My generation had great role models, free university and the morning-after pill. We should be running the world. Instead, two-thirds of us are facing mental health problems – and it’s not all about the menopause

Looking at the women in my own immediate friendship group, ranging in age from 50 to 63, we have lived through every flavour of chaos. Apart from the haywire hormones and feelings of invisibility, there are also the life-changing events that happen at this life stage – post-divorce relocation, caring for a parent with dementia, a breast cancer diagnosis, redundancy. Some of my friends are also supporting adult children with mental health problems, who are still living at home. When the singer and memoirist Tracey Thorn referred to this life stage as “sniper’s alley” she wasn’t kidding.

A survey by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) reported recently that almost two-thirds of women over 50 struggle with their mental health. Underlying factors included anxiety, sleep problems and bereavement, as well as the glaringly obvious: menopause. Nine out of 10 of the 2,000 women surveyed had not sought any help.

The Reform UK leader uses the energy of memes to fuel his popularity, but this should not distract us from the seriousness of his purpose

• Guardian investigation into Farage on Cameo

Nigel Farage has spent the past five years upending politics, breaking the two-party hold on parliament, and apparently sending several Cameo videos a day to his paying customers, charging £374,893 overall. But the Reform UK leader’s side hustle isn’t separate from his political work: posting is politics now, which is why Farage loves to brag that he runs laps around other MPs on TikTok.

Cameos are personalised messages, but they are not private – punters get a shareable link so they can post their anniversary wishes and birthday messages on social media. When Farage sent videos to a neo-Nazi group that used the videos for publicity, or described Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in language typically found in Pornhub categories, he was indeed making public statements. The defence from Farage’s team is that he can’t be held responsible for what people do with the messages he sends them, which is perhaps why most politicians don’t send personal endorsements to random people over the internet for money. His spokesperson said that Farage’s Cameo videos “should not be treated as political statements or campaign activity”.

Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

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.

Cosmologists and physicists come up empty handed when they attempt to pin down time. So what, exactly, is it?

When was the last time you raced against an unforgiving clock? Perhaps you skipped breakfast, broke a sweat, shelled out for a taxi or missed time with your family. Many of us have become slaves to time, with huge portions of our day spent chasing appointments and deadlines. But what is this thing we’re trying to beat?

We tend to imagine time as incessant and non-negotiable, ticking by somewhere out in the world, impossible to slow or stop. Yet an emerging scientific picture is that such “clock time” isn’t a standalone, physical phenomenon at all. It’s a mathematical tool or book-keeping device – useful for coordinating our interactions, but with no independent existence of its own. As with other key innovations, such as money, we can no longer get by without it. But I hope that debunking the myth of the clock can help us to focus on how life really progresses, and how much power we have to shape it.

When you are cured, the world cheers; when you are dying, it mourns. But when you are simply maintaining, the world is at a loss

Mornings begin with a silent inventory, conducted in the dark before the curtains are drawn: can I breathe easily today? The question is stripped of all poetic veneer. When you have stage four lung cancer, breath is no longer a background process; it is a finite currency I must spend with the caution of a miser. It dictates the architecture of my day, the borders of my energy and the very cadence of my speech.

I am not a “survivor” in the triumphalist sense of the word, nor am I imminently dying. I occupy the long middle – a rarely charted territory where the body remains fragile, treatment constant, and life does not so much move forward as stubbornly persist.

At the very moment Trump’s rambling speeches and meme–fied inanity threaten to overwhelm us, fashion, music and film are moving in the opposite direction

Put down your negroni, hang up your Prada handbag and pick up a paperback. Next time someone whips out their phone to take your picture, grab your reading specs, not your lipstick. Smart is the new hot.

Pop stars are launching book clubs – the 1970s had Studio 54, this decade has Dua Lipa’s online literary salon Service95 – or joining Substack, where Charli xcx recently published a 1,800-word essay interrogating why it is that as a pop star “you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid”. The supermodel Kaia Gerber (who is fashion royalty – her mum is Cindy Crawford) passes the time backstage at fashion week reading Didion, Duras and Camus, not Vogue.

Donald Trump’s ‘little excursion’ is likely to have long-term effects, from oil prices to inflation to growth, say experts

In the days after the US and Israel first bombed Iran, financial markets bet the economic fallout from Donald Trump’s “little excursion” in the Middle East would be short-lived.

“There are risks from higher oil prices longer term. But this is a tail risk,” one US-based fund manager said after the airstrike killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “History has shown time and time again that geopolitical flare-ups like this tend to be short-lived. This one should prove to be no exception.’’

Tehran’s response to Trump’s threat signals a potentially dangerous escalation as both sides menace sites relied on by millions

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

Tehran has said it will “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East, including vital water systems, if the US follows through on Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the strait of Hormuz is fully opened within two days.

As Iranian missiles struck two southern Israeli cities overnight, injuring dozens of people, and Tehran deployed long-range missiles for the first time, the developments signalled a dangerous potential escalation of the war, now in its fourth week, with both sides threatening facilities relied on by millions of people.

Accusations of intimidation and harassment within UK diaspora including ‘aggressive’ and ‘coercive’ videos online

Iranians living in the UK have expressed safety concerns to authorities amid heightened tensions linked to the conflict with the US and Israel.

Online videos of individuals allegedly being “aggressive” and “coercing” in London, which is home to one of the UK’s largest Iranian communities, have led to some feeling unsafe.

With a 7 October inquiry looming, the Israeli PM’s political career, legacy and personal freedom may all be on the line

Over three weeks of war, Iranian missiles have killed at least 15 people inside Israel, and injured many more, including about 200 in overnight strikes near a nuclear facility in the country’s south, but they have not touched public support for the war.

An overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis back the decision to start a new conflict, with the Israel Democracy Institute putting support at more than 90% in two wartime polls.

Exclusive: Allowing US tech firm to analyse intelligence in name of tackling fraud raises fresh concerns over privacy

• Campaign groups rail against Palantir, but the UK contracts keep coming

Palantir is to be granted access to a trove of highly sensitive UK financial regulation data, in a deal that has prompted fresh concerns about the US AI company’s deepening reach into the British state, the Guardian can reveal.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has awarded Palantir a contract to investigate the watchdog’s internal intelligence data in an effort to help it tackle financial crime, which includes investigating fraud, money laundering and insider trading.

Tim and Christen Bass are barred from working and facing homelessness after indefinite leave application rejected by Home Office

An American family who have brought their children up in the UK are facing the threat of homelessness and detention due to confusion over a Home Office application form.

Tim Bass, a data and technology consultant, and his wife, Christen, an autism specialist, have lived in the UK since arriving on a skilled worker visa in 2019. The couple have lived with their two children, aged 10 and eight, in south London since then.

Officer said he held himself responsible for accidentally phoning activist while in secret special branch meeting

An undercover police officer has admitted he was exposed as an infiltrator by his own blunder, which has been described by activists as worthy of Inspector Clouseau, the spycops public inquiry has heard.

The officer, who used the fake name Simon Wellings, jeopardised his own covert deployment by mistakenly recording himself discussing individual campaigners with other special branch officers.

Witnesses describe coordinated raids in which homes and vehicles were set on fire and several Palestinians injured

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

Israeli settlers have carried out a series of attacks across the occupied West Bank, setting homes and vehicles on fire and wounding several Palestinians in what witnesses described as coordinated raids on communities.

The violence, reported across at least half a dozen locations overnight from Saturday into Sunday, comes amid a wider surge in tensions in the territory. The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, cited local sources as saying settlers had entered al-Fandaqumiya and the nearby town of Seilat al-Dahr, south of Jenin, late on Saturday.

There was a time when the old trophy with the three handles felt like the personal property of Pep Guardiola. The Manchester City manager won the League Cup for the first time in 2018, beating Arsenal in the final, and he repeated the trick in each of the next three seasons.

The ensuing years in the competition have been less kind to Guardiola and the club but here was the riposte. On so many levels. City had entered this final as underdogs; an unusual position but a reflection of their recent wobbles and how Arsenal have been the pre-eminent team in England and Europe so far this season.

• Keely Hodgkinson caps famous night for British team

• Georgia Hunter Bell and Molly Caudery also take glory

Shortly before 8pm here in Torun, Georgia Hunter Bell, Molly Caudery and Keely Hodgkinson were jumping in delight and pure delirium after what was undoubtedly the greatest 29 minutes for Britain in world indoor athletics championship history.

Not one gold medal. Not two. But three. All in under 30 minutes. And as they waved the Union Jacks above their heads, and a phalanx of photographers crowded around them, you couldn’t blame them and the British fans in the crowd for getting more than a little giddy.

Inquiry into sexual assault claims did not establish that chief prosecutor’s actions amounted to misconduct, judges advise

The international criminal court’s governing body is expected to meet on Monday to assess the advice of a panel of judges who have challenged the findings of an investigation into the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan.

Last year a UN inquiry into the allegations about Khan’s behaviour is understood to have established a factual basis for claims of misconduct against him. The senior British lawyer has been accused by a complainant of sexual abuse.

Customers told not to eat affected pot and sachet products and to return them to place of purchase for refund

Several porridge products in the UK have been recalled over a possible mice contamination at their manufacturing site.

The British porridge and oat drink brand Moma issued a warning for seven versions of its pots and two of its sachets.

Flamengo player accused singer’s security of aggressive treatment of his wife and stepdaughter at hotel in São Paulo

The singer Chappell Roan has responded after the former Chelsea footballer Jorginho posted on social media claiming her security guard made his stepdaughter cry when she encountered the singer at a hotel in Brazil.

The American musician said Jorginho’s stepdaughter “did not deserve that”, and the situation had “made her really sad”, adding that the man involved in the incident was not her personal security.

Survivors describe how rangers and staff were targeted by an armed group during a raid on DRC’s national park earlier this month

Nearby Congolese soldiers had received warnings of the attack in the morning. But the soldiers did not arrive until late in the evening, long after the killings were over.

It happened before dawn on Tuesday 3 March, as a dozen rangers at Upemba national park headquarters were being briefed by their commander before the day’s routine anti-poaching patrol. At 5.40am machine-gun fire began to rattle out of the surrounding darkness.

Web domain added to government registry a month after president directed agencies to release files relating to UAPs

It was a gift to conspiracy theorists.

Last week, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency registered the alien.gov and aliens.gov web domains, adding both to the official government website registry.

As the chain marks 50th anniversary in Britain, Karen O’Rourke explains what makes it stand out against cut-price rivals

Almost exactly 50 years after H&M opened its first British store, the doors on its newest, in Brighton, swung open this week and the Swedish fashion company’s UK boss is determined to keep investing in the nation’s high streets despite its struggles.

In 1976, H&M opened in the brand-new Brent Cross shopping centre, the first American-style out of town mall to grace these shores. Its opening was such an event that the then Prince Charles attended.

Joe had never dated a bisexual man before, while Matt took time to trust his new partner, but now both are happy swapping roles in the bedroom
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Once I really trusted Matt, I started to enjoy being more dominant

When Joe worried he couldn’t compare, I told him I’d be fine never sleeping with a woman again

Madison Square Garden, New York City

The British artist’s brilliantly ambitious first arena show is a breathtaking showcase of her artistic range, with pole dancing, vogue battles and sword fighting

From time to time, photographs from FKA twigs’ stint as a backup dancer make the rounds on social media. In the early days, when her name recognition was secondary to the likes of Jessie J and Peter Andre, Tahliah Barnett would take to the stage and use her body and talent in service of someone else’s vision. The drama of being visible yet never being fully seen would become an important subtext to her work. Misrecognition from a lover, by the public, from the internet, provided powerful emotional stakes to her songwriting, which she complemented with ultra-tactile music that teased and staggered payoffs that went further than any expected beat.

The most definite proof that she has become an undeniable star in her own right comes tonight, when she tears the house down on her first ever arena date at Madison Square Garden. “Did you truly see me?” the singer whispers from bed in the show opener, Mirrored Heart. The immediate, roaring response is at funny odds with her lament that follows: “No, not this time.” If anything, the evening proves again and again just how intensely she and her audience seem to recognize one another. For one thing, the crowd is styled in her image, in fulfillment of her wish from Home With You to “see a hero like me in a sci-fi”. From blocks away, you can follow the stream of make-do Rick Owens looks and be certain that you are headed toward FKA twigs’ location. Inside the arena, it feels like New York is doing its best approximation of a Berlin nightclub: an orgy of black tank-tops, Lucite pleaser heels and constellations of facial piercings that must be a nightmare for the people running the metal detectors.

Fearless broadcaster who was the longest-serving presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour

Jenni Murray, who has died aged 75, was the longest-serving presenter of Woman’s Hour, bringing calm authority to the BBC Radio 4 weekday show for 33 years.

The programme that was launched in 1946 with cooking, cleaning tips and romantic serials had, by the time of Murray’s tenure (1987-2020), become a platform for subjects such as the menopause, domestic violence, genital mutilation and sexual politics. After a decade of Murray in the presenter’s chair, the programme was described by the Sunday Times in 1996 as “Radio 4’s sisterhood of the airwaves”.

The actor and presenter, and his dad, on winding each other up, learning to be resilient and the joys of family life

Born in 2000 in Rawdon, West Yorkshire, George Webster is an actor and presenter. In 2021, he made history as the first BBC children’s presenter with Down’s syndrome. As well as his regular hosting role on CBeebies, Webster has appeared in The Railway Children Return, Casualty, and the 2022 Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special. His fourth book, George and the Dragons: Lava Goes Wild!, is out now. Webster’s dad, Rob, is the chief executive of NHS West Yorkshire.

After a romantic booking error, would these two find anything to love in each other’s views on deplatforming Reform and right to buy?

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

Chris, 72, Bradford on Avon

Occupation Gardener, former teacher

Nico O’Reilly was superb for City while it was another Wembley performance to forget for Kepa Arrizabalaga

Kepa Arrizabalaga
Howler dropping Rayan Cherki’s cross for Nico O’Reilly’s opener started rot: his inclusion poses question of Mikel Arteta’s selection policy. 3

It promises to be a long three weeks for Tottenham Hotspur and Igor Tudor. That is, of course, if Tudor gets the time, after Nottingham ­Forest plunged Spurs deeper into the ­relegation fight, recording a humiliating 3-0 victory. “We are staying up,” was the chant from the away fans, who delighted in suggesting ­Stevenage could be visiting this vast arena for a Championship game in August.

When Spurs, a point above the relegation zone, do re-emerge after the international break, their trip to Sunderland will be the first of seven games to save their Premier League status. For Forest, who had to weather a first-half storm, waves of Spurs set pieces, this turned into a dreamy afternoon in the capital, a second victory in four days and, crucially, Vítor Pereira’s first league win since taking charge last month. West Ham’s defeat at Aston Villa only enhanced Forest’s fuzzy feeling.

• Sunderland’s Lutsharel Geertruida allegedly abused

• Referee stops game per anti-discrimination protocol

Sunderland’s Tyne-Wear derby victory at Newcastle was overshadowed by reports that Lutsharel Geertruida had been the subject of racist abuse from home fans.

The Premier League will now investigate after the referee, Anthony Taylor, stopped the match in line with the league’s on-field anti-discrimination protocol early in the second half.

• Leicester 33-19 Bristol

• Victory lifts Leicester into third place in Prem table

Swapping the bright Saturday night lights of the Stade de France for the rusty old Crumbie Stand can be a real mental challenge. There is certainly less demand for foie gras in Aylestone but for certain people nothing beats a constant diet of rugby. England’s Ollie Chessum did occasionally look a tad weary during another selfless 80-minute shift but a vital 33-19 Leicester win made all those hard yards worthwhile.

The result not only hoists the Tigers into third place in the Prem table but Gabriel Hamer-Webb’s spectacular last-gasp try earned what could prove a vital extra point when the playoff maths are totted up. Bristol, who had been pressing for a couple of bonus points of their own, were ultimately left empty-handed and down in fifth place after a game that was never less than intense and absorbing.

American last hit a competitive ball in 2022 but Instagram posts show her training again, with her motives still unknown

As was often the case in Serena Williams’s unparalleled tennis career, her time at the French Open in 2009 was far from straightforward. Her gritty performance in a third-round win against Spain’s María José Martínez Sánchez that went the distance was quickly overshadowed by a gamesmanship row after Martínez Sánchez refused to admit that one of Williams’s shots had struck her body, not her racket, before going back over the net. The point should have been awarded to the American.

An unimpressed Williams immediately protested to opponent and umpire. Then, once it became clear the point was a lost cause, she comically suggested Martínez Sánchez should probably not approach the net again. During her post-match press conference, Williams’s continued criticisms led to her uttering one of her more memorable quotes: “I’m, like, drama. And I don’t want to be drama,” she said, sighing. “I’m like one of those girls on a reality show that has all the drama, and everyone in the house hates them because no matter what they do drama follows them. I don’t want to be that girl.”

While Ollie Watkins gave the most articulate response to his omission from the England squad with the second-half goal that consolidated Aston Villa’s place in the Premier League’s top four, the most rousing noise around Villa Park arrived when Youri Tielemans replaced John McGinn a minute earlier.

Most of the stadium took to their feet and cheered the Belgian’s name more loudly than anyone else’s as he made his return after two months out with an ankle injury. On a day when McGinn, Villa’s inspirational captain, followed up his goal in Thursday’s Europa League victory over Lille with another nerve-settling strike here, the returning strength and quality of Unai Emery’s squad suggests they can maintain their two-pronged approach for Champions League qualification.

• Leicester lose 2-1 against Aston Villa having led 1-0

• Liverpool edge towards safety with 0-0 draw at Brighton

The relegation fears of the Women’s Super League’s bottom team, Leicester, worsened as they let a one-goal lead slip and lost 2-1 at home to an Aston Villa side who were inspired by their half-time substitute Ebony Salmon.

Leicester had looked on course to climb out of the relegation spot and above West Ham on goal difference, but Villa’s superb second-half fightback condemned Leicester to a 12th defeat from their 17 league games this season and left them three points from safety with five games remaining.

• Ronald Araújo scores only goal in hard-fought 1-o win

• Como thrash Pisa in Serie A for fifth straight victory

Ronald Araújo’s header helped Barcelona extend their lead over Real Madrid at the top of La Liga to seven points with a tight 1-0 win over Rayo Vallecano on Sunday. Álvaro Arbeloa’s Real Madrid host Atlético Madrid, who are fourth, later on in a derby clash.

Araújo nodded home João Cancelo’s corner after 24 minutes to secure the three points at Camp Nou but Joan García’s superb display in goal played just as big a part in their victory.

• ECB decision to back coach will be confirmed on Monday

• Lord’s summit with all county directors due next week

Brendon McCullum has been told he must improve relations with the counties after being backed to stay on as England coach despite this winter’s 4-1 Ashes defeat.

The Guardian revealed the day after England’s T20 World Cup exit three weeks ago that McCullum would continue, a decision that will be confirmed on Monday by the England and Wales Cricket Board chief executive, Richard Gould, and managing director of men’s cricket, Rob Key.

Growers face soaring fertiliser and fuel costs as shipping choke point of the strait of Hormuz hits supply chains

• ‘The stakes are enormous’: how a prolonged Iran war could shock the global economy

It is peak harvesting season for avocados in the lush southern highlands of Tanzania but growers are racing against time to find buyers for the precious green fruits before they become overripe.

Donald Trump’s disastrous Middle East war is being felt in the world’s energy markets but oil and gas are not the only products that transit through the maritime choke point of the strait of Hormuz. The conflict is also hitting supply chains elsewhere.

For gen Z, the pull of a time before smartphones is strong. For those of us who lived through it, the reality is somewhat different

‘People have to start going 90s,” according to the content creator Mike Sheffer. In other words: leave your phone at home. “In the 90s no one had cellphones,” Sheffer explains, helpfully, on a reel I saw on Instagram, in which he describes how he and his friends do this, using it as a challenge to be in the moment and invite serendipity. “Things just happen,” he says. “There’s a different energy.”

Ah yes, the serendipitous 90s energy of arranging to meet someone “under the clock at M&S” and hanging around for 40 minutes when they didn’t show, of trudging dangerous miles home late at night thanks to transport fails (several comments on Sheffer’s reel highlighted the safety angle), or of forgetting your keys and spending hours locked out (I think I spent most of 1990-1994 sitting, bored witless, on the doorstep).

Tribalism and political ambiguity worked with a less fragmented electorate. The party must reconnect with its base – and be open to work with other progressives

Led by a probably doomed prime minister, presiding over a struggling economy, exposed by an ongoing scandal, besieged by populist insurgents to its right and left, ambushed by a war that will bring higher inflation and public debt, and predicted to win just 75 seats at the next general election, according to the website Electoral Calculus, Labour is in an unprecedented crisis. The party will have to do unprecedented things to get out of it.

One could be making its political approach both narrower and more expansive. This would require Labour to drop habits and orthodoxies which have become ingrained since the 1980s.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

For some, creating a smash hit puzzle would have been enough to kick back for life. But for the Josh Wardles and Timothée Chalamets of the world, not even the moon is enough

He is one letter away from being a household name. Now Josh Wardle, the inventor of Wordle, has launched a new online game, and in doing so, provided an interesting insight into ambition.

For some, creating a global smash hit puzzle so zeitgeisty and popular it becomes part of millions of strangers’ daily routines and is bought by the New York Times for seven figures would have been sufficient for a lifetime. Rather than face inevitable comparison and potential disappointment by attempting That Difficult Second Album, they would have just kicked back on their yacht and called it a day.

This is not about assigning collective guilt to present generations. But injustice does not simply fade with time – it requires deliberate effort to address and redress

This month my country, Ghana, celebrated its 69th independence day. In my address to the nation, I invoked the courage and conviction of our founding leaders, who stood firm in the face of immense adversity to secure our freedom. Kwame Nkrumah reminded us that political independence without transforming the global systems that shape our economies and opportunities remains incomplete.

It is in that spirit that, this month, Ghana will table a resolution at the United Nations general assembly calling for the formal recognition of one of the greatest moral tragedies in human history: the transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of Africans as a crime against humanity, and the need for a process of repair.

John Dramani Mahama is president of the Republic of Ghana

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.

Humans are hard-wired to care for and protect each other. Becoming kinder is just like riding a bike

As a species, homo sapiens have a bad reputation. War, environmental pillage, weapons of mass destruction – if the human race was applying for the job as planetary custodian, we wouldn’t even make it through to the interview stage.

But maybe we are not as bad as we think. According to the author and psychologist Steven Pinker, human society has become kinder over the course of recorded history, perhaps not in a linear fashion, but in absolute terms. He argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature that over the long arc of history, violence – including murder, cruelty and war deaths – have declined.

Jackie Bailey is an award-winning author whose nonfiction book about spirituality, ‘The Outrageous Good Fortune of Living’ (HarperCollins), will be released in 2026. Jackie works as a funeral celebrant and pastoral care practitioner, supporting people to navigate death and dying

At a time when the bad news feels endless, we should celebrate the gutsiness of a judiciary quietly standing up for democracy

Cast your mind back to the American south in the late 1950s, when federal trial court judges were called upon to do a herculean job – enforce the supreme court’s titanic decision in Brown v Board of Education, which struck down the “separate but equal” school segregation regime.

Bear with me for a brief history lesson, because it resonates today.

David Kirp is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and a frequent contributor to the Guardian

The increased use of tags makes sense if done right. But years of accumulated problems include a depleted probation workforce

Given the frayed and depleted state of the public sector, it is not surprising that prisons in England and Wales are struggling to escape from a sense of perpetual crisis. Recent days saw the latest in a series of urgent notifications. These put a prison in special measures, and require ministers to produce an action plan within a month. Inspectors found that Woodhill in Milton Keynes is unsafe while a report on another failing prison, Swaleside in Kent, pointed to high levels of violence, staff shortages and education cuts.

David Lammy, who was shuffled into the role of justice secretary as a result of Angela Rayner’s hasty exit from government, is busy with the alarming push to remove most defendants’ right to a jury trial. So the implementation of recent sentencing reforms, and problems inside jails, have largely been left to the prisons minister, James Timpson. While there is no doubting his personal commitment, good intentions will not be enough.

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

The steep reductions are a grave error, both morally and pragmatically. But a better case needs to be made for spending

Progress is possible. Over two decades, global child mortality plummeted. There were many reasons for a 39% reduction in deaths in lower and middle income countries between 2001 and 2021, but a significant one was overseas development aid, which supported everything from sanitation to vaccination programmes to food security.

That shift has slowed, and – like similar advances – is likely to reverse if aid budgets continue to be slashed. Researchers warned last month that continuing cuts could result in more than 22 million avoidable deaths in the next five years, with a quarter of those among children under five.

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.

A former prisoner says that unless the government offers meaningful housing and employment help to those leaving prison, they will end up back there

I agree with John Podmore’s comments on prisoners (Letters, 18 March), but they do not go far enough in addressing what happens after release. As a former prisoner who spent five and a half years in custody, I can say plainly that support on release is almost nonexistent.

People talk about rehabilitation, but in reality you are released back into society with little more than a reporting requirement and the expectation that you somehow rebuild your life from nothing.

GLP-1 medicines work best alongside lifestyle adjustments, writes Dr Sam Robson. Plus letters from Anne Williams, Siân Williams, and a reader who has had success with Mounjaro

Your editorial (15 March) is right to highlight the growing evidence that GLP-1 medicines influence the brain’s reward systems and may have potential in treating addiction. These drugs represent an important therapeutic advance, and the moralising that has historically surrounded obesity treatment is both unhelpful and scientifically outdated. However, in clinical practice it is also clear that medication alone is rarely the whole answer.

Obesity, like addiction, involves powerful biological drivers such as appetite signalling, reward pathways and metabolic adaptation, but it also unfolds within behavioural and environmental contexts. Patients who achieve the most durable outcomes are typically those who combine pharmacological treatment with meaningful changes in diet quality, physical activity, sleep and muscle preservation.

The problem isn’t the beaver on the banknote – it’s a politics that no longer recognises what holds value, writes Dr Michael J Richardson

Jonn Elledge (What’s worth more: Churchill or a woke badger? Welcome to Britain’s banknote culture war, 16 March) is right that the debate over whether wildlife might replace figures such as Winston Churchill on Bank of England banknotes has become another front in Britain’s culture wars. As he notes, proposals to feature animals are neither unprecedented nor unpopular, with public consultation showing majority support for nature-themed designs.

But the backlash relies on a familiar claim: that attention to wildlife represents a misplaced priority – “the definition of woke”, as Nigel Farage put it. This framing is not new. During the 2021 evacuation efforts of animal charity Nowzad in Kabul, the story was reduced to “pets over people”, despite the fact that both animals and staff were saved. Similar narratives now position social care v climate concern.

Nato ‘cowards’ | Duck dish | Measurements | Small amounts | Chelsea gnomes | Excuses | Floaters

Perhaps Donald Trump might encourage his “cowardly” Nato colleagues by reminding them about his heroic efforts during the Vietnam war? (Anger grows among UK ministers amid fears Iran war could jeopardise Britain’s fragile finances, 21 March).
Tony Green
Ipswich

• My favourite cooking quantity (Letters, 19 March) comes from a wartime recipe for vegetarian duck. The first line reads: “Take a marrow about the size of a duck”.
Laurie Baily
West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the last seven days

Scientist Ryan Gosling is alone in deep space – or is he? – and America’s famed topical satire is given a British angle

Project Hail Mary
Out now
Novelist Andy Weir’s brand of comic, semi-plausible sci-fi led to Ridley Scott’s The Martian – now Phil Lord and Christopher Miller will be hoping to repeat something of the same success. Ryan Gosling is the lead of a caper in which a science teacher wakes up on a spaceship on a desperate mission in deep space.

Here’s how to follow along with our coverage – the finest writing and up-to-the-minute reports

Comedians strive for straight faces as Prime’s comic blockbuster returns, while Gus Van Sant directs a thrilling take on a real-life hostage drama. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

US president’s backing comes as Hungary’s PM faces toughest election campaign of 16 years in office

Donald Trump has endorsed Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who faces his toughest electoral challenge next month since taking power 16 years ago, as Europe’s far-right leaders gather for a “grand assembly” in Budapest.

In a video message, the US president told the national-conservative Cpac Hungary conference in the capital on Saturday that Orbàn, who has been trailing in the polls behind a centre-right rival for more than a year, was a “fantastic guy”.

Three cases previously confirmed reclassified by UK Health Security Agency after further testing

The number of confirmed meningitis cases linked to the Kent outbreak has fallen from 23 to 20.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Sunday that three cases previously thought confirmed had been downgraded after further testing.

Shadow justice secretary had called Trafalgar Square event an ‘act of domination’

James Cleverly has said he disagrees with his Conservative frontbench colleague Nick Timothy’s assertion that public Muslim prayers are an act of domination, as another senior Tory called for the party to respect the right to worship.

Kemi Badenoch has defended Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, after he posted images of mass prayer at a Ramadan event on Monday evening in Trafalgar Square, calling it “an act of domination” and “straight from the Islamist playbook”.

Centre-left Robert Golob and rightwing populist Janez Janša are frontrunners in contest after polarised campaign

Campaigners in Slovenia have warned of a surge in anti-Romany rhetoric as the country heads to the polls on Sunday, leaving many bracing for the outcome of a vote that has become, in part, a referendum on how the country treats its most marginalised.

In Sunday’s vote, the prime minister, Robert Golob, of the centre-left Freedom Movement party, faces off against the rightwing populist and Donald Trump ally Janez Janša.

Network breakdowns compounded by daily blackouts of up to 12 hours caused by fuel shortages

Cuba’s power grid collapsed on Saturday leaving the country without electricity for a third time in March as the communist government battles with a decaying infrastructure and a US-imposed oil blockade.

The Cuban Electric Union, which reports to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, announced a total blackout across the island without initially giving a cause for the outage.

There are flooding rains in Hawaii, rare snow in Alabama and a severe heatwave in the west coast

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The US is experiencing a striking mix of weather extremes this March. Flooding rains in Hawaii, rare snow in Alabama, flip-flopping temperatures in the north-east and, perhaps most concerning, a severe heatwave affecting the west coast are raising questions about how strange these patterns really are, and what role the climate crisis is playing.

Experts suggested that people around the US need to pay closer attention to the climatecrisis and do what they can to “minimize the impacts”.

Animals will feature on £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes, the Bank of England says, but which creatures should make the cut?

Native British wildlife will feature on the next set of £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes, the Bank of England has announced, but it has yet to be decided which creatures will make the cut.

While politicians from Nigel Farage to Ed Davey have sought to confect outrage about ditching Winston Churchill and Jane Austen for badgers or blackbirds, public consultations by the Bank show that people favour the switch to wildlife. Regularly changing images on the notes is a measure to foil counterfeiters.

Chris Packham is a naturalist, broadcaster, campaigner and author

Naturalist Lucy Lapwing is the author of Love is a Toad: Exploring Our Relationship With Nature

In one corner, clean energy champion Ed Miliband. In the other, residents – and Reform politicians – outraged at plans for more large-scale solar farms in Lincolnshire than anywhere else in the UK

As night descends on the grand offices of Lincolnshire county council, everything appears orderly and calm. Paintings of long-forgotten councillors and dignitaries stare out into an empty drawing room. The council chamber is silent and dark. Bored receptionists glance at their phones while a handful of admin staff hunch over glowing screens. But a rebellion is brewing in the office of the council leader, Sean Matthews, who took charge last May, when Reform replaced the Conservative old guard. The affable former royal protection officer is plotting an apparently radical campaign of civil disobedience against a series of giant solar farms planned for Lincolnshire.

Despite a quarter of a century in the Metropolitan police, Matthews is willing to break the law to stop solar developers. He is planning to lie down in front of the bulldozers. “They can arrest me – I’ve arrested plenty of people,” he says, leaning forward on a sofa. “It’s much bigger than me and my criminal record. For goodness sake, it’s the future of the county, it’s the future of our land. I am passionate about that and I will do what I can.”

Exclusive: War in the Middle East is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined

The US-Israel war on Iran is a disaster for the climate, according to an analysis that finds it is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined.

As warplanes, drones and missiles kill thousands of people, level infrastructure and turn the Middle East into a gigantic environmental sacrifice zone, the first analysis of the climate cost has found the conflict led to 5m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in its first 14 days.

Unpaid carers say they remain ‘in limbo’ as DWP continues to pursue discredited repayment bills

MPs have threatened to launch a fresh inquiry into the handling of the carers allowance scandal after unpaid carers spoke of being “stuck in limbo” by the government’s response.

The warning came amid concerns over delays in Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) plans to offer redress to tens of thousands of carers who were unfairly issued with overpayment bills based on discredited official guidance.

Exclusive: Rebecca Harris promotes latest Crewkerne Gazette skit, created by Joshua Bonehill-Paine who says he is Tory member

The Conservative party’s chief whip has been condemned for promoting AI-generated footage created by a notorious far-right figure who was jailed for hate crimes against Jewish people.

Rebecca Harris reposted the latest skit by the Crewkerne Gazette, which depicts Kemi Badenoch and her shadow justice secretary, Nick Timothy, as characters in the gangster film Scarface.

‘Problem-solving’, child-focused courts to replace adversarial hearings, with earlier intervention to cut delays

Family courts are “not good enough” and have treated women and children unfairly for decades, a government minister has said.

Announcing a major overhaul of the family justice system in England and Wales that will play a central role in “rebalancing” the family courts, Alison Levitt said often brutal legal showdowns will be replaced with a “problem-solving”, child-focused model.

Figures seen by the Guardian show the two peers each attended just 1.12% of sessions in past four years

Evgeny Lebedev’s longstanding commitment to being the most relaxed member of the House of Lords has come under threat from another peer, Ian Botham, with both recording identical attendance rates of 1.12% over the past four years.

According to Lords records seen by the Guardian, Lebedev and Botham – who were both appointed by Boris Johnson – each managed to make it to seven of the 625 sessions of the upper house that took place from the start of 2022 to the end of 2025.

White House says talks ‘constructive’ but Russian negotiators not present; more civilians killed in country’s south-east by Moscow attacks. What we know on day 1,488

Ukrainian and US negotiators trying to secure a peace settlement of Russia’s invasion opened their latest round of talks in Florida on Saturday, with more discussions planned through the weekend. Russian representatives did not attend the meeting. “We continued discussing key issues and the next steps within the negotiation track,” the chief Ukrainian negotiator, Rustem Umerov, posted on X. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met at two sets of US-brokered talks in the United Arab Emirates this year and a round in Geneva last month. Moscow and Kyiv agreed on prisoner exchanges, but no breakthroughs were achieved.

The White House described the latest meeting as “constructive”, with discussions “focused on narrowing and resolving remaining items to move closer to a comprehensive peace agreement”.

Russian attacks killed four people in south-eastern Ukraine and left much of the northern region of Chernihiv without power on Saturday, officials said. Zaporizhzhia governor, Ivan Fedorov, said the morning attack on the city killed a man and a woman, and injured six others, including two children. In the adjacent Dnipropetrovsk region, officials said two people died in an area south-east of the main regional centre, Dnipro. Five people were injured in attacks at multiple places. In his nightly video address, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said power had been cut to parts of Chernihiv region, where efforts were under way to fix damage after a drone strike on an energy facility. Power and water supplies have also been cut to parts of Kyiv.

Ukrainian forces shelled a public building in Russia’s border region of Belgorod on Saturday, killing four people, the regional governor said. Vyacheslav Gladkov, writing on Telegram, said the attack hit a “social site” in the village of Smorodino, without giving further details. The bodies of two women were pulled from under rubble, he said. Belgorod has come under frequent Ukrainian attack during the four-year war.

Authorities in nearly a dozen Russian regions in recent weeks cited various excuses to prevent demonstrations against internet censorship and the blocking of the popular messaging app Telegram. In most cases, they succeeded. Mindful of a crackdown on dissent since the invasion of Ukraine, activists decided not to risk holding unauthorised rallies, even if they weren’t about the war. Some went to court to challenge government refusals to authorise pickets, while others scaled them back to smaller indoor gatherings.

Tens of thousands of Czechs filled a large plain in Prague to rally against the government of the billionaire prime minister, Andrej Babi, on Saturday, slamming it for “arrogance of power”. The Million Moments for Democracy movement organising the protest has criticised the government for “playing down” threats from Russia invading Ukraine. Protesters, some carrying Ukrainian flags, criticised its refusal to provide military aid to Ukraine. Babis leads a three-party nationalist cabinet comprising his catch-all ANO party, the far-right SPD and the rightwing Eurosceptic Motorists. “[The government] is doing everything to drag us towards Russia and, together with Hungary and Slovakia, to dent the EU,” Marek Perutka, a conservationist carrying a Ukrainian flag told Agence France-Presse.

Nasa confirms meteor after residents reported hearing thunder-like noises about the time the fireball was visible

A suspected meteorite crashed into a home in suburban Houston on Saturday night, according to local residents and officials.

Speaking to the local news outlet KHOU11 over the weekend, Spring area resident Sherrie James recalled the incident, saying: “My grandson went to check and said there was a hole in the ceiling … then I saw the rock, and I thought, ‘That looks like a meteor.’”

Trump and border czar Tom Homan confirm plan to assist TSA agents amid partial government shutdown standoff

Donald Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, have confirmed that the president’s administration is sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to US airports beginning Monday to assist with security amid extremely long lines – and to help airport security agents who have been working without pay since 14 February because of a partial government shutdown.

Homan will lead the effort, Trump said on Sunday.

Electoral alliances expected to play vital role in number of contests including Paris and Marseille

Voting is under way in France in the second round of local elections seen as a bellwether for next year’s presidential race – with cities including Paris and Marseille in the balance and both the radical left and far right hoping for gains.

Most of France’s 35,000-odd communes elected their councils in the first round last Sunday, but in municipalities where the contest is tighter, including most large urban areas, the second round will be decisive, with electoral alliances playing a key role.

News that chickpea dip is to join list of products used for UK inflation basket confirms its move into the mainstream

• The best (and worst) supermarket hummus tasted and rated

It is a sign of the times. This week it was revealed that hummus is joining the list of foods used to measure the cost of living in Britain as the ubiquity of the dip at mealtimes sees it billed as the “new ketchup”.

The decision to drop a pot of hummus in the inflation basket is a moment for the all-conquering chickpea dip, which arrived on supermarket shelves in the late 1980s. Since then Britons have gone from spending virtually nothing to £170m a year on the versatile stuff.

Regulators narrow securities definitions – a shift that could benefit Trump family’s crypto projects

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On Tuesday, major US financial regulators published rules for the cryptocurrency industry that may reduce regulatory requirements and that insiders believe will benefit the Trump family’s ventures.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued new guidelines for the cryptocurrency industry to answer the longstanding question of what does or does not qualify as a security, a classification that entails strict oversight. SEC chair, Paul Atkins, has dubbed the framework a “token taxonomy” for the sector. Published jointly with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the guidelines classify most of crypto-based assets as commodities, collectibles, payment tokens or “digital tools”, exempting them from the SEC’s more stringent oversight and disclosure requirements. Only blockchain-based representations of existing securities, such as stocks and bonds, remain classified as securities under this new framework.

Police issue alerts and security tips to households reliant on heating oil to deter a crime that can leave victims with bills of thousands

There is no subtle way to receive heating oil deliveries in rural Northern Ireland: clearly marked tankers trundle through roads and lanes and park outside homes while they replenish storage tanks.

The trucks’ comings and goings are visible to the entire community, indicating which households have stocked up on oil, and that is a problem because criminals monitor deliveries to identify targets.

Iran war should be wake-up call about costs of not going full throttle towards EVs as Chinese have done, experts say

By the 1980s, Detroit’s once titanic carmakers were being upended by rivals from Japan. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler had grown rich selling gas guzzlers, but when oil prices rose and suddenly cheap, fuel-efficient Japanese models looked attractive, they were unprepared. The collapse in sales led to hundreds of thousands of job losses in the automotive heartland of the US.

Now western car manufacturers are making what one former boss calls a similar “profound strategic mistake” as they pull back from electric vehicles (EVs) and refocus on the combustion engine just as oil prices are soaring once again. Experts say the industry’s future – and that of tens of millions of jobs – could be on the line. This time, however, the threat is from China.

It gave us Game of Thrones, The Sopranos and The Wire. But as HBO Max comes to the UK and with new ownership imminent, the network that reinvented television is fighting to stay itself

It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” It might have seemed like a hollow brag at the time, but this aggressively assertive tagline marked the beginning of a new era in small-screen entertainment. The slogan was a statement about what the US cable network aspired to be but, also, a tacit rejection of what most television still was in 1996. It seemed a brave opening salvo: after all, at that point, there wasn’t yet much basis for it.

HBO (Home Box Office) had begun life in 1972 as a subscription service touting a mixture of films and sport. But by the late 80s, this offering was growing stale; threatened by proliferating networks, the protectiveness of big studios and increasing competition. Original, made-for-TV content was the obvious way forward. But how to find a niche?

Martial arts champion who became a star of 1980s action movies and played the wholesome hero of Walker, Texas Ranger on TV

Action cinema of the 1980s was a podium where Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone fought over gold and silver position. Bronze belonged indisputably to Chuck Norris, who has died aged 86.

The premature death of Bruce Lee in 1973 had left a vacancy for a martial arts movie superstar that was eventually filled to some extent by Norris, Lee’s friend and colleague. He had made an early screen appearance battling Lee in high-kicking combat sequences, which the pair choreographed together, in The Way of the Dragon (1972). Both men were trained fighters, so there was no call for stunt doubles or the obfuscating frenzy of quick cuts; their face-offs were filmed in medium and wide shots to preserve the sense of integrity.

Ten strangers take on an intense game of hide and seek. Plus: an essential documentary about a chemical scandal. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Channel 4

Impressions of Keir Starmer, sketches about dodgy skincare products, and some ‘god-awful performances’ aside, the inaugural episode’s ambition was refreshing to see

In the end, it’s a feeling, isn’t it? You can tally up the laughs, work out the ratio of good lines to bad, sketches that fly, sketches that plummet straight into the mire – but in the end, a comedy show leaves you with a feeling that tells you whether it worked or not.

The general feeling, I think, will be that the inaugural episode of Saturday Night Live UK – Sky’s version of the famous 51-year-old American original founded and still overseen by the infamous Lorne Michaels – did work.

The creators of Stranger Things’s new dread-suffused drama sees a happy couple head off for an idyllic wedding – a poorly-lit cabin in the woods. The results are chilling

When I heard the Duffer brothers, creators of Stranger Things, had a new series on Netflix, I knew I had to watch – but I was not eager. I believe identical twins who make moving pictures are inherently creepy, even when those productions aren’t called Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. My nervous system won’t let me enjoy horror, and I don’t understand people who do. Is life not scary enough?

The first episode (out Thursday 26 March) – is that a working title or what? It’s like calling Mrs Doubtfire “Heartwarming Drag Act”, or Free Willy “Pelagic Marine Predators Do Not Belong in Captivity” – places us four days before the wedding of Nicky (Adam DiMarco) and Rachel (Camila Morrone), the central event of the story.

A powerful new fact-based drama depicts Huw Edwards’s fall from being the BBC’s top news anchor to a conviction for making indecent images of children. The Doc Martin star talks about secrecy, off-the-record research – and why his ears needed to be stuck down

Huw Edwards has not sat at a newsreader’s desk since July 2023, when he was suspended by the BBC following a report in the Sun that he had paid a teenager £35,000 for intimate images and conversations. A year later – when new BBC News at Ten anchor Clive Myrie announced that his predecessor had been convicted of possessing indecent images of children – the Welsh broadcaster’s career effectively ended.

But on Tuesday the night of 24 March Edwards is back on screen, reading the news in the late-night slot he occupied for decades. He is played by the actor Martin Clunes and his BBC desk has been recreated in the London canalside news studio at Channel 5 by the producers of Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards.

Prospect Building, Bristol
Switching from convulsive rhythmic thrills to shimmering introspection, the Brooklyn indie-rockers’ music defies expectations and is viscerally of the moment

‘The last time we played here, we played on a boat,” Cameron Winter murmurs in a rare moment of between-song chat. There are also quite a few boats bobbing around in the Geese singer’s lyrics, seemingly symbolising both freedom and confinement, but right now he is being perfectly literal. The vessel in question was Thekla, a cargo ship turned venue moored in Bristol harbour that is roughly an eighth of the size of the room that greets the Brooklyn indie-rock band tonight.

Geese’s rise since that 2023 show has been precipitous. Thanks to the acclaim that met their fourth LP, Getting Killed, last autumn, less than a year after Winter’s solo bow Heavy Metal earned similar plaudits, theirs is now the name on the lips of anyone left with a desire to anoint new saviours of rock’n’roll. Spend 90 minutes watching them perform, though, and you too may come around to that way of thinking.

The DJ and multi-instrumentalist thinks Donna Summer still sounds like the future, but which ‘unevolved’ Kinks staple can he no longer stomach?

The first song I fell in love with
I would sit by the radio and record songs on an old Dictaphone that I found under my grandfather’s desk. I spent the summer listening over and over to I Fought the Law by the Clash. Even through a Dictaphone, it sounded like a building exploding.

The first single I bought
Convoy by CW McCall for $1 from Bradlees discount store in Connecticut, and listened to it 40 times in a row. I think it was at that point my mom thought: “He’s both going to be a musician and an addict.”

The song I do a karaoke
I take pride that I’ve never done the same karaoke song twice. My Way by Frank Sinatra wasn’t my finest moment. Nor was In Da Club by 50 Cent. At least my Bust a Move by Young MC wasn’t as terrible as it could have been.

Lyceum theatre, Sheffield
Nineteenth-century verismo becomes 21st-century psychodrama, as English Touring Opera dramatise this tawdry tale of jealousy and violence with a keen eye for the dramatic image

Heralding a new era, Pagliacci and The Gondoliers are the first English Touring Opera productions to premiere in Sheffield, the company’s new home city. If the latter was a palpable hit on opening night, Leoncavallo’s slice of operatic grand guignol was less so, despite director Eleanor Burke’s valiant attempt to turn 19th-century verismo into a 21st-century psychodrama.

Some things work here and others don’t. Pointing up Nedda’s enduring love for Canio even as she plans to elope with Silvio heightens the final tragedy. Having the outstanding ETO ensemble portray the demons inside Canio’s head, urging him on to commit the final act of violence – here, strangling Nedda with a telephone cord – is a powerful device. Zeynep Kepekli’s meticulous lighting design ensures they are a watchful presence throughout while highlighting the prurient voyeurism that compels audiences to revel in other people’s domestic misfortunes.

From electroclash pioneers to dancefloor-fillers via viral TikTok fame thanks to their hit Seventeen, the Liverpool band are back with a new album and another metamorphosis

It was October 2001 in New York City, and Mira Aroyo and bandmate Reuben Wu were invited to DJ a new party. The gritty, 200 capacity Luxx on Brooklyn’s Grand Street specialised in forgotten queer electro sounds from the 1980s. The party’s name? Electroclash.

“It was us, Peaches, people from Berlin,” remembers Aroyo. Larry Tee, the Atlanta DJ and RuPaul collaborator, had booked them for their love of overlooked gems by Gina X or Bobby O. “It was hedonistic, nonbinary, flamboyant.”

Too often framed as a tragic icon or a victim of domesticity, the poet remade herself and her work at the start of the 60s, as a new collection will show

In February 1962, Sylvia Plath dropped in on her neighbour in Devon, Rose Key, with “a plate of absolutely indigestible Black Walnut-flavored cupcakes”. She had made them from a Betty Crocker mix palmed off on her by the bank manager’s wife. Not wanting to waste it nor feed it to her own family (she was scornful of both processed food and the British appetite for starch), Plath baked it and efficiently dispatched it next door.

There was a lot of cake-baking involved in the social life of North Tawton. Plath excelled at it – like everything else. In the early months of that year, shortly after giving birth to her second child, she was not only making her own “six-egg” sponges, she was taking Italian, German and French lessons, writing an experimental poem for the BBC Third programme (Three Women), obsessively sourcing rugs for her new house (“I have looked & looked at carpets, in Exeter, London & Plymouth, & feel now that our choice is right & sensible”), having the downstairs floors cemented (she hated dirty floors) and expressing a desire to begin woodwork classes.

Multi-award-winning writer best known for his speculative fiction, but whose novels and novellas also spanned genres from crime to historical

Dan Simmons, who has died aged 77, was a versatile, prolific and genre-stretching writer whose work embraced the definition of SF as speculative, rather than simply science, fiction. In fact, before he wrote the four massive space opera novels that became known as the Hyperion Cantos, he had already made his name as a writer of horror. His first novel, Song of Kali (1985), won the World Fantasy award; his next, Carrion Comfort (1989), won the Bram Stoker, Locus and British Fantasy awards.

Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion were originally one novel. Divided into two, each won a Locus award, while Hyperion also captured a Hugo, and Fall of Hyperion the British Science Fiction Association prize. His two Endymion novels, again originally one book (1996), finished the Hyperion series.

The publisher has cancelled the US release of Shy Girl by Mia Ballard and withdrawn the UK edition after weeks of online speculation about the novel’s origins

Hachette Book Group has withdrawn a horror novel after allegations circulated online that its author relied heavily on artificial intelligence. The book is to be discontinued in the UK after being published in November 2025, and its US launch date has been cancelled.

The book, Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, had been scheduled for release in the US this spring under Hachette’s Orbit imprint. However, the publisher confirmed it had halted publication after an internal review. The title has also been removed from online retailers including Amazon, and will no longer be distributed in the UK.

Raynor Winn’s lawyers have confirmed she published a previous book in 2012, years before the memoir that won a £10,000 prize for debut writers

Author Raynor Winn published a book under a pseudonym six years before her 2018 memoir The Salt Path, despite repeatedly describing the later work as her debut, it has emerged.

Winn received widespread acclaim for The Salt Path, including a £10,000 prize for debut writers.

From owing a debt to obscure Japanese horror Sweet Home to the influence of Aliens and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the franchise continues to petrify players three decades on

To many of us playing and writing about video games in the 1990s, Resident Evil seemed to come out of nowhere. The emerging PlayStation and Saturn consoles were all about slick, bright arcade conversions – the shiny thrills of Daytona and Tekken – and Japanese publisher Capcom was in a rut of coin-op conversions and endless sequels to Street Fighter and Mega Man. Scary games were rare at the time and mostly confined to the PC. So when the news of a horror title named Biohazard (the Japanese name for the series) started to emerge in 1995, it caught the attention of games journalists as it seemed radically out of step with prevailing trends. Games were about power, but as early demos quickly revealed, Resident Evil was about vulnerability.

Thirty years later, it’s still here. The series has sold more than 180m copies worldwide, with 11 core titles and dozens of spinoffs and remakes, as well as film, television and anime tie-ins. Its characters and monsters are icons, its tropes now embedded in game design practice. What has allowed it to not only survive but flourish in such a rapidly changing industry? Why do we still let it scare us?

The fates of two ostensibly similar online games released this year, Marathon and Highguard, prove that success is becoming close to unattainable

What does success look like for developers of online video games? In 2026, the answer could not be clearer: no one has a clue.

Consider Highguard, 2026’s first big flop. Signs were promising on its launch on 26 January, with a peak of 100,000 concurrent players on Steam – plus those enjoying the game on PlayStation and Xbox, which do not make player counts public. As a free-to-play game, the barrier to entry for Highguard was low. And thanks to a prime advertising placement at the end of December’s The Game Awards – a buzzy spot usually reserved for known hitmakers, not free-to-play upstarts – curiosity was high.

In this week’s newsletter: the creators of All Will Rise on standing up to the tech giant – and joining the No Games for Genocide movement

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Video games are in a funding crisis. Investor money flowed freely during the pandemic gaming boom, but now the well has run dry. It is increasingly difficult, for indie developers especially, to get the capital to make games. It is extremely unusual, then, to hear of a developer returning an investor’s money. Yet that is what Speculative Agency, developers of All Will Rise, have just done.

Last year, All Will Rise, a deck-building game about a team of activists fighting for the future of their oligarch-run city, received money from Microsoft as part of a developer acceleration programme. In late-2025, however, the team became aware of No Games for Genocide, a collective of developers, journalists, union organisers and others that came together as a result of Israeli assault on Gaza to protest against “material and commercial ties between the games industry and enabling genocide, war crimes, and the military industrial complex”.

Team Artichoke; PC/Mac
Ancient Greek gods, adorable raccoons and hypnotic puzzling from Olympus to the mortal realm and back

There’s been a trend for a while where familiar puzzle game genres are imbued with novel stories to give them depth and meaning beyond simply clearing a screen for points. Occult object sorter Strange Horticulture and historical romance card game Regency Solitaire are lovely examples, and now here’s Mythmatch, a match-three game in the style of Candy Crush or Bejeweled that’s also a warming tale of friendship and community set in a small town in ancient Greece. Interspersed with cerebral challenges are dialogue scenes with villagers and with gods which accentuate each other and give little clues that are picked up later, making this both puzzle game and communal oral drama.

You play as Artemis, the immortal daughter of Zeus, who is tired of getting overlooked for plum jobs in favour of her oafish brother Apollo (brilliantly portrayed as an insufferable proto-tech bro). When the role of God of the Hunt comes up, she applies, but finds she must first earn favour with a council of her elders on Mount Olympus, and they all have puzzle-based jobs for her. Hephaestus wants her to help make arrows and hammers in his foundry, while Apollo needs her to protect his collection of chimp soft toys (a not-so-subtle dig at NFTs). These mini-tasks take the form of match-three puzzles, though cleverly they also bring in elements of other puzzle games such as Plants vs Zombies and Overcooked.

Omnibus theatre, London
A couple of former hedonists are reunited years later in Louis Emmitt-Stern’s quick-witted dissection of bereavement and the queer dating scene

History is supposed to stay, well, history. But in Louis Emmitt-Stern’s Tony Craze award-winning play, it tumbles face first into the present. Ten years ago, Jude (John McCrea) and Kyle (Perry Williams) were a couple who relished all things hedonistic, and partying into the early hours on a cocktail of drink and drugs. That was until they broke up and Kyle disappeared.

Now they find themselves together again in Jude’s Canary Wharf penthouse in the middle of the night, after he has a nasty fall and Kyle is unexpectedly called to the hospital as his emergency contact. Years have passed and their lives have diverged: Kyle has left behind the party lifestyle while Jude is in the early days of grief following the death of his partner, Sam. Both are working hard to keep up appearances. But as they talk, cook spaghetti carbonara and catch up on all that’s changed, their lies begin to crack open.

Lyceum theatre, Sheffield
Contemporary resonances abound in English Touring Opera’s gloriously choreographed and costumed period production: a masterclass in clarity over chaos, performed with boundless enthusiasm

The Gondoliers, Gilbert and Sullivan’s last big hit, came hot on the heels of their infamous quarrel over the cost of a carpet at the Savoy theatre. There is no hint of acrimony, however, in what must rank as Sullivan’s sunniest, most sophisticated score wedded to some of Gilbert’s most brilliantly barbed lyrics. What could be shrewder than, “When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody”?

A sharply pointed satire on the pitfalls of egalitarianism, the plot features babies swapped at birth and a pair of gondoliers, one of whom may or may not be the son of the recently deceased King of Barataria. English Touring Opera’s period production locates the action in the late 17th century, but contemporary resonances abound: the cash-for-endorsements antics of the money-grubbing Duke and Duchess of Plaza-Toro are but one step removed from the Andrews and Fergies of today.

Theatr Clwyd, Mold
Director Kate Wasserberg emphasises the fantasy and supernatural elements of the poet’s ‘play for voices’ in an entertaining and inclusive production

As with Molière at the Comédie-Française or Brecht in Berlin, there is a satisfying smack of regional reality in watching Dylan Thomas’s classic invocation of an early spring day in Wales staged as the real Flintshire thing glitters tantalisingly through the panoramic lobby windows of Theatr Clwyd.

Watching being the key word. Premiered on radio in 1954, Under Milk Wood stands with Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons as a rare sound play to have grown into a theatrical classic. Whereas Thomas left it to the ears to envisage the musical obsessive Organ Morgan, the much-loved Polly Garter and other residents of his fabulous valleys village, directors and designers have a free hand to visualise.

Sadler’s Wells, London
Kameron N Saunders’s ambitious sci-fi-coded fable is paired with a showcase of Crystal Pite’s mastery in contrasting order with human messiness

The headline news here is Taylor Swift’s star backing dancer getting a major commission for English National Ballet. If it looks nothing like a pop concert, that’s because Kameron N Saunders is a choreographer who has worked with Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet among others. He is also an early career artist, who in his piece Proper Conduct has thrown a huge amount of ideas into a high concept dance that leaves a few question marks.

The first section is breezy ballet, Justin Peck style, saturated colours and sunshine. But don’t get comfortable, because Saunders is about to pull the rug. A sci-fi-voiced narrator tells us of the rot in society and it segues into nude-costumed conjoined dancers, in striking formations and fleshy connections (the dancers are excellent throughout). But then in comes an army of AI robots in Daft Punk-style visors. It’s visually impactful, with genre-fluid movement, but flails a bit in terms of conveying meaning. Is the message to beware of people who tell you how to live as they’ll steal your soul? That big tech promises to solve your problems, but will actually erase your humanity? Not sure. But Saunders’ ambition is admirable, and we will see more from this creative mind.

Perfume obsessives are making online fragrance mood boards for everything from ‘having a fight with your parents’ to ‘looking at old photos’. It’s both nostalgic and comforting

I was bestowed with a nickname throughout my younger years: Smellanor. When I decided to go by Elle, the nickname evolved with it: Smell. I’m always a sucker for a fun rhyme. But it did make me hypervigilant about maintaining what I actually smelled like, vowing that this moniker would never manifest itself into reality. Thus began my ongoing journey into the wild world of fragrances.

Years later, during one of my many late night TikTok binges, I stumbled across my first set of perfume-inspired image carousels that assigned scent profiles to abstract concepts, almost each one accompanied with a slowed-down version of Robert Miles’s Eurodance hit, Children. The age of 18, for example, has a scent profile of sweat, vodka, lip gloss, musk and lace. Looking at old photos too long smells like paper, iris, amber, musk and cedar. The first time passing a joint includes grass, fog, smoke, lip gloss and (obviously) cannabis.

Tens of thousands gathered in Seoul to show that, after a four-year hiatus, they had still kept a place for the band in a very changed world

The Zubillaga family had come from Veracruz, Mexico. Julio and Miryam had brought their daughters, Renata, 15, and Fernanda, 11, as a gift, across 15 hours of flights to a city none of them had visited before.

They had tried for world tour tickets to see BTS in Mexico but they had been snapped up already, so they came to Seoul instead, joining the tens of thousands outside the gates, waiting for the music to reach them. “It’s beautiful,” Renata says of the new album, Arirang. Her favourite member, like her mother and father, is Jung Kook.

The Zubillaga family, (L-R) Julio (44), Renata (15), Miryam (43) and Fernanda (11), flew to South Korea from Mexico as a birthday gift for Renata.

Nearly 300 of the actor’s items, from designer gowns to everyday basics, to be sold in Los Angeles, with some lots under $100

A customised sunhat. A slogan sweatshirt. A “mom” necklace. An old copy of Cosmopolitan. If these sound like items found in many homes today, they’re actually the castoffs of a household name: Gwyneth Paltrow.

Next week, nearly 300 pieces owned by Paltrow will be on sale as part of an auction at Julien’s, the Los Angeles auction house that has sold big-ticket items such as Marilyn Monroe’s so-called “naked” dress and the leather jacket worn by Olivia Newton-John in Grease. But, while those items went for six-figure prices, Paltrow’s sale is a little more affordable, with estimates starting at about $50 (£37) to $75 (£56) for some of Paltrow’s personalised stationery.

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

• This week’s question: American football takes for ever. In which other sports do you spend most of your time not playing the game?

From what I can see, travelling in many cases has zero effect on a person’s outlook and prejudices. If that were not so, then high-flying politicians of all stripes would be among the most broad-minded people on the planet as they constantly jet from city to city. I can think of several proverbs that are extremely true, or at least seem so, such as “A stitch in time saves nine”, or “Many a mickle makes a muckle”, which it patently does – or especially the universally true, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. But what other proverbs or quotes or apparently clever soundbites are untrue, for at least some of the time? “Fine words butter no parsnips”? And how do questionable assertions become sayings in the first place? Neil Ashby, Powys

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Our expert taste-tester gives peas a chance – but which received a frosty reception?

• The best supermarket oven chips, tasted and rated

The sweetness of a pea is more than just a desirable taste; it’s an indication of a pea picked at the perfect moment. As the sugars convert into starch, peas lose their sweetness rapidly after picking, leading to a less sweet, more fibrous and lower-quality product.

That’s why high-quality peas are picked, blanched and frozen as quickly as possible, usually all within two and a half hours. That said, other factors such as soil, seed quality, transportation and a stable freezer temperature all affect a frozen pea’s quality.

From budget to Japanese-style models, here are chef Ben Lippett’s sharpest picks for comfort, cut and cost after weeks of chopping. Plus, what to know before you buy

• The kitchen gadgets top chefs can’t live without

A great chef’s knife is less a tool and more an extension of the person holding it. In the kitchen, your knife effectively becomes your right (or left) hand. Balance equals control; good steel spells confidence and longevity; a sharp edge means ease.

I’ve put a handful of knives through the only trials that matter: shallots diced to translucence, tomatoes sliced gossamer thin, herbs chiffonaded to perfume. I’m looking past marketing into geometry, materials, grind and ultimately how each knife feels – at minute one and hour 10. Does it bite eagerly, or wedge and bruise? How does it feel in your hand – is it perfectly balanced or too blade-heavy? Does it sing on the board, or thud? Will this knife need lots of TLC, or will it look after itself?

Best chef’s knife overall:
Wüsthof classic chef knife, 20cm

Best budget knife:
Victorinox Fibrox chef’s knife, 20cm

Travelling over Easter? Whether it’s mini magnets or collapsible buckets, here’s the parent-tested kit that’s actually worth bringing (and what’s just a waste of money)

• How to get kids outdoors

Holidays are a different experience after having kids. A concept that once evoked the promise of rest and relaxation becomes a feat of logistics and endurance, where one forgotten item can mean a week of no sleep (been there, done that, got the T-shirt).

Despite fears that we’d never be able to holiday again after having children, my partner and I have taken numerous trips with our two offspring – both under four – and some of the breaks have actually been enjoyable. The most memorable was when we took our eldest around Thailand for our honeymoon when he was seven months old. But we’ve really earned our travelling-with-kids stripes thanks to the family commitment that requires frequent trips to New York.

Our expert puts the best power washers through their paces on the toughest – and muckiest – outdoor chores, from grimy paving slabs to dirty decking

• The best lawnmowers to keep your grass in check

The trouble with the great outdoors is that it gets a bit untidy. Your garden tools might do a good job of keeping your plot in check, but keeping your patio, decking and outdoor furniture spick and span can take hours, especially if you rely on a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush.

That’s where the pressure washer comes in. These handy tools connect to your hose pipe and squirt water at any cleaning problem. Stubborn and unpleasant stains, from bird dirt to years of neglect, can be lifted from your garden’s hard-wearing surfaces in seconds. With the right attachments, you can also use your pressure washer to hose down cars, bikes and boats.

Best pressure washer overall:
Ava Go P40

Best budget pressure washer:
Kärcher K 2 Classic

The star chef gives a masterclass in her home kitchen and shares the simple secrets to perfect poached chicken

Angela Hartnett’s home kitchen isn’t a place you could recreate, however much Le Creuset you bought. A basement in east London, it has the relaxed timelessness of a villa in a Sally Rooney novel, but the embedded knowledge of a Michelin-starred chef who’s been cooking since she worked in her family’s chippy 40 and a bit years ago (she’s now 57) – every utensil exactly where your hand would be looking for it, everything mysteriously the right size.

Today she’s making a poached chicken with spring vegetables. It sounds simple, and it’s maybe the fundamental paradox of food that the simpler a dish – the fewer the ingredients, the less fussing about – the easier it is to screw up. Poached chicken can come out the colour of over-washed underpants, although, to be fair, still taste delicious. Cook it too fast, and the skin wrinkles away from the meat eerily, so now it’s like underpants wearing tights. Listing errors from my own back catalogue is so unappetising that I’m going to stop, even though I’m nothing like done. The question is, how does a chef make this dish look so elegant, so vivid, so sharply delineated but perfectly harmonious, so appealing, so cheffy?

From the fluffy dough to the gooey filling, our resident perfectionist pulls apart the best way to create Georgia’s iconic, indulgent cheese-stuffed bread

The first time I encountered what Tiko Tuskadze describes as “perhaps the most iconic of all Georgian dishes” was in her London restaurant, Little Georgia, back in the days when it was a tiny space on Broadway Market. If “traditional cheesebread … baked to order” sounded good on the menu, the reality of khachapuri was even better: a golden round of fluffy, buttery bread spilling forth frills of hot, salty dairy on to the plate (this is the kind of thing that passes for fast food in Georgia, according to Silvena Rowe, which makes me feel as if we’ve been slightly short-changed.)

Tuskadze goes on to explain in her book Supra that there are “as many variations … as there are families in Georgia” – the boat-shaped, open adjaruili that Polina Chesnakova notes has “taken the internet by storm”, the Ossetian mashed potato variety and the Gurian take with hard-boiled eggs and a “supremely fluffy, slightly oniony, soufflé-like cheese filling”, which inspires Caroline Eden to share with readers of her book Green Mountains the glorious Georgian word shemomechama, “which loosely translates as, ‘I accidentally ate the whole thing’”. Here, however, I’m going to concentrate on what Chesnakova says is “by far the one most commonly consumed in Georgia itself”, and also the one that reminds Tuskadze most of home, namely imeruli khachapuri, originally from the west-central region of Imereti, which is “essentially a flat bread stuffed with buttery imeruli cheese curds and cooked on the stovetop”. Need I say more?

How did this pick-n-mix salad-and-protein sludge become a typical working lunch?

Few things have killed the leisurely lunch like capitalism, but to really see this in action, the food court of London’s financial shadowland, Canary Wharf, is a good place to start. Wandering the warren of Prets and Itsus are Deliveroo riders and suits-on-the-clock. And they’re usually carrying the same thing: a nice big bowl of slop.

A slop bowl is the universal term for a mishmash of pick-your-own dishes assembled and sold in fast-casual spots that have become the de facto working lunch. The contents vary (they tend to feature Asian and eastern Mediterranean dishes) but as the name suggests, it is always served in a bowl, and by the time you’ve got to your desk, has usually become slop. They can cost anything from £7 to £25 depending on what you add – much like coffee, the slop bowl is as customisable as a modular shelving unit from Ikea. This sounds like a lot. But we also live in an era where a salad bowl from Pret can cost £12, so maybe it’s not.

The cooking is precise, proud and purposeful

Osteria Vibrato appeared last month on Greek Street, Soho, feeling to any passerby just like any other neutral-fronted Italian restaurant in this pasta-swamped part of the capital. Not much to see here. Pushing your face against the window wouldn’t achieve much, either, apart from an unsightly smear.

Meanwhile, all the in-the-know people – that bunch of infuriating, generously paunched “foodies” who keep London restaurant gossip alive – understood that this particular osteria is the latest opening by Charlie Mellor, former proprietor of the Laughing Heart in Hackney, which opened in 2016 and very quickly became favoured by chefs and industry media types alike, because it took food very seriously, stayed open late and danced a dainty line between debauched and old-school cosseting. It sold pumpkin cappelletti with sage, and chicken liver paté with crisp chicken skin and jellied walnut liqueur. The room was furnished with quirky tables complete with cutlery drawers, and there seemed to be a never-ending party going on in the ground-floor bar. Mellor, the star of the show, led the charge: warm, serious yet with a great capacity for silliness, though weirdly omniscient as to who needed what and when.

Some people are better at organising, and it sounds as if you all have fun when you do get together, so try not to take it personally

My friends seem genuinely happy to see me when we’re together and usually accept when I suggest meeting up. But if I don’t initiate, I rarely hear from them. Not even a “Hi, how’s the new job?” or a “How are you?” Months can go by.

This makes me wonder if these people are real friends and question whether I’m doing something wrong. When we do get together, we share things about our lives, laugh a lot and do activities we all like, so time together makes me feel connected. But once we say goodbye, I don’t hear from them. It’s all very confusing and discouraging.

I was all alone in a Washington DC hotel on my birthday – and someone else had received my children’s message by mistake

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

In the 1990s I travelled extensively for work, leaving behind my young family. It was tough on us all. One trip took me to Washington DC on my birthday. I was sitting in my hotel room, alone and feeling sorry for myself, when there was a knock at the door.

On the other side was a bellboy holding a birthday cake, complete with lit candles on top. “Happy birthday!” he said, handing me the cake and a fax. My two very young daughters had handwritten a lovely happy birthday message and sent it to the other side of the world.

When Tracy Crisp was at her ‘messiest and darkest’, Adrian didn’t diminish her pain, but he did help her look beyond it

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

I met Adrian when I was 18 and we married when I was 23.

I fell in love with Adrian because he made me laugh, he was smart and he looked good in footy shorts.

Brian, 53, a property management director, meets Jeanette, 46, who works in investor relations and occasionally models

What were you hoping for?
At worst, a free meal and an enjoyable conversation. At best, the start of a journey …

Fraudsters exploit isolation and search for human contact to often devastating effect. These are steps you can take to avoid them

As you have got older, retirement has left you with more time on your hands. Loneliness has set in. Luckily, you have found a friend through one of the online motoring groups you are in, and a close bond has blossomed over your common interest in cars.

But your new friend has found themselves short when it comes to paying for their university textbooks, and has asked you for £50. It’s not much, and you get on so well that you agree to pay via bank transfer.

Those planning for uni in England and Wales this autumn can apply for student loans from Monday. Here are the options for families worried about debt

Our child is heading to university soon – should we try to pay their tuition fees upfront so they are not saddled with a debt for decades?

Our child is a recent graduate and their student loan debt is ballooning – should we help pay off some or all of it?

Bypassing animal health certificate system by using cheaper pet passport issued abroad could backfire, experts say

British pet owners who want to take their furry friends elsewhere in Europe have been warned not to try to dodge expensive health certificates by using a pet passport issued abroad.

Before Brexit, taking a cat, dog or ferret to the EU was relatively simple: the Pet Travel Scheme meant an animal needed a microchip, vaccination against rabies, a pet passport and, for dogs, there were also requirements concerning tapeworm treatment.

From a real get-away-from-it-all isolated ‘off-grid’ cottage by the sea to a 42nd-floor three-bedroom flat in a London tower block

DHSC corrects statements after regulator intervenes as experts say smoking causes far more cancer cases

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has had to retract a misleading claim that sunbeds are as dangerous a cancer risk as smoking.

In January, health officials announced stricter rules for sunbeds, incorrectly claiming they were “as dangerous as smoking”. The comparison was repeated in social media posts shared by the health secretary and NHS England and was reported by a number of media outlets.

Wellness enthusiasts on TikTok and Instagram claim the combination bestows glowing skin and better digestion

A shot of lemon juice and olive oil might be delicious on a salad – but would you drink it straight up?

That’s what wellness enthusiasts on TikTok and Instagram are doing, claiming it bestows glowing skin and better digestion, and supports the dubious process of “detoxing”.

Evidence suggests saunas can boost heart health, but their real power may lie in bringing people together in an increasingly digital world

From fields to floating pontoons, in horseboxes, barrels and beach huts, saunas are springing up across Britain. The British Sauna Society now lists about 640 saunas – up from 540 at the start of the year – while a recent report predicted that the UK could become the world’s largest sauna market by 2033, outpacing even Finland and Germany.

“The continuing growth suggests that the peak has still yet to come – if there is one,” said Gabrielle Reason, the society’s director. But are saunas a tonic for the nation’s health – or a wellness fad with hidden risks?

A happiness researcher called prolonged eye contact ‘the best thing ever’, claiming it can bring couples closer. Does it really work?

In January, business professor and happiness researcher Arthur C Brooks appeared on the Modern Wisdom podcast to offer advice on optimizing morning and evening routines. His tips seemed reasonable – think exercising early and no alcohol before bed. Then, for couples, he made a kookier suggestion: every night before going to sleep, spend five minutes holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes.

“This is the best thing ever,” he enthuses, explaining that it can help with mood management and to strengthen your relationship.

A neat cuff can elevate an outfit in seconds – but it takes more than a quick fold to get it right

Trousers – they’re not rocket science. But there are plenty of ways to mess them up, or to elevate them above their primary role of covering legs. A classic styling trick has emerged recently: the turn-up. Harry Styles had them for his pinstripe trews at the Brits, actor Chase Infiniti turned her trousers up at Paris fashion week and hefty turn-ups feature on baggy blue and ecru jeans and olive-green track trousers in JW Anderson’s latest collection for Uniqlo.

Turn-ups are the bread and butter of preppy labels such as J Crew-adjacent brand Alex Mill. Head to the website of this New York label and turned-up jeans paired with purple loafers and pink socks, or with letterbox-red ballet flats and yolk-yellow socks, will wash over you like salt spray. At John Lewis, meanwhile, turn-ups run the gamut from pencil-thin to the depth of an Oxford English Dictionary.

The spring equinox is here, which means days in the park, ice-cream selfies and an extra layer for the evening

All the talk on red carpet night was of leading guys such as Adrien Brody and Leonardo DiCaprio flashing the bling

While the eyes might be the window to the soul, lapels are certainly doing some talking. On the Oscars red carpet last Sunday night, Hollywood’s leading men flashed a lot of bling on their suits.

From Adrien Brody who wore an astronomically large brooch titled Ulysses, arguably as big as the James Joyce tome is thick, to a clean-shaven Pedro Pascal, who distracted from his newly bare chin with a silk and feather Chanel Camélia brooch, lapels were vying for the spotlight.

Bold shades are all over the catwalks, but they can be tricky to wear. These tricks will make them work in the real world

You would think primary shades would be the easiest colours to wear. Red, yellow, blue: we can name these before we can tie our shoelaces. They are not sophisticated colours, such as Armani greige or Pantone favourite Mocha Mousse. They are not challenging-to-wear colours, like chartreuse or mustard. They are Mr Men colours. So wearing them must be child’s play, surely.

And yet they are weirdly tricky to wear. They can feel shouty and basic: the getting dressed equivalent of speaking loudly without saying anything particularly interesting, which is – to paint it in primary colours – not what any of us are aiming for.

Our writer first hiked in the Lake District, Eryri and Dartmoor in the 1970s. Their beauty remains unrivalled, but they are more popular than ever. So, here’s how to avoid the crowds

Before we enter the clouds on snow-capped Helvellyn, I glance back down at Ullswater. The early morning sun is bursting around the dark corners of High Dodd and Sleet Fell, sending a flush of light across the golden bracken and on to the hammered silver of the lake.

Further away to the south, ragged patches of snow cling to the high gullies. The nearest village, Glenridding, can barely be seen behind the leafless trees and all I can hear is the gurgle of the stream. It is the quintessential Lakeland scene: the steep slopes above the water, the soft colours and hard rock, all combining into something inimitable. And judging by the photographic and artistic record, it is one that has hardly changed since the Cumbrian wind first ruffled a Romantic poet’s curls.

The wild moors and gentle dales of the UK’s oldest national park are just as inviting today as they were when it was created in 1951

Look at a satellite photograph of Britain taken on a clear night and the only things visible are the glowing street lights of towns and cities. If you cast your eyes to the centre of northern England, the distinctive, cupped-hand-shaped boundary of the Peak District national park is clearly outlined as an island of darkness washed by an ocean of light from the industrial conurbations of the north and Midlands.

It was established in April 1951 as the first national park in Britain. And that view from space gives the clearest indication possible of why this site was chosen – it put a national park where it was most needed in the country. It has been estimated that about a third of the population of England and Wales lives less than an hour away from the Peak District.

From a deconsecrated London cemetery to a Cumbrian seal colony, our readers select wonderful ‘havens for both human and non-human visitors’
• Tell us about your trips to France – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

I always take friends on an afternoon walk when they visit Bristol, to experience the swift changes in scenery: starting at the tobacco warehouses of Cumberland Basin before ascending from the muddy banks of the River Avon up into Leigh Woods, a national nature reserve. As well as possible animal sightings like peregrine falcons and roe deer, the woods are an important site for whitebeam trees, with several species only growing here. It’s easy to spend a full afternoon crisscrossing the trails before walking over Brunel’s famous suspension bridge for a well-deserved coffee at the Primrose Café in Clifton village.
Tor Hands

I loved Tanzania – we flew over hungry lions in a national park

I can still remember my first flight, in 2002. It was magical. I was working as a tour guide in Myanmar. I met a British balloon pilot called Phil, who had a spare place on a flight. He offered to take me, too.

I don’t particularly enjoy flying in planes, but this was different. We floated gently with the wind, out in the open air. There was no turbulence. It was so serene and picturesque as we flew over temples. I immediately fell in love with ballooning.

The former Countdown host on nasty rightwingers, the plane she bought to fly solo around the world, and her love of snogging

Born in Bedfordshire, Carol Vorderman, 65, studied engineering at Cambridge University. Her mathematical skill secured her a role on the Channel 4 gameshow Countdown, which she co-hosted from 1982 to 2008. Since 1999, she has presented the annual Pride of Britain awards, and in 2000 she received the MBE for services to broadcasting. She has published educational workbooks, self-help guides and her latest paperback is Now What? A People’s Manifesto for a Better Britain. She is a team captain on Channel 5’s show Celebrity Puzzling. She is twice divorced, has two children and lives in Bristol.

When were you happiest?
I was happiest in every aspect of my life in the 1990s, when I was married to Paddy [King, a management consultant] and we had the two children and my mum lived with us, and Countdown was the biggest show on Channel 4.

My wife is horrified by the price of tickets, and I get triggered if I sit too near the stage due to an unfortunate incident at the circus

At the start of the year, my wife launched a campaign for us to go to the theatre more. It bears many of the hallmarks of my 2018 campaign for us to go to the theatre more, which failed miserably after my wife pronounced it stupid. She claims not to remember this.

My wife’s campaign is hampered by her refusal to accept the kind of outlay that modern theatre-going requires. She comes into the kitchen and places her open laptop in front of me.

From the Azure Window to nocturnal lights and radar-visual, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 What is Ikea’s all-time bestselling item of furniture?
2 Which country had a mosque on its national flag until 2021?
3 101-year-old Bill Greason is the last survivor from which era of baseball?
4 Which sisters shared one eye and one tooth between them?
5 Which nuts are the most radioactive common food?
6 Who became German minister for women and youth in 1991?
7 Which Australian bird has killed humans in the wild?
8 Which fortified wine is an ingredient of tiramisu?
What links:
9 ares; august; job; mobile; polish?
10 Berry; Chowns; Denyer; Ramsay; Spencer?
11 Eildon Hills; Glastonbury Abbey; Mount Etna; Richmond Castle?
12 Jennifer Beals; Jessie Buckley; Helena Bonham Carter; Elsa Lanchester?
13 Azure Window, Malta; Darwin’s Arch, Galápagos; Lovers’ Arch, Italy; Toilet Bowl, Utah?
14 Nocturnal lights; daylight discs; radar-visual; CE1; CE2; CE3?
15 Pilot (1); Taylor Swift (8); Earth, Wind & Fire (9); Guns N’ Roses (10); Kate Bush (12)?

His multi-hyphenate career has made him one of Britain’s most versatile recognisable stars – but hasn’t stopped him facing some seriously awkward moments…

Riz Ahmed was multitasking. It was February in London, and the actor was doing an interview with a men’s magazine en route to collect his kid from school. So far, so starry. “Here’s the reality,” says Ahmed today, palms slamming down hard on the table. “I’m late for the school run. I’m stuck in traffic. I’m meant to be at my laptop, but I’m having to do it on my phone, in my car. I’m double parked on a double yellow line, doing the interview, looking over my shoulder. The traffic warden’s coming, it’s rush hour. He tries to move me along. I try to get out of there while I’m talking on the phone to this guy.”

Distracted, Ahmed hit another car. The driver jumped out of his vehicle, incensed. “He’s like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’” says Ahmed, who had been attempting to continue the interview. “I’m now going off video, like, ‘Oh, my signal’s a bit bad!’ while going on and off mute negotiating car insurance details. On the phone, I’m going, ‘Absolutely, it was just such an honour getting to tell my story with these amazing collaborators,’” he says, his voice lowering an octave and turning smooth.

The Brooklyn author on immigration and the inspiration behind his latest collection of stories

I often write the first paragraph of a story in a notebook, add to it every so often or leave it there to see if something might emerge from it. In 2008, in San Francisco, I went with three friends on a hike near Muir Woods overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At the summit, there was a kind of lodge where you could get a bed for the night and use the kitchen to make your own dinner. The view was spectacular.

As we climbed, I began to imagine a character, an Irish guy who had made up his mind to go home. This was his last big outing in the landscape. He had been working as a plumber. Dotted in the Bay Area were houses where he had repaired pipes and installed new sinks and toilets and washing machines. This was his legacy in America. He was someone who could be depended on in an emergency. But he was illegal and he was going home.

Gig AI trainers worldwide are selling moments of their lives, including calls and texts, to AI companies for quick cash

One morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out on his daily neighborhood walk to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he recorded several videos of his feet and the view as he walked on the pavement. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the country’s minimum wage, or for Louw, a 27-year-old based in Cape Town, South Africa, half a week’s worth of groceries.

The video was for an “Urban Navigation” task Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors for uploading their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. In a couple of weeks, Louw made $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life.

We’d like to hear from volunteers who have experienced a charity closing

Across the UK, many small charities face increasing financial pressures, forcing some to shut their doors. When this happens, it can leave the people who relied on those services without support - and volunteers and communities trying to step in and keep things going.

We’d like to hear from volunteers who have experienced a charity closing. Have you or others tried to continue the work informally and what were the challenges of doing that? Did you try to keep it going - and what difficulties did you face? What happened to the people who depended on the service?

Health officials, schools and a university in Kent are working to contain an outbreak. We want to hear from those living in the area

A meningitis outbreak in Kent has been linked to a strain that most young people are not routinely vaccinated against, with two people confirmed to have died and 11 more in hospital. Health officials have offered antibiotics to those at risk, as authorities work to contain the spread.

We want to hear from people living in Canterbury and the surrounding area whether the outbreak is being well managed by the authorities.

We would like to hear about the ways people have helped each other feel less isolated

Was someone there for you when you were feeling lonely? As part of the Guardian’s Well Actually series, we would like to hear about the ways people have helped each other feel less isolated. You can tell us your story below.

If you’re having trouble using the form click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here.

We are looking to speak to lollipop people about their experiences on the job

Lollipop people in Suffolk have become the latest neon-clad, road patrollers to don body cams amid a rise in abuse. We are looking to speak to lollipop people about their experiences on the job.

The council has launched a six-week awareness campaign called “Lollipops Aren’t Just For Children” to remind drivers to slow down, be patient, and show respect at patrol points. The cameras have been used by school crossing patrols in Greater Manchester, Clacton and Basildon for similar reasons.

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