He started in the Harry Potter films and has since become ubiquitous, playing every type of character: romcom leads, evil villains, comical idiots. He even starred in a Taylor Swift video. So how does he stay so under the radar?

Domhnall Gleeson has got so much new stuff coming up, someone recently joked that this was the “summer of Domhnall”. Now the phrase is all over the internet, and Gleeson is mortified: “The worry is that somebody will say this to me now thinking that I believe it.” He doesn’t know where it came from – possibly his co-star Gayle Rankin on his new movie The Incomer. “It’s certainly not something I’m trying to push … but it would be great if it could be the headline.”

He’s in a good mood when we meet at a London hotel on a hot afternoon. You could say he’s good at interviews – charming, funny, garrulous, the perfect chatshow guest. He could just be acting, admittedly, but he seems to be a genuinely good-natured, grounded sort of guy.

Being subservient to the interests of the wealthy now means that his hands are tied, and he will be unable to tackle Britain’s most pressing issues

Damn the electorate. They’re so impatient. No sooner do they get a new leader than they want another one. Those ingrates are already starting to grumble about Andy Burnham. Maybe the country is becoming ungovernable. Perhaps it’s social media. Or a consumerist culture, always picking the next shiny thing. Perhaps we’re addicted to drama. As we’re on our sixth prime minister in 10 years, and as similar levels of discontent surface in many other countries, these claims are recited across the media. What’s wrong with us?

Yet our disgruntlement is entirely rational. We give up so quickly on our prime ministers because they give up so quickly on us. Though it may involve different issues, it is always the same betrayal: the public interest is sacrificed for the sake of a tiny number of immensely wealthy people. And it tends to happen almost immediately.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Campaigners say care users face a postcode lottery for support overseas – despite no extra cost to taxpayer

Disabled people are being blocked from travelling abroad by NHS care boards and local councils that refuse to let them use their care funding outside the UK, the Guardian has learned.

Campaigners warn of a “postcode lottery” in England where the right of a disabled person to travel overseas depends on where they live or the whim of local officials – even when there is no extra cost to the taxpayer.

The comedian’s new Friday night series will be set in a working pub, with his aunties working the bar and celebrities doing shifts as managers. Or it will be if he can only get his licence …

Joe Lycett sits in a pub, an untouched pint in front of him. “Since I had my son, I’m not drinking anywhere near as much,” he laments. “Children do not respect hangovers, or tiredness in general.”

His son is almost two, and Lycett has readjusted his life accordingly. “I’ve started going to bed when he does, which is about seven o’clock,” he explains. “I’ve seen a few nights where I’ve just gone: ‘Right, well, that’s me, then.’”

Benedict Andrews’ intense, interval-free mashup of ancient and modernist classics is a show of two halves

The Electra bit of the title refers to the Sophoclean tragedy of a daughter trapped in a cycle of vengeance, the Persona part to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film about an actor who suddenly stops speaking while performing Electra on stage.

Benedict Andrews’ drama after Bergman and Sophocles first welds the two together, then raises the concept higher by enlisting his star castings in Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss to share the parts of Electra and her murderous mother, Clytemnestra, as well as Bergman’s inexplicably silent actor, Elisabeth, and her nurse, Alma, who fall into a disturbing, mirrored relationship.

At the National Theatre, London until 10 October

What former PM could resist upstaging the new one hours before his first dispatch box appearance in 16 years?

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No good deed goes unpunished. Or any deed for that matter. It was only a few weeks ago that Keir Starmer was insisting he would remain an MP until the next general election. So we should all probably have guessed that he would be off at the earliest opportunity. U-turns were a distinguishing feature of his two years in office.

And what former prime minister could resist upstaging the new one hours before his first appearance at the government dispatch box for 16 years? Especially when the new one had been plotting his downfall for at least a year. It’s what everyone would have wanted. Right?

The prime minister said Britain needed to be brutally honest about the mistakes of the last 40 years of UK politics

Andy Burnham has blamed Brexit and Margaret Thatcher for a decade of low growth in the UK, arguing that Britain needs to be brutally honest about having taken “a series of wrong turns” in the last 40 years.

In his first Commons appearance since he took over as prime minister about six weeks ago, Burnham told MPs he wanted to build a new sense of optimism so “we can make this next decade better than the last”.

Hinted that he would commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2030, saying he had appointed John Healey as his chancellor “precisely because” of his position on military spending.

Signalled he is open to renationalising the water industry – saying he is looking at “all possible solutions”, as the sector is a “leaking monument” to the failures of privatisation.

Opened the door to looking again at electoral reform in Labour’s next manifesto. “I do believe there needs to be a mandate to make that change. There are different views in this house, but I believe we will need to get a consensus at the next election. And if there is that consensus, then a change can be made in the next parliament.”

Announced he would attend the Cop31 climate summit in Turkey and continue pursuing green energy – but that he would be “pragmatic” on supply, amid expectations he will approve the Jackdaw gasfield. “The mistake is saying it’s got to be one or the other for political purposes. The truth is, it’s going to have to be both.”

Attacks on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and reprisals against US bases in Middle East quash hopes that flare-up last weekend was limited in nature

The US has launched new airstrikes on Iranian targets, prompting counter strikes by Tehran targeting American interests in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, fuelling concerns about a ⁠wider renewal of hostilities.

US Marine Corps base Camp Titin in Jordan was targeted for an “intense ballistic missile attack”, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) said early on Wednesday, according to Iranian news outlet Tasnim.

Suspect Tyler Robinson to be tried for aggravated murder, felony charge that carries death penalty sentence in Utah

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A Utah judge ruled Tuesday that the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk must stand trial for aggravated murder, a felony charge that makes him eligible for the death penalty if convicted.

After several hours of closing arguments in Provo, Utah, judge Tony Graf ruled there is sufficient evidence to try Tyler Robinson, 23, who has been charged with the murder of one of the US right’s most prominent figures.

Six employees killed on Tuesday after Moscow escalates attacks on infrastructure and Ukrainian capital

Russia has opened a deadly new phase in its war against Ukraine by deliberately targeting the country’s railway network, with six employees killed on Tuesday in the latest strikes on Kyiv.

Ukraine’s state-owned railway company, Ukrzaliznytsia, said its workers died when a ballistic missile plunged into a locomotive depot. The Russians hit other railway facilities, it added, during a massive bombardment of Kyiv and the Kyiv region. At least 12 people died, with a dozen wounded, including three children.

John Sellers, 34, who moved with his family to Sweden aged 10, has been ejected despite his recent marriage to a Swede

A 34-year-old British man who has lived in Sweden since he was 10 has been deported in the latest of a series of Brexit-induced catastrophes for UK citizens in the country.

John Sellers was told to leave despite living in Sweden for 24 years, having been educated in the country and newly married to his Swedish partner, Caroline.

British far-right pundit breaks silence on ICE arrest and deportation and says he was ‘really, really terrified’

Milo Yiannopoulos, the British far-right commentator who was arrested last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Louisiana and deported to the United Kingdom, has broken his silence about the experience, saying that “for the first time I know what it feels like to be really, really terrified”.

Yiannopoulos on Tuesday appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, a YouTube show presented by Piers Morgan, the British broadcaster and media personality. Yiannopoulos, 41, described the experience in the US as “humiliating and disorientating”, “physically degrading” and “frightening”.

Speed limit dropped from 60km/h for around 70% of general roads in the hope of making narrow streets of crowded cities safer

Drivers on residential roads in Japan have been forced to take their foot off the accelerator, after the speed limit was slashed from 60km/h (37mph) to 30km/h in an attempt to reduce deaths and injuries among pedestrians on narrow urban streets.

The new limit, which went into effect on Tuesday, applies to residential roads with no centre line or maximum speed signs, media reports said.

Police urged people in Overasselt to stay indoors after one person died and 34 were arrested

Authorities have arrested 34 people, including French, Belgian and Algerian nationals, after a person died in a pre-dawn shootout in a Dutch village reportedly linked to a notorious drug lord.

Police urged people in Overasselt, near the German border, to stay indoors with doors and windows shut in case further suspects were on the loose.

More than 1,000 people confirmed dead and more than 4,000, including 36 British nationals, remain missing

A British aid worker was mistakenly identified by Nepalese authorities as a rescued survivor after returning to Kathmandu on a humanitarian aid flight.

Alastair Chambers, a 45-year-old former Gloucester councillor, said he flew to Nepal last week to distribute sleeping bags, food and essentials to communities cut off by collapsed bridges.

A week on from the flash flooding disaster, authorities are urging relatives of the thousands of missing and dead to provide blood samples

An army official calls out a name. A young woman stands, two pieces of identification in her hands. She fills out a form, takes another and moves to the back of the hospital to give a vial of blood.

With so many people killed by Nepal’s floods, and hundreds of bodies being buried because the morgues are full, there is now a push to identify victims through DNA. The woman, Prakrit Gurung, 19, is hoping her DNA will be linked to her mother’s body. Her father’s has been found – her brother recognised his picture on a wall outside the hospital.

Andy Burnham has announced a crackdown, but doubts remain over authorities’ ability to take on organised crime

“There were parents dropping their children off and then heaving from the smell,” says Liz Thompson, 45, who runs Blessings Nursery in Bradford, West Yorkshire.

During the recent heatwaves, the smell from an illegal waste dump on Midland Road, just metres from the nursery, became so unbearable that staff had to keep the doors and windows shut and the children couldn’t play outside.

Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly finds warmth and humor in Rachael Gunn’s ordeal, but never fully reckons with what her notoriety meant for breaking

Early in Netflix’s new documentary, Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly, Australian B-girl Rachael Gunn, recounts a session she had with her sports psychologist prior to the 2024 Paris Olympics.

“Right before the Olympics, I went to my therapist, panicked,” she says. Her therapist asked her what was the worst thing that could happen. And she said, “The whole world could laugh at me.” Her therapist responded: “Do you think that’s reasonable?” Cue Gunn’s hysterical laughter.

You’ll thank yourself for making these batch-cooking beauties to store in the freezer until the next busy worknight

I’ve called this spicy chicken and baked rice “midweek”, but you can enjoy this baby all week long. Juicy, spiced chicken, fluffy baked rice and enough flavour to make you bin that takeaway menu and raid your cupboards instead. Then some fragrant, delicate fishcakes with a lovely, bouncy texture, which are such a winner for the freezer. Taking only 10-ish minutes to cook from frozen, they save you from hunger and distraction on a busy WFH day.

An enraging documentary hears from women sent away for becoming pregnant outside marriage. Plus: the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
Ann in Wales was sent away by her parents when she became pregnant after being raped (“I didn’t blame them, I blamed myself”). Joan in Sunderland gave evidence in court against the teacher who raped and got her pregnant – but he was acquitted. They tell their stories in this blood-boiling documentary, along with other women who were unmarried, pregnant and sent to so-called “mother and baby homes” between 1949 and 1976. People who worked in those places also speak, as do some of the grown-up children who were adopted by mostly white, middle-class families. It brings their fight up to date as they demand an apology from the state. Remarkably, there are some joyful moments to hang on for. Hollie Richardson

According to a new survey, that’s the age when people feel most confident and in control of their lives. In other words, they no longer have a chairdrobe ...

Name: 50 (and thriving).

Age: You can work this one out.

A 150-metre-long island appeared from nowhere on Williston Lake, British Columbia; vanished, then reappeared 20 miles away

A thickly forested island appeared mysteriously on a western Canadian lake. Nearly 150 metres (500 feet) long and 75 metres (250 feet) wide, the land mass took local people and experts by surprise. It wasn’t on any maps or navigation charts.

One boater approached and took a video of the island, capturing nearly 100 trees undulating in the chop of the lake.

Ever since the earliest known recording of whale song was made in 1949, researchers have been captivated by the wails, rumbles, clicks, grunts and squeals of their communication. As technology improves, scientists are decoding the intricate patterns that make different species’ vocalisations distinctive. Madeleine Finlay hears from Emma Bryce, a journalist who has spent months investigating human efforts to understand whale song. She explains how this knowledge could help us better protect whales from human-made harms.

Credits:

1. Valeria Vergara/Raincoast Conservation Foundation

2. Footage courtesy of Raincoast Conservation Foundation - Obtained for research under SARA permit XMMS 4 2026

3. Video by Amanda Cotton/Project CETI

4. Footage courtesy of Valeria Vergara and GREMM. Obtained for research under SARA permits QUE-MM02-2016 and QUE-LEP-001-2018

5. Project CETI

6. Project CETI

We are used to the idea that our fellow humans might intentionally mislead or manipulate us, but the idea that machines can now do the same is deeply unsettling. Researchers are racing to find solutions before it’s too late

• The summer issue of the Long Read magazine is out now. Click here to order

In November 2023 – a lifetime ago in the field of artificial intelligence – some of the most powerful people in the world descended on Bletchley Park, the wartime codebreaking hub in Buckinghamshire, to talk about AI safety. In attendance were the then US vice-president, Kamala Harris, the AI bosses Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, delegations from 28 countries, two of the three so-called “godfathers” of AI, and Elon Musk.

The first iteration of ChatGPT had been released only a year earlier, and there was already plenty of evidence that AI models could be used for ill, from spreading misinformation to generating deepfakes. A presentation at the summit, however, highlighted a different issue: what if the biggest problem wasn’t to come from people misusing the technology, but from AI’s own behaviour?

I was told to keep my diagnosis private but I am determined to show the reality of breast cancer and reject the stigma that prevents women seeking treatment

‘Madam, this looks like breast cancer, and if it is, we will chop off your breast.” That was how the doctor welcomed me into the chaotic world of cancer in 2017 when I was 32 years old. He had his back to me, but kept on talking, peering into the specimen bottle.

For a moment, I could no longer hear him. I thought of my three children, the university degree I had just bagged and the future I had envisaged. If I was going to die, what was the point of it all? I had invested everything I had to obtain that degree, subjecting my children to days of absence while I spent my nights in the university library.

As I celebrate five years of citizenship, the far right is poised to take control in Saxony-Anhalt. Courage is needed to defeat it

Two events take place in coming days that will affect my relationship with Germany. One, which will be splashed across the media, is dark and forbidding. The other, which will pass unnoticed except by me and my close family, should have brought me joy. Now that feeling is tempered with confusion.

On 6 September, voters in the small eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt are expected to give Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) a resounding victory. If the arithmetic falls in a certain way, a German far-right party could assume power for the first time since the Nazis.

John Kampfner is a Berlin-based author and broadcaster. His latest book, Braver New World, is published by Atlantic

Testosterone replacement therapy comes with serious and potentially irreversible health risks including infertility and early heart disease

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Are you tired? Feeling flat and irritable? Finding it difficult to concentrate? Maybe you’re experiencing the seemingly ubiquitous symptoms of modern life. Or, if you’re a man, you may have been told by countless uncredentialed online influencers that you’re probably suffering from “low T”.

For decades, testosterone has been marketed to men as a means to maximise virility. But in recent years, social media has fuelled the “T-maxxing” trend, in which men are encouraged to maximise their testosterone levels through either natural or artificial means.

A bill proposing a cap on donations is up for debate this week. We must seize this chance to keep big money out of our politics

Christopher Harborne gave Reform £9m in one day – more than double the amount all trade unions combined gave Labour nationally and its MPs directly for the entirety of the last general election. Once such “largesse” in our politics was rare, now it is commonplace. In 2015, just 1% of donations were from individuals and companies giving £1m or more – by 2024, that figure was a third. The chequebooks of the rich and powerful are already circling the next election. The question for Labour is, are we prepared to pay the price if we refuse to stop them?

The prime minister deserves credit for recognising how toxic this has become and the public support for action too. As a result, on Wednesday, measures to cap what overseas donors can give will come before parliament in the representation of the people bill. Yet focusing on location rather than the level of a donation misses how wealthy individuals can set up a UK shell company or use a UK postcode to continue to dominate our democracy. With several British millionaires already funding political entities and parties and others waiting in the wings, our goal must be to ensure no one – near or far – can buy Westminster.

Stella Creasy is Labour and Cooperative MP for Walthamstow

This weekend, Rodrigo raised millions for charities that benefit women and girls, and she has previously been vocal about Gaza and Ice. With free speech increasingly under threat, her peers should take note

Donald Trump, the 80-year-old president of the United States, spent his weekend whining about a lake and posting memes of Donald’s Ducks. While he was busy with his ducks, Olivia Rodrigo, a 23-year-old pop star, spent her weekend trying to Make America Somewhat Decent Again. On Saturday, Rodrigo hosted the inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival, bringing together female artists to raise money for women-focused non-profits which have had their funding slashed by the Trump administration. The festival raised $10m (£7.4m) which Melinda French Gates matched, bringing the total to $20m.

In a perfect world a singer holding a benefit concert for feminist charities wouldn’t be radical stuff. But we don’t live in a perfect world, do we? We live in hell. Trump has successfully bullied US institutions into doing his bidding. Universities have defunded diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, many media outlets have kowtowed to the US’s self-styled king and tech CEOs have jumped into bed with him. Women’s rights are going backwards globally and our civil liberties are under attack.

A summer on the road suited the prime minister’s open style, but now the walls of conventional politics are closing in

Nothing stays fresh for long in parliament and no one sounds normal. The air, thick with convention, suffocates originality, tuning every voice to the same Westminster pitch. The need to escape that climate is one reason why Andy Burnham quit his Commons seat to run for mayor of Greater Manchester. Or that is how he tells the story.

Returning after nearly a decade away, the prime minister says he wants to throw open the windows, let in some air. He thinks devolution can cultivate a healthier political culture. He intends to rebalance England’s centre of gravity with a power base in the new No 10 North.

Japan’s collision with Donald Trump reveals the dilemma facing Britain: economic independence is becoming more necessary – and more tricky to achieve

“In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity” is an aphorism attributed to Albert Einstein. It seems to be taken to heart by this White House. A global bond sell-off sparked by an inflationary shock emanating from the Gulf sees Donald Trump seeking to restrict plans by Japan – a longtime ally – to reduce dependence on an international system America dominates.

Japan, a successful exporter, has long done things its own way. For years Tokyo saw off the bond vigilantes despite running enormous deficits and a huge national debt. It demonstrated how a central bank could fund public spending and keep interest rates low if it wanted to. This economic model was refined by Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. However, this week the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, called time on Abenomics as his price for US help in stabilising Japan’s currency. Japan’s Sanae Takaichi, he indicated, should shrink her $2tn spending plans and raise rates. Abenomics did not suddenly become financially impossible. It became inconvenient to the issuer of the world’s reserve currency.

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.

Problems with housing, jobs and technology have dented young people’s confidence in the future and each other

Hope, Raye told a crowd at Reading festival on Saturday, was the theme of a set inspired by her second album. Having established through a show of hands that most of the audience had just done their GCSEs, and after recounting her own rocky road to stardom, the 28-year-old singer led a series of upbeat chants of “it’s gonna be all right”.

For anyone who thinks adolescence ought to be a time of optimism, it was a charming spectacle. But a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank paints a much gloomier picture. Building on existing evidence of declining wellbeing, such as Alan Milburn’s report on young people who are not in education or work, the IPPR’s researchers found that 11- to 24-year-olds in England (gen Z and older members of gen Alpha) are increasingly lonely. They have fewer friends than young people in the past and are less contented with those they do have. One in 20 say that they have no friends at all. A series of interviews produced worrying evidence of their lack of confidence about the future.

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

Readers respond to an article by Dr Zubir Ahmed, who argued that better palliative care should be prioritised before assisted dying is legalised

I work as a renal physician, including on a transplant ward, so I will have had many of the same experiences as Zubir Ahmed, but I do not share his opinion about assisted dying (As a doctor, I say this: before we even consider assisted dying, fix how we care for the most vulnerable, 26 August).

It is universally agreed that patients with capacity should be able to make decisions about their treatment. Their decision is the one that matters if they have the ability to use and understand the relevant information and can communicate any decision they make. The doctor needs to explain possible options and their likely outcomes in as fair and balanced a manner as possible.

Sandy Martin and Joan Ruddock respond to an article on changes to the voting system

Your report (Labour MPs will push Burnham to back voting reform in first 100 days, 25 August) says: “The UK last rejected electoral reform in 2011 after a referendum [on] whether to change to an alternative vote system.” Many people do not realise that the referendum was not about a proportional electoral system. While the alternative vote is the best way to elect a single person, it really doesn’t work for a government.

That referendum was primarily a popularity contest for Nick Clegg, and it is no surprise that he was rejected, predominantly by people who were not aware of the actual terms of the referendum. A national commission, taking evidence from people across the country, followed by a general election that includes a manifesto commitment to changing the system, will be a far more reliable and accurate representation of the views of the British people than a referendum is ever likely to be.
Sandy Martin
Chair, Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform

Far from being crazy, the grandchildren of the radical ‘permissive’ generation are using their voices to fight for progress, as we taught them to do, writes Paul McGilchrist

I can’t help feeling that Nesrine Malik’s critique of “Woke 1.0” was more nuanced and focused than the published responses suggest (Letters, 24 August). Yes, it could be puritanical, dogmatic and wrong-headed at times, but to dismiss it on these grounds is to ignore Malik’s entreaty not to “trivialise and dismiss movements that resonated globally, and which had safety, dignity and equal opportunity at their heart”.

Far from being “crazy”, so called “Woke 1.0” was the roar of the grandchildren of the radical “permissive” generation – on both sides of the Atlantic – using voices they were always encouraged to believe could change the world. They were schooled in human rights like no others before them, and inducted into activism through historical precedent, armed only with just cause and integrity. They were unashamed to wear conviction on their sleeves and prepared to face the inevitable backlash as readily as their often-celebrated countercultural forebears.

David Devanny on the challenges in running the late poet Charles Causley’s home in Launceston, Cornwall

In response to your letters on preserving writers’ homes (25 August) Cyprus Well was the cottage home of poet Charles Causley (1917-2003) in Launceston, Cornwall. We are a small charity, proud to open the doors to aspiring writers, schoolchildren, residents and tourists as much as we can, year-round. We share Causley’s sanctuary of 50 years with those who love his work or write their own, as well as those who just want to immerse themselves in a peaceful and enriching environment.

Like others who run writers’ homes for the public, it’s not easy – particularly with weather impact on the building and demands on shrinking sources of funding. We owe everything to our volunteers and occasional private philanthropy, supplemented by grants and donations from trusts and foundations. It would be wonderful if the town council – some of whom knew Causley in his lifetime – would reconsider their position on supporting us, too.

• Fernández: ‘This is a club built for success’

• Chelsea’s move for Monaco’s Camara falls through

Manchester City have equalled the British transfer record with a £125m deal to sign Enzo Fernández from Chelsea, who were left raging after their attempts to replace the Argentina midfielder were dashed by Monaco reneging on an agreement to sell Lamine Camara last night.

On a day of twists and turns, City emerged in a strong position after they bolstered their attack by signing Iliman Ndiaye from Everton for up to £65m and landed one of Enzo Maresca’s biggest targets on a five-year deal. Chelsea held out for a huge fee for Fernández and it seemed they were going to find a replacement for him as the transfer window drew to a close.

• 25-year-old walks away from £40m deal at last moment

• Beto and Ndiaye already sold by club to raise funds

Everton’s £40m move for US international Folarin Balogun collapsed late on deadline day to leave manager David Moyes with only one striker for the first half of the season.

Everton had agreed a £40m deal for Balogun only for issues with the striker’s medical to place the transfer in doubt after the Merseyside club had sold Beto to Fiorentina and Iliman Ndiaye to Manchester City. Enquiries were made to Manchester United for Joshua Zirkzee and Aston Villa for Tammy Abraham but proposed loans for both forwards were rejected.

• British Wimbledon semi-finalist loses 6-3, 6-3, 7-5

• Elena Rybakina into second round with 6-3, 6-2 win

Six weeks on from the fortnight that changed his life, Arthur Fery’s first grand slam appearance since his semi-final run at Wimbledon came under considerably different circumstances. He is now the 33rd best men’s player in the world, a direct entrant for all of the biggest tournaments, and he has continued to gain experience at the highest level of professional tennis each week.

As a result of his continued exposure on the tour, though, Fery’s adversaries have also learned a bit more about him. In his first main draw appearance at the US Open, Fery came up against a prepared and sharp Lorenzo Musetti, who knew exactly how to exploit the vulnerable parts of his game in order to secure a win. The Italian comprehensively outplayed the British No 1, reaching the second round with a comfortable 6-3, 6-3, 7-5 victory.

• Ireland: 281-5; England: 283-4

• Bouchier hits 104; fifties for three Ireland batters

A century from Maia Bouchier led England to a record women’s one‑day international run chase against Ireland at Grace Road on Tuesday, as they passed their target of 282 with six wickets and 71 balls to spare.

Bouchier missed out on selection for the T20 World Cup in June, but she remains a key part of England’s ODI plans as they try to build a new team following the retirements of Heather Knight and Tammy Beaumont.

A decade after Kaepernick’s quiet protest shook the NFL, his exile looks less like an aberration than a blueprint for the culture war that followed

America likes nice round numbers, perfect for anniversaries and reflections, and it has, suddenly, been 10 years since Colin Kaepernick first protested police killings – more accurately, police killings of Black people that went unpunished either internally or by the courts – by taking a knee during the national anthem for the entirety of the 2016 NFL regular season. He never played in the league again.

Ten years covers a lot of ground, especially in these years of American darkness, and many of the important details surrounding Kaepernick, his banishment and significance have disappeared, time replaced by more time and more darkness – time moving faster than ever, at internet speed, where nothing matters, where nothing sticks. We consume by clip, by click, by meme, and knowledge by meme is not knowledge at all.

The departure of Marc Skinner and senior squad members leaves new manager Eva Olid to guide United into new era

Guardian writers’ predicted position: 7th (NB: this is not necessarily Tom Garry’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips)

Last season’s position: 4th

• Minute’s applause to take place in Lincoln on Wednesday

• Spate of serious recent crashes have put safety on agenda

The death of the Welshman Fin Tarling continues to cast a long shadow over professional cycling and nowhere will that absence be felt more deeply than at the men’s Tour of Britain which begins on Wednesday.

Tarling’s former team NSN Cycling, which includes the Olympic medallist Ethan Vernon, also one of his closest friends, will be brought to the start line in Lincoln for the opening 187km stage, for what is expected to be a minute’s applause.

The Argentinian’s decision to quit international football was met by an outpouring of affection from the country he led to World Cup glory in 2022

Anyone who was present at Lionel Scaloni’s press conference immediately after the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina in New Jersey on 19 July and saw his tears, the sobs which prevented him from speaking while he got up and walked out, could tell this was a man weeping not because of defeat in a single match but because he was fully aware that what that particular group of men had been through for the past eight years had come to an end.

Messi’s announcement that he is retiring from international football, posted on Instagram on Monday complete with photos of three handwritten sheets of some anonymous yet corporate-looking headed paper and a Harry Potter Time Turner pen, to the soundtrack of Brindis sung by Soledad Pastorutti, instantly dominated the news and unleashed a barrage of homages, gratitude and joy from all corners. But it’s not exactly a surprise.

• Corporation cites audience shifts and financial concerns

• Broadcaster under fire over approach to sports rights

A staple of Sunday afternoon TV for almost 50 years, with an instantly recognisable theme tune, is being axed amid complaints that the BBC’s sports coverage continues to go downhill.

The BBC head of sport, Alex Kay-Jelski, has been under fire of late and will certainly not have endeared himself to some of the licence-paying public who have enjoyed the coverage of winter sports on one of Britain’s longest-running sports shows with the news on Tuesday that Ski Sunday is being dropped.

Canadian PM is set to retaliate against tariffs levied by Donald Trump and criticized US officials over insults

• US politics live – latest updates

Mark Carney has rebuked Donald Trump’s administration and urged officials in Washington to “start being serious” amid escalating trade tensions between the US and Canada.

Days before Canada is due to retaliate against Trump’s sweeping tariffs with its own duties on US goods, the Canadian prime minister criticized US officials for insulting his country. “It is beneath their office,” he said.

Wong, 29, is accused of urging foreign powers to impose sanctions, blockades and other hostile measures against China

Joshua Wong, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy activists, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiring to seek foreign sanctions against Hong Kong and China, a national security charge that carries a maximum life sentence.

Prosecutors have accused Wong, 29, of working with the exiled Hong Kong activist Nathan Law to urge foreign powers to impose sanctions, blockades or other hostile measures against China.

Boy’s mother says she hopes case will help others, as judge says exclusion should be ‘a tool of last resort’

The mother of a 10-year-old autistic boy who had his permanent exclusion from a primary school quashed by the high court has said she hopes the ruling helps other children.

The boy, who cannot be named, was permanently excluded from his primary school, part of the Lift academy chain, after coming to school in July 2025 with a replica butterfly knife, which he handed to a friend to use against another child during an altercation in the playground.

Campaigners say some care boards in England flouting their legal duty, resulting in ‘cruel’ postcode lottery

Seriously ill children are being denied the chance to die at home because the NHS in many parts of England is flouting its legal duty to provide the care needed to make that happen, critics say.

The widespread failure to provide at-home end-of-life care is forcing children who want to die at home to instead do so in hospital. Campaigners have described it as “cruel”.

Haakon VIII promises to uphold 1814 constitution but his queen misses ceremony because of post-surgery ‘complications’

King Haakon VIII swore an oath of allegiance before Norway’s parliament on Tuesday in the first major stage in the passing of the crown since the death of his father after 35 years on the throne.

Wearing a ceremonial uniform, Haakon, who became king when Harald V died on Friday, promised to uphold Norway’s 1814 constitution with his 22-year-old daughter, Crown Princess Ingrid Alexandra, by his side.

Head of tree collections at Kew ‘very worried about this autumn’ as hot, dry summer has caused brittleness

High winds associated with El Niño could cause widespread mortality among tree species already weakened by a prolonged period of extreme heat and drought, experts have warned.

This summer much of Europe has been scorched by a series of record-breaking climate crisis-induced heatwaves. The impact is notable across much of England’s countryside, where once green land has turned brown, and many trees are undergoing “early autumn” – wilting and losing their leaves early – to cope with extreme heat.

After lying dormant for years, the Era Dorada project in Asunción Mita resumed this year and villagers say history is being repeated, despite promises of change

In the community of La Lima in Guatemala, Elda Dinora Ramírez, 58, looks towards a small well at the back of her home. Dusty wooden planks lie across the opening, concealing the faint gleam of water far below. “The well is drying up again,” she says.

Ramírez’s home lies less than a mile from Era Dorada – a goldmining project acquired by the Canadian multinational Aura Minerals in January 2025. After years of inactivity, the project was reactivated this year when the Guatemalan government granted Aura a construction licence.

Exclusive: 7,280 suspected illegal spills in rivers and sea recorded in first five months of 2026

The number of suspected illegal discharges of raw sewage into rivers and seas by water companies during dry weather increased significantly during the first five months of 2026.

Dumping raw sewage into waterways during dry spells via overflows amounts to pollution. It is considered a breach of the permits given to water companies and is illegal. Discharging during dry weather increases the toxicity of the sewage pollution entering waterways. Rivers have less flow and volume, and there is no rainwater to dilute the sewage pollution entering the waterway.

Critically endangered New Zealand bird enjoys record breeding season triggered by mass fruiting of native tree, pushing its numbers to 325

The population of the world’s heaviest parrot, the kākāpō, has surpassed 300 birds for the first time in 75 years, after a record breeding season triggered by the mass fruiting of a native New Zealand tree.

Ninety chicks were officially added to the population of the critically endangered birds on 1 September, pushing the total to 325 – a record high since recovery efforts began.

Cash announced after horror car crash that killed two police officers and house fire in which woman and young girl died

Cleveland’s police force is to receive a £2m funding boost to tackle serious crime, after the home secretary said successive high-profile tragedies in the Middlesbrough area had led to a “sense of disquiet” in the community.

Shabana Mahmood and the prime minister, Andy Burnham, paid tribute in parliament on Tuesday to police constables Matthew Blades and Tom Clough, who were killed when a Volkswagen Passat travelling on the wrong side of the A66 dual carriageway collided head-on with their marked response vehicle.

Officers responded to reports concerning safety of baby girl at property in Wincobank area of the city

Five people are being held on suspicion of murder after a newborn baby died from stab wounds in Sheffield on Sunday.

Police officers found the girl at a property in Holywell Heights, in the Wincobank area of Sheffield, while responding to reports concerning her safety just before 6am on Sunday. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Reform leader said inquiry had been widened but watchdog is not believed to have decided whether to do so

Nigel Farage is facing questions about why he claimed his finances were the subject of a second standards investigation, as he was sworn in again as Clacton’s MP.

The Reform UK leader said when he resigned in July that the standards system had become a “political tool” because “yet another standards investigation is under way” into his finances.

Billy Allison, 36, pleads not guilty to charge over Matthew O’Gara’s death after incident outside Lichfield bar

A man accused of murdering a businessman outside a bar in Staffordshire has pleaded not guilty.

Billy Allison, 36, a member of the flag-raising group Raise the Colours, appeared at Stafford crown court on Tuesday and entered not guilty pleas to the murder of Matthew O’Gara and to causing grievous bodily harm with intent to a second person.

Government talks up pact but Venezuelan opposition alarmed that democracy yet to return after Maduro exit

Trump administration officials on Tuesday defended a highly contentious deal giving the US control of a significant chunk of Venezuelan oil reserves, arguing that the sweeping agreement would help stabilize and rebuild democracy in the shattered South American country while giving Washington vital access to strategic crude reserves.

Last week, Donald Trump announced a “groundbreaking” deal that would give the US “majority” control over 65bn barrels – roughly one-fifth – of Venezuela’s oil reserves.

Claims that Trump and Rubio are trying to influence result have parallels with CIA intervention 64 years ago

The year was 1962 and the Kennedy administration was desperate to swing Brazil’s congressional elections against its leftwing president, João Goulart, as a way of countering the supposed communist threat sweeping a region the US considered its back yard.

Historians say that in the lead-up to the vote, the CIA and the Department of State secretly channelled millions of dollars to opposition candidates and a group tasked with spreading rightwing propaganda and stirring up unrest.

Decision marks a significant turning point in a case that sparked a national debate in Italy

A British-Australian couple will be allowed to spend more time with their three children after the ⁠youngsters were removed from the family’s off-grid woodland home in central Italy last year, their lawyer said on Tuesday.

The juvenile court ⁠of L’Aquila in Italy has ⁠approved a ​staged process under the supervision of social services that could ultimately allow the children to leave the residential care facility ⁠where they have been living since November.

Two people shot dead and suspect later died in hospital after shooting in parking lot of Venture-N bar

Authorities in Tucson, Arizona, are investigating a shooting outside a gay bar that left three people dead as a possible hate crime.

The shooting occurred shortly after midnight on Monday in the parking lot of Venture-N, according to Tucson police. The suspect, identified by police as 44-year old Ousman Ceesay, allegedly killed 42-year-old Vincent Anthony Siqueiros and 33-year-old Cameron Davis Capara.

Matt Clifford, who drafted AI action plan and advised Starmer and Sunak, hired for senior role at US firm

The architect of the UK government’s AI strategy has joined the US startup Anthropic in a senior role a year after stepping down from his Downing Street post.

Matt Clifford, a successful tech investor, was appointed as AI opportunities adviser by Keir Starmer last year but resigned from the unpaid role six months later for personal reasons.

Bodycote is the latest FTSE 250 industrial company set to fall to an overseas bidder, despite the government’s talk of ‘reindustrialising’

The UK is in the business of “reindustrialising”, says the prime minister. If we are, an increasing portion of the activity will be under foreign ownership. Tuesday brought yet another overseas private equity swoop on a FTSE 250 industrial firm.

This time it’s the Macclesfield-based Bodycote, which describes itself as “the world’s largest service provider of heat treatment and specialist metallurgical technologies” – think, for example, processes and coatings to toughen jet engine blades. The buyer is the US buyout firm Veritas for £1.65bn or 940p a share, or £1.85bn including debt. Unless, that is, the rival bidder, CVC, a European private equity firm, comes back for another bite, which the market clearly thinks is a possibility because Bodycote’s shares closed at 955p.

FCA chief, Nikhil Rathi, warned of ‘adverse consequences’ if challenge made to settlement, court filings allege

The boss of the UK’s financial regulator is accused of threatening a consumer group with “adverse consequences” if it blocked a £9.1bn compensation scheme meant to settle the motor finance scandal.

Legal documents reviewed by the Guardian said the alleged comments by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, amounted to “an inappropriate intervention by a public official”.

James Dyson says ‘complete dental system’ will also include toothpaste and mouth rinse that each cost £8.50

It is the live stream you never wanted to see but may find impossible to resist: rolling footage beamed live from inside your mouth while you are cleaning your teeth.

Dyson, the home appliance maker that made its name inventing bagless vacuums and bladeless fans, has turned its attention to oral hygiene with a £420 all-singing, all-dancing toothbrush that can clean, floss and even spray tiny jets of mouthwash.

Guy Ritchie’s crime caper is back with the usual hijinks, swearing and men shaking their fists. But its ridiculousness is strangely comforting – and Theo James’s beefcake Eddie is so bland that he is fascinating to observe

He lives in a house, a very big house in the country. He has pectorals the size of Bentleys and wears plus-fours so voluminous they could accommodate his fleet of gundogs and still provide room for snarling groundskeeper Geoff (“I would do anyfink for you an’ this famlee”). And yet! Edward “Eddie” Horniman, 13th Duke of Halstead (Theo James), is sad. And aggrieved. A moment’s silence, please, as this powerful hunk pontificates on the unbearable lightness of being the millionaire protagonist in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen.

“Four hundred years ago, this estate spread out as far as the eye could see,” he tells Geoff (Vinnie Jones) as the camera swoops over his verdant playpen, a lavish patchwork of abundant hedges and cap-doffing deer. “But it’s been diminished. Year after year. Generation after generation. First came the apologies, then came the shame, then came the contraction. I want it back, Geoff,” he growls, hexagonal jaw stiff with emotion. “I want it all back!”

Wiley Wiggins plays a man wandering around Austin, Texas, whose reality-bending encounters make him uncertain whether he’s awake or asleep

“I’m gonna tell you about a dream I once had,” Richard Linklater – playing himself in his own film Waking Life – tells Wiley Wiggins, playing the film’s unnamed protagonist. “I know when someone says that usually you’re in for a very boring next few minutes, and you might be,” Linklater adds as he hammers away at a pinball machine. “But it sounds like … what else you gonna do, right?”

On paper, that’s the premise – and, if you’re cynical, the central dilemma – of Linklater’s 2001 genre-defying indie masterpiece. Wiggins plays a man wandering around Austin, Texas, who is uncertain whether he’s awake or asleep. He may be stuck in a dream, unable to wake up – or reality might just be this weird.

She spent the biggest moment of her career at the Paris Olympics thrashing around like a toddler having a tantrum – then went viral globally. Now, a new Netflix film reveals how the much-mocked breakdancer got over it

Netflix’s Untold is ostensibly a series of sports documentaries. However, since its inception five years ago, it has been most successful when sport collides with the wider celebrity machine. There have been films about Caitlyn Jenner, Jake Paul and Vinnie Jones. The gold tends to come when the subjects spill over into public notoriety. With that in mind, it was only a matter of time before they made a film about Raygun.

You may remember Raygun as the Australian breakdancer who spent the biggest moment of her career at the Paris Olympics thrashing around like a toddler having a tantrum in a supermarket. If you didn’t see her routine, you will almost certainly be aware of the memes she inspired. Adele discussed her during a concert. Rachel Dratch did an impersonation of her on Jimmy Fallon. For months, Raygun was everywhere. As this film demonstrates, she really didn’t want to be.

Film-maker Ed Sayers’ project gathered footage from collaborators all over the world, cleverly edited to combine human and animal contributions

This delightful, fleet-footed film represents a labour of love both for its writer-director-producer-editor, Briton Ed Sayers, and his many, many collaborators who shot the film’s footage on Super 8 all over the world. Between them they’ve used decades-old rigs in newfangled setups with stock that, like several of the species seen here, would have gone extinct had it not been for the intervention of enthusiasts.

The brief from Sayers was simply to film nature, so we get shots of all manner of flora and fauna, ranging from coral reefs to high deserts, places populated by minute bugs all the way up to whales. Given Super 8 reels can only capture a few minutes’ worth of stock, this must have been a fiendishly complex puzzle in the editing room, so all credit to Sayers not just for his own lovely footage and clever vision but for his nimble collaging of the whole thing together.

In Netflix film Turning Point: Generation 9/11, the lives of people forever impacted by the terrorist attack in 2001 are explored

Twenty-five years on, memory is giving way to history. Soon the US will cross the point where half its population were born after 11 September 2001 or were too young to remember the day that terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in northern Virginia and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

“When I do that math, I get to the bomb at Hiroshima – that’s how distant it is,” says Brian Knappenberger, 56, director of a new Netflix documentary, Turning Point: Generation 9/11. “When we talk about the second world war, for our generation it seemed like a long time ago but, for the current generation of 20-year-olds, that’s how long ago it was.”

The infamous Japanese noise artist has a vast and forbidding catalogue that commands a cult fandom. Sam Andrews, 18, is vlogging his way through the lot – and taking a stand for deep listening

An Instagram Reel that looks like an 80s coming-of-age movie pops up on your feed. It’s four teenage boys in an American-style basement – comfy sofas, guitars, ping pong table – jeering and laughing. But they aren’t secretly drinking beer or planning on sneaking out. They’re brandishing a vinyl copy of Pulse Demon, the most popular album from the cult Japanese noise artist Merzbow, and subjecting themselves to its brutally harsh sound in full, for fun. “I think this is the Book of Revelation: The Soundtrack,” one guy blurts out, a vague look of fear in his eyes.

Merzbow, real name Masami Akita, is the world’s most renowned noise artist. Since 1979, Akita has released more than 400 recordings, which range from a 10-hour long album misleadingly titled Merzbient (it’s anything but ambient) to a free-noise supergroup called Flying Testicle. Since February, Sam Andrews, the video’s 18-year-old creator, has been attempting to listen to every one, and is documenting his progress online each day. “I think of my day in album-size chunks,” he says, laughing. “It’s like, get up at seven, get breakfast and then headphones in: noise.”

The Black Bananas singer knows all the words to Rapper’s Delight and relates to AC/DC, but which song reminds her of a heartbreaking theft?

The first song I fell in love with
Van Halen’s Runnin’ With the Devil. I was five or six and I went to visit my cousin Tommy who was much older. He was on a hockey team and we went to see them practise before the game and they had Runnin’ With the Devil on really loud. I was like: “Wait, what’s this?!”

The song I do at karaoke
You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC. Me and Brian Johnson – my voice has that thing, you know?

Irish noisemongers Gilla Band, shadowy producers Two Shell and lovable band the Big Moon have new records, and there are tours from Bob Dylan and Kelela – plus the best of jazz, global and classical

• ‘It’s easier when nobody’s watching’: inside the secretive and sublime freak-folk of @
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

Their un-Googlable, very online name is the antithesis of this earthy duo’s sublime art-folk. Like their emotionally ambiguous music, the pair don’t give up their mysteries easily
• The best music of autumn 2026: Johnny Marr, Phoebe Bridgers, Rachel Chinouriri and more
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

Victoria Rose arrives at Philadelphia’s 30th St Station and apologises for the sticky streaks covering her car’s interior. She’s a beekeeper, and it’s just propolis, a resinous sealant for gaps in the hive. Her bandmate, Stone Filipczak, is riding shotgun, and her protective gear occupies the rear passenger seat. We’re heading to one of their favourite spots, an Ethiopian restaurant that doubles as a venue. The dining room quickly gets boisterous – a challenge for our interview given that Filipczak and Rose are relatively soft speakers, and not wildly keen to divulge specifics about the music they make as @. Like Rose’s bees, they’re a secretive and self-sustaining pair.

As you might guess, @ is pronounced “at”. It’s a tough Google. The name, Filipczak explains, came from “a vision of an @ sign on a kick drum head”. Not that they have any need for one: @’s art-folk is rooted in acoustic guitar, woodwinds and vocal harmonies that furrow and frolic. Their fantastic second album, Autosmile, is their first with the venerated indie label 4AD. (The name is a reference to a meme showing a dopey sunflower: “When you and gang faded and auto smile gets turn on …”)

American Scoundrel tells story of McCarthy attack dog, mob lawyer and Trump mentor – will the president be thumbing its pages?

Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark have written a book Trumpworld doesn’t want you to read. Published on Tuesday, American Scoundrel is a propulsive, horrifying biography of Roy Cohn, the New York mob lawyer whose extraordinary life charted, as the book’s subtitle has it, a “Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump”.

“I told my publicist to reach out to any of the Fox News hosts and reporters, to Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon,” Bird said. “We haven’t gotten a peep, other than Joe Rogan. He said he looked at the galleys, and he got back to my publicist and said, ‘I’m not interested.’ I’m kind of surprised. This is a serious biography of the president’s mentor, whom he publicly admires and says he still misses.”

This exhaustive biography of the Booker winner brings her properly out of the shadows for the first time

‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford), “won’t do.”

The cardiganed image confuses the author with her protagonists. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more.

A grieving couple who have lost their son find a way to a mirror universe where time runs backwards – but the narrative machinery is shonky and distracting

There is something farcical – grotesque, even – about life played in reverse. A child falling into a tree. A sandwich emerging from a mouth, bite by reconstituted bite. A doctor unstitching a wound. The world is strange in any order, but rewind helps us notice – makes the ordinary absurd.

Novels that pick a fight with forward momentum tend to harness this absurdity, revel in it. In The Cockroach (2019), Ian McEwan gives us a sneering Brexit fable about political nostalgia. If voters want to turn back the clock, let them. He unleashes “Economic Reversalism”, which sees employees pay for the privilege of work, and every pound sent back to where it came from. In Time’s Arrow (1991), Martin Amis inverts the Holocaust. Just imagine it, he dares us: a network of sanatoriums instead of death camps. A vast machinery of reparation run by benevolent Nazis. How monstrously laughable.

Global crises are tightly linked to how we treat each other at the local level, argues this optimistic book

In times of crisis, there is one person to whom the left still turns for guidance.

More than a decade and a half after leaving government, Gordon Brown has mellowed into the Labour party’s favourite wise elder; one who has never disappointed the faithful by going off to make a ton of money, remaining quietly committed to public service and deeply engaged with the world’s knottier problems. Having successfully led the global response to the financial crash of 2008, and advocated powerfully during the pandemic for global cooperation against the virus, he was never going to simply sit back and shrug as the world spiralled into conflict and chaos under Donald Trump.

There are juggernauts and indie gems aplenty for when the nights draw in, from an ingenious puzzle game to blockbusters such as Marvel’s Wolverine and Call of Duty
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

After 20 years away, Capcom’s hyper kinetic action adventure returns, pitting skilled samurai Miyamoto Musashi against hordes of warriors and demons in Edo-period Kyoto. Master the complex combat then prepare for flashing blades, disembodied limbs and geysers of spraying blood.
• 4 September; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox

Before The Witcher 4 arrives in 2028, CD Projekt Red is returning us to the world of The Witcher 3 for one last foray. Looks like wind’s still howlin’

The game that graced us with Bathtub Geralt, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, arrived more than a decade ago. So it was a touch surprising this summer when developers CD Projekt Red announced a new expansion to the venerable adventure, titled Songs of the Past, for next year. It will release alongside a full remaster of the original game, which will be free for anyone who bought it back in 2015. (The studio is also working on a sequel, The Witcher 4, but that’s not due until 2028.)

As it turns out, this is all possible thanks to a partnership with Fool’s Theory, a studio founded by CD Projekt Red veterans, which took on the brunt of the development work. “We’ve had this story in a drawer for many years,” explains Marcin Blacha, VP story director at CD Projekt Red. “Of course, we moved on to Cyberpunk 2077 and now The Witcher 4, as well as our other projects. But because we knew The Witcher 4 would take time, we saw a gap in our release calendar where Songs of the Past could go. Thankfully, we were able to find the right partner to help execute it.”

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Asobo Studio
The medieval franchise is transplanted to Crete, conjuring action-adventure magic from familiar ingredients

The path in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a familiar one. Amid ancient ruins and sun-dappled gorges, a young woman, Sophia, dutifully treads the same footsteps as a Minoan warrior from millennia ago, one with whom she seems to share a visionary connection. The “resonance” between these two characters is made clear by their echoing actions – a crank pushed in the bronze age that still works in the medieval present, for example. Through these spliced timelines, it becomes clear that Sophia, compelled by her supernatural gift, possesses little agency. Destiny beckons her forwards.

This is a smart meta concept for a game that, at its most basic level, boils down to keeping your left thumb planted firmly on the analogue stick, always pushing Sophia onwards in linear fashion. You jostle her through ornate corridors rendered as higgledy-piggledy pirate camps and cobbled Venetian streets. For the greater part of the game, you propel her through the Minoan remains of Crete, which harbour a dark and terrible secret. It is classic third-person action-adventure fare, building on the template laid down by the likes of Tomb Raider and then refined and complicated by titles such as The Last of Us. Little, from an interactive perspective, surprises: you dash, vault and swing between teetering podiums, squeeze through tiny gaps in rock and crouch behind conveniently placed walls to avoid enemies.

The flat routines of a dead end railway job screen out an approaching menace in a quietly intriguing game from the indie developer of Cat Lady and Lorelai

Lonely jobs have provided excellent material for independent video games over the years. From Papers, Please to Firewatch to The Stanley Parable, players have been happy to spend hours dwelling in depressing cubicles or rural hideaways, usually because there is an intriguingly hidden point to it all.

In Trainwatch, a character named Troy has taken a seemingly godforsaken job as a railway worker in an unnamed desolate backwater. His main task over the course of a single month is to manage a level crossing, closing the gate whenever a train comes, while also carrying out daily chores such as cooking and washing. It sounds serene, but Troy is also running away from something. The other stipulations are that he stays sober and calls his wife every night. And there is something lurking in the fog at the edges of the fields – one day he must face it.

As The Story – inspired by a scandal that ended a young Black reporter’s career – makes its London debut, its author explains why, two decades on, it’s more relevant than ever

If our ability to discern fake news from fact is a hot topic today, Tracey Scott Wilson was on to it more than two decades ago. As a child, the playwright’s father trained her to watch the news every night and discuss it with her three siblings. It meant that she was well placed in the early 00s to spot how stations such as Fox News were veering away from objective reporting to become angled towards a given agenda.

By this point a real-life story had been percolating in Wilson’s mind for more than two decades: in 1981, Janet Cooke, a young, ambitious Black American reporter at The Washington Post, had been exposed as a liar. Cooke had just won the Pulitzer prize for her news story about an eight-year-old drug addict, which turned out to be invented. Cooke was discredited, both for her reporting and for embellishing her CV, and was forced to hand back her prize two days after receiving it.

O2 Arena, London
The polymath rapper’s stage show, which also features SWAT teams and a warship, is truly bravura stuff – but you can’t help feeling this is an artist at a creative crossroads

A$AP Rocky dangles precariously from a helicopter, while beneath him black-clad SWAT officers brawl with his white-masked followers. This isn’t some cliffhanger setpiece from the rapper/actor’s latest film – it’s just how shows on his Don’t Be Dumb tour open. It’s a big production: there are further prop helicopters, including a smaller one up in the rafters from which he also raps (a reference to his single Helicopter), while the stage recreates the top deck of a naval warship, for reasons that never become clear.

The bizarre set underscores a sense of a man in career transition, unsure who he is any more. In the eight years since his last album, this survivor of homelessness and incarceration became a father, three times, with Rihanna; he’s pivoting towards movies – good ones – and co-chairs the Met Gala. His new record sought to redefine him as an artist, juggling more of his trademark pugilistic rap with ambitious stylistic experiments and unexpected collaborations (Damon Albarn! Danny Elfman!).

Royal Albert Hall, London
Period instrument grain and an energised Jakob Lehmann did a fair job with Berlioz’s concert setting of the drama, but the hall’s murky acoustic buried some of the sparkle

Berlioz wrote his setting of the Faust story for concert performance, counting on the fact that what went on in his audience’s mind’s eye would be more fantastical than anything that could be portrayed on stage. The forces he employed aren’t on the same scale as those for his Requiem – written almost a decade earlier, in 1837, and heard here earlier this month – but are still huge. Here they came in the form of the period-instrument orchestra Les Siècles, plus the Choeur de Radio France and, joining in the closing five minutes, the Radio France children’s choir – conducted by Jakob Lehmann, making an energised Proms debut.

Les Siècles’ period instruments brought their own grainy texture to the palette, from the chattering piccolos representing Méphistophélès’s malignant spirits and the silky violin swoops lulling Faust to sleep, down to the inclusion in the orchestra of an ophicleide, an instrument that’s an evolutionary dead end on the tuba’s family tree. The Hungarian March sounded snappy, as did the brass fanfares, echoed at one point by a small band up in the gallery.

Swinton takes a dead man’s identity, Glasgow’s heir to Billy Connolly heads on tour and Gillian Anderson, Keira Knightley and Natalia Osipova all hit the stage
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

The star has denied allegations of bullying and harassment in the workplace in a suit that has now been thrown out of court

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed the remaining claims in a well-publicized lawsuit against Lizzo’s production company, declaring that the case brought by her former wardrobe stylist could not proceed.

The ruling by US district judge Fernando L Aenlle-Rocha comes nearly two years after he dismissed Lizzo as an individual defendant from the case brought by Asha Daniels against the About Damn Time singer and her production company, Big Grrrl Big Touring, Inc Daniels first filed her lawsuit in September 2023, alleging that she was subject to bullying as well as sexual and racial harassment in an “unsafe, sexually charged workplace culture”.

He upset Queen Elizabeth II, defied the developers and had to scrap for every inch of graffiti space in a gentrified, urban landscape

• Prolific UK graffiti artist Helch dies

You know you’ve made an impact when the headlines upon your death are filled with words like “iconic”, “infamous”, “world class” and “upset Queen Elizabeth II”. By that measure, graffiti supremo Helch made a pretty serious mark on the world.

He died this week, leaving behind a country pockmarked by his tag, a giant towering HELCH, though sometimes reduced to just a simple upper-case H. It was on railway bridges and motorway overpasses, on derelict buildings and decrepit high rises. From Bristol to London, Helch was everywhere. He was even on a railway viaduct on the way to Windsor Castle, in 60ft high white letters, “ruining” the view of poor old Elizabeth’s home and apparently leaving our late monarch in an absolute rage.

Wilson, whose 2017 English translation of Homer’s epic poem inspired Christopher Nolan’s box office hit, is revisiting it after criticising the film adaptation

Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English, is to retranslate the ancient Greek epic poem from scratch less than a decade after the publication of her acclaimed version.

The announcement comes after Wilson attracted controversy this summer with a scathing assessment of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film adaptation of the Odyssey, which she slammed for its “abysmal” writing and lack of sex scenes.

From ceramic goblin feet to furry disembodied legs, Korean-Chinese artist Woo Jin Joo is using London junk to inject the art world with a spirit of playfulness

Woo Jin Joo’s studio is full of magic. Ceramic green goblin feet line the windowsill, disembodied furry legs jut out of one white wall and, on the table behind where the Korean-Chinese artist sits drinking tea, a headless being dressed in a black coat squats, arms aloft in warning.

There are also neat racks of colourful thread next to a freehand embroidery machine, the source of this supernatural horde. This is where Joo creates much of her art – surface embroideries and sculptural 3D creatures inspired by Korean myth, philosophy and the relationship between humans and the natural world.

Girls Gone Bible is on tour in the US, touting a regressive ideal of femininity through discussions of abstinence and mental health struggles

At first glance, the crowd gathering outside a music venue in Red Bank, New Jersey, could have passed for a group of sorority rush hopefuls – or Ella Langley fans on their way to the country star’s show. Most of them were under the age of 30. They wore cowboy boots, maxi sundresses and soft, bouncy blowouts, scrolling on their phones outside the doors as they waited for friends to arrive.

But one accessory gave them away: the Bibles they toted. These women were there to pray.

The famous pueblos blancos in southern Spain’s Sierra de Grazalema natural park teem with wildlife amid a limestone wonderland of peaks

‘The wind is in from Africa / Last night I couldn’t sleep.” Joni Mitchell has ear-wormed her way into my head as my wife and I step out from Zahara de la Sierra into the mountains of Sierra de Grazalema natural park. The Africa bit probably comes from yesterday’s visit to Zahara’s castle museum. Here, high above the tiled terracotta mosaic of village rooftops, we learned how the recapture of this picturesque hill town was a turning point in the Reconquista – the military campaign of the 1400s that saw the Catholics retake southern Spain after seven centuries of Moorish control. As for sleep deprivation, I may just have overdone it on last night’s tapas.

Either way, Africa feels present as we tramp through the countryside of Andalucía, if only in the wildlife. The painted lady butterflies drifting over the flower-spangled verges, the turtle doves purring from the olive groves and the booted eagle drifting overhead: all are summer visitors recently blown in from the great continent to our south.

Got that new term feeling? Embrace the September reset with tailored blazers, hints of cashmere and a surprisingly excellent tee

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Nobody has handed me a timetable in decades, but I still love that new-term energy, and this edit leans right into it. A blazer that is properly tailored, rather than assembled from buttons and hope. Closed-toe shoes to ensure a proper soft landing after months of sandals. A T-shirt from a brand I was fully prepared to be sniffy about, until it made me eat my words. And a packing solution, because the only sane way to deal with the end of summer is to plan a holiday, obviously.

There’s also a genius lip colour for lip balm addicts like me, a bag doing a very convincing impression of something 10 times its price, and one long-sold-out cardigan that was worth every month of the wait.

Whether it’s homemade ice-cream or a skirt you can wear as a dress, your August favourites suggest you’re holding on to summer for as long as possible

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After five brutal heatwaves we’d expect you to be sick of summer by now, but judging by your August hitlist, many of you can’t get enough of it. An ice-cream maker, packing cubes and travel wardrobe heroes suggest you’re determined to embrace every last drop of sunshine before summer 2026 gives way to rain and the school bell.

You’ve been thinking ahead too, though. A plastic-free lunchbox and a foolproof coffee maker will help ease you back to work and school, and there’s always undereye concealer when all the coffee in the world can’t hide your post-holiday blues.

This no-frills pizza oven gets the basics right and is more than good enough for most people

• The best pizza ovens – tested
• Ooni Koda 2 review

The market for pizza ovens tends to be dominated by a handful of specialist brands, so it can feel like a gamble to buy from a lesser-known manufacturer or a retailer that offers a wider range of goods.

The ProCook outdoor pizza oven is no gamble, though. It’s every inch a capable, compact and versatile pizza oven, despite being just one product in an offering that includes pretty much everything from storage jars to squeegees.

Too cloying, too sweet or just right? Our tester works through the shop shelves to find the best slaw for your next barbecue, picnic or packed lunch

• The best supermarket veggie burgers

I find shop-bought coleslaw hard to stomach because it’s sharp, gloopy and often made with copious amounts of poor-quality mayonnaise and spirit vinegar. Pungent ingredients, such as cabbage and onion, are better eaten fresh, otherwise they break down and give off a disconcertingly sulphurous and sweaty aroma.

I judged each product in this test on appearance, aroma, texture and, above all, taste, and awarded extra points for value. I marked down for an off-puttingly strong raw onion aroma.

This rubbly cousin of hummus is flavourful and satisfying at any time of day, served warm, topped with a colourful salad and just made to eat with homemade flatbreads

Few things make me happier than a bowl of warm musabaha served with freshly baked bread straight from the pan. It’s a combination that shouts comfort, generosity and the simple pleasure of sharing food. Across the Levant, musabaha is a much-loved breakfast or brunch dish, though I’d happily eat it at any time of day. Served with the buttery, soft turmeric and nigella-seed flatbreads, it becomes a meal that is nourishing, intensely satisfying and perfect for gathering family and friends around the table.

From fermenting plums in honey and pickling courgettes in vinegar brine to a British take on kimchi, there are many ways to make the most of the warm-weather harvest

What’s the best way to preserve late-summer fruit and veg?
Jess, by email
Fruit, fruit everywhere, so try fermenting it in honey, says Rachel de Thample, author of The Fermentation Year (published in September). “I’m currently looking at a jar of blackberries, but whole plums would be gorgeous, too,” she says, especially when eaten with blue cheese – “or any cheese, really” – meat or fish; you can also use the syrup like maple syrup or cordial. De Thample packs the fruit into sterilised jars and pours in just enough honey to cover it: “If the fruit has a low acidity, add a spoonful of lemon juice or a splash of cider vinegar as well.” Pop on the lid and leave for a few weeks. “It gets fizzy, but it doesn’t get to that explosive stage, because it has quite a concentrated sugar content. It’ll keep for up to a year at room temperature, but I normally pop it in the fridge after a few weeks.”

Kimchi is another option to keep Jess enjoying summer fruits all year round. “In Korea, apples and pears are traditional, but there’s a kimchi for every season and region,” says De Thample, who takes a British approach with a courgette, blackcurrant and strawberry number: “You can use up tomatoes in the paste, too.” Otherwise, if you have plums and damsons, take inspiration from Japanese umeboshi: “That has a high percentage of salt – I use 15% per 100g fruit. Layer the salt and plums in jars and, if it’s really dry, pour over water; otherwise, just crush a couple of the plums so their juices create a brine with the salt.” The brine can then be used like a plummy soy sauce, De Thample says: “Having a few jars stored away always makes me feel like I’m winning.” Damsons are also a dream in flavoured liquors, says Kenji Morimoto, regular Guardian contributor and author of Ferment: “That’s a really nice way to capture their flavour, and all you need is vodka, the fruit and rock [or granulated] sugar.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

An intriguing and refreshing hot-cold combo of eggy rice, butter, cold cucumber sauce and pickles

When cooking on a weeknight, it’s easy to forget that sometimes experimenting with temperature is as important as flavour. Hot things combined with very cold things are exceptionally refreshing in the summer, and also make the mundane more exciting and playful. This dish of hot rice, hot butter, cold cucumber sauce, hot egg and cold pickles might sound, well, a bit weird, but I promise it’s delicious, comforting and also cooling.

Good Time Cooking: Show-Stopping Menus for Easy Entertaining, by Rosie Mackean, is published by Pavilion Books at £26. To order a copy for £23.40, visit guardianbookshop.com

The first genuinely cool thing to have happened in Borough Market for ages

A Turkish-Cypriot meyhane, which translates roughly as “wine house”, has slotted in upstairs at the Globe Tavern in Borough Market, south London. Any cab driver worth his salt will bend your ear over the fact that this is “where Bridget Jones lives”, which might be a bit confusing if you’ve booked in to eat kuzu şiş (lamb neck kebabs) and to knock back a couple of rakis with a fermented turnip juice chaser.

That Bridget Jones trivia, by the way, is completely true: the upstairs space at the Globe was used as the heroine’s gaff in that famous film franchise. Now, however, when you climb the staircase up to Kismet, an old, slightly eerie and flickering TV by the restaurant entrance begins to tell a very different tale. This is chef Keiran Mustafa’s very personal tribute to his family’s homeland and the community they built in London. Mustafa was the opening head chef at BiBi, to my mind one of the best restaurants in London, and before that he worked at industry stalwarts Chez Bruce and the Harwood Arms.

Assisting an ageing loved one can start with small tasks but may lead to full-time caregiving that requires more support

Helping an ageing parent or loved one often begins with easy-to-field requests: Pick up a prescription. Drive them to a doctor’s appointment. Grab groceries.

However, light tasks – just “helping out” here and there – may eventually snowball into the avalanche of full-time caregiving, a phenomenon becoming known as “caregiver creep”. Like “caregiver burnout”, it’s not a formal term, but there is growing awareness about this slow build among healthcare providers and experts.

After a burglary, my parents decided we needed extra security. Jerry was the answer – and this hungry, handsome hound helped us all in countless ways

Jerry came into our lives because a burglar had broken in. My mum had woken in the middle of the night to find an intruder in our kitchen. He scarpered, but the psychological damage was done. Two days later, my dad came home with the cutest little rescue puppy, with traces of beagle and labrador in him. He was two months old, had a black, brown and white coat, and big, bashful eyes. We called him Jerry because we had a cat called Tom. “I’m not sure how he’ll protect us,” I said. “He will,” my dad replied.

Jerry was very laid-back and Zen. He became part of the family straight away. He also became the therapy dog we hadn’t realised we needed. With two teenagers in the house (me and my older brother) and a hyperactive younger brother, someone was always in a strop and needing to let off steam by taking him out for a walk. Each time, Jerry obliged. I’d bore him with my latest teen-romance trauma; he was a very good listener. Sometimes, he’d have five walks a day, with both of my parents taking their turn. He certainly got his steps in.

Camille had bad experiences with men, so when she met Marcus they took things slowly. Now sex is a shared joy

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

Marcus will go down on me for as long as it takes. He has a gentle touch and is an amazing kisser

Mike, 37, a scientific editor, meets Caterina, 35, a teacher

What were you hoping for?
Good company, nice food and an interesting evening with someone new. I got everything I hoped for.

While many young people have found jobs and built careers, some have struggled to complete their courses

The crisis in the youth employment market, with almost a million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) across the UK, has placed fresh emphasis on ways of getting employees into the workforce.

The government hopes to increase focus on technical and vocational learning in England from the age of 14. In parallel, there is an ambition to create thousands more apprenticeships.

I need to take him off my family account, but it says the only way is for him to join me for a joint call with O2

My partner packed up and disappeared with his children while I was out with friends. I was left having to foot all our bills, including rent, which has made me financially stressed.

We had a family plan with O2 which meant family phones were all registered to my account. When my partner left, he stopped paying his share of the monthly phone bill, so I set about trying to remove his, and his children’s, phones from the account. O2 explained he would need to join a conference call with me and O2 to agree the transfer of the numbers in question.

Despite plans to scrap the lifetime Isa, experts still advise you open one now and not wait for the new first-time buyer account to launch

If you want to start saving towards your first home, don’t wait until a new Isa just for first-time buyers goes on sale. That is the advice from experts after more details emerged about a savings account the government plans to launch to help people get a foot on the property ladder.

The first-time buyer Isa is likely to replace the existing lifetime Isa in two years and is supposed to be simpler than the older account. However, it looks as if the financial benefits won’t be as attractive as those offered by the current product, so there’s no advantage in hanging around.

Plagued by bank impersonation scams, one Guardian Money reader got even by stringing the fraudsters along … for hours

• New payment set up? The bank scam where your ‘bank’ is the scammer

“A couple of Sundays ago at just past 11am my mobile rang. An automated message purported to be from Barclays Bank, querying a payment to Argos for more than £1,000. Not only had I not made a payment to Argos recently, nor do I bank with Barclays.

I am plagued with these kinds of calls. Usually, when possible, I make it clear to the scammers that I know their game. Usually, that call ends there and then.

Studies have found that anti-inflammatory drugs can improve your mood. But what does that mean for conditions such as depression and anxiety?

Inflammation is the immune system’s response to injury or infection. If you cut yourself and the area becomes red and swollen, that’s inflammation: immune cells are rushing to fight germs and repair tissue.

But inflammation can also occur in the body during illnesses, and a low level of inflammation can arise from obesity or ageing. “A marker of that inflammation tends to be elevated cytokines in people’s blood,” says Prof Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London and author of Immune Health: A Myth-Busting Guide. “They’re the molecules immune cells use to communicate with each other.”

More and more young people are engaging in sexual strangulation. But experts say there’s no safe pressure – and we have to start talking to teenagers about it

When touching someone’s throat, it can only take the pressure of a handshake to cause serious injury, unconsciousness or death. These injuries, which include brain damage and stroke, are often internal and invisible, showing up days or even months after the initial incident occurred. Experts say many who participate in sexual choking are not aware of the risks.

Choking or sexual strangulation is common among young people, says Prof Heather Douglas of the Melbourne Law School. In a 2024 survey of 4,702 Australians aged between 18 and 35, she and her research team found that 57% reported ever having experienced sexual strangulation; 51% reported ever having strangled a partner and 43.9% reported participating in both.

The public health emergencies in 2022 and 2024 saw the virus reported in 145 countries, but in the new cases children appear particularly affected

A fresh outbreak of mpox in Guinea Bissau – the country’s first – means the virus formerly known as monkey pox is back in the headlines. So what has changed?

Since 2022, there have been almost 190,000 lab-confirmed cases of mpox reported worldwide in 145 countries. Before then, outbreaks of mpox tended to be relatively small and in a handful of African countries, where the viral infection was known to be endemic.

Scientists found those who had used hormone replacement therapy were 10% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia

Hormone replacement therapy may reduce the risk of dementia, a study has found.

Scientists tracked more than 180,000 postmenopausal women in the UK in the largest study of its kind. They found that those who had used HRT were 10% less likely to develop any type of dementia and 16% less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the most common form, compared with those who had never used it.

Looking for an alternative to fast fashion, Eve Ogden Schaub decided to create a garment from homegrown flax

From crop tops to shorts and brightly patterned dresses, many of today’s clothes are the result of fast fashion. But one woman is taking a radical approach to challenging this trend by growing her own dress.

Eve Ogden Schaub is in the midst of a project to create a linen garment made from flax she is growing at home, documenting the process in videos shared on her Instagram account.

Due to its ubiquity in fast fashion, gen Z are pushing back against the synthetic material and using it as an insult

In 2015, Kate Moss called an easyJet pilot a “basic bitch” and a catchy new insult meaning obvious and uncool hit the mainstream. Had it happened in 2026, Moss might have used the word “polyester”, reportedly gen Z’s new favorite diss, levied at cheap-looking videos on TikTok, and sometimes at other users’ taste.

But its use as a figurative insult also echoes a literal backlash against polyester, now the most-produced synthetic fibre on the planet.

The ‘dad’ look favours straight lines and muted colours, while ‘dudes’ prefer baggier clothes with adornments

There is a competition going on at the US Open this week and it’s not the one involving rackets and balls. Instead, leading men who are not entered into this year’s draw are serving looks rather than aces.

Tennis legend Roger Federer took to the court on Tuesday in navy blue polo shirt and shorts, navy blue sweatbands and navy blue socks. The cuts were trim and the top was tucked in. The young Spanish player Carlos Alcaraz wore a Nike vest, untucked and the colour of Ribena, maroon shorts, and trainers that looked like a sweetshop counter.

Across six decades, the late country singer and pop culture icon turned self‑presentation into a flamboyant art form

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Dolly Parton may have had a record 25 US country No 1 singles, released 66 studio albums and earned six Golden Globe nominations, among many other achievements, but the Tennessee-born star also had an incredible number of fashion moments. “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”, she famously quipped when asked about her style. As we bid her farewell, six Guardian writers reflect on their favourite Dolly looks.

***

Pierogi are a religion in Poland, but I’d never been a believer. Could a recce in the charming Baltic city convert me?

I used to live in Poland. I worked in a fish-and-chip shop in the western city of Poznań, boning cod and peeling potatoes for £1.50 an hour. With the exception of that job, I enjoyed everything about my time in the country, not least the food. I liked the chicken broth with noodles, the slippery herring, the knuckles of pork the size of basketballs, the cold beetroot soup that beats gazpacho hands down.

One thing I was less delighted by were Polish dumplings – pierogi. It wasn’t that they weren’t nice – they were – it was more that they didn’t seem to warrant the extreme levels of affection and esteem Poles often bestow on the doughy parcels. By being ambivalent about them, I was going against a well-established grain.

Want to avoid the crowds in Florence and Siena? Escape to these islands, from lively Elba to tiny, car-free Giannutri

Scattered between the Tuscan coast and Corsica, the seven islands of the Tuscan archipelago offer a striking contrast to mainland Tuscany. All are part of a protected national park, but each has its own character – some are lively, others tiny and sparsely inhabited. Montecristo and Gorgona are only accessible via strictly limited guided tours, but here’s a brief guide to the highlights of the other five.

***

Tourism is only just taking hold in Vipava, but the locals are determined to do it right, by putting community first and preserving what makes it special

The drive to Pedrovo is vertiginous, and each hairpin bend has me sending a silent prayer that we won’t meet a tractor coming the other way. When we near it, we abandon the car and continue on foot to the hamlet, a scattering of red-roofed, whitewashed houses high on the steep karst hillside. The air is warm and dry, scented with wild sage.

We follow a hand-painted sign to Čilčevi Farmstead. Descending stone steps to a lush garden, we find a shaded table set with fresh cheeses produced at the farm’s own dairy. Below, the valley stretches in both directions, a wide flat plain hemmed in by steep mountain slopes, with the Vipava River winding lazily through fields and vineyards.

From secluded coves in Ireland to an evening passeggiata on Italy’s Aeolian islands, readers share their discoveries
• Tell us about your most memorable food and drink discoveries in Europe

Giant griffon vultures glided parallel with my bus as it reached the highest point of Cres, the least populated of the four main islands in the Kvarner Gulf at the very north of the Croatian Adriatic. Covered in scrubby heath, olive groves and lavender, with small towns and villages on its coastline, its wildness is its appeal. Some, like Cres town, are unobtrusively set up for holidaymakers; in others local people just quietly get on with the life they’ve lived since the Venetians ruled here. All are lapped by the turquoise, crystal seas Croatia is known for.
Rhiannon

Selling direct to public helps squeezed farmers control prices and improves access to food in rural areas

Fizzy drinks, packets of crisps and bars of chocolate: for decades, vending machines were known as a place to grab a quick snack.

Now one family of farmers is trying to change that by bringing vending machines offering fresh milk and local produce – including scotch eggs, sausage rolls and brownies – to villages and other rural locations.

It’s a great detection tool, but if your plant is infested with thrips or spider mites it may not be enough …

The problem
The worst pests are the ones you can’t see; thrips and spider mites are tiny and very good at hiding on the undersides of leaves, in leaf joints and along stems. By the time you notice the damage – silvery streaks, speckling or fine webbing – the infestation is usually well under way. Early detection is the difference between a quick fix and a full-blown outbreak.

The hack
Use a sticky lint roller to pick up pests that are hard to see. The idea is it works as both a detection tool, and a light physical intervention, lifting adults and eggs before they multiply.

Forget writing that novel: the most satisfying tasks are often the smallest. From batch cooking and bird feeding, to filling a kettle with meticulous precision, our readers reveal their favourites

Sometimes, it’s the smallest accomplishments that bring the biggest feelings of joy. You don’t need to run a marathon or write a novel to get a sense of achievement; something as simple as reorganising your cutlery drawer or repairing a garden fence can prove surprisingly satisfying. Here, readers share the modest achievements that have brought them great pleasure.

I really enjoy cooking and have a large collection of spices. Recently, I bought a few dozen glass bottles and organised my herbs and spices in a drawer, with labels on the lids and sides. Every time I cook, I feel pleasure from being able to instantly put my hand on the requisite spice without fumbling through piles of little boxes, and having to open and smell them to be sure which is which. Anna Smith, musician, Utrecht, the Netherlands

As the sex doll industry grows and AI changes the products available, what does it mean to engage in any kind of relationship with a woman-shaped thing?

Two weeks ago, two distressed citizens stumbled across what they assumed was the mangled corpse of a woman, stuffed into a suitcase in a small town about three hours south of Sydney. They called the local police, who in turn issued a statement that a body in a suitcase had been found. The wider public waited sombrely for Australia’s tally of dead women to tick up by one.

But instead, a day later, after forensic analysis, it was determined that the woman in question wasn’t a woman at all. The “body” was that of a sex doll, marked with fake bruises, left to rot on a lonely dirt road. In Australia, as in the UK and some other European countries, it is not illegal to own a sex doll unless it resembles a child. Given the doll’s seemingly mature presentation, police investigations were called off.

In this month’s newsletter: communities are reshaping how empire is remembered in public life. Plus, holding royalty to account in Jamaica and repairing centuries of harm in California

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Hello and welcome to the Cotton Capital newsletter. I’m Nadine White and this month we’re asking: after the toppling, what comes next?

Britain spent much of 2020 arguing about what should come down. Statues of enslavers and colonial figures were toppled, defaced or quietly removed. Edward Colston ended up in Bristol harbour. Robert Milligan was taken down outside London’s Museum of Docklands, while campaigners renewed calls for Cecil Rhodes to come off his plinth at Oriel College, Oxford. But six years on, one of the most persistent battles is still playing out.

How slavery reparations could help make yearning to return to Africa a reality | Natricia Duncan

British corporation continued trafficking of enslaved Africans to Guyana 40 years after abolition | Chris Osuh

Trafficked on the last US slave ship, Cudjo Lewis never returned home to Benin. But his descendant has | Adria Walker

Moringa lattes and tigernut kebabs: the Ghanaians ‘taking back the power’ of their food | Kaamil Ahmed

Sydney’s sugar rush: how the colony’s most powerful profited from Australia’s slave trade | Paul Daley

A Las Vegas jury on Monday found Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis guilty in the 1996 murder of the hip-hop icon

• Jury finds Duane Davis guilty of murder of Tupac Shakur

Thirty years after the killing of Tupac Shakur, conspiracy theories and rumors about the perpetrator’s identity, one man has now been held criminally responsible for the rap icon’s death.

A Las Vegas jury convicted Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a 63-year-old former South Side Compton Crips gang leader, of murder for his role in the drive-by shooting. During the two-week-long trial, prosecutors argued Davis was the “on-the-ground, on-site commander of the effort to kill Tupac” and had sought revenge after the musician was involved in a fight with his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.

He was Queen’s flamboyant frontman. She was his shy girlfriend, dreaming of marriage until they both realised he preferred men. Thirty-five years after his death, in the week he would have turned 80, Mary Austin talks about their unbreakable bond

There were four silver trunks in Mary Austin’s attic that she packed in the mid-1980s and hadn’t opened since. It was too painful. Almost 40 years on, in 2022, she opened one. It was crammed with lyrics from songs written by Freddie Mercury – Don’t Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, We Are the Champions and, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody. She shut the case. It was still too painful.

“To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.” Eventually she asked her two sons to sift through the treasures on her behalf.

We want to hear from young people who have chosen to start their own businesses rather than follow a traditional career path

A growing number of Gen Z are starting their own businesses, with the number of Start Up Loans taken out by young founders rising by 132% over the past five years, according to analysis by the British Business Bank. Meanwhile, Hiscox analysis of Companies House data found nearly 400,000 Gen Z directors are now running UK-registered businesses.

We’d like to hear from people aged between 18 and 29 who have started a business about what inspired you to do it and how you got started. How is your business going? What have been the biggest challenges and rewards? Do you see yourself continuing to run your own business in the future?

We would like to hear from frontline or key workers about how the heat has affected them in the workplace this year

With record high temperatures across the UK this summer we want to hear from those whose work meant they couldn’t escape the extreme heat.

August 13 marked the hottest day of the year so far with temperatures reaching 38C in London and 37C recorded in other parts of the country; this marks the first year temperatures of 37C and above have been recorded on three separate days in the UK. Climate scientists are saying the incoming Super El Niño is likely to deliver more record breaking hot weather next year.

Floods and mudslides have swept away houses and roads with many hundreds missing

More than 1,400 people are still missing and 392 have been confirmed dead after the flash floods and landslides on the Nepal-Tibet border.hit the Himalayan border areas of ⁠Nepal and in ​Tibet in China. An avalanche of ice and rock triggered massive flash floods causing widespread damage to villages and infrastructure.

Officials said hundreds of travellers from countries including India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Malaysia, were reported missing.

We would like to hear about the TV shows that you simply can’t stomach anymore and why

From Euphoria to The Great British Bake Off Guardian writers have compiled the TV shows that are now part of their viewing history they feel tainted by. Now we want to hear from you.

Which TV shows that once thrilled have now turned sour for you?

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