British love of silliness comes to the fore when politicians stand shoulder to shoulder with satirical rivals

When world leaders are elected, it is usually a solemn moment, but when the Labour party veteran Andy Burnham found out he had won the Makerfield byelection, increasing the likelihood he could become the next prime minister, he was standing next to a man with a bin on his head.

The newest Labour MP was also flanked by a man in a fox costume. Robert Pownall, the founder of the campaign group Protect the Wild, decided to run as a fox in order to demand an end to trail hunting.

The unstoppable Nigel Farage is looking increasingly stoppable in the wake of Makerfield. The actual prime minister, meanwhile, has gone into hiding

You’ll note Keir Starmer is in full bunker mode – and we’ll get to him – but after this Makerfield result, why isn’t Nigel Farage? Why isn’t Nigel ranting madly at his generals and refusing to admit that actually, everything that went wrong for Reform here flowed directly from his personal character, and is going to keep happening in one way or another because people don’t change. Nigel’s gonna Nigel.

Nobody fetishises plain speaking like Farage, so we owe it to him to honour that and observe that Reform really shat the bed. Makerfield is among the party’s top 10 target seats for a general election, and Reform strategists’ decision to field yet another inadequate liability, whose past social media activity they simply couldn’t be arsed checking, seems to have proved something of a turn-off – for example for women, who strangely didn’t feel minded to vote for someone who had said: “I’m sexist, sorry but I am.” Rob Kenyon will no doubt be back on his plumbing rounds next week. So, Makerfield ladies, make sure your husband’s home to be consulted as to whether you really want your sink unblocked. It’ll honestly be cheaper to replace it.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

It turned its cast into global stars, triggered fashion crazes and even made an omelette go viral. As The Bear bows out, ‘cousin’ Ebon Moss-Bachrach talks obsessive fans, fork tattoos and why he’s ‘dumbly proud’

Ebon Moss-Bachrach is currently starring in an acclaimed Broadway production of Dog Day Afternoon, but after he takes his bow, there’s only one thing audience members want to talk about. “Every time I leave through the stage door, there’s a couple of hundred people yelling ‘Cousin!’” he laughs.

That’s his catchphrase as cranky maître d’ Richie Jerimovich in The Bear, of course. And now the culinary comedy-drama is back on the menu. One of the decade’s most influential TV shows is about to return for its fifth and final season. It seems the right time to reflect on how this scrappy creation became a surprise smash hit and cultural sensation.

With Declan Rice nursing a knock, his midfield partner is the reliable rock to which team’s fate is inescapably yoked

Elliot Anderson is running. It’s the 88th minute against Croatia, and the game is won, and the game is done, and this is the 60th game of his season and there are deeper challenges to come. But as long as the ball is loose, he’s going to chase it down: first Josip Sutalo and then Josko Gvardiol, a simple recycling of defensive possession rapidly mutating into an unpleasant ordeal. As the ball is worked across defence, Anderson single-handedly follows it all the way across the pitch, over to the far touchline, where he eventually forces a rushed pass and a turnover of possession.

And in an opening win defined by mood swings and tectonic shifts, in a team savouring the wealth of options and contingencies at its disposal, it’s worth dwelling on just how quickly Anderson has become indispensable. Declan Rice is carrying a knock and looks a little short of gas. Harry Kane will almost certainly not have the legs to play eight full games plus extra time. The wingers, the centre-half pairing, the full-backs are not yet set in stone. Beyond Jordan Pickford, virtually every area of this team is operating in a kind of managed flux.

Age verification means that the sector’s biggest players will now have access to information that will only make them richer and more powerful

This week, the UK announced a wide-ranging ban on social media that will soon block users from communicating or accessing information on apps such as X, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat unless they prove that they’re over the age of 16.

The prime minister, Keir Starmer, called the policy “a line in the sand”. “Tech giants had their chance and failed,” he said, “but we’re stepping in to protect children, back parents and set a new normal for future generations.” All internet users, especially children, should be protected from exploitative systems online, but this new law will only foster more harm and help the largest and most powerful tech companies consolidate power and influence over everyone’s lives.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology journalist who writes the newsletter User Mag and is the author of the bestselling book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

In his new memoir, the vice-president covers his conversion and politics – at a time when hardline Catholicism is ascendant in the US

When JD Vance became Roman Catholic, he wondered what his dead grandmother would think.

His grandmother Mamaw did not have anything against them, but growing up in Ohio he had sometimes heard that Catholics were servants of the antichrist. And although the people he knew as a child professed personal relationships with Jesus, most rarely went to church. The Church of Rome – with its rituals and costumes, foreign leadership, veneration of Mary and the saints – seemed exotic, even alien, to his family from Appalachia.

Ministers say PM faces being forced out by party if he does not act, with one calling his departure inevitable

• How quickly could Burnham become PM?

Cabinet ministers loyal to Keir Starmer have told him he faces being forced out of office by his party if he does not set a timetable for his departure by the end of the weekend.

Andy Burnham, who won a compelling majority in the Makerfield byelection overnight, is expected to travel to London on Monday to meet MPs in the expectation of becoming prime minister within weeks. One cabinet minister – who has not previously told the prime minister to go – said his departure was now inevitable.

After partying into the early hours, supporters were back for the new Makerfield MP’s victory rally which ended with a madcap escape

There was plenty of the hopey, changey stuff from Andy Burnham at his victory rally on the morning after the night before – but it ended with the new MP for Makerfield doing a runner. “Are you going to become the new prime minister?” shouted Sky’s political editor, Beth Rigby, at the retreating Burnham. “Keir Starmer says he is not going to give way – what’s your message for Keir Starmer?”

Hemmed in by cameras, chairs, tables and a whole load of the giggling supporters who had been assembled around him on the turf at Ashton Town FC’s grounds, Burnham picked up the pace.

From Restore and tactical voting to questions over that £5m gift, the Reform leader faces challenges on several fronts

As those around Nigel Farage are fond of pointing out, Reform UK has now led in more than 300 consecutive national polls. When it comes to byelections, though, it is fair to say the party’s results are more mixed.

Yes, Robert Kenyon came second in Makerfield to a popular regional mayor backed by a Labour campaign so relentless that the main risk was annoying voters by knocking too often on their doors. Kenyon also increased his and Reform’s share of the vote from the 2024 general election.

‘Borrowed’ supporters from across the political spectrum voted to trounce Reform

• How quickly could Burnham become PM?

The morning after Andy Burnham secured a landslide byelection victory in Makerfield, returning him to Westminster after nine years as Greater Manchester mayor, it is hard to avoid the large, red placards bearing his face.

But Burnham’s win was not just thanks to Labour loyalists. Instead, it appears that a coalition of voters from the left, centre and even the right united to back him at the ballot box.

From the proportion of votes secured by Restore Britain, to the percentage point difference in Reform UK’s fortunes, here are the takeaways

It was, the consensus opinion states, probably the most politically consequential byelection in recent UK history. But what can we learn from the raw numbers announced overnight in Makerfield? Here are some of them.

Lines closed between Luton and Bedford as emergency services attend scene

Two trains have collided in the Bedford area, authorities have said, with a number of people injured and police and other emergency services at the scene.

The collision, which is reported to have caused injuries, has also caused major delays to the evening commute, with lines closed between Luton and Bedford, Thameslink said.

Thomas, 43, a former military police officer, has whip suspended during investigation into the allegations

A Liberal Democrat MP suspended by the party has been arrested on suspicion of controlling and coercive behaviour and assault, the Guardian understands.

Cameron Thomas, the MP for Tewkesbury, was arrested by Gloucestershire police on Wednesday. The Liberal Democrats said the 43-year-old had had the whip and membership of the party suspended.

Department for Transport analysis suggests tiny economic boost would be outweighed by up to £62.5bn in trade-offs

The economic boost from a Heathrow third runway could be a tiny fraction of previous estimates, government analysis shows, while the overall trade-off from the bigger airport could set the UK back by as much as £62.5bn.

As ministers promised to speed up expansion of the London airport in the name of economic growth, documents prepared by the Department for Transport said the runway was expected to boost GDP by only up to 0.05% – 90% less than the 0.5% previously stated.

US-Iran meeting in Switzerland on implementation of peace deal cancelled over clashes in southern Lebanon

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to renew a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon on Friday after 24 hours of intense violence that posed an early challenge to the new agreement between the US and Iran to end their conflict.

A meeting that was scheduled to take place on Friday between Washington and Tehran in Switzerland to discuss implementation of the new deal was cancelled when Hezbollah killed four Israeli soldiers and Israel carried out a wave of retaliatory airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley that killed at least 47 people.

Cambridgeshire police say 30-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder is not fit to be interviewed

A man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a three-year-old boy ended up in a crocodile enclosure has been released because he is not fit to be interviewed, police have said.

The 30-year-old man from Norfolk has been bailed while detectives from the major crimes unit conduct further inquiries, Cambridgeshire police said.

US president provokes outrage as PM says he ‘totally invented’ story in interview with Italian media

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has said Donald Trump “totally invented” a story about her after the US president claimed she begged him to take a photo with her during the G7 summit.

The two former allies had appeared to be getting their relationship back on track by having several one-to-ones on the sidelines at the gathering in Évian after falling out in April over the US-Israeli war in Iran.

Temperatures expected to climb to 30C over the weekend in southern England and south-east Wales

The Met Office has issued an amber extreme heat warning for much of southern England and south-east Wales over the coming days – the most extreme heat warning the weather forecaster has issued for four years.

Temperatures are expected to climb to about 30C (86F) over the weekend and peak on Monday and Tuesday at 34C, “though there remains a chance of this being exceeded in some spots”, the Met Office said.

Birds have been in the park since the Russian ambassador gave King Charles II two in 1664 – but none ever bred there

They arrived in the royal park shortly before the Great Fire of London, when the Russian ambassador presented a pair to King Charles II as a gift.

But although pelicans have been living in St James’s Park since 1664, none ever learned the art of courtship – until now, when for the first time in more than 360 years, chicks have been born.

⚽️ Kick-off time: noon local/3pm ET/8pm BST/5am AEST
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Mail Beau

The atmosphere here at Lumen Field (excuse me, Seattle Stadium, how dare I) is positively electric a full 30 minutes before kickoff. This was predictable — the stadium has a well-earned reputation for being among the loudest in the United States — but it is still a sight to behold. The place is nearly full, and there are no shortage of Aussie fans as well, very prominently sat behind the goal at the south end of the stadium. Truly incredible atmosphere.

Pre-anthem mailbag

Andy Burnham’s resounding win in the Makerfield byelection has set the stage for a leadership battle with Keir Starmer. The outgoing mayor of Greater Manchester received more votes than Reform and Restore combined, and the nature of the victory has prompted speculation he could replace Starmer as prime minister within weeks, if not days. Annie Kelly speaks to political correspondent Alexandra Topping

MI6 spy on the ‘Moscow watch’ who was involved in the audacious escape of the double agent Oleg Gordievsky

Meta Ramsay described herself in her latter years as an “international affairs consultant”, while her former career was summarily defined in Who’s Who as having been a member of HM Diplomatic Service. In reality, Ramsay, who has died aged 89, was the spy who perhaps should have been appointed the first woman “C”, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.

On retirement from MI6, as required at the age of 55 in 1991, she was the most high-ranking woman in the service, yet it would still be more than three decades until the first female “C”, with Blaise Metreweli securing that distinction only last year. Ramsay went on to play an active part in Labour politics when her old friend John Smith was leader, and subsequently in the House of Lords during Tony Blair’s government.

Investigation: The entrepreneur was once the toast of London’s tech scene, a ‘global leader of tomorrow’ who starred on Dragons’ Den and promised untold riches for the startups she championed. But people she worked with in the last decade, from Malta to Switzerland, describe a very different reality

Julie Meyer is sitting in a starkly lit attic, surrounded by piles of £50 notes. A California blond in a crisp, white shirt, her long, stockinged legs crossed at the knee, she listens intently to the young man standing before her. As he talks, she sizes him up. Eventually, she tells him: “I’m going to make you an offer.” It could be a scene from a heist movie, but Meyer is in a BBC studio, shooting a 2009 episode of the TV show Dragons’ Den. A celebrated entrepreneur with a venture capital fund, she is ready to invest in whichever contestants catch her eye. For the viewers, she has some advice: “What is success? A lot of it is self-belief. Continuing on when most rational people would stop.”

This is an online spin-off from the original Dragons’ Den series, so the stakes are a little lower. But for Lex Deak, a 23-year-old with a big idea for a social media website, what happens in this room today could be make or break. He desperately wants to work with Meyer.

Sales of high-end barbecues are booming as hotter and longer summers increase appetite for alfresco dining

Burned sausages, limp salads and undercooked chicken legs you live to regret; the British barbecue has historically been a sorry affair. But a slew of fancy equipment the price of a secondhand car is revolutionising the grilling game.

Over the past few years, the £1,000-plus barbecue has soared in popularity. The Big Green Egg, a pioneer of the premium outdoor cooking movement, has recorded 1m visits to its UK website so far this year. Its classic model retails at £1,495.

Minerva theatre, Chichester
Memories of an ex-girlfriend are rekindled as a couple prepare to celebrate in this adaptation of the film

This story spans a week in the life of a couple approaching their 45th wedding anniversary. As Kate (Geraldine James) manages the preparations, Geoff (Gabriel Byrne) receives a letter about a formative ex-girlfriend who died falling into a crevasse on the Swiss Alps more than 50 years ago. Katya’s body has been found, preserved in ice. “She’s still there,” he says, and this frozen piece of his past threatens to cast the couple’s Norfolk village life together in a different, perhaps lesser, light.

David Constantine’s short story turned film is a quiet and delicate thing. So much of its emotion happens in the unspoken moments and silent revelations. What a tricky business to transpose this to the stage, so it is impressive that Hannah Patterson adapts with such spare, evocative economy.

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

Riverside Studios, London
Ted Walliker’s one-man play about a night gone spectacularly wrong is boldly ambitious but we need to know more about the man at the mic

Watching a comedian crumble onstage is hellish. In Ted Walliker’s new play, the performer’s breakdown is deliberate but the show’s wider ambitions miss their mark. Pitched as a standup set that swivels into an absurd faux-confessional, this first foray into co-production for Riverside Studios is a one-man tangent.

The trouble starts with how quickly the framing device of a standup show is shoved aside. When bumbling posh-boy comedian Tony (Walliker) fails to get the laughs he wants, he tries on a tougher persona and launches into a violent story of misadventure with Mike, his best friend, long-time crush and all-round scoundrel. A delirious pep enters Tony’s step as he outlines a gratuitously gruesome night of pulled-off faces and munched-up bones. Spiralling from a mistake in McDonald’s where we meet the titular character, we are hurled into an entirely different play, with only the occasional address to us “folks” to remind us this is supposed to be a comedy set.

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.

Former England goalkeeper discusses why it was time to leave Paris, the lure of her new club and when she will know it is time to stop

When Mary Earps signed for Wolfsburg eight years ago, shortly after they had played in the Women’s Champions League final, there was no club photographer available for her unveiling, meaning her agent popped out to buy a scarf from the club shop before taking a makeshift announcement image. So when the former England goalkeeper’s latest club, London City Lionesses, announced her Women’s Super League return with a glamorous photoshoot on a boat on the Thames in front of landmarks such as Tower Bridge, she was struck not only by how much the women’s game and her life have been transformed, but by the bold scale of her new team’s ambitions.

“The energy and effort put into the shoot, I would never have imagined this even five years ago,” says Earps, whose move to London City from Paris Saint-Germain was confirmed on Friday. “All I keep saying is ‘I’m so excited,’ but that shoot just poured petrol on the excitement fire. Wow, if that’s what they do just to say ‘Hey, by the way, Mary’s arrived,’ then imagine hopefully what we can do [in the future].”

Working at a tournament brings its own demands but nothing like the pressure on home players for a good showing

Greetings from Los Angeles – from your own podcasting correspondent. England aside, it’s been 20 years since I was in the host country for a major tournament. Professional commitments make this a marginally different experience from driving around Germany with Ian, Matt and Oli in 2006 just wondering when the next stein was going to be thrust into my hands – dancing with Trinidad and Tobago fans, feeling lucky to miss out on Brazil v Australia tickets because my hangover was too much for the sun.

The question you are asked most by people back home is along the lines of: “Is there World Cup fever in the States?” I am reminded of a local TV crew who walked around central Cambridge on the eve of our FA Cup quarter-final with Crystal Palace in 1990 asking people how they felt about the game, and being rewarded with lots of nice middle-class people who didn’t even know there was a football team in Cambridge.

• Florencia Peña quits after the broadcast on Luzu TV

• Luzu says ‘those responsible’ relieved of their duties

Members of a news crew in Argentina have lost their jobs after falsely reporting the death of Lionel Messi’s father.

Florencia Peña announced on Luzu ⁠TV that Jorge Messi had died and went on to suggest that Messi would not play any further matches in the ongoing World Cup. In the aftermath of the report, the ⁠Messi family issued ⁠a statement on Thursday announcing that Messi Sr. was in hospital with an undisclosed medical issue, but was “progressing favourably”.

Games in Miami and Monterrey were at heat level a players’ union had warned in the past should trigger delays

Two of the first round of matches at the World Cup were played at a level of severe heat that a football players’ union has previously said should trigger the delay or postponement of games, a Guardian analysis has found.

A further four games were played in cities with temperatures also beyond that level of heat, though conditions inside the stadiums were mitigated by air conditioning.

Scotland fans in the Massachusetts city awaiting their game against Morocco have continued to make an impression on the locals

On Thursday afternoon, local broadcasters in Boston went live to an event hosted by the city’s mayor, Michelle Wu. It was a significant moment, with Wu confirming a deal that would commemorate a new chapter for the city. Representatives of the other party were also present, and they were easy to spot. Particularly the one guy in a kilt and a T-shirt reading: “I’m not perfect, but I am Scottish, and that’s kind of the same thing.”

The agreement signed will see Boston and Glasgow become twin cites. Officially, according to Wu, the arrangement will “create new opportunities for meaningful cooperation and mutual growth”. But who was she kidding. A more telling line was the one that reflected “longstanding ties between Scotland and the United States” and, of course, “the goodwill generated during the Fifa World Cup 2026”. In other words, Boston’s love affair with the Tartan Army is now official.

There would be no more sadness. No more despair. A change was a-coming – and he would work tirelessly to make it happen

In the end, it wasn’t even close, Andy Burnham taking well over 50% of the vote and Rob Kenyon departing the stage without a murmur, never to be heard of again. Rob will probably be happier that way. He never looked as if he was much enjoying the attention of being the candidate for Reform in Makerfield.

After a brief acceptance speech at the count, Burnham reappeared six hours later at Ashton Town FC for the celebration rally proper. Flanked by several MPs waving ‘Andy for Us’ placards, and one notable ex-MP in Josh Simons who had vacated the seat for the coronation, Andy was all smiles in the sunshine. He’d even swapped out the slightly too tight black T-shirt for a slightly too tight white polo shirt. This was him dressing up for the occasion. He can do formal when he tries.

From a hopeless candidate to botched strategy, this latest byelection defeat is telling. But for Labour, there is still a long and arduous journey ahead

The day before the voters of Makerfield chose their new MP, I stood with my camera-wielding colleague John Domokos on the main road through the post-industrial town of Hindley. Every two or three minutes, a van or small truck drew level with us, and there it was again: a honked horn, and a full-throated shout of “Reform!”

But on our side of the street was an augury of the news to come: the house of a man called Les, who had views most Guardian readers would find deeply problematic, and no less than seven placards adorned with the logo of Rupert Lowe MP’s new mega-right outfit, Restore Britain. “Farage has lost it,” Les told us. In at least one sense, the result – Labour’s Andy Burnham triumphing with 55% of the vote, Reform on 35%, and Restore managing 7% – proved he was spot on.

A dynamic new strategy would allow the BBC to redefine what trusted news means, as it is still valued highly in this age of anxiety

Timing is all, and the timing of last week’s brutal job cuts at the BBC News could have been better. Not just because the director general Matt Brittin was reportedly on holiday, but because the announcement came straight after a new report showed social media platforms and AI chatbots had now overtaken traditional TV channels and websites as people’s first port of call for news.

The same Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report also noted higher levels of global uncertainty and anxiety – caused not just by geopolitical instability, economic and environmental fears, but by a loss of trust in institutions, and in the news itself.

Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist

Andy Burnham’s positive vision has struck a powerful blow to Reform – but the PM risks diminishing the impact by clinging on in No 10

• Neal Lawson is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass

That tingle of emotion you felt when you awoke today? That is the long-lost feeling of progressive hope. That it comes from Makerfield is all the more remarkable. Reform has been defeated in a seat that it should have won at a canter – trailing Labour, even when its voteshare is combined with that of Restore. It finished second there in the 2024 election and it recently won all of the council seats. If Reform had faced any other politician, its candidate, Robert Kenyon, would be heading to Westminster.

But Reform was up against Andy Burnham, probably the only Labour candidate who could have held Makerfield. He is the only candidate for the party’s leadership who can defeat Reform, and the causes of Reform, and bring in a new era of progressive government. To say there was a lot riding on Makerfield would be a massive understatement.

Are we in the opening scenes of a disaster movie? There’s something going on with insects

It’s the start of the G7, guaranteeing us a week of either serious commentary or hot mic moments that may, in their way, prove more revealing than all the thousands of words of analysis. Previous summits have delivered a steady flow of off-the-cuff remarks from world leaders, including President Obama, at the G20 in 2011, grousing to the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, about Benjamin Netanyahu (“You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day”), and Jacques Chirac, who, at a European summit in the early 2000s, said of the UK: “You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland.” Rude!

Do we really want to play dice with our planet?

A series in the Guardian recently declared “it’s time to talk about geoengineering.” So let’s talk about it. And let us start with some simple truths about this cluster of techno-optimistic “quick fixes” which purport to somehow offset our slow progress towards zeroing out planet-warming carbon emissions.

Solar geoengineering proposals – reducing sunlight – have received the most attention, but a host of desperate schemes have been proposed in an effort to “fix” the disruption of climate caused by the growing burden of carbon dioxide human activities add to the atmosphere.

Andy Burnham has shown Labour can beat Reform. He must show that his promise of change is a programme, not another slogan for power

Andy Burnham’s triumph in the Makerfield byelection leaves the prime minister with only two options: fight openly for the Labour leadership, or leave office cleanly. The former Greater Manchester mayor easily saw off Reform UK’s candidate – winning 55% of the vote to his rightwing rival’s 35%. He won largely because he changed the political meaning of voting Labour in Makerfield. With Mr Burnham, the party went from being the unpopular incumbent to being the vehicle for change.

The prime minister’s implicit claim that it was Starmerism that beat Reform is not credible. The polling by Persuasion UK in Makerfield shows that Labour won because of Mr Burnham’s personal brand, anti-Starmer signalling and leftwing economic message. Significantly, Mr Burnham’s victory rally speech on Friday connects with the data. He was offering, in rhetoric, economic security through a visible state. This is not just redistribution, but the state as buyer, planner and manager. That would be a welcome shift, but how would he deliver cheaper essentials, more public control, fiscal expansion, industrial renewal and fairer rules on housing, work and migration? Mr Burnham’s programme needs to be more than slogans.

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.

Over more than 50 years and 30 films, the composer-director duo have created some of the most memorable movie experiences of all time

Which living artist has been nominated most times for an Oscar? The answer isn’t Steven Spielberg (with 24 nominations), but his long-term collaborator composer John Williams, with a record 54. The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s most personal film, seemed a fitting finale for the duo in 2022. But Spielberg persuaded Williams, now 94, to write the music for his latest sci-fi blockbuster Disclosure Day, their 30th film together.

Williams has worked with other directors, creating scores for era-defining franchises from George Lucas’s Star Wars (who would Darth Vader be without The Imperial March?) to Harry Potter. But it is his partnership of more than 50 years with Spielberg that has changed cinema history, with hits including Jaws, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List. “John Williams has been the single most significant contributor to my success as a film‑maker,” Spielberg has said.

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.

Harriet Gibson recalls an eye-opening encounter with the artist, while Andrew Keeley talks about the influence of California on his work, and Christine Hayes recalls his ‘letter’ to the Guardian about smoking

In 1963, I was a naive 17-year-old on a week’s introduction to “art” at the Royal Court theatre with a group of about 10 sixth formers. We had an acting workshop with John Dexter, went to a wrestling match and were taken to visit an up-and-coming artist in his studio in Notting Hill.

I remember a smallish room with paintings lining the walls. David Hockney (Obituary, 12 June) talked about his work, said he was about to leave for the States and showed us a work on the wall called My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, which he explained was dedicated to his boyfriend who was in the States.

Dr Matthew Dryden praises an astute doctor and the value of teamwork across continents. Plus a letter from Dr Brian Jones

Devi Sridhar writes about some of the global public health responses to the outbreak of hantavirus centred on the MV Hondius, but her conclusions as to how the world avoided another global outbreak failed to recognise the real reason disaster was averted (Right now, we could be living through a hantavirus disaster. The world avoided that, and this is why, 15 June).

The UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs) programme funded by the Foreign Office and managed by the UK Health Security Agency supports health services in all UKOTs around the globe. These are small and vulnerable communities with very limited medical services in most cases. The key success of this lean but effective programme lies in close communication and strengthening the health services.

Dr Carole Gavin says if the government fails to act it will bear the responsibility for yet more avoidable deaths, while Sarah Brown describes her mother’s experience

The experience of working in A&E described by Sophie (Patients are dying in A&E corridors – but I’ve seen how things could be different, 11 June) will be familiar to every member of staff working in a UK emergency department. Not only are patients dying on our corridors with no privacy or dignity due to lack of space and hospital beds, but we know that many more will die later as a consequence of their prolonged emergency department stay (More than 1,300 deaths a month in England due to long A&E waits, figures suggest, 8 June).

I have been an emergency physician for more than 30 years during which time the advances in emergency medicine have been life changing, with acute interventions for once untreatable conditions such as stroke and heart attacks now routinely available. Unfortunately despite all of the advances in medical science, in England in 2026, we are now unable to provide even the most basic, humane emergency care. The government appears to be prepared to accept these deaths and when we repeatedly try to raise the alarm we are told NHS performance is improving as there are fewer patients waiting in A&E for more than four hours. However those are the well patients who will go home, while the seriously ill patients wait for up to 48 hours for admission to a bed – something that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. I am amazed on a daily basis by the resilience of the patients and staff in the face of this disaster, but fail to comprehend why this national crisis is allowed to continue.

Never make the mistake of conflating the actual people of a country with those who govern it, says Eric Jansson

The survey on which you report (Only one in 10 Europeans now see US as an ally, survey suggests, 10 June) is wonderfully in line with the view of US citizens themselves, given the recent poll finding that only 2% of them trust the US government “just about always”, and only 15% trust it “most of the time” – a shrivelled fraction of the 73% who in 1958 said they trusted it always or most of the time, according to the Pew Research Center. We can rest easy knowing that Europeans and Americans (never mind their governments) remain natural allies with plenty to agree about.

Never make the mistake of conflating the people of a country or civilisation with those who govern it. This goes for Washington, Brussels, London, Moscow, Beijing, Kinshasa, you name it.
Eric Jansson
Oxford

️ Updates from the second round at Shinnecock Hills
️ Day one report | Follow us on Instagram | Mail David

Matt Fitzpatrick has to hole a 27-footer to save par at 3. It keeps him at -3 and in a tie for third. Great work. But not so good for playing partner DeChambeau, who misses the fairway, comes up short with his approach and looks utterly baffled as his par putt from 30 feet drifts five feet past. He completes an error-strewn hole by missing that one so it’s an ugly double bogey and Bryson tumbles down to +2.

The average score in round one was 73.280 which isn’t too exteme for a US Open. Here’s how it compares to the last five years.

• Second Test day 3: New Zealand 391 & 252-3; England 291

• Tourists establish commanding 352-run lead

For all the reports that suggest Ben Stokes and the England management have brokered something resembling a peace deal over the past 48 hours, the team being led by Joe Root in the all-rounder’s absence still finds itself in strife.

On a sappingly hot third day, New Zealand steadily moved into a ­position of dominance, reaching 252 for three in their second innings and leading by 352 runs. Based on the ­trajectory of this second Test, Stokes will be returning for a high-stakes series decider at Trent Bridge next week.

Back-row’s colossal performance in Prem semi-final proves he is ready to come of age for Northampton against Exeter

As Henry Pollock idly plays with the straggly end of his blond rat’s tail on a sunny day in Northampton, he looks wholly at ease. There are more microphones in front of him than anyone else but that’s fine. Exeter are preparing to hit him with everything they can muster but that’s fine too. If you’re aspiring to stand out from the crowd, it’s all part of the deal.

Because a high-profile Prem final is exactly where he wants to be. Particularly as he missed the last one. When Saints lifted the trophy in 2024 he was away in Georgia with England Under-20s, jumping up and down in a hotel room in Tbilisi. “I was a bit annoyed I missed that experience but the boys have been telling me how amazing the whole week was. I am just trying to live every moment of it.”

• Commonwealth Cup winner was bought for £250,000

• Ryan Moore steers Precise to Coronation Stakes triumph

Alexis Mac Allister for £7m. Just £4m for Moisés Caicedo. And £250,000 for Venetian Sun, a Group One winner here on Friday in the Commonwealth Cup. Has anyone ever had an eye for a sporting bargain quite as sharp as Tony Bloom’s?

There were some huge sums changing hands for yearlings at Tattersalls’ Book 1 sale in October 2024. The football super-agent Kia Joorabchian alone signed for £25m-worth of bloodstock, while Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai’s Godolphin operation was close behind with a £23m spend. Bloom, meanwhile, picked up a daughter of the young stallion Starman for just 240,000 guineas (£252,000), and she is now a Group One winner at both two and three with more than £800,000 banked in prize money alone.

• League referred to EEOC for religious discrimination

• San Francisco Giants pitchers wrote Bible verses on hats

• MLB had warned players over violation of league rules

The US justice department has launched a civil rights investigation into Major League Baseball after the league criticized three San Francisco Giants players who wrote Bible verses on their hats during the team’s Pride Night.

Most of MLB’s 30 teams celebrate Pride month with a themed game to acknowledge the LGBTQ community and its baseball fans. During a 12 June game against the Chicago Cubs, pitchers Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker wrote Bible verses on their hats, which featured the Giants’ logo in rainbow colors, while pitcher Sam Hentges chose not to wear the themed cap at all.

• All the latest from around the grounds

• Mail Tanya or comment below with your thoughts

And now from the Finchale end, Ben Stokes… the first ball is a dot, the second flies down to fine leg off the thigh pad of Vasconcelos for four. Ball three: nothing. Ball four – ooops, a drop by Ben McKinney at leg slip. In and out, midnight sweats. Ball five: four through the covers in front of the watching groundsmen sitting on plastic chairs. Ball six – off the ankles to long leg for a couple. Ten from the over.

The Grace Road groundstaff have gone for a weird striped pitch today – beige ends and a grassy middle. It has been largely successful – Luxton and Whiteman both out, Yorkshire 40-2.

• Manchester United travel to Hull on first weekend

• Manchester City without Guardiola host Bournemouth

Coventry will begin their first Premier League campaign in 25 years with a Friday night trip to the champions, Arsenal, on 21 August. Their fellow promoted club Hull begin at home to Manchester United on the Saturday and Ipswich entertain Sunderland that day.

Other eye-catching opening weekend fixtures include Andoni Iraola taking Liverpool to Newcastle on 23 August for his debut match and Manchester City starting life after Pep Guardiola at home to Bournemouth on the same day.

The €500,000 tournament has attracted several strong national teams, plus the favourites, WR Chess, led by the world No 1, Magnus Carlsen

Dragon Chilling may be an ­unfamiliar chess name, but the squad from China won the gold medals at the World Teams Rapid in Hong Kong. Teams of six include a woman, a ­junior and an amateur who has never achieved a 2000 ­rating. The strong ^­performance by Asian teams at the start highlights a boom in chess, with enthusiasm sparked by successive world ­champions from China (Ding Liren) and India (Gukesh Dommaraju).

The time control for rapid is 15 minutes for the whole game, plus a 10 seconds per move increment from move one; while for blitz it is three minutes plus a two seconds per move increment. There is no repeat of the attempt in London last year to play without increment, which caused chaotic conclusions to several games.

Have you followed the big stories in football, cricket, golf, tennis, athletics, rugby union, horse racing and MMA?

Thangam Debbonaire and Sarah Pochin argue in Sky News interview at Makerfield byelection count

The Labour peer Thangam Debbonaire has clashed with Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin at the Makerfield byelection count, asking the MP: “You don’t like being on television with brown people, do you Sarah?”

The row erupted during a testy interview on Sky News that included an exchange about the £5m personal gift that Nigel Farage accepted from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne in the months before he stood as an MP in the 2024 general election. The gift, first revealed by the Guardian, is under investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner, who will examine whether or not it ought to have been declared.

Roman Lavrynovych and Stanislav Carpiuc imprisoned for seven years and two years respectively

Roman Lavrynovych and Stanislav Carpiuc have been jailed at the Old Bailey for seven and two years respectively for arson attacks on property connected to Keir Starmer.

Lavrynovych, 22, from Ukraine, and Carpiuc, 27, from Romania, were found guilty on Monday of conspiring to commit arson on a car and two properties linked to the prime minister.

Ensuring fair compensation for those affected by legacies of enslavement and measures to address debt burdens, part of 18-point strategic roadmap

More than money: the logic of slavery reparations

A global framework for reparatory justice has been adopted at a conference in Ghana.

Heads of state, governments and other officials adopted the strategy on Friday at a gathering in a hotel in the capital, Accra, which was the first major meeting since the adoption of the landmark United Nations (UN) resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.

Police fear Waleed Saeed may have up to 70 more victims after campaign of entrapment, threat and extortion

A sexual predator who targeted mostly Muslim males online for blackmail has been jailed for 16 years, and detectives fear he may have up to 70 more victims.

Waleed Saeed’s campaign of entrapment, threat and extortion started in 2018 and left two victims feeling suicidal because of the humiliation they felt.

Experts cast doubt on conclusion of government-funded study of factory emitting forever chemicals near Blackpool

Questions have been raised about the conclusions drawn by a government-funded study into kidney cancer rates near a factory linked to forever chemicals near Blackpool.

Pfoa, a known carcinogenic forever chemical that was banned globally in 2020, was emitted from the AGC Chemicals Europe plant in Thornton-Cleveleys, near Blackpool, between the 1950s and 2012. An estimated 49 tonnes of Pfoa were emitted during that period. The factory, which AGC Chemicals Europe bought in 1999, stopped using Pfoa in 2012.

Veteran campaigner Robin Hanbury-Tenison is raising money for a research station near his home in Cornwall

Pedalling on water for more than a hundred miles in a heatwave, pushed back by east winds and having to navigate 31 locks would be a challenge for anybody. But when that body is 90 years old, with a bad knee, failing balance and malfunctioning arms and shoulders, it’s a herculean feat.

Rainforest campaigner Robin Hanbury-Tenison, 90, is pedalling 104 miles down the River Thames from Oxford to Richmond on a water-bike to raise money for a unique research station which is being built to study Britain’s temperate rainforest.

As demand soars, the country’s mangrove forests and the livelihoods of shellfish gatherers are under threat from encroaching farms and unchecked pollution

At low tide, Johana Carolina Cruz Potes steps into the mudflats around Isla Costa Rica, in Ecuador’s Jambelí Archipelago. Holding a bucket and a short metal hook, she probes the tangled roots of a mangrove patch, searching for concha negra, black-shelled cockles, buried beneath the sludge.

Cruz Potes has done this work since she was nine, when she first followed her father into the mud. But earning a living from shellfish gathering – often the only income for families here – has become harder as grounds shrink and catches decline.

Strong winds and heavy rain batter Slovenia, while France experiences atypical heatwave

Severe thunderstorms swept across the Balkans last week, bringing widespread destruction to parts of the region. The storms developed as unstable hot air lingered over the Adriatic Sea while a cold front plunged south-eastward.

The front began its journey on 10 June in Slovenia, where the Slovenian Environment Agency recorded 65mph gusts at Ljubljana airport. Heavy rain also fell widely across the region with 23mm reported in Kranj.

Portsmouth, Hampshire: A huge conservation effort is under way to restore native oysters to the Solent, and I was on hand to help give them a pre-release spa day

Native oysters (Ostrea edulis) have been harvested from Chichester Harbour since Roman times, but due to overfishing, disease, pollution and competition from invasive Pacific oysters (Magallana gigas), the population has declined by 96% over the past century.

The Solent Oyster Restoration Project is working to restore reefs by reseeding them with juveniles and installing cages containing a high density of mature broodstock beneath pontoons, to facilitate the release of millions of larvae.

Bar Standards Board forbids Karim Khan from practising in England and Wales, following suspension by ICC

Karim Khan, the international criminal court prosecutor, has been suspended from practising as a barrister in England and Wales by the UK’s Bar Standards Board (BSB).

It comes less than two weeks after Khan was suspended as ICC chief prosecutor as part of a disciplinary process triggered by sexual abuse allegations against him. Khan has repeatedly denied the claims.

No wild celebrations after Makerfield byelection win as incoming Labour MP signals the start of an even bigger campaign

• Andy Burnham wins by huge majority

While an election count normally feels like an ending, the culmination of long campaign, in Makerfield the declaration of Andy Burnham as the constituency’s new MP felt like just the beginning.

In the days and weeks leading up to polling day, all talk was of whether Burnham could beat Reform, in this seat where Labour had lost every single vote they were contesting in the council elections just weeks ago.

Liam Byrne, who chairs Commons business committee, says too many operators are still waiting for redress

The Japanese tech company at the centre of the Post Office IT scandal is facing calls from a parliamentary committee to make an “immediate” payment towards the compensation bill for victims.

Fujitsu supplied the faulty Horizon software to the UK Post Office, which led to branch operators being wrongly prosecuted over discrepancies in their business accounts.

May figure of £23.3bn underlines challenge facing Andy Burnham if he ends up as Labour leader

The UK borrowed a higher-than-expected £23.3bn in May amid the economic fallout from the Iran war, underlining the fiscal pressures facing Andy Burnham if he takes over as the Labour leader.

In figures released shortly after Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield byelection, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said public sector net borrowing – the difference between government spending and income – for the month was the second highest for any May on record.

Simone Venturini says proposal aimed at discouraging arrivals in ‘periods of heightened tourist pressure’

Venice’s new mayor has said he hopes to raise a controversial entrance fee for day-trippers to the lagoon city to as much as €50 (£43).

Simone Venturini, the rightwing former tourism councillor who was elected as mayor in late May, said the proposal was aimed at further discouraging arrivals “during periods of heightened tourist pressure”.

‘We have come too far to turn around now,’ the monument on Alabama’s Montgomery Square reads

At the recently opened Montgomery Square in Alabama, bronze hands rise from the pavement, holding a placard against the sky. It reads 7053, the booking number displayed in Rosa Parks’s 1956 mugshot after she and other leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott were arrested.

Often with booking numbers and mugshots, the viewer is trained to see criminality before circumstance, guilt before resistance. But at Montgomery Square, a number meant to reduce Parks to an arrestee, has been remade into a monument to what her arrest exposed.

Outcry as experts from African and Asian countries – where mortality is highest – prevented from attending Portugal conference on prevention

Visa rejections have threatened progress on mother and baby health after experts from struggling countries were barred from talks, global midwife leaders have said.

Politicians, donors and UN agencies convened this week at the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) congress in Lisbon, Portugal, a key conference to discuss the millions of avoidable mother and baby deaths every year.

Emily Maclean is a midwife

The web giant announced that Artificial, a biopic about the controversial tech executive, ‘will be better served if it were released by a different studio’

Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s controversial Sam Altman biopic, which is poised for an awards run next year, has been dropped by its distributor, Amazon.

In a statement first reported by Puck, Amazon said that it believes “that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the film-making team to find the film a new home”.

Exclusive: Telegram urged to clarify how it detects illegal incitement after attacks were coordinated using app

Telegram is facing questions from Ofcom over how it detects and prevents illegal incitement after a Ukrainian man was found guilty of carrying out arson attacks on a car and property associated with Keir Starmer.

A spokesperson for the regulator said it had contacted the messaging app “to seek further clarification” because the arsonist had been directed on Telegram by a handler linked to Russia.

Guardian readers in the US share concerns about how the SpaceX IPO and AI boom affect their retirement accounts

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire last week after SpaceX debuted on the stock market with a valuation of $1.77tn.

Millions of Americans could soon become indirect investors in SpaceX and other emerging AI-focused companies as US markets increasingly shift toward AI-driven investments.

May heatwave drives up volume of sales 1.2%, the strongest monthly growth since January, says ONS

Retail sales bounced back to growth in May as record hot weather spurred sales of fans and paddling pools, while online purchases also soared.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the volume of retail sales in Great Britain grew 1.2% in May compared with the previous month, the strongest monthly rate of growth since January.

Andrew Bailey says ‘inflationary pressure in pipeline’ despite US and Iran signing initial peace deal as interest rates kept on hold

The governor of the Bank of England has warned consumers to expect higher costs this year as a result of the conflict in the Middle East, despite falling oil prices as the US and Iran signing an initial peace deal.

Speaking after the Bank kept interest rates on hold at 3.75%, Andrew Bailey said there was “still some inflationary pressure in the pipeline” after the conflict pushed up energy prices.

From Disclosure Day to Backrooms, a new wave of films promote stories of paranoia, alienation and mistrust. What are they trying to tell us?

Thank heavens for cinema, that light in the darkness and the source of all shocking scoops. It tells us to wake up and take action before it’s too late. That we live in the Matrix. That the CIA killed JFK. That our spouse is a robot and our boss an Andromedan. Also that there is an Escher-style staircase beneath the Tokyo subway and a disembodied zombie leg stalking the hook-up parks of Brazil.

How might we react if a trusted friend said all this? Would we be entertained or appalled, enlightened or freaked out? Would we even regard them as a trusted friend any more?

Recent Van Gogh show was National Gallery’s most popular ever and British Museum gears up for arrival of Bayeux tapestry

When Tate Modern announced a major exhibition devoted to Frida Kahlo, few doubted it would be popular. The Mexican artist has become one of the most recognisable cultural figures in the world, with her image adorning everything from tote bags to T-shirts.

But even Tate was unprepared for the scale of demand. The gallery has said more than 41,000 tickets have already been sold for Frida: The Making of an Icon, which opens on 25 June, making it the highest pre-selling exhibition in Tate’s history, surpassing the previous record of 32,000 advance sales for David Hockney in 2017.

From one hostile environment to another, the documentaries and dramas ranging from Nigeria and Syria to British immigration give vivid life to an experience that can feel very remote

As World Refugee Day approaches on Saturday, this year’s Refugee Week offers a multitude of events taking place across the UK, including a film festival that takes audiences from Ain el-Helweh – Lebanon’s largest refugee camp for Palestinians – in Mahdi Fleifel’s A World Not Ours and to an immigration removal centre in Dreamers, directed by Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor.

The UK’s asylum system is the focus of Allies in Exile, a first-person documentary from Syrian film-makers Hasan Kattan and Fadi al-Halabi that premiered on Tuesday at the BFI Southbank, which explores the labyrinth facing asylum seekers. Meanwhile, refugee charity Choose Love, in partnership with Tarot productions, curated a selection of four short films that together chronicle different stages in the search for asylum, from the difficulties of everyday life in a person’s home country through the perilous journeys made over land and sea, and arrival in a hostile environment marked by ostracism and ongoing trauma.The event, which took place on Thursday at Picturehouse Central, London, was entitled Fearless Stories and showcased films that “challenge division”.Josie Fernandez-Marelli, chief executive of Choose Love, says: “The UK wouldn’t be what it is today without all the incredible people and cultures that make it up. As division is growing, it’s more important than ever to work together to make sure that refugees are seen as human beings, with hopes, dreams and ambitions.”

Each episode of this PI drama’s second season is a half-hour haze suffused with melancholy and distressed urban beauty. It’s the kind of show that could only exist on Apple TV

Getting a TV show made isn’t easy. OK, so you’ve got an interesting idea and some good scripts – but a network or streaming platform will have many further questions. How much will it cost to make, which age/demographic will enjoy it, can it be distilled in a grabby one-line summary, could it recoup investment by running to multiple seasons? Nobody’s going to take a punt on your kooky pet project and risk losing money.

At least that’s the theory, but Apple TV seems happy to commission shows having ticked none of the above boxes. Pound for pound – that is, ignoring the overwhelming volume of Netflix shows – it’s probably the best streamer in the game, having gambled and won on Severance, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, The Studio, For All Mankind and Widow’s Bay. But it also has a stable of oddball charmers that work in a moseying sort of way – Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed and Margo’s Got Money Troubles being two recent ones – and a slew of baffling misfires like Government Cheese and Hello Tomorrow! that have popped up, done a thing nobody understood and disappeared again. You don’t know what you’ll get with a new Apple show, but it’s likely to be something nobody else would green-light, and they’d often be right.

The Northern Irish sitcom returns for a second season, and the lads go into a tailspin after learning about the famine. Plus: more World Cup action, with Scotland v Morocco

9pm, BBC Three
This offbeat sitcom from Northern Ireland, which started life as a BBC comedy short, is now in its second hilarious series – and it guest stars Steve Coogan. As we rejoin the boys of Ballymacnoose for an opening quadruple bill, Callum (Ryan Dylan) has a job as an actor at the folk museum, with an eccentric boss (Coogan). When the gang watch his performance as a peasant, they learn about the famine, and it sends each of them spiralling in different ways. Hollie Richardson

The stupendous fantasy epic is back, and Ryan Gosling finds himself stuck in space with a cute alien in a lovably jolly comedy

James Cameron’s bold, blue-tinged fantasy epic returns for a third outing. This one has a similar feel to The Way of Water: regular bouts of stupendous aerial and aquatic action; plenty of dastardly human behaviour; and – underlying the whole enterprise – warnings about colonisation and the ignorant exploitation of the natural world. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña and Sigourney Weaver are back as our favourite human-Na’vi blended family, still defending their way of life. The new element is the Mangkwan, a clan living next to a volcano led by the ambitious Varang (a lip-curling Oona Chaplin), who sees a collaboration with the gun-toting Earth forces as a route to power.
Wednesday 24 June, Disney+

(Ibeyi)
Newly independent and proudly self-sufficient, Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Diaz mix ancient lore with heavy bass, and harmonies with distortion, to incantatory effect

Having ceded creative control to numerous collaborators on 2022’s Spell 31 (veteran pop songwriter Eg White; rappers Pa Salieu and Berwyn), Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Diaz return to first principles for their fourth album. Written mainly by the sisters themselves, Offering recentres Ibeyi in their own sonic universe: fusing the influences of their Cuban percussionist father and Parisian upbringing, the twins sing in multiple languages, summoning ancient lore over intricate beats, transcendent harmonies and brooding distortion.

Self-sufficiency crops up as a lyrical theme, too: “One thing is for sure, I’m who I was looking for,” goes the refrain of Baba, which matches incantatory vocals with an irresistibly grimy bassline. (Perhaps the fact this is being released on their own label rather than XL, the taste-making British indie they were previously signed to, is also relevant here.)

The Chinese-Danish artist wrote nine 10ths of Larsson’s breakout album then got a Grammy nod. It’s a fine springboard for her own revelatory pop

From Aarhus, Denmark
Recommended if you like Caroline Polachek, Zara Larsson, Grimes
Up next Debut project coming later this year

You could hardly make a better professional songwriting debut than co-writing nine 10ths of a moment-defining album – namely Zara Larsson’s Midnight Sun – then getting a Grammy nod for it. It’s an enviable springboard for the relaunch of Helena Gao’s solo career. Over the past few years, the Chinese-Danish artist has released a handful of singles and EPs – standout God’s Favourite split the difference between NewJeans and R&B, and comes with an excellent Sims-referencing video – but her new music feels like a real flourishing, sidelining her older sweetness for a freakier braid of heavy bass, stuttering trance and a pitch-bending falsetto to rival that of Caroline Polachek, singing in English and Mandarin.

(ECM)
Lovano and his spirited quartet make his instrument glow in all its pliable eloquence, with rattling originals amid the Charlie Haden and Wayne Shorter covers

The saxophone’s 19th-century inventor, the Belgian Adolphe Sax, imagined hybrid horns that could combine the speed and fluency of woodwinds with the volume and punch of brass. Sax’s career was almost derailed by a childhood of hair-raisingly frequent accident-proneness that led his mother to fear for his survival, but at 20 he patented a prototype contrabass clarinet, and then the first saxophone as its offspring. Sneered at by traditionalists for decades, the sax was sidelined to parade bands and purring strings mimicry in dance orchestras – until jazz musicians from Sidney Bechet in the 1920s to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter and scores more contemporary originals, all the way to Joe Lovano today, put it centre stage as jazz’s radiantly expressive equivalent of the classical violin.

And Lovano’s Paramount Quartet glows with all the saxophone’s pliable eloquence in a master’s hands, alongside comparably free-spirited guitarist Julian Lage, bassist Asante Santi Debriano and sometime Living Colour drummer Will Calhoun. Lovano is a brilliant bebop player, but also an inspired free-improviser, creatively inhabiting the sound worlds of classic jazz, global music and more texture-based European approaches. He played Charlie Haden’s First Song with Bill Frisell long ago, and here it returns on a lyrical solo guitar intro from Lage and an exquisite sax theme, spinning into long improv over vaporous guitar chords and soft, sleek runs.

Gerhardt/WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/Manze
(Hyperion)
Alban Gerhardt eschews the romantic, heart-on-sleeve interpretations of these famous concertos, and finds nobility and poetry even in the most turbulent music

Alban Gerhardt adopts a back-to-basics approach in these thoughtful readings of cello concertos by Elgar and Dvořák. Determined to counter ideas embedded in the collective musical psyche by the likes of Jacqueline du Pré and Mstislav Rostropovich, there is a straightforwardness here, and a refusal to luxuriate that may not please those used to more heart-on-sleeve interpretations. Nevertheless, by scrutinising the scores – and few composers were as pernickety with their markings as Elgar – he finds much that is refreshing as well as illuminating.

In the Dvořák, he’s less theatrical, more poetic than his Soviet-born predecessor, aided by Andrew Manze, who keeps the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln clipped and generally light on its feet. Gerhardt’s is a noble, cleanly articulated performance that yearns where others prefer to gush and keeps its feet firmly planted in the Bohemian countryside, even when the music is at its most turbulent.

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.

The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee; A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper; Murder on the Red River by Marcie R Rendon; The Devoted by Catherine Cho; The Repentants by Kate Foster

The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill, £16.99)
In the eponymous Mumbai apartment block, the immensely rich and those who serve them exist side by side but worlds apart. Fading American actor George Abercrombie, married to superstar Sweety Sahota, finds himself advertising Indian whiskey while his younger wife’s acting career continues its stellar trajectory. Waking on the sofa with a hangover and only hazy memories of the night before, George discovers Sweety stabbed to death in the marital bed and one of his shirts, blood-stained, in the laundry basket. He knows he will be the prime suspect, but not only have Sweety’s phone and laptop disappeared, so has his assistant, Amit … Told from the points of view of George, Amit and Sweety’s put-upon PA Gemma – with Amit and Gemma both having secrets of their own – and laced with dry humour and social commentary, this is a tense, fast-paced tale of class, power and corruption.

In the latest autofictional instalment of his family saga, the French writer makes sense of his sibling’s violent homophobia and short life

At 33, the French writer Édouard Louis has already seen all seven of his slim novels translated into English. In his breakout debut, The End of Eddy (2017), and again in Change (2024), he wrote about being the promising child of a poor family, the bullied gay son who became a bestselling author. Several of his other books have offered sympathetic sociological portraits of his parents: a father destroyed by physical labour, a victim of French healthcare and housing subsidy cutbacks, and a mother who, after raising numerous children in poverty, fled first Louis’s father and then, in Monique Escapes, published earlier this year, his abusive successor. Now, in Collapse, translated by novelist Tash Aw, Louis describes his eldest brother’s death, at 38, from complications relating to alcoholism.

“I felt nothing at the announcement of the death of my brother,” he begins; “not sadness or despair or joy or pleasure.” The reasons for his coldness soon become clear. His brother was violently homophobic. His drinking at one point prevented Louis from sleeping ahead of a crucial exam. After The End of Eddy came out, his brother went looking for him with a baseball bat. So when Louis talks with his mother and sister about how to pay for his brother’s funeral and admits, “yes, I would have let him be buried like a dog”, we understand why.

Is Japan really full of centenarians? And what about ‘blue zones’? A brilliant skewering of ageing secrets and lies

There is a special place in hell reserved for doctors who trade on their authority, status and medical training to monetise public fear and gullibility. Every time I scroll past a qualified physician touting elixirs that promise youthful vigour, cellulite-free thighs or gut microbiome makeovers, I want to poke their fraudulent eyes out. At best, these charlatans have chosen lining their pockets over helping others. At worst, as in the case of the Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers, they are actively dangerous – something I witnessed first-hand on hospital wards in 2021 as unvaccinated patients succumbed to the disease.

Nowhere is human hope monetised more ruthlessly by medical grifters than in the anti-ageing industry. Our inescapable fate – decrepitude and death – makes us ripe for exploitation. Who doesn’t want to pop a pill or hook themselves up to an IV infusion that, for only £99.99 a month, will magically stave off the moment you turn into your grandparents? In Morbid, debut author Saul Justin Newman, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Population Ageing, sets out to topple the whole, sordid house of cards. His central argument is that our fear of frailty and dying has “created an opening for all manner of skullduggery in the science of ageing”, an area of research which is rife, he argues, with “misleading claims, mistaken assumptions, and outright chicanery. The world’s oldest man is a fake, hundreds of thousands of the world’s oldest people are actually dead, and five decades of research on human longevity is moot.”

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.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S; EA Vancouver/Electronic Arts
Micromanaging your fighter is a little tedious, but the action is thrilling in this authentically detailed sporting simulation

Becoming a professional fighter takes years of repetition, drilling techniques and training footwork until everything is instinctual. Your body needs an automatic answer for every limb, from every angle. In MMA, which encompasses every martial art, it’s even harder.

EA Sports’ UFC 6 realistically captures the grind of this brutal discipline. Throw on Career Mode and you spend most of your time working on combos and techniques. It’s all about making the complex controls feel second nature, increasing the effectiveness of every strike thrown by your fighter. With simulated six-week-long training camps between bouts, you can sometimes spar 12 times before a fight that could be over in a matter of seconds.

Tony-winning choreographer Sonya Tayeh was ‘broken up’ when she heard about the Irish singer-songwriter’s death three years ago. Now she and a group of over-40s female dancers are paying homage: ‘People love her, people need her’

Sonya Tayeh remembers watching Saturday Night Live in October 1992, at home in Detroit, when a young, shaven-headed woman behind a microphone tore a picture of Pope John Paul II into pieces, while saying: “Fight the real enemy.”

“I felt like the entire world paused,” remembers Tayeh, still in wonder at Sinéad O’Connor’s protest against abuses in the Catholic church, and the defiance in “those eyes that just seep through your soul and burn … It was like I could feel the world vibrate under my feet. I was overcome,” she says, on our video call from New York. I can see Tayeh has one side of her head shaved – a long curtain of dark hair sweeps down the other.

Camden People’s theatre, London
Jonny Khan’s debut play, about an uncle and niece manning phones at a rescue service during racist attacks, is well acted yet lacks tension

This theatre’s address was once the headquarters of the Camden Monitoring Project, a volunteer-run organisation established to provide safe transport home for South Asian restaurant workers at a time of rampant racist attacks. Built on four years of research with the local Bengali community, actor Jonny Khan’s debut play turns that chapter of history into a fictional two-hander, which unfolds on a single evening in 1994.

Muhammad (Bhasker Patel) is a Bengali Londoner who spends his nights coordinating the understaffed rescue service. He and his mature-beyond-her-years teenage niece Alima (Nusrath Tapadar) have barricaded themselves into his dingy office where the phone won’t stop ringing. The murder of a white teenager has prompted a slew of verbal and physical attacks. Frightened callers plead for assistance on Muhammad’s helpline, knowing the police have turned a blind eye.

Garsington Opera, Wormsley Estate, Stokenchurch
Director John Caird and conductor Laurence Cummings bring Monteverdi back to the Chiltern Hills with polished, festive inclusivity

Lightning, it would appear, can strike twice in the Chiltern Hills. In 2022, director John Caird and conductor Laurence Cummings collaborated on a much-admired staging of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, a seminal work from 1607. Four years later, and it’s the turn of Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, another terrific slice of baroque music theatre. Like Ulysses, it took Monteverdi decades to find his way back to the genre he’d helped define during his middle period in Mantua. Inspired by the newly commercial operatic world of late-1630s Venice, he fashioned a hit show with dramatic insight and plenty of special effects to pull in the crowds.

Robert Jones has salvaged elements of his Orfeo set design, with musicians seated on verdant terraces surrounded by crumbling frescoed walls. The opulent costumes, some of them apparently repurposed as a cost-saving measure (although you’d never know), encase the Greek gods in shimmering Elizabethan robes and ruffs. The mortals, clad in whites and creams, feel as if they’ve wandered in from an Edwardian country house party. Paul Pyant’s elegant lighting surrounds it all with a golden aura. Magical moments, such as Neptune rising from the sea, or the arrival of Telemaco on Minerva’s chariot, are pulled off with an unpretentious ingenuity.

This year brings world-renowned choreographers, ballet cabaret and fluffy clowns for toddlers

This was San Francisco Ballet’s big new commission in 2024, now getting its European premiere at Edinburgh international festival. An ambitious production with some impressive visuals, it’s a show for our times: an AI-themed retelling of the Pandora’s box myth by choreographer Aszure Barton. Music is by British producer Floating Points, who performs live, with an orchestra.
Edinburgh Playhouse, 28-30 August

Ahead of the band’s first new album in 16 years, the hugely influential guitarist will be taking your questions for the Guardian Film & Music reader interview

At the end of July, the Durutti Column will release their first new music in 16 years: the stunningly beautiful Renascent. It’s a prime time for Vini Reilly, Bruce Mitchell and Keir Stewart to return as the Durutti influence is everywhere: sampled by Blood Orange on his latest album Essex Honey; cited by Harry Styles on his new LP Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, as well as by Mark William Lewis and Yung Lean; played on The Bear.

Not that the group need the endorsements: since 1978, they have been one of the UK’s most distinctive acts, their dreamy instrumentals offering a sunlit alternative to the crags of post-punk, as last year’s reissue of their debut, The Return of the Durutti Column reminded us. The record’s deviation from the norms of the era, wrote Alexis Petridis in a five-star reappraisal, “ultimately worked in its favour: other than the sound of the primitive rhythm tracks, there’s nothing to tie the music here to a specific era, which means it hasn’t dated.”

Over 40 years, Italy’s Il Cinema Ritrovato – or ‘rediscovered cinema’ – has evolved into an influential international gathering

Bologna will be transformed into an open-air museum of cinema on Saturday as a nine-day festival dedicated to restored, rediscovered and overlooked films – some dating back more than a century – gets under way in the northern Italian city.

Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, Il Cinema Ritrovato, or “rediscovered cinema”, has evolved from its niche origins into an influential international gathering captivating a new generation of cinephiles.

Andy Serkis has picked the perfect actor for the next iteration of the Lord of the Rings franchise. But if Tolkien didn’t linger over this subplot, should we?

Let’s be honest: Anya Taylor-Joy would make a great elf. If any human being could flit from tree to tree as if woven from gossamer and starlight, or appear on a moonlit branch looking as though she had just been summoned by a haunted lute, it would be the star of The Queen’s Gambit, The Witch and Furiosa. She is perfect for Lord of the Rings, and it is no surprise whatsoever that she has been cast as the elf Seren in the forthcoming Andy Serkis-directed The Hunt for Gollum, as confirmed this week by the Hollywood Reporter.

You’ll probably have heard about the movie: Serkis is back as Gollum, Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf, and the whole thing is about a barely mentioned, if crucial, section of LotR in which Aragorn is charged with chasing down the snivelling, one-time owner of the One Ring before Sauron’s forces can get to him.

Tate Modern celebrates everything Kahlo, the British Museum marks John Constable’s 250th birthday, while Claydon prepares for an invasion – all in your weekly dispatch

Frida: The Making of an Icon
The great surrealist and self-explorer Frida Kahlo gets a show that emphasises her influence and posthumous fame.
• Tate Modern, London, 25 June to 3 January

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.

I have no legs, so the thought of tackling the nearly 6,000-metre peak seemed crazy. But after reflection, and hard physical training, I decided to give it a go

I was born with a rare genetic disease called sacral agenesis, which meant that my legs didn’t work. When I was five, I had surgery to amputate them. Doctors told my parents that I might never sit up, let alone be a functioning member of society – but as a child I wanted to try everything, and my mum and dad were great at encouraging me.

I learned to navigate the world by walking on my hands. I also had a wheelchair, or I’d get around our neighbourhood in Wyoming by skateboard, just like other kids.

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.

Whether you suffer from hay fever, damp rooms or just want to breathe cleaner air, here are the best purifiers from our expert’s test of 10

• The best dehumidifiers – tested

You may not have given much thought to air quality, nor to air purifiers, if you’re lucky enough never to have had hay fever or any of the many other health conditions connected to airborne particles.

But air pollution – including industrial emissions, exhaust fumes and dust – is one of the gravest environmental health risks in the UK. Densely populated and low-income areas feel the worst effects. It’s a global problem, explored in Beth Gardiner’s book Choked.

Best air purifier overall:
Blueair Blue Signature large

Best budget air purifier:
Levoit Core Mini LAP-C161-WUK

They claim to fix fine lines, blemishes and redness – but which stand up to scrutiny? We asked dermatologists and put them to the test to find out

• The best anti-ageing creams, serums and treatments

LED face masks are booming in popularity – despite being one of the most expensive at-home beauty products to hit the market. They claim to either reduce the appearance of fine lines, stop spots or calm redness, with some even combining different types of light to enhance the benefits.

However, it’s wise to be sceptical about new treatments that are costly and non-invasive, and to do your research before you buy. With this in mind, I interviewed doctors and dermatologists to find out whether these light therapy devices work.

Best LED face mask overall:
CurrentBody Series 2

Best budget LED face mask:
Silk’n LED face mask 100

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The model and entrepreneur talks pants, lawnmowers and restoring classic cars with the Filter

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David Gandy is one of the most recognisable faces in fashion, starring in hundreds of campaigns for brands including Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, Hugo Boss and many more. He was the first man nominated for model of the year by the British Fashion Council.

From 2014 to 2019 he designed a bestselling range for Marks & Spencer featuring underwear, sleepwear and more, and in 2021, he launched his own fashion and lifestyle brand, David Gandy Wellwear. A committed philanthropist, he has worked with several charities, from Save the Children to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, and backed the Centre for Social Justice’s Lost Boys report on the crisis facing boys and young men in the UK today. The David Gandy Wellwear summer collection is available now.

A bittersweet blend of sake, Cynar and Aperol that’s as light and refreshing as early summer days are long

This is very light, refreshing and goes down a little too easily, which makes it perfect for early summer.

Joshua Owens-Baigler, co-founder, Osteria Angelina, London E1

Forget pineapple and use berries instead, with aromatic five-spice adding its warming fragrance to this darkly delicious take on the classic bake

I grew up thinking the only fruit that was allowed in an upside-down cake was tinned pineapple, so once I discovered that no such rule existed and that I had free rein, upside-down cakes became far more exciting. I’ve since used everything from plums and apples to blood oranges, but today I’ve gone for blueberries. And, thanks to how juicy they are, you don’t even need to make a caramel: just toss the berries in sugar. I always add a pinch of five-spice, too, for a warming fragrance that just works. Trust me!

Whether making a last-minute panic buy or you simply can’t be bothered to stray far from home, the dusty shelves of your local store often boast their share of trusted, dependable bottles

There was a time in my life when Campo Viejo Tempranillo was as essential as milk or bread; my flatmates and I designated it our “house wine”’. The year was 2011, we wore a lot of elasticated statement belts and lived opposite a corner shop by Brixton prison. Like us, the wine was young, fruity and there for a good time.

Campo Viejo remains one of the more obvious choices for a last-minute bottle of red. Even better is Muriel Tempranillo Rioja at the Co-op, which has all the dark red fruit and vanilla you might expect from young rioja. These days, I’d freshen up either of them with a blast in the fridge, or mix with lemonade for that emblematic Spanish summer cocktail, tinto de verano.

From flavoured porridge to omelette pancakes, these meals provide slow-release energy without weighing you down

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While I adore almost everything about June, there is a brief window, round about now, where I get flashbacks to my childhood PE lessons. That’s right, folks: it is sports day season. And while I love cheering on my own kids (and trying to calm my inner Julia from Motherland), as a kid I hated it with a passion. I was not remotely sporty, but I have tried to quieten those hangups and encourage my girls as best I can. And the one thing I can do, confidently, is give them a nutritious breakfast.

Which leads me on to one of the big food topics on everyone’s lips, whatever your age: what are we eating before we work out? If social media is anything to go by (and it really shouldn’t be, or with caution at least), we should all max out on protein. But what’s the workout rule of thumb: carbs before and protein after? And what is high-energy food anyway?

Penelope worries this will teach her children it’s OK to trespass; Spencer sees no harm in them hopping over. No sitting on the fence – you decide who’s in the wrong

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

It doesn’t matter that it only takes five seconds. It’s a flagrant disregard for property rights

No harm was done to their garden. It’s just a lawn with a few shrubs. I don’t see the problem

I’d always wanted to represent my country at something, so when I learned about Mölkky, I got a team together

It was December 2023 and I was searching in the attic for Christmas decorations when my phone pinged. I pulled it out of my pocket and found a WhatsApp message from my son who was backpacking in Australia. The message read, simply: “You might want to take a look at this” – it was accompanied by a short video clip.

The footage was grainy – it was night-time somewhere in Queensland and the streetlights weren’t the brightest – but I could make out Louis and his travel companion Asher throwing what looked like a rolling pin at a collection of numbered wooden skittles.

Edward thinks of sex as playtime and has a vivid imagination, which Jane is happy to go along with despite being quite ‘vanilla’ herself

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

When I dreamed about Jane in a latex catsuit, we had one made

Brendan Maclean had never spoken with drag queen Karen from Finance in person, nor laid eyes on the man behind the makeup. Then came a chance encounter in Melbourne

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

I’d had a big, sparkly pop career in my 20s but by 2024 I was beyond my twink era, and getting by hopping from one weird gig to the next. Covid had really done a number on the music industry and, while my friend Paul Mac had kept me making music, I found myself drifting through a strange, boozy few years in Sydney. I’d been single since 2020 and my best friend was my cat.

Throughout that hazy time, I was as terminally online as ever. At 38 I was posting like a 20-year-old. One day, for no particular reason, I posted a track from the Dissociatives’ self-titled album from the mid-noughties. Paul, who I call my gay uncle, and Daniel Johns of Silverchair fame, had made just one LP together, and the obscure track, Thinking in Reverse, was one of my favourites.

The rules have changed and more taxpayers are being pulled into the net, not only the wealthy

Less generous rules have turned capital gains tax into a “cash machine” for the government, with income from the levy soaring by almost 80% to £24bn in the last tax year – equivalent to well over £800 a household.

A series of changes to the way the charge works means more people are being pulled into the capital gains tax (CGT) net, and not only the wealthy. And, given the scale of the change, this week experts were reminding consumers of legitimate ways to reduce a CGT bill.

Katie Kendrick, Cath Williams and Jo Darbyshire were subject to tens of thousands of pounds of hidden costs as their new-build freeholds soared in value, making their homes unsellable. Their campaign could finally end the ‘feudal’ system in England and Wales

When a leaflet about leasehold injustice landed on Cath Williams’ doorstep in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, nearly a decade ago, she barely gave it a second thought, tossing it straight into the bin. Had she given it more than a cursory glance, she’d have read about how residents on her new-build estate had found out the leaseholds for their homes had been sold without their knowledge, which could cost them all thousands of pounds. “Sometimes you get things through the door and you go, ‘what are they on about?’” recalls the 69-year-old retired university lecturer. It was of no interest to her. Or so she thought.

Williams hadn’t realised her home was leasehold when she decided to buy it. It was never mentioned in any promotional material, she says, and the word “leasehold” was only later added to her paperwork in pencil by an estate agent four weeks before her move in date – by then she had already paid her deposit and it was too late to back out. Her unease about what this would mean built over time and it soon became clear it would be a huge headache for her: any alterations to her home would require paying the freeholder an ever-increasing permission fee, the property would decrease in value as the lease got shorter, and the ground rent could increase drastically over time. Ultimately, it could leave her trapped and unable to sell her home.

Wuva staff’s kindness and empathy means we are able to plan more trips away

My husband has motor neurone disease (MND). For us to continue going away, we decided to buy a refurbished mobile hoist, which helps to get out of a bed, from the online mobility equipment company, Wuva.

It arrived quickly, but had been damaged in transit and didn’t work. I contacted Wuva out of hours via WhatsApp, and within five minutes I received an extensive apology and advised an engineer would call me shortly.

After falling for a scam call, ‘The Tech Chap’ host Tom Honeyands realised he’d given away vital details in social media posts

When Tom Honeyands realised he had been defrauded out of £70,000 he was furious and embarrassed – and left wondering if he had given away too many details on his social media videos.

Honeyands was on a work trip to Tokyo when he got a call from someone claiming to be from Lloyds bank. The caller asked if he had made a recent transaction in Singapore and when he said no, the scammer said his account had been compromised and that security details needed to be reset.

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.

From doing chores to staying away from exes, some adults are buying sticker charts to help stick to their goals

• Tell us: is it OK to date a friend’s ex? We want to hear from you

There is a sticker chart on the kitchen cupboard in the Gray family home in Birmingham, England – the two Gray children, aged four and 10, get excited when it’s time to add another gold star. But they aren’t being rewarded for brushing their teeth or learning their spellings; this is someone else’s chart entirely.

“They know that mommy gets a gold star when she goes to the gym,” says Bek Gray, a 33-year-old healthcare professional who has been using sticker charts to motivate herself for one and a half years.

An increasing number of people are finding trail running relatively late in life – and they’re reaping the health benefits

Earlier this year, 62-year-old Karla Wagner placed second in the 100-mile division of the Grandmaster Ultras, an Arizona trail-running event designed for 50-and-over runners in the age group known as “grandmaster”.

For most of her adult life, Wagner, who is from Lander, Wyoming, avoided running because it triggered her asthma. But when asthma meds improved, she added trail running to her fitness mix and became completely hooked in her early fifties.

Many of us have reassured ourselves with the ‘five second rule’, but bacteria can transfer almost immediately – and sticks around for hours

You drop a piece of cucumber on the floor. Do you immediately throw it in the bin or reassure yourself of the age-old “five-second rule” and reckon it’s fine to pop it in your mouth after a quick rinse?

If you fall into the latter camp, John Tregoning, professor of vaccine immunology at Imperial College London, has some bad news. He refers to three studies into bacteria transfer that all point towards the rule being false.

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.

Before choosing a stick to satisfy your Crayola makeup cravings, it’s wise to consider your skin type and tone

There’s something deeply satisfying about scribbling on your face with a makeup stick. Also, convenient. Solid sticks of foundation eliminate the risk of smashed or leaky bottles, are more compact and portable than liquids and creams, and can mostly be blended with fingertips, dispensing with brushes and sponges. They can be applied in a more localised way than other types of foundation and are particularly useful when someone – often with a deeper skin tone – benefits from two shades of foundation and doesn’t want them to merge into each other.

Sticks were all the rage for a few years, but fell from favour until Bobbi Brown’s excellent Skin Foundation Stick (£39) was practically the last one standing. Dior and Charlotte Tilbury recently revived the category and sticks are now enjoying a major comeback. Under the most scrutiny is Bobbi Brown herself, no longer a part of the eponymous brand, but helming the highly influential Jones Road. Her new Your Skin Foundation Stick (£36) is different from her groundbreaking Bobbi Brown formula, but exactly as I’ve come to expect from Jones Road – very moist, glowy and natural-looking. Although definitely not for everyone (including oily skins, and those who want full or matte coverage), it’s a sure-fire winner with devotees of Brown’s pared-back aesthetic. There are 30 shades in a selection of undertones. It spreads like butter, though if longevity is a priority, you’ll need a setting spray. But expect a comfortable ride and a pretty, non-caked finish.

Yves Saint Laurent saw the power of photography to push boundaries and take risks that had an impact in the fashion world and beyond. The new exhibition Yves Saint Laurent and Photography, at New York’s International Center of Photography, includes nearly 300 iconic photographs and archival objects with images by artists including Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Irving Penn, Andy Warhol and others. Pairing photographs with contact sheets, campaign materials, magazines and personal images, the exhibit shows the vital role images played in legacy of the Yves Saint Laurent brand

Fashion house pays tribute to Chinese style with its 75th anniversary catwalk show in Shanghai

“New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down.” For the British designer Ian Griffiths, who encountered this line in the New Yorker, it summed up why China’s biggest city was the right place to celebrate Max Mara’s 75th anniversary.

“Max Mara is a product for metropolitan women, and it would be patronising to assume that a metropolitan wardrobe should be western-centric,” Griffiths said.

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.”

With Two Weeks in August and the return of The Four Seasons, TV dramas about nightmare getaways are having a moment. Here are Guardian readers’ tales of their own

In early 1969, my parents booked a holiday in Belfast for one week and a bed and breakfast in Dublin for one week. When we arrived at our Belfast destination, The Elsinore Hotel, there wasn’t another car in the parking lot and the hotel was empty except for the aged husband and wife owners. Being 12 years old, I didn’t think too much at the time about the quiet, empty place but the owners invited the whole family down to the dining room every evening and we enjoyed some great meals. Lots of pictures of JFK and the pope adorned many of the hotel walls and being a Catholic family ourselves, the hosts made a big fuss of us.

Britain’s Camping and Caravanning Club started as a cycle camping club 125 years ago. I cycle from its birthplace to one of its oldest campsites to see if its free-wheeling spirit survives

Skylarks call out a cascading trill as I pedal between the pink and white hawthorn blossoms that make my path look like a May Day parade. I’m on the outskirts of Oxford, a city I thought I knew well, yet as I follow the National Cycle Route 57 on the e-bike I’d picked up in Jericho, it feels as though I’ve discovered a secret passageway.

This year the Camping and Caravanning Club (CCC) turns 125 – and I’m celebrating with a 60-mile cycling and camping trip, leaving from the city where the organisation was born and heading to Walton-on-Thames to stay at one of the oldest campsites in the CCC network.

The French cities of Marseille, Aix, Avignon and Arles boast a wealth of museums and festivals showing work by contemporary artists. Here’s how to make the most of a dazzling cultural summer

My wife and I moved from London to Marseille a little over five years ago when our British passports still conferred “right to reside” in France. That first winter on the beach, in short sleeves, as our daughters played in the topaz-coloured Mediterranean and the sun set across an ever-clear blue sky, I understood why this part of southern France has always been popular with artists.

I was recently speaking about this with the painter Fanny Nushka and her sailor husband, Benoît Bouchet, on the terrace of Café la Muse in Marseille’s “coolest” neighbourhood. She said: “It took a long time to go back to blue. It’s like being in Paris and painting the Eiffel Tower. It’s dangerous to paint the Calanques [limestone coves] as an artist from here.”

Starting your crops where you will harvest them avoids transplant shock and can speed growth. Just beware of hungry animals!

I like to think of myself as a fairly laissez-faire food grower. I see the prescribed sowing windows as guidance mostly, and have been known to bung a healthy seedling in a bed alongside a different plant family even if it goes against my crop plan. But when sowing seeds, I am all about control. I’m a devoted user of modular seed trays, preferring to keep my seeds compartmentalised so that I can monitor their germination and growth before choosing the ideal moment to plant them out.

Yet some crops lend themselves to being sown directly in the spot where they’ll grow until harvested. Quite a few crops can be sown outdoors now, in early summer’s generally friendly weather.

From a one-room village school transformed into a five-bedroom rural pile to a flat in a grand Victorian building in London

‘Reading is having a moment,’ according to Tinder. But do its users actually appreciate books, or just talk about them to get dates?

Name: Booksmaxxing.

Age: The next big thing.

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.

Amid UK government proposals for a ban, experts discuss what other activities might really serve children well

When a Lancashire schoolgirl was asked what she would do if the social media ban for under-16s came into effect, her answer hit a national nerve: “Stare at a wall,” she deadpanned. The clip went viral, not least because it distilled a question many parents have been asking themselves about the consequences of the government’s plan.

The answer, says Arran Wilson, of The Wildlife Trusts is not simply to tell children to go outside, read a book or join a club. “It’s not as simple as that,” Wilson says. “We need to think about the world we’ve been raising them in.”

He did every substance imaginable – and got punched by Chuck Berry – but Keef’s still going strong. As the Stones knock out another new album, he explains why he’s rejecting AI in favour of ‘the old ways’

Keith Richards has just become a great-grandfather. “This is true! This is true!” he enthuses, video-calling from somewhere in the depths of the Hit Factory, the New York studio first patronised by the Rolling Stones 46 years ago when they were making Emotional Rescue. “It’s been a couple of weeks. It’s a new thing for me. But I’m a fantastic grandad,” he confides. “Great-grandadding is … I try to let them hang with me for as long as humanly possible, then I hand ’em back. I’ve been doing a lot of grandfathering in the last year or so. I’ve got three or four new ones, you know. When I say new, I mean … two or three years old. Or four. Or one, or maybe five.”

Hang on, that seems a little vague. He shrugs and explodes in a wheezy chuckle. “I lose track, you know.”

Standup comedy gives women a space to talk about certain topics that have become more sensitive, while performers remain wary of censorship limits

Packed into the upstairs theatre of a small performing arts space in east Beijing, more than 100 people, mostly women, are giddy with anticipation. “Who did you come to see?” asks the MC, fashionably dressed in a faded denim two-piece suit. The answer is bellowed in unison back to him: “Fang Zhuren!”

Fang Shaoli, AKA Director Fang (Fang Zhuren), has built a cult following in China in the past two years. Decidedly less fashionable than the evening’s host, Fang is dressed in a yellow hoodie and dark blue jeans. Her everywoman attire is part of the appeal. With a stout frame and short, sensible haircut, Fang, who was born in 1975, hails from rural part of east China’s Shandong province. Before discovering the art of standup comedy she worked in factories and on construction sites, but mainly lived as a housewife to a difficult husband. Her jokes riff on the deep sexism that permeates Chinese culture, particularly away from the big urban centres like Beijing and Shanghai.

A decade on, have you healed the rift, or is your relationship beyond repair?

With the 10th anniversary of the 2016 EU referendum result approaching, we would like to hear from people on how the vote affected their relationships with family and/or friends.

Perhaps you voted differently from a parent, child, sibling, partner, or friend, which caused tension and conflict. If so, a decade on, have you been able to heal the rift, move past your differences or has it damaged your relationship beyond repair? Tell us.

Our wildlife series Young Country Diary is looking for articles written by children, about their summer encounters with nature

Once again, the Young Country Diary series is open for submissions! Every three months we ask you to send us an article written by a child aged 8-14.

The article needs to be about a recent encounter they’ve had with nature – whether it’s a nesting bird, a beetle on the move, a field full of flowers.

Did you visit the famed tree? Did you take photos of it? Please share them with us

The Major oak, one of Europe’s oldest, largest and most celebrated ancient trees, which has grown in Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, England, for at least 1,000 years, has died.

The huge tree failed to produce any leaves this year, after becoming stressed by a series of hot, dry summers. Footfall from visitors admiring the oak and well-intentioned historical interventions have also not helped its longevity.

We’d like to hear from people in the UK about how their local bird populations are faring, and what they mean to them

We’d like to find out about your experience of wild native birds where you live and whether there have been any changes over time.

Do you notice the same number of birds or less? What type of birds do you come into contact with? How has the soundscape changed? Do you ever use apps like Merlin to identify birds?

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Ukrainian strikes on a Moscow oil refinery, protests at the G7 summit, wildfires in Spain and Messi at the World Cup – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing