Reform leader went public after approach from Guardian, but does his claim stack up that money was for his security?

• Nigel Farage was given undisclosed £5m by crypto billionaire in 2024

• Farage referred to standards watchdog over undisclosed £5m gift

Nigel Farage has admitted he received a personal gift of £5m from the Reform UK mega-donor Christopher Harborne shortly before the general election in 2024.

He did not disclose that gift at the time and had made no mention of it since. That is, until Wednesday morning, when the Daily Telegraph published a story in which Farage admitted receiving the money from Harborne – saying it was for his personal security.

Award-winning chef and husband ordered to stop offering lifts home from rurally located Hansom

It was when people were bringing a change of shoes to walk home that a couple running an acclaimed restaurant in North Yorkshire thought: “Actually, why don’t we give you a lift?”

But the arrangement, loved by customers, has fallen foul of the council, which has informed Ruth Hansom and her husband, Mark, that they were in breach of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976.

PM was supposed to be preparing his election excuses but took no damage from mediocre end-of-session clash

Today was never meant to have been this way. The plan had been to prorogue on Tuesday night ahead of next week’s elections and the state opening the week after. No need for Keir Starmer to face a last prime minister’s questions of the parliament. Time to catch his breath. Put his feet up. Recover from the near constant noise of the Peter Mandelson scandal and leadership challenges.

Start to prepare his excuses ahead of predicted losses. Pencil in a reshuffle. Some of his cabinet ministers were looking decidedly queasy on the government frontbench. Even the good ones. The chronicle of a death foretold. Always handy to have colleagues you can sacrifice to save your own skin. If only temporarily. When you are prime minister, every extra day in No 10 matters.

The fashion and magazine industries have had a makeover but this glossy knock-off reunites the old team – and recycles the old plot – with style

Twenty years have gone by; the fashion and publishing worlds have changed but Satan’s clothing and accessory choices are pretty much what they were. It’s time for a sprightly and amiable sequel to the adored mid-00s Manhattan romcom that followed the adventures of would-be serious writer and saucer-eyed ingenue Andrea “Andy” Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway. Straight out of college in one of the flyover states, she fluked a job at iconic New York fashion magazine Runway, edited by the terrifying and amusingly surnamed Miranda Priestly, played of course by Meryl Streep. Miranda doesn’t look a day older in the sequel, and nor does Nigel, played by Stanley Tucci, still in post as her loyal, worldly, privately melancholy second-in-command.

So Andy has come back, having been laid off by some Jeff Bezos-type meanie from the upmarket broadsheet where she’d been winning awards for super-serious but boring articles. She can’t afford to turn down a mephistophelean offer to be features editor for Runway, where she finds things are very different. The magazine now has nothing like the colossal budgets of old; embarrassingly, it has to distance itself from the sweatshop economy, and is ground down by chasing clicks and eyeballs in a fickle digital world ruled by a teen customer base with no class and no taste. Miranda has to pay pursed lip-service to body positivity and rejecting heteronormativity in the workplace, and gets schooled in correct language by her new assistant Amari (Simone Ashley). She even has to fly coach.

Everything was in place for Andrea’s dream celebration in Barbados. Then her close friend was denied the right to walk across a British airport to board a connecting flight

Weddings can be complicated to organise, especially when the venue is more than 4,000 miles from home. But Andrea, a Londoner, was confident she and her partner, Josh, had thought of everything when they planned their dream wedding in Barbados for the beginning of May.

The British couple – Andrea of Nigerian and Josh of Bajan heritage – booked a stunning venue, with tropical gardens and spectacular views.

Jennifer Rauchet, wife of Pete Hegseth, caused partisan uproar by supposedly wearing a bargain dress to the formal event – but what it says about our attitudes to fast fashion is more interesting

Although far less important than the political violence at the White House correspondent’s dinner in Washington over the weekend, the sartorial choices of the Maga administration are now getting airtime – and one dress is causing a particular furore.

It is being reported that Jennifer Rauchet, wife of the US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, wore what appeared to resemble a gown listed on Shein for $42 (and similar to another on Temu for half the price).

Assailant was reportedly hunting for anyone ‘visibly Jewish’ in suspected antisemitic attack in north London

Police are treating the stabbing of two men in Golders Green, north London, as terrorism, with the suspect described as having been hunting for anyone “visibly Jewish” to attack.

The stabbings, which happened just after 11am on Wednesday, follow a series of arson attacks on Jewish targets in London since March, including two previous incidents in Golders Green.

Reform leader changed his mind about standing as MP after gift from Thai-based crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne

• Analysis: Farage’s bid to get ahead of story only raises more questions

• Farage referred to standards watchdog over undisclosed £5m gift

Nigel Farage was given £5m by the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before announcing he would stand in the 2024 British general election, the Guardian can reveal.

Farage had stated he did not intend to stand as a prospective MP but U-turned in June 2024, within weeks of receiving the personal gift from the Thailand-based businessman.

Sophie Corcoran challenging 10,000 Interns Foundation, which works with people from under-represented groups

An influencer is taking a charity that organises internships for black and minority ethnic people to court because they do not organise schemes for white people.

Sophie Corcoran, a GB News commentator, applied to a programme the 10,000 Interns Foundation was running with the Bar Council. She said she was “shocked to discover that the scheme is restricted to applicants of a particular racial background”.

Actor and presenter broke his hip, right leg, pelvis and ribs when he gave a talk at CogX festival at O2 Arena in 2023

Stephen Fry is suing two companies that organised a tech conference where he was injured in 2023 after falling off the stage, high court documents show.

The actor and presenter broke his hip and had multiple breaks in his right leg, pelvis and ribs when he attended the CogX festival at the O2 Arena, where he delivered a talk on artificial intelligence on 14 September 2023.

US president’s threat comes after Germany’s Friedrich Merz suggests Trump team is being outplayed in its negotiations with Iran

The US may reduce its number of troops deployed in Germany, Donald Trump has announced, days after the country’s chancellor said America was being “humiliated” by Iran.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, the US president said his administration was “studying and reviewing the possible reduction of troops in Germany, with a determination to be made over the next short period of time”.

People with meniscus tears who underwent surgery had poorer knee function and worse osteoarthritis after 10 years than those who did not

A common knee surgery for cartilage damage does not benefit patients and may lead to worse outcomes, a 10-year trial suggests.

The study tracked outcomes for patients treated for a meniscus tear, who were given a partial meniscectomy, one of the most common orthopaedic surgeries. Their trajectories were compared with patients who had randomly been assigned to receive “sham surgery”, in which no procedure was carried out.

Justices rule in landmark decision Louisiana must redraw congressional map, largely killing major civil rights law

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The US supreme court has ruled that Louisiana will have to redraw its congressional map, in a landmark decision that effectively guts a major section of the Voting Rights Act.

In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, the court rendered ineffective section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 has long been used to ensure minority voters are treated fairly in redistricting.

Results suggest radiotracer maraciclatide can ‘light up’ condition on scan and reduce need for investigative surgery

A non-invasive scan for endometriosis has shown promising results in a trial, boosting hopes for far quicker diagnosis.

The trial, which included 19 women with the condition, suggests that an experimental radiotracer, called maraciclatide, can “light up” endometriosis on a scan. The current need for a surgical investigation is seen as a major obstacle to timely diagnosis, with women in England typically waiting nearly a decade.

Month-long mission to save animal in Baltic sea off Germany has attracted national frenzy

• Timmy the whale rescue attempt begins off coast of Germany – in pictures

Attempts to rescue a young humpback whale stranded in shallow waters off the Baltic coast in Germany have been criticised by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) as “inadvisable”.

The 10 metre-long whale, variously nicknamed Timmy or Hope, swam on to a sandbank more than a month ago and its health deteriorated as it repeatedly became stranded. Hopes were raised on Tuesday when divers helped the mammal on to a flooded barge. By Wednesday, the barge, pulled by a tug boat, had reached Danish waters as it headed towards the North Sea.

Zohran Mamdani said he would not meet UK monarch privately, noting Indian diamond claimed by crown in 1849

In a way, it must be tough being king. One day, you’re lauded by the US president, applauded by Congress and served spring-herbed ravioli and parmesan emulsion on a golden plate.

The next, you’re essentially snubbed by the mayor of New York City, who makes it clear that a) he does not want to meet you, and b) you should return a diamond that your ancestors took from a 10-year-old Indian boy.

England’s higher education regulator must rebuild trust with troubled sector after series of blunders under previous leadership

In its brief and unhappy life, England’s Office for Students has been offered a series of challenges it has largely failed to meet. This week the latest and most embarrassing of those was unveiled when the high court decisively rejected the higher education watchdog’s attempts to fine the University of Sussex more than £500,000 for regulatory failings relating to Kathleen Stock’s time as an academic at Sussex.

Stock quit Sussex in 2021, saying she felt ostracised and targeted for her views on gender identity and transgender rights. Here was the highest profile test case that the OfS had seen: a subject of enormous controversy and sensitivity, involving key issues of academic freedom and freedom of speech. But as we now know from Mrs Justice Lieven’s ruling, in its rush to intervene, the OfS managed to tie together its own shoelaces.

Authorities are yet to decide how they will move the body of the massive creature, which is attracting humans, eagles – and plenty of sharks

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Thin strips of flesh hang down like rotten tinsel, swaying in the wind. Glistening fluid trickles on to the stone where insects buzz. On the windward side, the odour is masked by the salty air. But step downwind, and you enter a sickly, sour-sweet blend of garbage and rotting fish. A passing couple pull their T-shirts tight over their noses.

On a rock shelf at the southern end of Era beach, the estimated 25-tonne body of a sperm whale rests like a melted candle. Looking down at the rock pools, floating chunks of white fat bob in the water.

King’s carefully crafted address to US Congress was the result of close liaison with aides, No 10 and Foreign Office

Donald Trump called it “fantastic”, Democrats cheered references to Magna Carta, while the joint session of the US Congress came together in giving it a standing ovation.

King Charles’s address to US lawmakers, while non-political, did not shy away from politics. And, though the president did not take offence – “He made a great speech, I was very jealous” – its pointed mentions of subjects the US president has previously disparaged were not lost on America.

As the country prepares to elect a new president, a fierce debate is raging on how to end the decades-long armed conflict for good

The landmark 2016 peace deal between the Colombian government and the largest insurgent army in Latin America succeeded in some ways: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) agreed to lay down their weapons, and the violence that had racked the country was substantially reduced.

But the deal alone could not end the decades-long armed conflict for good. Subsequent administrations slow-walked the implementation of the settlement, which was rejected by Farc dissidents and other rebel factions.

PocketOS was left scrambling after a rogue AI agent deleted swaths of code underpinning its business

It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jeremy Crane said.

The culprit was Cursor, an AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model, which is one of the AI industry’s flagship models. As more industries embrace AI in an attempt to automate tasks and even replace workers, the chaos at PocketOS is a reminder of what could go wrong.

You already get extra legroom and all sorts of goodies if you travel first class. Soon you won’t even have to queue for the toilet

Name: The aeroplane en suite

Age: Coming soon.

You can understand the motivation – more UK investment by UK funds means faster UK growth – but fiduciary duty trumps all

A simple principle lies at the heart of pension investment: the pension manager must invest in the best interest of the client. UK ministers have often wished UK funds would show more home bias by channelling more pensioners’ cash towards domestic assets in the interests of economic growth, but the fundamental rule of the game has always been understood. You don’t mess with the fiduciary duty.

Thus, when Rachel Reeves a year ago unveiled her Mansion House accord – a pledge by 17 of the biggest providers to earmark a slice of workplace pensions for UK private assets – it was made clear the arrangement was voluntary. What’s more, as the signatories emphasised, the commitment was “subject to fiduciary duty and the consumer duty” and “dependent on implementation by the government and regulators of critical enablers”.

A few days of joviality will hardly change American foreign policy or guarantee Trump’s ever-erratic affections for long

To do our job, investigative journalists are learning to work across borders. This isn’t just about the truth, it’s about staying alive

• Laurent Richard is a journalist and the director of the Forbidden Stories consortium

In February 2025, the body of journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was finally returned to Ukraine after months of uncertainty. She was one of 757 Ukrainian casualties handed over by Russian authorities as part of an exchange of prisoners and the dead.

Roshchyna had disappeared in the summer of 2023 while reporting from the Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine. When her body was examined, parts were missing: her eyeballs, her brain, her larynx – possibly removed to conceal the signs of how she died. Preliminary forensics suggest “numerous signs of torture”, according to the Ukrainian prosecutor.

Laurent Richard is a journalist and the director of the Forbidden Stories consortium

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

Breakfast, lunch, dinner: there’s no meal I can’t spoil with my desire to get more than my fair share. And it’s been this way ever since I was a kid

I have identified my worst character trait. In such a crowded field, this has been no easy task. This one wins out because it’s two equally unappealing traits rolled into one. They both concern food, or rather eating. Number one: I cannot stop coveting what others have on their plates. Number two: I cannot bear to give anyone anything off my own plate. The hypocrisy is as unattractive as a half-eaten pot of yoghurt covered in mould.

A Russian study into whether “moral transgression might enhance gustatory pleasure” has concluded that it does. French fries were fed to participants in a number of ways, one of which saw one person eating another person’s chips. Deliciously, these (identical) chips were considered by the thieves to be altogether nicer. It would also be nice if I could cite this as the logic behind my desire to pilfer from the plates of others, but for me it’s not always about the taste, or hunger. I just want it for the sake of wanting it, like a dog looks at you longingly when you’re eating even if you’re eating something the dog wouldn’t want.

Trump is volatile, capricious and unreasonable – but he belongs to the old world of analogue power. What comes next will be harder to manage

Donald Trump is not impressed by soft power. He respects hard men with military muscle. But he can be moved by pageantry, which is the purpose of King Charles’s visit to Washington this week. Trump is flattered to rub shoulders with majesty. The good vibes are then supposed to radiate warmth through a political relationship that has been chilled by the war in Iran.

It might work, but not for long. Trump’s irritation with Keir Starmer and other European leaders for what he calls cowardice in the Middle East is aggravated daily by evidence that the war is a strategic calamity.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Thursday 30 April, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform UK – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

The ZSL has given us the word ‘zoo’, inspired artists and birthed a quarter of all Sumatran tigers. It has fascinated me since childhood – and the world since 1826

In the spring of 1826, two extraordinary things occurred in central London. The first was the death of Chunee the elephant. On 1 March at Cross’s Menagerie, upstairs in the Exeter ’Change on the Strand, Chunee was killed by a firing squad in the cramped enclosure where he’d been kept for the previous six years.

By this point Chunee was more than three metres (10ft) tall and weighed at least five tonnes. Like all adult male elephants, he periodically went into musth, when his body was flooded with testosterone, making him aggressive and uncontrollable. After Chunee injured one keeper (apparently deliberately) and accidentally killed another, the proprietor, Edward Cross, decided to have him destroyed.

The world will be watching to see how the ban for anyone born after 2009 works out. So far it’s been a win with smokers and non-smokers alike

Last week saw the passage of the tobacco and vapes bill, which has a very ambitous aim: to create a “smoke-free generation” and eventually end smoking for ever in the UK. Quite simply, anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 will never be legally able to buy tobacco products. From 2027, the minimum legal age for the sale of tobacco will increase by one year (from the current age of 18) every year. There will be a permanent generational line: everyone above it will still be allowed to buy cigarettes; everyone below it won’t. But over time the proportion of people allowed to smoke will become smaller and smaller as older citizens die – until one day no one in the UK will be able to legally buy cigarettes.

It’s quite a clever piece of legislation: rather than an outright ban that will result in conflict over rights with smokers now, it gradually reduces the number of those able to purchase tobacco products legally year by year, hopefully leading to further declines in smoking that happens invisibly. Public health researchers will be studying the impact of this legislation (a policy experiment and one of the first of its kind), and whether it could be a model to introduce in other countries and areas.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

This piece previously suggested vapes were included in the generational ban; this was an error in editing and has been amended. As noted elsewhere, the sale and use of vapes will be regulated, not banned.

Parliament’s failure to change the law on a difficult issue should be the spur to democratic innovation

The prorogation of parliament on Wednesday signals the end of the road for the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill. The proposal to allow some patients in England and Wales, under very specific circumstances, to have medical assistance in ending their own lives was still at committee stage in the Lords when the house rose. Since it was introduced as a private member’s bill, it cannot be carried over into the next session.

Campaigners for assisted dying are furious at what they see as procedural obstruction by unelected peers, bogging the bill down with heaps of amendments and running down the clock, thwarting the will of the elected Commons. Critics of the bill counter that the normal legislative process was followed and that the volume of amendments was a function of poor drafting, leaving practical and ethical problems that had to be addressed in the Lords.

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

The world must accelerate the shift to renewables, regardless of the economic effects of Abu Dhabi’s decision

Opec appears to be the latest casualty of the Iran war. On Tuesday, the United Arab Emirates announced that it was leaving the oil cartel after 60 years. The loss of a critical member is a blow to the group and its de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, in the midst of the biggest supply crisis in history.

This is a geopolitical decision, not merely an economic one. The UAE has built itself into an increasingly interventionist and unilaterally minded power, not only challenging Riyadh’s dominance but undermining its more cautious approach to regional affairs. The rift has become increasingly public and bitter – with Saudi Arabia bombing what it called a UAE-linked arms shipment in Yemen in December. Abu Dhabi, as the main target of Iranian strikes among the Gulf countries, is also enraged by what it sees as a feeble regional response to the current conflict, and has been privately pushing for counterattacks.

It isn’t a story of villains and victims, but a housing system under strain, writes Nick Vernoum. Plus a letter from John Farquhar

Your article on landlords (I thought landlords were unchallengeable – until I met one of mine at a party, 22 April) paints them as shadowy figures wielding quiet power, but the reality is often more ordinary – and more complicated. I’m an “accidental landlord”. In my 40s, after working long hours to buy a modest home, I became seriously ill with chronic fatigue and had to move back in with my parents. Letting my house wasn’t about exploitation; it was about survival – covering a mortgage I could no longer sustain through work.

Over time, I reinvested carefully, and I now own a small number of properties. The income isn’t lavish; it has supported my parents and given me a chance to rebuild my life. I know my tenants well. They can contact me any time, and I sort problems quickly.

Readers respond to the British Medical Association’s warning that the increasing use of ‘non-doctors’ in medical roles is unsafe

I am an advanced clinical practitioner in acute respiratory medicine, and the British Medical Association’s (BMA) characterisation of practitioners like me as unsafe “substitute doctors” demands a response (Safety fears as UK hospitals use nurses to cover for doctors due to shortage of medics, 25 April).

Every shift, I assess and manage patients with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations, pulmonary embolisms, pneumonia and acute respiratory failure, taking clinical responsibility in a consultant-led multidisciplinary team, underpinned by a master’s-level qualification and over a decade of specialist experience. This is not doctor substitution. This is advanced practice: a distinct, evidence-based clinical role that enhances patient care rather than compromising it.

Peter Foreshaw Brookes says economic conditions and smartphone usage (and its effects on coupling) are more likely causes

The global drop in fertility has a number of causes, but rising biological infertility (infecundity) is not one (Toxins plus climate harms likely cause of reduced fertility, study finds, 26 April). Recent reports of a paper by Shanna Swan, the writer of Spermageddon, and others have claimed the paper shows that exposure to pollutants has been driving down biological fertility and may be contributing to the downturn of fertility rates in recent years. This is unlikely.

A meta-analysis published last year, which controlled for regional variation, found that sperm counts increased in the US in recent years. Although there are other mechanisms by which biological fertility could be affected, time to pregnancy (TTP) directly tracks how quickly couples conceive. TTP increased in Britain in the late 20th century, and has been stable between 2002 and 2017 in the US for women under 30, only increasing by about 4% for women who already had a child. Meanwhile, infertility has been staying around the same or decreasing in developed countries in recent years.

Westminster drinking culture | Cocking things up | Fragile over-60s? | Victory over Trump | Jobs for Neets | Heavy lifting

The Labour MP Alex Sobel says he has never “actually seen anyone smell of booze” (Hannah Spencer riles fellow MPs with attack on parliament’s drinking culture, 27 April). That’s a relief, otherwise I would have wondered whether we were all living in a strip cartoon in The Dandy or Beano.
Pete Lavender
Woodthorpe, Nottinghamshire

• Now we know why they make such a cock-up of everything.
Michael Fuller
Ampthill, Bedfordshire

It was a see-saw tie, a tale of three penalties; two scored, one by each team and a third given and then taken away, the most dramatic momentum shift inside a couple of minutes towards the end, the incident that stood to redefine the tie suddenly rubbed out.

It was a night when the controversy pulsed and if it lacked the beauty of Paris Saint-Germain versus Bayern Munich from the other Champions League semi-final first-leg it still had drama; knife-edge tension.

• LIV staring at closure in absence of alternative funds

• Leading names expected to eye return to main tours

LIV Golf executives are poised to confirm to players that Saudi Arabia’s funding of the circuit will cease at the end of 2026, in a move that will begin a scramble between some leading names in the sport to return to traditional tours.

Without an alternative and unlikely funding source from 2027 onwards, LIV in its current form is staring at closure just four years on from staging its first tournament. Nothing has materially changed for LIV in recent weeks yet formal admission of an upcoming Saudi exit will be viewed as a key moment in a disruption story that is heading towards a messy finale.

• Ukrainian has not played since November 2024

• Cas confirms appeal by Mudryk against the FA

The Chelsea forward Mykhailo Mudryk has appealed to the court of arbitration for sport after he received a reported four-year playing ban from the Football Association for the use of a banned substance.

Mudryk has not played a competitive match since November 2024 after he failed a drug test while on international duty with Ukraine and began a provisional suspension. Under the terms of any four-year ban he would not be eligible for selection again until December 2028, but if an appeal to Cas were successful then the 25-year-old could possibly return next year.

• Former world No 4’s knee problem follows arm injury

• Draper says it is ‘gutting’ to miss Roland Garros

Jack Draper has been ruled out of the French Open with a knee injury. It is another blow in his attempt to re-establish himself after a long-term arm injury ruled him out for the best part of eight months.

Draper has managed nine matches in five events since returning in ­February and retired during his first-round match with Tomás ­Martín Etcheverry at the Barcelona Open this month. He was diagnosed with an aggravated knee tendon injury and had initially hoped to return before the second grand slam of the year next month.

The Premier League isn’t as fun and fizzy as PSG v Bayern but that’s the price of the twice-weekly churn that rewards discipline and sacrifice

In the novel Rabbit, Run, John Updike has one of his characters, a groovy and progressive 1960s priest, calling round to talk to his fellow minister, a hard German Lutheran, about the secret doubts he harbours about his faith. Is the doctrine really necessary? Is hell just, you know, a metaphor? He likes Jesus. But maybe he also likes sinful things, like sex and recklessly open attacking football.

The hard German Lutheran takes one look, curls his lip and tells the groovy progressive priest to get down on his knees in the kitchen and beg for forgiveness. Who is he to reason with divine suffering? Life is pain. Joy is pain. Pain is pain. Frankly, the groovy priest who likes flying full-backs and an open midfield disgusts him. He will burn in hell for his spineless debauchery. The groovy priest leaves in tears.

• Campaigners hit out at striker’s role in ‘Let It Pour’ video

• ‘He is a great hero for many young people’

Erling Haaland’s collaboration with a leading American beer brand has caused a backlash in his native Norway, where alcohol advertising is banned.

World Cup sponsors Budweiser’s hiring of the Manchester City and Norway striker to help launch its “Let It Pour” promotional video together with the former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp has led to criticism from campaigning groups, who described Haaland’s commercial deal in the buildup to this summer’s tournament as “tragic”.

• Murphy wins 13-10, Higgins fightback sinks Robertson

• Mark Allen to face China’s Wu Yize in other semi-final

Shaun Murphy stormed into the world championship semi‑finals in Sheffield as the defending ­champion, Zhao Xintong, became the 21st player to fall victim to the so-called “Crucible curse”.

Murphy’s 13-10 triumph means Zhao joins the list of first-time ­winners who have failed to return the following year and successfully defend their crown.

Arsenal condemned a broken Leicester to a bottom-place finish in the WSL and kept the pressure on Manchester City at the top with a dominant win. Two goals each from Sweden’s Smilla Holmberg and Stina Blackstenius and one apiece from Frida Maanum, Mariona Caldentey and Leah Williamson, helped Arsenal reduce their goal-difference deficit with the league leaders from 13 to six.

“I’m so happy,” said the Arsenal head coach, Renée Slegers. “We wanted to win today, we needed to win today, so we did that … What’s most pleasing to see is that we play the Arsenal way and that doesn’t change regardless of who’s on the pitch. Everyone’s contributing.”

Conservative selection policy reinforces perception that some are undroppable, no matter how bad the results

Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. England’s head coach, Charlotte Edwards, is perfectly sane, but on Tuesday she announced a squad for the home T20 World Cup that starts on 12 June almost exactly the same as the one that surrendered the Ashes, by a score of 16-0, 15 months ago. The optics are dreadful.

For anyone who has followed England closely over the past year, the conservatism of Edwards and her selection panel comes as no surprise. Last summer, the main selection news was that Kate Cross – who did not play in the Ashes due to injury – was discarded. Edwards awarded one new cap, to Em Arlott, who was also the only new face in the squad Edwards took to India in October.

Matthew Pennycook says ending system must be done slowly to avoid hitting housing supply and legal pitfalls

A ban on new leasehold properties in England and Wales is unlikely to come into force until after the next election, the housing minister has said, as he defended the government’s piecemeal attempts to dismantle the system.

The long-promised end would take years to “switch on”, Matthew Pennycook said, even though the ban of leaseholds on new houses was passed in 2024 and the government intends to pass one on new flats soon.

As defense secretary testifies before House, Trump posts AI-generated image of himself with weapon and caption: ‘NO MORE MR. NICE GUY’

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Pete Hegseth denied that the US-Israel war on Iran, which the Pentagon estimates has cost the US at least $25bn, is “a quagmire” and claimed critics of the operation posed a greater threat to the US than Iran itself.

Hegseth came under pressure to set out Washington’s strategy for the conflict as he appeared before the House armed services committee on Wednesday for a marathon hearing alongside Gen Dan Caine, chair of the joint chiefs of staff. The US defense secretary asked lawmakers to approve $1.5tn military spending – and then described some of those lawmakers as “the biggest challenge” to the war effort.

Report calls for tough action to combat ‘escalating and unsustainable burden’ of liver-related problems in Europe

Governments in Europe should impose much higher taxes on alcohol and unhealthy food to tackle the continent’s 284,000 deaths a year from liver disease, experts say.

Taxes on those products should rise sharply enough for the money raised to cover the huge costs they place on health services, the criminal justice system and social services.

Russian president welcomed decision to extend Iran ceasefire in what US president said was a ‘very good conversation’

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump discussed the war in Iran and floated a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine in a phone call on Wednesday.

In the call, which lasted more than 90 minutes, the Russian president said Moscow viewed the prospect of a US ground operation in Iran as dangerous, while welcoming Trump’s decision to extend a ceasefire in the region, according to Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser.

Narges Mohammadi denied medical leave from prison in spite of sharp decline in health and drastic weight loss, say lawyers

The family of the jailed Iranian Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi say they fear for her life after a sharp deterioration in her health, suspected heart attack and drop in body weight of almost 20kg (44lb).

The 54-year-old human rights activist, who was awarded the 2023 Nobel peace prize while in prison, had been released for health reasons in 2024. She was re-arrested in December 2025 during the memorial service of a fellow human rights activist and is being held in Zanjan central prison, in north-west Iran.

Colombia president Gustavo Petro tells 57-country talks on a green energy transition that fossil fuel interests could destroy humanity

The world is threatened by a “suicidal” model of capitalism that is leading to war, fascism and the potential extinction of humanity, Colombia’s president has said, as he convened 57 governments to address the climate crisis.

Gustavo Petro blamed fossil fuel interests for taking ever more desperate measures to prevent a transition to green energy. “There is inertia in the power and the economy of this archaic form of energy – fossil fuels – that lead to death. Undoubtedly, that form of capital can commit suicide, taking with it humanity and [other] life,” he said. “The question that needs to be asked is whether capitalism can truly adapt to a non-fossil energy model.”

Pace of sea-level rise has turned Outer Banks coastal area into a ‘canary in the coalmine’ for other east coast communities

Moving house has a more literal meaning on Hatteras Island, the slender hook of land that juts off the coast of North Carolina. After a slew of houses toppled spectacularly into the Atlantic Ocean recently, entire buildings are now being lifted on to wheels to flee the rapidly eroding coastline.

Since September, 19 homes have been lost to waves that tore them from their pilings, sending them crashing into other structures like bumper cars before breaking up in the ocean. Spooked homeowners have turned to the unusual services of Barry Crum, a lifelong Hatteras resident who has become the island’s main house mover.

Rush for lithium, cobalt and nickel is ravaging livelihoods, water and health of world’s most vulnerable, UN study says

Critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel are becoming the “oil of the 21st century” as the scramble for precious metals deepens poverty and creates public health crises in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, a report by the UN’s water thinktank has found.

The investigation by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) concluded that the growing demand for lithium, cobalt and nickel used in batteries and microchips is draining water supplies, eroding agriculture and exposing communities to toxic heavy metals.

Scientists find annual sea surface temperatures across Europe reached highest levels recorded, while deadly wildfires set large parts of continent ablaze

The Nordic heatwave that pushed temperatures above 30C (86F) in the Arctic Circle in July was part of a record-breaking year that saw abnormal heat sear more than 95% of Europe, a report has found.

Parts of Scandinavia were scorched last summer by 21 days of punishingly hot weather that led to “tropical nights” in typically cool countries such as Norway, Sweden and Finland, according to a scientific report campaigners said showed “all the emergency warning lights are flashing red”.

Three defendants deny plotting arson attack on two homes and a car connected to prime minister in London last year

A series of arson attacks on property linked to Keir Starmer was masterminded by a Russian-speaking contact using the pseudonym “El Money”, a court has heard.

Roman Lavrynovych, 22, and Petro Pochynok, 35, both from Ukraine, and Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, a Romanian national, sat with their heads bent towards interpreters as Duncan Atkinson KC, prosecuting, opened the trial over the arson attacks that took place in May last year.

Ruling is blow to Office for Students after it issued record fine for allegations over professor’s trans rights views

The University of Sussex has overturned a £585,000 fine from England’s higher education watchdog after the high court rejected claims that the university breached free speech regulations in a case involving a former professor.

The ruling is a damaging blow to the credibility of the Office for Students as the court rejected the regulator’s lengthy investigation involving KathleenStock’s 2021 resignation,which came after protests over her views on transgender rights and gender identity.

Brown calls for police to look into former prince’s use of public funds and says he had colleague raise issue in 2008

Gordon Brown has revealed he ordered that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor be questioned about incurring “unacceptable costs” as a trade envoy in 2008, as he called for the police to widen their inquiry to include the use of public funds.

The former prime minister said he asked a colleague from the business department to question Mountbatten-Windsor about his travel expenses.

Wave of measures has helped cut offending in stores last year by a fifth as new retail crime law comes into force

Co-op is secretly marking commonly stolen items including alcohol and laundry detergents with invisible “forensic spray” to track them, in the latest crackdown on shoplifting as a new law on retail crime kicks in.

The supermarket aims to use the technique across the country having tested it in Manchester and London since last year.

Accusation vessel contains grain looted from Russian-occupied territories triggers diplomatic spat between both nations

Ukraine has asked Israel to seize a vessel it claims is carrying grain looted from Russian-occupied territories, triggering a rare diplomatic spat between the two countries.

The dispute spilt into public view this week when president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “another vessel” carrying grain “stolen by Russia” had arrived at a port in Israel and was preparing to unload.

Indictment claims ex-FBI director’s social media post last year of shells arranged into ‘86 47’ was threat against Trump

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James Comey made a brief appearance in court on Wednesday after the justice department indicted him over a social media post in a renewed bid to prosecute one of Donald Trump’s longtime political adversaries.

The former FBI director was indicted in North Carolina on Tuesday over a photograph he posted last year of seashells arranged in the numbers “86 47” – a message the justice department says amounts to a threat against Trump, the 47th US president.

New lawsuits allege employees urged company to notify authorities months before deadly Tumbler Ridge attack

Families of seven victims of a mass shooting at a secondary school in British Columbia are suing OpenAI and the company’s CEO for negligence after it failed to alert authorities to the shooter’s troubling conversations with ChatGPT.

The lawsuits, filed on Wednesday in a federal court in San Francisco, allege that the violent intentions of the shooter, identified as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, were well-known to OpenAI. Employees at the company flagged the shooter’s account eight months before the attack and determined that it posed “a credible and specific threat of gun violence against real people”, according to the lawsuit.

Indictment accuses high-level officials in Sinaloa of offences such as drug trafficking, weapons offences and kidnapping

The US justice department has charged the governor of Sinaloa and nine other current and former officials for alleged ties to the Sinaloa cartel, accusing them of aiding in the massive importation of illicit narcotics into the United States .

Some officials were members of Mexico’s progressive ruling party, Morena, posing a political conundrum for Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum as she seeks to offset mounting pressures from the Trump administration.

Lawyers for world’s richest person try to paint him as humanitarian as judge cuts off his long-winded replies

After a dramatic first day of opening statements and testimony from Elon Musk in his case against Sam Altman and OpenAI, the trial continued on Wednesday with a cross-examination of the Tesla CEO. Musk began his second day of on the stand by repeating the accusation that Altman “stole a charity” and would endanger humanity with AI multiple times. OpenAI’s attorneys pressed the world’s richest man on his allegations, resulting in testy exchanges and multiple interventions from the judge.

Musk often refused to answer questions as instructed, and the judge interjected several times to tell Musk to simply give a yes-or-no response. At various points, Musk told OpenAI’s counsel, “You’re being misleading with your question,” and “Your questions are not simple, they are designed to trick me, essentially.”

Drugmaker had stalled large-scale projects in England but has now pledged investment at two sites, announced by Keir Starmer

Britain’s biggest drugmaker AstraZeneca has said it will invest £300m in the UK in a surprise U-turn after pausing large-scale projects last year.

The drugmaker had pulled back investments in Britain after becoming disillusioned with the business environment, including the availability of new medicines on the NHS and drug pricing.

Blockade threat in vital strait and Trump’s stance lift crude, pushing pump prices to highest level since 2022

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Average US gas prices have hit a new high at $4.23 a gallon, their highest since 2022 and a record since the start of the war with Iran, according to the motor club AAA.

The price of Brent crude, the benchmark that influences the price of gasoline in the US, now stands at $114.60 a barrel, up nearly 25% from the recent low since mid-April. US gas prices a year ago averaged $3.16 a gallon.

Continent ‘sleepwalking’ into series of economic and national security problems due to over-dependence

Europe is “sleepwalking” into a series of economic and national security problems because of an over-reliance on Chinese green technology, according to experts.

A report co-authored by Michael Collins, a former deputy head of national security strategy at the UK Cabinet Office, described the risks of depending on China for green tech as “serious”.

In this extract from a new book on Sheffield’s musical history, Monkeys drummer Matt Helders and the cream of the city’s indie scene look back on the febrile mid-00s – from brilliant tunes to ‘brainless violence’

In 2005, enough of a storm seemed to be brewing in northern British indie music that NME tried to coin a new genre to encompass it all: New Yorkshire. “Forget LA, New York or London,” the feature read. “New Yorkshire is the best new band scene in Britain.” The magazine lumped together a bunch of disparate bands such as Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys, the Long Blondes, Milburn, Harrisons and Bromheads Jacket, along with a Leeds and Wakefield bunch comprised of Kaiser Chiefs, the Cribs, Black Wire, the Research, ¡Forward, Russia!, the Ivories and the Sunshine Underground.

The New Yorkshire tag, though, had overlooked a fairly noticeable split in Sheffield at the time between the artier indie bands, often students, and the more traditional local indie outfits.

From Peep Show to Half Man, some of the best television can be the hardest to watch. Get ready to look through your fingers at these supremely squirm-inducing scenes

It’s not exactly how anyone imagines their first time. Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer follow-up, bruising BBC drama Half Man, is full of disturbing scenes but none more so than in the opening episode, when teen delinquent Ruben orchestrates his younger step-sibling Niall losing his virginity.

It makes for one of those TV moments where it’s physically impossible to sit comfortably on your sofa. But what are the all-time most unsettling? From bad rapping to DIY dentistry, here’s our selection of 15 scenes that made us wince, squirm and watch through our fingers …

Caroline Muirhead’s whirlwind romance with a Scottish farmer soon took a turn when she discovered his dark secret. This Netflix docuseries is a tale of her bravery, and the shocking stupidity and neglect it was rewarded with

There are some truly amazing women in the world. The fact that this thought most often crosses my mind when I am watching a true crime documentary and hearing about the female victims of men’s crimes and learning how much suffering they endured while raising children, holding down jobs, keeping friends and parents happy and safe from knowledge that would upset or endanger them is so bleak that I’m going to put it away lest rage overwhelm me for good.

Let us focus instead on another name to add to the list of extraordinary women, again brought to public attention by the terrible act of a man she knew. The three-part Netflix series Should I Marry a Murderer? tells the story of pathologist Caroline Muirhead who, at the age of 29, meets and falls in love with a Scottish farmer she meets on Tinder. His name is Sandy McKellar.

Mare of Easttown meets Schitt’s Creek in this rich, wonderful and laugh-out-loud series, in which a put-upon mayor tries to turn a cursed New England island into a tourist hotspot

What do you do if you want your charming little island off the coast of New England to become the next Martha’s Vineyard, but it’s full of legends about local cannibalism, sea hags, clown killers, poison fog and boogeymen who slaughter teenage girls in their beds? And what if it is full of sea hags, poisoned fog and clown killers, which doesn’t bode well for the mythical status of the cannibalism and boogeyman tales?

Such is the dilemma posed by Widow’s Bay for its mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), in a 10-part series that in the very best way defies categorisation. Horror may be its most obvious element, but it is so much more than that. Still, for fans of that genre, the writer-creator Katie Dippold and Hiro Murai, the director of the first five episodes, which set the tone, deliver the goods, lovingly covering most of the tropes.

Footage from John Lennon’s only full-length performances after the Beatles – at Madison Square Garden, for charity, with the Plastic Ono Band – has been edited and restored

Last year we saw Kevin Macdonald’s One to One, an archive compilation documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s heady existence in New York in the early 1970s; it took its name from the two charity concerts that they mounted at Madison Square Garden to raise money for children who had been abused at New York’s notorious Willowbrook State School – a scandal to which Lennon had been alerted by watching Geraldo Rivera’s TV exposé. (We have to hope that the box office receipts fully made a difference, but the concert certainly helped change the law to underscore the civil rights of people in children’s homes.)

Now here is the live footage: an immersive split-screen film whose edit was overseen by Sean Ono Lennon. And although no amount of revisionist gallantry can conceal how terrible Yoko Ono’s vocals are, this has a historical fascination as they were Lennon’s only full-length concert performances after the Beatles’ split. And Ono’s performance of the bizarre Open Your Box is certainly arresting: “Open your box, open your box, open your trousers …” There is a heartfelt version of Imagine; a truly apocalyptic rendering of Cold Turkey; and among the old faves are Come Together (after which Lennon says he forgot some of the lyrics: “I’ll have to stop writing these daft words, man, I’m getting old”) and a raunchy Hound Dog (“Elvis I love ya!” he shouts – and perhaps Elvis was aware of this tribute, perhaps not).

Film-maker Yael Melamede presents a fascinating, if inevitably slightly indulgent, account of the revered Israeli designer’s life and work

Architect turned film-maker Yael Melamede presents us with this insightful, though perhaps faintly indulgent, portrait of her mother, Israeli architect Ada Karmi-Melamede. With her brother Ram Karmi, Karmi-Melamede designed the supreme court of Israel building in Jerusalem in the early 90s, and then had a brilliant solo practice, creating Ben Gurion Airport.

Karmi-Melamede’s ethos is to establish buildings that take root in their allotted space, an “architecture of the ground and of the sky” – rather than replicate the endless glass towers of first-world cities which could be put down anywhere. Another witty maxim of hers is: “The cheapest building material is the light.” She aimed to do away with her brother’s fashionable brutalism and concrete, a conflict which appears to have resulted in a fascinating dialogue (or possibly conflict) within the supreme court building itself.

OVO Hydro, Glasgow
From So Sick to Smack That, this double-headliner provides major millennial nostalgia – but goes to show how varied their respective careers were at their peak

For pop-R&B leaning millennials, the pairing of Ne-Yo and Akon on this co-headlining tour certainly has a heavy dose of nostalgia, which kicks in almost immediately with the smoke that billows around Ne-Yo’s black fedora and Michael Jackson-inspired moves. But there’s an undeniable magic beyond that, as the two artists pull from careers that produced eight UK No 1 singles and 410 weeks in the Top 40 between them in the mid-00s to early 10s.

Over the course of just under three hours, the duo take turns in the spotlight, the mood seesawing in line with each of them. Beginning with a snippet of Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel before segueing into his 2008 hit Miss Independent, Ne-Yo is smooth and suave in his vocals and dextrous choreography, an effective contrast to Akon’s all-out charisma and party-starter energy which arrives with classics like Smack That – the first time, of many, that the crowd fully loses it.

He was the burned-out bigwig who moved to a very big house. Now back with his first music for decades, he talks about signing the Proclaimers, being punched by Julian Cope – and his Scott Walker-inspired trio

David Balfe has had quite a life. In the Teardrop Explodes, he took amyl nitrate on The Old Grey Whistle Test and acid on Top of the Pops. As a music publisher he’s been involved with a multitude of bands from the KLF to the Proclaimers, and his record label signed Blur when they were called Seymour. However, he’ll probably be most remembered as the man immortalised in their 1995 smash Country House. “Balfey” actually lived “in a house, a very big house in the country.”

“That’s going to be the first thing mentioned in my Guardian obituary,” he chuckles. “I’m aware that the song isn’t exactly a paean to my greatness, but I’m genuinely proud about it. It’s the one thing you can casually drop into a dinner party and everybody goes, ‘What the fuck?!’”

UK artist Linett Kamala was astonished to see a maypole in a Jamaican hamlet – a colonial relic, but one bringing joy. So she reinvented the tradition by ditching English folk tunes and adding bass bins, LED lights and pounding beats

In a community centre in London, a ping pong table, a treadmill and a row of computers hug the edges of the room. It all feels familiar, apart from the towering green structure with dangling multicoloured ribbons: a maypole, and we’re here to dance around it. Our group of six circle it and get ready, but instead of traditional English folk music (“And on that tree there was a limb, And on that limb there was a branch …”), it’s dancehall, cranked up loud.

This is a session courtesy of British-Jamaican DJ, artist and educator, Linett Kamala. She made her name as one of the first female DJs at Notting Hill carnival in 1985 at just 15 years old, and is now on the event’s board; as Lin Kam Art, Kamala has dedicated much of her life to music, education, community work and art.

Plucked from relative obscurity to score Hugh Jackman film The Death of Robin Hood, the skilled singer-songwriter explains how he conquered his impostor syndrome

Last year, Jim Ghedi was having a chicken dinner at his mother’s house in Sheffield when he checked his phone. “This director started following me on Instagram,” he recalls. “And there’s pictures of him with Nicolas Cage. As a joke, I said to my mam: ‘I might message him and say, let me do your next film score.’ As I said it, he messaged me, saying: ‘I want you to do my next film score.’”

The director was Michael Sarnoski and the film is the forthcoming A24 production The Death of Robin Hood, starring Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer. Sarnoski had heard Ghedi’s excellent 2025 album, Wasteland, a stirring and brooding album of apocalyptic folk that was a reflection of societal rot and collapse in England. Released on the small Calder Valley label Basin Rock, the album was critically acclaimed – and his most successful and ambitious to date – but it had not turned Ghedi into a household name. He thought that the film opportunity “would all blow away and they’d find out who I am”, he says. “Some top producer would put up the red flag.”

This ‘nonfiction thriller’ takes us through exactly what would happen if Nigel Farage won his dreamed-of majority

For some years now, mainstream British politics has revolved increasingly obsessively around the question of how to stop Nigel Farage. What started a decade ago with Brexit may yet end in a general election that boils down to one question: do you or don’t you want to risk putting this man in Downing Street? That said, we still know surprisingly little about what a Reform government might mean in practice.

Of course, it might never happen. But if it did, what exactly would Farage do with a majority that enabled him to fulfil his wildest dreams? And how well would an unwritten British constitution, still heavily reliant on good chaps voluntarily being good chaps, cope with full-fat populism?

The Northern Irish writer explores music and family, memory and duty in this stunning collection of sharply observed tales

The stories in Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell’s fourth collection are often devoted to family life, or a professional life in the arts: or both. They’re almost always about memory and how to manage it. They offer a certain continuity with her earlier collections, Multitudes, Intimacies and Openings, though it’s subtle and organic rather than directly narrative.

In All Grown Up, Luke returns to his childhood home, only to be steadily reabsorbed by it. He applies himself to clearing the house, putting it on the market; he thinks about all the possibilities he’ll have once he’s sold up. But the longer he stays the less impulse there is to leave, and the more he remembers, not just about his life here, but his life generally. Meanwhile he’s a 40-year-old divorcee with a bad back, incipient alcoholism and a child at boarding school, attempting to come to terms with divorce, the death of his mother and his sense of entrapment. A one-night stand with his ex-wife’s sister doesn’t help. As you read, that title cycles between bleak irony and an equally bleak optimism.

After the birth of her son during lockdown, the Welsh actor was flooded by disturbing thoughts she couldn’t shake, a plunge into darkness and isolation. She discusses how it changed her and what helped her recover

Kimberley Nixon’s memoir, She Seems Fine to Me, is out on 7 May, and she’s quite terrified. This isn’t an author worried by sales figures or reviews. Nixon’s book is an up-close-and-personal account of perinatal OCD. It tells of the dark, disturbing thoughts that taunted and haunted her after the birth of her son: her racing mind, relentless rumination, the Technicolor horror stories that played inside her head, always centred on harms to her baby. The book holds nothing back.

“Is it really brave or is it really stupid?” says Nixon. “In my head, I’ve written a book about what a horrible person I was and put it out in the world – and I have to keep reminding myself that’s not it. I’ve written a book about a mental health condition and trying to fight it.”

In The Secret War Against Hate, Pulitzer-prize finalist Steven J Ross looks back at those who infiltrated and prevented hate groups in the US

Steven J Ross’s new book, The Secret War Against Hate, is a sequel of sorts to Hitler in Los Angeles, his bestselling Pulitzer-prize finalist from 2018. That book told the story of Leon Lewis, a Jewish attorney, and others in the 1930s who foiled Nazi attempts to cause havoc in the City of Dreams. Now Ross looks south and east, to Atlanta and New York after the second world war, where activists and agents worked to infiltrate and defeat new Nazi groups.

The distinguished professor of history at the University of Southern California said: “With Hitler in LA, Leon Lewis hid the spy codes but once I figured it out, I realized, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got a historian’s dream here,’ which is an unknown story that’s really important. All I had to do was not get in the way, not be overly author-ly, just be the guide taking you through the story. I knew the beats. I knew how spy stuff and detective stuff goes. I changed my writing style.”

Pragmata, Saros and Vampire Crawler bring together aesthetics, responsiveness and creative opportunities in joyous ways that can’t be defined, only experienced

Game feel is one of the most elusive concepts in the glossary of interactive entertainment, at once perfectly clear and difficult to define. Obviously, it refers to what a game feels like to play, but where does that feeling come from? How does it manifest? Or consider it from a different angle. When the chef Samin Nosrat started her career at the renowned Chez Panisse in California, she began to understand that what diners really responded to in their food were four key factors – salt, fat, acid and heat – and how these elements interacted. This idea formed the basis of her bestselling cookbook. It perhaps also inspired a video game audio director to once compare game feel to eating a potato chip: the salt and fat are part of it but so are the crunch and the sensation of the chip dissolving in your mouth (pdf). Game feel is a combination of elements – the responsiveness of the controls, the intuitiveness of the action, the aesthetics of the world and the creative opportunities they engender – all coming together in the right quantities.

I’m thinking about this a lot right now, because three games released in the last few days illustrate the idea of good game feel beautifully. The first is Pragmata, Capcom’s sci-fi action adventure in which you explore an abandoned colony base with the help of a child-like android, who lets you hack robotic enemies, lowering their defences before you blast them to pieces. The hacking mini-game takes place on a grid with nodes that add power-ups to your hack attack. As you progress, you add new types of nodes, as well as new weapons, and the interplay between these elements is complex, multifaceted and fun. This takes place in a linear world filled with hidden areas, so exploration is guided but discovery is possible. You run, jump and glide – it all feels seamless. It is joyous simply to be there.

Genki Kawamura’s eerie new film expands on a haunting video game that leaves players lost in endless subway tunnels. He explains how this makes viewers and players face their worst fears

Genki Kawamura is something of a polymath. A bestselling author, film-maker, script writer and producer – he is also a lifelong gamer who grew up playing and being inspired by the games of legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto. His latest project Exit 8, now in cinemas, is a fascinating adaptation of the Japanese horror game, developed by a lone coder based in Kyoto, operating under the name Kotake Create. “I was captivated by its game design and the beauty of its visuals,” says Kawamura. “At the same time, I watched many streamers play it. As I did, I realised that although the game is incredibly simple, each player creates their own story, and each streamer brings their own unique reactions. It felt like a device that could reveal something fundamental about human nature.”

The concept behind Exit 8 the game is simple. The player finds themselves trapped in an endlessly looping section of a Tokyo subway station. Viewing the narrow, brightly lit corridors in first-person, you pass the same posters, the same silent commuter, the same locked doors over and over again. The only way to escape is to spot anomalies each time you pass through – maybe the eyes on a poster start following you, maybe the commuter stops and smiles – at which point you have to double back the way you came. Complete eight runs without missing an anomaly and you get to leave through the eponymous way out. There’s no story, no reason for it at all. The mystery is part of the appeal.

PlayStation 5; Housemarque/Sony
As a fast-firing spaceman, one minute you’re invincible, the next you’re dead – with every battle like watching a firework show through a kaleidoscope

On the planet Carcosa, mangled, blackened trees and crimson flowers take root next to the ruins of some ancient alien civilisation, flanked by statues contorted in pain, tearing at their marble skin. There are metallic tunnels deep underground, chasms of impossible size snaked with cables, so you feel as though you’re exploring the intestines of some giant machine. There’s a House of Leaves quality to these spaces, which shift and change and clearly weren’t built for humans.

You are Arjun Devraj (played by Rahul Kohli), a space security guy who’s on a mission to find missing colonists on an alien world before it all goes a bit Event Horizon and you become the next lost expedition. Classic. There’s some unethical space capitalism happening out here, and Devraj himself is a bit of a traumanaut who brought way too much mental carry-on luggage for this extremely long-haul flight. But it’s nothing that shooting some aliens won’t fix, right?

From mega hit Clair Obscur to the genius Blue Prince, the winners at this year’s event help me refocus on why games really matter

The 22nd Bafta game awards were on Friday, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took the biggest game prize. This makes it only the second game ever (after Baldur’s Gate 3) to win top prize at all five of the main awards shows: the Dice awards in Vegas; the Game awards in LA; the public-voted Golden Joysticks in the UK; the Game Developers Choice awards in San Francisco; and now London’s Baftas, the final event to celebrate the gaming output of 2025.

I’ll be honest: I was hoping for a different winner. Blue Prince, an eight-year project by the visual artist and former film-maker Tonda Ros, is the most extraordinary thing I played last year. It’s the game where you inherit a sprawling mansion that changes shape every day, and you must navigate its ever-shifting blueprint to find its secret room. I went so deep on this game that I was still playing it and thinking about it weeks after solving its initial mystery, piecing together bits of opaque lore from Reddit threads. I think it deserved at least one best game award (apart from ours).

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon
A 1950s Port of Spain setting simmers with political change and family tension in Martina Laird’s debut play

The air hangs heavy in Alma, a drinking club in 1950s Port of Spain, Trinidad. Heat and rum bring their own kind of languor – but in Martina Laird’s play, change is coming, both within a fractured family and in the wider world.

Alma is managed by a mother and daughter. Ellen Thomas gives the indomitable Pearl a basilisk glare but not maternal instincts (“the only thing I done wrong is to make children dat not worth nothing”). Ruby (an exuberant, citrussy Cat White) runs a honeypot scam on tourists, but doesn’t intend to “stay here in downtown hell”.

Wigmore Hall, London
The Stockholm-based chamber ensemble, led by violinist Hugo Ticciati, brought a programme that linked Auerbach and Janáček to Golijov – with clarinettist Christoffer Sundqvist the hypnotic soloist - and Mahler

A solo violin and viola lament in ghostly harmonics, sounds skimming and slipping glassily off one another. Christ’s sinews snap in the explosive pizzicato of two double basses, before a vibraphone takes over: counterpoint suspended like drops of blood in a bowl of water, harmony smudging into cloudy new shapes. It’s Pergolesi – his famous Stabat Mater – as only Lera Auerbach could hear it, her 2005 Sogno di Stabat Mater a concert-opener that’s O/Modernt in microcosm.

Violinist Hugo Ticciati’s flexible Stockholm-based chamber ensemble (whose name translates to “Un/Modern”) has spent well over a decade expanding our ears and minds, making the old new and the new old through unexpected musical juxtapositions, arrangements and dialogues.

What began as a tiny space above the founder’s stables became the beating heart of the city’s performing arts. Its leader Jimmy Fay reflects on recent hits and reveals what audiences can expect from the theatre’s anniversary year

‘The Lyric gives voice to everyone in Northern Ireland,” says the theatre’s boss, Jimmy Fay. “It’s a beacon.” Fay views the 2026 programme, celebrating 75 years of the Lyric, as an opportunity to showcase current creative talent, as well as honouring the theatre’s past.

One of the plays from the repertoire that Fay was keen to revive is Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup, from 1983. With a cast including Marie Jones, the new production – which runs in May – is directed by Dan Gordon, who performed in the original. Reid’s play traces the daily lives of Protestant working-class women in Belfast across three decades, from the second world war to the Troubles, with humour and poignancy.

Tron theatre, Glasgow
Frances Poet’s music-driven drama reconstructs the Greenock dispute that saw 240 workers square up to bosses

It was the early days of the Thatcher project. At the start of 1981, the free-market chill was about to lay waste to the Linwood car plant, Bobby Sands was beginning his fatal hunger strike and formerly militant unions were feeling cowed by the implications of the 1980 Employment Act. This was the era of Ghost Town by the Specials: economic desolation at No 1.

The outlook was bleak, but in a garment factory in Greenock, something remarkable happened. Furious at their American owners for proposing to move production to Northern Ireland where lucrative subsidies awaited, 240 workers occupied the Lee Jeans plant. Refusing to leave, the predominantly female workforce drew support from miners and dockers, Jimmy Reid and Michael Foot. Seven months later, the 140 still occupying reclaimed their jobs.

At Tron theatre, Glasgow, until 9 May. Then touring until 10 June

Suit is part of effort to hold suspect and any still unknown perpetrators accountable, says rapper’s stepbrother

The stepbrother of Tupac Shakur has filed a lawsuit against the man set to go on trial for the rapper’s 1996 killing. The suit is part of an effort to hold the alleged killer and any still unknown perpetrators accountable, Maurice Shakur says.

“Many individuals who were involved have long since passed away, while others have been hard to identify,” the suit states. “Yet, one thing is certain: there remain individuals who were involved in Tupac’s murder who, for 30 years, have not been held accountable for their crimes.”

Billionaire Stephen Schwarzman’s portrait hangs discreetly in a building that promises cultural clout and architectural poise – yet can seem rather bland and bloodless

When the wealthy Paduan banker Enrico Scrovegni commissioned the building of his eponymous chapel in the 14th century, he made sure that he was immortalised in the lavish frescoes adorning its interior. Florentine artist Giotto depicted Scrovegni, clad in robes of penitential violet, holding up a model of his chapel as a devotional offering. Just beyond Scrovegni’s eyeline, in a tableau of the Last Judgment, cavorting demons consign sinners to hell, a fate he presumably sought to avoid through his earthly largesse.

Donors and patrons have always insinuated themselves into art and architecture – whether in name or depiction – reminding onlookers of them and their piety and munificence. The image of Scrovegni and his chapel reverberates across the centuries in the portrait of American private equity mogul Stephen A Schwarzman – another man of wealth and taste – which presides discreetly over Oxford University’s new Centre for the Humanities. Named after and bankrolled by Schwarzman to the tune of £185m, it is the largest single gift since the Renaissance.

Opera needs big money: opera chiefs need big donors. New York’s Metropolitan Opera has just lost a $200m investment, but should it have accepted it in the first place?

Opera’s stories of power aren’t only played out on stage. The mechanics of producing opera involve vast amounts of people, from set builders to wig-makers to chorus and orchestra, and even vaster amounts of money. An opera company needs huge reservoirs of cash: whether from governments, companies donating for tax benefits, or private individuals whose motivations may be entirely driven by sheer love of the form, or they might not. The Royal Opera House named a hall after the American investment banker Alberto Vilar who promised the company £10m, before being convicted and imprisoned for fraud in 2010, while the Sackler family’s millions sponsored swathes of culture across the US and UK – but the source of this wealth gave the world an opioid epidemic.

So pity the poor opera house manager, trying to deal with an essentially insoluble situation: choose your donors, choose your poison. And pity especially Peter Gelb, who has been running the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the world’s biggest opera house, for the past two decades. Gelb faces in extremis the same hard economic truth that all opera houses, classical music institutions and performing groups face. Unlike so many parts of the economy, the services they provide have not become – and cannot become – more efficient. It’s what is known as Baumol’s cost disease, a term coined by the economist William J Baumol in the 1960s. One of the examples he used to illustrate the “disease” was a string quartet. It took four players in 1800 – and still, today, takes four musicians. How stupidly inefficient! It’s the same story, only exponentially less efficient and more expensive, for putting on an opera. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, one of the Met’s recent blockbuster productions, still needs an army of stage managers as well as orchestral musicians, it still requires gigantic sets and a stellar cast just as it did in 1865, all to fill the Met’s 4,000-seat auditorium.

Dan Reed says the film recasts abuse allegations as lies and sidesteps Jackson’s relationships with children

Michael, the recently released biopic of Michael Jackson, has been severely criticised by the director of Leaving Neverland, the 2019 documentary that chronicled claims against Jackson of child sexual abuse by Wade Robson and James Safechuck.

In an interview with Variety, Dan Reed, who was subject to death threats after Leaving Neverland was released, said: “What the movie does is creates a version of events that essentially portrays Wade, James and others who’ve accused Jackson of child sexual abuse as liars without actually articulating it.”

Physical phone-blocking devices, powered by NFC wireless technology, are becoming a popular solution for doomscrolling. Brigid Delaney puts one to the test

Wake up, 100 messages from group chat overnight about something – what? another assassination attempt; a village destroyed in Lebanon; the football result in England; the weather in Iran being manipulated; the pesticides causing lung and bowel cancer, so everyone who eats salads is now at risk of cancer; meditate for 20 minutes, then fire up x.com, a place I thought I’d never want to revisit, with its carnival barkers and supplement salesman, and have you seen the Lego thing calling Trump a paedo?, you gotta see the Lego thing, and this is before my first coffee, yet x.com is the coffee and the tea, whatever Elon has done to the For You algorithm is evil genius, it’s like the global collective id, nasty and funny and addictive and compelling – like gawking at a car crash, like soaking in a hot bubble bath of anger, and memes, and geopolitical dramas, and Trump, Trump, Trump – soaking in Trump, and then, For Me (just as Elon promised).

So begins the circuit around my phone, that goes all day and night, around the tiny screen with its icons (when a born-again Christian once told me he had favourite icons, for a long time I thought he meant apps, not pictures of the Virgin Mary). I started to feel like I was in Canberra, on one of those enormous roundabouts, rotating between the icons – not Joseph, not Jesus, but X and WhatsApp and TikTok and even LinkedIn for Christ sakes – round and round from one app to the next, just checking, checking in case something is happening. I watched tiny videos and maybe, occasionally, got distracted by the novel I am meant to be writing, which is due on 31 July. But the novel is boring, just a static Word doc on a screen, it’s not giving; it’s taking hard work. So I spend six minutes with my novel, and then it’s time to go back to my phone, to circle the roundabout visiting all my icons again, like a demented Stations of the Cross, because I can’t focus, I just can’t focus on work right now when there is so much good scrolling to do …

Whether you are starting from scratch, or have a well-honed routine, moving can help us feel happier and healthier. Experts share their one essential exercise and how to get the most out of it

Many of us, regardless of our age or fitness levels, know that we should be doing more exercise but are unsure where to start. So what is the ultimate exercise for improving health, longevity and general wellbeing? Here, personal trainers share the best moves, whatever your individual needs or abilities.

We put seven top pizza ovens – from gas to wood-fired to electric – through their paces to find the ones worth firing up at home

• The best (and worst) chef’s knives

If you’re passionate about pizza – and, let’s be honest, there aren’t many who aren’t – then at the top of your foodie gadget wishlist has to be a pizza oven. You’ll struggle to find many that won’t salivate at the thought of a light pillowy base, smothered in a rich tomato sauce, and topped with melting, oozy cheese.

Seven years ago, I tested my first pizza oven, the Gozney Roccbox, and since then, these appliances have moved from niche product to a must-have for family get-togethers and entertaining.

Best pizza oven overall:
Gozney Arc Lite

Best budget pizza oven:
ProCook outdoor pizza oven

Most suitcases look hardwearing, but which ones actually are? We dropped bestselling brands’ luggage from a ladder to find out …

• The best carry-on luggage

A suitcase is like the portrait in the traveller’s attic, accumulating more than its fair share of knocks and scrapes while we refresh ourselves on the road. We trundle them over cobbles, see them tumble from luggage racks on the train – and if we choose to fly, there’s a fair chance they’ll be mishandled before we reunite at the carousel.

For our testing, we pushed eight suitcases to the limit by dropping them on to a hard surface, as if they’d been fumbled by a baggage handler. Air travel is especially tough on suitcases, so you might get away with choosing a less-resilient case if you make the climate-conscious choice to travel by rail or sea.

Best suitcase overall:
Away the Large

Best budget suitcase:
Tripp Holiday 8 Large

I spent a month testing anti-consumption strategies, from cash stuffing to ditching Amazon Prime, to find the ones that genuinely cut my spending

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I’m pretty careful with money, I say as I trip over piles of Amazon Prime boxes. I’ve never really been the shopping type, I insist as I stare at drawers groaning with unworn Asos clothes. Look how much I care about the environment, I tell myself as I click “buy now” on yet another battery charger I bought to replace the one, two or five I’ve lost around the house somewhere.

You don’t have to be a shopaholic to be drowning in stuff. All it takes is an averagely mindless approach to impulse buying, until one day your home is heaving with a personal landfill of tat.

You told us your favourite subscriptions for cutting costs and reducing household waste. Plus, Anya Hindmarch’s shopping secrets and marathon essentials

• 33 easy plastic-free kitchen swaps

Whether they’re full of harmful chemicals or packaged in plastic, it’s no secret that many household cleaning products aren’t great for the planet. But “taking a more sustainable approach to washing and cleaning doesn’t have to be inconvenient”, said Hannah Rochell in her recent roundup of the best sustainable subscriptions. From vegan washing detergent in a natty recyclable tin to compostable scourers, her guide is full of delivery services that make greener living less effortful.

Her list wasn’t exhaustive, though, so we asked you for the subscription services you swear by for cutting costs, reducing household waste and making your life easier. (And no one has any commercial links to these companies – we always check.)

‘A cherry-cola colour and funky, acidic aroma’: the best supermarket balsamic vinegars, tasted and rated

The best fake tan for a sunkissed, streak-free glow – tested

Ditch power tools, build a hedgehog highway: how to create a nature-friendly garden

How I Shop with Anya Hindmarch: ‘I would label everything if I could’

The best hair straighteners for foolproof styling, tried and tested by our expert

An intrepid way to save stale pitta bread by turning it into moreish and wonderfully seasoned snacks

Three years ago, I helped my friend, the chef Sam Webb, set up Babette, a street food stall at Newquay Boathouse. Webb and his team make everything from scratch and, wherever possible, using only local Cornish produce, from their hot honey (sourced from the Rescued Bee) to pitta with freshly milled flour from Cornish Golden Grains; he also grows his own produce with fellow restaurateur Matt Comley at Gannel Valley Gardens.

As you might expect, saving food waste is at the top of Webb’s agenda, which is how he came to create waste-saving pitta chips to serve with hummus. It’s a recipe I couldn’t resist, not least because they take minutes to cook. What makes Webb’s pitta chips unique is their wonderful seasoning of sumac, za’atar and sea salt just before serving.

In the second instalment of Annalisa’a new adventures in chocolate, we explore a range of irresistibly chewy treats

I first cemented the allure of the “chew” aged 14, working illegally as a chambermaid (I lied about my age) and finding a guest’s Gummy Bears laid open – a breach I heavily exploited. Recently this chew need has been sated by dates and their use in chocolate as a healthy caramel. Dates do have nutritional benefits over mere sugar: fibre, minerals, antioxidants and make a great pre-workout boost.

My favourite, and how it all started, was with Solkiki’s excellent date bonbons: almond ganache in a date, surrounded by 66% Bolivian chocolate. When I’m eating chocolate dates for personal pleasure, the cocoa content needs to be high to counterbalance the tooth-jarring sweetness of dates, so these really did it for me. Another great contender was Sam Joseph’s 70% covered peanut butter medjool dates.

Artichokes and peas seasoned with garlic, ground ginger and turmeric make a sensational and surprising sauce for pasta, and a showstopping Moroccan-spiced lamb shoulder with a fruity salsa

I was lucky enough to grow up in a home where we had lots of family and friends around, which meant lots of people to feed. On those occasions, if my mum wanted to make something special that required minimal effort, she served a roast lamb shoulder. After all, roasts actually follow a concept similar to traybakes: the main ingredients are combined in a roasting tin and the oven does most of the work. In Morocco, méchoui can refer to either grilled or roast dishes, but for a lamb shoulder it typically means that it’s roasted. But, first, my take on a traditional artichoke and pea tagine, a popular dish typically enjoyed in spring. In Moroccan homes, tagines are served simply with bread, without sides, but I have found that some make excellent sauces for pasta.

A fun, shareable Tunisian chickpea soup for a party, a one-pan moussaka, and a fragrant, layered, chocolate viennetta

Traditionally, this would be a Tunisian breakfast, and it’s not a million miles from one of my favourites, Egyptian ful medames. But here I’m proposing it as an evening offering: make a big pot of delicious flavourful chickpeas, then lay out a spread of accompaniments (pickles, olives, capers, boiled eggs). Second, a good traditional moussaka is a wholesome but time-consuming process, but that’s not the case with this simplified version, which you can easily make on a weeknight. Finally, you might not be surprised to learn that this basil viennetta was one of the most popular recipes when we were testing dishes for my new book, MEDesque. First, of course, because it tastes unreal. Second, because everyone got a huge tug of nostalgia, and third, because everyone became giddy with excitement, trying to figure out what the flavour was.

These negative comments about bodies and faces permeate society and could lead to some tough talks with friends

Hi Ugly,

How do I respond to my friends when they criticize their bodies, faces, skin?

Why is this column called ‘Ask Ugly’?

How should I be styling my pubic hair?

How do I deal with imperfection?

My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done

I had presumed I would love her instantly – but a traumatic birth led to devastating numbness

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was waiting for an overwhelming rush of love, but when I looked at my newborn baby what I felt was utter despair. No matter how much I smiled at her, crooned at her, fed, patted, caressed and changed her, I was absolutely numb.

I had yearned for her. Growing up in Italy, I was surrounded by images of perfect motherhood. Every rural crossroad has its tiny shrine to the Madonna and Child. I was certain by the end of my teens that I wanted to have at least one baby.

The actor and producer on being a teenage model, making My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the secret to long-lasting love

Born in Hollywood in 1956, Rita Wilson’s first role was in The Brady Bunch at the age of 15. She went on to appear in Frasier and The Good Wife, as well as romcom classics such as Sleepless in Seattle and Runaway Bride. She produced the highest‑grossing romcom of all time, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as well as Mamma Mia! and A Man Called Otto, which starred her husband, Tom Hanks, and son Truman. Alongside her career on screen, she has released music since 2012. Her sixth studio album, Sound of a Woman, is out on 1 May.

My mum took this photo of me in Hollywood. I’d just started high school and was joyful, open and optimistic.

It feels as if your work and your identity are fused. You’ll get through this, but you may have to use this time to consider other careers

I’ve been a teacher for more than 20 years and loved it. I had promotions every couple of years and was happily making my way up the ladder. This year, however, I was made redundant because of restructuring and this has thrown me into a feeling of complete confusion. I have tried to find roles at the level I was working at, but have not been successful. It has left me feeling lost and unclear.

The last five years within education have felt fraught. I left the previous school I’d worked at because I felt the headteacher was unable to support me following the death of my mum. The school before that I left after whistleblowing on a senior leader for bullying. I am worried the repeat issues and feelings of being unhappy all come from me, and somehow I am seeking out conflict or issues.

The chancellor’s changes will come into force in April 2027, affecting everyone from savers to landlords and sole traders. Experts say to act now

Millions of people will be affected by a range of savings, investment and tax changes that take effect in just under a year’s time.

“April 2027 may feel some way off, but when it comes to financial planning, a year is not a long time,” says Jason Hollands at the wealth management firm Evelyn Partners.

Apple laptop sets new performance bar with more storage, new chips and plenty of options, but now has two-tier specs depending on processor

Apple’s Macs have been on a roll this year with the brand new budget MacBook Neo and a faster MacBook Air M5, but now it’s time for its workhorse MacBook Pro to be upgraded with the fastest, most powerful M-series chips.

The latest MacBook Pro comes in two screen sizes and a large range of chip and configuration options. The 14in version starts with the M5 chip costing £1,699 (€1,899/$1,699/A$2,699) and then jumps to the more powerful M5 Pro from £2,199 (€2,499/$2,199/A$3,499) before climbing further for the 16in version or the top M5 Max chip. A pricey machine for professional workloads.

It cheerily addressed letters to my late spouse, and threatened penalties if he terminated his contract

After my husband died suddenly, I discovered he had been paying £171 a month for our EE broadband and TV contract. EE initially offered me a monthly deal at £44.99 on the phone.

There followed two letters, one day apart, cheerily addressed to my late husband. The first stated that he would have to pay £1,007 to terminate his contract; the second giving a termination fee of £520. The letters told him he could take the contract with him when he moved house.

The airline refused a refund or credit for our group of 14 after a brain tumour diagnosis for my two-year-old child

We were organising our wedding for this June when the happiest period of our lives became a nightmare.

Our two-year-old daughter was diagnosed with an aggressive grade 4 brain tumour requiring immediate life-saving surgeries. The prognosis is devastating.

Charity says starting specialised care after first miscarriage instead of third reduces risk of future losses

Giving women access to specialised care after their first miscarriage could prevent about 10,000 pregnancy losses a year across the UK, according to a study.

Currently, women in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are eligible for specialist care on the NHS for early baby losses after they have had a minimum of three miscarriages.

While the research identifies obesity as a major cause, scientists say it does not account for the extent to which cancer rates are increasing

Obesity is a key factor for the rising rates of cancer among younger people in England, according to a study.

There are 11 types of cancer, including bowel and ovarian cancer, that are increasing among people aged 20 to 49 between 2001 and 2019, according to analysis by researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research and Imperial College London.

Two world records were broken in the Adidas super shoes last weekend and the public can soon get their hands on a limited release. Our writer took a pair for a spin

• Bread and honey for breakfast and 150 miles a week training: secrets of Sawe’s world record
  

They’ve been billed as “humanity’s fastest shoe”, the cutting edge of trainer technology, lighter and bouncier than anything that’s gone before. Sabastian Sawe was wearing them when he became the first person to run an official marathon in less than two hours in London on Sunday, as was Tigst Assefa when she beat the women-only marathon record on the same day.

But could the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 help me – a lapsed runner of questionable skill – get my running mojo back? I was sceptical. My trusty New Balance trainers have seen me through a number of long-distance runs, and of the many reasons why I increasingly found running a slog, footwear didn’t feature highly on the list.

Social media is awash with content about food intolerances and the symptoms to look out for. But figuring out whether you actually have one, and what’s triggering it, is surprisingly difficult. One avenue people are gravitating towards is at-home testing. Madeleine Finlay sits down with health and lifestyle journalist Rebecca Seal to unpick the science behind these tests. Rebecca explains how they purport to work, how accurate they actually are, and how we can all investigate what we might be intolerant to, without breaking the bank. Rebecca’s book Irritated: The Allergy Epidemic and What We Can Do About It, is out now.

‘They’re all junk, and should be banned’: the trouble with at-home food intolerance tests

Order Rebecca’s book from the Guardian Bookshop

Get it right and leather trousers have the power to make you look just that tiny bit cooler than everyone else in the room

Leather trousers are not for the fainthearted. They come with … baggage? Mythology, perhaps, is a gentler way of putting it. Either way, you know what I mean. Leather trousers can be suggestive of pelvic-thrusting rock frontmen. Noisy motorbikes. They hint at midlife crisis or teenage rebellion. They are a lot.

But leather trousers – along with gym clothes in public and cancelling plans at the last minute – have been normalised in polite society. There is a new breed of leather trouser-wearer. You know who I mean: she looks as if she could be an architect, perhaps. She is chic and understated (neutral colours, not too much jewellery) and she’s wearing a nice pair of trousers that just happen to be leather, rather than wearing leather trousers in a let’s-get-the-shots-in kind of way. Again, if you know what I mean.

Body lotions containing exfoliating acids are infinitely more effective and less messy than granular scrubs

The onset of sunshine has caught my limbs by surprise. I went out in short sleeves last week and my neglected, greyish arms looked as if they were recently freed from a plaster cast. If you are to be a bride this spring, you may already be thinking about how best to restore what lies beneath the winter layers. The answer for us all is an exfoliating body lotion – an all-over moisturiser to even out upper arm bumps, slough off dead skin, smooth roughness and moisturise dry patches, ready for lighter clothing. There are several new ones that improve on predecessors.

I typically recommend Ameliorate to brides who’ve likely ringfenced some budget for pre-wedding skincare. Punchier than those on supermarket shelves, its clinically proven Transforming Body Lotion uses effective levels of lactic acid and urea to exfoliate without stinging or drying, plus glycerin and sweet almond oil to moisturise the newly uncovered skin beneath. Now Ameliorate makes a pearlised, lightly tinted version to provide additional cosmetic effects. The new Illuminating Glow (£24 for 300ml) adds a subtle, streak-free veil of golden tan to all areas and skin types that washes off easily with soap and water. It’s a fast and easy way to look immediately healthier while it simultaneously does the grunt work.

Show features pink denim and suit printed with headlines from Gabrielle Chanel’s time in resort town

Chanel’s honeymoon period with the new designer Matthieu Blazy is showing no signs of cooling. Blazy’s fifth catwalk show – on the Biarritz beachfront where the young milliner Gabrielle Chanel opened a couture house in 1915 – was an irresistibly seductive love letter to the enduring allure of the double-C logo.

The day before the show, sales assistants at the Biarritz boutique were holding up Chanel beach towels on the shop floor to create extra changing room space for shoppers impatient to buy jeans at €3,100 (£2,690) a pair. Blazy’s jeans are becoming a totem of the new Chanel, which, in aesthetic, although certainly not in price, marries high taste with an inclusive, democratic point of view.

To celebrate the release of the film Mother Mary, starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, in which a fashion designer creates a comeback dress for a pop star, we weigh up the best performative looks

“Dressed like a fabulously turned-out carrion crow,” is how our reviewer described the gothic, avian-like get-up PJ Harvey wore to perform her journalistic and theatrical ninth album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, in Brixton, south London, in 2016. The dress was the work of Harvey’s longtime friend, the Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester, and epitomises the more dramatic stage looks – melodramatic but pared-back – that Harvey turned to for her later, darker albums. As she said of the clothes: “For me, it’s about the ability to meet the world. And it is a second skin, isn’t it? It’s protection, as well. It’s a very big part of clothing, the feeling of protection, particularly in Ann’s clothes.” Who would have thought that someone who earlier in their career took to the stage in Spice Girls co-ords and hot-pink catsuits would wind up in such serious Belgian high-fashion? Ellie Violet Bramley

Gentle cycling is the perfect pace to enjoy the region’s sunflower fields and medieval towns – with gourmet food and fine wine along the way

As I cycle in golden light through the Loire’s vineyards, I have the sudden wish to wear a flowing floral dress, tuck a sunflower behind my ear and answer only to the name Delphine. Opulent chateaux, honeyed stone villages, blazing fields of sunflowers … the Loire is so ridiculously and relentlessly beautiful it’s no wonder artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Émile Vernon made it their home.

A short zip across to Paris on the Eurostar and then an hour south on the TGV to Saint-Pierre-des-Corps and it feels as if we’ve stepped into a live JMW Turner landscape (he toured the region in 1826).

From the Cambrian Mountains to Cardigan Bay, the 83-mile Teifi Valley Trail is a grassroots initiative designed to revive a once-thriving area

Up here, the river was a mere gurgle; a babbling babe finding its way into the world. A few sheep roamed, a kite wheeled and a spring-clean wind ruffled the tussocks on the barren hills and rippled the pools. It was a stark yet striking beginning. As we followed a brand new fingerpost, skirted Llyn Teifi – the river’s official source – and picked up the fledgling flow, there was a sense great things lay ahead, for us both.

The Teifi rises in Ceredigion’s Cambrian Mountains – the untramped “green desert of Wales” – and pours into Cardigan Bay 75 miles (120km) south-west. It’s one of the longest rivers wholly within Wales and, historically, one of its most significant: the beating heart of the country’s fishing and wool-weaving industries, 12th-century abbeys at either end, Wales’s oldest university en route.

Beyond the Tuscan capital, there are exquisite towns with Medici fortresses, stunning frescoes, Roman amphitheatres – and not a selfie stick in sight

First, it was Barcelona, Venice and Dubrovnik. Now, Florence has joined the most overtouristed destinations in the world: its 365,000 inhabitants shared their city last year with 4.6 million visitors. The director of the city’s Accademia gallery – home to Michelangelo’s David – talked in 2024 about “hit and run” tourism, describing visitors “on a quick in-and-out mission to take selfies … trampling the city without contributing anything”. Local author Margherita Calderoni describes Via Camillo Cavour, a street leading to the Duomo, as a “rancid soup” of chain restaurants and “shops selling plastic trinkets from who knows where”.

Although steps are being taken – the city council has introduced a ban on new short-term lets and is promoting sights in lesser-known neighbourhoods – tackling overtourism is a challenge. And other Tuscan cities, such as Siena and San Gimignano, are suffering too. But beyond these honeypots, Italy’s fifth-largest region is full of glories, with not a takeaway chain or selfie stick in sight. Here are six of my favourites.

Clear waterfalls, mountain meadows and high-altitude refuges are just some of the highlights of this less-visited part of the stunning range, shared in a new guide to the region

The “forgotten” Dolomites lie to the east, far from the crowds of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo and Val Gardena. Belluno is the main gateway, two hours north of Venice by train or a drive up the A27. From here, the upper Piave valley leads into the quieter Friulian mountains. The land rises gently, opening into pasture, then stone lifting into spires above the meadows.

Traditional local councils, the Regole di Comunità, still manage the land and forests collectively here, sustaining artisans and alpine farmers in scattered hamlets shaped by shared work and resilience. Pastìn (a minced, seasoned blend of pork and beef), malga cheeses and polenta, once staples for long days in the mountains, are still shared over grappa at the end of the day. Beyond the hamlets, paths lead towards Monte Pelmo or drift into the beech woods of Cansiglio, where deer call at dusk. It’s a fine place to experience mountain culture, and these are some of my favourite places.

When I saw a woman with a facial difference like mine at a party, I crossed the room to speak to her. It led to one of the most joyous, exciting and transformative discussions, in which I connected with feelings I’d always ignored

At a fundraising event, I looked across the crowded room and saw a woman with a cleft – a gap in the lip (and sometimes the palate) where a baby’s face doesn’t fuse properly during pregnancy. She was standing on her own, and I beckoned her over to join the small group I was with. She politely declined and before I quite realised what I was doing, I was crossing the room to speak to her.

I too had been born with a cleft. I’d talked to doctors, my parents, my wife and other friends about it to varying degrees over the years, but as I walked towards her, I knew this was going to be the first time – in more than 60 years – that I was going to have a conversation about living with a cleft with someone who also has one. I was terrified I might offend her, but I said something like: “Isn’t it scary walking into a crowded room? Because it feels as if everyone is looking at us.”

What makes the best birthday cake? Well, it all depends on the recipient

What’s the best birthday cake?
Katie, by email
“My mum once made a cake with mini rolls made to look like cats with googly eyes and strawberry lace tails,” says Nicola Lamb, author of Sift and the Kitchen Projects newsletter. And that’s the whole point of a birthday cake, right? It should align with the recipient’s favourite thing: “That could even be a lasagne,” Lamb says. “I’m not at all prescriptive about what you stick a candle into.”

Of course, some cakes are a safer choice than others. Take the Victoria sponge: “I don’t think anyone is going to have a problem with a plush vanilla sponge, jam and cream job,” Lamb says. “If you want to lower the effort and feed a lot of people, bake the sponge in a brownie tray for a single-layer, low and wide cake, spread whipped cream stabilised with mascarpone over the top, dollop on some jam and you’re good to go.” That said, you could go for a vanilla or chocolate buttercream instead, which, Lamb adds, comes with the bonus of welcoming sprinkles.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

It promises to filter toxins, absorb odours, prevent mould and keep roots healthy, but does it deliver?

The problem
Once you have graduated from novice plant parent, how can you take your level of care to the next level, helping your houseplant not only survive but thrive? Is activated charcoal the answer? You will find it listed in terrarium recipes and soil amendments. It promises to filter toxins, absorb odours, prevent mould and keep roots healthy. The bag looks purposeful, and the price suggests it is doing something important. The question is whether any of that holds up in an ordinary pot on an ordinary windowsill.

The hack
Activated charcoal works by adsorption, trapping impurities on its porous surface. In a closed terrarium or bottle garden, where water recycles and there is no drainage, a charcoal layer can slow the buildup of gases and bacteria. But does that translate to standard houseplant pots?

There is no wrong way to journal, say experts, and putting pen to paper can help with mental health and clarify thoughts and feelings

• How to start … anything: expert tips for trying something new

Humans have been jotting down their feelings and experiences for millennia. The earliest example of a diary is over 4,500 years old, written on papyrus by a mid-level official who helped in constructing the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Since then, other noteworthy diarists have included Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Audre Lorde and also me. (One guess as to which of those intellectual powerhouses recently journaled about getting a tummy ache after eating too many Swedish Fish.)

Avant-garde theater legend Robert Wilson’s final work was a bold reimagining of Melville’s classic. His collaborators explain bringing it to the Brooklyn stage

Not far into Herman Melville’s 1851 epic novel Moby-Dick, a shipowner describes the man who will take their whaler on a tragic quest. Captain Ahab, he says, is “a queer man … a grand, ungodly, godlike man”.

The same might be said of Robert Wilson. By the time he died last July at the age of 83, Wilson had transformed himself from a stuttering, gay son of conservative southern Baptist parents in Waco, Texas, into New York City’s titan of experimental theatre, opera and dance. His shows could be hours long, or even a full week. They could demand an audience to watch a performer walk with astonishing slowness across a stage, or dazzle them with rows of figures striking flamboyant poses before bright screens. Wilson collaborated with his own adopted children, with corps of performers he wrangled himself, with luminaries including Philip Glass and Tom Waits. Early on, he developed an instantly recognizable visual vocabulary, and insisted on using it until the very end.

Article 42.7 had languished in obscurity for decades – until Donald Trump began casting doubt on US commitment to Nato

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Most people have heard of Nato’s article 5. The “one for all, all for one” clause states an armed attack on one member country should be considered an attack on all, requiring member states to come to the victim’s aid – including with “the use of armed force”.

Not so many, till this week, had heard of the EU’s own mutual defence clause, article 42.7 (pdf), which says that if a member state comes under armed attack, the others “shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power”. That’s perhaps because there hadn’t, until recently, been much need for Europeans to consult article 42.7. More than 40 US military bases and 85,000 troops across the EU (and UK) were testament to Washington’s defence commitment to the old continent.

Wicked star’s one-woman West End show was stopped in response to an increasingly common problem for theatres

A performance of Dracula in the West End on Monday night was halted after its star, Cynthia Erivo, spotted that an audience member appeared to be filming the show.

A representative for the production, in which Erivo plays all 23 roles, confirmed that there had been a short stop caused by the incident. A commenter on the forum Theatreboard, who said they had been at the show, wrote that Erivo – roughly an hour into the performance – “looked out into the audience and said: ‘Are you filming? Is someone filming?’ and stopped the show”. Another commenter said that they had attended Dracula – which is at the Noël Coward theatre – the following night and that there were extra reminders to the audience about taking photos and filming.

As David Attenbourugh turns 100 years old, we would like to hear your memories over the years – including any encounters you’ve had with him in the wild

As David Attenborough turns 100 years old on 8 May, we would like to hear your memories of the great naturalist and broadcaster over the years – including any encounters you’ve had with him in the wild.

What is your standout memory of Attenborough? Have you ever met him? You can share your stories – and pictures – below.

We’d like to hear how you’re adapting your expenditure as the cost of living rises amid the conflict in the Middle East

Rising prices and economic uncertainty linked to the conflict in the Middle East are putting pressure on household budgets across the world.

The International Monetary Fund has warned the conflict is pushing up the cost of energy and food, increasing borrowing costs and weighing on economic growth. Surveys suggest millions of households are already making changes to cope – cutting back, dipping into savings or taking on debt.

We would like to hear from younger people about how often they go to the cinema

People born after 1997 are now the most frequent cinemagoers, According to a US-based survey by Fandango, with 87% saying they have seen at least one film in a cinema in the past 12 months.

With this in mind, we would like to hear from people aged 18-29 about how often they go to the cinema. Do you prefer it to home viewing, and why? What is the best film you’ve seen at the cinema recently?

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?

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Britain’s king and queen have met Donald and Melania Trump for a US state visit, which was arranged to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US’s independence