much the players who had bought that title could do – until a group called Stop Killing Games began lobbying for new consumer protection laws

You can never be sure how long an online video game will last. Developer BioWare shut off sci-fi shooter Anthem’s servers in January, after seven years. Electronic Arts discontinued access to The Sims Mobile the same month. Wildlight Entertainment shuttered its Highguard servers in March, mere months after the game’s release. Activision Blizzard took Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile offline in April. Dozens more games have had their servers shut down in the first six months of 2026, adding to an already long list of video games that are no longer playable.

There is little that players can do when a company decides to stop supporting online play. Communities work hard to keep their favourite games online, sometimes keeping dead games running on private servers, though that may not necessarily be entirely legal. Generally, though, when a game goes offline it is dead and it’s not coming back.

PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch 2, PC; Team Asano/Square Enix
Upbeat, charmingly retro RPG full of treasure-hunting, temple-roaming, monster-slaying and princess-saving is an absolute blast to play

You can’t help but wonder if developer Team Asano is in a private competition with itself to come up with the most ridiculous name for a video game. Following Project Triangle Strategy and Bravely Default: Flying Fairy we have this mouthful: The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales. It’s a playable love letter to the Zelda adventures of yesteryear rendered in the studio’s trademark glorious 2D-HD art style, melding evocative pixel sprites with modern visual effects.

From west Philabieldia, born and raised, our hero is adventurer Elliot. The antagonist making trouble in the neighbourhood is a king’s dastardly aide intent on summoning an ancient evil. The story is pure after-school-TV schlock, fully voice-acted but still unafraid to make you sit through reams and reams of text, and the action comprises treasure-hunting, temple-roaming and dispatching monsters. It’s part Chrono Trigger, part Oracle of Seasons as our almost obnoxiously upbeat hero journeys through the ages in order to solve puzzles, tip his fedora and of course, save a princess.

After the billion-dollar company’s leaders sent staff a memo saying the brand had ‘over-extended’, game studios may be in the firing line

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In March 2000, Bill Gates stood onstage at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and, to a packed crowd, officially announced the company’s long-anticipated video game console. “We want Xbox to be the platform of choice for the best and most creative game developers in the world,” he told attenders – and that was indeed the intention of the small, dedicated team who put together the blueprints of that first machine.

The Xbox landscape seems very different 25 years later. Last week, mere days after a bullish summer showcase full of Gears of War revivals and promises of a renewed focus on Xbox’s gaming strengths, new CEO, Asha Sharma, and chief content officer, Matt Booty, wrote a memo to Xbox staff inviting them to brace for “hard truths”. “Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20bn on ongoing investments in our content, platform and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue,” it read.

Tate Modern, London
Frida Kahlo took self-portraiture to new levels of interior revelation and her work takes you deep into her mystery. So why is this show padded out with responses by lesser artists?

Charisma is something you can’t fake and Frida Kahlo had it before she became an artist, let alone a modern hero. In photographs, the teenaged Frida appears both in a silk dress staring boldly from beneath her already colliding black eyebrows, and posing as a man in suit and tie. In a home movie her husband, the Marxist mural painter Diego Rivera, woos her and they cuddle. Those were the good times. Rivera is so fat and ugly next to his wife, you’d think he would have appreciated his luck more.

Every image of Kahlo is interesting but nobody could portray her like she portrayed herself. She took self-portraiture to new levels of interior revelation, psychological and physical. Inspired partly by the surrealists and partly by Catholic traditions of depicting pain, Kahlo took herself apart and put herself back together in images of suffering, survival and triumph. In her 1937 painting The Heart, she stands neat and calm while a sword pierces her chest and her disembodied arms reappear in two floating, otherwise empty outfits. The most complete of the Fridas has a brace on her left foot which could be a Freudian symbol except it’s a factual reference to the physical challenges she suffered all her life after she was severely injured in a bus crash when she was 18.

Japan House, London
This darkly atmospheric exhibition pairs the revolutionary Hiroshima images of revered photographer Kikuji with Ai’s glittering but deeply melancholy visions of cherry blossom

Japan House’s first, free photography exhibition, Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai begins with slow-burning suggestions of fire: a box of Lucky Strike cigarettes, its surface crackling and curled; Coca-Cola bottles sinking into a dark bed of crushed ashes. Kawada took the photographs with a 4x5 plate camera; here they’re reprinted on washi paper, the textures and density of the blackness making them even more evocative of obliteration. They are vestiges of American culture in the wake of American violence – images found in the wreckage of Hiroshima in the aftermath of atomic destruction.

Kawada, now 93, is a photo geek’s photographer; people have paid up to £25,000 for a copy of Chizu (The Map), the photobook that collects together his tense, ruminative Hiroshima impressions, made when he was in his 20s. A series of seemingly abstract images depicts the stains on the wall – all that remained of bodies in the Genbaku (A-Bomb) Dome. Kawada was 12 when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. His approach to capturing one of the worst scenes of mass destruction in human history was to tell it with a kind of detachment, indirect and impressionistic, fragmented. It’s a story about proximity to trauma and surviving it. His photographs veer away from truth. The reality is impossible to comprehend – for both Kawada standing there, and us viewing the images. These were revolutionary photographs at the time – and they still feel new in their search to express the inexpressible.

Underbelly Boulevard, London
Audience members become unsuspecting mind-readers, and numbers disappear from their memory, in this hugely entertaining show

An audience member is on stage, their feet hypnotically glued to the floor. Under the influence of magician and mentalist James Phelan, we’ve just seen them unable to count to 10, or remember their own name. Now Phelan has a finger to their brow, to channel into their head the unspoken thoughts of another punter sat in the auditorium. A woman in the back row is invited to summon to mind what she wished to be when she was younger. A pause while she does so, and then: “she wanted to be the Woolworths pick’n’mix lady,” pipes up the mesmerised individual. And the woman in the back row exclaims: “Holy shit!”

Give or take banal speculation about plants in the audience, I have not a scooby how such tricks are accomplished. The mind reels. Phelan, the nephew of TV conjuring stalwart Paul Daniels, occupies most of his set, Showman, with this stuff, and – no matter how many times you’ve seen mind-benders and “neuro-linguistic programmers” do it all before – it’s absorbing to watch an innocent member of the public have the number seven seemingly wiped from her mind, or another one select the very figure between nought and 200 that Phelan requires for his dramatic climax to work.

Opera Holland Park, London
Alice gets a musical-theatre belter, the ‘Drink Me’ Bottle performs soprano acrobatics and the Caterpillar smokes his hookah like Audrey Hepburn

Will Todd’s family-opera version of the Alice in Wonderland stories, premiered at Opera Holland Park in 2013 and well travelled since, has been something of a signature show for the company. For several years it was performed on mini-stages dotted around the lawn behind the theatre, with the audience following the musicians around. Now it has been brought into the main theatre, with Leslie Travers’s picture-postcard Victoriana set elements adapted by Ceci Calf, and with Martin Duncan reworking his original direction.

Todd and his librettist Maggie Gottlieb give us some of the most familiar characters and scenes from Lewis Carroll’s stories and nudge them into a gentle rescue-story scenario. Alice is sheltering in a pet shop with her horrid brothers when she releases the White Rabbit from his cage and sets her Wonderland adventure in motion. Eventually, having puzzled with the Cheshire Cat, witnessed the demise of an Ofsted-worthy Humpty Dumpty (“regular assessment’s a social investment”) and had tea with the Mad Hatter, she saves her new friends from penal servitude in the Queen of Hearts’s jam-tart factory and finds herself back in the pet shop – where, thanks to the Rabbit having magically acquired opposable thumbs, all ends happily. The singers take their bows and then chat with the children who have been watching from cushions at the front.

Roundhouse, London
In her first European jaunt outside of her headbanging band, the singer uses humour to turn angsty songs into rowdy collective catharsis

Hayley Williams swaggers on stage with a guitar and begins gleefully raging about her antidepressant of choice. Mirtazapine, a pop-punk ode to the drug that “makes me eat” and “makes me sleep”, swiftly rouses the audience into a boisterous singalong. Her chemistry with the crowd is so potent that it’s easy to forget this is Williams’s first London gig since supporting Taylor Swift on The Eras Tour with her band Paramore in 2024, and her first ever European tour as a solo artist. “I remember so many of you,” she says, beaming at the crowd. She points at someone in the front row: “You came on stage [for] Misery Business.”

For years, Williams had vowed to never pursue solo music. In fact, when she landed a deal with Atlantic Records at 14, it was on her insistence that she’d make music as part of a band. Now finally released from the contract she signed as a teenager, the 37-year-old’s third solo record, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, was a grief-stricken reflection on lost loves and lost innocence. On stage, she appears to heal those wounds with soulful artistry. A daring cover of Nina Simone’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood leaves the room in silence; a brief snippet of Didn’t Cha Know by Erykah Badu prefaces her viral hit Good Ol’ Days.

Christie’s sale in London in September carries estimates up to £150,000, with some instruments also used by Noel Gallagher and Bernard Sumner

Johnny Marr is preparing to auction off about 80 of his guitars, including the Rickenbacker heard on This Charming Man.

Marr has partnered with Christie’s for the auction, which will take place on 17 September in London, with the collection – including amps and other equipment – available for the public to view in London and New York prior to the sale.

Supernatural horror Saccharine and melodramatic comedy Maddie’s Secret are the latest films on body-image anxieties served up by Hollywood

Saccharine is soundtracked by a rumbling stomach. Ping-ponging between binge eating and regimented workout routines, first-year medical student Hana Hitching (Midori Francis) considers how she could drop down to her ideal weight. For someone whose body-image issues appear longstanding – a brief shot reveals the diet books stashed away in her drawer – a quick fix appears irresistible. Hana begins taking an illicit supplement guaranteed to make the weight just “melt off”. The secret ingredient? Human ash.

Soon she begins to be stalked by the ghostly presence of the woman whose cremated last remains she has been consuming. “It’s kind of worth it, right?” says a formerly overweight friend, who once took the same pills and experienced the same ensuing anxiety and audio hallucinations, in a scene that encapsulates the cruel motto central to extreme diet culture: nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

The Grange festival, Northington, Hampshire
David Alden’s blackly comic Kafkaesque production has a strong cast whose lively performances were not always matched by the Early Opera Company in the pit

The year 1724 found Handel at the very height of his popularity. Giulio Cesare, written for a handpicked cast of the finest singers, may lack the psychological depth of Tamerlano, the year’s other premiere, but rarely had the composer come up with such an infectious score. A gung-ho tale of colonial conquest, it is ripe for sending up politicians with a hankering for foreign intervention. Here, however, David Alden resists the temptation to skewer the likes of Trump in a Kafkaesque production that takes quite a different tack.

For an opera often staged as a comedic romp, Alden’s nightmarish world of body bags and refugees is about as dark as it gets. Cesare initially seems more interested in his military memoirs than sleeping with the enemy. Cleopatra is unhealthily fixated on asps while her servant, in a brilliantly absurdist twist, is a bona fide mummy. Tolomeo’s general urinates in the toilet while his master lounges in the nearby bath and Cornelia, widow of the brutally beheaded Pompey the Great, is battered and bewildered until she finally turns to the bottle.

Ten years on, leaving the EU has made life more difficult and costly – here are some of the ways we’ve lost out

It is 10 years since voters in the UK chose to leave the EU, and our wallets have been feeling the effects ever since.

From paying more to take the dog on holidays in France – and making calls while you are there – to higher grocery bills and the headache of filling in customs forms for parcels, Brexit has made many simple tasks more complicated and expensive.

We’ve rounded up stylish and comfy summer footwear for every occasion, whether you want beach perfection or office-ready

• The best sunglasses for every budget

I’m over clunky shoes the minute there’s a glimmer of sunshine in the sky. And because flip-flops will only get you so far (literally and figuratively), a range of sandals is constantly in rotation for me during the summer months.

Sandals have also become an unlikely favourite for men’s event dressing, with Alexander Skarsgård stepping out in a pair of Valentino Rockstud flip-flops on the Sundance red carpet earlier this year. And while thong sandals aren’t for everyone, plenty of more reserved options offer additional coverage.

We’re well into strawberry season now, but which punnets are the pick of the crop and which hit a sour note?

• The best supermarket strawberry jams, tasted and rated

Back in 1994, I used to pick strawberries in Dorset to earn extra pocket money. It was gruelling but delicious work. We’d shuffle on our hands and knees down furrowed rows of plants, picking those beautiful, fat red berries and trying not to eat too many along the way. We were paid by the punnet, which at my picking speed amounted to less than £1 an hour, unlike the impressively fast seasonal workers who came to our village every summer.

I scored the strawberries below on sweetness first, using a Brix refractometer, which measures the sugar content of fruit and veg (each Brix point represents 1% sucrose in the juice by mass). Sweetness isn’t everything, however, and some of these berries had a lovely, complex, honeyed or floral flavour. Tartness is important, too, for bringing balance and a refreshing quality to the eating experience. As a general rule of thumb, go for fruit with a bright red body, fresh green leaves and a powerful but fresh aroma.

Want to prolong the life of your TV? A wireless TV box could be the answer. Our expert put top devices – from Freely streamers to Sky and Amazon Fire – through their paces

• Do you really need a new TV? Simple ways to upgrade your current setup

TV is changing – and so is the way we watch it. Forget that dusty aerial or unsightly satellite dish, you can now stream mainstream channels such as the BBC, ITV and others via Freely, alongside premium services such as Sky Atlantic, over wifi – and it doesn’t need to cost the earth.

Freely comes from the creators of Freeview and Freesat. It’s backed by the UK’s main public service broadcasters and is supported by a growing list of TV providers. Scroll the Freely programme guide, and you’ll find familiar channels such as Dave, Yesterday and W. To watch them, you just need a wireless TV box and wifi.

Best Freely TV streamer:
Manhattan Aero

Best budget wireless TV stick:
Amazon Fire 4K Max

Our writer spent three months putting natural, recycled and bio-based leggings, sports bras and tops to the test

• How to make your clothes last longer

Most of us love to exercise in flattering, figure-hugging clothes, but they’re often unsustainable. Workout gear with stretch tends to be made from fossil-fuel-derived synthetics, which dominate global fibre production. They shed microplastics during every wash, have huge carbon footprints (polyester is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in fibre production) and can take hundreds of years to decompose in landfills, releasing harmful gases in the process. However, it can be difficult to find good workout clothes made from alternative, less-polluting fabrics.

So I set out to find the best workout gear made from materials that have a lower environmental impact but also don’t compromise on performance. I put a range of pieces, from leggings to shorts, tank tops to base layers, to the test, wearing them for different types of exercise to find out how they felt, and if they retained their stretch. I looked at the environmental impact of each item, and I’ve noted any take-back and recycling schemes.

This one-pan. 30-minute stir-fry will be just as delightful if you swap out the cheese for tofu

This is such a gorgeous one-pot rice dish, though it deviates from my usual microwave method and goes back to cooking rice the good old-fashioned, stove-top absorption way. If you’re vegan, you can easily substitute tofu for the paneer cubes. In fact, I told my tofu-mad children that the paneer was tofu, and they were none the wiser.

Barron Trump has a new yerba mate and Kai Trump a ‘bold’ energy drink – would their offerings pass the taste test?

Do you like sugary soft drinks? Do you like Donald Trump and his family? Do you want to support nepotism?

If the answer is yes to all these questions, then have I got the products for you: a pineapple yerba mate co-founded by Trump’s son, and a syrupy, energy-drink-thing developed by his granddaughter.

Cooking for kids doesn’t have to be a chore: these three meals are quick, full of flavour and, crucially, fun both to make and to eat

Family meals don’t need to mean hours in the kitchen or a mountain of washing-up. These crisp chicken nuggets are a healthier homemade favourite that kids absolutely love, while the lamb lollipops are fun and surprisingly simple; the stuffed pitta pockets, meanwhile, are perfect for lunches, after-school dinners or eating on the go. Above all, all three dishes are built for real family life: quick, full of flavour and designed to make mealtimes a little easier and a lot more enjoyable.

High in fibre and polyphenols, popcorn has been touted as the perfect snack for the health-conscious. It’s also the ideal vehicle for salt, sugar, butter, bacon fat …

Popcorn became indelibly associated with cinema-going during the Great Depression (it was cheap and hugely profitable), but it also has an established reputation as a superfood – recently given a boost by longevity expert Dan Buettner, who described popcorn as the best snack to eat if you want to live to 100. “It’s very high in fibre, it’s very high in complex carbohydrates, and it even has more polyphenols than a lot of vegetables,” he said.

Popping corn has been consumed by humans for at least 4,000 years, but its widespread popularity as a snack probably dates to a single event: the Columbian Exposition of 1893, also known as the World’s Fair, held in Chicago.

Puff Puff, AKA Puffy, came to us aged 13 with no teeth, a broken ear and a cold – but was always there in tough times

Three of our cats had died of old age, leaving my family heartbroken. So Brandy, my wife, looked at our local animal shelter website and saw it had a 13-year-old stray cat with no teeth, a broken ear and a cold. Betty, as the staff had named her, had one day left to live before the shelter was going to put her down.

Brandy sent me along to see her. The warden said no one had visited Betty, but as soon as they opened the cage a Himalayan cat catapulted out of her blanket straight at me. I picked her up and knew I had to take her home.

Meg was married to a man but had fantasised having sex with women for years. When she met Jess, her knees buckled

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

I’d spent so many years visualising having sex with a woman

An academic and a medical student share concerns about ​extremes of wealth and poverty, but do they agree on the monarchy?

Anna, ‘in her 40s’, Exeter

Occupation Education academic at the University of Exeter

The standup and Big Boys creator on experiencing grief at a young age, his mischievous grandmother, and why he refuses to learn to drive

Born in Watford in 1993, Jack Rooke is a comedian, actor and writer. He studied journalism at the University of Westminster, and began his standup career in 2014. Rooke’s breakout show, Good Grief, was written with his grandmother, Sicely, and documented their experiences of bereavement following the death of Rooke’s father, Laurie, from cancer. His next show, Happy Hour, became the basis for his two-time Bafta-winning Channel 4 comedy, Big Boys. Rooke is taking an updated version of Good Grief on a UK tour, starting at the Roundhouse in London on 14 August. Rooke is an ambassador for the suicide prevention charity Calm.

I am three years old and being pushed by my nan on a swing. She’s in a lovely powder-blue two-piece while I am sporting an iconic all-in-one black-and-white striped mini boiler suit dungaree scenario. For reasons we will never know, I look rather unimpressed.

We were charged the wrong amount, but because the bank says we have no evidence it won’t do a chargeback

I went to Paris to recover from the grief of losing my dog.

All was going well until I took a taxi from a rank outside Musée d’Orsay to my hotel near Notre Dame – a 12-minute journey.

Bank details at risk as criminals use AI to create fake sites and emails offering pre-release beta test version

Like millions of gamers around the world, you have been waiting years for Grand Theft Auto VI to be released. Now you have the opportunity to play the much-anticipated game before everyone else.

An email has arrived inviting you to play a pre-release “beta” version of the game so that you can alert the makers to any bugs before its official release later this year.

Government’s temporary VAT cut aims to ease cost of living for families this summer – here’s what’s on offer

From Thursday families can enjoy a cut-price trip to Legoland or the cinema to watch Toy Story 5 as the government’s school holiday discount scheme Great British summer savings gets under way.

Billed by Rachel Reeves as a way to “support families with the little treats in life”, the temporary VAT cut will reduce ticket prices at family attractions such as zoos and theme parks as well as the cost of children’s cinema tickets and restaurant meals.

The impact on petrol and food prices, energy bills and mortgages if the truce holds and strait of Hormuz reopens

Around the world, markets reacted with relief this week to news that Donald Trump had signed a draft peace deal with Iran that promised to reopen flows of oil and gas from the Gulf to global buyers.

There are already signs the truce could unravel, with Friday’s peace talks in Switzerland abruptly called off, but for now markets seem persuaded that commercial vessel traffic through the key waterway can start returning to normal.

Fitness isn’t just about getting a six-pack or competing in a triathlon. These straightforward, low-intensity moves will improve your strength and mobility and make almost everything easier

There are lots of movements that make you stronger and more physically capable – press-ups, squats and kettlebell swings build strength and muscle that help in a huge variety of situations. But can you get more specific? Well, yes: there are exercises that target the challenges of everyday life, whether that’s playing on the floor with your kids or bringing in the big shop. Here are the moves you may want to consider, presented by a dozen movement coaches, personal trainers and strength specialists.

People assume that those with facial hair are more likely to harbour bacteria on their faces than the clean-shaven – but the truth is more tangled

The idea that beards are dirtier than clean-shaven faces has been floating around for decades, says John Tregoning, professor of vaccine immunology at Imperial College London. There is even research that shows people perceive bearded men as less hygienic: one study found restaurant customers rated waiters with facial hair as dirtier. Science doesn’t necessarily back that up, though.

One of the earliest studies on the subject, published in 1967, looked at how much bacteria could be recovered from men’s faces after being artificially sprayed on to their skin. Researchers compared washed and unwashed faces, both with and without beards. The dirtiest combination wasn’t with a beard: most bacteria was recovered from unwashed clean-shaven faces, followed by unwashed bearded faces, washed bearded faces and finally washed clean-shaven faces.

Screenings can find treatable conditions before they have caused too much damage – but ‘overscreening’ can cause harm

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes when the tech entrepreneur and longevity influencer Bryan Johnson posted about his girlfriend’s “vaginal microbiome report” in April. (He said it was in the “top 1% of vaginas”.) While the vaginal microbiome is genuinely interesting, most clinicians don’t routinely recommend this test to patients.

As medical technology has become more powerful – and more marketable – the line between helpful screening and unnecessary testing has blurred.

More walking and standing in the workplace also associated with higher risk, according to Danish research

Bending forwards and walking a lot at work in the early stages of pregnancy may increase the risk of miscarriage, a study suggests.

Miscarriage affects about 15% of women. Risk factors include parental age, smoking, night shift work and exposure to air pollution and various chemical compounds.

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons say Milan fashion week collection demonstrates rejection of ‘useless design’

Speaking backstage before the Prada show at Milan fashion week on Sunday, the co-designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons described their latest collection as “breaking the perception of what is perceived as typical luxury in high fashion right now”.

This was a purified version of Prada. The design duo called it a “rejection of experimental shapes, techniques and decoration” distilling the collection to pieces that are “intentional and meaningful”.

Move over Barbie, ‘electric fuchsia’ is now dominating football’s biggest stages. But why has the sport embraced the colour?

Any fashion-conscious England fan watching the World Cup this week would have appreciated the moment the attack reached the Croatian end – and not just for the potential goals.

It offered another glimpse of goalkeeper Dominik Livaković in hot pink, a shade fast becoming a visual signature this tournament. Forget Barbie pink – welcome to the World Cup’s hot pink summer.

As some shops toy with the idea of removing changing rooms, what does it mean for the future of the high street?

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Is the changing room dead? According to the teenage fashion mecca, Brandy Melville, it is. The brand has closed all its fitting rooms across stores in the UK, US and Canada, with shoppers taking to social media lamenting the change.

“Why does Brandy hate [its] customers?” one TikTok user questioned. “How am I supposed to know if it’s cute on me???!” another exclaimed.

These tailored trousers are ideal for those sunny days when the forecast looks dodgy later on – or when there’s a heatwave but you still have to go to the office

I think we can probably agree that Audrey Hepburn would not have been seen dead in jorts. The baggy, grunge-adjacent knee-length denims that were everywhere last summer and are creeping back around are definitely cool. Totally a vibe. But elegant they are not.

The capri pant is an undeniably elegant solution to the problem of what to wear when jeans or tailored trousers are too hot and cumbersome, but you don’t want to wear shorts. For instance, when it is sunny while you are getting dressed, but you are going to be out all day and the forecast looks dodgy later on. Or when there is a heatwave but you still have to go to the office, so Daisy Dukes are not going to work.

Come for the sun; stay for the seafood, jazz festival, galleries and coastal walking in this laid-back village within a city

South of the city centre, Le Mourillon is Toulon’s characterful and unpretentious seaside quarter. Once a fishing village, Le Mourillon is home to little shops selling Provençal produce such as huge garlic bulbs and tomatoes in vibrant shades, alongside lively bars and restaurants. It’s not as glamorous or polished as the likes of Antibes or Saint-Tropez – you won’t find designer brands – but it’s all the more charming for that.

From a waterfront palace in Greece to a nonna’s house in Italy, these stylish boutique hotels offer character and comfort at a budget-friendly price

The vibrant port city offers a more relaxed and budget-friendly base for exploring this beautiful coastline by train and ferry

The ferry from Salerno to Amalfi town was set to take about 35 minutes, and we were debating whether to risk the windswept top deck, fearful our packed lunches might fly into the Tyrrhenian Sea. (My father and I were taking a pragmatic approach on our Italian holiday, opting for light midday meals to save space for the primo and secondo courses at dinner, and ample lemony desserts.)

As our ferry sped across glittering water, we admired the views as the Amalfi coast unfolded, incandescent with charm. But we could also see the crawling traffic on the narrow roads that cling to the cliffs. That could have been us, up there in one of those toy-sized rental cars, squeezed between a tourist coach and a fed-up local leaning on their horn. Thankfully, we were on a boat instead, sea breeze in hair and coffee in hand.

This wetland south of Syracuse was saved from developers and preserved as an unspoilt haven for migratory birds

We rented Il Nido because we thought other people wouldn’t like it. Small and basic, without internet, the property was supposedly beside a beautiful national park famous for its coastline and migratory birds. The online picture suggested it was pressed up against one of those concrete pillars (common around Sicily) supporting a deserted and rotting motorway flyover. I was writing a thriller with mafia connections. My partner wanted to scrape off six months of fumes from her new job in London. Our daughter needed fun.

“This is a bomb,” said the hostess, opening a cupboard under the sink. “You turn it anticlockwise to go off.”

The solutions to today’s puzzles – and the winner of the Anguish Languish contest

Earlier today I set these three puzzles about deception. Here they are again with solutions.

1. Super syllabus

For one day every June, South Africa’s searing racial inequality seems to melt away at Comrades race

In the early morning dark, thousands of runners waited, jostling with anticipation. South Africa’s national anthem rang out. Then the haunting swell of Shosholoza, first sung by Zimbabwean migrant workers in South Africa’s goldmines. Finally, that unmistakable, spine-tingling piano: Chariots of Fire.

Runners gather before the start of the marathon

28 June 1951: The much-talked of state-owned experimental abattoirs have not been built

HEREFORD: With the departure of the high winds, rain has come again in a steady, dreary drizzle. To-day we should have been hay-making: it is as well that none is yet turned and that not much is cut. Rams are sitting each against the trunk of an apple tree: the sheltering branches form big green umbrellas. Nasty selfish creatures. Janice seems to think, so I have brought her back to her old nook against the house between two clipped bushes: she can keep dry there and eat a handful of crushed oats. The cats were already under another bush. Flossie has gone to her basket and grandmama cat sits behind me on my chair; it was her habit to treat a distinguished author like this and she got from him a quite unfair portion of chair.

The men are mucking-out buildings, masoning, and whitewashing. Farmers have done their best to produce good meat under difficult conditions, only to see waste and animals cruelly treated and left to wither away in congested areas outside the totally inadequate slaughterhouses. The much-talked of state-owned experimental slaughterhouses have not been built, and it is doubtful if even two will be ready this year. Up at Ardgay my cousin has found a rare bugle; it was sent to the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens and is being photographed there.

Whether its our careers, health or relationships, we often set the bar too high and end up feeling disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Try this new way of thinking … and you may just see some real results

Every January, millions of us sit down and write our goals for the year. By March, most of them have been abandoned. So we set new ones in spring, and when September rolls around, we do it again. New season, fresh start, same cycle – and plenty of beating ourselves up along the way. I lived this cycle for years. When I was working at Google as a digital health executive, I was a champion goal-setter with quarterly OKRs (objectives and key results) and a running list of personal goals I would review every week. On paper, it worked. I was successful by most external measures. But I had this persistent feeling that I was running just to stay in the same place, like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

After retraining as a neuroscientist and studying how the brain learns, I started to understand why. Goals work brilliantly under very specific conditions. You want to buy a car that fits three kids and costs under £25,000? Set a goal, do the research, buy the car. The destination is known and the path is clear.

Aiden is an unforgettable young caregiver in Walthamstow, east London, who has been looking after his mum for over half his life. Every few weeks, Aiden and other young carers get a rare night off thanks to tenacious council worker Satvinder, who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough. This film joins them as they reclaim a few hours of their teenage lives back.

Is Mum OK? is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them. There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class.

People trained to experience world as otters, salmon and other River Tone creatures for pioneering research

What does a kestrel make of the dog sniffing in the long grass below? Why does an exhausted salmon pause before a weir? How will an otter experience the rumble of a passing train?

Eighteen people have spent six weeks swimming, slithering and soaring as otters, salmon, earthworms, red deer and kestrels in an attempt to better document the risks for wild animals in our human-dominated landscape.

Together my best friend Annabel Rook and I worked to support victims of gender-based violence – until she became one herself. Now I feel like a part of myself has been erased. Why aren’t more people outraged?

It is the summer of 2005, and we are staying on the sun-kissed shores of Busua, a coastal community in Ghana. The sand here is made of crushed pink shells. Annabel and I pick up handfuls and scrub our stained feet in the shallows. We’ve been wearing flip-flops for months, trailing through the rich red dust at the refugee settlement where we work. The Atlantic is rough and alive. Its tumbling motion and the wind are making me feel euphoric. Annabel is smiling to herself, too, and jumping in and out of waves.

“Mori,” she shouts, “it’s like being beaten up by an old friend!”

The animated sequel sets up a tug-of-war between physical and digital play for children but is still eager not to be an anti-tech screed

For more than 30 years, Pixar’s signature Toy Story series has been entertaining children while giving voice to their parents’ anxieties. This is especially pronounced in the film’s sequels, as the living toys who dedicate their lives to the happiness of their owner/child experience all different sorts of potential and parent-paralleled obsolescence, from physical wear-and-tear and a child reaching young adulthood to the toy equivalent of empty-nesting (still hanging around the playroom but no longer anyone’s favourite). It’s only natural – maybe even a little belated – that Toy Story 5 would address the encroachment of technology, which continues to make its way to children earlier and earlier. So many years after the tech breakthroughs that allowed Toy Story to become the first computer-animated feature, and Pixar to become a household name in family entertainment, has the formerly Steve Jobs-owned company turned against the kind of innovation that built its success?

We would like to hear from Cape Verdeans in the UK and across the globe on the team’s progress in the tournament

Cape Verde is enjoying a fairytale World Cup, with their performance becoming the story of the tournament.

There was the shock 0-0 draw with Spain in their tournament debut. Then on Sunday, there was another when they drew 2-2 with two-time champions Uruguay in Miami. This now puts them in serious contention for a place in the knockouts.

How has the shortage affected you? How are you coping?

Health leaders have warned Britons are facing some of the “most severe” shortages of NHS medicines on record, including common painkillers, epilepsy drugs and HRT.

The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) has warned that medicine shortages pose a “serious risk to patient safety”.

We’d like to hear from UK adult adoptees about they navigated their reunion with a birth parent

Guardian journalist David Batty has described the complex family trauma many adult adoptees have to navigate during reunion with their birth parents, often without professional support.

We would like other UK adult adoptees to share their experiences of adoption reunion. How challenging was it to forge relationships with birth relatives and to maintain them? What, if any, support did you receive? How did it impact your relationship with your adoptive family?

We would like to hear about the best film you have seen this year so far and why

The Guardian’s film writers have compiled their favourite films of the year so far – and we’d like to hear about yours, too.

Which films have captured your imagination this year? Are there any new releases from so far in 2025 that you would recommend watching?

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