Our European environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan answers your questions on the climate after reporting on the shocking heatwave that continues to scorch its way across Europe, covering everything from the lack of preparation to ways to deal with the heat

Woodworm20 asks: Almost all of the climate “solutions” on offer, so far, have involved yielding complete power over to a handful of billionaires [some] with extreme views and no notion of what life and community is for the other eight billion people. As we are almost certain to resort to the cheapest option of geoengineering our way forward, do you have any practical solutions that don’t involve a global autocracy?

Ajit: Climate action does not require a greater level of corporate capture or autocratic governance than the fossil fuel status quo - and the solutions on offer today already come from a broad range of actors. Autocracies are building wind turbines and solar panels in poor countries, publicly traded companies in democracies are getting state support to capture carbon from cement plants, cities are turning car parking into bike lanes, and individuals are swapping steak for tofu. All of these are important actions in scientific roadmaps to clean the economy by the middle of the century.

Ajit: I don’t think there’s evidence to suggest it’s a root cause, but I have wondered a lot whether it contributes. If you scroll through the social media feeds of far-right leaders in most western European countries, their top topic is migration/crime and the second is typically climate/energy. Yet if you speak to their voters, at least in Germany, where I live, it quickly becomes clear that opposition to climate policy is at most a minor issue.

That paradox is reflected in polling data. How can it be that less than 10% of the public denies the science of climate change, yet far-right parties who do so consistently get more than 20% of the vote? The obvious answer is that people are voting for them for the core issue of migration, not climate. But what is less clear is why these parties spend so much time bashing climate action. There are plausible suggestions that it plays well to fossil fuel lobbies many are linked to. A more convincing theory, I think, is that the far right sees itself as having already won the fight over migration – now it needs new battlegrounds to differentiate itself from mainstream parties.

With bosses at the BBC prioritising social media platforms over radio, things feel apocalyptic at the broadcaster’s flagship news show – especially given the lack of diversity. Is this it?

For Radio 4’s Today programme, last week’s biggest story was off-air: a BBC News edict that the corporation’s correspondents should in future prioritise platforms such as TikTok and Instagram over traditional TV and radio franchises, including Today.

This policy serves to “chip away the relevance of Today to the life of the nation. This is an act of vandalism pure and simple,” foamed a show insider to the Guardian anonymously. (Although there is a lively media parlour game in guessing which presenter the quote most sounds like.)

His plan for the country is still vague, but there are clues to what he thinks, on topics from inheritance tax to welfare and social care

One week on from Keir Starmer’s resignation, Britain finds itself in a state of both certainty and ambiguity. It is almost guaranteed that Andy Burnham will be prime minister by the end of the summer, bar sudden scandal or meteorite. And yet, whether Burnham gets his expected coronation or not, the infancy of his return to Westminster coupled with the speed of Starmer’s exit timetable has created a remarkable situation: a figure who was not even an MP until a fortnight ago could soon enter Downing Street without anyone knowing what policies he will implement, other than the obligatory buzzword of “change”.

We are watching a political project being conceived in real time, where the nation’s major unions are fighting about who Burnham’s chancellor – and therefore what his economic programme – should be before he has actually been appointed prime minister.

A pop superstar widely perceived as a romantic has in fact mostly written love songs troubled by strife, ghosts and delusion. Ahead of her wedding, we strip away the gossip to see what Swift-as-songwriter has spent 20 years telling us

When she was 19 and already had her second album under her belt, Taylor Swift made a point of telling a would-be beau he was all wrong for her: “I’m not your princess, this ain’t our fairytale … It’s too late for you and your white horse to catch me now,” she sang in her 2008 song White Horse. Then as now, Swift liked a happy ending: she had no qualms rewriting Romeo and Juliet to end with marriage in Love Story, or imagining stealing a boy from his no-good girlfriend in You Belong With Me, both from the same album as White Horse. She just didn’t want a guy to come and rescue her from the messiness of life, like a prince in an early Disney movie whose appearance signals marriage, a happily-ever-after and, effectively, the end of a young girl’s life.

This story has always been an easy one to reject; even Disney was poking fun at it as early as Sleeping Beauty. And like many women of her generation, Swift has had a complicated relationship with all that marriage implies, at least in how she’s written about it. When she met Travis Kelce, the man she is now set to marry, she was fresh from her 2022 album Midnights, in which she made it repeatedly clear she can and will ditch any man, even a perfectly nice one, who stands between her and her ambition. “He wanted a bride / I was making my own name,” she sang on Midnight Rain. In Bejeweled, the tone toward a neglectful “baby boy” is even sassier: “I miss you … but I miss sparkling.” No man is going to end the Taylor Swift story, because there are only two forces that can end the unfolding of that story. One is God; the other is Taylor Swift.

Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate – and think through – the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference?

In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one.

Gabriel was a cheerful but intense junior academic with a passion for Vipassana meditation and what his brother calls “enthusiastic” rock climbing. The eldest son of a Greek management professor and a British documentary maker, Gabriel split his time between teaching and international development work. At the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow at St John’s College, Gabriel taught courses on political theory and wrote papers on the moral contortions of “yuppie ethics” and the ethical blind spots of effective altruism. When he wasn’t there, he did crisis work for the United Nations Development Programme in Sudan and Lebanon.

Want to see some old wonders but don’t fancy forking out £33 for 40 minutes with a tapestry? Our critic celebrates the British treasures you can see all year round – from monstrous crypt carvings to the vaulting glory of our cathedrals

There’s a carved stone character grimacing furiously in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral and you can see why – a man is sitting on his head, legs apart, holding a fish and bowl in outstretched arms. Other figures perched atop slender stone columns include a creature with a serpent’s tail wrestling a dog-like monstrosity, a gryphon eating a siren, and a (now-detached) carving of a horned devil. All this nefariousness in the depths of England’s holiest shrine.

But then medieval British art is full of wonder, mystery and humour. It is also so abundant that it gets taken for granted. But now, after almost 1,000 years, it is about to have a moment. This week, the rush will begin to get £33 tickets to spend 40 minutes in the company of a medieval British artwork. The Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-metre embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066, was almost certainly embroidered by Kent women to a commission by Bishop Odo of Bayeux in the 1070s.

The prime minister unveiled his long-awaited defence investment plan on Tuesday after months of delays

Keir Starmer warned his successor not to borrow more to pay for defence as he raided energy, transport and housing projects to pay for a £15bn military spending plan.

The prime minister revealed his long-awaited defence investment plan (Dip) on Tuesday after an 11-month government row that cost him his defence secretary and arguably contributed to his downfall.

Exclusive: Pentagon files suggest some new facilities will store nuclear arsenal, with $163m also earmarked for secretive spy base

More than $4bn (£3bn) is to be spent upgrading the US government’s military and spy bases in the UK, according to official documents that shed light on the UK’s apparent role as a secretive site for American nuclear weapons.

The construction plans include building new bunkers in Suffolk, which will seemingly be used to store nuclear weapons, and modernising facilities to help covert units run secret operations.

Normally safe principality left reeling from apartment blast, which also injured Vadym Iermolaiev’s wife and child

Police in Monaco are searching for a suspected bomber after a Ukrainian-born business tycoon, his wife and their child were injured in an unprecedented attack that has shaken the normally ultra-safe principality.

The Monaco government said a suspect had left a parcel bomb in the lobby of a residential building that exploded shortly before 9pm on Monday, causing what officials described as a “powerful explosion”.

Emily Barley, founder of Maternity Safety Alliance, says recommendation in Amos report will not solve wider cultural problems

The appointment of a national maternity commissioner would be “fundamentally dangerous”, a bereaved mother who founded a maternity safety campaign group has warned.

Emily Barley, whose daughter Beatrice died because of failings at Barnsley hospital in 2022, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the recommendation for a maternity commissioner in England in the Amos review was “not going to do what we need to move maternity safety forwards”.

Maternity triage services – the childbirth equivalent of A&E – need an urgent overhaul, including more staff on duty, so that women’s concerns are acted on more quickly.

Families should get the right to seek a fresh, independent investigation when things go wrong if they are not happy with the hospital’s own inquiry.

The NHS’s “brutal” and “cruel” system of agreeing compensation with harmed and bereaved families should be replaced by a new process in which hospitals admit errors immediately.

The NHS must root out racism and discrimination that is “embedded throughout the maternity and neonatal system”.

• Paraguay stun Germany, Morocco send Dutch home

• Email us | Bracketology | Golden Boot | World Cup Daily

Tuesday’s World Cup Daily podcast has dropped. Max, Barry, Archie and Nicky chew over last night’s drama:

A couple of videos for your delectation now. Photographer Shaun Botterill has a World Cup portfolio spanning 40 years – here he talks about the moments that made those memorable images:

Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State for Culture, cites need for sufficient plurality of views in news media

Newsflash: European media group Axel Springer has completed its takeover of the Telegraph in a £575m deal, after winning all the necessary regulatory approvals.

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner says:

”Today is a day we have worked towards for a long time, and one we will always remember.

Axel Springer was founded in 1946 under a British press license, and The Telegraph was our North Star. Axel Springer and The Telegraph share strong commitments to freedom, values, a tradition of embracing and pioneering technological change, and an entrepreneurial will to actively shape the future.

Climate campaigners question choice of James Evans for role given past criticism of green energy projects

• UK politics live – latest updates

The appointment of a Reform UK member of the Senedd Cymru as the chair of a key Welsh environmental committee could “undermine the hard graft of ministerial scrutiny”, a green thinktank has warned.

James Evans, a former Conservative party MS who defected to Reform UK in January last year, has been appointed chair of the Welsh climate change, environment, sustainability and rural affairs committee.

Law firms seek up to £4.5bn on behalf of 700,000 buyers of new-build homes

• Business live – latest updates

Britain’s biggest housebuilders, including Barratt Redrow and Taylor Wimpey, face a multibillion-pound class action lawsuit over claims that they colluded over higher prices for homebuyers.

The lawsuit is being led by Mark McLaren, a former legal affairs manager at the consumer group Which?, on behalf of more than 700,000 consumers who bought a new-build between 2015 and 2026, against Barratt, Bellway, Berkeley Group, Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey, Vistry Group and Bloor Homes.

Acoustic recording of a song titled The World Is Not Enough included in wide-ranging auction featuring formative Coldplay recordings

A lost demo recording of a song Coldplay’s Chris Martin reportedly intended for 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough is going up for auction, alongside other recordings from the band’s earliest years.

For the auction by Wax Poetics, the British producer Chris Allison is making available an archive of recordings the band made prior to their Allison-produced second EP The Blue Room, released in October 1999.

Guardian investigation exposes full links between a US business linked to baby deaths around the world and Australian ‘birth keeper’ Emily Lal, the central witness at the inquest into the death of a Melbourne wellness influencer

• How a Melbourne woman’s death is shining light on the dangers of non-medical births – Full Story podcast

• Find more from The birth keepers series here

During her time at the helm of a multimillion-dollar organisation linked to baby deaths around the world, Emilee Saldaya has always avowed one thing: she’s never heard of a woman dying after a freebirth.

“I’ve never heard of a mother dying in childbirth in the sovereign birth world,” the Free Birth Society founder said in a December 2024 appearance on The Way Forward podcast, adding: “In the sovereign birth world we aren’t losing mothers.”

In the second of a series on nationalisation, we look at the lessons from Clement Attlee’s administration

• Will Andy Burnham ‘go big’ in expanding the role of the state?

A prime minister with ambitious plans for state ownership. Private companies that put profits before investment. A country struggling with onerous debts.

The UK in 2026 with a new prime minister weighing up how and what price public utilities can be nationalised? No, this was Clement Attlee’s government in 1945, committed to taking over the commanding heights of the economy at a time when the country was on its uppers.

Wakelyns needs £1.2m to save its diverse organic crops and ‘micro’ enterprises including a bakery and honeybee hives

The aerial view of Wakelyns matches the experience of visiting it at ground level: in a region dominated by prairie fields of industrial agriculture, here lies a vivid green lung of land. Its sounds and sights in summer – the sleepy purr of the turtle dove, the vivid pink flash of a bullfinch – have vanished from most of the British countryside.

But Wakelyns is not a nature reserve – it is a thriving farm, a “living laboratory” for agroforestry and a hub for innovation and business. It is also under threat, and its owners must raise £1.2m to turn it into a charitable community benefit society.

We are surrounded by sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures – and most of it barely registers. Time to slow down and take it all in …

What was the last thing that made your body feel good? Maybe it was the first sip of tea or blast of water in your morning shower, the warm silk of a cat’s back arching to meet your fingers, pulling on a T-shirt softened by repeated washing or the moment you align the numbers on your bike lock and it releases with a weighty clonk? Maybe somewhere you encountered a paper coffee cup with a cardboard sleeve embossed with ridges that offered “a surprisingly gratifying tactile delight”? Maybe you’ve never considered paper cups much; I hadn’t before I read that in Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff: The Sensory Enchantment of Everyday Life.

The Small Stuff is a manifesto for tuning into the tiny opportunities for gratification being human offers, even in increasingly frictionless, AI-enabled, automated lives. Starting from that paper cup, Bogost – an interdisciplinary academic at Washington University, video game designer and writer – explores how we’ve become what he calls “dematerialised” and how to fight back, analysing the idiosyncratically pleasing qualities of plastic drinking fountain tumblers, using “steel-crank-roll paper towel dispensers” and – don’t tell me this one doesn’t resonate – peeling the plastic protective film off, in his case, a wooden knife block (I have happy memories of doing this on our microwave door).

Long before the 2016 hit animation and its forthcoming live-action remake came a pioneering silent film that established a whole new genre

Next week sees the release of Moana, the live-action remake of the 2016 Disney animation smash – again starring Dwayne Johnson. But that was not the original Moana. That honour goes to a Moana released a full century ago: a glimpse of Polynesian life now largely forgotten but none the less offering some inspiration to the makers of today’s iteration.

“Someone at Disney picked the bones of the 1926 Moana to make their movie,” believes film historian Bruce Posner.

Olivia Wilde directs and stars alongside Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton in bizarrely moving tale, with Rogen’s levity keeping the outrageous plot points in check

Here is a four-way sex comedy of embarrassment, as if JB Priestley had written a play about swinging. But as well as embarrassing, it is intriguing, amusing and, finally, somehow bizarrely moving.

Middle class married life is satirised in the personae of two couples having an excruciating dinner party. A failed musician and his wife, played by Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde (who also directs), extend the invitation of the title to their stylish neighbours, a therapist and ex-firefighter played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. Rogen is first among equals in this cast, the ironic insider-outsider perpetually undercutting the situation’s proliferating absurdities with knowing gags or yelps of incredulous outrage, and deploying that unmistakable yuk-yuk-yuk laugh.

Trusted by millions, the finance expert has seen his name and face used to mis-sell a string of fake investments. And yet, he says, it would be ‘very simple’ for the government to stop them

This month, an email from a consumer landed in Martin Lewis’s inbox. It was from an elderly woman with a disability who had been scammed when she invested in a scheme purportedly endorsed by Lewis – and lost her life savings. “THEY ARE BASTARDS!” Lewis wrote at the top of his social media post about it. Even though the personal finance expert is a veteran campaigner against fraud, he says he had “tears running down my face”. He still sounds upset. “I felt a mixture of frustration, anger and sadness.” Not only for the plight of the woman, but for the “constant, ongoing deluge of shit from the scammers”.

Lewis never advertises anything. To hammer home the point, his social media profile picture has the words “I don’t do ads” tattooed on his forehead. But still, people fall victim to deepfake videos and frauds that appear to show him offering investments. The scale of harm is great enough that MoneySavingExpert (MSE), the company Lewis founded in 2003 and sold in 2012 for up to £87m – he is now its executive chair – has someone full-time handling these cases.

The London summer opera company in leafy Holland Park has always punched well above its weight. As it celebrates its 30th birthday, its director of opera James Clutton picks some of his favourite moments from the past three decades

• Opera Holland Park’s 2026 season continues until 22 August.

Potion kits, walkie-talkies and interactive pets … here are our top picks for seven-year-olds (without a Labubu in sight)

• The best gifts for six-year-olds

There are seemingly endless gifts available for seven-year-olds, which can make the choice feel overwhelming. This probably stems from their growing individuality. At this age, most children are becoming more independent and confident and can play on their own or with friends, without full adult supervision.

“At seven, children start getting into things such as kits, puzzles, cooking and sports,” says Rachel Carrell, CEO of the childcare company Koru Kids. “The key here is to pick things that stretch patience and perseverance without feeling like homework.”

It feels as if we are being abandoned to our fate by those in power, with further extreme heat expected next week

In the summer of 2019, I had a “fun” idea for a piece. Paris was due to experience its hottest day in history, and I proposed travelling around the city trying out its various cooling-off strategies to see if they would help. Reader, it was not fun and they did not help.

Last week, Paris experienced its worst period of catastrophic heat on record, worse than that day in 2019, and worse than in 2003, when a sustained heatwave killed nearly 15,000 people. I now live in a neighbourhood in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest département in mainland France and one of the most exposed to extreme heat, and, to add to the complications, am seven months pregnant. So how did my week go this time?

Where were you when Ronaldinho lobbed David Seaman in England’s quarter-final game against Brazil at the 2002 World Cup? Our head of newsletters, Toby Moses, was sitting in an exam hall for his English A Level exam. It was heartbreak for England more than two decades ago, but perhaps they can go a couple of steps further in this tournament.

• Bracketology | Golden Boot standings

Our cartoonist on the latest knockout drama as Jonathan Tah does a Chris Waddle and Casemiro has a brat summer

• Buy David’s cartoons | Some of his favourite works

• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

• Under pressure head coach ‘would love to continue’ in job

• Tuesday declared national holiday in Paraguay

Julian Nagelsmann said he will not be resigning after Germany’s elimination from the World Cup last 32 at the hands of Paraguay after a penalty shootout.

“I am not someone who runs away,” said the Germany head coach. “This is not the first time this has happened, and there are some things about today that need to be changed. But if the DFB wants me to continue I am going to continue. I know the mechanics of football, I know how the industry works. I know a lot of people will want me to leave but I would love to continue if the football association wants me to.”

Historic run to the last 32 and a match against England have left proud fans back home dancing late into the night

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) had not been at a World Cup finals tournament for 52 years – but they are making up for lost time in North America. After a draw against Portugal, a narrow defeat by Colombia and a 3-1 victory against Uzbekistan – inspired by Yoane Wissa’s two goals – they have already made history by booking a place in the knockout phase. Now they face England.

“We deserve to play England,” Wissa said when the match-up had been confirmed. “We have worked hard for this. You know, it’s not easy in our country. There is war in eastern Congo. Every time we wear this shirt, we think about them.”

• Ancelotti says late win was Brazil’s ‘most complete game’

• Hajime Moriyasu says Japan ‘have to improve’

Carlo Ancelotti was characteristically calm after Brazil’s 2-1 victory against Japan on Monday, insisting he had never doubted his team would get back into the game and warning they are getting better and better.

“At half-time I told the players to be patient because sooner or later we would score,” Ancelotti said. “What was important was to keep our structure. We know we’re going down the right path and we have to continue on this path.”

Former goalkeeper and US Soccer general manager is hosting the Spain team at his training camp in Chattanooga

At the foot of Signal Mountain on a bend in the Tennessee river, over the little level crossing like a postcard of America, past the sheriff at the gate and through an avenue of pines, the perfect pitch awaits Lamine Yamal, Rodri and the rest. So does a man. He’s 6ft 3in, 78 years old, his name is Bill Nuttall, and he’s here every day.

“I’ve got nothing else to do,” he says, laughing. He’s done it all: he cleaned out Pelé and got cleaned out by Gordon Banks, coached Gerd Müller and built a US national team from scratch, the hosts making history in 1994. He also brought Spain here, an even better host now than he was back then.

There are images that flicker in the mind before sleep: the loss, the resilience and then the strange mundanity of it all

What was it like? Is the question I am often asked when I return from working in Ukraine, where I have been travelling regularly since 2022. There’s an understanding implicit in the question that the answer will not – not quite – lie in the accumulation of reporting. For good reasons the reporter keeps her eyes steady and focused outward, collecting the essential information, conveying it as clearly and smoothly as possible. The reporter reins in and disciplines her subjectivity, while, ideally, recognising its existence and understanding its contours. The reporter knows that the facts of the matter are the thing.

At the same time, feelings and impressions cannot wholly be untangled from the facts. Feelings are inevitable, if you are functioning as a human in any sense at all. They are the tentacles of empathy that reach out in an attempt to understand people and situations. Feelings have an epistemic role – a part to play in acquiring knowledge. Nevertheless, they must be tidied into the background. Respect for your readers and your subjects demands it; the rituals and rules of journalism demand it.

Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer

Ukrainian Lessons by Charlotte Higgins (Cape, £22) will be published in August. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a time of war with Charlotte Higgins and guests
On Wednesday 30 September, join Charlotte Higgins and our panel of acclaimed Ukrainian writers to reflect on the profound connections between war, art and life. With Olia Hercules, Sasha Dovzhyk, Olesya Khromeychuk, and Shaun Walker. Book tickets here

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 country is dependent on the global giants that call Dublin home. Irish ministers can’t be trusted to chair vital European digital sovereignty talks

On the face of it, Ireland behaves like a good European by being a staunch advocate of human rights and a beacon of progressivism on the western edge of the continent. But there is one vital area in which its record is less than perfect – one that should cause concern when the Irish government takes over the rotating six-month presidency of the EU on 1 July. The EU’s tech and AI rulebook will be renegotiated during the same period, but the Irish state and economy have been captured by big tech. Ireland is so compromised that as president of the Council of the EU, it should recuse itself from all tech and digital sovereignty negotiations.

The last time Ireland held the EU presidency was in 2013, during negotiations on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A leaked Facebook memo describes a 2013 meeting where the company’s executives met Ireland’s then prime minister to complain about the proposed data privacy rules. They left understanding they had Enda Kenny’s assurance that Ireland would use its “significant influence” as EU Council president to deliver what Facebook called a “positive outcome”. The executives also attended “a dinner hosted by senior Irish politicians to work through the various ways that the Irish could be helpful”.

Johnny Ryan is director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

Drug-resistant bacteria are no longer confined to hospital settings but are spreading into communities in every country

Why should a surge in sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in Europe be a concern across Africa or for people who don’t consider themselves to be at risk? Because it points to a bigger problem: the ease with which drug-resistant infections are now spreading, and not just in hospitals but within the community too.

The speed and scale at which people travel and interact in our interconnected world is increasingly helping to drive this, allowing drug-resistant pathogens to move rapidly through populations and across the world – including between high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where the burden is often greatest and surveillance more limited.

Personable warmth is something that mistrustful voters sorely need, and Burnham has it. But he’ll also need a little of what Starmer has to succeed in No 10

Keir Starmer has stepped down and Andy Burnham is, in all likelihood, about to walk through the door of No 10. I have had the rare privilege of working closely with both men. For five years I served as a chief prosecutor while Keir Starmer was director of public prosecutions (DPP). And for much of Burnham’s time as mayor of Greater Manchester, I worked with him on violent crime, working-class representation and community cohesion.

I have watched both lead, up close and under real pressure. And as the country changes hands, I keep returning to the single quality that separates them – because it happens to be the quality Britain needs most right now.

Nazir Afzal is a former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England

The lovefest from Musk’s conservative fans completely overlooks the unscrupulous tactics behind his immense wealth

For 12 glorious days in June, Elon Musk experienced something nobody else in the history of humankind has ever experienced: trillionaire status.

Did all those zeros make Musk happy? Did the army of children he has sired love him more? Did he find inner peace? We’ll never know because Musk was dragged back to being a boring old billionaire last Wednesday, after shares in Tesla and SpaceX plunged amid a broader tech sell-off.

She always believed Halloween was an Americanism too far. What would she have thought about the rise of this US high school tradition in Britain?

When I was young, and Halloween was just becoming a thing, and other people’s mums were doing fun stuff like blindfolding children and sticking their hands in a bowl of peeled grapes, calling them witches’ eyeballs, my mum was saying: “This is a disgusting Americanisation of what was previously a very low-key event.”

I used to daydream about how great it would be to have one of those fun mums who didn’t hate America. Imagine all the other stuff she might do! She might buy Pop-tarts just to see what they were like. We might go to Disneyland.

The Trump v Slaughter decision allows the president further influence over agencies Congress itself created

What is Congress for? According to the supreme court, not very much. On Monday, the supreme court overturned Humphrey’s Executor, a 91-year-old precedent, nullified the Federal Trade Commission Act, a 112-year-old law, and presumed to settle a 250-year-old debate on the scope of presidential authority when it reapportioned power away from the people’s representatives in the House and Senate and gave it instead to Donald Trump. In Trump v Slaughter, the court ruled that the heads of independent agencies that Congress created cannot be protected from arbitrary firings by laws that Congress passed. Instead, Donald Trump is now free to fire agency heads at will and to replace them with political loyalists, regardless of what Congress has said about it.

The ruling has one key exception: Donald Trump does not, according to the justices, have the ability to fire members of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve without cause and without proper procedure. A separate decision found for Lisa Cook, the Joe Biden appointee who was the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, and who was fired via social media post by Donald Trump last year. In addition to Cook’s job, the decision protects the independence of the Federal Reserve and the health of financial markets, to say nothing of the considerable personal wealth of the justices themselves.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Updates from day two | Serena on her SW19 return
Sabalenka overcomes wobble | Diary | Email Daniel

Next no No 3: Alex de Minaur (5) v Roman Andres Burruchaga.

Next on No 2: Otto Virtanen v Ben Shelton (4).

Liv Apps thoroughly deserves the top award after an impressive campaign, with her Saracens coach, Alex Austerberry, also excelling

1. Liv Apps Thoroughly deserved PWR player of the season. The No 9 has been Saracens’ standout player in an impressive campaign and her playing relationship with her half-back partner Zoe Harrison has made the team tick.
2. Meg Jones The England captain steered Trailfinders to their first PWR final with some incredible performances. Her ability to turn a game on a dime with great running lines, huge tackles and leadership qualities make her the MVP of the London club.
3. Alex Matthews The Gloucester No 8 does a lot of work that goes under the radar but her worth was clear for all to see when she was out injured. The club’s performances dramatically changed and her influence will be even more important next season with figures such as Zoe Stratford and Tatyana Heard leaving the club.

• All England CEO requests ‘financial information’ from players

• Resentment rising over stalling tactics in long-running dispute

The All England Club (AELTC) is questioning the players’ claim that they receive 22% of tournament revenues in prize money from the ATP and WTA tours as the row over their remuneration and welfare rumbles on.

Sally Bolton, the AELTC chief executive, said on Monday that it had requested “financial information” from the players shortly after they announced they had cancelled a planned protest in limiting media activity for the first week of Wimbledon.

• Executive committee member says it was ‘very bad idea’

• Caf says its aim is to make tournament world class

A plan to expand the Africa Cup of Nations from 24 to 28 teams has been rejected, the Guardian has learned.

The proposal had been made by the Confederation of African Football’s president, Patrice Motsepe, in February at a press conference in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. Had it been agreed it would have been put in place for the 2028 tournament.

Figures spell out the highs and lows of a force of personality who could swing games in his team’s favour

He swept Nathan Smith for six on an acid-trip of an afternoon, his last on the field as a Test cricketer. He nearly shredded Will O’Rourke’s fingers with a straight drive and swung his way to 30 as an agent of chaos. But was it ever going to last much longer?

In his finest moments, Ben Stokes would grind before the burst, scoring two off his first 66 balls at Headingley in 2019 before tub-thumping to an unbeaten 135. Holding on for a half-century in the World Cup final that same summer before a last, desperate release of power, 34 coming off his next 17 balls at Lord’s. He could make batting look harder than anything else and then, only then, would he play the shot of a lifetime.

Beijing, whose stockpiles and renewables industry allowed it to withstand energy shock, is now gaining from global solar and EV push

China has emerged as the sole winner in Asia from the strait of Hormuz crisis, according to a report published on Tuesday.

The report by the Asia Group thinktank concluded that China had weathered the storm of the global commodities crisis resulting from the closure of the Middle Eastern waterway, and also stood to gain from the economic and geopolitical trends sparked by the wider conflict.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Energy system operator says sum needed to deliver clean power targets while meeting rising demand is up by 50%

The cost of rewiring Great Britain’s electricity networks through the 2030s is now 50% higher than before the Labour government came to power, and could reach almost £90bn in the next decade, according to the energy system operator.

Building new high-voltage transmission lines and infrastructure to connect low-carbon energy to the grid in the 2030s was initially forecast by the energy system operator to cost £58bn.

Family of St Lucian fisher Ricky Joseph left suspended in raw grief, while media coverage of attacks is waning

It has been more than four months since Ricky Joseph left his home for the last time.

His partner, Lucille Charles, and their chidren were still asleep at home on the Caribbean island of St Lucia, when Joseph, 35, set out to sea early in the morning on 13 February to fish for tuna, ballyhoo and snapper.

Trump administration faces an escalating controversy over handling of ‘Jane Doe 4’ documents in Epstein files. White House has called her allegations ‘completely baseless’

A woman known as Jane Doe 4 in the Jeffrey Epstein files is “staying off the grid” and lives in fear of retaliation from the Trump administration amid an escalating controversy over its handling of her case, according to a family member.

“Trauma is brutal. Chronic trauma destroys,” said the relative, who described the woman’s life as layers of abuse dating back to early childhood. “She’s coping as best she can.”

Government hopes for 30% of city’s fleet to be electric by 2030, in move hailed as ‘gamechanger’ on air pollution

The unruly chaos of Delhi’s roads would be unrecognisable without the rickshaws and scooters that zip through India’s capital in their millions, emitting toxic fumes in their wake. But now, ambitious policies aim to give the city’s most recognisable vehicles an environmental makeover.

On Monday, Delhi’s government announced plans to eventually ban petrol scooters, motorbikes and autorickshaws in favour of those running on electricity, in an attempt to bring down dangerously high pollution levels in the city by the end of the decade.

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

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

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

Red warnings issued in Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Balkans, with authorities urging people to stay indoors

Parts of central, eastern and southern Europe sweltered on Monday as the “heat dome” behind last week’s record-breaking temperatures shifted east, bringing dangerous conditions to a new swathe of the continent.

Budapest is forecast to exceed 40C on Tuesday, according to models from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

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

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

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

Acquisition by Axel Springer ends three years of uncertainty over ownership of 171-year-old titles

• Business live – latest updates

The European media group Axel Springer has completed its £575m takeover of the Telegraph, ending three tumultuous years of uncertainty over the future ownership of the 171-year-old titles.

The Germany-headquartered company, which gazumped the owner of the Daily Mail by tabling a blockbuster offer at the 11th hour, said it had now received all regulatory approvals in the UK, Ireland and Austria to take full control of Telegraph Media Group (TMG).

Hospitality trade bodies’ data published as celebrity chefs and restaurateurs launch campaign for VAT cut

Nearly a quarter of UK pubs, bars and restaurants are losing money, according to new survey data that came as a group of celebrity chefs and business owners stepped up their campaign for a sector-specific VAT cut.

Spearheaded by chef Tom Kerridge, leading figures in the hospitality sector are calling for VAT on the industry to be cut from 20% to 10%.

After being arrested, beaten and targeted for conscription, Amal Sahel realised he needed to leave his country. But his journey to Europe was fraught with danger

When Amal Sahel* was 15, he and his friends found a long length of metal lying abandoned in the street. The boys thought immediately of its best use: a sword. Over the past year, they had grown used to seeing strange debris – what Sahel calls “interesting pieces of metal” – in their neighbourhood.

The debris had been left behind by repeated air raids on Sahel’s home city in Yemen: a previously quiet location in a country gradually collapsing into civil war.

Outright bans may have unintended negative consequences for young people, University College London report warns

School smartphone bans are “overly simplistic” and are not supported by young people who regard them as “punitive” rather than helpful, according to research by University College London.

The UCL report was published on Tuesday, the day after a statutory ban on smartphones in schools in England came into force, making individual schools and trusts legally responsible for being phone-free throughout the day.

Government fears repeat of anti-migrant violence in 2008 that led to looting and resulted in deaths of 62 people

South African authorities have deployed police units to towns and cities around the country before planned demonstrations against undocumented foreign nationals.

Security personnel were seen patrolling the central business district in Johannesburg, the economic capital, where many shopkeepers decided not to open on Tuesday. Trucks and other assets belonging to the South African National Defence Force were also present, according to local media reports.

Anger grows over Monday’s ruling over Trump’s power to fire agency heads as court due to rule on president’s desire to withhold citizenship from those born in US

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Donald Trump doesn’t have any public events today. He’ll spend the morning in executive time and policy meetings. The president will later speak at a Rose Club garden dinner at 7pm ET, but right now that is not open to the press.

We’ll keep you updated if anything changes.

Diplomats from around world meet in Sarajevo in second attempt to agree on top envoy, as US pushes for its choice

Diplomats from around the world are due to meet in Sarajevo on Tuesday in an attempt to resolve a deep rift between the US and Europe over a top envoy appointment that could have a powerful influence on the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Disagreement has erupted over who should become the next high representative for the international community, a post with significant powers, in an overt test of political wills. The Trump administration is assertively pushing a business-driven agenda, potentially at the expense of Bosnia’s delicate postwar political balance.

Ladidi Shaibu’s two siblings both gained asylum before the Trump administration’s changes to immigration policy. But instead of being allowed to join them, she is being deported to Uganda

Growing up and living with albinism in rural Nigeria was tough for Ladidi Shaibu. She and her two siblings with the condition were shrouded in stigma and lived in constant fear of being mutilated or killed. Her sister was attacked twice and her brother was kidnapped as a child by people who wanted to sell his body parts.

Three years ago, Shaibu, 35, entered the US via the border with Mexico and registered as an asylum seeker. Her brother had already been granted asylum and her sister’s case was soon to be successful, too.

CMA says developers should be able to steer users away from app stores for payments to increase competition

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The UK’s competition watchdog is challenging Apple and Google’s “effective duopoly” over mobile platforms by allowing developers to steer users away from their app stores to make purchases.

The Competition and Markets Authority argues that consumers and app owners are being let down by Apple and Google restrictions on spending money outside their app stores.

Exclusive: Staff at Rockstar Games hope move can be completed before release of GTA VI scheduled for November

The makers of Grand Theft Auto are attempting to gain official union recognition after mass sackings last year.

Video game designers and other employees at Rockstar Games are working with the IWGB Game Workers Union to try to secure unionisation before the release of GTA VI scheduled for November.

British bike maker says cycling market is recovering from sales slump and investments will add new expertise

The French sports gear retailer Decathlon and a Chinese investment group that was an early backer of Labubu soft toys have bought stakes in the British folding bike maker Brompton, as its boss said the cycling market was recovering from a slump in sales.

Decathlon has acquired a 10% stake in the manufacturer while BA Capital has bought 5% in a deal understood to collectively be worth about £18m.

Thirteen countries with a free trade agreement with Brussels have their quota reduced by just one-third

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The EU has halved the amount of duty-free steel it will accept from abroad, but has agreed higher import levels for more than a dozen trading partners, including Britain.

The curbs are designed to reduce cheap Chinese steel coming into the bloc. However, 13 countries with a free trade agreement (FTA) with Brussels, including the UK, have had their quota reduced by only a third.

After suffering the schadenfreude of gamers online, the Tony-winning Broadway musical offered redemption to Cliff Bleszinski

‘It was utterly heartbreaking, to be honest, and it certainly didn’t help with my drinking. I’ll leave it at that.” Cliff Bleszinski is recalling the launch of LawBreakers, the arena first-person shooter he put out in 2017. It had been his first project as the CEO of his own studio, Boss Key Productions. Before that, he was the creative figurehead behind hugely successful sci-fi shooter series, Gears of War, when he was known to millions of gamers as CliffyB.

“I retired from Epic and all of it, and I missed making neat stuff,” he says. “And my agent at the time was needling me: ‘Come on, you want to get back in, have your own studio? Look at what [Hideo] Kojima’s doing.’ And I was like: ‘OK, if Kojima can do it, so can I.’ Such hubris, right?”

Fifty years after its release, Coolidge’s dramatisation of the key moments before and after her rape is still absolutely essential

Martha Coolidge’s overwhelmingly candid and courageous personal docudrama from 1976 is a pioneering study of rape made more powerful by the radical modes of scrutiny that she devised. Coolidge set out to dramatise the key moments leading up to and following the rape she survived a decade or so before, as a teen co-ed, by a fellow student. The rapist is shown driving her and a bunch of other students to a party in New York. He insists they stop off at a certain, dilapidated apartment on the way; this is where the crime happens, and it is made worse in the aftermath by bullying from malicious girls in a neighbouring dorm and the insidious misjudged condescension from the dean when he hears the rumours.

The film gives us these scenes, but also fly-on-the-wall sequences of the film-maker discussing the project with the actors, rehearsing and improvising. These latter scenes are at such length that you are invited to wonder if this is the main (fictional) event. The lead (Michele Manenti), playing “Martha”, is open about having been subjected to a similar date rape, and her dorm-mate, Anne, is played by Anne Mundstuk, Coolidge’s actual dorm-mate at the time. The rapist “Curly” is played by Jim Carrington, an actor who later gained prominence in 80s teen movies and as a screenwriter. Unconsciously, he makes the rape scene even more horrendous by speaking to the director on-camera in a later, separate instance about how he can see Curly’s point of view and how men are allegedly at the mercy of their own urges in the moment. After that unwatchably horrible scene, Carrington confesses to feeling such rage at his victim that he wanted to punch her in the face.

The humble digestive is elevated to ancient wonder status in the competition. Plus: the US version of Doc Martin. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
With a place in the final six at stake, the four remaining teams must produce two dozen perfectly executed savoury millefeuille and babka buns. Before that happens, they’re tasked with creating intricate biscuit showpieces inspired by the ancient wonders of the world (hanging gardens of bourbon, anyone?) accompanied by elegant petit gâteaux. Ali Catterall

The fallen star, who was accused of sexual misconduct in 2017, is back in a Netflix special which has its moments but not enough of them

Louis CK is back, again. It’s been nearly a decade since the comedian, actor and writer-director admitted his guilt in a series of sexual misconduct allegations, resulting in a number of organizations severing ties and sending him into relative exile – for a few months, anyway. Since then, he’s toured extensively (often to a crowd reception implying he was the one wronged) and self-released four comedy specials, among other endeavors, so it’s not as if the existence of a new one is especially surprising. But it is notable that Ridiculous is backed by Netflix – a full-circle moment for a comic whose last pre-scandal hour titled 2017 was a Netflix release as well.

It’s less a triumphant return than a gradual slinking back, an unspoken assumption that no one really cares that much about his behavior; no particular defense or apology, just a shruggy emoticon. When describing a tour of his elderly father’s prospective nursing home in the special, CK says: “The theme of the tour is: ‘This Is What This Is’,” implying a sense of grim acceptance. It feels a bit like that’s the theme of the Ridiculous tour, too – whether we want it to be or not.

Based on actor-director Peter Benedict’s own play this tiny-budget thriller has the feel of a stagey recording as the double-crosses pile up higher than an MP’s promises

The fictional shadow cabinet minister at the centre of this darkly comic blackmail thriller is offended when the male prostitute he has hired describes his reputation as “colourful”. Colourful MPs support bloodsports and wear bow ties, he says; he prefers the term “maverick”. It’s never said out loud, but clearly he sits on the right in political terms; you can tell from the sneer in his voice as he utters the word “proletariat”.

Executioner is adapted by Peter Benedict from his play Deadlock, with a staginess that feels a bit much for the screen. Benedict also co-directs and stars as the MP, called Robert Marlowe, giving a lip-smacking performance that makes Hannibal Lecter look like a character from kitchen sink realism. The entire film is set in the basement studio of Marlowe’s country pile, where he dabbles in pottery while listening to Gilbert and Sullivan (there’s even an echo of The Mikado in the plot).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queenie’s ticking biological clock drives her chaotic misadventures in this sage and funny follow-up

A gynaecological examination is a good analogy for the kind of painful self-inspection at which Queenie Jenkins excels. The heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 debut Queenie memorably begins that novel with a medical appointment for a mystery ailment that turns out to be a miscarriage. The sequel, Queenie Is Working on It, picks up the story eight years on, with the now 33-year-old Queenie back on the gurney, this time for a fertility checkup. “I didn’t realise they did condoms for anything other than … penises,” Queenie observes lamely as the unsmiling doctor sheaths a probe. Life has changed, but in many ways, Queenie has not.

Carty-Williams’s first novel about a stumbling Jamaican-British woman living in London, navigating romantic disaster and a mental health crisis, was a breakout bestseller. Reassuringly, her keen ear for female friendships – the deep affection, the stubborn solidarity, the ribald humour – endures, as does her understanding of how the particular experience of race suffuses the ordinary lives of Black women. These are the qualities that made Queenie feel unique and interesting in 2019. She remains so in 2026, but your patience for the new novel rather depends on your tolerance for her continued misadventures.

Robin Farquharson was a prize-winning game theorist, anti-apartheid activist and countercultural chaos merchant

Even as an undergraduate, Robin Farquharson was famous for being erratic. He provoked anxiety and goodwill in equal measure. His aim in life, according to an anonymous writer in an Oxford student newspaper, was “to become a contradiction in terms. Since last October, he has been cutting friends in the street; sleeping alternate nights in mysterious George Street garrets and obscure collegiate crypts.” The profile described his soul as “dogged, indomitable” and “fierce, incompatible”. Maybe. Later to become a prize-winning game theorist often hailed as a genius, he died aged just 42 in a squat fire on April Fools’ Day 1973. The poet Aidan Andrew Dun called him an “outsider among outsiders … a luminous ruin of a man”. For anti-psychiatrist RD Laing, he was “very intelligent and totally out of his fucking mind”.

Farquharson once joked he had been born a member of the master race in South Africa. He wasn’t entirely wrong. His father had founded a distinguished law firm in Pretoria; high-up politicians would regularly come over for dinner. He attended elite private schools – future pupils included the novelist Wilbur Smith and Elon Musk – and got himself a pilot’s licence even before, barely 16, he entered university. Later at Oxford he studied PPE, befriended Bertrand Russell and Rupert Murdoch (a self-declared Marxist at the time), and shared digs with future chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson. Intellectually he was regarded as high-wattage but, about to land a starry All Souls College fellowship, he wrecked his chances by phoning the college warden to tell him he had a message from God he needed to share.

Two gay Afghan men find each other in Istanbul, in a much-hyped debut that fails to sustain the killer energy of its opening act

Everyone in No God But Us is performing. Families perform respectability; lovers perform fidelity; NGOs perform goodness; autocrats perform power. The drag queens in Bobuq Sayed’s anticipated debut novel are the most honest performers of the lot. They’re the only ones who admit they’re in costume.

Delbar is the “door bitch” at a drag club in Washington DC. Fresh out of college and not yet out to his family, he has no idea who he is. He knows who he is expected to be: the well-buttoned son of Afghan immigrants. He also knows who he might become under the spotlight; his drag persona, Sharia Raw, is waiting in the wings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hampstead theatre, London
Robert Lindsay excels as Franklin D Roosevelt in Richard Nelson’s fascinating retelling of King George VI’s diplomatic visit in 1939

The 2012 film Hyde Park on Hudson – fictionalising a 1939 visit by King George VI and his queen Elizabeth to a summer home of President Franklin D Roosevelt and first lady Eleanor – was a modest success, seen (more happily by Republicans than Democrats) as an oblique take on the Clintons: the president hiding a complex private life while his wife was more intelligent and independent than some folk liked.

The film’s screenwriter Richard Nelson treats the material for the third time (he also did a 2009 BBC radio drama) in this related but rebooted stage play, providing a fascinating example of how context can change content. Inflected by this week’s 250th birthday of American independence, a play in which a monarch comes crown in hand on a Foreign Office mission to secure American support for the impending European war also has resonances of the shakiness of Nato under President Trump whom King Charles recently met on a state visit.

Elf Lyons mixes humour and heartbreak, Frank Skinner works the crowd, Kristen Schaal returns with a secret – and one man sings the same song over and over again

No fringe festival has been complete in recent years without some oddball clown confection – usually animal-based – from the idiosyncratic Lyons. But this year’s offering promises something unusually personal, a reflection on a breakup she experienced while touring her last show.
Pleasance Courtyard, 5-31 August

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

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

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

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

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

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

Touring until 5 December

Citizen Vigilante, which follows a businessman taking bloody revenge on immigrant criminals, was posted by the tech trillionaire in the wake of damning reviews

A German film starring Armie Hammer that was allegedly denied a certificate by the German ratings board for “inciting violence against immigrants” has secured worldwide distribution and an explosion in its viewing figures after a bizarre intervention by Elon Musk.

Citizen Vigilante, a thriller starring Hammer, and written and directed by Uwe Boll, was posted free on Musk’s account on X from Thursday to Sunday, resulting in a major boost to its marketing and commercial profile. The film was released in the US on 19 June by Quiver Distribution, which according to Variety, has now acquired worldwide rights. Musk also posted: “Citizen Vigilante 2 will be even better.”

The Dutch photographer believed mastering colour was the sign of a truly skilled artist – and pioneered an influential style best described as ‘organised chaos’

A new exhibition follows the unlikely route of tarot cards all the way from 15th century Italy to its association with the occult now

Once the territory of bohemians such as Pamela Colman Smith – an intimate of William Butler Yeats whose art won the admiration of Alfred Stieglitz – and mystics such as Aleister Crowley (among other things, inventor of his own religion), the tarot has now gone mainstream. Searches for how to do tarot readings skyrocketed during the pandemic, and decks are proliferating at a dizzying pace – your local independent bookstore probably sells at least a dozen of them.

It’s never been easier to get a reading – or at least a quick card pull – and The Morgan Library & Museum’s new show, Tarot!, capitalizes on the practice’s increasing popularity to lure in the curious and knowledgeable alike. Tarot! starts by charting the cards’ evolution from Renaissance Italy up through the 21st century, then offers up the tarot-themed work of more than two dozen artists – among them Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, as well as new art by celebrated British painter Chris Ofili.

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

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

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

From a less-crowded camino and the Slovenian Alps to a stunning river trail and Ireland’s remote Beara peninsula

Distance up to 74 miles
Duration 3-9 days

Slimmer, longer lasting and much easier to live with, new Oura sets a very high new bar for health-tracking wearables

Oura’s new Ring 5 is a massive upgrade for smart rings, dramatically shrinking in size and weight to bring them right into line with standard wedding bands and other jewellery. It is finally a smart ring you can genuinely forget you’re wearing.

The Ring 5 is a straight replacement for the popular Ring 4 and costs from £399 (€399/$399/$A649), though it requires a £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99/A$9.99) a month subscription to access anything but basic daily metrics. An Oura is not a cheap proposition.

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

• The best sunglasses with UV protection

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

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

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

• The best summer sandals for men and women

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best wine cooler for hosting and overall:
Peugeot Equilibreur

Best wine cooler for a picnic:
Le Creuset sleeve

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scotch eggs, fresh baguettes, arancini and tinned fish are all dependable dishes that won’t hamper a feast at the park or beach

What failsafe dishes can I take to a picnic? They’re so often disappointing.
Alice, by email
Ah, picnics … Idyllic in theory, tricky in execution. We’re really talking about food that’s structurally sound (and therefore travels well), can be eaten alone (or with salad) and is comfortable when left to sit around for a bit, which is why the humble scotch egg is such a strong contender. “I’d definitely bring a plastic container full of those,” says Luke Larsson, head chef and co-owner of Khao Bird in Soho, London, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, favours a Thai-style version. “Ours start with a soft-boiled egg wrapped in sai oua sausagemeat, which is a northern Thai sausage packed with turmeric, chilli, herbs and aromatics,” he says. That’s then coated in panko breadcrumbs and deep-fried. “Leave to cool slightly before packing them up, so they stay crisp,” Larsson adds, and pack some chilli jam or nam jim for dipping.

“I’m a big believer that picnic food should feel nostalgic,” Larsson says. “Unfussy things that you actually want to eat on the grass with a drink in hand.” Which brings us nicely to the jambon beurre, a sandwich that’s often demolished by Manon Lagrève, author of La Saison, after a family bike ride in France. “It’s always an occasion to make a delicious sandwich,” she says, so “get the best baguette you can, ham from the butcher’s, then I like to add comté and a few cornichons. And don’t forget the salted butter.” Rather than messing about with constructing barriers to stop any moisture from soaking into the bread, Lagrève recommends packing all the elements individually, popping them in a cool bag and constructing the sandwiches on arrival: “That enhances the picnic vibe too.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

From savoury pastries and chilled reds to cherry overload, discover what’s fresh and what’s become just a bit stale

Savoury millefeuilles (above)
Elegant savouries are all the rage on menus right now, for example, at Planque, which has a chanterelle and radicchio millefeuille with comte sauce. Think fancy deconstructed vol-au-vents with modern gastronomic flair.

Tomatoes, samphire and basil bloom in summer – as, of course, do the essential strawberries

Basil
The scent and flavour of summer: keep stems cut-end in shallow water, and out of the fridge. If you have a pot plant, stand it in a saucer and water from below in the morning as basil hates having wet feet overnight.

There’s a common misconception that Indian cooking is time-consuming and usually involves a dizzying number of ingredients, but these two home standbys show you can create magic in mere minutes

My earliest memories are of cooking, sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s kitchen in Varanasi, northern India, dutifully combining water and flour to make dough or grinding spices between stones, both sensory kitchen tasks that became my playtime. The other kitchens of my life – those of my mother and aunt, my own kitchen at home and our restaurant kitchens at Mowgli – are still where I feel most at home, standing over a pot and conjuring aromas that waft through the house. There is a common misconception that Indian cookery is hard, and that for every dish you have to grind and roast and marinade, but that couldn’t be further from the truth: with a single stove ring, 20 or so minutes of fuel, one pot, a board, a knife and a spoon for stirring, you can create magic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

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

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

The car lease company won’t rescind my contract because it says the vehicle is driveable. The only problem is, it won’t even charge

My brand new Peugeot EV stopped working within a fortnight of delivery.

The dealer postponed the repair appointment by a month because it was too busy. Peugeot Assist, operated by the RAC, eventually collected it for repair under warranty two weeks ago, but it never reached the dealer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got a stick in a pot that you’re tempted to bin? All it needs is this little-known signal to flower again …

The problem
Most of us have bought an orchid, enjoyed its flowers, then been left with a couple of leaves and a bare spike. Many assume the show is over and bin it or leave it on the sill out of guilt, watering it occasionally while expecting nothing. There it sits, dormant, waiting for a signal most people never think to give.

The hack
Phalaenopsis orchids rebloom in response to a temperature drop. In their natural habitat, a cooler spell signals the change of season and triggers the plant to produce a new flower spike. Recreating that shift is the prompt most orchids are waiting for, and it’s simpler to do than you might think.

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

Name: The sunset stipulation.

Age: About six months.

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

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

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

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

• Read more from the My rookie era series here

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

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

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

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

Exclusive: Activist tells of his life as one of India’s most prominent political prisoners and his opposition to the government of Narendra Modi

Prison is hardest at sunset. As the thousands of prisoners incarcerated in Delhi’s most infamous jail are cast out of their cells and forced into the dank yard until darkness falls, prisoner number 626714 feels the punishing dread begin to rise.

Yet the inmate – better known as Umar Khalid – was recently moved to discover that another political prisoner, exiled at a camp thousands of miles from India, wrote of the very same feeling more than 150 years ago.

The actor’s sophisticated sense of humour and natural ability to make everyone laugh were there long before her famous sitcom roles
A life in pictures
Penelope Keith: the most spectacular sitcom snob ever to grace our screens

Penelope Keith, who has died aged 86, became justly famous for displaying a classy hauteur laced with mischief in TV sitcoms such as The Good Life and To the Manor Born. But I can vouch for the fact that something of that quality, honed by a sophisticated comic technique, lay within Penny herself. I first met her when I worked at Lincoln Theatre Royal, where she was a member of the company, in the early 1960s. I vividly recall her surveying a voluminous exhibition of paintings by a local artist in the theatre foyer, magisterially commenting: “Busy lady!” and sweeping out. Such style and assurance in a 23-year-old was rare.

The mischief was also there from the start. A year or so later I found Penny doing small parts at the RSC where she gained a certain notoriety even as one of the crowd in Julius Caesar: when Mark Antony had urged the citizens to lend him their ears, her voice had been heard to pierce that of the throng with a cry of “Ave an ear then.” She was clearly destined for bigger things and indeed starred as an acid-tongued murderee in the first play I ever reviewed for the Guardian, Francis Durbridge’s Suddenly at Home, in 1971.

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

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

• Tell us: were you born on 4 July?

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

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

Burnham announced that as UK prime minister he would set up a ‘No 10 North’ in Manchester to oversee a devolution of power and resources across the UK

Andy Burnham’s tenure as mayor of Manchester has come to an end after nine years. But after his Makerfield byelection victory, the PM-in-waiting plans to maintain his links with the city by setting up a “No 10 North” in Manchester to oversee a devolution of power and resources across the UK.

Burnham has asked Caroline Simpson, the chief executive of the Greater Manchester combined authority, to lead the new No 10 North and help put his vision of “Manchesterism” into practice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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