Are you feeling hungry? If not, you will be after reading about the world’s most mouth-watering, life-changing sandwiches of all time ...

A crab stick and taramasalata baguette
I was young and carefree, living in Barons Court, west London, in the mid-90s. Chains weren’t a thing, and delis all had sandwich fillings laid out in silver dishes of a uniform, surgical shape, inviting adventure. Russian salad and ham? Sure, why not. The price structure was weird: sometimes everything was the same, and other times you’d accidentally hit a premium ingredient and your sandwich would be £3.50. That’s how I hit on the crab stick and taramasalata baguette, after a financial catastrophe involving actual crab. Crab sticks taste nothing like crab. They are, in fact, more delicious. So much better. And everything so pink. My life was like a fairytale. Zoe Williams

A vegetarian Christmas focaccia
Christmas sandwiches can be wildly underwhelming for veggies – but I’m still craving Glasgow cafe Boca’s offering: salty focaccia, stuffed to the brim with mushroom and chestnut roast, apricot glazed carrots and parsnips, cranberry and walnut agrodolce, sprout slaw and the option to add hefty slices of brie – which, of course, I did. Indulgent, Christmassy, and not a “festive falafel” in sight. Leah Harper

As the pioneering BalletBoyz company celebrates its 25th anniversary and Billy Elliott returns to the stage, the male dance landscape appears transformed from where it was at the turn of the century. But a certain macho dismissiveness remains …

“We always thought BalletBoyz was a really stupid name. We wanted not to be BalletBoyz.” says William Trevitt, founder of the company called, guess what, BalletBoyz. It was the BBC that landed them with that tag, when then-Royal Ballet dancers Trevitt and Michael Nunn made a cheeky and revealing backstage documentary at London’s Royal Opera House. Their knockabout, laddish charm won them fans, and when they went on to found their own company, first the two of them, later expanded to 10 men, the name stuck. It does carry a slight hint of the Chippendales about it. “We had a theatre manager coming and saying: ‘Could you ask the dancers to take their shirts off in the second act?’” remembers Trevitt. Which may say something about the expectations of a group of men dancing.

BalletBoyz is heading out on tour this month to celebrate its 25th anniversary. In those two-and-a-half decades, Nunn and Trevitt have done a lot for the image of men dancing (they have had women in their shows over the years, too, it must be said). It was never their intention to make a statement, it was always just about great dance, but still, here were two straight men who danced together – and later a whole company of young men – and commissioned a new repertoire that wasn’t about romantic partnering, but “two matching energies and exploring the balance between them”, as Trevitt puts it.

Around the same time Nunn and Trevitt were making their video diaries, another iconic male dancer spun into view. The film Billy Elliot came out in 2000, the story of the miner’s son who wanted to dance, and by the moving final scene was leaping into choreographer Matthew Bourne’s pioneering Swan Lake with its cast of all-male swans. The film was turned into a multi-award-winning musical that’s still going strong, with a new national tour opening this autumn.

It seemed like a moment where the image and profile of male dancers was changing – the so-called “Billy Elliot effect” – with rumours that one year more boys than girls auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. It feels as though in 2026 we’re living in a culturally different time to the turn of the millennium, especially when it comes to expectations of gender, so have attitudes to boys and men dancing completely changed?

“It’s cool to dance now, isn’t it,” says Layton Williams, who was the ninth Billy Elliot on stage, and more recently a runner-up on Strictly with pro partner Nikita Kuzmin. “My nephew is dancing on TikTok with his mates, and he’s a proper lad.”

His first story collection, Reward System, was a cult hit. Now comes a novel that’s a bleakly funny appraisal of millennial relationships, technology and ennui. He talks about love, precarity and being called the ‘voice of a generation’

Jem Calder’s writing career had a fairytale start. Sally Rooney emailed him, impressed with a short story he’d submitted to the literary magazine she was editing soon after Conversations with Friends came out. It was the first story he’d ever completed. Calder was already “a huge fan” of Rooney’s, so the whole thing was surreal, he tells me. “I can’t really imagine what could top that, to be honest.”

That story ultimately ended up in Reward System, Calder’s 2022 collection of six interconnected tales following a cast of sad young things living in an unnamed city. It was hailed as a book of the year; a review in this paper placed Calder among “the most talented young writers of fiction at work today”. Now, his debut novel, I Want You to Be Happy, picks up some of the themes of the first book: the trials of modern love, millennial ennui, consumer culture, technology, political and ecological doom. And it’s already got some famous fans: David Szalay has sung its praises, while Andrew O’Hagan says Calder is his “new favourite writer”.

When Leah and I planned a family, we wanted to be as mutual as possible. Could reciprocal IVF – Leah carrying an embryo made from my egg – be the way forward?

Late last year, it became my friend’s favourite party trick. “Rosa’s going to have a baby next week,” she’d say to a group of people who didn’t know me. I’d watch their faces as they tried to inconspicuously scan my body, detecting no sign of a bump. “Congratulations!” they’d say, smiles tight, clearly wondering what other delusions I might have up my sleeve.

I was, however, about to have a baby. At daybreak on a warm October day, our beautiful, 6lb 10oz, 19.5in‑long baby girl was born; skin pink and taut, scream wet and bright. I held my wife’s hand and head as our daughter emerged from her body – a daughter who had initially come from me.

East Midlands electric car club helps residents and cuts emissions – but the need for a volunteer-led scheme reflects a much wider problem

In the aftermath of the Covid pandemic Miriam Stoate, a regenerative farmer from rural Leicestershire, noticed that too many people in her small village in England’s East Midlands were struggling to get around.

Although there were plenty of cars parked in Tilton, too often she found some of the village’s residents did not have access to one when they really needed it.

US leader enters talks with superpower rival from vulnerable position, but will be hoping for economic wins amid turbulent backdrop

If all goes to plan over the next few days – and that is a big if – Donald Trump will arrive in Beijing on Wednesday for a highly anticipated summit with Xi Jinping, China’s leader.

The trip will mark the first time a US president has visited China in nearly a decade. The last visit was also made by Trump, during his first term, in 2017.

Catherine West issues ultimatum for the PM as ex-minister Josh Simons joins calls for prime minister to quit

At the start of her programme Laura Kuenssberg addressed Catherine West and Bridget Phillipson who were sitting waiting for the main interviews.

Kuenssberg told West she wanted a cabinet minister to challenge Keir Starmer. She said she was sitting next to one of them. What was her message to her?

Well, there’s nothing stopping Bridget from standing. Why are all the men better than the women? We do need some senior women to step forward and to challenge for what is going to be a really difficult two and a half years between now and the general election, and also to take us into that second term.

I love you dearly, Catherine, but I just disagree on this one.

Spanish passengers taken off MV Hondius by medical teams in hazmat suits after being screened for the infection

• Cruise ship hantavirus outbreak – latest updates

An evacuation has begun of passengers onboard a cruise ship at the centre of a deadly outbreak of hantavirus.

Spanish passengers wearing blue plastic ponchos and hair coverings were taken off the vessel by medical teams in hazmat suits on Sunday morning after being screened for the infection.

Writing by Narges Mohammadi, arrested 14 times for activism, offers a disturbing insight into treatment

In an exclusive extract of writing smuggled from prison in Iran, the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has described the “torture” of solitary confinement, and her systematic medical neglect by the prison system.

The writing from the past decade will be part of a soon to be published memoir that gives a rare and alarming insight into the treatment of Mohammadi, who is in critical condition. It details beatings, constant interrogations, deprivation of medical care and long stretches in solitary confinement during her numerous imprisonments.

Revolutionary Guards issue warning as Trump awaits Iran’s response to Washington’s latest proposal for peace deal

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have threatened to target US sites in the Middle East if its tankers come under fire, Iranian media reported on Saturday, as Washington was left waiting for Tehran’s response to its latest negotiating position.

“Any attack on Iranian tankers and commercial vessels will result in a heavy attack on one of the American centres in the region and enemy ships,” the force said, a day after US strikes on two Iranian tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

Russian leader says he would be willing to negotiate, as drone attacks continue after scaled-back Moscow parade

Vladimir Putin has said he thinks the Ukraine war is winding down, in remarks that came a few hours after he had vowed to defeat Ukraine at Moscow’s most scaled-back Victory Day parade in years.

“I think that the matter is coming to an end,” Putin said of Europe’s deadliest conflict since the second world war. He said he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe, and that his preferred negotiating partner would be Germany’s former chancellor Gerhard Schröder – a choice likely to be met with skepticism in Ukraine and the EU.

Open letter criticising invitation to Nigel Farage warns of association with ‘racism and inflammatory rhetoric’

Political leaders have been invited to a rally opposing antisemitism on Sunday, with British Jews hoping the “silent majority” will join them for a “million mensch march” across central London.

The prime minister, Keir Starmer, is considering attending the Standing Strong: Extinguish Antisemitism rally, which is backed by more than 30 Jewish groups, while the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is expected to speak.

African archipelago hopes startups, digital infrastructure and diaspora investment can transform its economy

For much of its history since its discovery by the Portuguese in the mid-15th century, the Cape Verde archipelago off the coast of west Africa served as a hub of the international slave trade, with Africans forcibly transported to marketplaces before being distributed across the Americas and Europe.

Now, almost 150 years since slavery was abolished in Cape Verde, and just over 50 years since independence from Portugal, Pedro Fernandes Lopes wants the country to become a beacon for the free movement of human and financial capital across the African diaspora.

Ceremony organisers taking event procedures ‘extremely seriously’ after broadcast of racial slur in February

Usually the most scrutiny at the glittering Bafta TV Awards is reserved for the stars’ outfits on the red carpet and the winners’ acceptance speeches.

But this Sunday those behind the show will be watching with bated breath and taking the event “extremely seriously” after changes were made to how TV coverage of Bafta’s awards ceremonies is handled after the broadcast of racially offensive words during February’s Bafta film awards.

⚽ Scottish Premiership news from the 12pm BST kick-off
⚽ Live scores | Motherwell 1-1 Hearts | And email Billy

“We’ll fight it out until the end,” reads a banner among the Green Brigade in the north curve of Celtic Park. You’ll never walk alone rings out.

Rangers’ Connor Barron gets us going.

Replacing a leader is difficult, as Jeremy Corbyn proved – but MPs can apply pressure, publicly or privately

Many Labour MPs believe Keir Starmer will not survive as Labour leader for long enough to fight the next election. What they cannot agree on, however – even after a disastrous set of results in this week’s elections – is how his departure might come about.

The Labour rulebook makes it notoriously difficult to unseat a party leader: none has been formally ejected in the postwar period, though some, including Tony Blair, have resigned under pressure from their own MPs.

Focus group sceptical that replacing Keir Starmer would improve party’s fortunes, with some drawn to Reform or the Greens

• UK politics live – latest updates

As Keir Starmer faces the prospect of a leadership challenge, former Labour voters in a Birmingham constituency were last week feeling nervous about what could come next.

A month ago, the group from Birmingham Yardley had very little good to say about the prime minister, comparing him to a rat or a donkey. They said they felt he had let them down.

From devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales to councils and mayoralties in England, find out what happened in your area

• Elections mapped: how Labour lost ground in different directions

Keir Starmer’s party lost out to Reform and the Greens, with no respite in Scotland, Wales or England. These maps show the scale of the historic results

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

Labour has suffered heavy losses across England, Scotland and Wales, losing ground to opponents on the left and the right in a fragmented political system.

The graphics below show where Labour’s losses were most severe, and how the electoral landscape has changed as a result.

Sentenced to 44 years in prison for her political activism, she is now critically ill and her family warn she may soon die in custody. In this exclusive excerpt from her writings, smuggled out of prison at immense risk, Mohammadi describes the horror of her incarceration

The cell had no ventilation. At the top of the door, at the highest point, there was a window set close to the ceiling, covered with a perforated metal sheet. The tiny holes in the sheet would allow the thinnest strands of sunlight to promise morning, and as the sun’s golden rays disappeared, they would signal the coming of night.

The most delusional element of solitary confinement is time itself. The hands of the clock are gone; day and night pass without measure. Time becomes nothing but a narrow beam of light slipping through the small holes in a metal sheet. I didn’t dare take an afternoon nap, because I would lose my grip on time entirely. In the outside world, such a nap might last only minutes – but inside the cell, within the confines of my shackled mind, it felt as though years had passed. When I woke up, I didn’t know if it was still today, if I had slipped back into yesterday, or if I had already arrived at tomorrow.

With Trump wavering on Nato and war in Ukraine, Europe is scrambling to spend billions on weapons such as drones

In a small workshop in England’s East Midlands, engineers at the British startup Skycutter are designing weapons for Ukraine. A row of 3D printers make the fuselage for interceptor drones, while parts such as motors and navigation chips are slotted together by hand. The same process happens hundreds of thousands of times a month in partner Ukrainian factories.

The swarms of cheap, deadly and often autonomous drones deployed in that war have already changed combat completely. Troops far behind the frontline must move constantly to avoid attack from the air, travelling along netted tunnels and landscapes crisscrossed by fibre optic cables used to steer drones past radio jamming. Cities are terrorised by guided missiles that are cheaper and therefore more widely used than those that came before.

They have opposite views on the flying of the union jack, but could they agree on the need for safe and legal asylum routes into the UK?

Maxine, 62, Barnsley

Occupation Retail sales assistant

Social media influencers and booming men’s health companies are pushing the hormone as an answer to all ills. But is ‘low T’ really problematic – or something created to sell men a cure to a problem they don’t have?

A s a young man, Nick Dooley never thought about his hormones. He always considered himself “quite an outgoing, confident, chatty person”. Around the time he turned 30, however, Dooley began putting on weight and struggling with anxiety, “just slowly becoming a shell of my former self”, he says. By 38, he weighed 22st (140kg) and had a range of health issues. “I spent most of my life sat in front of a TV, doing nothing, with zero motivation, and from how I was in my 20s, that wasn’t me. I knew something wasn’t right.”

In 2024, Dooley had a private medical exam, which flagged he had fatty liver disease and was producing low levels of testosterone. “It wasn’t something I’d ever really heard of,” he says. “So I started down a Reddit rabbit hole.” An NHS doctor told him his blood testosterone levels, at 11.2 nmol a litre, were “within range” (although guidance differs between trusts, NHS England generally considers between 8 and 30 nmol/L normal) and offered him antidepressants. “I knew that wasn’t going to fix me,” he says. Instead, Dooley signed up with Manual, an online men’s health company. After two quick blood tests and a virtual consultation, Manual, which has since rebranded as Voy, started him on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT).

A staggering 44% of human languages are endangered – with culture, tradition and whole ways of understanding the world at stake

We are lucky to know anything at all about the Ubykh language. In the 1800s, tens of thousands of people spoke it on the Black Sea coast. When Russia conquered the region, the Ubykhs resisted until they were forced into exile in the Ottoman empire. Transported thousands of miles by a traumatised community now scattered across Turkey, Ubykh survived until 1992 when its last fluent speaker died. It was one of at least 244 languages that has become extinct since 1950, and soon – unless anything changes – my grandmother’s language will have joined them.

Over the next 40 years, language loss has been predicted to triple without intervention. Yet we hear about language endangerment far less often than we hear about other wounding losses to our planet’s diversity or history. Deforestation in Costa Rica is being reversed following the realisation of the enormous natural and scientific resource that may disappear with its trees. International archaeologists rallied to preserve and restore ancient remains in Syria following the destruction wreaked by Islamic State. But the efforts of those labouring to document or preserve minority languages are rarely celebrated.

It won’t win any plaudits from Japanese purists, but there’s still much to admire here

No spoilers, but I knew even before I’d reached for my chopsticks that Mitsu would be a vast improvement on its predecessor, because it has taken the place of Nobu Shoreditch in the under-gusset of the Aethos hotel, a Swiss-owned “lifestyle hospitality brand”, in east London. Nobu was gargantuan, moodily lit (that is, pitch black), woundingly expensive and terrifically hard to book, despite having something like 797 seats; it was also one of the most soulless London restaurants of the past 25 years. Nobu Shoreditch felt symbolic: it was where all the raffish hope of the 1990s YBA crowd and the early noughties electroclash heads went to die.

But that was then, and now, in 2026, the Aethos crew has deftly brightened and lightened the mood of the room, making it actually cosy and adding a twinkly central bar; there’s an open robata kitchen and roomy booths, as well as a pretty Japanese garden. Mitsu calls itself an izakaya, which is what European restaurateurs always say when they mean the Japanese-influenced food isn’t too po-faced and you can get really tipsy on sake.

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

Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson star in a farmyard mystery, while the spirited bonkbuster returns for a smutty second outing

The Sheep Detectives
Out now
Few can claim a writing career as varied as Craig Mazin, creator of TV’s Chernobyl, co-writer of several Scary Movie and The Hangover films, and co-creator of The Last of Us. Here, he turns his hand to a comedy-mystery about sheep, starring Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson. Adapted from a novel by Leonie Swann.

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

Lucy Punch’s middle-class antihero is back, and one half of the Knife presents an album of dazzlingly inventive psychedelia. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

⚽ News, discussion and more before a huge day of action
⚽ Today’s fixtures | Tables | Follow on Bluesky | Email us

Elsewhere yesterday, Sunderland held Manchester United to a 0-0 draw at the Stadium of Light.

Arne Slot’s decision to bring off Rio Ngumoha for Alexander Isak against Chelsea was not well-received by fans, but the head coach insisted that he only did it because the 17-year-old winger had been suffering from cramp.

Over-by-over reports from the action at Durham
County cricket: day three – live | And mail James

4th over: New Zealand 11-1 (Plimmer 3, A Kerr 2) Plimmer clips a single into the leg side and Kerr opens her account with a flick off an in-swinger into the leg side. All eyes on England’s fielding, that is an area that Charlotte Edwards has really been drilling them on to improve, dropped catches and sluggish efforts were becoming all too common sight in the years preceding.

3rd over: New Zealand 8-1 (Plimmer 2, A Kerr 0) Georgia Plimmer works a single down to deep third to bring Kerr on strike to Lauren Bell. It’s a top over from the lissom limbed seamer, she keeps Kerr honest for three dots.

Updates on day three from the latest round of games
England v New Zealand – live | Mail Tanya or post BTL

Harry Duke has a great head of blond hair, very Tudor prince bob. Four slips as Harris charges in to Jones.

Jones seems to have decided that attack is the way forward. His toes are twitching to come forward to Higgins.

• Yates sustained abrasions and laceration to his left ear

• Jay Vine and Marc Soler still under medical observation

The British rider Adam Yates has been pulled out of the Giro d’Italia after sustaining a concussion following a crash on stage two.

The 33-year-old sustained abrasions and a laceration to his left ear during an incident involving almost 30 riders on Saturday’s rain-soaked 221km route from Burgas to Veliko Tarnovo in Bulgaria.

This report will update after stage three

• Dubois recovers from knockdown in opening seconds

• Wardley knocks him down again but stopped in 11th

Daniel Dubois completed his latest resurgence with brutal efficiency when he became the WBO world heavyweight champion after stopping Fabio Wardley early in the 11th round of a dramatic and blood-soaked contest. Howard Foster, whose pale blue shirt had turned crimson as if he worked in an abattoir rather than in a boxing ring as a referee, jumped between the courageous fighters to rescue Wardley 28 seconds into the penultimate round.

It was a merciful stoppage because the fallen champion, with his face a mask of blood pouring from his badly cut and broken nose, had been examined twice before by the ringside doctor. Both fighters emerged with enormous credit after an epic battle. Dubois was knocked down twice in the fight, and dropped for the first time 10 seconds after the opening bell, but he came back with commendable resolve. He also proved he was the superior technician as, working behind his thunderous jab, Dubois sank one blow after another into the steadily sagging figure of Wardley. But the 31-year-old from Ipswich, who suffered the first loss of his career, simply refused to surrender or even go down at any point during this riveting battle.

Aston Villa and Crystal Palace’s runs to European finals are historic achievements, but symptomatic of a worrying trend

There will be no doubting Unai Emery’s supremacy in the Europa League if he is reacquainted with the trophy in Istanbul this month. A fifth title would add to the Aston Villa manager’s legend and it would show he can do it with an English club. The latter achievement, though, may be diminished in value. A greater concern lies in the way that Premier League clubs, gradually but discernibly, are dominating Europe’s smaller competitions in a way Uefa surely could never have intended.

Villa will be the eighth English finalists from the last 22 teams to reach the Europa League’s showpiece. Should they win, it would be the first time since the first two years of the Uefa Cup, its predecessor with the same trophy, that sides from England have won the secondary tournament in consecutive seasons. They would build on Tottenham’s haphazard triumph of last May and while neither consistency nor relative excellence should be sniffed at their progress contributes to a concerning broader trend.

The eggheads can argue the head coach is merely an interchangeable cog in a team’s fortunes – but emotion counts in an ever-changing game

Your manager has fallen out with the sporting director and results have gone awry, so you replace him. Easily done, it happens. But then it turns out that the new manager could not be more ill-suited to the squad, results go awry and so you replace him.

A bad leader would hesitate and hope things worked out, but you are ruthless and decisive and turn to a manager who was once a youth player at the club and has some anecdotes about the old days. But it turns out some people think his methods are old‑fashioned and results go awry, so you replace him.

• Sparta keeper Surovcik says he will pursue legal action

• Slavia chair calls incident in derby ‘disgrace’

The derby between Slavia Prague and Sparta Prague was abandoned on Saturday after hundreds of home fans stormed the pitch in the closing minutes, when Slavia were leading 3-2 at their Fortuna Stadium and seconds away from clinching the Czech league title.

Slavia supporters breached security barriers during stoppage time and flooded the field, with some carrying lit flares and running toward the visiting section. Pyrotechnics were thrown into the stands as players from both teams attempted to leave the pitch.

• Teenager had performed well in 1-1 draw with Chelsea

• Coach: ‘He said that was enough … he was playing well’

Arne Slot said he understood the boos that greeted Liverpool’s draw with Chelsea and his decision to substitute Rio Ngumoha but remains “100% convinced” he can win back the Anfield crowd next season.

Anfield’s frustrations at an underwhelming season came to the surface as Liverpool were held 1-1 by a Chelsea team that had lost six Premier League matches in a row and conceded 11 goals in their three previous away games.

The US president will be counting on China to influence Iran and help him out of his latest mess. But the price may be high – including for Taiwan

Like an out-of-control wrecking ball, swinging wildly back and forth, Donald Trump smashes up the international order without much thought for the consequences. Lacking coherent strategies, workable plans or consistent aims, he power-trips erratically from one fragile region, tense warzone and complex geopolitical situation to another, leaving misery, confusion and rubble in his wake. Typically, he claims a bogus victory, demands that others repair the damage and pick up the tab, then looks around for something new to break.

The president will bulldoze into another international minefield this week – the fraught standoff between China and Taiwan – when he travels to Beijing for a two-day summit with President Xi Jinping. After a string of humiliating policy implosions over Ukraine, Gaza, Nato, Greenland, and now Iran and Lebanon, needy Trump craves a diplomatic success to flaunt at home. But his hopes of vote-winning trade pacts are overshadowed by his latest war of choice. He needs Xi’s promise not to arm Iran if all-out fighting resumes – and Xi’s help keeping the strait of Hormuz open as part of a mooted framework peace deal.

Are you late so often that it’s become your entire personality? Just know this: you are the worst

No matter the rumours, no matter the truth, Hollywood convention dictates that all actors describe whatever cast they’ve been part of as “one big happy family”. This rule being broken, and by a true legend – albeit 33 years later – means something serious must have taken place. Which it did.

In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Meryl Streep has disclosed that she had “beef” with her Death Becomes Her co-star Goldie Hawn because she was always late for filming. “She had a red convertible, I remember, and she’d drive herself to set. She had her hair all … ‘Oh gosh, sorry!’ And everybody thought: ‘Oh, she’s so cute.’”

The group’s latest triumph won over the Department for Business and Trade, now it is eyeing private care providers and supermarkets

A paragon of the kind of people-powered progress that feels all the more necessary in divisive times, the Living Wage campaign, is celebrating its25th anniversary this year.

Born out of Telco (The East London Citizens’ Organisation), which ultimately became the nationwide group Citizens UK, the campaign has always involved communities working together, to press for social and economic change.

My activist group is about 80% women. Where did all the men go – and how can we get them back?

In Donald Trump’s first term, my Brooklyn-based activist group had the peculiar dynamic of being started by two men while being composed of about 65% women. Since November 2024, our group has doubled in size, and the gender imbalance has tipped even further: we are now about 80% women.

Almost 18 months into Trump’s second term, it is abundantly clear that the appetite for anti-Trump, pro-democracy activism has not dimmed at all. And yet, there is a substantial portion of the populace that, in my experience as an activist, seems to have lost its fervor for the fight.

A supreme court decision will determine whether the cruel, unconstitutional execution of people with intellectual disability becomes even more prevalent

The supreme court will soon rule on Hamm v Smith, an Alabama death penalty case that could significantly increase the number of people with intellectual disability who are executed. In this case, Alabama is fighting to execute a man named Joseph Smith. Smith’s five IQ scores – 72, 74, 74, 75 and 78 – all fall around the bottom fifth percentile of the population.

Based on these IQ tests, which measure learning, reasoning and problem-solving, and Smith’s adaptive behaviors, which include the social and practical skills that Smith uses to navigate everyday life, a federal court determined that Smith is intellectually disabled. Because the supreme court held in its landmark 2002 Atkins ruling that executing anyone with an intellectual disability violates the constitution, Alabama cannot execute Smith.

She delights in pretty dresses and homegrown roses. I am the boisterous daughter who despises rules. Despite all the differences, our bond is strong

Among the myriad things I doubt my mother realises reminds me of her is the embroidered coat hanger.

The hangers with the delicate, lace cloth, designed to protect. The ones handmade with personal touches no global chain would bother with because, just like a lifetime of maternal love, if you are lucky, it is sewn with the same kind of slow, attentive care.

We used to have the back and forth of actual conversation. Now we have phones filled with our friends’ rambling soliloquies

The message I most dread receiving on WhatsApp isn’t “Call me” or “I can’t believe what you did last night”. It’s “I’m just going to vn you, it’ll be easier”. I roll my eyes as I fish my grubby headphones out of my bag to listen to yet another voice note.

Voice notes were fun when WhatsApp introduced them in 2013, but what was once a novelty has become too many people’s go-to method of communication. We are now faced with what feels to me like a voice note epidemic. Side effects may include the cheapening of conversation and a startling increase in narcissism.

Annabel Martin is a lifestyle and culture writer

Spirit Airlines helped turn flying into a fee-based nightmare. Now it’s gone, and fuel prices are soaring

Forgive me for not mourning last week’s demise of Spirit Airlines, the company responsible for making flying absolutely terrible. Due to rising expenses and billions of dollars in debt, Spirit shut down abruptly last Saturday, stranding thousands of customers who were unaware that an entire business meant to transport them through the sky was about to shutter for good.

Spirit was struggling for years, but it all got so much worse thanks to the soaring cost of jet fuel caused by the war in Iran and the crisis in the strait of Hormuz that halted the shipment of oil. It was bad enough being the country’s most ridiculed mode of conveyance outside of the Segway. But now it costs even more to suck that badly.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Sir Keir Starmer faces a deepening crisis of authority as election losses suggest disappointment with Labour has already curdled into cynicism

If you are Sir Keir Starmer, the results of the local and devolved elections make for grim reading. Thursday’s ballot gave almost two-thirds of Britain’s electorate the chance to vote. Fragmentation is no longer the future of British politics. In many places it is its present. After a quarter-century in which Labour and the Conservatives dominated electoral life, both parties suffered heavy losses in their traditional strongholds. Politics since the turn of the century has been upended: Reform UK seized the Tory bastion of Essex, home territory for Kemi Badenoch; the Greens wrested mayoral power in London’s Hackney and Lewisham from Labour; and Plaid Cymru routed Labour in Wales’ Senedd. This looked like more than the familiar midterm backlash, whatever the party in power. Clearly Sir Keir was on the ballot paper – and was roundly rejected by the voters.

The question is whether the prime minister is listening to the electorate – or hearing what suits him. Many voters appear unconvinced that the government represents a meaningful break from the Conservatives. The prime minister said that people had “sent a message that the change that we promised isn’t being delivered in a way they can feel”. Change exists, says Sir Keir, but people don’t perceive it. This message risks patronising voters – or at worst gaslighting them. These elections suggest that disappointment with Sir Keir has already curdled into cynicism.

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Michael Frayn and Julian Barnes have announced that they won’t be writing any more books. It is a hard habit to kick

“Retirement is the ugliest word in the language,” Ernest Hemingway said. Writers, like artists in general, aren’t the retiring sort. And what does it actually mean? As the playwright, novelist and former Guardian journalist Michael Frayn quipped 20 years ago, “Nobody comes in and gives you a clock.”

Frayn was 72 at the time. Since then, he has added a further novel (Skios), a play (Afterlife) and two memoirs to a backlist that includes the hugely successful plays Noises Off and Copenhagen (a revival of which has just finished at the Hampstead theatre in London). Now, at 92, that clock has caught up with him. “Sadly it’s over,” he told Radio 4 this week. “Writing has been my life.”

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Paul McGilchrist, Jean Wilson and Chris Keil on the Spanish artist’s haunting images

• Charlotte Higgins’s appraisal of Francisco de Zurbarán is insightful and compelling (Simply divine: the extraordinary supernatural visions of Francisco de Zurbarán, 30 April). However, Zurbarán’s painting The Crucified Christ contains the same conundrum that haunts so many depictions of this scene. Whatever the style, however moving, whoever the artist and however painstaking the rendering, the crucified body rarely conveys the intolerable heaviness of a body hanging by a single nail in each hand and through the feet. Even those evocations that include a small platform beneath the feet mostly fail to show the excruciating slump of a body suspended in this way. It is not that suffering needs to be conveyed – this is often not the purpose of the artist’s rendering. The sheer heft of the body’s suspension would exert distorting pressures on the frame, distensions of the arms and probable contortions of the shoulders and rib-cage that are peculiarly absent in most of those within the genre, including those in a realist tradition. There are exceptions (Peter Paul Rubens, for example), but surprisingly few.
Paul McGilchrist
Cromer, Norfolk

• In the long dining room at Auckland Palace in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, there is a wonderful collection of Francisco de Zurbarán’s work: Jacob and his 12 sons. They have been there since 1756, after being purchased by Bishop Trevor, and went on display when the palace opened to the public in 2019 after an extensive renovation project. The bishop was outbid on one of the portraits and commissioned a copy to be made by Arthur Pond to complete his set. They are a reminder of Bishop Trevor’s religious tolerance, as he supported a bill giving equal rights to the Jewish community; the 12 sons of Jacob each headed one of the 12 tribes of Israel.
Jean Wilson
Carshalton, Surrey

Fiona Collins and Stephen Pound on crossing borders

I was delighted to read Phil Coughlin’s nostalgic account of Spike Milligan’s border-straddling pub in Puckoon (Letters, 1 May).

But, here in Wales, we have the real thing in the little village of Llanymynech in Powys, where the border between two nations goes through the Bradford Arms hotel. Sunday drinking was illegal in Wales until 1961, so customers would crowd into the private bar, which, being to the east of the border, was not under Welsh drinking laws. For the rest of the week, most customers were more comfortable in the public bar, on the west side of the border.

Ariella Lister wonders what such an event would look like today, while John Bailey doubts that it brought people together. Plus letters from Dr Allan Dodds and Peter Aylmer

Celebrating the legacy of the Festival of Britain 75 years on by considering “how art can bring people together in the darkest times” is a fine sentiment (Editorial, 1 May). But far too many in this country have no opportunity to share in that legacy. We need to recognise that this country is a very different place to that of 75 years ago – it is divided and more diverse. We are now a multicultural nation – but a fractured one.

A possible solution to the many racist and prejudiced attitudes we see around us is to have another festival of Britain, but with a very different focus. One where groups of people of different races, creeds and religions show the country how they differ from each other in customs and practices, but also how similar we all are, with groups showcasing their food, music, history, interests, specialisms etc. Hopefully this might help dispel the fear and mistrust people feel when new and established immigrants settle among us.
Ariella Lister
Mill Hill, London

Beware the wind | The ‘Brailsford’ apple | National treasures | Local election results | Andy Burnham’s plight

I had a similar experience to Zoe Williams (The day had come to scatter my mum’s ashes. What could possibly go wrong?, 5 May) when I scattered my dad’s ashes near the first tee at his golf club. After reaching into the urn and grabbing a large handful of his ashes, I threw them into the air only to have them all blown back at me by a sudden gust of wind. Friends always said I looked very much like him and I felt a tremendous sense of pride as parts of him went into every orifice.
Bob Dawson
Greenmount, Greater Manchester

• Glad to read about the campaign to save the mother of Bramley apples tree (Report, 5 May). How about a campaign to rename the apple itself the “Brailsford” apple? It’s surely time to reverse the patriarchal appropriation of Mary Ann Brailsford’s beautiful tree and her stunning apple by Matthew Bramley in cahoots with Henry Merrweather.
Vicky Barnes
Condover, Shropshire

Emissions understated by factor of five in Essex plans for tech giant, while Greystoke’s Lincolnshire plans show similar error

Developers working for Google have significantly misstated how much carbon two proposed AI datacentres will contribute to the UK’s total emissions in planning documents reviewed by the Guardian.

The tech company wants to build two huge datacentres – one 52-hectare (130 acre) project in Thurrock and another at an airfield in North Weald, both in Essex. To do so, developers are required to submit planning documents calculating how much carbon these projects will emit as a proportion of the UK’s total carbon footprint.

New York’s Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brushed off question about run for presidency

The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez answered a question about potentially running for higher office in 2028 by declaring: “My ambition is to change the country.”

The Democrat delivered that remark at a political forum in Chicago on Friday amid widespread belief that she is positioning herself to run for the White House in 2028 or challenge her party’s leader in the US Senate, fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer.

The Right Rev Evelio Menjivar-Ayala vows to ‘keep talking’ as West Virginia bishop, amid tension between Trump and the Vatican

The new bishop appointed to lead West Virginia Catholics has pledged to continue speaking up for immigrants in the mould of Pope Leo, who appointed him last week amid ongoing tension between Donald Trump and the Vatican.

The Right Rev Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, 55, is not planning to hide his views after being elevated from assistant bishop in Washington DC to lead the diocese that covers West Virginia – the first Latino American bishop from El Salvador, who left Central America as a teenager and arrived in the US smuggled in the trunk of a car.

Jubilation in Budapest as new leader invites people to ‘step through gate of regime change’

The pro-European centre-right leader Péter Magyar has been sworn in as prime minister of Hungary, marking the official end to Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power.

Saturday’s ceremony – during which Magyar had invited people to join him to “write Hungarian history” together and “step through the gate of regime change” – comes a month after his opposition Tisza party won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections.

Zachary Alam spent four years in jail for his role in the Capitol attack before Trump pardoned him in 2025

A convicted participant in the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack who was pardoned at the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency has been ordered to serve seven years in prison after a jury found him guilty of committing a burglary in Virginia in May 2025.

Zachary Alam, 34, had previously drawn one of the stiffest prison sentences – eight years – for his hand in the violence carried out at the US Capitol in Washington DC by supporters of Trump after his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden after the 2020 White House election.

National Geographic photographer and WWF ambassador Jasper Doest joined conservation teams during the latest mountain gorilla census in Bwindi Impenetrable national park, taking pictures of the apes and the people essential to their survival

Brigg, Lincolnshire: We work these vehicles hard and they will have problems, but today was really not the day for a steaming bonnet

There’s never a good time for a tractor to break down, but this was exceptional timing. Late April was very dry as predicted, and with a change in weather prospects, the birdfood seed needed to go in. The purpose of this “crop” is to fill the birds’ winter hunger gap, and it has to be sown in a narrow window: after the early May frosts, but before the soil dries out too much.

We had just delivered the trailer of seed to the field, and were on the road returning to the farm, to collect the rolls that press the seed into the soil. As we passed through Brigg, the lights appeared on the dashboard and steam started to appear from the bonnet. This was our smallest and newest tractor. Hurriedly, we pulled into a driveway, water pouring from under the engine. Half on and half off the road, we started to collect traffic behind us. A quick look justified a call to the tractor dealers – it was a tricky job and the clock was ticking.

Substituting the petrochemicals that underpin everyday life is challenging, but there are ways to produce what we need without fossil fuels

• I tried to live for 24 hours without using oil-based products. It was ridiculously impossible

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The standoff in the strait of Hormuz has shown just how dependent the world’s economy is on fossil fuels. From petrochemicals to plastics and fertiliser, they all begin life as oil or gas – but are there alternatives? Can we loosen the grip that fossil fuels have on our lives?

While solutions to wean the transport system off imported oil are well understood – albeit not fully implemented – substituting the plethora of petrochemicals that underpin everyday life is a much more challenging task.

Norway’s energy minister says country has a ‘responsibility’ to address shortfalls caused by wars in Ukraine and Middle East

In case of any doubt about Norway’s commitment to maintain – and expand – its production of gas and oil offshore, the energy minister, Terje Aasland, has a pithy response: “We will develop, not dismantle, activity on our continental shelf.”

This week, to the alarm of environmental campaigners, he announced that three gasfields off the country’s southern coast would reopen by the end of 2028 – nearly three decades after they closed – to meet a shortfall caused by the impact of the war in Ukraine and disruption to supplies from the Middle East.

Disregard from UK Labour and struggling public services are just some of reasons behind ‘astonishing’ collapse

By Friday night, Keir Starmer and much of the Westminster Labour group were quietly relieved that the local election results in England hadn’t been quite as bad as feared. In Wales, however, Labour’s collapse in the Senedd was even more total than the most pessimistic predictions.

For more than 100 years, Welsh Labour was the democratic world’s most successful election-winning machine, but the political behemoth limped into third place this week with just nine seats in a 96-seat parliament. A new chapter in Wales’s political and cultural history has opened: pro-independence Plaid Cymru is set to form a minority government.

SNP leader wants to ensure voices of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland ‘are heard loud and clear’

John Swinney has said he plans to work with the nationalist first ministers in Wales and Northern Ireland in a coordinated opposition to Labour’s policies on the cost of living and UK government spending.

The Scottish National party leader said he had spoken to Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Féin first minister of Northern Ireland, on Friday night after she had called to congratulate him on his party’s “emphatic” victory in the Holyrood elections.

One man critically injured following incident in Arnold and suspect is being held on suspicion of attempted murder

A man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after five people were struck by a car in a town centre in Nottinghamshire, police have said.

One man suffered life-threatening injuries and remains critically ill in hospital while four other men sustained less serious injuries after the incident in Arnold shortly before 1.10am on Saturday.

At the city’s Great Exhibition of 1904, 57 Somali men, women and children cooked, weaved and danced for visitors

It was, the posters said, a rare chance to see a “little known but interesting people”: a live display of 57 Somali men, women and children who cooked, weaved and danced for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of Edwardians who flocked to Yorkshire to see them.

More than 120 years later, this controversial – and, in its time, incredibly popular – show will be revisited in a new exhibition in Bradford that will put Britain’s colonial legacy under the spotlight.

Property disputes, predatory developers and surging sea levels are putting the historic Black community at risk

On Arthur Champen’s half-acre property in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, a thicket of southern live oaks, palmettos and pine trees muffle the roar of cars on nearby highway 278. His haint blue house, lightened by the sun, sits on stilts to protect it from flooding that comes with the high tide. During the spring, it is common for the marshland adjacent to his land to turn into a muddy soup. “Other than the cars,” Champen, 81, said, “you hear how peaceful it is?”

About a decade ago, Champen’s family nearly lost the grassy marshland next door that their family bought several generations ago.

Denmark’s king asks Troels Lund Poulsen to form government after PM struggles to gather support

The king of Denmark has asked a centre-right politician to try to form a new government after the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has failed to put together a ruling coalition.

The announcement on Friday night shook the political establishment as Frederiksen has been a staple of Danish politics for decades. Her left-leaning party, the Social Democrats, won the plurality of votes in parliamentary elections in March.

Home reportedly occupied by mother of Paul Flores, who was convicted of killing college student who went missing in 1996

Soil testing at a property linked to the man convicted in the murder of California college student Kristin Smart, who disappeared in 1996, turned up evidence of human remains, a state sheriff announced on Friday.

“We can’t call it Kristin, but there’s evidence to support human remains – there at one time,” the San Luis Obispo county sheriff, Ian Parkinson, said at a news conference.

Mohamed Bulbul arrested in Mogadishu after covering case of woman allegedly being tortured in prison

A journalist who covered the case of a woman who said she was being tortured in prison was detained and beaten with pistols by Somali authorities, along with two others, for his reporting for the Guardian.

Mohamed Bulbul was arrested with the journalists Abdihafid Nor Barre and Abdishakur Mohamed Mohamud on Friday evening while in a restaurant in the centre of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. They said they were assaulted by members of Somalia’s US-trained counter-terrorism police unit and taken to be questioned by police. All three were released in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The salacious gossip website is hounding politicians and tracking vacationing members of Congress

TMZ has only been in Washington DC for a matter of weeks, but the salacious gossip website is already having an impact: hounding politicians, tracking vacationing members of Congress and reporting on a senator taking a trip to Disney World.

It’s been quite the start as the website and TV channel attempts to break into the political scene, with its first focus on members of Congress taking a two-week recess – typically meaning the politicians return to their home districts and states to meet constituents – during a record partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Ambitious plans are being scaled back – but film and TV industry point to big existing investments in British production

Hollywood blockbusters including the eagerly anticipated Beatles biopics and big-budget TV series such as Bridgerton have been keeping the UK’s film and TV studio facilities packed.

But as the streaming wars recalibrate having passed “peak TV”, a slowdown in the content arms race is prompting property developers to switch to building datacentres amid the AI boom.

Train operator will become 11th national service returned to public ownership since Labour was elected in 2024

Great Western Railway will be nationalised in December, the government has announced.

The train service, which has been in private hands for 30 years, mainly run by First Group, will be the 11th train operator on the national railway brought back into public ownership.

Halifax says cost of typical home fell by 0.1% in April, the second consecutive monthly drop, with pace of annual growth down from 0.8%. to 0.4%

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UK house prices fell for a second consecutive month in April, as Halifax halved its estimate for the annual rate of growth owing to the conflict in the Middle East.

Halifax, which is part of Lloyds – Britain’s biggest mortgage lender – said that the cost of a typical UK home fell by 0.1% in April, to £299,313. This followed a 0.5% fall in March.

Previously prohibited use of websites such as Omoggle that connect a streamer to a stranger’s video feed now allowed

Last week, at 4am, 19-year-old Sammy Amz was scrolling through X when something caught his eye: a popular Twitch streamer was competing in a 1v1 “mog-off” with a stranger, and losing.

The next day he opened the Omoggle gaming website and began to play. Quickly he matched with another user – green dots appeared on their faces onscreen, as the website began to compare their measurements: canthal tilt, palpebral fissure ratio, nose-to-face width ratio and so on.

Photographer Sonia Reveyaz explains the lure of the hustle, bustle, glitz and glamour on the sidelines of the Cannes film festival

It’s flashy, jazzy, tacky, it’s jet set, totally. From dawn to dusk on the Croisette, the boulevard stretching along the Mediterranean Sea in Cannes, everyone is dressed to the nines. For 10 days, it’s all about getting an invitation to join the Cannes film festival’s exclusive club. But not everyone stops to watch a movie.

In this image-driven economy, luxury is embodied right down to the skin. The media plays a central role in creating desire. Magazine publishers and social media platforms collaborate with brands to promote their new products and showcase the celebrities who wear them. Now, a new type of celebrity – one with an unconventional career path and who starts from nothing – is invited to the Croisette: influencers.

Sarah Adams and Daniel Mays star in this grim but sensitive true crime story. Plus, Greg Davies hosts this year’s Bafta Television Awards. Here’s what to watch this evening

Sunday, 9pm, ITV1

Jack Thorne’s headline-grabbing drama about toxic masculinity is the clear favourite. But might the odds be stacked against it? Here is our guide to the worthiest winners

This year, the Bafta TV Awards feel relatively young at 71. After all, David Attenborough has just turned 100, and August marks the 90th anniversary of BBC television. But Sunday’s ceremony is a long-established and recognised celebration of the state of British TV – which isn’t always easy to predict.

The frontrunner for this year’s awards – featuring new host Greg Davies – is Adolescence, which has 11 nominations. But its chances may be affected by the qualifying period for shows – the previous calendar year – meaning entries aired between 17 and five months ago. Given that Adolescence was dropped by Netflix on 13 March last year, some voters may conclude that it has already been honoured enough. (At last month’s separate Craft awards, it surprisingly lost the Writer category to Slow Horses.)

Mick Hucknall belts out all the tunes on stage in Chile. Plus, the wonderfeul Hannah Waddingham hosts SNL UK! Here’s what to watch this evening

10.15pm, BBC Two

In this week’s newsletter: As studios chase safer bets and streamers fail to deliver, the humble standalone comedy has been replaced by blockbusters that sprinkle jokes instead of delivering belly laughs

There was a striking moment during this week’s episode of The Rewatchables, the wildly popular film-recap podcast that I reach for when I’ve had my fill of history/football/glum current affairs pods. The episode was revisiting 90s comedy There’s Something About Mary, a film that in some ways holds up hilariously, and in others has aged about as well as a bottle of semi-skimmed on a summer’s day in Death Valley. As part of the episode, the podcast’s panel were going through their favourite comedy films by decade and were spoilt for choice – until, that is, they reached the 2020s, when they seemed to collectively draw a blank. “The Drama’s pretty funny …” one offered tentatively. Finally, host Bill Simmons cut through the umming, ahhing and awkward silence to get to the heart of the matter: “Do we have comedies any more? What happened to comedies?”

Yes, what did happen to comedies? Or rather, what happened to the “everyday” American comedies like There’s Something About Mary that once set up a permanent frat house residence in cinemas? You know the ones I mean: those that took a familiar real-world situation – teens trying to lose their virginity, a man clashing with his girlfriend’s dad, a maid of honour struggling to arrange a hen do, stunted adolescents refusing to fly the nest – and stretched them to absurd and lurid extremes. It’s a lineage that goes back almost half a century, to the days of Animal House (rowdy college students annoy the dean by throwing a massive rager).

When my father collapsed suddenly, an episode of the US comedy in which Steve Carell does CPR to the tune of Stayin’ Alive sprung miraculously to mind

It was a boiling hot day last summer, four days after my dad’s 73rd birthday. Mum was plating up dinner and Dad was on the sofa complaining about how stifling it was. I was meant to head to work, for my job as a personal trainer, but decided to take the evening off. It was just as well: as I turned back to Mum, Dad collapsed backwards and suffered a massive cardiac arrest.

Mum was hysterical. She called the ambulance as I tried to stay calm but inside I felt mad with fear as she relayed what the 999 handler was saying. “Check if he’s breathing,” she told me. I put my hand on his chest but felt nothing. “Move him to the floor.” I laid him on the wood flooring.

(Atlantic)
The lyrics may argue the dancefloor is dead, but this funny, wilfully plasticky new single isn’t the total about-turn from Brat that fans expected

Last month, Charli xcx began the media campaign for her seventh studio album by giving an interview to Vogue magazine. The ensuing feature caused an impressive degree of online consternation, not because the 33-year-old star had said anything particularly controversial, but because she had suggested that the follow-up to 2024’s Brat would sound markedly different to its predecessor. “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she said, not unreasonably declining to chase Brat’s vast success by attempting to replicate it. (Although, in fairness, you could have probably worked that out from House, the noisy, experimental collaboration with John Cale she released at the end of last year as the first single from her soundtrack to Wuthering Heights.)

She also played the interviewer a track that contained both “heavily processed guitars” and the lyrics “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music”: Vogue duly ran with the idea, trumpeting Charli xcx’s “rock reinvention” in both the headline and on its cover and other news outlets picked up on the story – “CHARLI XCX CONFIRMS ROCK ALBUM”. What one journalist tactfully called “heated discourse online from some fans and artists within the music industry” followed, eventually prompting the singer to respond, posting “a video of me making a song called Rock Music that is not actually rock music which is funny because I never said I was making a rock album”.

Brooklyn Storehouse, New York City

The viral star electrified Brooklyn with winking visuals, self-aware humor and a slew of special guests

From the look of the crowd at PinkPantheress’s show in Brooklyn last night, you’d be forgiven for thinking that King Charles had extended his recent trip to New York. The crowd that snaked its way through a never-ending circuit of cracked asphalt and grimy water on their way to Brooklyn Storehouse wore union jacks and tartan miniskirts, which you could imagine would be in line with royal protocol for how to dress when a sovereign visits a warehouse rave.

PinkPantheress is certainly royalty among a vast swath of young, terminally online people; a pop princess who is mainstream enough to clinch top billing at Coachella and perform on primetime TV, but whose taste has always leaned more niche and left-field than anything that would ever go platinum. Or would it? Pop music is always in a state of flux but we’re living through an interesting period of realignment. Chalk it up to AI backlash, a floundering music industry or fatigue with chart-gaming reindeer games, but lately a raft of musicians who’d played nice for years have seen big rewards going for broke with wildly adventurous work. Performers like Slayyyter, Zara Larsson and Jade, who’d once been siloed off as “pop’s middle class” or incarcerated in the “Khia asylum” have been rewarded twice over for their boldness with both critical acclaim and charting hits. PinkPantheress is something of a figurehead among these artists and one of its brightest hopes. Her show yesterday night at Brooklyn Storehouse doubled as a flex of her star power and a mini-music festival highlighting a wave of like-minded musicians who are just as poised to break out.

(DH2)
On a floral-themed LP, squiggling melodies and quizzical distortion banish the winter gloom Dreijer brought to the Knife and his tracks with Fever Ray

Swedish producer Olof Dreijer is best known for projects with his sibling Karin: namely their duo the Knife, plus Karin’s solo act Fever Ray, with whom he created four brilliant tracks on 2023 album Radical Romantics. For all that his beats on these records often had African-Caribbean-Latin syncopation, they also had a Scandinavian winter gloom.

Conversely, his debut solo album seems to crane upwards towards sunlight like flowers – and each of the tracks has a floral name. Dance heads will already be familiar with some of them (having appeared on EPs stretching back to 2023) but together they show quite how distinctive Dreijer’s own musical accent is: you can tell it’s him sometimes from just half a second of music.

An erudite account of the foundation of the state and its subsequent moral and political decline

Israel’s attack on Iran is only the most recent example of its degeneration in recent decades, coming on top of its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, genocide in Gaza, invasion of Syria and relentless bombardment of Lebanon. The fact that the US joined in this illegal war confirmed to many in the region what they have long suspected: that the country is an outpost of western imperialism in the Middle East.

The state of Israel, which arose from the ashes of the Holocaust 77 years ago, has received an unprecedented degree of international sympathy and support ever since. This support was partly due to western guilt and partly due to the perception of the Jewish state as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. The country’s Declaration of Independence promised to uphold “the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex”. In the early years of statehood, Israel was seen in the west as an icon of liberal, progressive and egalitarian society.

The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed; The Rainshadow Orphans by Naomi Ishiguro; No Ghosts by Max Lury; Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler; Moon Over Brendle by Jeff Noon

The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed (Gollancz, £22)
On a gigantic spaceship halfway through its 400-year voyage to a new world, hundreds of Earth colonists are kept in frozen stasis by the ever-increasing maintenance crew. Not all the crew are happy with the way their lives are harshly controlled by the Administration, and peaceful protests have inspired whispers of revolution. The multicultural city-ship has two official languages: Inglez and Arabek. Iskander Ezz is a translator between Crew and Administration, aware that “when you speak a different language, you become another person”. Damietta, his younger cousin, finds the unofficial Nupol better for communicating with her fellow protesters. Nupol, an argot made up of many “dead Earth” languages, is used throughout the book by several viewpoint characters, adding a distinctive flavour to a speculative fiction its author calls Arabfuturism. Partly inspired by the historic Arab spring, this is a thoughtful, exciting space opera.

The Rainshadow Orphans by Naomi Ishiguro (Solstice, £20)
The first volume of a trilogy inspired by Japanese pop culture is set in bustling, crowded Rainshadow City, where hi-tech wealth and a corrupt emperor exist alongside magic, poverty and criminality. Toshiko, Jun and Mei are the Kawakamis, haphazardly seeking revenge on the Lucky Crow gang for the murder of their adoptive Aunt. When Toshiko almost accidentally steals a precious dragon pearl from a powerful gangster, they’re plunged into a fast-moving adventure involving a conspiracy to deport all the city’s illegal immigrants to certain death, and replace low-paid workers with attractive female robots. Various plot strands see characters discovering magical powers, a mother dragon desperate to save her baby’s life, and a strangely helpful cat. Trope-heavy, entertaining fun, with a cartoonish vibe.

Fearing the worst can lead to physical changes, according to this fascinating study of a strange medical phenomenon

In Roald Dahl’s 1980 masterpiece The Twits, Quentin Blake’s illustrations demonstrate how Mrs Twit’s horrible attitudes eventually ended up deforming her looks. “If a person has ugly thoughts,” wrote Dahl, “it begins to show on the face.”

In her latest book, science writer Helen Pilcher explores this very idea: that negative beliefs “can be physically transformative”. The nocebo effect, as this is known, comes from the Latin for “I will harm”, and strikes when a person’s negative expectations, whether subconscious or conscious, lead to illness.

The Women’s prize-shortlisted author on being obsessed with Judy Blume, hating Jane Austen at first, and the joys of Tove Jansson

My earliest reading memory
The Little Engine That Could. My mom used to read it to me at night and then one day I could read it myself. I read it over and over in bed, the story of a valiant little train making it over the mountain when all the bigger ones refused. The thrill of that never got old. I must have been four.

My favourite book growing up
I was really into Judy Blume. Obsessed. My very favourite, theone that made me think about being a writer for the first time, was It’s Not the End of the World. It’s told in the first person (which was a revelation to me) in the voice of a 12-year-old whose parents are divorcing. The dialogue is funny and sharp. It was the opposite of going through the Looking-Glass: Blume helped me see at age nine how all the drama and craziness and humour and meaning is right here in everyday life.

For anyone needing a break from binging The Pitt, you can always put in your own shifts as a hospital manager, surgeon, paramedic and of course as a demonic morgue assistant

Like the rest of the western world, our household is currently binging medical drama The Pitt, revelling in its visceral depiction of life in a modern emergency department. So far the series has yet to inspire a video game tie-in (though there has been an amusing parody), but fans wishing to try their hand at tense medical (mal)practice, should not despair. Here are eight of the best hospital games spanning more than 40 years of gruesome interactive surgery. Squirt some hand sanitiser and come this way.

PS5, Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Annapurna Interactive
The nostalgic antics of a trio of tenacious teens make for silly yet undeniably enjoyable gameplay, framed by a playlist of bona fide bangers

The older we get, the more we tend to romanticise our teenage years. As bills pile up, we yearn for the simple days of drinking cider in parks. We often tend to forget the bad parts: the frustrating lack of autonomy, the unrequited crushes and the doofuses you’re forced to tolerate in the playground. But after four hours spent hanging out with the pretentious teens in Mixtape, I felt pretty relieved to be in my 30s.

Set in a nondescript town in northern California, Mixtape follows the exploits of tenacious trio Rockford, Slater and Cassandra as they head to a legendary party on their last day of high school. With Rockford about to leave her friends to move to the big city, she wants to immortalise the gang’s time together in musical form. Every song on a carefully curated mixtape triggers a totally tubular flashback to one of their shared memories.

Enchanting and a little eerie, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth is the second great game in as many years based on the classic children’s books

Sleepy, happy-sad, and imbued with the mildest peril, Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories may seem an unlikely fit for the action-heavy medium of video games. Rather than embark on swashbuckling adventures, these milk-white, hippo-esque creatures prefer to potter about Moominvalley, only venturing further if the weather conditions are just right.

Yet a small Norwegian video game studio, Hyper Games, is now on its second exquisitely charming Jansson adaptation. The first, 2024’s Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, put players in control of the wily free spirit, Snufkin, as he dismantled overly ordered nature parks (and evaded authority-loving wardens). The latest, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, sees young Moomintroll wake up at night in the dead of winter. With his parents still hibernating, the creature is all alone, thrust into a cold and unfamiliar world.

James Bond games have always fallen short of capturing the precise feel of the classic movies. But Amazon’s first dip into the 007 mythology seems to have a character of its own

In the wake of the last James Bond movie, No Time to Die, there was a surge of articles asking whether it should spell the end for Ian Fleming’s secret agent. In that movie, Daniel Craig played the character as a fading force, mentally and physically exhausted, and out of touch. “The world has moved on,” Lashana Lynch’s younger agent told him at one point, and in a lot of ways she was right. A product of the cold war era, 007 was a sociopathic misogynist addicted to booze and amphetamines – Craig tried to play all that down, creating a more rounded character and, controversially, giving Bond the ultimate redemption arc at the end of his final outing.

But five years later, with the franchise’s new owner Amazon still trying to pull the next film together, we’re about to get what looks to be the best Bond game since GoldenEye. Created by the Danish developer IO Interactive, famed for its Hitman series of anarchic open-ended assassination sims, 007 First Light follows a fresh-faced Bond from his early career as an aircrewman to his first mission as a double-0 operative. The games press was recently given a three-hour hands-on demo to play, and reports suggest that it combines elements of the Hitman games (Bond navigating a gala event, either sleuthing or punching his way to the mission objective) with major set-piece shootouts, chase scenes and miraculous gadgets. (For more on its making, read this piece about how developer IO Interactive brought it together.)

Despite a call for calm, a combustible mix of politics and protest punctuated the preview week across the pavilions

Every two years the art world assembles in Venice for a sprawling celebration of visual arts at which countries “compete” against one another for the prize of best national pavilion. It is a barometer of taste, a shop window for artists and the industry’s biggest get-together – once described by the art historian Lawrence Alloway as an “orgy of contact and communication”.

This year, 99 countries are involved, including Somalia and Qatar, which are among seven first-time participants in an event that was overshadowed by the death of its curator, Koyo Kouoh, just over a year ago. She wanted an event that focused on “enhancement” with a main show called In Minor Keys. Despite the call for calm, a combustible mix of politics and protest punctuated the preview week. The activist group Pussy Riot turned up on site to object to Russia’s inclusion and a strike on Friday in protest at Israel’s inclusion caused several pavilions – including the UK, Austria and France – to close their doors.

Lowry, Salford
The tale of a Burnley businessman who gives his town a financial leg-up overeggs the north-south cultural divide, but Pippa Cleary’s bright musical numbers propel the positivity

Was ever a musical so eager to be liked, so anxious not to exclude? It is not just the patronising pre-show introduction, which assumes we have never been in a theatre and insists we all hate bankers. It is also the pathological number of pop-culture references in Rob Madge’s book. “We’re on your side,” it seems to say, “because we too have heard of Coronation Street, EastEnders, Cher, The Legend of Zelda, Jeremy Beadle, Mamma Mia!, Dirty Dancing, Wonderwall …” The list goes on.

The level of insecurity is strange because Bank of Dave: The Musical is a tremendously likable show. The source material is the feelgood true-life story of Dave Fishwick (Sam Lupton), the Burnley businessman whose egalitarian conscience led him to step in where others had failed. Seeing his fellow townsfolk being held back for want of money, he determined to set up a non-profit bank that would treat them with trust and respect.

The theme of earth’s biggest art extravaganza – spiritual rest – felt wildly wrong for our crisis-hit planet. Thank goodness for the pavilions, from fake babies to hi-tech sperm banks to a chocolate Russell Crowe

It was almost over before it even started. This year’s Venice Biennale has been tearing itself apart for months: countries not showing up, artists getting fired, exhibitions being cancelled, funding getting pulled. There were petitions and protests months before a painting was on a wall. The jury quit in the days leading up to the opening, then Iran quit, then the European Commission quit. There were protests against Israel and Russia during the preview, artists went on strike and artworks were replaced with installations of Palestinian flags.

The whole thing was a massive mess of conflicting politics, personal tragedy and unresolvable ideological differences from the very beginning. And all this without even mentioning that the curator, Koyo Kouoh, died last year and wasn’t able to see her artistic vision through to completion. In a sense, the 2026 Venice Biennale never stood a chance.

Barbican, London
This ambitious and imaginative concert experience blended live and filmed performance. Not all its experiments felt successful, but at its best this was mesmerising

While the Southbank Centre marked its 75th anniversary this week with a Danny Boyle spectacular that managed to overlook the building’s six resident orchestras and classical raison d’être in favour of grime, techno and drum’n’bass, the Barbican quietly got on with the business of imagining a concert hall for the 21st century.

Darkness Visible – a collaboration between violist Lawrence Power and film director Jessie Rodger, who together are creative studio Âme, along with a host of starry musical friends – isn’t a flawless show. But as an experiment in thinking through sound, in testing digital limits and amplifying the live concert experience, it has a lot going for it: the start of a longer conversation about how we experience music in a multimedia, post-internet age.

The board of the vocational charity has shown a ‘catastrophic failure of governance’, according to a member of the group’s council

The trustees of City & Guilds London Institute have been accused of attempting to dodge accountability for a “catastrophic failure of governance” by stalling on the launch of an independent inquiry into the £166m sale of the vocational charity’s training and accreditation business last October.

Members of the 148-year-old body voted overwhelmingly last month for the trustee board to trigger what would be the third investigation into how the foundation sold its operations to the private operator PeopleCert in October.

Second season of BBC hit has attracted one of the most high-profile casts ever assembled for a reality TV show

If it were any other show, the sight of the comedian Alan Carr sobbing under the burden of his dishonesty may have been enough to put off any celebrity thinking about accepting a place in the perilous Traitors’ castle.

Yet the second season of The Celebrity Traitors, being filmed at its now famous Highlands retreat, has managed to attract one of the most high-profile casts ever assembled for a reality TV show.

Rising tide of censorship is spreading, reshaping what students are permitted to read, learn and think

Maia Kobabe wrote Gender Queer as a tender attempt to explain non-binary identity and the journey of sexual discovery to immediate family. “I tried to make it as sensitive and thoughtful as possible, especially given that I knew that my mother would read it,” the author says. “I was trying to build bridges, trying to connect with people, trying to be understood as my full authentic self by my family and my friends and my community.”

But then came culture wars and a concerted effort by reactionary forces to turn back the clock. For three consecutive years, Gender Queer was the most challenged title by would-be book banners. Speaking from Santa Rosa, California, Kobabe, 36, recalls: “Many of the people who challenged my book in the early years, when it was conservative parents speaking up at school in board meetings, would hold it up and say this book is inappropriate or it’s pornography and then they would proudly say: ‘I’ve never read it.’”

Adolescence writer Jack Thorne’s romantic new drama Falling is quite the gear shift. Its stars open up about what it’s like to research a love so controversial that the church couldn’t allow it

The scene is the convent garden of a closed order of nuns, the place is somewhere in the UK with a maelstrom of social problems – which, let’s be real, could be any of it. Keeley Hawes’s Anna, a nun, isn’t self-righteously cloistered; she makes regular forays into the real world to do good works at food banks. But she’s not of this world. She moves with such unobtrusive poise it takes a beat to work out what it reminds you of: obedience. Bride of Christ, remember? She wears her faith lightly: when she’s in the walled garden, it’s to grow cabbages not praise God’s creation, but she still radiates peace, and her vegetable patch radiates it right back at her.

In the 90s, Hawes slayed one period drama after another: Wives and Daughters, Our Mutual Friend. For Falling – the surprising project from writer-creator Jack Thorne, who made such a strong statement about the modern condition and its harsh edges with Adolescence that MPs were debating it in parliament – she channels something I haven’t seen since those days. Her range of gorgeous guileless expressions.

Ali used to want sex more than James, and feels guilty that she doesn’t enjoy it as much as she used to
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Any pressure to have sex doesn’t come from James – it comes from within, from a fear of complete loss

Sarah Eberle hopes to inspire people to nurture where town and countryside meet and nature is need of protection

Stinging nettles, buttercups, broken crockery, fly-tipped flowers and a discarded gnome are not the usual hallmarks of an RHS Chelsea flower show garden.

But this year’s On the Edge garden by Sarah Eberle – the most decorated designer at Chelsea – is designed not to look like a garden at all, rather to transport its visitors to the liminal spaces on the outskirts of towns where the countryside begins and nature is in critical need of protection.

We spill the tea on the supermarket bags worth your cuppa – and which should be left to stew

• The best (and worst) supermarket coffee

My grandma would turn in her grave if she knew I tested these teabags by brewing them in a cup, but that’s how I drink tea mostly. Or at least I did until I met tea specialist Matt Ritson, who helped me test today’s teas with the industry-standard cupping process and, afterwards, introduced me to some mind-blowing whole-leaf teas. We studied the appearance and aroma of the wet leaves in an observation bowl, then the colour and clarity of the tea itself, before supping it from small bowls and aerating the tea to maximise its surface area.

The bags I tested ranged from 2p to 34p a pop, but when you think about the quality and sourcing of the higher-priced teas, even they are incredible value. We scored them on flavour, structure and balance, plus certification, trading standards and sourcing. I also awarded points to plastic-free bags – it seems the industry is finally responding to the uproar against microplastics, though some producers need to catch up and work without the polypropylene glue that’s still often used to seal teabags.

Whether it’s the Met Gala or the start of holiday dressing, May is big news in the fashion world

• The best wedding guest dresses for every budget

May starts with a bang, in fashion. The Met Gala, which happens on the first Monday in May every year, is the most outrageous, most high-concept red carpet of the year. The Met looks don’t offer much in the way of real-life style, but they are a nice reminder that fashion in the summer should be fun.

Bank holiday weekends are the perfect time to road test your holiday-season style, and longer evenings make a breezier kind of dressing up feel doable. There are some gems out there right now: read on for the Cos trousers that might just be your new wardrobe staple, and the high-street flats that I’ve had compliments on every time I’ve worn them.

Whether your skin is dull, dry or sensitive, these are our expert’s favourite formulas from her test of 25. Plus, dermatologists share their top tips

• The best eye creams for banishing bags, puffiness and fine lines

Moisturiser is a crucial step in any skincare routine. It supports barrier function and repair, helps protect your skin from environmental stress, and even forms the base of a flawless face of makeup.

However, the market is flooded with options – Boots has more than a thousand listings under facial moisturisers – and finding the right formulation for your needs can be a nightmare. Admittedly, I found the task of writing this page far more daunting than anything I’d tackled before.

Best face moisturiser overall:
Haruharu Wonder Black rice 5 ceramide cream

Best budget moisturiser:
Simple hydrating light moisturiser

Interactive or imaginative, educational or just plain fun – whatever toddler you know, these gifts are parent, kid and play-expert approved

• The best toys for one-year-olds: 25 fun, skill-building ideas

Children really start to become little people by the time they’re two, with strong opinions on what they do (and don’t) like. Most are walking and running around – often at high speeds – as well as climbing and pulling themselves up on anything they can get their hands on.

They’re also a lot of fun, constantly learning and developing physically, with fine and gross motor skills, along with verbally mastering new words every day.

Zingy lemon and mint elevate tender young beans in this fresh and simple spring supper

What are your simple pleasures in the kitchen? The sizzle and spit of a fried egg? The smell of buttered toast, or putting on an apron to mark the end of a day? I like podding beans. I enjoy how it involves hands but not much brain, and how it makes time feel slow and good, like drinking a cup of tea. I also like that it reminds me of my Gujarati aunties doing the same (but with valor beans). And I love not always cooking so much, as in this recipe, where you pod and chop the beans, then mix them with pasta to reveal a simple good meal.

A zesty, grown-up, after-dinner digestif that drifts into the arena of the rum old fashioned but in a fancy glass

A balanced, after-dinner refresher that layers sweetness, bitterness and richness in equal measure. The result has a clean, bitter-edged finish, making this perfect for the season, when the nights still hold a bit of a chill in the air.

Giovanni Dellaglio, assistant bar manager, Le Magritte at The Beaumont hotel, London W1

An unadulterated, wobbly, joyous flan made the way it should be

I started the year in one of my favourite places: Mexico City. I’ve since become one of those annoying people who finds a way to bring it up in nearly every conversation, so please indulge me just this once! Each time I’ve been to Mexico, I develop a new fixation, and this year I ate a considerable amount of flan. It’s seen as a bit of a retro dish here in the UK, and perhaps a little divisive, but I love it.

Softly braised vegetables combine with crisp-skinned chicken thighs in this reliable, versatile dish

The weather lately has been as temperamental as peas in pods. But peas are even harder to read than the sky: some pods contain sweet things no bigger than peppercorns, which explode when you bite them; the contents of others, however, are closer to small ball bearings, their size very likely a sign that all the natural sucrose has been metabolised and transformed to pea starch. The best thing for the tiny ones is to snack on them alongside a bit of cheese, whereas the path for big ones is the same as for dried peas, so pea and ham soup or a long-simmered puree.

Prepared for all the above, I first checked that there were frozen peas in the freezer. It was a packet I used to take for granted until my son, aged 14 (and having finished all the biscuits, crisps, cereal and milk) decided that peas were a decent late-night desperation snack. Fortunately, there was a packet, because I needed a good portion of it to make up for the pea shortfall caused by the huge and tiny ones found in one kilo of pods.

You must look after your own mental health. A therapist could provide a safe space to discuss your feelings

I feel torn between being a supportive wife and protecting my own mental health. My husband has recently had great success using drugs, diet and exercise to lose weight. He has struggled for a long time, and I am immensely proud of him, especially as he is now tapering off the medication and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The problem is that I have struggled with anorexia and bulimia my entire life. I’m not in therapy as I can never find the right therapist. I go through periods when it’s manageable, but sometimes it flares up.

My husband is well aware that I still struggle with these issues. However, our daily life since his weight loss has become a constant stream of calorie talk, workout updates and discussions about his shrinking clothes. I pretend I’m fine to avoid raining on his parade, and because he can be defensive when challenged, but beneath the surface I am drowning. I have stayed the same size throughout our relationship, yet find myself constantly comparing my body with his progress. I’m in my 40s and worry about getting older and being replaced. I am exhausted by trying to act as if I’m OK when I am actually deeply triggered.

When Mitch Cairns met Agatha Gothe-Snape, he was instantly charmed. Then an absurd exchange shifted their relationship into something more than friendship

The first time I saw Agatha, she was saturated, standing in a knee-high bucket wearing a knitted woollen jumper that said Ho Ho Ho on it. Whatever I’d expected to see at the Christmas group show at MOP Projects – an artist-run gallery in Redfern, Sydney – this vision transcended it. As I walked into the hall-like space, it was devoid of any artwork aside from this absolutely beautiful woman standing there with water dripping on to her head.

It was 2007, and I was a graduate of the National Art School. People weren’t making this type of work there, so it’s no exaggeration to say the whole image was completely new and arresting for me. She was silent and stationary but so alive.

Jonathan, 23, a student, meets Katie, 27, an environmental campaigner

What were you hoping for?
To meet someone outside my usual bubble, have an interesting conversation, and see where it goes.

Though open marriage is often imagined as something men want, women also choose this relationship structure – with all its rewards and challenges

It’s late afternoon, and Lucy texts her husband’s girlfriend. The sound of cartoons plays somewhere in the living room, and she absentmindedly wipes a smear of jam off the countertop.

A few minutes earlier, Lucy’s phone buzzes with a school email: a parent-teacher event for Thursday evening. She’s been attending these events alone, but pauses this time. She wants her husband, Oliver, there.

Fraudsters exploit confusion or anxiety over new IHT rules by offering a ‘safe haven’ for savings pots

The caller pitches a great deal. Shift the moneysaved in your pension and reinvest it in a scheme overseas where you can avoid it being caught under next year’s changes to the UK’s inheritance tax (IHT) system.

From April next year, any money left in a defined contribution pension after your death, which is most workplace and all private pensions, will be pulled into the IHT net.

As fuel prices soar, millions of Britons could reduce their electricity costs by installing home storage

Consumers across the UK are bracing for the war in the Middle East to deliver a sharp rise in home energy bills from this summer.

The looming energy cost crisis has prompted a record number of households to investigate green home upgrades to try to keep bills down, including heat pumps, solar panels and electric vehicles.

I’ve received 77 unpaid PCNs from TfL but it won’t accept they weren’t from my vehicle

Someone cloned my car number plate back in October and racked up £8,500 in Ulez fines. I appealed, but this was rejected.

Unfortunately, the cloned car is the same make, model and colour as mine. I’ve now received 17 “order for recovery of unpaid penalty charge” notices from Transport for London (TfL). The bailiffs will arrive next week, according to their letters.

From a picturesque countryside corn mill to a city flat in London’s historic waterside heartland

After embarking on a trial of CAR T-cell therapy, actor Sam Neill announced he is cancer-free. Researchers are enthusiastic the therapies could be a major weapon in the battle against cancer

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“Game-changer.” That’s how Prof Misty Jenkins, an immunologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, describes CAR T-cell therapy, an emerging but still costly cancer treatment that supercharges the body’s immune system to fight disease.

Late last month, Jurassic Park actor Sam Neill put the treatment in the spotlight, revealing his stage three cancer was in remission after undergoing CAR T-cell therapy as part of a clinical trial in Sydney. He stopped short of describing his remission as a miracle – the success, he said, was “science at its best”.

There are misconceptions about the addictiveness of cannabis and many users are struggling with dependency

Amy knew it wasn’t great. But there she was, at the bottom of a dumpster, desperately searching for the THC vape cartridge she’d thrown away just hours earlier.

Amy, 18, had previously tossed that same cartridge, known colloquially as a cart, into a public trash can. Passersby stared as she later rooted around to recover it. So she lifted the entire garbage bag and brought it back to her apartment, where she dug through a bunch of sloppy, stinking detritus before finding it and taking a grateful toke. Later that same week, she threw it into the dumpster – surely that would prevent her from going back. But she did.

Beauty products have never been more advanced. But as people layer them up, experts have seen a rise in perioral dermatitis. What is the too-much-skincare rash, and what can you do about it?

It often starts innocuously: a small cluster of spots around the mouth, easily dismissed as a hormonal breakout or a reaction to something you have eaten. But this is how perioral dermatitis shows up – quietly, persistently and seemingly more frequently.

“It’s quickly become one of the most common inflammatory conditions I treat,” says Dr Anjali Mahto, a consultant dermatologist and founder of the Self London clinic. Reddit threads on the subject run to thousands of posts, TikTok is awash with people documenting flare-ups, and actor Amanda Seyfried has spoken publicly about dealing with it. A recent report in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology confirmed the condition is on the rise. Meanwhile, the global market for perioral dermatitis treatments is growing.

Would you know how to respond if someone was taken critically ill? Experts explain the basic skills we can all learn and how to perform them with confidence

“If you learn one thing, it should be how to resuscitate,” says Richard Webber, an associate clinical director of St John Ambulance and practising NHS paramedic in the south of England. “We know that for every one minute delay in restarting the heart, there is a 10% reduction in survivability.”

PM’s wife, accompanying him to the polls, follows a long line of women to mobilise the jacket when stakes are high

Not a white flag but a cream blazer was what Victoria Starmer chose to wear to accompany her husband, the prime minister, to vote on Thursday morning. She follows in a long line of women who have mobilised the power blazer at high-stakes moments.

Starmer’s, which looks much like a £1,690 ivory Alexander McQueen crepe design, comes hot on the lapels of another. In episode one of the new series of Amandaland, Amanda wears a beige double-breasted iteration in a high-stakes fictional moment: to give a toe-curling talk about her (not shallow) lifestyle brand Senuous as part of careers week at her kid’s school. Earlier in the week, the Princess of Wales launched the Foundations for Life report wearing a creamy beige high-waisted Roland Mouret suit.

Duo Whitaker Malem worked with pop art sculptor Allen Jones and a car bodyshop in Kent to create gala’s biggest jolt

At Monday’s Met Gala, it inevitably fell to Kim Kardashian to deliver the evening’s biggest jolt. One of the few celebrities to straightforwardly interpret the “fashion is art” dress code – which focused on how the dressed and undressed human body is the through-line in most works of art – she decided to forgo her usual role as a walking billboard for a major fashion house and instead arrived in an orange fibreglass breastplate created by a small east London art duo and a car bodyshop in Kent.

“Good art should start conversation, and Kim did exactly that,” says 61-year-old Patrick Whitaker, half of the design practice Whitaker Malem, who made the breastplate just weeks before the gala. “She was very clear on wanting a breastplate, very clear on the car body finish. And I think she was nervous really. She understands the competition.”

Whether it’s Palantir selling a $239 chore coat, Anthropic taking over a coffee shop or executives walking the red carpet at the Met Gala, tech’s biggest players are pivoting to fashion to sell their brands – and attempt to appear cooler in the process

Last week, the US spy tech and data firm Palantir launched its latest “merch drop”, including a denim chore coat. “Rugged utility, enduring style” reads the website’s description of the $239 (£175) jacket, which is branded with the company’s logo on the chest pocket and comes in blue or black.

Eliano Younes, the head of strategic engagement at Palantir, told the New York Times that it was part of the company’s commitment to “re-industrializing America” – the jacket is made in Montana and recalls workwear of a previous era. “It’s not political,” he added. “It’s about people who love Palantir and are aligned with our mission.”

The key lesson from Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s style is to keep the messaging simple

Carolyn Bessette Kennedy has been an insider style icon for ever, but this year she has flipped from under-the-radar reference to global phenomenon. Ryan Murphy’s Love Story, a glossy dramatisation of her doomed romance with JFK Jr, gave us nine delicious hours of lingering closeups of her white tank tops and jeans, her simple black dresses, perfect black oval sunglasses and tortoiseshell headbands. If you didn’t know you wanted to dress like CBK before you started watching, you did by the end.

Carole Radziwill, who was friends with Carolyn, has pointed out that copying CBK’s style is pretty much the least CBK thing you could do. Her friend, she told the Deuxmoi podcast, “pulled her hair back in a headband because she didn’t want to wash it every day. She did what felt natural to her and she dressed in things that made her feel comfortable and most like herself. Mostly jeans and button-downs and T-shirts. The takeaway is not to mimic her style, but to do and wear what feels most authentic to you. Be yourself. She was very much herself.”

It took 10 years for Naseby to achieve its DarkSky International certification. Now, a night out in the tiny Otago town is like ‘a tour through the history of the universe’

As the last strip of pink on the horizon fades to indigo on the Maniototo Plain in Otago, every word I speak arrives in a puff of condensation. Six hundred metres above sea level, in winter the temperature here can drop to -15C. Spring isn’t much warmer. But the chill is worth it. Standing in the dark in what feels like the middle of nowhere, I’ve come to a paddock not far from the historic mining town of Naseby to stargaze.

Even in a country where there’s about 20km of space per person, the Maniototo Plain is sparsely populated. During the 1860s gold rush about 20,000 fortune seekers descended on Otago, but when they eventually moved on, towns like Naseby were left to a sleepy future. Now home to just 140 people, it’s not even a place you drive through. “We’re not on the way to anywhere,” says local Jill Wolff. “You’ve got to choose to go to Naseby.”

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From the breezy dunes of Normandy to the dreamy lagoons of the Algarve, our writers choose their favourite places to eat and drink by the sea

You share your favourite spots for sand, seafood and sundowners from the Kent coast to the Greek islands
• Tell us about your favourite railway trip in Europe – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Dungeness is a place of wild beauty, a stretch of coast that knows fierce winds. Artist and gardener Derek Jarman’s cottage roof blew off at least once and the wind regularly wreaked havoc with his planting. Stubborn plants survive on this vast shingle beach and just as stubborn is the Snack Shack, with its opening times dependent on the weather, as its website says. On fair weather days it’s an ideal place to have lunch as you explore the peninsula. If you’re in luck they will not have run out of lobster rolls among other freshly caught seafood delights. Paying homage to Jarman and eating outdoors here replenishes the soul.
Charlotte

The West Sussex village of Amberley, near Arundel, is easy to reach by train and offers great hiking in the national park, castles and a newly reopened pub with a focus on local food

Wisteria and clematis hang from weathered cottage walls. Tulips and pink apple blossom spill out of several gardens. Thatched animals decorate the rooftops. There’s a Norman church, a medieval castle and an 80-hectare (200-acre) nature reserve. Amberley is the kind of place people assume you can only reach by car, but the village has its own railway station with regular direct trains, along the scenic Arun Valley line, from Bognor, Horsham and London Victoria.

This spring, the Black Horse pub reopened in Amberley. The new owners are the gourmet Gladwin brothers, Oliver and Richard, returning to their Sussex roots near Nutbourne Vineyards. Having founded five Local & Wild restaurants in London, the Black Horse is their first country pub and first place with rooms.

The actor on her Dua Lipa faux pas, restless legs syndrome, and a shock realisation at a housewarming party

Born in Bristol, Tuppence Middleton, 39, trained at ArtsEd in London before appearing in films The Imitation Game and Mank. Her stage roles include The Motive and the Cue at the National Theatre, and her TV work spans Sense8, War and Peace, The Forsytes and the next series of Slow Horses. Since the age of 11, she has had obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which she writes about in Scorpions, out in paperback on 21 May. She lives in London with Swedish film director Måns Mårlind and their child.

What is your greatest fear?
Endless vomiting. That comes from my emetophobia, which is a huge part of my OCD.

I suspect the fox is stealing my delivery parcels off the doorstep, but I’m not going to escalate without proof

It is late afternoon, and I’m standing before the living room’s big bay window, with its commanding view of the street, when I hear the middle one coming down the stairs and turning the corner to the kitchen.

“Look at this,” I say. I can hear the reluctance in the slowing of his footsteps as he changes course.

The contrast between the dense, layered building and the clean lines of the cab make for a winning image

William Shum describes Yau Ma Tei, the Hong Kong district in which he took this photo, as “one of the region’s older and most characterful districts. I’m always drawn to this area because it feels authentic and full of local life. Older residential buildings, street-level shops and constant traffic show a very recognisable side of the city.”

Shum’s eye was drawn to the contrast between the passing vehicle in the foreground and the residential building in the background. “The building is full of repeating windows and air-conditioning units, which creates a dense and layered background, while in front the taxi appears in a very simple and clean shape,” he says. “Two things are instantly recognisable here: the city’s compact residential architecture and its iconic red taxis. This image brings those together.”

From Cara o cruz and Kopf oder Zahl to Lost City of the Incas, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 The singer Rachel Agatha Keen performs under what mononym?
2 Which national football side has just three wins, all against Liechtenstein?
3 What religious movement was founded by Madame Blavatsky?
4 Which car-making giant was established in 1968?
5 What is the subject of Hiram Bingham’s book Lost City of the Incas?
6 Petrichor is the particular smell produced by what?
7 Which warbler is nicknamed the northern, or mock, nightingale?
8 How many sides does a hectogon have?
What links:
9 Country singer and Rhodes scholar; Mastermind’s original host; Northern Ireland secretary 1997-99?
10 Earth measurement; pebble; reunion of broken parts?
11 Financial privilege; reasonable time; Salisbury doctrine; Sewel convention?
12 Edge of Tomorrow; Groundhog Day; Run Lola Run; Source Code?
13 Dinara Safina; Jelena Janković; Karolína Plíšková; Marcelo Ríos (ranking)?
14 Armburgh; Cely; Paston; Plumpton; Stonor?
15 Cara o cruz; Kopf oder Zahl; pile ou face; krona eller klave?

Tyrone Scott, who didn’t think he had a hope in the election, wants to help the Greens rebuild ‘community cohesion’ in Hackney

You would expect most political candidates who pull off a shock win to celebrate their victory, maybe with a glass of bubbly and excitement for the challenges of elected office ahead. But on Friday, as thousands of new councillors celebrated their triumphs, some surprise victors were less than pleased.

Green party handlers apologised to one newly elected councillor in Finsbury Park, north London, put down as a “paper candidate”, who pulled off an unexpected win. “You’re going to be great, we’ll support you,” they said, according to the Islington Tribune.

From Naomi Ishiguro to Jess Atwood Gibson, more children of high profile writers are becoming authors themselves. Parents and their literary offspring discuss the pressures of measuring up

Martin Amis liked to observe that the unusual position he and Kingsley Amis held – father-and-son novelists – was a historical anomaly, a “literary curiosity”. But it was not unique: Alexandre Dumas père and fils, Fanny and Anthony Trollope, and Arthur and Evelyn Waugh had all come before them.

And if Amis’s assertion wasn’t true then, it’s even less true now. In recent years, increasing numbers of children of novelists have become writers themselves, and this year sees a particularly rich batch. Kazuo Ishiguro’s daughter, Naomi, publishes the first in her new fantasy series this month. Margaret Atwood’s daughter Jess Gibson published her fiction debut this spring, and earlier this year Patrick Charnley, son of the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, published his first novel to wide acclaim.

He’s played English titans from William Shakespeare to Gareth Southgate, but what does the actor really think about the country today?

We are at a corner table in a breakfast place in Chelsea, Joseph Fiennes opposite me on the banquette with his jack russell, Noa. “Dog duty,” he says, apologetic. Noa looks at me, brown eyes also apologetic. They’ve been in Hyde Park, he says, he lost track, didn’t have time to take her home. Nature is where he’s at his best, where he feels cleansed, connected, observant – his sentences are decorative like this. “It’s when I’m at my happiest, on hours-long, rain-drenched walks. Hot cheeks, freezing hands.” In an ideal world he’d be trekking or wild swimming in the rugged landscape of the Tramuntana in Spain. But if it must be London, “nothing beats Hyde Park”. Fiennes is tidy in a cashmere cardie and thick twill chinos. Noa has a snazzy yellow collar. Anyway, she’s well-behaved, he says: “Aren’t you, Noa?” She curls up to prove it. The scene is a masterclass in unhurried wholesomeness. Until he says Noa will savage me if I’m mean.

Fiennes was launched into the national consciousness as the doe-eyed, luscious-lashed 28-year-old star of Shakespeare in Love opposite Gwyneth Paltrow. He’s self-deprecating about his career since, saying to one interviewer that it condemned him to a decade of “flouncy shirts and horses” and to me that he’s been “pretty much a supporting actor for an actress throughout”. While he’s worked alongside impressive women – Cate Blanchett, Helen Mirren, Elisabeth Moss, Rachel Weisz, Eva Green – his own standout roles include the chilling Commander Waterford in The Handmaid’s Tale (whom he describes as “insidious”). Now 55, he jokes, he’s mostly “playing dads”. Not least Young Sherlock’s dad in the Amazon series – young Sherlock being his real-life nephew Hero Fiennes Tiffin – but also a gripping portrayal of Richard Ratcliffe, husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was held hostage in Iran for six years, in Prisoner 951.

How has this affected you? Have you been able to make alternative plans?

People could see their travel plans upended as airlines cancel or consolidate flights to conserve jet fuel as the war in the Middle East disrupts supplies.

Airlines are reviewing their timetables to see which flights can be cancelled in advance and cause the least delays.

We would like to hear from people who converse with AI chatbots on a personal level

Lots of people now use chatbots as personal assistants, sometimes to the extent that they have formed an emotional attachment to them.

We would like to hear from people who converse with AI chatbots on a personal level. Have you formed an emotional bond to an AI chatbot?

If you’re affected by the National Savings and Investments lost funds scandal, we would like to hear from you

This month the state-backed National Savings and Investments (NS&I) bank will share its plan to reunite thousands of bereaved families with their missing money.

In March it emerged that 37,500 people faced delays because of problems tracing the premium bonds of deceased customers. The families are collectively owed nearly £500m.

Share a tip on a great train journey you’ve taken, whether long or short. The best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

Whether it’s a short hop across the Channel on Eurostar or a long-distance adventure crossing several countries, more of us are rediscovering the excitement and romance of rail travel. We’d love to hear about your favourite train-based trips in Europe.

The best tip of the week, chosen by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet wins a £200 voucher to stay at a Coolstays property – the company has more than 3,000 worldwide. The best tips will appear in the Guardian Travel section and website.

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Femen and Pussy Riot protest in Venice, Israeli strikes in Gaza, the hantavirus outbreak and Emma Chamberlain at the Met Gala – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists