Cheyenne Roundtree, an investigative reporter at Rolling Stone, was as shocked as anyone when allegations of rape and sexual abuse were made against the music mogul. Then she began digging into his past life. In her first interview, she paints a horrifying picture of lost police reports, repeat behaviours, rumours and run-ins

For Cheyenne Roundtree, an investigative reporter at Rolling Stone, the civil lawsuit that dropped on Sean “Diddy” Combs in November 2023 seemed to come from nowhere. Filed by his ex-partner, the singer Cassie Ventura, it alleged that Combs had beaten and raped her, plied her with drugs and forced her into sexual encounters with male sex workers throughout their decade-long relationship.

Roundtree, along with much of the world’s media, was shocked. “I’d grown up in the era of Diddy and Cassie and viewed them as this power couple,” she says. “Her hit Me & U was my song. Diddy was this mogul – I knew him for the music – and she was this style inspiration, this beautiful, talented woman living an amazing life.”

The issue cannot be avoided any longer. Andy Burnham and his chancellor must face the fear of a pensioner backlash, and find a fair solution

There is always something oddly unreal about party conference season. In theory, everyone is getting away from Westminster to better reflect on the state of the nation. In practice, the whole circus just briefly relocates to the coast, to live off warm white wine and gossip for three days, before coming back with a streaming cold. But this year, reality seems more elusive than usual.

Everyone knows hard choices loom, but everyone is frightened to make them. Every serious party needs billions of pounds to fund their promises, and everyone knows there’s an obvious place to find the money, but nobody wants to be the first to say so. And so a deferential silence shrouds the pension triple lock, whose future will be vigorously debated on the fringes and in private conversation this autumn, but less so on the stage.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

This brutal, hilarious new show about life as a fiftysomething is full of all the heart and humour of human life. At points it’s mesmerisingly perfect

There’s a moment in Sharon Horgan’s new show, Youth, when – as protagonist Alex (Horgan) is seeing her son off to university – she inadvertently begins to run after the car that’s taking him away. And then she catches herself, and slows. And then she starts up again. It was such a tender, vicious glimpse into the future that I found myself sobbing into the sofa and cursing her name.

All of which is to say: Sharon Horgan is back and she’s better than ever. Youth is the representation every woman who has ever slapped on an oestrogen patch after a divorce, looked around and thought “What the hell now?” has been waiting for. Horgan herself has described it in interviews as forming the third part of a loose trilogy that began with Pulling. Co-written with Dennis Kelly, Pulling was about three thirtysomething antitheses to Bridget Jones, whose dark chaos apparently scared the BBC so much they unexpectedly cancelled it just as it was truly getting into its stride. That was followed by Catastrophe, written by and starring Horgan, with Rob Delaney, as a couple who have a fling, find that she’s pregnant and end up making a brutal, hilarious go of things.

Youth is on HBO Max

A week after Elizabeth ‘Tsontso’ Moselakgomo’s body was found, runners took part in a morning run to honour her name and demand more protection

The runners smiled and laughed, congratulating each other on finishing their 5km or 10km Saturday run, their foreheads glistening with sweat in the early morning sun. They helped themselves to water, instant coffee and sugary snacks, provided by waiting volunteers on the lawn outside a gated community of modern apartment blocks, and then stretched out together.

But there were sombre moments too, as they mourned one of their own, who had lit up their Saturday runs around Sandton, an upmarket area of Johannesburg. Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo’s body had been found a week earlier, on Saturday 12 September. The 38-year-old went missing three days earlier, after going out for a run alone after work.

Drug gangs have moved off Britain’s streets and into vulnerable people’s homes. Addicts like my friend are easy targets, but the reality can be more complicated than it seems

Duncan is a good friend of mine. He looks like a Dickensian rock’n’roller: tall and skinny, long hair, retro clothes. He’s read the Flashman novels three times. We met in secondary school in west London in the early 1980s. We got drunk, smoked Rothmans and banana skin spliffs and played Dungeons & Dragons. At 14, we got into punk together and spent our teens playing music and seeing live bands. As we moved into our 20s, I trained as a journalist and Duncan, a talented songwriter and guitarist, carried on with music.

At the age of 23 he got involved in heroin. He found the lifestyle immediately seductive, his partner at the time, Lucy, told me. He would often befriend his dealers. “I remember more than once waiting in his car as he’d gone up some tower block to score, thinking where on earth is he?” Lucy said. “He’d be hanging out chatting. There were some genuinely fascinating characters with incredible stories to tell.”

As diet trends proliferate on social media, it can be hard to work out which are backed by science and which should be ignored. From paleo to keto, raw food to intermittent fasting, each attracts a tribe of ardent followers. Now Daniel Lieberman, professor of biological sciences at Harvard University, has written a book to try to cut through the noise. In Fed Up, he uses his background as an evolutionary anthropologist to scrutinise the evidence, turning himself into a guinea pig in the process and trying various diets. In this podcast, he tells Ian Sample which one has remained part of his routine

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Andy Burnham seeks stability in Middle East to bring down prices at home as first meeting with Trump looms

The UK has agreed to provide defensive air support to Saudi Arabia to help counter Houthi fighters and restore stability in the Middle East while driving down the cost of living at home, Andy Burnham has said, ahead of his first meeting with Donald Trump.

The prime minister said he had agreed to a request for air-to-air refuelling of Saudi jets to defend energy infrastructure against the Iran-backed rebels and help keep oil flowing from the Gulf to ease global economic turmoil.

System gives patients, loved ones and health workers the right to ask for a second opinion on care

Martha’s rule, which lets NHS patients, staff and relatives request a review of their care, is being expanded to every A&E in England, health officials have announced.

The system gives patients, their loved ones and health workers the right to ask for a different medical team to examine the care being provided on inpatient wards and to recommend changes. It has already potentially saved hundreds of lives, official figures show.

PM skirts question and says his focus is on rebuilding bridges before first meeting with Ursula von der Leyen

Andy Burnham has opened the door to fighting the next election on the UK rejoining the EU, but said his immediate priority was continuing to rebuild bridges with European allies.

The prime minister, who will hold his first meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Tuesday, did not rule out including reversing Brexit in Labour’s next manifesto – but suggested the country should focus on securing closer trading ties first.

Higher-than-expected figure will make chancellor’s aim of calming jittery bond markets more difficult

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The UK government borrowed a higher-than-expected £18.3bn last month, increasing the pressure on John Healey as he attempts to calm jittery bond markets before next month’s budget.

Official figures released by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday said public sector net borrowing – the difference between government spending and income – was £2.9bn higher last month than in August 2025.

Human rights lawyer says accused father is victim of ‘archaic system’ after boy fell from window in July

A British father is expected to appear in court in Cyprus accused of “recklessly” causing the death of his two-year-old son, who was fatally injured falling from a fourth-floor window.

The 37-year-old, who has not been named publicly, was on the first day of a family holiday near Paphos on 12 July when the toddler died.

Without an agreement sanctions on nearly 3,000 entities accused of supporting the war on Ukraine will lapse at the end of the day

Meanwhile, the Kremlin ⁠said it considered all western ⁠sanctions on ⁠Russian ​individuals to be illegal and that ⁠they should all be revoked.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry ⁠Peskov was answering ​a question about ‌a ‌push by some EU ‌countries to lift sanctions on Russia-linked billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman in return for keeping ‌thousands of other individuals and businesses under ​sanctions related to the war in Ukraine, Reuters reported (11:15).

Exclusive: Collection’s 300,000 pages record lives of enslaved people in countries including the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa and Trinidad

Nearly 4m records documenting the lives of enslaved people across 20 former British colonies have been made searchable online for the first time.

The records have been digitised and indexed by the genealogy company Ancestry, which has partnered with the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London.

White House promoted its own ‘Trump TV’ feed online after ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC decline to participate

The major US television news outlets agreed to suspend their video coverage of Donald Trump after the administration banned journalists from several outlets from entering the White House grounds.

The collective decision came after the barred outlets – CNN, MS Now and Politico – sued the administration on Monday, saying the president’s actions were a violation of their first amendment rights.

Experts say trend across England probably reflects swifter access to diagnoses as wealthier families go private

Some of the most affluent areas of England have had the sharpest rises in the proportion of young people claiming disability benefits for ADHD and autism since the pandemic, according to new research.

Claims for the personal independence payment (Pip) benefit for these health conditions were typically proportionally far higher in deprived areas with higher rates of poverty, low educational outcomes and insecure employment.

President has been posting on Washington arch, AI and his ‘25 top achievements’ – the chances of an uplifting speech appear slim

The annual gathering of the United Nations general assembly has historically been a platform for US presidents to display their most serious face and a positive vision to the world.

From Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to John F Kennedy and Barack Obama, over eight decades US leaders have used the setting to expound on grand themes before a global audience at pivotal moments in international affairs.

In more than two decades in the Prison Service, Pia Sinha gained a reputation as a fixer. Now, as head of the Prison Reform Trust, she’s sounding the alarm about overcrowding and other problems

Pia Sinha has led the Prison Reform Trust since 2023. In that time, she has seen a Conservative government finally admit to an overcrowding crisis that had tipped over the edge. (It was in October 2023 that the early release scheme was devised; by May 2024, the Tories had also launched Operation Safeguard, using police cells as temporary housing.) She’s watched a change of government, then a change of prime minister, then Andy Burnham instantly assailed by negative headlines as the consequences of that early release scheme unfolded: prisoners had to actually be released early. “We’re a bit concerned about how [Burnham] has handled it,” she says, in the trust’s scruffy, un-corporate offices in central London, “but that’s in the knowledge that he had a bit of a hospital pass.”

To recap on Burnham’s handling: when he came in in July, he paused the scheme for an urgent review; in August he announced a series of exclusions, further crimes for which people couldn’t be released early, including manslaughter and death by dangerous driving. That solved an immediate problem, that the killers of PC Andrew Harper would otherwise have been released, but had the knock-on effect of reducing the numbers expected to be released by about a quarter. The conversation Sinha wants to have is what prison overcrowding looks like, what it does to prisoners and staff – and what it means for society.

Party strategists say careful targeting of seats has paid off and should continue, but some say a wider vision is needed

One of the more dramatic moments in a Liberal Democrat conference otherwise short of them came late on Sunday, when the party frontbencher Lisa Smart told the polling veteran John Curtice that, in effect, he no longer understood modern politics.

Curtice had warned the Lib Dems they risked being left behind, with the lack of a coherent national message seeing them all but ignored outside a few electoral strongholds. Smart’s response? In the new era of five- or six-party politics, and mass tactical voting, this does not matter.

People in the UK are more interested in oral health than ever - and you can now buy prebiotic toothpastes and brushes that cost up to £600. Yet we remain in the midst of a serious dental crisis

A December 1969 report from the consumer magazine Which? explored a relatively new gadget that, it predicted, many people would be giving as Christmas presents: the electric toothbrush. For those who hadn’t yet seen one, the magazine described it as “not that much different in principle from an ordinary brush – you have a stick with a brush on the end. The difference is that an electric one moves the brush head for you”. Progress indeed.

Nearly six decades on, electric toothbrushes can do a lot more than merely jiggle, offering multiple speeds and movement sensors for real-time tracking of where you’ve brushed – some even promise gum-massage or tongue-cleaning modes. Prices range from about £25 for a basic Oral B model to £599.99 for a Philips Sonicare model that gives “smart coverage feedback”. The latest super-toothbrush – a mere £419.99 – features a camera and a built-in water jet to clean between teeth, using AI to identify gaps. Created by Dyson, it’s still, essentially, a stick with a brush on the end (although there is another toothbrush on the market that’s shaped like a mouthguard, with individual brushes, that claims to clean your teeth in 20 seconds).

Cryotherapy chambers and other practices have little evidence behind them, says top performance director

Dr Claire-Marie Roberts was working at Coventry City when she received a call from someone asking whether she knew how much oxygen was in the atmosphere. As the performance director, responsible for optimising players’ potential, she was accustomed to being pitched the latest gimmick promising miraculous gains. At times, she could receive up to 50 LinkedIn messages a week offering a device, supplement or technology that claimed to produce magical results.

“It is only 21%,” the caller told her. That’s GCSE chemistry, she thought. Then came the sales pitch: “So what we’ve done is put oxygen in a can and we think you might want to use it.”

At first the mice were just a distant pitter-patter. But soon they had an unblinking confidence that they owned the entire house and all the food in it

Living in a nine-person house in Vancouver, Canada, far from my UK home, came with plenty of benefits. Cleanliness was not one of them. A dish left behind quickly multiplied and bins overflowed in little more than a day. I’m not saying the endless strew of disposable coffee cups was the cause of our year-long mice infestation, but it no doubt helped.

In the winter of 2023, one of my housemates began to hear the sound of creatures rattling around in the ceiling of her basement room. The pitter-patters grew louder and louder; others began to report sightings from across the house. It wasn’t long before I was waking to the sound of my bedroom bin rustling. I had to accept it: we had mice.

At 14, he heard Stravinsky and resolved to be a composer. As Reich approaches his 10th decade, the man revered by the likes of David Bowie reflects on a life that changed the soundtrack of modern living

Steve Reich is not yet 90 but the celebrations have already begun, with the world premiere of his new piece for large ensemble, In All Your Ways, at the Edinburgh festival last month and a late-night concert at the BBC Proms. But when I ask this most supremely influential of living composers how he feels about becoming a nonagenarian on 3 October, Reich is coy. “I haven’t quite got there yet,” he says. “I don’t want to dot the i before I even get there. I’ll let you know in due course …”

Born in New York in 1936, Reich has spent the last six decades producing music that has changed the soundtrack of modern life in Europe and North America, and inspired superlatives from a wide array of music critics. The New Yorker has called him “the most original musical thinker of our time”.

In her weekly column for the Guardian, Anna Tims solves readers consumer problems – ranging from the devastating to the ridiculous. She’ll be online at 3pm to answer your questions and share her wisdom

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Each week Anna Tims helps Guardian readers deal with consumer issues that can range from mildly annoying to utterly life-wrecking.

Anna will be joining us online at 3pm BST. Ask her anything about what she’s learned over the past few years, from the best and worst companies she’s dealt with, to the most unlikely and difficult issues she’s helped Guardian readers face.

The premise is an imminent attack on Britain by Russia in a world in which Michael Gove is prime minister and Nicola Sturgeon his deputy. It’s enjoyably terrifying – and the politicians’ stiffness is huge fun

Trigger warning: this review contains the phrase “Michael Gove cosplaying as PM.” There is no helpline.

The Wargame is mind-warping. On the one hand, it posits an imminent nuclear strike on Britain by Russia. Bad! On the other, it posits this happening in a world in which the government is composed of Michael Gove cosplaying as prime minister, Nicola Sturgeon as his deputy, Harriet Harman as home secretary, Sayeeda Warsi as attorney general and Penny Mordaunt as defence secretary. So, you know, there’s a competing “Come, friendly bombs …” vibe too.

Photographers from all over the world entered more than 24,000 images into the world’s largest bird photography competition, with an image of a northern gannet bursting through the ocean’s surface taking the grand prize

I took him to university this weekend, and it reminded me of the exhilaration of suddenly having your own space, absolutely separate from your mother

When kids are small, and their expectations of an event diverge from yours in some important way, you feel terrible about it. You might be taking them to a play, and they thought that meant they’d be allowed to play, but actually it meant they had to sit still while strangers shouted things. You experience their disappointment as much as your own physical pain.

Then when they’re “adults”, your expectations diverge again. They thought you’d drop them at university and immediately leave, while you thought you’d unpack, and meet their flatmates, explore the city, and spin round a supermarket, then have a Nando’s, and maybe read a bedtime story, get chatting to the other parents and maybe all do karaoke? Well, then it’s time to manage your own disappointment, and the only thing to be said for that is that it’s way less bad than managing theirs.

I want him to start the fightback next week against extremists who peddle hate and those who despise this country. That would be true patriotism

“The speech” may have been in the making a long while, maybe for a lifetime, but Andy Burnham has only a week left for revision before his first conference as Labour leader. Expect hope, of course, that the future will be better, though the way is hard. Already his optimism means that fewer people think they will be worse off next year. But his most urgent task is the cultural wildfire that needs extinguishing before it takes hold.

The rise of anti-migration neofascism is more threatening than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Shock tactics by a few hundred people in black shirts and balaclavas are designed to invade the national consciousness, their noxious hate bleeding into the mainstream – and they do.

The rights of overseas voters are protected by US federal law. It’s not hard – but Americans should start planning now

The UK hosts the second largest population of voting-age US citizens outside the United States, but Americans living in the UK vote at very low levels in US elections.

The US government’s Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) estimated that there were 298,268 voting-age US citizens in the UK in 2022, second only to Canada. But FVAP also estimated that only 3.8% of these US citizens in Britain voted in that year’s midterm elections. Why do hundreds of thousands of eligible US voters in the UK not exercise their right to vote, even though US rules for voting abroad are relatively welcoming compared to many other countries?

The disease is soaring as funding is cut. African nations are plugging the gap but they need help with the transition

Botswana nearly defeated malaria. In 2024, we recorded just 290 cases and one death. Through our elimination efforts, many of our districts had seen no local malaria cases since 2010. Then, as is unfortunately the nature of malaria, it came back.

In the first 23 weeks of 2025 we recorded 2,223 cases and 11 deaths. The disease reached places where previously there was no malaria. We were not alone. Namibia recorded more than 95,000 cases in 2025, and Zimbabwe more than 156,000, according to government figures.

If anything, the ongoing war is uniting a divided country against the foreign invaders. Washington seems a long way from grasping this point

The US president, Donald Trump, asked recently on one of his Truth Social rants: “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?” So frenetic and all-over-the-place are Trump’s statements that one does not know which are actual policies and which are simply noise. But if counting on the “Iranian people” to rise up and fight is indeed US policy then, as far as I can tell from within Iran, it is a failed one. And miserably so. At least for now.

There is no reliable nationwide polling that can tell us what Iranians think about the war in real time. So this is an observation, not a poll. It comes from conversations I have had with many people.

Hossein Hamdieh holds a joint PhD in Geography and Anthropology from Humboldt University of Berlin and King’s College London. He is currently based in Tehran, where he works as a social researcher

Ursula von der Leyen’s outreach to Canada and new security proposals are wise – but she may not be the right messenger

Europe’s strategic predicament is ever clearer, and ever darker. The continent is at war, which is being fought militarily in Ukraine, but is escalating rapidly across Europe through hybrid attacks. Germany’s disclosure that it blames Russia for the drone attack at Leipzig airport; a Russian drone strike on a train near the Ukraine-Poland border; an Italian jet shooting down a Russian drone over Lithuania; flares fired from a Russian warship at a Danish helicopter – all within the space of a couple of weeks – tell a coherent story. Whether because Russia is bogged down and unable to advance in Ukraine, or because it believes the US will not come to Europe’s rescue, Vladimir Putin’s regime is ever more bent on escalating its aggression in Europe.

Putin’s calculus is not irrational. Trump never misses a chance to lash out at Europe – the latest example being his threats of further tariffs on the EU if Brussels proceeds to offer Canada “associate membership”. Europeans have grown numb to Trump’s insults and threats, but these threats do underline his deep antipathy, suggesting that if a Russian attack warranted a response, Trump might look the other way. The US certainly can’t be relied on to have Europe’s back.

War, AI disruption and markets in turmoil: the warnings are all there. But lessons from the 2008 crash could help us

New facilities for witnesses who have been sexually assaulted are a step towards halving violence against girls and women

The creation of specialist courts to try rape and serious sexual offences in England and Wales is a welcome recognition from the government that the status quo is unacceptable. Victims, the vast majority of whom are women and girls, are being failed by a system that too often appears blind to the obstacles in the way of anyone who wants to see a perpetrator brought to justice. In 2025, rape cases took an average of 424 days after they had reached the crown court. Added to pre‑trial delays, this means thousands of lives being placed on hold for years.

Long waits are simply unendurable in many cases; a rape review ordered by Conservative ministers in 2021 found that the proportion of complainants dropping out of cases had risen from 25% to 43% in five years. As well as the harm caused to individuals, there is an obvious impact on public safety when perpetrators go unpunished, and chances to rehabilitate them are missed.

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 failure to address widespread economic insecurity, and a crisis in living standards, is allowing the far right the harness a growing protest vote

After less than a year and a half in office, Germany’s beleaguered chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is already looking like a lame duck leader. Anticipating dire results in two state elections which were held on Sunday, Mr Merz cancelled a planned speech at this week’s United Nations general assembly in order to plot an emergency response. A night of extraordinary humiliation for his conservative Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) must have confounded even his own low expectations.

In the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) won its second regional election this month with 38% of the vote. The CDU meanwhile recorded its worst result since the second world war, failing even to meet the 5% threshold for representation in the state parliament. Mr Merz took over the leadership of the CDU promising to see off the threat of the AfD. Instead it has ascended to a menacing and unprecedented position of electoral strength, and enjoys a comfortable lead in national polls.

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.

Pete Dorey believes most public services are thoroughly over-managed, Michael Barrett says whistleblowing policies are essential. Plus letters from Frances Kirkham and Jenny Webb

Tom Dolphin’s excellent article on the failings of NHS management made sombre reading (The Letby inquiry report makes one thing crystal clear: too much NHS management is scandalously poor, 16 September). Yet I believe that most of our public services are thoroughly over-managed, with frontline professionals neither listened to nor respected by their institutional superiors, and at risk of damaging their careers if they speak out about poor decisions, excessive workloads and impossible targets or “performance indicators”.

Like so many of our current woes, the rise of managerialism can be traced back to the public service reforms of the Thatcher governments in the 1980s, and the mantra of “management’s right to manage”. As professionals were supposedly self-serving vested interests, the transfer of power to managers was supposed to increase efficiency and responsiveness to service users.

Phil Murray responds to articles about the precarious path talented young athletes face

Jonathan Liew’s piece (Raheem Sterling’s bleak tale a reminder of absurd path young footballers face, 17 September) is informative and timely, particularly when set against Jacob Steinberg’s report (‘They are very similar’: Arsenal’s Dowman reminds Merino of Lamine Yamal, 16 September).

The tiny proportion of young footballers originally “signed” by top flight clubs at a ludicrously young age, who then achieve their dreams of a Premier League career, rather than being summarily dismissed at the age of 16 or 17 with the vast majority of their contemporaries, should be a reality check for parents/guardians of all aspiring young athletes.

Polly Hudson has sparked debate among readers over which camp they fall into

I realised as a teenager doing exchanges with European fellow teens many years ago that it’s always easier to be guest rather than host (There are two kinds of people in this world: hosts and guests. Nobody can be both, 15 September).

The skills of hosting can be learned, and you can make things more relaxing by buying in a few readymade dishes, or asking friends to bring one. So as someone who is often host, yes the failure to reciprocate will lead to resentment.
Dinah Robertson
Lymm, Cheshire

Readers respond to Carolin Würfel’s article on the reasons behind Alternative für Deutschland’s recent electoral success in Germany

Carolin Würfel is right to see the success of AfD in the eastern states of Germany as a way to protest against west German dominance (I know why many east Germans vote AfD. And no, it’s not an inherited longing for dictatorship, 15 September).

But she overlooks the fact that the “takeover” of 1990 could not have been done much differently. Any path more resembling those of other east European nations would have led to mass migration to West Germany. In that sense the current situation is not the fault of western politicians and industrialists. One thing could and should have been done differently, though. An attempt to build a conservative-centrist party representing the east would have been important, instead of just transferring the western parties. Die Linke fulfilled such a role for some time, but from the left, not the centre. Now AfD fulfils this role from the right.

With added coverage comes added scrutiny and there is a feeling that the league was too lenient when punishing chants about the late Portugal forward

The good thing about Cristiano Ronaldo playing in your league is that he is one of the most famous footballers ever and when he scores a great goal or reaches 1,000 (just 21 to go), many people watch. The bad thing about Cristiano Ronaldo playing in your league is that when something negative happens and he is involved, just as many people will watch and listen. Global attention is something that the big European leagues have had for years but it is something the Saudi Pro League, which has spent billions in search of achieving a similar stature, needs to get used to.

On Sunday 13 September, Ronaldo wrote to his 680 million Instagram followers to discuss the events of Saturday evening. That was when Al-Taawoun supporters were coming to terms with a 6-0 home thrashing by Al-Hilal, whose £150m-plus forward line, Ollie Watkins and Gabriel Martinelli, got five between them. Fair to say that some handled it better than others as what followed was in the worst possible taste.

Norwegian is meticulous in his training regime – ‘if there’s anything that’s out of my control, then I’ve not done my job properly’

On a snowy Norwegian morning in January, Jakob Ingebrigtsen was on his treadmill, shooting the breeze about his running philosophy before our more formal interview. I should write something on this, I told him. Sure, came the reply.

In recent weeks, the 26‑year‑old has added to his legacy with a European 5,000m gold, the World Ultimate 5,000m title and a world road silver medal despite achilles surgery in February and a flu that lingered through May and June. So now seems as good a time as any.

• ‘I’m happy. It’s an exciting place to be right now’

• Prem champions have moved to tie down huge asset

England back row Henry Pollock has signed a bumper new contract with Northampton. The 21-year-old has agreed a “multi-year” deal, the Prem champions announced on Tuesday morning.

“I’m massively happy to re-sign with Saints, my boyhood club,” Pollock said. “It’s an exciting place to be right now. We’re in a great spot as a team, but it feels like there’s still so much more growth in us.”

• Fariba Hashimi fled after Taliban returned to power

• ‘This medal can show resilience from Afghan women’

An Afghan cyclist who disguised herself as a man to pursue her sporting dreams won an Asian Games silver medal on Tuesday, hoping it inspires other women in a country where Taliban authorities have sharply curtailed their freedoms.

Fariba Hashimi, who is based in Italy, powered home second in the women’s road race near Nagoya in Japan, calling the triumph “something special”.

The league phase kicks off this week, with several sides optimistic of unseating the European champions

This competition is wide open. “But, wait, you say that every year!” No, honestly, this time it is wide open. The league phase of a new Women’s Champions League campaign begins on Tuesday with genuine elements of unpredictability, intrigue and a competitive feel after Barcelona, the holders, and winners of four titles in six years, underwent significant changes this summer.

The Spanish champions, who have reached six European finals in a row, have had four players who started the victory in the final last season leave the club. Ona Batlle joined Arsenal, Salma Paralluelo signed for OL Lyonnes – against whom she scored twice in that 4-0 victory to clinch the title in May – and Alexia Putellas and Mapi León moved to London City Lionesses. They have a very different look and feel to the formidable aura they demonstrated in Oslo.

For the first time in 14 years, Millwall and West Ham faced each other in their 100th meeting. Documentary photographer Adam Isfendiyar was at the Den to record the fans’ matchday experience

When Millwall hosted West Ham at the Den on Saturday, it was the 100th competitive meeting between the clubs, and the first in 14 years.

The pair are separated and connected by the Thames. They were formed around the heavy industries of east London’s docklands in the late 19th century and were geographically much closer then – Millwall on the Isle of Dogs and Thames Ironworks, from which West Ham emerged, around Canning Town. Before Millwall relocated south of the Thames to New Cross in 1910, both were north of the river and only a little over two miles apart.

Straight to the point: graffiti on a wall near the Den.

Brighton have impressed in a goal-laden start to the season, in a league that remains a brutally strong attraction

Get ready for the dopamine crash. And this one really is a proper autumn nosedive. The past 17 days up to and including Sunday’s cut-off gave us 30 Premier League games and 79 goals. Which, if you take Spurs out of it – and this is fair because Spurs are now post‑goal, an entertainment concept unrelated to goals or even football itself – is really quite a lot.

Are your pathways stimulated? Are the neural connectors flickering? Well get ready for cold turkey, for 19 blank days of shivers and shakes until the Premier League show resumes in October. Maybe it really is time to buy one of those powders off the internet.

Pre-season thoughts of European qualification are already beginning to look bafflingly optimistic for Roberto De Zerbi’s team

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In March, Tottenham, fearing possible relegation, spent big to bring in Roberto De Zerbi, who will probably never go into a negotiation with a stronger hand. There was obvious improvement and they stayed up on the final day of the season. Since then, Spurs have spent a net £175m ($234m) on improving the squad. The message seemed clear: the fiscal caution of the Daniel Levy era was over and this was a club willing to spend. Yet Spurs go into the first international break bottom of the Premier League table.

To an extent, the issue is confidence. On the opening weekend at Brentford, with a weird mishmash of a side, a team that was clearly undercooked, they were hammered 3-0 by much better-prepared opponents. That was not hugely surprising given how sensible Brentford’s transfer dealing had been and how early they had done it. More worrying was what happened the following week as Spurs, starting well before fading, lost 2-0 at home to Newcastle.

• President writes to council and member nations

• Infantino says he is ‘fully committed to leading Fifa’

The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, has agreed to commission an independent governance review after coming under mounting pressure to do so in the wake of the World Cup sale debacle.

The Guardian revealed last month that several members of the Fifa council had been lobbying for an external review of both the proposed Fifa Forward Enterprise sell-off and the Folarin Balogun controversy – with the Football Association chair, Debbie Hewitt, increasing the pressure last week by writing to Infantino demanding the release of all documents relating to both issues.

Canadian province alleges deadly attack could have been prevented if company had warned police of shooter’s ChatGPT use

British Columbia has sued OpenAI in California, saying a mass shooting at a school in the province could have been prevented if the company had warned local ⁠law enforcement that the shooter ⁠had used ChatGPT to ​plan the massacre.

The lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court on Monday names OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, as defendants. It is seeking damages to fund recovery efforts in the province after the February attack, as well as an order directing changes to the way the company handles ChatGPT conversations that could lead to violence.

Women escaping abusive partners abroad could get new protections from legal analysis of Hague convention

British mothers who bring their children with them when returning to the UK after fleeing from domestic abuse abroad – which can lead to them being accused of abduction – could be given greater legal protection and support.

The government has agreed to examine how domestic abuse features in international child abduction cases, with a view to giving survivors of domestic abuse more help fighting partners’ demands that they return children to their home countries.

In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.

Rescuers search for missing in collapsed homes after storm causes landslides, travel chaos and power outages

Typhoon Dujuan has killed at least four people and injured 22 in Japan, while tens of thousands of houses near Tokyo remained without power after the storm swept through the region, authorities said on Tuesday.

Dujuan – which brought violent winds of 144km/h (89mph) – was moving away from Japan on Tuesday morning, allowing authorities to downgrade most heavy rain and landslide warnings.

Trump’s announcement on Russia ally comes as he steps up his trade war with Canada, a long-term US ally and top supplier of potash

President Donald Trump has said he is working on a “massive” deal to buy fertiliser from Belarus, pivoting away from main supplier Canada amid an escalating trade dispute, and moving instead toward an ally of Russia.

“The United States is working on a massive deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus,” Trump said on his Truth Social network. “The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our farmers and ranchers.”

A magical new film captures the secret life of the deep sea in a stretch of the ocean at risk from industrial mining

A magical film that explores the wonders of the deep sea through the eyes of a team of scientists and an underwater robot called Isis will be shown in selected cinemas across the UK next month.

The documentary, How Deep Is Your Love, offers a playful, irreverent and bittersweet look at our anthropocentric view of Earth, as it switches perspective from humans to deep sea animals and back again. It follows a research team from the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, who sail for 12 days to reach a remote region called the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a biodiversity-rich area of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico. It takes Isis five hours to make the 3-mile (5km) descent to the bottom of this harsh world, where sunlight cannot penetrate, and where nodules rich in minerals mark it out as a hotspot for industrial mining.

‘Godzilla-level’ phenomenon is supercharging the climate crisis and will have a huge impact on communities across the world

The “jaw-dropping” El Niño currently heating up the planet has burst through the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon, several months before its expected peak.

The latest data shows the temperature rise at the heart of El Niño in the Pacific Ocean has now reached 3.05C. That is higher than the 3.02C set in late November 2015, the previous high set in the 150 years of modern records. This temperature is measured against the average of 1991-2020.

New report shows key indicators of Earth’s health are ‘outside the safe operating space’ as climate disaster looms

The planetary life support systems relied upon by humans have deteriorated to their worst levels ever recorded amid ongoing pollution and habitat destruction, according to a key yet grim annual update by scientists.

Of the nine “planetary boundaries” that help determine whether life can flourish on Earth, seven are being breached at their highest ever levels of transgression, according to the latest planetary health check, a process that was established in 2009.

The number of potentially damaging environmental incidents triggered by this year’s hot and dry weather has surpassed that of 2025

Wildlife in England and Wales will be affected by the current drought for years to come, the government has said.

This summer saw large parts of England and all of Wales plunged into a serious drought, with both recording their driest Julys since records began in 1836.

Motion passed at party conference calls for new approach to implementing ruling that legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex only

The Liberal Democrats have rejected official guidance by the equalities watchdog on how organisations should implement the supreme court ruling on transgender people, calling it “discriminatory and unworkable”.

The motion, passed overwhelmingly at the party’s annual conference in Brighton, makes the Lib Dems the first of the big three parties in parliament to call for a new approach to implementing last year’s ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex only. The Greens have previously done so.

Nats says fault at Prestwick has been ‘fixed’ after airports in Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland are hit

Airlines have called for “action and accountability” over the UK’s air traffic control services after a technical issue led to flights being disrupted for the second time in a fortnight.

Dozens were cancelled and others severely delayed after a fault on Monday morning at National Air Traffic Services (Nats), this time at its second control centre at Prestwick in South Ayrshire.

Lawyer tells hearing that families wish to know whether weaponry involved in deaths was made in Britain

Israeli and UK military commanders could be requested to give evidence to an inquest concerning three British workers killed in Gaza when aid vehicles they were travelling in were hit by an airstrike.

It is also possible that the inquest into the deaths of John Chapman, 57, Jim Henderson, 33, and James Kirby, 47, may examine whether the weaponry that killed the men was made in the UK.

Nigel Farage dismisses loss of previous leader as ‘bump in the road’ and says party will ‘carry on as if nothing has happened’

Nigel Farage dismissed the loss of Reform UK’s leader in Wales last week as a “bump in the road” as the party unveiled a replacement.

Helen Jenner replaces Dan Thomas, who stood down last Tuesday after he was arrested on suspicion of assault and controlling or coercive behaviours.

Former New Zealand prime minister’s purchase is the highest sale price recorded in suburb of Dee Why this year

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Jacinda Ardern and her husband, Clarke Gayford, have bought a $5.3m home in Sydney’s northern beaches, according to a source with knowledge of the sale.

The former New Zealand prime minister settled on a home in Dee Why after looking at properties in the area including in nearby Curl Curl.

Disappearance of jet components sparks concern some of the program’s technology secrets could have been exposed

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The Department of Defence is examining how F-35 fighter jet parts bound for the US from Australia were unexpectedly diverted to Hong Kong, the acting prime minister, Richard Marles, has said.

Marles said “very much everything that has occurred at the Australian end” would be reviewed, but claimed the technology parts were not “sensitive”, as first reported by Politico over the weekend.

Generations of artisans from Mumbai to Lucknow have shaped the world’s most coveted designs. Plus, the gen Z memes giving classic Bollywood a new life

The zardozi embroidery on a Dior dress, the T-strap leather sandals at a Prada show, the mirror-work technique used on a Fendi bag – for decades, the skill of Indian artisans has been an invisible force behind some of the world’s most coveted fashion.

Now, that work is beginning to claim its own place in the spotlight, and the Mumbai-based textile and embroidery atelier Chanakya International is at the forefront.

Dog collars, guitars and self-portraits among 285 objects, with money going to her animal welfare foundation and son

An auction of the French film star turned animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot’s personal items has fetched nearly €1m (£858,000, US$1.15m, A$1.61m) in Paris, almost 20 times the estimate, according to the auction house Millon.

A total of 285 objects were auctioned, ranging from straw hats, sunglasses and nightgowns to tableware and furniture from Bardot’s homes in Paris and Saint-Tropez, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Small traders and drivers bear the brunt of a refining shortage taking forecourt prices towards £2 a litre as wars wipe out about a fifth of global supplies

The smoke rising from the Kapotnya oil refinery to the south-east of Moscow marks one of Ukraine’s biggest air raids on the Russian capital since the start of the war, and the latest salvo in an energy crisis that threatens to affect households and businesses across the globe.

More than 1,500 miles away, British motorists are braced for the ripple effect from that conflict, and the US-Israel war on Iran. Average UK diesel prices are expected to reach record highs within days – while across Europe and the US, pump prices have already surpassed all-time highs.

Theatre told that Facebook and Instagram filter out ads mentioning ‘social topics’ such as civil rights or feminism

A theatre in Barcelona has been banned from promoting a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on Instagram and Facebook because the work includes “social topics”.

When the newly reopened Teatre Raval, which seats 193 spectators, asked Meta, the parent company of the two social media sites, why its publicity had been blocked, it was told “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform [topics that are central to Woolf’s work] are usually classified as ‘social topics’ by our automatic system” and are filtered out.

Lawyers say Black employees at Tesla experienced ‘rampant racism’ that was left unchecked for years at their flagship factory in California

Dozens of Black employees at Tesla’s flagship plant in California said they were subject to racist slurs, unequal pay and promotions, and bullying by supervisors on a daily basis, a situation management did little to nothing to fix.

Their complaints form the basis of a lawsuit brought against the Elon Musk-owned electric car company by the state of California, which began trial with opening statements on Monday.

Blow to John Healey before budget as UK households face ‘notable strain’ on their finances

Fears of a steep rise in mortgage payments and increasing job insecurity have sent UK consumer confidence tumbling to a three-month low, according to a leading survey.

In a blow to John Healey before next month’s budget, the S&P Global consumer sentiment index dropped to 42.7 in September from 42.9 in August, indicating “a notable strain on financial confidence across UK households”.

Director Pepa Lubojacki’s heartbreaking film chronicles the lives of her brother as he struggles with drink and homelessness – and her own shame in the face of societal prejudice

Czech film-maker Pepa Lubojacki originally set out to make a film about pigeons. What fascinated the 39-year-old director was that the grey birds are clearly beautiful and highly intelligent creatures, yet human cruelty towards them is socially acceptable in the way it isn’t towards, say, crows or magpies. “You can spot kids kicking and chasing pigeons while their parents cheerfully look on,” she says.

The moral blind spot reminded her of the way that people looked at homeless people like her older brother and her cousins. “The public has learned to avert their eyes,” she says. “My cousin was declined care seven times with open wounds in the hospital, and finally, they had to amputate both of his legs.”

The comedian went from being discovered by Chris Rock to making Saturday Night Live history. Now his new Netflix special, Buy the Dip, tackles timely topics with optimism

There is a single minute in Buy the Dip, Nimesh Patel’s new Netflix comedy special, in which the comedian nimbly and hilariously goes from describing his wife in labour with their first child to complaining about a Rolex sporting doctor wearing “insurance payments on his wrist” to Luigi Mangione. “He killed one guy, allegedly,” Patel quips, arguing that the terrorism-related charge Mangione got stuck with (which a judge dismissed) was offensive to real terrorists.

The hilarious bit is impressive for how much Patel packs into a single minute and how much it all speaks to the comedian’s own experience, expertise and worldview.

Lawson sets the first challenges for the eager new contestants, with mixed results. Plus: the final episode of 70 Up. Here’s what to watch this evening

8pm, Channel 4
Nigella Lawson enters the tent as a new judge and all it takes is her saying “sumptuous” to crack Noel Fielding: “I think I might be pregnant.” Chocolate stout cake is the first task for the eager batch of bakers – with one of them daring to put a twist on Nigella’s own recipe. They then need to recreate a coffee and walnut cake from a picture, before doing their self-portrait cake showstoppers. You will gasp in horror at least twice. Hollie Richardson

Every ethical issue surrounding parents vlogging their kids’ childhoods for money is raised in Joscha Bongard’s debut, but it releases the dysfunctional tension too easily

When teenager Luca (Maja Bons) wants to watch the film of her birth, she finds it on YouTube. Same with the sweet, thoughtful chat her mum gave her about periods when she was nine or 10; it was filmed in the family’s podcast studio. None of life’s special moments go unmonetised in this satire from Germany, a horror story of family dysfunction. It’s a look at the dark side of the family influencer industry, raising just about every possible ethical question about parents vlogging their kids’ childhoods, and it’s impressively disturbing, up to a point.

Sixteen-year-old Luca is the only child of Stella (Bea Brocks) and Chris (Liliom Lewald), social media stars who make viral videos of their perfect-looking family life for their 4 million followers. They live in a beautiful, sterile minimalist home in the countryside, and we often watch them through CCTV cameras fitted in every room. Shrewdly, first time film-maker Joscha Bongard doesn’t portray Stella and Chris as monsters; they love their daughter Luca, who they affectionately call Nunki. But fundamentally they do their best parenting in front of the camera, all bright smiles and proud affectionate glances.

A London-dwelling émigrée goes back to Lebanon to see her dying father in this somewhat overwrought film examining a difficult childhood

This somewhat overwrought drama was apparently shot during the Covid-19 pandemic, partly in the city of the title and partly on sets in a Bulgarian studio. Its higgledy-piggledy production schedule perhaps accounts for the film’s fractured, frenetic quality and the feeling that the characters are perpetually in motion. Mind you, to be fair, the shredded editing might also be meant to reflect the distraught mental state of protagonist Lana (Tala Calil, also co-writer and producer) and the energy of the city itself, a municipality ravaged by wars that also has some of the most chaotic traffic in the Middle East. There’s even a scene where Lana’s new friend Sirine (Flavia Bechara) is driving and wants to take her coat off so she makes Lana take the wheel, much to Lana’s terror and distress, a nonchalance about safety believable for a city where traffic lights appear to be only a suggestion.

That said, Lana has a lot going on so she’s easily rattled. She left Beirut 25 years earlier, and has only come back to see her biological father of whom she has only negative memories, from a childhood blighted by his alcoholism and violence. These days she lives in London with her boyfriend Ben (Michael E Rodgers) and her mother, but the former relationship is also rocky due to Lana’s OCD. She’s obsessed with wearing as much sanitary PPE kit as possible, including not just an N95 (in UK FFP2) mask but one of those full-face clear plastic ones, too. However, she suddenly finds the strength to stop wearing all the gear when she gets back to Beirut and reconnects with her cousin Rami (Assaad Bouab). She starts to open up a bit more, and befriends the aforementioned Sirine, who helps Lana when she’s having a panic attack at the hospital. By slow degrees she works up enough fortitude to face her father before he dies, but that means confronting some family secrets she never knew.

The rugged roads and lush vegetation of southern Portugal are showcased in this weaving-together of disparate threads of history and landscape

In a sea of doomsday ecological documentaries, Maureen Fazendeiro’s pastoral marvel is a sight for sore eyes. A solo debut feature for the Lisbon-based French director, this hybrid film studies the historical and geographical contours of Alentejo, a rural region in southern Portugal. The opening is set to a jaunty soundtrack of energetic percussion beats and twinkling organ notes, taking in the resplendent vistas of the landscape, with its rugged roads and lush vegetation. We see, too, a small archaeological tool hunt for ancient relics beneath layers of golden dust. Mirroring these acts of care and attention, Fazendeiro’s film takes the form of a cinematic excavation, fusing present-day tableaux with archival materials, folkloric legends with historical records.

The abundant use of tracking shots not only takes in the wondrous biodiversity of Alentejo but also facilitates a fluid movement between separate epochs. Observational scenes of green hills, boundless blue skies and roaming livestock are overlaid with narrated excerpts from second world war-era letters written by German archaeologists Georg and Vera Leisner. Credited with producing the first inventory of megalithic monuments in Alentejo, the pair imbues their wartime correspondence with the joy of discovery and the sadness of exile.

Creators of Post Script, made with vocals by the late Mark E Smith, defend it as ‘a great, positive record’, but fiancee describes it as ‘ethically wrong’

The fiancee and last manager of the late Mark E Smith, frontman of the Fall, has hit out against the release of an album being marketed as the band’s final official album, calling it “ethically wrong” and a “cash grab”.

When Post Script was first announced in June, several media reports assumed the nine-track album contained recordings that the final Fall lineup were working on before the singer’s death, in January 2018. However, it subsequently emerged that it contains unused studio vocals recorded between 2001 and 2014, to which longtime Fall associates Ed Blaney and Simon “Ding” Archer have posthumously added music.

Bestselling book The Good Immigrant launches a series of thoughtful explorations of race – starting with the hosts of Pod Save the UK. Plus, a look at an outrageous heist

Launching alongside a 10th-anniversary edition of the essay collection by writers of colour, this podcast sees its editor, Nikesh Shukla, reconvene with the book’s contributors. A series of thoughtful conversations about what has changed and what’s stayed the same when it comes to race in the UK starts with Nish Kumar and Coco Khan on England flags, and why humour is essential to their political podcasting. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Joe Hill-Gibbins’ claustrophobic staging of Bartók’s opera of dark symbolism is paired with his brand new production of Stravinsky’s psychological drama, with Peter Hoare superb as the tragic hero

Welsh National Opera might be marking its 80th year, but any feelgood factor is decidedly absent from their season-opener. Bartók’s only opera and Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio form a challenging double-bill: serial murders, patricide and incest, blood and more blood, but gripping performances made this a powerful experience.

Béla Balázs’s libretto for Bluebeard’s Castle transformed the Perrault fairytale and its happy ending into an intense psychological drama: the castle with its weeping walls and seven locked doors a metaphor for the secret inner workings of the male psyche, and Judith, Bluebeard’s new wife, his fourth, the archetypal woman, too curious for her own good.

Thousands of knock-off records worth a fortune are being seized in the UK by anti-counterfeit police stings

From 2017 onwards, Rehan Ahmed styled himself as a savvy business owner. But behind the facade of a successful entrepreneur lurked one stark fact: his empire was built on fakery.

On Friday, the man behind the biggest-ever UK case of producing fraudulent vinyl, who sold counterfeit copies of records by some of the world’s biggest artists including Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Kendrick Lamar, was jailed.

This recklessly ambitious doorstopper follows the 16 days of England’s medieval uprising from a vast array of viewpoints, and in startlingly rich prose

AK Blakemore’s third novel tells the story of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when commoners of all classes – not only peasants, but merchants, servants, smugglers, and some local lords and officials – rebelled at the imposition of a poll tax and rampaged through southern England, burning records of debts, killing their oppressors and laying waste to their homes. The book closely follows the events of the rebellion’s 16 days, employing a vast array of points of view, including the young king Richard II, several of his courtiers, dozens of elements of the rebellious Commons, a porpoise and a runaway horse. The title suggests the novel’s portrayal of these events as an inevitable reckoning; a “doom painting” was a picture of the Last Judgment on the wall of a medieval church.

As a book of this scope must be, it’s a doorstopper. As any novel by Blakemore will be, it’s dazzlingly rich in lexical glamour, and this is likely to be any reader’s lasting impression of the book. Sometimes it feels as if the author is out to use every word in the English language in a startling, aestheticised, puckish way that expands both the word and the world. The result can be joyously silly. Who else would give us slugs that “blurb their elementary forms from out of the undergrowth to begin a dank and toothless festa”, or “lunar-brilliantined mud”? But there is also gravity and passion here, especially when she intimately imagines the lives of the commoners: “they rise, to fry eggs in butter and pork fat; they rise, to whet knives on scarred stone; they rise, to braid the manes of their draught horses; they rise, to count arrows; they rise, setting aside their glitchy dreams of hairy stars and blue-skinned devils; they rise, fearful and powerful, into the bright day.” The cheekily anachronistic appearance of “glitchy” in this medieval scene is typical of Blakemore’s method. All forms of language, high and low, archaic and modern, are here. Her use of detail to convey a historical scene is also extraordinary: the barber’s chair where “a crowd has gathered beneath the ribboned pole to watch the draining of a cyst”; the brewer with “a grotty beard, chlorotic with hops, [that] hangs down almost to his belt”; or “the horseflies waltzing over the liquefying flesh of severed heads”.

The author of Labyrinth on the turning of the seasons and the lore and landscape of her beloved Sussex

Kate Mosse’s new book is a love-song to West Sussex, part of a series designed to bring out its authors’ personal connections to a home landscape. It began last year, with Michael Morpurgo welcoming spring in Devon, where he has lived – at the farm that inspired War Horse – for over 50 years; and then Val McDermid celebrating winter in Scotland, where she grew up and still lives. Bernardine Evaristo will explore summer soon – but, meanwhile, we have Mosse, also deeply and endearingly rooted in her chosen patch.

Mosse grew up in the village of Fishbourne. She now lives in Chichester, where she got to know her husband when they revised for A-levels in the shadow of the Bishop’s Palace, and held hands when she turned 17 on the day of the city’s annual Sloe Fair. Twenty-three years later, they celebrated her 40th there, with their children. Today, they live with his 90-something mother Granny Rosie – also “Sussex to her bones” – who remembers watching cattle herded in fields where a supermarket now stands.

From an abstract portrait of an actor who might be Natalie Portman to a groundbreaking work of autofiction, we rate the best from the coolly controversial author

In Cusk’s headline-grabbing latest, a writer invents the biography of a film star who sounds very like Natalie Portman. Set in the now standard late-Cusk sans serif typeface (no frivolous flourishes!), Life of M serves up observations on fame in a light fictional coating. “To always be playing a part is to have no home.” Having made her name as a devilishly good creator of brainy social comedies, Cusk’s pivot to wintry autofiction since the Outline trilogy appears to have reached its logical conclusion in this flat, abstracted portrait of empty celebrity. The New York Times called it “rarefied, cosmopolitan, self-serious”.
Sample line: “Everything I did or said in her company was false. It was as if I was acting, while M came across as authentic and real.”

In When America Roared, Pulitzer-winning reporter Jonathan Kaufman looks back to a decade of greed and excess, and uses it to explore where we are today

Donald Trump is “so much a creature of the 80s but even in the 80s, everyone made fun of him,” Jonathan Kaufman said. General Electric CEO Jack Welch, “the most prominent business figure in the country, maybe in the world, mocked him. No one took him seriously.

“Even today, if you look at the [White House] ballroom, you look at all the things he’s doing, it’s this 1980s aesthetic, right? You can just see the way he looks at the world: the glitz, the cheapness, the gold brocade everywhere. That screams 1980s. All he needs is big hair and leg warmers and listening to, I don’t know, synthetic pop, and he’d be right back in 1985.”

PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC; Remedy
A surprisingly conventional game from a famously weird developer, this sequel to 2019’s Control is accomplished but safe

This is an arthouse action game from Finnish developer Remedy, masters of exactly this type of thing. It’s a sequel, however, so not only must it clear the high bar that its strikingly distinctive predecessor has set – it must also ideally arrive with a bushel of new ideas. There are clear and valuable strengths here in character progression and the lustrous presentation of its paranormal world, but Resonant doesn’t feel as enjoyably recondite or expansive in its influences as 2019’s Control did. As you wander New York brandishing supernatural abilities against glowing orange foes, the sad sense creeps in that you might be playing any number of games.

As paranormal event survivor Jesse Faden, your journey through the original Control was like a sequence of playable Twilight Zone episodes, battling prosaic household objects with supernatural properties that teased and twisted reality inside an endlessly fascinating supernatural government bureau called the Oldest House. You’d navigate architecturally impossible spaces bridging the subconscious and the bricks-and-mortar world, in order to defeat a malevolent fridge. That’s broadly true again in Resonant, albeit with diminishing returns. This time you’re playing as Jesse’s brother Dylan, waking up after years of containment in the Oldest House to find its contents have escaped into downtown Manhattan. So you head out of the interesting place, and into a setting you’ve explored before in Marvel’s Spider-Man, The Division, Max Payne, and others ad infinitum.

PlayStation 5 (version played), PC; Screen Burn
Tragedy, and an apocalyptic fog, befall a fishing community. It is up to outsider Simon to offer some kind of closure

You spend a considerable portion of Silent Hill: Townfall in a kind of foetal position, cowering behind objects that will be eerily familiar to anyone who lived in the UK during the 1990s. Cars seem to be modelled on the era’s boxy Volkswagen Golfs; logos adorning phone boxes should narrowly escape the attention of copyright lawyers at BT Group. (For millennials, the deja vu will likely intensify the horror, as if stepping back into a childhood nightmare.) Simon, the nerdy, unassuming star of the game, pokes his head around corners to catch a glimpse of the demonic entities that wish to maim him, before shrinking back down again with a downwards motion of the analogue stick. In such moments, it’s easy to imagine him wrapping his arms around his knees, clasping his eyes shut and wishing himself away from this place.

The game’s setting, St Amelia, is based on the fishing communities of the East Neuk of Fife. The terror lurking here is wonderfully specific: absent lairds, island poverty, an oil-drilling corporation. Anguished beasts lumber down quaint streets lined with sandstone houses and fluttering bunting. This venerable horror series may have shifted to Scotland, yet we remain firmly in classic Silent Hill territory – weather and all. St Amelia finds itself suffused in supernatural fog and the vast majority of its inhabitants have vanished following some kind of mass tragedy. The artful, evocative presentation is such that you can almost taste the in-game air, the briny seaside tang diluted by rainy mist.

PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox; Arbitrary Metric
The latest work from the team behind Paratopic is part compulsive time-loop management sim, part eerie subterranean adventure

Fetch the chair from storage. Deliver a message that causes disgust. Clean vomit in the afternoon and pour another glass in the evening. In Roman Sands RE:Build, you provide concierge service to delirious, broken people who couldn’t care less about the sweat on your forehead and the bags under your eyes.

In this reimagining of the 2019 visual novel Roman Sands, crafted by the team behind the Americana horror road trip Paratopic, you’re trapped in a beach resort and tethered in a time loop. The task is deceivingly simple: fulfil menial directives from four gluttonous individuals, unlock tools and items to open more rooms and then do it all over again.

The first console I ever bought, it was hyped as a threat to the PlayStation, then mocked as a flop. But now, as it marks its 25th anniversary, it’s looked back on with misty-eyed reverence

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube, the first console I ever bought with my own money. I vividly remember getting on the bus after school with a year’s worth of savings safely zipped into the pocket of my bag and going to a branch of Currys, where I dumped a bunch of notes, coins and vouchers on the counter to collect my pre-order. (It turned out that some of the vouchers from the previous Christmas had expired, but the guy at the checkout clearly felt so sorry for me that he redeemed them anyway. If you’re out there, Currys guy: thank you for taking pity on a desperate 13-year-old.)

If it hadn’t been for the ill-fated Wii U console, whose failure to take off in 2012 resulted in the first unprofitable periods in Nintendo’s game-making history, the GameCube would be remembered as the company’s biggest flop aside from the infamous Virtual Boy, from 1995. Released in Japan this week in 2001 (and in May 2002 in Europe), this surprisingly powerful purple cube sold much less than the Xbox and the PlayStation 2. With its squat, colourful form and unusual controller, arranged around a big traffic-light-green A button and small analogue sticks designed for small hands, it had a hint of Fisher-Price about it.

Hackney Empire, London
There is real skill in making us laugh about things that are depressing. And the gags come thick and fast in the ex-Mash Report host’s touring show

Nish Kumar is angry. And why shouldn’t he be? The world is one big, damning catastrophe. So here the ex-Mash Report host is, in his trademark linguistically dextrous, mile-a-minute style, to run us through the current affairs and colonial-history hellscape. Yes, we get Donald Trump jokes. And yes, there’s more than one mention of how the internet has corrupted us all. But, God, does it feel good to hear someone, clearly enraged, scream the things this Hackney audience is, more than likely, also thinking.

He’s the UK’s leading lefty comedian – and for good reason. There is real skill in making us laugh about things that are, broadly, very depressing. Of course, Kumar knows he is preaching to the converted; he states plainly that his audience are a bunch of non-heckling, hand-raising “geeks” who are already on board with his views. Part of the show grapples with that discomfort; he believes passionately in standup as an art form – and it has made him big money – but for the first time, he’s wondered whether now is the right time for his usual political satire. Should we really be laughing when things are, well, this bad?

Touring until 27 November

Minghella theatre, Reading
Soprano Claire Booth’s mouth is isolated against a black background to capture the racing brain of a desperate woman, with added operatic flair

There is a long preamble to Samuel Beckett’s short play, performed in darkness by an unstoppably animated mouth. First, Luciano Berio’s experimental Sequenza III, performed by soprano Claire Booth, which becomes a musical companion piece to Beckett in retrospect for its stuttering repetitions, gasps and throat-clearings. Then a trio of short films about the Irish playwright’s relationship to Folkstone (where he got married in 1961). It is a three-part programme, part of the 2026 Beckett Biennale, culminating in the drama.

None of the buildup is required. The mouth, also played by Booth, is still arresting in its speed and urgency, reaching for a truth that rests just beyond its rapid articulations, even as syntax breaks down.

Under the direction of Rufus Norris, the setup is academic, the theatre part of Reading University’s campus, but the production has nothing dusty or donnish about it. It is impressively delivered by Booth, who captures the racing brain, the split interior self and the speed of desperation to replay a life that seems to be flashing before a woman’s eyes – or rather, her mouth – from her birth to this moment in a field, among the cowslips at the age of 70, which might be the moment of death. You glean, from the repetitions and verbal hiccups, that it has been hard, loveless and undermining, yet there is an insistence on speaking it aloud.

Birmingham Rep
Alex Keenan perfectly captures protagonist Chris’s bewilderment and cheeriness in Ned Bennett’s ambitious new staging

The most alarming moment in Mark Haddon’s young adult novel is when Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old on the autism spectrum, flees his Swindon home for London. After a perilous train journey, he arrives at Paddington station and is overwhelmed. The book’s text becomes a barrage of fonts and type sizes to express the information overload: announcements, shop signs and adverts all shouting for his attention.

That sense of cacophony, a sensory assault of products, people and places, characterises Ned Bennett’s ambitious new staging of the Simon Stephens adaptation for Birmingham Rep and Melting Pot. Eleanor Bull’s bare stage, an outsize studio in white, alternates between clean geometric lines, such as the row of pastel-coloured houses that form a picture-book street, and more detailed high-definition projections.

Touring until 28 May.

Byre theatre, St Andrews
Warm-up routines lead into a reverie about life on the stage in Company Chordelia’s funny, carefully calibrated show

The inevitable aches and sprains of an ageing body take on heightened significance for a seasoned dancer turning up to work each day. Revel by Company Chordelia is a whimsical rumination on these changes, and a personal riposte to the fear that you might “make a spectacle of yourself” if you don’t stop at the “right” moment.

It is conceived and staged by the artistic director Kally Lloyd-Jones, who performs with the co-creator Steinvör Palsson, a well-known teacher and choreographer in the Scottish dance community.

William Meyers spent 25 years photographing New York – and noticed how small, everyday acts of civic engagement helped sustain the nation. He talks us through his favourite images

In the UK, 18 million people are hard of hearing – yet there is no dedicated centre for the Deaf community. Now urban planner and activist Amanprit Arnold has made it her mission

Meeting outdoors became second nature for most of us over this long, hot summer, but Amanprit Arnold doesn’t get the luxury of choice. She’s sitting at a terrace table when we meet at a cafe because she’s a member of the Deaf community (Deaf with a capital D denotes membership of a unique cultural and linguistic minority).

“Nowhere in London is specifically designed for me,” says Arnold, who was born deaf and used hearing aids before getting cochlear implants at 21. “Inside a cafe, the acoustics can be so bad. It’s much easier for me to hear out here.”

Some admit to spending thousands of dollars for barricade spots and other VIP perks at concerts, which is slowly becoming common

When Harry Styles announced a fall residency at Madison Square Garden, 43-year-old Tara Bess knew she had to be there. She didn’t want to spend hours camping for a prime spot in the general admission area, so Bess bought a VIP ticket for $1,400 from a resale ticket site, which allowed her to enter the arena early and secure a spot at the barricade.

“When you’re up close, you can see him closing his eyes and almost meditating to the music,” Bess said. “You can hear the click of equipment on stage, you just feel very connected to the performance.”

Whether its a nod to frontline Covid heroes or a return to biology in a world of digital noise, there’s a rich vein of new films featuring organ deliveries, including Runner and the latest Resident Evil

Hollywood loves a ticking clock – especially when there’s a delivery involved. For decades, dangerous cargo has been entrusted to certain types of action hero: spies, soldiers, hitmen, Jason Statham.

Lately, however, Hollywood seems interested in a different kind of hero – not to mention a different kind of cargo. Forget your nuclear launch codes, stolen diamonds and mysterious briefcases, for human organs are the new MacGuffins du jour, and the medical professionals charged with getting them to the ICU have become unlikely action heroes.

A 90-minute wait on a motorway hard shoulder was terrifying with lorries thundering past

My partner and I were among a group of passengers left stranded for 90 minutes on a motorway hard shoulder after our coach driver was arrested for suspected drug driving.

We had boarded the Cambridge to Brighton Flixbus service at Gatwick. The coach was an hour late, was visibly damaged on the outside and the driver set off without closing the luggage hatch.

The theory is your plants will perk up if you reflect some extra light their way over the long winter months

Most houseplants are hungry for sunlight, which is in short supply during a UK winter. Plants on a shelf or coffee table often get insufficient light, so they stretch, lean and thin out. Not everyone can move their plant to a south-facing sill, so the hunt is always on to make the most of what little light there is.

Readers and the Filter team share the best buys they still treasure, from charity-shop gems to Vinted bargains. Plus, the fashion experts’ guide to women’s basics

We love secondhand shopping here on the Filter – whether it’s Second Hand September or not. You can unearth one-off, affordable pieces, and feel good about not adding overconsumption to your list of things to worry about. So to inspire us, we asked you for your best-ever preloved finds, whether that’s furniture or fashion or more (and added a few of our own, too).

“An Ercol daybed I bought on eBay for £50, in need of some TLC,” reader Fiona told us. “Stripped, re-webbed and with a new cushion, it is now a thing of beauty and very comfortable.”

Which supermarket syrups ooze with potential? We put 10 of the finest, grade-A bottles to the test

• The best supermarket runny honey

Though today’s maple syrups vary dramatically in intensity, complexity and taste, they’re all of decent quality and have that classic and unmistakable flavour. I avoided blended or maple-flavoured syrups for this test, and instead tried only 100% pure, grade-A maple syrups, using Agriculture Canada’s flavour wheel and four-step tasting process as a guide. I poured a small shot into a glass to observe the colour. Then I followed the tasting process: I smelled the syrup with three quick sniffs, took a small sip and swirled it around my mouth before contemplating the flavours. Step four is to assess the flavour intensity. Alongside appearance, aroma, texture and taste, I awarded extra points for specific provenance and organic certifications, as well as for value.

Prices vary greatly, and although the dearest bottles taste divine, so do the cheapest. Each pure maple syrup is unique in flavour, with nuanced notes from mild clove tones to intense, woody and almost menthol-like piney flavours. Like wine, maple syrup has the tang of its terroir: it’s an artisanal product that tastes of the land.

Is an Oxford shirt the ultimate wardrobe staple? Are skin-tight fits ever a good idea? And what’s the perfect fabric for autumn and winter? Our menswear expert has all the answers

• The best white T-shirts for men

The photo above stopped me mid-scroll: Harry Styles, before his 30-show residency at Madison Square Garden, dressed in a big white shirt and smart tailored trousers. After a summer spent parked in front of three fans with ice packs on rotation, when wearing actual clothes felt like punishment, here was proof that normal service had resumed.

So, now the rain’s back and autumn’s creeping in, it’s time to follow Harry’s lead and reintroduce some structure to your wardrobe: coats, knitwear, tailoring, all the pieces that make you look forward to getting dressed in the morning. One staple that’s long overdue a comeback? Shirts.

Loop and tube bands are cheaper than a gym membership and take up less space than weights – our exercise buff put 18 to the test

• The best treadmills for your home

Movement breeds motivation, not vice versa. If you want a fast ticket to a regular training habit, you need to remove the friction between you and that first rep. When the sofa looks more appealing than getting a sweat on, it pays to have a simple, quick, convenient way to kick into workout mode. That’s where resistance bands come in.

Portable, lightweight, compact and convenient, the right set of bands could be the path of least, er, resistance to easy home workouts and reaching your fitness goals.

A rich Levantine fusion dish of sumac-spiced roast chicken, onion and flatbread with tahini yoghurt, and a simple, textured salad

Fattet musakhan, a celebration of two beloved Palestinian dishes, takes centre stage here, bringing together crisp bread, creamy yoghurt, sumac-spiced onions, tender chicken and fragrant olive oil in one rich and comforting dish. Alongside, the salad brings a welcome freshness, with crisp cucumber, creamy avocado and bright acidity cutting through the richness of the chicken. Together, they make a beautifully balanced meal, bringing the generous, communal spirit of Palestinian cooking to the table.

Scottish breakfasts are worth getting up for: think eggs and potato cakes in a freshly baked roll, or toasted barley bread laced with sticky plums and honey butter

I’ve long wanted a space to cook the food that really excites me, and Clementine, which opens its doors in north London next month, is exactly that. These two recipes capture what the cafe is all about. This is food that feels both considered and completely unfussy: crisp morning rolls stuffed with folded scrambled eggs and tattie scones, and griddled barley bannocks served warm with salted honey butter and roast plums. Breakfasts worth getting out of bed for.

Sometimes cooking is about celebration or indulgence, but there are other times when you just need a speedy but delicious midweek meal

Of course, the act of cooking can be many things – joy, ritual, nourishment, comfort, celebration, indulgence – but this fish pie pasta bake and tomato and feta lentils are strictly about speed. Because, in reality, these are exactly the kind of recipes we all need in our repertoire, ready to whip out on a Wednesday night.

From the blissful threat of ‘death by chocolate’, to a book made of sponge and the lemon drizzle to end them all, these are the bakes that left the biggest impressions

The Sorting Hat sponge I made for my son’s Harry Potter party is not the best cake I’ve ever tasted. That would be anything baked by my granny, or the coffee religieuse (a choux pastry puff) I ate in Boulogne-sur-Mer with my mum. But it’s the most surprisingly edible cake I’ve ever made – a vaguely Jamie-Oliver recipe with buttercream filling and tinned mandarin slices. It didn’t only work; it tasted great, and wasn’t quite as teeth-screechingly sweet as expected. My one regret is that I over-pimped the decoration: it looked so sinister in the fridge with its cold, Sorting Hat stare that the next day I stuck on googly eyes and further sparkles. This perhaps explains why everyone assumed it was a poo emoji cake, despite it being a Harry Potter party with heavy-touch theming. That people thought I actually wanted children to eat shit is a shame, but it still remains my greatest culinary success. Catherine Shoard

At 51, I want many more years of a healthy, happy sex life. So I decided to compile my own guide

When I got divorced after 28 years of monogamy, I was excited to be having sex again, but had concerns. I was 48, and the last time I’d been single was in the 90s; terrified of pregnancy and hyperconscious of HIV/Aids, I hadn’t considered condomless intercourse an option back then.

Now, at 51, I’ve been wondering how important barrier protection is for me. Though I haven’t hit menopause, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) says that “by 45 getting pregnant naturally is unlikely”, and HIV/Aids prevention and treatment have improved significantly in the last three decades.

A Reform politician and an NHS worker had different takes on Nigel Farage, but could they agree on renewable energy or tax policies?

Chris, 42, London

Occupation Electrical supervisor of the maintenance team at an NHS hospital

Rory left the monastery after feeling lonely; with Orla, herself a Catholic, he’s been making up for lost time

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

We had sex after a week. I remember thinking afterwards wow, everything has changed

Anna Malos and Georgie bonded over their shared love of travel and horses. By their third date, an awkward encounter cemented their relationship

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

Georgie and I met at a kick-boxing club in London in 2004. We sparred together in a few beginner classes, just hitting soft pads. Although I didn’t pay her too much attention initially, I immediately recognised she was tall, elegant and very good looking.

It wasn’t until the club’s Christmas drinks that things kicked off between us. We started talking and couldn’t stop. We’d both travelled and worked in Latin America, and also loved horses – Georgie had volunteered with a horse-riding business for tourists in Ecuador. The sparks were flying all over the place.

Shortage of memory chips and other critical components reverses trend of electronics becoming cheaper

Apple’s recent product launch caused headlines around the world as it unveiled its first folding phone. But hidden in the slick technology showcase was a nasty surprise: a £100 increase in the price of all iPhones, including older models.

It is blamed on “RAMageddon”, which has reversed a decades-long trend of electronics becoming cheaper. It is the fallout from the AI gold rush hoovering up every memory chip available for vast datacentres. This has led to a severe shortage of the chips, and other critical components, for electronics, including phones.

Scam emails are increasingly using psychological tricks, such as using near-identical URLs like miсrosoft.com

You’ve read the email carefully and it looks legitimate. The link it asks you to click on has none of the usual red flags: there are no weird numbers or extra parts to the URL. You feel safe to proceed.

But if you had looked slightly closer you may have noticed something slightly wrong with one of the characters. Just as in the headline of this piece where instead of “a” we used the Cyrillic “α”.

It just goes to show that the split-second decision you make when clicking a link is often the most vulnerable part of the whole security chain.”

Energy bills are scheduled to rise next month but there are innovative ways to heat your home and save money

When Giles Gibson turns on the hot tap in his home, the water that comes out of it is not heated by gas but by the tiny datacentre strapped to the tank.

Attached to the hot water cylinder in his London home is a compact computer server that generates heat and then transfers it as it operates.

An app and a register of trusted traders may give greater protection to consumers but it is too late for some

In hindsight, Sheri Ingram, 35, can see the red flags. Lee Slocombe, a builder hired to renovate her ex-boyfriend’s home in the south Wales valleys, offered to do the work cheaply because he had materials left over from another job, then asked for money upfront to buy additional supplies.

“At the time, we believed him,” says Sheri, who was in her early 20s when it happened, and had just left university. The couple budgeted about £8,000 for work that included removing a supporting wall and building an extension with a balcony.

Saddling up is only likely to be an issue for elite athletes – and those with low sperm counts

“Cycling isn’t big on the radar of fertility doctors,” says Prof Colin Duncan, a fertility expert at the University of Edinburgh.

For women, he says, the only time cycling is likely to affect fertility is when it’s done at extreme levels, such as the kind of training undertaken by elite athletes.

Modern lifestyles seem to be exacerbating the problem of bromhidrosis – an underresearched condition that is widely misunderstood and devastating for sufferers

If Hayat goes out to eat, she’ll choose a table far away from other diners, ideally by a door or open window. She likewise tries to avoid people at the cinema or on planes, even if it means paying extra – whatever it takes to avoid being too close to others.

She chalks it up to a persistent past insecurity. “I still have that paranoia … It’s just in my head, because of everything I went through.”

Claimants having to find decades-old medical records to prove they qualify for compensation despite inquiry’s recommendations

Suzanne Morgan will never forget the day her mother died. It was nine months after she had gone into hospital with gallstones, where she received a routine blood transfusion.

“She went downhill rapidly,” Morgan recalled. Her mother haemorrhaged in her liver, and the next day she was dead.

Since the ancient Olympics, athletes like Hyrox competitor Joanna Wietrzyk have experienced runner’s diarrhoea. What does the science say about extreme exercise’s ‘mechanical jostling of the intestines’?

Soiling yourself in public sounds like a bad dream. But the Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk has now apologised for doing just that at the Hyrox games in Beijing on Saturday.

Wietrzyk won the fitness race but not before using communal equipment with faecal matter visibly running down her legs – and muddying Hyrox’s reputation.

Textile designer brings florals, vines and smiley doodles to brand’s luxury checks for one-off paired collection

Burberry and Celia Birtwell are both national treasures of sorts. One is Britain’s grandest luxury name, the other the textile designer who dressed bohemian 1960s London in her prints and has a place in art history as David Hockney’s favourite muse.

Burberry’s designer, Daniel Lee, has always loved Birtwell’s prints. When the two met this spring, he fell for “her energy, and her zest for life”, and a one-off Burberry meets Birtwell collection that closed London fashion week was born.

Brand returns to its physical and unconventional roots as it battles undergoes stark restructuring

Back when a young Lee McQueen was showing at London fashion week, there was Dante, the show in a Hawksmoor church with a skeleton in the front row and a blaring soundtrack of organ music and gunfire. And there was Voss, where models were trapped inside a giant mirrored box set up as a psychiatric ward.

Twenty-five years later, the Alexander McQueen brand returned from the Paris schedule to a creepily beautiful subterranean 17th century London chapel, with steel harnesses, bulky ankle strapped heels that looked like electronic monitoring tags, and a chain mail dress of tiny silver skulls.

For his trek across New York City, the singer wore a pair of Prada slip-ons. I tried to do the same in my penny loafers – and soon found out why experts advise against it

Last month, just before his 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, Harry Styles was spotted walking the streets of New York. According to the paparazzi who trailed him throughout his journey, he walked eight miles – all the way from Brooklyn into Manhattan – in loafers.

If, like me, you own a pair of loafers, your first thought is probably: that doesn’t sound like a good idea. On Instagram, Grazia called Styles’ shoes “perhaps the least sensible footwear for such an undertaking”.

To mark Oxfam’s Second Hand September, here are some of your best thrift discoveries and the stories behind them

Oxfam’s Second Hand September campaign encourages people to avoid buying new clothes for 30 days and choose preloved pieces instead. From £28 Prada skirts to £5 wedding dresses, we asked people to share their favourite fashion finds and the stories behind them.

A long-distance walking route in the south of France devised by the celebrated land artist offers intrepid hikers an opportunity to immerse themselves in nature and art

At 69, I had never hiked with a backpack and I had no idea what land art was. Nonetheless, when my friend Jackie, a nature documentary film-maker, invited me to join her and her friends Wendy and Sasha on a hiking trip to Refuges d’Art in the mountainous countryside of Haute-Provence, I said a resounding “yes”. We would be sleeping alongside sculptures by the renowned land artist Andy Goldsworthy.

First, I watch Rivers and Tides, a documentary on Goldsworthy’s work, and discover he has built exquisite ice sculptures and stone cairns in my own country, Canada. His work seems to speak to an older part of the soul. Then, I start walking up hills, gradually adding weights to my backpack until I can comfortably carry 9kg (20lb).

The Alpe Adria loop is an eight-day walking trail that crisscrosses borders, taking in dramatic peaks, glorious meadows and charming places to stay

‘Achtung! Staatsgrenze!” OK, the signpost marking the “state border” didn’t have exclamation marks but, with its no-nonsense Prussian font, it did feel quite shouty. The only thing was, no one on the Feistritzer Alm – a peaceful sweep of Alpine pasture at the meeting of Austria and Italy – was paying any attention to it at all.

Hikers hiked straight past. Mountain bikers used it to prop up their cycles. Cows grazed willy-nilly. And the patrons of the Schutzhütte Oisternig enjoyed their cold beers regardless of which country they were in. While official boundaries may have changed in these parts over the centuries, the magnificence of the mountains has not.

Beautifully situated refuges with superlative views offering sanctuary to intrepid hikers and climbers

A good mountain hut, I reckon, should be small and only accessible on foot after considerable effort. Throw in a bit of historical interest and I’m bound to be happy. In which case, Cabaña Verónica in the Picos de Europa is a fine start to this list. It sleeps six, and at 2,325 metres requires a two-hour trek from the nearest cable car station, never mind road. It has incredible views and a friendly custodian who keeps things in good order. Yet the real attraction is that this place was formerly a gun turret of a US navy battleship that was scrapped in Bilbao in 1960. An enterprising engineer, Conrado Senties, had it carried up on horseback and reassembled on a plug of rock in the middle of nowhere. Don’t ask why, just enjoy the eccentricity.
€15, reservarefugios.com

From the foothills of the Pyrenees to the peaks of the Dolomites, you share your top views, meals and adventures at altitude

• Tell us about a trip to Germany – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

No doubt your first thought on hearing the words “double-decker” is of a bus. But in the Swiss village of Stans, an old wooden funicular carriage ascends to the station, where a double-decker cable car awaits. Inside, a spiral staircase leads you to an open upper viewing deck. At the summit, the views back to Lucerne are superb, and there are alpine marmots to spot too. There was a wedding ceremony going on at the summit on our trip!
Martin

St Dominic, Tamar valley: After just a few years, this rewilded plot of soggy land is home to voles and shrews and vigorously growing indigenous plants

At last, proper rain has greened the scorched pastures and washed shrivelled leaves and nut husks along the narrow lanes. Springs dribble and streams remain low; inspection of our well, dug more than a century ago by the legendary “Diver/Diviner” Cullas of Metherell, reveals a water level better than feared, but we remain cautious in our use.

On the exposed northern edge of the parish, overlooked by Kit Hill and the distant blue haze of Dartmoor, Larkrise’s rewilded 10 acres of poorly drained land shows ever more growth. The thorny boundary hedge, with purple sloes, blackberries, scarlet hips and masses of haws, encroaches on planted trees – extra protection from predatory deer. The mix of guarded trees are tall and vigorous, interspersed with open patches of seeding knapweed, grasses, plantains and rattle. The guelder rose, spindle, holly and buckthorn already produce berries, less than seven years after this project began.

I once asked a resident what she would do if she could do anything. She replied: ‘I’d run in a field’

In my 40s, I was beginning to wonder where I fit in the employment world. I had a variety of jobs including an improv instructor, actor and corporate facilitator, then Covid arrived and all those people-facing roles disappeared.

Living in Sydney, with my kids at school and a mortgage to pay, I took on some temp work through an agency.

Arthur Plummer got a bike when he retired at 65 and joined a cycling club as one of its youngest members. Now he is its oldest but still racking up 5,000km every year

When Arthur Plummer retired at 65, he bought a secondhand bicycle. His sister was a member of a cycling club for seniors in the Canadian city of Waterloo, Ontario, where they lived, and Plummer joined, too, becoming one of the club’s youngest members. Now he is 92 and its oldest member – but he still cycles thousands of kilometres every year. His odometer for this year so far reads 4,270km (2,650 miles). After our conversation, he intends to cycle another 40km.

“I love cycling,” he says. “Wherever I go, even if I ride on the same roads, there’s something new happening. When I get on my bike, I feel great. I come home at about 3pm and I feel exhausted. However, it’s the nicest feeling. It’s exhilarating, and it’s resulted in me being extremely healthy.”

Fantastic display and two-day battery life plus everything that’s great about Google’s more pocketable Pixel Pros

Google’s latest super-sized Pixel takes everything that’s great about the relatively pocket-friendly 11 Pro and adds a huge, high-quality screen and a big battery.

That makes the Pixel 11 Pro XL one of the largest smartphones available in Europe and the US, competing directly with Samsung’s giant Galaxy S26 Ultra and Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro Max, with an equally sizeable £1,279 (€1,399/$1,299/A$2,099) price tag – £80 (€100/$100/A$100) more than last year with less memory because of the cost of RAMageddon.

Alaa lives in a tent pitched on the ruins of her house, which was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike that killed all three of her children. In one month, she will give birth again.

As the war in Gaza approaches its fourth year, this week, the Guardian follows five ordinary Palestinians as they go about their lives. Each will tell the story of their day, revealing the terrible toll of the ongoing conflict.

Alaa Hessi takes each step deliberately: raises her foot to land heavily on the stair above, takes a breath, slides her hand up the railing. Resting atop an uneven mess of rubble, the wooden staircase judders with each motion. Her movements are slowed by the heavy melon of her pregnant belly.

The sound that wakes me in the morning is the buzzing of flies inside the tent, and the noise of our neighbours.

While global billionaires and multinational companies have been lured to its shores, many islanders feel left behind and priced out, with food bank use increasing

On a late Friday afternoon on the Channel Island of Jersey, tourists and locals are flocking to St Helier’s waterfront where the town’s sprawling beach has emerged at low tide.

In one direction, they face the calm waters of St Aubin’s Bay, ringed by a seaside promenade and punctuated with a tidal island hosting the 16th century Elizabeth Castle.

Tensions grow as Trump tells Fox News he is considering ‘wiping Iran out’ after attacks on Riyadh by Houthi rebels

Governments across the Middle East are bracing for an escalation of violence after Iran claimed it had received intelligence that the US was preparing for a renewed bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic.

In a potential sign of growing tensions before the UN general assembly in New York this week, Donald Trump cut short a weekend visit to the Camp David presidential retreat on Sunday with no official explanation, and a new security alert was issued by the state department to all US citizens in the Middle East.

Has your accommodation provider gone bust? Have you been able to find alternative accommodation?

Nearly 70 students in Dundee have been left scrambling to find new accommodation for the new academic year after a university housing scheme went bust.

It is the latest in a string of issues with university housing schemes amid severe financial strain on the sector.

We’d like to hear from people in the UK who have abandoned or delayed plans to get on the property ladder

UK house prices rose for the first time in four months in August, while mortgage approvals fell to their lowest level in more than two years amid increasingly difficult conditions for first-time buyers.

The boss of Britain’s largest housebuilder recently described it as the most challenging time to buy a first home since the financial crisis, pointing to rising interest rates, student debt and squeezed wages. Meanwhile, research from the Building Societies Association found 59% of renters aged 25 to 44 thought they would own a home by now but do not.

We would like to speak to people about how their early years coloured their relationship with cash

We would like to speak to people about how their childhoods shaped their attitude towards money in later life.

Do you think the way you manage money has been affected by your upbringing? Did your family talk about money openly, or was it a subject that felt taboo? And how has that shaped your attitude to your personal finances today?

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached. Whether you are 16 or 100, we want to hear the unvarnished truth about what it’s like to live as a single man today.

Are you trying to find love? Or are you happy living life as a bachelor? Do you find the experience of modern dating – with all its red flags and height requirements – to be a minefield? Or are you attracting more attention than ever before?

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