The home crowd swooned to Andy’s mood music, even if some of it could have been a Keir cover version

• UK politics live – latest updates

There’s no pleasing some people. For most of last week, all the opposition parties were moaning that Andy Burnham had taken a vow of silence ever since the Makerfield byelection. That no one had a clue just what the prime minister designate had in mind.

On Monday, Andy sought to answer some of those questions, but before he had opened his mouth, Kemi Badenoch accused him of trying to avoid the scrutiny of MPs. He should be doing this from the dispatch box, she said. Um … except he’s not a minister. Maybe she plans to give him a guest slot from the opposition benches. There again, she was also saying that all his plans were bound to fail long before he had even told us what they were. Never change, Kemi. Just keep saying the first thing that comes into your head.

In The Good Life, To the Manor Born and beyond, the star played domineering snobs with pinpoint comic timing – yet she still made them feel like old friends. No one will do it better

At their broadest, and most audience-friendly, sitcoms thrive on stock characters: chancers, jobsworths, slobs and snobs. No actor has ever been more suited to the last than Penelope Keith. Others have played funny snobs, but she was a walking colour chart of snobbery. Her greatest strength was her ability to always locate a new variation on the same theme, picking out any number of tones and nuances to give each of her characters more life than their writers probably anticipated.

The big one, of course, was Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life, which ran from 1975 to 1978. On paper, her role was simply to provide contrast. Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal played the leads, Tom and Barbara, two self-sufficient dreamers in frayed clothes who were never happier than when they had dirt under their fingernails. By design, Keith was meant to represent the opposite; stiffer and more materialistic and appalled by anyone who didn’t follow social convention to the letter.

Novels were starting to seem like a thing of the past for me, until I found a book I couldn’t put down. Is there anything better?

I never decided to stop reading novels; I just fell out of the loop. You need to meet a few basic conditions to disappear into a story: a medium amount of patience, some free time, enough inner peace that a made-up person’s tribulations are more engrossing than your own. You need to stop worrying about the world, stop making to-do lists, stop reading nonfiction about trade wars and regular wars, stop rewatching old episodes of The West Wing with your kid in a bid to explain, over hours of whip-smart dialogue, how the political philosophy of the third way leads really slowly but directly to the coming of the fascist overlords.

Spend enough time in no fit state for fiction and it becomes your thing: someone will ask whether you’ve read The Safekeep, and rather than simply say, “Not yet,” you’ll say, “I don’t really read novels any more because, come on, that person didn’t really walk into a room. That person is imaginary.”

Despite disappointments we remain indebted to an all-round talent for transforming the way in which Test cricket is played

Last year I completed a book on England’s cricket captains since Mike Brearley and the final chapter was devoted to Ben Stokes. It began with the observation: “There is jeopardy here.” It ended with the conclusion: “I would be hard pressed to name anyone in the last few decades who has done more than Ben Stokes to keep a format [Test cricket], still beloved by so many, alive.”

Jeopardy and Stokes have been frequent bedfellows, on the field and off it. My jeopardy came in having to assess Stokes the captain before the Ashes series last winter given that there is a long tradition of deciding the merit of England captains based upon their results against Australia. We know now it did not go so well; we also have an idea of how much torment it brought him. Yet I’m still content with those pre-Ashes observations. Of course there is always jeopardy with Stokes. We have never known what he would do next (which now includes his sudden decision to retire from international cricket). Moreover, despite the recent disappointments, I think he remains one of the best captains England have had – to the amazement of most of us.

Trump, laying siege to freedoms and truth itself, is twisting America’s milestone birthday into a joyless occasion

• Americans: how do you feel about the country’s future after 250 years of independence?

• Tell us: were you born on 4 July?

This is the room where it happened. The assembly room at Independence Hall in Philadelphia where, 250 years ago this week, a group of sweating, treasonous men broke from the most powerful empire since ancient Rome. Amid a summer of trial and error, delegates including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson ratified a flawed but aspirational document to declare their independence from the British crown. The date was 4 July 1776 – but it took nearly a month for all 56 delegates of the Second Continental Congress to formally sign on.

“I don’t blame them,” Maggie Burkett, a park ranger, told a group of about 40 tourists as they gazed at green baize tables adorned with books, letters, pipes and candles one recent afternoon. “These words on this page are treason, just as much as burning the king’s coats of arms was. By signing this document, you are literally risking your life. The 56 men who signed this document were brave. In my opinion, they were heroes.”

Mothers and fathers have healthier, younger-looking brains, according to recent studies. It must be all those years of mental and emotional gymnastics

Good news, fellow parents: our children may have laid waste to our finances, pelvic integrity and circadian rhythms, and mocked our new sandals so devastatingly we can never wear them again, but a series of studies reported in New Scientist suggest parenting “may permanently improve brain health for Mum and Dad”. In one study, mothers with more children showed patterns associated with younger brains; another of nearly 38,000 people found “mothers and fathers have younger-looking brains”.

This is unexpected. I feel as though parenting reduced me to a cognitive husk: the lyrics to Here Comes a Digger – a rare groove from a DVD my elder son briefly enjoyed in 2005 – long ago supplanting the whereabouts of my keys, informed political opinions and the ability to form coherent sentences. I’m only fit for three things now: worrying, laundry and snacks.

Expected next prime minister focuses on restoring faith in politics, cost of living and devolution in major speech

• What is Andy Burnham’s economic and political blueprint for Britain?

Andy Burnham has set out his blueprint to transform the UK with a promise to improve living standards and restore faith in politics through the “biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen”.

The person widely expected to be the next prime minister said the current system was “broken” and that “more of the same” would not be enough to tackle the significant challenges faced by the country.

A long-term ambition of greater public control of essential services such as water, housing, energy and transport to help curb the cost of living.

A No 10 North hub to oversee the distribution of power and resources from Whitehall across the country, which the Guardian revealed would be run by his former chief executive in Manchester.

The biggest council housing building programme since the postwar period, and a high street “renaissance” through reform of business rates.

Rebalancing an education system that he said had been too focused on the university route and putting academic and technical courses on an equal footing.

Pay will be 35.2% higher on average compared with four years ago after series of strikes that have cost NHS £1bn

Resident doctors in England have voted to accept a new government deal on pay and jobs, bringing an end to strike action that has cost the NHS £1bn since last summer.

It comes after the British Medical Association called off a strike at the last minute earlier this month to put the offer to members.

Increase comes after seven-year campaign by mothers of victims for a change in the minimum sentence for domestic murder

Offenders who kill their current or ex-partner face spending an extra 10 years behind bars, with a new minimum sentence of 25 years in England and Wales, under plans announced by David Lammy.

The increase, announced by the justice secretary on Monday, comes after a seven-year campaign by mothers of victims for a change in the minimum sentence for domestic murder.

Jacob Wulfson, who strangled woman he met online, was allowed to be tried at airbase court martial instead of facing UK justice

• Bizarre questions and an all-male ‘jury’: woman strangled by US pilot in Britain tells of airbase trial

• Explainer: how the US bypasses British courts

A police force in England is facing mounting questions over its decision to allow the US military to prosecute the case of a woman who was strangled by an American fighter pilot in his apartment in Cambridge city centre.

Cambridgeshire police has acknowledged that in the days after the assault in 2023, it allowed the US military to take “investigative primacy” in the case, despite the fact the crime took place within the force’s territory and when the pilot was off duty.

Means-tested scheme included in immigration and asylum bill condemned by charities for placing tax on refugees

Asylum seekers will be ordered to pay about £10,000 to cover their state-funded living costs or be denied settled status in the UK under a new law to be considered by MPs on Tuesday.

The means-tested scheme, compared by officials to student loans and included in the immigration and asylum bill, has been condemned by charities for placing a tax on refugees fleeing war, torture and famine.

Christopher Harborne, who also gave Nigel Farage £5m ‘gift’, reported to have registered to vote in Hampshire

Christopher Harborne, the Thailand-based crypto investor who has given millions of pounds to Reform UK, would be unlikely to get around a planned cap on overseas political donations even if he has registered to vote in the UK, it is understood.

Harborne, who also gave Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, £5m as a “gift”, has registered to vote in Hampshire, the Times reported, with a spokesperson for the billionaire quoted in the paper saying that he had decided to become a “registered voter in the UK”.

⚽ Kick-off time: 4.30pm EDT/9.30pm BST/6.30am AET
⚽ Bracketology | Player guide | Golden Boot standings

Match report: Brazil 2-1 Japan

Not for the first time in this tournament, there were long periods when Brazil did not impress. And not for the first time in this tournament, they got away with it. It may be inexplicable but the Carlo Ancelotti method that worked at Real Madrid is working again: stay in games and eventually either opponents will make a mistake or brilliant players will do something brilliant.

Gabriel Garland, 24, was involved in New Year’s Eve altercation but not charged with any offence

A Love Island contestant has reportedly left the programme over his connection to a stabbing in London.

Gabriel Garland, 24, was removed from the ITV2 dating series after briefly featuring in an episode on Sunday night as a Casa Amor villa boy.

A familiar face on TV and the stage, Keith was made a dame in 2014 for her services to the arts and charities

Penelope Keith – a life in pictures

Penelope Keith, best known for starring in sitcoms The Good Life and To the Manor Born, has died aged 86.

A statement on behalf of her family said: “We are deeply saddened to announce that Dame Penelope Keith died peacefully whilst living with cancer at her home in Surrey where she had lived for more than 50 years.

Andy Burnham has set out his vision for the UK, in his first big policy speech since launching a bid to replace Keir Starmer as prime minister. The Makerfield MP confirmed he would set up ‘No 10 North’ and pledged to ‘bring about the biggest rebalancing of power the country has ever seen’. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s north of England editor, Josh Halliday

• Andy Burnham vows to set up No 10 North as ‘nerve centre of rewired Britain’

Tehran believes it should control the shipping route but its neighbour has its own plans for reopening it

The strait of Hormuz is Iran’s chief bargaining tool in the negotiations with the US and so it was always likely to be the greatest point of contention. Every inch of the 24-mile-wide waterway is being contested in a test of wills and patience.

For Iran, the continuation of the dispute is not a problem so long as it does not lose control.

The final season of the hit chef show is the most entertaining and purely enjoyable since the first – plus everyone ended up getting what they wanted! What an incredible rollercoaster

No show has ever needed to end like The Bear. The series initially made its name as a vehicle of pure forward momentum, the story of a burned-out high-end chef drafted in to fix up and save his dead brother’s sandwich restaurant. Through eight breathless episodes we saw Carmy get repeatedly pummelled by the stresses of the job – fights, demands, an accidental stabbing – as he sought to rebuild it in his own image.

With the benefit of hindsight, this probably should have been the entire show. Because The Bear was in such an almighty clatter to get where it wanted to go that, when it got there, it didn’t have the first clue how to proceed. Seasons three and four both stalled badly, in a morass of montages and flashback episodes that felt like placeholders. The drop-off was tangible.

The experience inside the grounds of SW19 is as far removed from outside world as ever, which is no bad thing

There was a group of 10 demonstrators outside the main gates of the All England Club on Monday morning, protesting against Barclays’ sponsorship of the championship on the grounds that as well as providing its customers here with deckchairs and free strawberries and cream, as well as the chance to visit something called the Clubhouse by Barclays at Aorangi, they are also heavily invested in various weapons manufacturers who are supplying the Israeli Defense Forces.

“We’re not against tennis,” one of the protesters shouted out through a loudhailer. “We just want the Championships to drop Barclays.”

If you both agree on a date when you will either commit to one another or move on, you can avoid a drawn-out breakup or years of loveless coupledom – in theory

Name: The sunset stipulation.

Age: About six months.

Whether it’s short shorts or gardening gloves, you’re embracing summer with gusto

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Summer is in full swing, and June’s favourites show us that, before the record-breaking heatwave that covered a lot of the UK, you were embracing the season with gusto.

Some of you updated your summer wardrobe with short shorts or chic sandals. Others topped up on SPF or bought gardening gloves, suggesting lots of time spent outdoors. Meanwhile, the popularity of this card game and travel hairdryer suggests many of you are off on your hols. From spicy condiments to breathable pyjamas, here’s everything you loved in June.

In 1993, she squeezed a $333m settlement from a Californian energy company in a scandal over contaminated water. Three decades later, she has a new target in her sights – and it’s global

When Erin Brockovich woke to find 30 emails from people from the same town, she realised something was going on. People email Brockovich all the time because of what happened in 1993, when she was instrumental in suing Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) on behalf of residents of the town of Hinkley, California, whose groundwater had been contaminated. The case resulted in a settlement of $333m – then the largest ever payout for a direct-action lawsuit. When she was immortalised by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, she became the hero we didn’t know we needed, a modern day Joan of Arc. She had won against PG&E with no formal legal training.

The emails she received a few weeks ago were about datacentres. In April, she put a callout on her website asking for anyone with concerns about one near them to get in touch. Within a month, 3,862 people had replied. Tech companies have needed datacentres to power their technology “for ever”, she says, but the new ones being built to power AI? “This feels like Hinkley on steroids.”

‘Stevie Wonder and Prince played all the instruments on their albums, but in recording studios. I did it all in a back room at home – and then it won two Grammys’

I grew up as one of the YouTube generation, with the idea that you could create your own fanbase by making videos. So when I was about 17, I filmed myself in our family back room doing Stevie Wonder covers like Isn’t She Lovely, made up of six layered vocal parts sung by different versions of me, or Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing, where I played various instruments.

Not for the first time in this tournament, there were long periods when Brazil did not impress. And not for the first time in this tournament, they got away with it. It may be inexplicable but the Carlo Ancelotti method that worked at Real Madrid is working again: stay in games and eventually either opponents will make a mistake or brilliant players will do something brilliant.

Brazil were 1-0 down at half-time and struggling. Their earliest exit form a World Cup seemed entirely possible. Five players in the Brazil starting lineup were aged over 30, five of the six defensive players – and they looked it. Japan were quicker, slicker, sharper and more imaginative. But the introduction of Endrick and a change of shape and approach at half-time changed everything. Brazil started slinging crosses into the box and Japan wobbled. Casemiro, barely a pedestrian in the first half, headed the equaliser and, deep into stoppage time, Gabriel Martinelli squeezed in the winner.

• Arsenal star says squad has practised penalties

• Bukayo Saka provides ‘healthy competition’ for place

Noni Madueke has warned that England must not take the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) lightly but expects a much more fluent attacking display than against Ghana during the group stages.

England struggled to break down Carlos Queiroz’s side in the 0-0 draw in Boston last week and the DRC are expected to employ the same counterattacking style for the last-32 tie in Atlanta on Wednesday. Madueke started against Croatia and Ghana before losing his place to his Arsenal ­teammate Bukayo Saka for the win against Panama.

• Teams meet in round of 32 in New York on Tuesday

• ‘We’ve been labelled as favourites … we are confident’

Didier Deschamps has warned France’s rivals that the team will not change their attacking approach to this World Cup, saying as he prepared for the last-32 tie against Sweden on Tuesday: “We have a capacity for danger, and I want us to keep it.”

The France head coach said it was “good to be busy” as he returned to the camp after time at home fol­lowing the death of his mother last week. Deschamps expressed gratitude for the support he had received from his team after his bereavement, in another sign of the tight bond among Les Bleus this summer.

All of the critiques of this tournament have proven valid and warranted, even as the action on the pitch has delighted us

• Predict the winner | Daily podcast | Download our app

The football has taken over. Ultimately, that’s what always happens. Football is an incredibly resilient sport, the World Cup an incredibly resilient tournament. It has withstood authoritarian leaders and corruption scandals, the horrific exploitation of migrant workers and military dictatorships, and it looks as though it will survive sky-high ticket prices and immigration policies that make a mockery of Gianni Infantino’s claim that this is the most inclusive World Cup of all time.

This is not to say that those are not major issues. The situation with Iran has been unique, but the treatment of the team has been outrageous. That they could pass through the tournament unbeaten, eliminated only because of a last-gasp Austria goal against Algeria, is remarkable enough in itself, but they could surely have achieved far more had they not had to switch training camps, been allowed their full backroom staff and been able to travel to games without punitive restrictions.

This is an extract from Soccer Desk: World Cup edition, a newsletter from the Guardian US that will run regularly during the tournament. Subscribe for free here.

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Following the bumper end to the record-breaking group stage in which a whopping 16 Geopolitics World Cup matches were completed over 54 hours, Football Daily has now gone – at the time of writing – nearly 36 hours with just one single GWC match for company and is now experiencing acute withdrawal symptoms; a miserable glimpse into our post-GWC future in which “colleagues”, “families” and “the growing pile of crockery in the sink” will eventually have to be acknowledged and addressed with all the gusto of Steve Bruce at a press conference.

Steve Clarke away

I have this dread
That we will not
Get to

Anything for ten
Years; you have
Done it

At least Steve Clarke walked willingly through the door marked Do One, unlike Marcelo Bielsa, who hasn’t resigned and is waiting for the Uruguayan federation to oust him via the catapult marked Haz Uno” – JJ Zucal.

So, England face the Democratic Republic of Congo in Atlanta on Wednesday. Are the locals going to be confused by not knowing if the Congolese team are Democrats or Republicans?” – George Paterson.

While I appreciate Football Daily’s desire to crowbar puns into everything, I’d like to point out that Christian Fuchs ushered himself through the door marked Do One [in the Steve Clarke style? – FD Ed]. The fans and board were happy with him, so I can’t imagine why he opted to leave the beautiful surroundings of Newport” – Dave Lloyd.

In defence of football, I rebuked a chatbot for stating ‘soccer’ was used widely in the UK from 1883. It then admitted it was the public schools and upper class who used the term. A minority with big mouths. A bit like Infantino or Trump!” – Alex Cameron.

This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.

His big speech showed promise, but the need is urgent. Keir Starmer failed to fix a broken economic model; Burnham must not make the same mistake

Today’s speech by Andy Burnham underlines that he represents a shift in vibes. What matters, however, is substance, and on that front we still have more questions than answers.

Our soon-to-be prime minister made plenty of good noises. His speech was at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, which showcases the struggles of ordinary people – such as the Levellers, Chartists, suffragettes and trade unionists – for justice and democracy. He would “take inspiration from that history”, he told his enthused audience.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Labour has to match the success of its New Deal for young people in the late 1990s – and remedy the injustices that have led to a ‘lost generation’

Today a new programme starts to help the million unemployed young people not in employment, education or training (Neets). By chance, it launches on the day Andy Burnham set out to paint a picture of his horizons with plans that put the young first, closely matching Alan Milburn’s searing review of the fate of a “lost generation”.

As from now, any employer can claim £3,000 in a youth jobs grant to take on an 18- to 24-year-old who has been on universal credit and looking for work for at least six months. That financial incentive for employers will be well complemented by Burnham’s devolution revolution. The Burnham remedy is a great shift of power, funds and taxes out of Whitehall into the hands of local mayors, because local is where jobs are, locally is where education and further education succeed or fail and locality is all too often where disadvantage blights children’s future. Burnham’s confidence that the local works best for unemployment comes from the success of his Manchester “working well” programme, which has outstripped national schemes.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

European nations are starting to pay attention after a landmark UN resolution, but reparations is about more than symbolic remembrance or returning stolen artefacts

• Ghana conference calls for formal apology for transatlantic slave trade

In Accra, Europe finally showed up to a conversation it can no longer avoid.

For four years, the global movement for reparative justice has been gathering political momentum across Africa and the Caribbean, from Nairobi to Bridgetown, from Accra to Addis Ababa. Yet the very European states whose wealth and global standing were built through slavery, colonial conquest and racialised extraction remained absent. That changed two weeks ago.

Liliane Umubyeyi is co-founder and executive director of African Futures Lab

Labour came to power promising to tackle Silicon Valley. But from workers’ rights to online privacy it has failed at almost every turn

During a recent conversation in the House of Lords, a former senior US government official told me that “democracy was broken”. When I asked why, they pointed to research that showed that governments – regardless of party – represent the interests of the wealthy and not the people who vote for them.

Nowhere is this more visible than with the tech lobby, which has effectively thwarted all attempts to hold the sector to account, while at the same time embedding its services into the heart of the state and our personal lives.

Beeban Kidron is a crossbench peer and the author of How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back

The forefronting of macho personas like Cain’s is cynical, and misses the reality of my generation’s experiences

• BBC was aware of concerns over Ashley Cain’s ‘toxic masculinity’ online

Recent weeks have not been good for Ashley Cain, the former footballer and now former presenter of BBC Three’s Ashley Cain: Into the Danger Zone. While he was once seen as a catch for a legacy broadcaster keen to win back the attention of young men, the Guardian brought to light a number of disturbing posts made by the presenter, describing women as “slags”, “sluts” and “bitches”, as well as tweets joking about hitting and choking women. Although the BBC has announced the axing of Cain’s show, and said that its vetting process “clearly failed”, new reporting in the Guardian shows concerns about Cain’s online comments were raised with the BBC last year.

Questions remain about why nobody apparently thought to run a background check in the first place, and why concerns about Cain were apparently ignored. Cain’s attitude was not exactly a secret. After his football career, he appeared on Ex on the Beach and became known for seducing fellow contestants. Then he gained a big following on Snapchat for posting videos of himself having sex with women. In 2015 he denied accusations of capturing and sharing sexually explicit photos and videos of a woman without her consent. A scroll through his prolific and public social media profiles (“talcum powder pimp slap these bitches already!”) would have revealed several troubling statements. In an Instagram post he said, “I don’t deny it. I don’t excuse it.”

Rohan Sathyamoorthy is a 20-year-old writer from south-west London

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The country’s likely next prime minister sketches a post-Thatcherite state built on radical devolution. The test is whether Whitehall yields

Andy Burnham is not prime minister of the UK – yet. His speech on Monday at the People’s History Museum in Manchester might be read as campaign fodder. But given his lack of opponents, the race to be Labour leader looks already over. If he enters Downing Street, the oration would be the most serious challenge to the Thatcherite settlement attempted by any prime minister since 1979. In office, it will only become that if he turns the language of devolution and public control into institutional power.

For decades, Britain has privileged markets over public provision. It weakened local government and organised the state from the centre. And it treated utilities, housing and industry as best disciplined by private ownership and competition. The financial crash forced Gordon Brown into a necessary repudiation of some of those ideas. But that was an emergency. Since 1979, no prime minister has taken on all three pillars of Thatcherism at once. Mr Burnham’s speech does.

A natural disaster provides unforgiving clarity in a country already reeling from years of crisis and the unlawful US seizure of Nicolás Maduro

The devastation wrought by an earthquake is shaped by what happened before and after it as much as by the shock itself. The twin tremors that hit Venezuela moments apart last Wednesday were its biggest since 1900, at 7.2 and 7.5, and were shallow temblors, which often cause more destruction than deeper ones of similar magnitude. Aftershocks continued on Monday. At least 1,450 people have died, with tens of thousands reported missing and more than 3,000 injured. The UN estimates that there has been $6.7bn of damage – equivalent to 6% of the country’s GDP – including key infrastructure; 38 hospitals are said to need repairs. Unicef says that 1.8 million people need aid.

The toll of such disasters reflects the condition of the nation before they struck, and the state’s capacity to respond. While remarkable rescues in the last few days have brought joy even after the 72-hour window judged crucial to saving lives had closed, the picture is not kind to Venezuela’s leaders.

Readers respond to the findings of the Ockenden inquiry, which revealed that more than 500 mothers and babies came to harm or died as a result of inadequate care in Nottingham

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett asks why women are so routinely ignored in their maternity care (Belittled, ignored or gaslit – now we know the true cost of not listening to pregnant women, 25 June). Our research on formal reports about women’s poor maternity care identifies various reasons why women are not listened to, and they all start with their accounts being given less credibility because of prejudices held against them.

Gender-based prejudices carry disturbing echoes of historical patriarchal assumptions and myths about the mysteries of female bodies. They lead to women being perceived as anxious, hysterical or irrational, and can result in their symptoms being dismissed as psychological rather than physical, if they are taken account of at all.

Rob Fink reveals what happened when he spotted someone eating the Danish bøfsandwich, in response to an article on the cultural links of food

The “chickpea trail”, as described by Federico De Blasi, is a wonderful example of historical cross-border cultural and trading links founded on food (Tracing one delicious snack around the Mediterranean showed me that modern borders are absurd, 26 June). But such links need not be ancient and can sometimes be newly forged.

A few years ago, my family and I went on holiday to Denmark. In between Legoland and the airport, we stopped at roadside services for lunch. As we ate our chicken and chips, I spotted a man eating what appeared to be an enormous burger covered in gravy – using a knife and fork, as to do otherwise would have been logistically challenging

Readers offer suggestions on what to do with a royal residence that won’t have a king or queen

So Buckingham Palace is no longer needed by the monarchy (Report, 25 June) and the Houses of Parliament are no longer fit for purpose. How about a temporary move for the latter into the former while waiting for a new building, ideally in Birmingham or Manchester (real devolution).

In this way, taxpayers might see some benefit from the £369m spent on the former royal residence. Part of it could still be used for ceremonial purposes. To be honest, though, it’s the symbolism that appeals – a change of ownership and purpose to signify a long overdue move to more meritocratic government.
Richard Churcher
London

Tennis players’ media duties | Train services | HS2 | Night-time | Bad Bunny

I’m sure I’m not the only one saddened at the news that the top tennis players have decided not to continue their protest over prize money and have agreed to carry out their media duties during Wimbledon in full (29 June). I had hoped they could be persuaded to institute a complete ban, rather than the partial one originally threatened, and thus spare us from inane and unrevealing pre- and post-match interviews.
Peter Bolton
Stoke-on-Trent

• I recently travelled on an Avanti West Coast train from Manchester to London. Approaching Euston, there were announcements about gathering up belongings etc, but one stated: “We have pickpockets operating at this station.” Is it not bad enough that train companies overcharge us for an inadequate service without employing people to rob us when we get off?
Iain Bannerman
Altrincham, Greater Manchester

• World No 1 wins 4-6, 6-3, 6-7 (6), 6-2, 6-3

• Italian overcomes a fall and bleeding foot

For one uncomfortable month, in the aftermath of the most shocking collapse of his career, the discourse around Jannik Sinner focused on his lack of durability. Not only was he so vulnerable in remotely warm conditions, but to many his five‑set record of six wins and 12 defeats was unworthy of a player of his stature.

It was only fitting, then, that Sinner immediately found himself embroiled in another fifth set on his return to the match court. This time, the world No 1 kept his composure and held firm physically at the climax to recover from two sets to one down against a courageous challenger in Miomir Kecmanovic, opening his title defence with a 4-6, 6-3, 6-7 (6), 6-2, 6-3 win on Centre Court.

• Stokes on Brook: ‘There’s a reason he was vice-captain’

• Head coach says he will honour contract to end of 2027

Brendon McCullum said that “the project isn’t finished yet” as he pledged to stay on as England head coach despite the shock retirement of Ben Stokes, his captain and right‑hand man over four years in charge of the Test team.

After England lost against New Zealand on Monday in Stokes’s final game as an international cricketer, McCullum said he is fully committed to a contract that runs to the end of next year. “From my point of view, my enthusiasm and commitment to English cricket has never wavered, and that’s certainly the case now. I’m excited about the opportunity of where this cricket team can get to,” he said.

Springboks coach has named a starting XV with more than 900 caps for their first Nations Championship game against England

The Nations Championship does not start until Saturday, but for Rassie Erasmus the fun and games have already begun. Sometimes the simplest messages can be the most effective and Erasmus’s decision to kickstart the week with an early bang by naming a strong Springbok lineup to face England was another artful initiative by a head coach who loves to be one jump ahead.

Not only has the heavy thud of a properly stacked Bok team sheet instantly set the narrative for the week, it has left England to try to play catch‑up if they can. Virtually all South Africa’s heaviest hitters – Siya Kolisi, Pieter‑Steph du Toit and Malcolm Marx – will be there to roll out the welcome mat at Ellis Park, banishing any idle notion that Erasmus might tinker slightly for the opening fixture.

• Captain Hayley Matthews says pressure off in semi-final

• Six-time champions Australia unbeaten in tournament

Hayley Matthews says her West Indies team are leaning into their status as massive underdogs when they play Australia in the first T20 World Cup semi-final at the Oval on Tuesday.

Australia surrendered their 20-over crown two years ago and the 50-over title last year, but over the past fortnight they have looked far and away the best team. They have had a clinical tournament, sweeping aside all and sundry in Group A including the 50-over champions, India, at Lord’s on Sunday.

Tommy Paul and world’s best hope to prolong career with therapy, which claims to ‘rejuvenate body, mind and spirit’

Before his straight-sets first-round victory over Alexandre Müller on Monday, the American No 21 seed, Tommy Paul, stepped into the All England Club’s new recovery suite and laid down on a strange zigzag-shaped bed.

At that point, hydrogen gas was pumped through his nostrils and his body experienced multiwave light, pulsed electromagnetic and sound therapy – all from a £128,000 device called the Ammortal Chamber, which claims to be “the fastest way to reset, recharge and rejuvenate the body, mind and spirit”.

In blistering dissent, Sonia Sotomayor writes ‘the court gives the president a power unknown even to the English crown’

• Key cases today: Trump can fire federal regulators; Lisa Cook firing unconstitutional; bid to appeal $5m E Jean Carroll verdict; mail-in ballots arriving after election day

The supreme court is due to release some of its final opinions at 10am ET, with major decisions including on Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship and to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook still to come.

Last week the court handed the Trump administration huge wins in major rulings on immigration. It gave the administration a green light to block asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a decision that fundamentally reshapes the US asylum system. And it also ruled in favor of the administration’s bid to strip temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians, who were legally in the US and protected from deportation. The decisions, powered by court’s conservative justices, saw the supreme court accused of advancing a white supremacist agenda.

Caracas and La Guaira affected by 4.6-magnitude tremor as death toll passes 1,700 and humanitarian crisis grows

A strong aftershock has rattled northern Venezuela, sending terrified residents racing on to the streets five days after the twin earthquakes that killed 1,719 people, left tens of thousands missing and triggered a growing humanitarian emergency.

The aftershock early on Monday – which the US Geological Survey measured at a magnitude of 4.6 – shook the capital, Caracas, and the devastated port city of La Guaira, where rescue crews are still hoping to pull as many survivors as possible from the rubble. Colombia’s geological survey put the aftershock’s magnitude at 5.1.

Two sides agree to try to make bilateral relationship ‘more balanced’ after weeks of threats

The EU and China have agreed to enter three months of talks to try to avoid a trade war over the bloc’s €360bn (£310bn) annual import/export imbalance.

In their first joint statement in seven years, the two sides agreed in Brussels to open a formal trade consultation after weeks of threats and recriminations from China if the EU imposed any measures to stop the flood of goods and components into the bloc.

Information not reported through ‘appropriate channels’ and left DUP unable to formally respond, leader says

Former and current members of the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) knew of allegations about the former leader Jeffrey Donaldson but did not share them, the party has said.

Information about Donaldson was not reported through “appropriate channels” and left the party unable to formally respond, the DUP leader, Gavin Robinson, said on Monday.

Trial begins of Simon Levy, who denies killing Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins and attacking third woman

A man who was arrested in connection with the suspected murder of a woman was freed by police and went on to kill another woman four months later, a court has heard.

The prosecution said Simon Levy, 40, had previously raped and attacked a third woman, whom he left for dead, and sexually assaulted six others during a series of attacks between January and August 2025.

Teresa Ribera blames ‘ideologically driven’ falsehoods, driven by those with vested interests in fossil fuels, for attacks on green policy

The heatwave wreaking chaos across Europe is a “dramatic warning” to reject climate naysayers, a European Commission vice-president says.

Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for a clean, just and competitive transition, lambasted those who listened to the “vested interests” of the fossil fuel industry rather than scientists and their own citizens.

Teams painstakingly combed endangered Atlantic habitat over several years, helping to grow 8m native trees

A small band of volunteers has helped to grow nearly 8m native trees in Scotland, crucial to efforts to restore lost parts of the Atlantic rainforest, after collecting 11m seeds by hand.

About 100 volunteers, including retired teachers and doctors, office workers and young families, have spent tens of thousands of hours venturing into often remote woods in the western Highlands and islands to search out seed-bearing trees.

Underwater expedition by Florida-based team supports possible therapeutic use of bacterial toxins from sea squirts

Researchers at a Florida university say bacterial toxins produced by tiny marine organisms they have studied in Antarctica could become an effective treatment for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.

A team from the University of South Florida (USF) recently returned from a six-week expedition to one of the world’s remotest regions in which they collected samples of ascidians, invertebrates known as sea squirts that thrive in the icy waters.

Western states experience unseasonally low temperatures but New York and Washington DC could reach 40C by end of week

Unseasonal snow has fallen in some parts of the US, while other parts of the country brace for a heatwave this week.

A strong cold front spread into the western US from the northern Pacific over the weekend, bringing an abrupt change in conditions to a region that had been experiencing high summer temperatures amid drought. Temperatures from the Canadian border to California have widely been 5-10C below the norm since Friday, and more than 10C below in some parts farther north. The pattern is expected to remain for much of the coming week.

Former parliamentary private secretary to Rishi Sunak admits offence relating to betting on date of 2024 election

A former Conservative MP who was Rishi Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide when he was prime minster has pleaded guilty to cheating at gambling with bets on the date of the 2024 general election.

Craig Williams, who was the MP for Montgomeryshire and, earlier, Cardiff North, admitted in court to using confidential information to place bets on the timing of the contest.

Mark Rutte stressed need for military investment ahead of long-awaited UK funding announcement on Tuesday

Nato’s secretary general has said he is confident Andy Burnham will stick to the alliance’s long-term spending commitments, and that the man expected to be the UK’s next prime minister would recognise that rearmament can spur economic growth.

During a visit to London, Mark Rutte said he did not expect the UK to meet an alliance target to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035 “in one big step” when its long-delayed defence investment plan was published on Tuesday.

Guardian journalist whose investigations helped expose political wrongdoing and brought down government ministers

The award-winning investigative journalist David Hencke, who has died from liver cancer aged 79, had his byline on many of the most important scoops carried by the Guardian during his 33-year career on the paper.

An ebullient and unfailingly genial figure, he was one of those whose exposure of the cash-for-questions scandal in 1994 led to the downfall of the Tory ministers Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith, and in 1998 he was the first to publish the home loan scandal that caused the first of Peter Mandelson’s resignations as a minister.

Asad Hussain, 36, from Cheadle in Greater Manchester, found guilty of stalking involving serious alarm or distress

A man has been jailed for eight years after he set up a fake Tinder profile for his ex-partner and enticed multiple men to her house with the intention of raping her.

Asad Hussain, 36, also known as Ash Hussain, from Cheadle in Greater Manchester, appeared at Chester crown court on Monday, where he was also handed a 15-year restraining order. He had previously been found guilty of stalking involving serious alarm or distress and assault by beating.

US president posts that meeting will take place on Tuesday in Qatari capital after exchange of fire in strait of Hormuz

• Iran is jealously competing with Oman as decision-maker over strait of Hormuz

Donald Trump has claimed that Iran has agreed to hold talks in Doha after the US and Tehran traded fire in the strait of Hormuz this weekend, threatening the collapse of a ceasefire meant to keep the strait open and pave the way for peace talks.

In a terse post on Truth Social, the US president claimed the meetings would take place in the Qatari capital, as US media reported that the two sides had agreed to halt strikes after tit-for-tat attacks that once again cut off shipping through the crucial waterway.

Four women among the dead and two people arrested after incident in city west of Hamburg

Four women and two men have been killed in a shooting at a youth welfare facility ⁠in northern Germany, police said. Two people including the suspected ⁠shooter were arrested.

The incident took place in Stade, a city close to the port city of Hamburg, on Monday afternoon. Police said the victims, employees of the shelter, were all shot inside the building. Five died at the scene and the sixth died in hospital. Police said the death toll could rise.

Emily Barker, Nick Hutcherson and Sydney Watson killed working to contain raging fires on Utah-Colorado border

The US Department of Interior on Monday released the names of three firefighters who were killed while working to contain wildfires along the Utah-Colorado border.

Two other firefighters who were part of the specialized helicopter-deployed crew were also injured in the blaze, although authorities did not identify them.

IDF has killed 235 children in territory since 7 October 2023 with no indictments in what activists say is ‘licence to kill’

On the day he died, Mohammad al-Halaq had been jubilant about a new school bag he had been given in class, printed with the logo of the UN child protection and advocacy agency, Unicef.

“He was extremely happy. It was something out of the ordinary for him to be given a bag,” recalled his mother, Aliyah. “He came knocking on the door to tell me had this new bag to put pencils and pens in.”

Starship Technologies six-wheelers could soon become a more familiar sight across the country under new laws

Driving down an endless string of identical roundabouts in the dead heat with hardly a human in sight, you see robots roving around on grassy pavements, whizzing past obstacles to hurriedly reach their final destination. This isn’t a scene from a Philip K Dick novel, however, but an average Thursday in Milton Keynes.

The robots aren’t a new arrival to the Buckinghamshire city, the UK’s largest new town and a longtime marvel for city planning enthusiasts fascinated by its American-influenced layout and postwar history. They’ve roamed its streets since 2018 – and could soon be coming to a town or city near you.

Exclusive: Safety campaigners concerned about plan for widespread deployment on already crowded pavements

Large numbers of autonomous delivery robots could be coming to towns and cities across England after ministers signalled they were likely to support a change in the law allowing their use, prompting concern from safety campaigners.

Low-speed robots, which mainly deliver groceries or takeaway food, are already in use in a handful of places but they operate in a regulatory grey area. The 1835 Highways Act bans “carriages” from pavements.

Exclusive: Move affects staff of both companies whose roles will be duplicated once operations are merged

Nationwide building society is axing 600 jobs in the first major round of cuts linked to its controversial takeover of the high street bank Virgin Money.

The move affects Nationwide and Virgin Money staff, whose roles are due to be duplicated once the lenders’ operations are fully merged.

Parcels of goods worth under €150 will no longer enjoy ‘de minimis’ exemption, exploited by platforms such as Temu and Shein

• Business live – latest updates

The European Commission has said it hopes to prevent the “desertification” of Europe’s high streets, as it prepares to introduce a customs tax on small parcels in an attempt to curb cheap Chinese imports.

Consumers have been able to buy up to €150 (£129) worth of goods, including fast fashion, cosmetics and toys, without any customs charges as part of a “de minimis” exemption, a tariff break meaning too small to matter.

The unconventional actor is releasing a new hip-hop album, the latest unlikely new string to his bow, but the big surprise is that he might actually be great

As good as he is as an actor, perhaps the best thing about Tom Hardy is how he will sometimes pop up unannounced and reveal that he is secretly quite good at other non-acting things. In 2022 he surprised the world by rocking up to a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition held in a Milton Keynes secondary school and wiping the floor with everyone. He loves dogs with such a ferocious intensity that children’s authors are resigned to the fact that he will never read their book on CBeebies Bedtime Stories unless it has a dog in it.

And now he’s a rapper. It has been announced that Tom Hardy’s new rap album Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer is being released in August. And, in true Tom Hardy style, it turns out that he has secretly been quite good at rapping all along.

This year’s celebration of contemporary dance in the French city is bold, baffling and breathtaking, with some high-voltage performers

Launched in 1981, the pioneering Montpellier Danse festival changed the face of contemporary dance, in France and beyond. In 2024, its own face changed when long-term figurehead Jean-Paul Montanari was succeeded by a four-person directorship of Hofesh Shechter, Jann Gallois, Dominique Hervieu and Pierre Martinez – though the programme currently continues its ethos of spreading dance across the city, and mixing the recherché with the popular.

Gallois’ Imminentes aims squarely at a general audience: an hour-long dynamo for six women that is never abstruse and always striking – if not always subtle. Its signature device, the long build-up, comes in from the start: the women lean in to each other in tender pairs, then gradually meld together into a dynamic and increasingly mobile group, bonded by linked arms and synced energies. Backing them is a crescendo of sound, and a bank of lights that ends up glowing as if powered by the sheer voltage that the dancers generate.

The latest in our series of writers paying tribute to their favourite comfort films is a pick for a comedy that demands countless rewatching

There’s a moment in Groundhog Day that genuinely changed my life: the bit where, noticing that Andie MacDowell has walked into the party that he’s rocking with an up-tempo boogie-woogie solo, weatherman Phil Connors cuts the band with a gesture, takes off his shades, and pivots straight into a soulful rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Has Bill Murray ever looked so cool in a film, before or since? Has anyone?

To be upfront, it took me a while to act on my love of that climactic moment (more on this in a minute) but there’s a lot to love in the prototypical time-loop drama even before you get to the Connors redemption arc. Murray, obviously, gets to showcase his full comedic range, moving from irascible cynic to unhinged hedonist to enlightened altruist and somehow keeping us onside for the entire problematic journey. Stephen Tobolowsky puts in a performance that would steal any other film as Ned Ryerson (“Needle-nose Ned! Ned the Head!”), and MacDowell has never played a more charming character than Rita, Phil’s endlessly patient producer. But really, the whole town of Punxsutawney should have got the best supporting actor nod: it’s the sort of place that you could imagine retiring to eat pancakes every morning in a diner where everyone knows your name. Phil might hate it: I love it, more and more every time I watch.

The inside story of the men who ruled the tennis courts, starting in the 1970s. Plus: the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tapes. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, Channel 5
Just in time to get you in the mood for Wimbledon, this four-part series explores the careers of the only 29 male players who have made it to No 1 in the ATP rankings. It begins in the 1970s (arguably the liveliest era in tennis history) with the controversial but charismatic figure of Ilie Năstase, a Romanian with a sweet backhand and a bad boy reputation. Phil Harrison

From his child safety campaign ‘Kids can say no’ to an awful appearance on Jim’ll Fix It, some of the things the TV star was allowed to do beggar belief. In this harrowing film, women who were assaulted by him as girls speak out

I mean this quite seriously; it is time to start commissioning programmes about good men. We need a steady, regular inoculation against despair. If deep dives into the lives of male celebrities past and present can yield enough unblemished records for a series, I’ll be surprised but delighted. If not, maybe we can ask the public to nominate “ordinary” men, like a version of the Pride of Britain awards. Channel 4, call me.

Such are the thoughts that wend their way across the mind as the two-hour-long episodes of Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator unfold. For those of you who remain unaware – Harris was one of the kings of light entertainment in the 1970s and 80s, an avuncular Australian presence who brought us daft hit songs like Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport and Jake the Peg with his extra leg (while wearing a false leg, to make sure only adults were let in on the double entendre), and then parlayed his talents as an artist and presenter into a long and lucrative TV career. He became re-beloved by a new generation in the 90s, playing Glastonbury in 1993 after his wobble-board version of Stairway to Heaven became a hit.

Low-budget chiller leans heavily on tinfoil-hat paranoia to build its reasonably effective suspense

Buckle up for a ride that’s turbulent with highly uneven quality but gets to its destination with a certain style. Black Box: Flight 298 is a horror-sci-fi-thriller that mostly takes place on a flight supposedly bound from New Orleans to Seattle, although it’s quite obvious this was filmed in a studio equipped with plenty of green screens to accommodate some cheesy visual effects in the back half.

However, before director Steven Quale and screenwriter Stephen Susco reveal the monster mastermind behind all the mayhem, they build up a pretty good head of suspense by gesturing towards the paranoia and terror many feel around air travel. Opening text ominously claims that the rates at which planes lose contact with ground control are much higher than the US Federal Aviation Administration admits, which doesn’t sound so bad really to viewers not prone to aerophobic anxiety. But that’s only the beginning of a yarn that bounces off tinfoil-hat paranoid conspiracy theories – there is literally a character who wraps her head in aluminium foil to protect herself from upper-atmosphere radiation – as well as more general angst around strange things that go bump in the stratosphere.

Glyndebourne, Sussex
This revival of Michael Grandage’s atmospheric production of Britten’s opera has numerous fine performances: Thomas Mole and Sam Carl are persuasive as Billy and Claggart, and Allan Clayton’s luminous Vere is a standout

Brutalist grey, its deck gently curved, HMS Indomitable looms over Michael Grandage’s production of Britten’s Billy Budd. Half-skeleton, half-cage, the ship is relentlessly claustrophobic, its hard edges softened only by coils of rope, hammocks and Paule Constable’s subtle, painterly lighting. No wonder the opera’s crowd of male bodies – clad here in spotless Napoleonic naval uniforms and grubby workwear – carries a palpable charge: visceral, violent, erotic. Thanks to the curved deck, those standing centre-stage of Christopher Oram’s set appear as if through a fish-eye lens or one of the officer’s telescopes. In this floating world at war, everyone is subject to scrutiny.

Premiered at Glyndebourne in 2010, Grandage’s production is now in the hands of revival director Ian Rutherford. The lines are firmly drawn between the goodness of the piece’s “angel” Billy Budd and the malevolence of its villain, John Claggart, whose “sexual discharge gone evil” (librettist EM Forster’s words) results in Budd’s death. Budd swings across the stage, lithe as a gymnast, unique in his physical ease. Claggart cowers and barks. The love “that could not speak its name” at the opera’s 1951 premiere has here found other ways to communicate; in one scene, Claggart bullies the terrified Novice in a chokehold that is simultaneously, unmistakably an embrace.

Nicky Woolf’s investigation into a rightwing YouTuber reveals much more than state interference in social media. Plus, why did a kid pretend to be Steven Spielberg’s nephew?

Lauren Southern tells journalist Nicky Woolf she feels as though she’s in a spy movie, “but the dumbest ever made, because I’m just a YouTuber”. Along with other members of the right-wing commentariat, the Canadian found herself linked with the Kremlin when a company she had worked for was revealed as a front for the Russian state. Her candour is striking, as Woolf’s investigation unfolds across six uneasy chapters. Hannah J Davies
Audible, all episodes out now

Tipped by Lorde and Billie Eilish, the New York musician twists sublime folk and chaotic synths into bewitching new shapes

At first Shane Lavers can’t get through. Then he’s on video call but I cannot speak. When we finally make a clear connection over the phone, I can hear that he’s surrounded by nature, with faint snatches of birdsong at the edge of his measured, slightly gravelly speech. The musician who performs both in and as Chanel Beads (it remains unclear even to its core members whether they’re a band or a solo project) is on location shooting a music video somewhere on the coast of North Carolina. Encountering him as a disembodied voice, never mind one competing with worldly twittering and chirping, somehow feels more fitting than it would for most other musicians.

For years, Lavers has honed in on a cryptic, panoramic sound that ricochets from catchy, shout-along rock music to flare-ups of dissonant experimental noise. If the typical payoff of a pop song is to encapsulate a clear emotional arch in three-minute, verse-chorus structures, the appeal of a Chanel Beads track is much more unwieldy. Earlier singles such as Ef, Police Scanner and Male Friendship flicker in and out of focus, establishing a ground-floor of groove, only for Lavers and his bandmates to upend it with swelling strings, chiming guitar and ear-splitting samples. Lyrically, his songwriting gathers around an unstable emotional core that is so dense in its unspoken feeling that it manages to achieve an aching kind of orbit. It’s Lavers’s great talent to handle all of that swirling intensity while keeping everything suspended in the air.

Now 84, the voice of Heat Wave and Jimmy Mack is releasing a new album. She answers your questions on Marvin Gaye, popularising the roundabout and why she hates cover versions of her songs

You were part of perhaps the richest and most exciting era of music since the German and Italian classics of the 19th century. How was it for you and what made it all tick? eamonmcc
William Stevenson discovered me after I had won an amateur contest. It was like a dream come true that a producer would come and approach me and say, “You have talent, come to Hitsville, USA.” I took his advice and showed up the next day unannounced and was immediately placed in a position as secretary [at Motown Records]. It felt real good that I was at the right place at the right time. It was magical to me and it’s all been just a glorious ride.

The Motown production line is sometimes compared to the production line of cars in Detroit. Is there anything to that, do you think? mesm
Motown and Ford are synonymous. My dad worked for Ford and [Motown founder] Berry Gordy worked there as an employee. It taught Berry Gordy the way to represent and how to manage and how to give people assignments. He called it Motown or Motortown. So, it’s all combined: Motor City, Detroit, manufacturing, making music as an assembly line.

JD Vance’s Christian vision is thoughtful – but impossible to square with the political company he keeps

At the heart of this strange, perhaps rather poignant, book is the biblical question: “What must I do to be saved?” Not in the crude sense of how to secure a place in heaven, but as an urgent challenge to a whole repertoire of destructive assumptions and habits endorsed by the majority culture. Vance’s famous first book, Hillbilly Elegy, chronicled, among other things, the impact of substance abuse on generations of the rural poor. It is not too much of a stretch to see this book as a vision of the modern west through the lens of addiction and its generational effects. Except, this time, it is the norms and expectations of elite modernity that are as lethal for the ambitious young professional as fentanyl is for the less privileged.

Vance offers a diagnosis that is not particularly original, but derives its force from the intensity of the personal questioning he undertook to arrive at it. The US vice president describes with clarity the pervasive mechanisms, in education and the professional and political worlds, that induct us into wanting what others want – not what we regard as inherently desirable. Most of us instinctively desire emotional security, meaningful work and, perhaps above all, hope and joy in nurturing the next generation, introducing them to a world of value and promise. One of the most telling moments in the book is the spectacularly successful young Vance’s painful bafflement when faced with the challenge of becoming a parent: “I knew exactly how to help my kid get into a good college but was woefully underprepared to make him a good man.”

A veteran techno DJ embarks on a campaign of civil disobedience in this passionate and at times hilarious tale of underground resistance

Midway through his firecracker of a debut, 2020’s The Young Team, Graeme Armstrong hurls the reader into an exuberant account of a rave, from protagonist Azzy’s pre-party pharmaceutical prep, through the resulting mystical abandon and euphoria, and on to the inevitable crash back to earth. The description of the anguished comedown is a welcome noughties update of Kingsley Amis’s beer-soaked hanxiety in Lucky Jim. All this, set against a panicky backdrop of juvenile turf wars in working-class Airdrie, near Glasgow, won Armstrong a place on the 2023 Granta best of young British novelists list.

You’d think there’s not much more to say on the subject of illegal raves, but in his second novel he’s doubled down, while jettisoning the social grit for cartoonish political satire. Narrator William Patterson, AKA DJ Turbo, has a regular gig spinning discs for kids at the ice rink, until a new political party sweeps Britain, demanding a return to civilised values and promising to eradicate moral decay. Top of the agenda is a total ban on electronic music and its associated youthful gatherings. Freedom, fun and independent thinking is frowned upon. Suddenly out of work, Turbo becomes Scotland’s least enthusiastic data-input clerk, while secretly plotting rebellion.

A parish priest cares for the mentally afflicted in an absorbing tale that combines antic comedy with serious moral themes

In 1474, in a fictional location in southern Europe, Father Alberto arrives from Jormel Abbey, where he has failed in his ambition to become a manuscript illuminator at their renowned scriptorium. He is the new parish priest of the villages of Hem and Long, whose congregants are generally “piebald and errant”, but not the most peculiar or refractory of his flock. Among his duties is to tend to the mentally afflicted of the convent of Saint Particular, patron saint of the unloved, who are confined in cells for the greater part of the year. The fearsome Abbess and the silent Sister Lorenza introduce Alberto to his charges using the Index, an annotated manuscript of the inmates whose strange minds are “filled o’er the brim”. They include Pieter Mastiff, a raging, blaspheming carpenter; Selina, compulsively naked and unhappily sexual; Carin Marina, a former princess with a secret; Malike Dene, who has scarred his body with a map of the “topography of the universe known”; Zanzibar, a homicidal horse; and a mute girl in rags who “remorselessly attempts to fly”. These are only a few of a wide cast of characters in a fable-like novel that skilfully combines antic comedy with serious moral themes.

At the end of each summer comes the Feast of the Holy Fool, a festival of misrule with intensely described acts of cursing, drunkenness, violence and sexual vagrancy. The mad are released to wander free but must be returned to their cells by the priest with the aid of his eccentric and resourceful sexton, Oblong. The most challenging to retrieve is the Flying Girl, who is fleet of foot on the ground and through the treetops. She speaks in “a cavalcade of light and tuneful gibberish” that might be birdsong.

Writing about home life doesn’t have to be humdrum argues the author of Natural Disaster – just look at world-spanning, taboo-shattering works such as Ducks, Newburyport and All Fours

‘There’s no place like home,” Dorothy declares at the end of The Wizard of Oz, as she departs the dazzling Emerald City for Aunt Em’s Kansas farmhouse. It’s a powerful metaphor for the way the domestic sphere is often portrayed in art: action, adventure and drama happen “out there” in glorious Technicolor, with the home rendered by contrast in sober sepia tones. Home may be the place we ultimately yearn for, but only once we have left it behind.

While working on my second novel, Natural Disaster, I was periodically plagued by the potential pitfalls of putting domestic life front and centre. The story takes place over 24 hours, following a woman who plans to spend her final day of maternity leave having a nice time with her two small boys (spoiler: it doesn’t go to plan).

Normal Golf Game takes a tiresomely easy genre and makes it infernally difficult. Which deserves a round of applause

I have always struggled playing golf. I wish I didn’t. It’s a beautiful game in concept. A leisurely walk in the sunshine, slapping a ball around, sandwiches and beer consumed during and after play. Sure, you have to dress like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, and getting membership of an actual club is more complex than joining the Freemasons (although many offer a two for one deal with this), but you don’t have to be fit, you don’t have to even run. It is the only outdoor sport where a fat dad can be the best in the world.

The premise couldn’t be simpler: get the ball in the hole. But there is nothing worse in sport than knowing what you have to do and not being able to do it. Just ask amateur parachutists.

The blockbuster launch is expected to dwarf the box office takings of the year’s biggest movies with one industry analyst predicting it could make $1bn within an hour

It is, quite simply, the most anticipated piece of entertainment since the Star Wars prequels and now, at last, you can reserve a copy. At midnight last night, Rockstar opened preorders on Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest title in the epic open-world gangster adventure series, five months before its 19 November release date on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X.

Prices have also been confirmed, with the standard edition costing $80 in the US, £70 in the UK, and €80 in Europe. An Ultimate Edition (£90/€100/$100) will include exclusive in-game cars, clothes and weapons – the developer has confirmed that there will also be in-game stores that are only open to Ultimate owners. Anyone who pre-orders the game will get a Vintage Vice City pack filled with 80s apparel and other nostalgic items, which look to be straight out of Don Johnson’s Miami Vice wardrobe.

As football fans revel in the real world tournament, its digital counterparts continue to stumble in capturing the ​hyped up ​atmosphere

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I come with a warning to all football fans: if you’ve been enjoying the World Cup enough to think, “I’d like to re-enact this on a football video game”, do not go to Netflix and play Fifa World Cup: Launch Edition, the officially licensed game of the tournament, which streams via your smart TV or computer. Developed by the virtually unknown Delphi Interactive, it’s a juddering, dated calamity, with sluggish controls (via your phone, once you’ve downloaded the app) and commentary courtesy of Clive Tyldesley that delivers all the excitement of a robotic train station announcement.

Until this, it was largely agreed that the worst World Cup football game in history was World Cup Carnival, the first official Fifa tie-in, which was released on various home computers in 1986. Publisher US Gold thought it had a deal with the Manchester studio Ocean Software to repurpose its acclaimed title Match Day, but the agreement fell through. With three months to go before Mexico 86, US Gold was forced to effectively rebadge a dire 1984 sim, World Cup Football, by the fading developer Artic. To add some value to the package, the game was released in a fancy big box complete with a fixtures chart, a World Cup facts poster and some flag stickers. Nobody was fooled – the World Cup Carnival was a critical and commercial disaster.

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

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

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

Various venues, Blackpool
Tapping into the kitsch and romance of a Blackpool weekender, this debut offering from Manchester’s White Hotel becomes a triumph of pan-genre experimentalism

One measure of quite how bold the programming is at new Blackpool festival The Black Lights: within two minutes you’re able to go from the closing notes of a BBC Philharmonic performance of John Adams’ symphonic masterpiece Harmonielehre in an awe-inspiring art deco concert hall, to a DJ, Afrodeutsche, slamming breakbeat techno in a side room as digital visuals canter alongside her and lager swells over the side of plastic cups.

This heartening disinclination to view art as “high” or “low” is what gives soul to this three-dayer curated by the team behind now-closing Salford venue the White Hotel, much loved for their tendency towards underground murk as well as absurdist wheezes, impulses both on show here.

Watford Palace theatre
There’s plenty of devilment as the Pennsylvanian flies the flag for the magnificence of women and riffs on pregnancy

The Best Job in the World, Michelle Wolf’s touring show is called. Whether that refers to motherhood (chief among Wolf’s current occupations) or standup (her profession) is left to us to decide. That parenting might be described in those terms prompts a very sardonic response from the Pennsylvanian, whose ear is keenly attuned to society’s dubious regard for mothering, and breastfeeding, and a host of other things women get up to without much fanfare. Wolf is here to redress that balance, in a show that flies the flag, tongue not always in cheek, for the magnificence of women in a society not built to accommodate them.

Exhibit A, as far as the 41-year-old is concerned, is the menstrual cycle – not just a woman’s period, mind you, but the whole (unheralded, poorly understood) month-long shebang. Exhibit B? Pregnancy, which should be discussed less in terms of “your baby is now the size of a grapefruit” and more: today, you’re manufacturing a spine! There’s plenty more where this came from, as our host unfurls the miracle of breastfeeding and (a mother to toddlers drawing her inspiration from near at hand) proposes The Very Hungry Caterpillar as a menopausal parable.

Touring until 5 December

Wigmore Hall, London
Marking the 50th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, a stirring programme culminated with Leon Bosch’s double bass sounding a fragile note of hope

On 16 June, 1976, more than 10,000 students from Soweto took to the streets in a peaceful protest against the apartheid regime. Police answered with shots. It was a spark that kindled into months of conflict, a turning-point in South African history. Freedom Songs – a day of concerts at the Wigmore Hall – marked the uprising’s 50th anniversary, culminating in a performance by Leon Bosch and the Ubuntu Ensemble.

Double-bassist Bosch is the son of an activist father, and he himself was arrested in 1976 – an event that derailed his ambitions to study law, steering him instead towards music. In a room full of South Africans, onstage and off, it was one of many such stories, the atmosphere quietly charged.

Royal Court, London
Hunger and TB, as much as imperialism, are triggers for the assassination that precipitated the first world war in Rajiv Joseph’s tragicomic reimagining of the plotters’ progress

Most of us have written an essay on the origins of the first world war, exam-cramming the names of Bosnian Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip and his victims – Austrian-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie – in Sarajevo almost exactly 112 years ago. A textbook answer is that their assassinations militarised Europe.

However, a student who answered a question on the origins of the 1914-18 conflict with the farcical speculation in Rajiv Joseph’s 2025 play Archduke might face a retake. Unemployed and diagnosed as a “lunger” (consumptive), Princip (Stanley Morgan) receives a “job” offer from Apis (Marc Wootton), a Slav nationalist who recruits Gavrilo and two other starving sick youths, Trifco (Abraham Popoola) and Nedeljko (Chris Walley), by filling their minds with a rant on historical wrongs and their bellies with the menus of his devout housekeeper, Sladjana (Janice Connolly). The lungers’ hunger is a major motivation, a recurring metaphor involving fancy sandwiches.

London Theatre Company founded in 2017 by Hytner and former National Theatre colleague Nick Starr has been sold to company that owns 20-plus venues in UK and abroad

The Bridge theatre in London, opened in 2017 by the former National Theatre duo Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr, has been acquired by Trafalgar Entertainment in a sale that also includes the Lightroom venue for immersive art shows. Trafalgar Entertainment now owns the duo’s London Theatre Company (LTC).

“After nine years, it feels like the right time to be moving on,” said Hytner, who described establishing the Bridge theatre – which has a flexible 900-seat auditorium – as a “thrilling experience”. Hytner directed several of the Bridge’s hits, including its opening promenade-style production of Julius Caesar and a long-running Guys and Dolls which ended with the audience dancing alongside the actors. Away from the Bridge, Hytner recently directed Giant at the Royal Court – which transferred to the West End and Broadway – and is staging James Graham’s new play, The Standard of Living, in the West End in September.

Show at Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin is biggest ever celebration of an East German female artist in a state museum

Gabriele Stötzer remembers the days when she had to decide: “Am I buying a sausage, or film for my Super 8 camera?”

Stötzer was one of the most radical artists in communist East Germany, and her desire to create was born in defiance of and in spite of the material conditions and oppressive restrictions of the GDR regime.

The Happy Valley actor is lined up as the lead in German director Thomas Ostermeier’s first Shakespearean play in English

James Norton is to take on his first major Shakespearean stage role and play Hamlet in the West End next year.

The King & Conqueror star said it was a “privilege” and “pretty terrifying” to be cast as the tragic prince in the acclaimed German director Thomas Ostermeier’s production next autumn. Norton was last on stage in 2023 in the harrowing A Little Life, based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, which the actor described as the hardest thing he has ever done.

Team hope 30 of hours of footage held by three countries will be enough to bring to life film-maker’s vision

More than 70 years after he shot the first few frames, Orson Welles’s ambitious project to put Don Quixote on the big screen may finally be completed thanks to a consortium of European film archivists.

Oja Kodar, the American film-maker’s partner and collaborator, has given her blessing to the project led by archives in France, Spain and Italy, along with the Munich film museum, to produce a coherent film out of 30 hours of footage scattered among them.

Coconuts, watermelon … hot doughnuts? We asked five globetrotting chefs for their most memorable seaside eats

Picture a high-summer day at a far-flung beach: the faint putter of lapping waves, drifting plume of suncream scent, and the approaching call of a food hawker making their way across the molten sand. What would you expect, or want, them to be selling? Though cold drinks, fresh fruit and miraculously unmelted ice-creams feel universal, the street snacks and beachside dishes that we crave vary wildly across countries and cultures.

So what pairs best with open water and a coastal breeze all around the world? What should you be on the lookout for when holidaying this summer? And what should you avoid? Here, from custard doughnuts in Portugal and chilli-spiked Mexican coconut pulp to flash-fried red mullet in Cyprus, five chefs fly the flag for the culturally distinct, freshly prepared beach dishes that they spend the whole year craving.

She was the friendliest dog you can imagine – with an insatiable appetite for jeans, table legs and steering wheels. I will always miss that floppy-eared destroyer

Holly, my hyperactive mad hatter of a beagle, was a gift from my well-meaning sister. She was born into a beagle pack who were kennelled in a dog food factory in the Irish town of Edgeworthstown in County Longford. She bounded into my life one sunny evening, a bouncing, dribbling, velvet-eared bundle of puppy energy.

From the moment I laid eyes on her, it felt as if we were meant for each other. She quickly figured out that I was a softie, with an abundance of patience and access to her food.

Most swimwear relies on synthetic fibres, but some brands are taking steps to reduce their impact. We’ve rounded up the best bikinis, swimsuits and men’s trunks made from recycled and alternative materials

• The best sunglasses with UV protection

If your summer holiday is beckoning, you may have swimwear on your mind. And if you want to get some new gear with your responsible hat on, you may feel out of your depth. Swimwear needs to work hard, stretching to fit us and our movements, while withstanding tough environments like salt water, sunlight and chlorine. This generally means our bathers will be made from a human-made, petroleum-based fibre like nylon or polyester, but are there more environmentally friendly options out there?

“Better [swimwear] should first and foremost mean longer lasting and higher quality,” says Helen Lofts, a circular economy advocate and founder of the swimwear brand Davy J. “Nylon and polyester fibres are incredibly hard-wearing and robust but the elastane they’re woven with to form a stretch fabric is often not. The quality and density of the fibre weave within the fabric will determine how robust they are.” This means cheap, thinner swimsuits will start to go see-through and degrade much quicker than those with quality lining and a tighter weave.

From frozen hot-water bottles to a frizzy hair hack – our fashion team share their wisdom

• The best summer sandals for men and women

On a typical day in high summer you’ll come across two types of people: those who suffer and those who revel. Perhaps you’re a bit of both – you love beaches, but hate hay fever. Or perhaps you burn in the sun, but live for the longer nights sipping pink gin outside.

Believe it or not, there are elements of summer that even the Guardian’s fashion desk struggles with, which is why we’ve compiled this summer survival guide.

Our expert put in the hard yards to find the top coolers to keep your wine crisp, whether you’re hosting, picnicking or just want to plonk your bottle in something stylish

• The best no- and low-alcohol wines for when you’re off the booze

I’ll admit to being a bit of a wine cooler sceptic – at home, at least. Don’t get me wrong: I love a crisp, cool glass as much as the next summer rosé guzzler. The temperature at which we serve wine is important, but I’m wary of any inessential gadgetry that threatens to take up prime real estate in my already cluttered kitchen.

What’s more, wine coolers are misleadingly named. In most cases, they don’t actually cool a bottle of wine – ie, bring down its temperature – but maintain it. This is the point of one on a restaurant table; for those who order a bottle (admittedly a dying breed), it can be kept at a relatively consistent temperature for the duration of their meal. For everyday drinking at home indoors, however, there isn’t much need for a cooler – we can keep returning the bottle to the fridge in between pours. But as picnic season approaches, coolers can come into their own. No one wants to ruin the romance of alfresco dining with warm wine. And bringing a wine cooler to a picnic definitely shows you mean business.

Best wine cooler for hosting and overall:
Peugeot Equilibreur

Best wine cooler for a picnic:
Le Creuset sleeve

As temperatures soar across the UK, chill your space – and avoid energy-guzzling aircon – with our pick of the best fans, from tower to desk to bladeless

• The best portable neck and handheld fans
• Dyson HushJet Mini Cool fan review

Our world is getting hotter. Summer heatwaves are so frequent, they’re stretching the bounds of what we think of as summer. Hot-and-bothered home working and sweaty, sleepless nights are now alarmingly common.

Get a good fan and you can dodge the temptation of air conditioning. Aircon is incredibly effective, but it uses a lot of electricity … and burning fossil fuels is how we got into this mess in the first place. Save money and carbon by opting for a great fan instead.

Best quiet fan for the bedroom and best overall:
AirCraft Lume – preorder now for delivery early July, or consider the cordless version (£179) or table fan (£129) for faster delivery

Best budget fan and best desk fan:
Devola desk fan – currently out of stock

There are few things quite like a freshly stewing pan of caponata – here, I’ve made the glossy, sweet aubergines the star of a handy weeknight orzotto

I have a core caponata memory, and it doesn’t take place in Italy. It was during my first visit to the Globe theatre in London, which all felt very magical: Shakespeare, an open-air theatre, plus an open-air foyer with a huge, paella-style pan of freshly stewing caponata. I instantly regretted going for a substandard meal beforehand, because in this pan were the glossiest, sweetest-smelling aubergines (with a hint of sour), finished with celery, pine nuts and all the gubbins – I still regret not pushing through the fullness barrier and ordering a portion. Since then, I’ve eaten wonderful caponata and it remains one of my favourite Italian dishes. Here, I’ve incorporated the essence of it into a weeknight orzotto.

Grains are such a staple of Lebanese cooking that you could devote an entire book to them. Here are two shining examples: a tabbüleh-style southern dish and a Sunni speciality for dessert

If bread is the main staple of Lebanese cooking, grains and legumes are next, and there is hardly a meal without one or the other. Bulgur wheat is the preferred grain, especially for rural communities of all confessions; in the old days, they grew their own wheat to make it, harvesting, threshing and parboiling the wheat before drying it in the sun and sending it to the local mill to be ground into fine and coarse grades to last the household until the next harvest. In fact, given the sheer number of recipes across the country, I could have easily devoted a whole book to Lebanese recipes for grains alone.

It may have only just opened, but this restaurant has about it the feel of a family taverna that’s already been here for about 62 years

There’s a brand new Greek-Cypriot taverna in Covent Garden, London, that’s offering taramasalata, souvlaki, spanakopita, kleftiko, kaimaki ice-cream and all the rest. Yet Zylia, which is pale, humbly furnished and deliberately homespun in its styling, somehow has about it the feel of a family taverna that’s been here for about 62 years. You know the sort: up a cobbled back street, with a beleaguered 98-year-old yiayia doing the dishes, a one-eared dog on the step waiting for lamb titbits, and a toilet that’s essentially a cleaning supplies cupboard, as well as home to 200 tins of olives.

Zylia has none of those things, by the way, and its feel is more down to clever interior design mixed with a thoughtful, authentic menu. Then again, you’d expect clever things from chef Nick Molyviatis and hospitality veteran Barry Karacostas. You might link Molyviatis more with Thai food, both at Kiln, where he used to be head chef, and the tarted-up, much-hallowed second rendition of Singburi, which relocated to Shoreditch last year; Karacostas, meanwhile, has recently been working with Arcade, a growing chain of London-based food halls. This is where things get doubly interesting, because Zylia is considered part of the new Covent Garden Arcade, except that, unusually, it has its own front door, its own brick walls, its own website and its own identity. It’s definitely part of Arcade. But it isn’t. Step out of Zylia and into Arcade to spend a penny, and you may as well be walking from a sun-battered Kefalonian alleyway into a Hitchcockian hotel lobby of rich woods, lacquered finishes and oxblood leather banquettes.

This Arcade/Zylia venture is testament to the wibbly-wobbly world of modern hospitality. Ten years ago, the likes of Dalston’s Street Feast and a thousand nationwide copycat street-food concepts told us that bricks-and-mortar dining was old hat. What we wanted, they insisted, was open-plan, wooden benches, ad-hoc ordering, confused queues, no servers; apparently, we wanted a bun fight over bao with all involved clutching buzzers. Now, in 2026, not only do chic, sexy food halls such as Arcade feel more formal and glossy than, say, The Ivy, they’re even hatching separate spaces on their sidelines with brick partitions and individual personalities. For the sake of argument, let’s call these annexes “restaurants”.

Interpretations of Greece’s most popular street food abound, but whose version of these smoky, juicy skewers is the best?

I’m aware that, fittingly, I’m dancing across hot coals by tackling souvlaki: in her book Taverna, Georgina Hayden devotes an entire page to the subtle differences between Greek and Cypriot barbecued meat kebabs (souvla, souvlaki, kalamaki, kontosouvli … the list goes on), yet, as Carolina Doriti observes in her beginner’s guide, “the beauty of souvlaki, Greece’s most popular street food, is its simplicity”. Though I’d steer you elsewhere for a more definitive explanation of what qualifies in different places, the name comes from the word souvla, or “skewer”; souvlaki is the diminutive, and it’s usually cooked on small skewers rather than on a big spit. That’s all you need to know, because – although what’s on there, how it’s seasoned and what accompanies it changes according to region and season – the ancient pleasure of smoky, juicy, grilled meat (as featured in the Iliad!) or indeed vegetables, remains the same wherever you go.

Graham and Josephine were friends for years, but after their spouses died they discovered a mutual attraction – and a fondness for adventurous sex

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

Our sexual preferences cover everything from vanilla to being tied up and spanked

You say you don’t put him under pressure, but he seems to feel it. Could you be overcompensating for your initial reluctance to have children?

My husband and I have one son, in his late 20s. We’ve always been devoted to him, keep in touch on a weekly basis and see him about once a month (he has a busy job and has recently started a new relationship, which seems to be making him very happy).

I never really wanted children, possibly due to my traumatic childhood: an absent, mentally ill father; and a single, emotionally imbalanced mother who made me the centre of her life. When my husband talked about having children, I gave it careful consideration and decided in the end to give it a go. Once our son was born, I embraced motherhood fully. We both adore him.

Philip, 74, an antiquarian book dealer, meets Carol, 66, who is retired

What were you hoping for?
Reciprocated love at first sight (I don’t ask for much in this life). To meet a kindred spirit who might even become a partner.

First Liza Shaw and Rohan were housemates, then they had a casual relationship. But a protest at Woomera would deepen their emotional connection

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

I met Rohan in 1998 in Lismore, New South Wales, where we were both going to university. Before that, I’d noticed him around town in his sarong and peacock feather earrings. He was distinctive and slightly dandyish, sometimes wearing dresses on campus. I had another partner at the time but our mutual friend introduced us, and Rohan and I became housemates.

We bonded living together and hosting dinner parties, where we’d talk about life and politics well into the night. I was intrigued by his friends. One time Rohan invited a member of the Black Panthers to come and stay at our house.

Research suggests travel scams are on rise as experts advise doing some detective work to make sure holidays are real

Holidaymakers have been advised to carry out amateur detective work to ensure they do not book into fake accommodation this summer, as research showed a third of travellers had seen an increase in potential travel scams on social media.

Consumer experts have urged holidaymakers to do a reverse image search on photographs of holiday homes and check their locations on an online map to verify they are real.

Designed to mirror the stock market, they are an easy and cheap way to save. Here’s how to start investing in them

Tracker funds have been around for about half a century, providing investors with access to a range of assets without them having to make difficult and risky decisions.

Built to follow the fortunes of a given financial market index, trackers do not need management teams, which means they generally come with low charges. If you have a workplace pension, you probably already invested in one without realising it. If you want to start investing, you are likely to be directed towards a tracker fund.

A niche type of fraud is lucrative enough for criminals to set up fake websites with dodgy software to harvest your data

After holding them for a few years, you have decided it is time to cash in your cryptocurrency holdings. The problem is, it is so long since you set up the digital wallet which manages them on your laptop, you have forgotten the lengthy access code.

Stressed at the thought of losing thousands of pounds, you search and download a program which promises to recover the 24-word “seed phrase” which gives you access to your cypto assets.

A pair of debenture tickets changed hands this week for a sum far beyond the means of ordinary tennis fans

Like many of us, Marcos Ortega enters the Wimbledon public ticket ballot every year in the hope of seeing some championship tennis. In seven straight years of trying, however, he has never got lucky. So he was delighted – initially, at least – to learn there was a way to secure a ticket for every game played on Centre Court.

But Ortega’s hopeful delight quickly turned to anger when he discovered that it would cost him £293,000.

Holistic care for incurably ill people has to include discussions about death and dying – but getting there is hard

It could be her usual generosity or disquiet, subtly disguised, but she leads by asking about “the kids”. Mine, not hers.

The question from a patient who has known me for years is a reminder that goodwill in medicine goes both ways. I scroll to a photo of my daughter, flanked by her brothers.

British-born, older men among those most likely to have disease found only postmortem, say researchers

One person a week dies with undiagnosed and therefore untreated tuberculosis in England, a study has found.

British-born, older men were among those most likely to have TB diagnosed only after death, researchers said, suggesting healthcare workers could be overlooking the possibility of the disease in these patients.

The hotter it gets, the faster our bodies lose water. Obviously, we need to replace it – but is anything better than plain H₂O? And does timing matter? Here’s what the science says

Hydration is important. In temperatures like those we’re increasingly seeing in much of the world, sweating can be the only way for our bodies to cool down, and our thirst isn’t always the best indicator of how much water we’ve lost or need. The consequences of not being sufficiently hydrated as temperatures creep towards the 40s can be severe, and can kick in much faster than most people realise. The good news is that remembering to drink plenty of water at regular intervals throughout the day will be enough for most people to avoid the worst. But if you’d like to understand why dehydration is so dangerous, whether you really need extra electrolytes, or if a cup of tea really can cool you down, read on.

To start with, it’s helpful to understand that our bodies are producing heat – and therefore losing water – all the time. “All the cells in our body are constantly using fuel for energy for various different processes, whether that’s movement or just staying alive,” says Dr Lewis James, a lecturer in sport, exercise and health sciences at Loughborough University. “About 75 to 80% of the energy that we use appears as heat.” If we didn’t have any way of dissipating this heat, then even lying on the couch would see your body temperature rise about 1.3C in a single hour (already enough to make you noticeably feverish) – but of course, we do. Normally, we lose a decent amount of heat through a combination of convection and radiation: the blood vessels in our skin dilate, allowing the blood to be cooled by the outside air. The problem is that when the external temperature goes up, this process becomes less effective and eventually stops working altogether. At this point, our main way of losing heat is through sweating: our bodies produce tiny droplets of warm water mixed with trace minerals, which (usually) evaporate on contact with the air, drawing heat away from the skin in the process. And as we rely more on sweating, it’s increasingly important to replace the fluids our bodies are losing.

Why do scary movies thrill some viewers and send others running for the hills? Our writer gets to the bottom of his fear of the genre – with the assistance of Freud, clinical researchers and his six-year-old self

I am six years old, and I am watching a man turn into a werewolf. The film is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 comedy. I am staring up at our black-and-white TV fixated on the werewolf transformation unfolding in slow motion and I begin to scream so inconsolably that my parents must carry me upstairs to calm me down.

That night was the beginning of my lifelong fear of horror films and of the supernatural, of darkness and of being alone in a house.

This antioxidant may enhance the protection sunscreens provide, but it is no substitute for them

Sunscreen does two important jobs. It is largely used for its UVB protection benefits – blocking the rays that cause sunburn and are a major contributor to the development of skin cancer. But it also blocks UVA radiation, filtering out the rays that lead to signs of ageing.

Vitamin C does neither of these things, says Rosalind Simpson, a professor of dermatology at the University of Nottingham. That said, it is thought to help prevent sun damage in a different way.

Callum Turner wore one for three-day wedding to Dua Lipa, but the perennial favourite has never really gone away

If Dua Lipa’s Chanel wedding dress was among the most anticipated fashion moments this summer, her new husband Callum Turner’s wardrobe is proving just as influential. But forget the bespoke Louis Vuitton morning suit – it’s all about his polo shirts, which he wore in Palermo during the couple’s lengthy nuptials this month.

Turner’s polo of choice is a £75 terrycloth version by the French brand Octobre Editions, but he is far from the first to champion the preppy top that spans celebrity, sport and politics alike. During England’s first game at the World Cup against Croatia, the team’s manager, Thomas Tuchel, wore a merino wool polo shirt from Marks & Spencer. Pundits watching World Cup games – including Gary Neville and Patrick Vieira – were also wearing polos. For their post-match assessment of the Netherlands v Japan match, Roy Keane, Ange Postecoglou and Neville each wore a polo shirt in mint green, cream and beige respectively. And just last weekend, Andy Burnham appeared shortly after his Makerfield byelection win wearing a blue polo shirt with jeans and Birkenstocks.

As Andy Burnham stuck to his ‘cool dad’ look while the UK sweltered, many in the Paris fashion pack did the same

For many, dressing for an extreme heatwave means wearing as little as possible. But for some men, not even record-breaking temperatures can dissuade them from pulling on their favourite pair of jeans.

This week as temperatures in the UK rose sharply on the back of the climate crisis, Andy Burnham stuck to his tried and tested “cool dad” combination of dark jeans with a dark blue (not black as he pointed out to Kemi Badenoch) T-shirt as he made his way to London to be sworn in as MP for Makerfield.

Brollies are becoming year-round must-haves, as designers from Burberry to Blunt cater to people ducking out of the sun

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A bottle of water and a handheld fan are regularly deployed to keep cool while out and about in hot weather. With temperatures reaching record levels for June, though, a new heatwave accessory has emerged: the sunbrella.

On high streets around the country, people wielding umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun have become a common sight. On Thursday, as the Austrian Grand Prix declared a heat hazard, Lewis Hamilton was spotted in the paddock holding a Ferrari red umbrella that matched his race suit. And they’re popping up on catwalks, too. At the Dior show during Paris fashion week on Wednesday, guests including the actors James Marsden and Mike Faist were handed large cream umbrellas to help ease their discomfort as temperatures hit 38C.

A landscape of forbidding peaks west of Bilbao plays host to an improbable world full of wild flowers, animals and resilient cheesemakers

Halfway across the first glacial depression, I leave the footpath to stand on a snow patch, disturbing a spider that runs off across the frozen crystals. A few yards farther along, the mountainside is awash with colour: tiny Alpine flowers alive with bees and crickets in a world surrounded by jagged peaks. A pair of chamois watch from a crag, then clatter off up an almost vertical face. Having stopped walking, I’m cooling down fast and put on a jacket. I am in Spain, I tell myself, during a European heatwave.

When I tear myself away from the wildlife, my hiking group are distant dots on a path that is snaking up a wall of rock. This is the Picos de Europa mountain range in northern Spain, a cluster of peaks rising to more than 2,500m and famed for the steepness of its slopes. I set off in pursuit, catching up with the group as they scramble over a ridge to find an unexpected view: a gun turret from a second world war aircraft carrier that is now a mountain refuge hut. (Cabin Verónica was cut from the USS Pulau in 1961 at a Bilbao breakers’ yard and dragged up here by mule.)

These traditional restaurants are the culinary backbone of this gastronomic capital, but finding the real deal means tackling offal – and red wine – for breakfast

I first went to a bouchon as a 20-year-old Erasmus student. I’d accidentally ended up spending a semester of my year abroad in the Auvergne countryside, which meant every weekend I’d thumb a ride to the nearest big city – Lyon. I didn’t know much about Lyon, except that it was famous for its food – in particular the hearty fare served up at these traditional restaurants with their red gingham tablecloths and chalkboard menus. So when I found myself eating stringy, overpriced beef muscle that cost more than my night at a hostel, I wondered what the hype was about.

But after nearly five years living in the city, I’ve now learned how to avoid the tourist traps (which largely line Vieux Lyon between souvenir shops selling fridge magnets and sweet shops). Historically, most bouchons weren’t in Lyon’s old town anyway, writes Yves Rouèche in Histoire(s) De La Gastronomie Lyonnaise, but in the neighbourhoods of Vaise, Croix-Rousse and La Guillotière, the gateways to the city in the Renaissance period where merchants and travellers stopped for the night.

From cliffside views of Lake Garda to post-hike saunas in Sweden, you share your most memorable walking trips

• Tell us about a cooler European coast – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

If you have a head for heights, then you can “walk with the gods” on the Sentiero degli Dei. It’s cut into the vertiginous hillside high above the Amalfi coast, offering heavenly views all the way to Capri and beyond. Ten breathtaking kilometres later, you’ll rejoin the earthly hordes of Instagrammers in the undeniably beautiful but crowded Positano. A super-convenient combined bus and ferry ticket from Travelmar takes you from any of the coastal towns to the start of the walk, in the lovely hamlet of Bomerano, in Agerola, and from Positano back to your base.
Brian

With Cambridge South about to welcome its first passengers, it’s an ideal time to explore some of the university city’s lesser-known treasures on foot or by public transport

Flat fields of poppies and ox-eye daisies stretch out to a wide horizon. There are butterflies, vetches, salad burnet. Skylarks sing overhead and a cuckoo calls from the trees near the river. Legend has it that the poet Lord Byron swam here as a Cambridge undergraduate and, 20 years later, Charles Darwin surveyed its beetles. Heading through flowering meadows towards a nature reserve known as Byron’s Pool, I’ve walked a mile from the new £250m Cambridge South station.

Opening to passengers on 28 June, Cambridge South will be the first Great British Railways-branded station. The towering Biomedical Campus next door is Europe’s biggest medical research facility, with about 40,000 visitors a day. The station itself, with its 1,000 cycle-parking spaces, living roof and solar panels, feels like a model for sustainable transport.

Inhaling, I lined up an arrow with trembling hands, pulled back the string and launched it

• Read more from the My rookie era series here

I’ve always secretly believed I might be incredible with a bow and arrow.

Not because I have great aim, or good hand-eye coordination or an aptitude for sport, but because I would really, really like for it to be true.

Mike Bell was 53 when he got the diagnosis that changed his life – and 61 when he learned it was wrong. He felt relieved, but also totally adrift

When he was 61, Mike Bell, who had spent eight years living with a Parkinson’s diagnosis, saw a new consultant. Though he still had pains, tingling, tremors and skin problems, Bell had stopped taking his prescribed medication and his symptoms had not worsened. Further brain scans were arranged – “everything, in every possible position” – after which Bell was “de-diagnosed”.

He still felt unwell, with unexplained pains, but he didn’t have Parkinson’s. In that moment, he says, he “lost his roadmap”, his sense of community with other people he had met with the same illness and his work campaigning for better understanding of the condition.

Camera, wifi and design updates bring welcome upgrades to Ring’s top model in wired or battery flavour

Ring’s recent revamp of its popular video doorbells with a more modern design is led by the top-of-the-line Video Doorbell Pro 3, which gains much-needed upgrades with a 4K camera and better wifi plus new interesting AI features.

The new doorbells are sleeker but keep the unmistakable two-tone Ring colour scheme, button, logo and ringtone. Battery models start at £80 or equivalent, with the top model costing £219.99 (€249.99/$249.99/A$329.99) with either a battery or wired, which is roughly in line with the competition.

Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: With summer’s great silence coming, we must enjoy the birdsong while we can – as I have done with my local conifer crooner

I have two summer earworms right now. The first is O Sole Mio, the jingle of our local ice-cream van, the second is a particular phrase that our resident blackbird keeps singing. Four notes, moving down the scale but ending slightly on the minor: that’s his party piece, delivered after a jazzy performance that includes dozens of other motifs. He likes to bellow it from the tallest tip of the conifer tree that sways over the road, and I can’t stop whistling it.

He will have developed this refrain over years, and like all musicians, he will have started off shakily. If I didn’t notice it last season, it was probably because he was still a shy apprentice, his song unfinished as he practised quietly to work out his preferred combination of notes.

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

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

She was a sex-positive star in the 80s and 90s who became an ‘accidental activist’ and her life is explored in a HBO documentary produced by Sarah Jessica Parker

Robin Byrd has no doubt about where the archive of her life should end up. “I think it should be in the Smithsonian,” she said. “I like to think big.”

But is such thinking “big” or just plain daft? After all, we’re talking about Robin Byrd, the self-described “orgy queen” who’s best known for promoting the work of strippers and porn stars on the no-budget, public access TV show she ran in the 80s and 90s that looked like it was shot by someone on mushrooms who was suffering from an advanced case of glaucoma.

Many thousands of children live with at least one parent working abroad in what is one of the EU’s poorest countries

Maria’s day runs differently to those of most 11-year-olds. By the time other children in her home town of Târgoviște are still waking up, she’s making sure her grandmother takes her morning pills.

After school, before she starts homework, she helps with cooking and cleaning, and gives her grandmother her treatment again. When her grandmother needs to see a doctor – sometimes across town, sometimes a two-hour bus ride to Bucharest – Maria* is the one who takes her.

While it can transform firms for better or worse, the use of private equity in essential services is attracting scrutiny. Here we examine some of its more contentious elements in the UK veterinary sector

Private equity could be the two most controversial words in business. For its supporters, it can bring investment, expertise and efficiency to a company. For critics, it is a one way ticket to profiteering, cutting costs and losing staff.

The arguments over private equity are particularly fierce when it is used in the public sector, particularly the NHS.

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

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

There was the shock 0-0 draw with Spain in their tournament debut. Then on Sunday, there was another when they drew 2-2 with two-time champions Uruguay in Miami. After drawing 0-0 with Saudi Arabia in Houston, they have reached the round of 32.

We’d like to hear from people in the UK about their experiences of trying to buy or sell a flat in recent months. Have there been any issues?

Getting on the property ladder is an achievement in Britain but for some flat-owners the home-ownership dream has turned sour.

High service charges, fire safety issues, and onerous leasehold conditions are among the issues that have affected flat valuations over the past decade. There are reports of owners, particularly in London, currently selling at a loss.

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

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

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

How did you cope? What do you remember of that period of hot weather? Tell us and share your pictures

The record temperature for June set in Hampshire in 1976 is expected to be surpassed during this current UK heatwave.

The highest June temperature on record of 35.6C was set on 29 June 1957 in London. This was then equalled on 28 June 1976 in Southampton during that year’s heatwave.

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