The number of luxury sheds and garden rooms has rocketed since the pandemic – fuelled by those wanting an office, a gym or extra living space. Meanwhile, the resentment between neighbours has been rising, too

Linda loves her shed. She loves that she can work there rather than in her dining room, which her toddler likes to tear through. She loves its Scandinavian vibe – it’s clad in wood and set on decking at the bottom of her garden. She loves the views of the countryside from the window by her desk. Or she did. Her desk faces the wall now, because she’s too nervous to face her neighbour. She never sits on the decking, either. “What if they see me?” she says. “It’s a horrible feeling.”

Linda’s neighbours are unhappy about her shed, or “garden room”, which is actually two rooms. They do not like its size (7.25 metres by 2.74 metres, or 3.5 metres if you include the raised decking) or its position, about 30 metres away from their house. Linda says they have barely spoken since the construction, which is awkward, as the gardens are separated by a low fence.

The need for independent regulation grows more obvious by the day. We must keep this tech in check before it’s too late

• OpenAI scraps release of new model over safety concerns in internal testing

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me more than 16,000 times – as OpenAI agents did to a UN public data hub while repeatedly trying to find its way around the UN’s cyber-blocks – and perhaps it’s time to admit the system we have for keeping AI agents under control isn’t working particularly well.

The news about AI systems cropping up in places they shouldn’t sounds alarming. Though the description of these as “hacks” is perhaps overstating things, AI has exploited issues in IT systems that humans simply haven’t got around to finding. It’s also important to note that we shouldn’t be worried that the machines have suddenly become sentient and decided to rebel against humanity. There is not enough evidence to suggest that’s what is happening. The systems are simply following instructions and trying to complete the tasks they have been given, even if they’re sometimes finding unintended ways around obstacles to do so.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

Although we’re living longer, the data on healthy life expectancy in the UK isn’t good. Andy Burnham must reverse this trend to protect the NHS and social care

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

The prime minister has put forward his bold proposal for a universal, NHS-style social care service. In doing so, Andy Burnham has put the spotlight back on one of the major challenges facing almost everywhere in the world: how to manage the demographic changes linked to an ageing society.

It’s an important discussion. But what if government didn’t just look at how to care for people in their later years and instead spent real political capital on policies to help people live longer independently, and in good health? The data isn’t pretty on this. While the trend over the past half-century in almost all countries has been for people to live longer, healthy life expectancy has been consistently falling.

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

Analysts believe PM has a ‘golden opportunity’ to offer older people better protection in return for weakening the triple lock guarantee

It is a brave party leader who is prepared to go into an election promising a multibillion-pound new public service – likely to be funded by tax rises or holding back increases in the state pension.

But Andy Burnham’s colleagues are excited about the confident promise of new social care system that seven previous prime ministers have failed to deliver.

Fear of outsiders is the defining issue of our times. But is it actually our own selves we’re scared of? And could art hold the answers? Here, the British Art Show’s curator reveals why he’s exploring our deepest dreams and nightmares

One of the moral low points of Keir Starmer’s tenure at Downing Street was his “island of strangers” speech, with its rhetorical echoes of Enoch Powell and dispiriting description of a nation fractured by difference. After widespread criticism, Starmer recanted his words, if not the sentiment behind them. Yet his choice of language was a reminder of how the idea of the stranger – representing immigration, but also wider, more inchoate anxieties about otherness and difference – holds such a potent place in Britain today.

In fact, from masked anti-migrant protesters on the south coast to xenophobic riots over the summer, from politicians vowing to stop the boats to immigration polling as the No 1 concern among UK voters, it’s probably true to say that fear of the stranger is the totemic issue of our times.

Manchester City have come out fighting against the guilty verdict but the Premier League faces questions of its own

Nothing is over, nothing is done. Or at least not judging by the bravura, balls-out confidence of Manchester City’s chair, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, who remains convinced the past three days of whiplash are simply the drumroll before the big reveal, prelude to some clinching piece of evidence that will swish away the initial finding of guilt on the Premier League’s 100-plus charges.

This appears to be the official City position right now. Rope‑a‑dope litigation. Scooby‑Doo justice. A verdict that is simply exposition, buildup to that moment where we finally get to rip off the zombie mask and reveal the cranky old amusement park owner underneath, with his bulging ring‑binder full of irrefutable evidence of City’s innocence.

Exclusive: Labour conference speech will kick off process that could replace current system with proportional representation

• UK politics live – latest updates

Andy Burnham is expected to announce that he will push ahead with plans for electoral reform in his first conference speech as Labour leader, in the latest sign that he intends to radically transform the UK’s political system.

The prime minister, a longtime advocate of reform, will kick off a process that could eventually lead to ditching the first-past-the-post system in favour of proportional representation.

US secretary of state and Donald Trump express concerns about decision to bail suspects; some residents reported as hesitant to return home

• Rubio says foreign actor was ‘clearly’ behind suspected RAF Fairford plot

• Tell us: have you been affected by the incident at RAF Fairford?

An MP and councillors representing the residents of the village near RAF Fairford who were evacuated due to the suspected plot have expressed scepticism and concern over the security response to threats made by Iran.

Roz Savage, the MP for South Cotswolds, said she had many questions about the circumstances of how the alleged plot was averted. The Liberal Democrat MP, whose constituency covers the military base, said she would be writing to the prime minister and the defence secretary with her concerns.

Freedom of information request finds six-month trial cost £320,000, used almost 100 police hours and led to just one – incorrect – alert

A six-month trial of live facial recognition (LFR) technology in London’s railway stations that cost more than £320,000 and almost 100 hours of police officers’ time ended in one false match against a watchlist of suspects and no arrests.

More than half a million faces were scanned between February and July this year in some of the capital’s busiest transport hubs during the British Transport Police (BTP) trial of the surveillance technology, which aimed to help catch offenders and people breaching court orders.

Dott, 49, receives seven-year sentence after abusing a boy and a girl in what judge says was ‘gross violation of trust’

The former snooker world champion Graeme Dott has been jailed for seven years at the high court in Edinburgh after being convicted of sexually abusing two children.

In August, Dott was found guilty of sexually abusing a boy and a girl after a five-day trial at Glasgow high court. The court heard that the 2006 world champion inappropriately touched and exposed himself to both children. He denied the charges but was convicted of two counts of lewd, indecent and libidinous behaviour by a majority verdict.

Women say inquiry should look at medical regulator after it dismissed request to scrutinise medic accused of sharing results of intrusive sexual health examinations with tycoon

Victims of Mohamed Al Fayed have accused the medical regulator of allowing his sexual abuse to continue unchecked by refusing to investigate allegations that doctors were complicit in his crimes.

Survivors of Fayed’s abuse have called for the General Medical Council (GMC) to be investigated after it dismissed a request in 2017 to scrutinise a doctor accused of subjecting a woman to intrusive sexual health examinations and sharing the results with Fayed.

Green energy entrepreneur plans rescue package for the group behind the Camden New Journal, Islington Tribune and Westminster Extra

The green energy entrepreneur and Labour donor Dale Vince is planning to launch a London-wide news operation, as part of a “rescue” of one of the capital’s most highly regarded local newspapers.

Vince, who has vowed to take on what he sees as rightwing bias in the UK media, said he would invest “whatever it takes” to support the loss-making group behind the Camden New Journal (CNJ), Islington Tribune and Westminster Extra.

Amanda Blanc says flooding threat is ‘absolutely increasing’, as she also warns ministers over ‘kite flying’ before budget

• Business live – latest updates

The boss of Britain’s biggest insurer has warned that homes being built now could become uninsurable in the future because they are sited in flood-risk areas.

Amanda Blanc, the chief executive of Aviva, said the flooding threat was “absolutely increasing”. Assuming current construction patterns continue, 115,000 homes will be built in flood zones in the next decade.

Residents say shop threatens Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s last surviving tearoom months after vape shop blaze nearby

In the heart of Glasgow city centre, nestled between shops, bars, offices and hotels, sits the Mackintosh Tearooms, the last surviving tearoom designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and one of the city’s most treasured heritage sites.

But last week passersby noticed a shiny new shopfront next door to the 1903 category A-listed building: hot-pink capital letters on a white plastic sign, advertising a vape and mobile phone repair shop.

Port city of Busan inundated with tourists keen to see the 3.5-metre animal close up

A large shark has become an unlikely tourist attraction after getting trapped in a narrow city canal in South Korea for more than a week.

More than 600,000 people are estimated to have visited a waterfront park in the southern port city of Busan since the 3.5-metre shark – nicknamed Bukang-i after the name of Busan’s North Port – was first spotted in its waterway on 18 September.

When NAZA premiered at Venice earlier this month, it sent shockwaves across the globe. Composed of interviews with 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, NAZA is a haunting exposé of the tools that the Israeli military uses to carry out the remote killing of Palestinians in Gaza – including AI, mass surveillance, and devastating airstrikes that kill civilians and raze homes. Now, the Israeli government is treating NAZA like a national security crisis. Benjamin Netanyahu is even pushing for legislation that could strip the film's two directors of their Israeli citizenship. Host Carter Sherman speaks with the directors of NAZA, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in one of their first interviews with an American journalist. The film, which was produced by the Guardian, will open in New York this week and soon expand to theaters worldwide. It will also stream, for free, on the Guardian website in November

Read the reporting in NAZA originally published in the Guardian:

• ‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza

• Revealed: Israeli military creating ChatGPT-like tool using vast collection of Palestinian surveillance data

An encampment is sprawling across Puerta del Sol plaza in central Madrid in protest against the ‘rentier economy’

Wielding a broom and dustpan, Marta García, 60, darted past the edges of tents, sweeping up bits of litter as she passed a poster that read: “What kind of times are these, when we need to defend the obvious?”

On Saturday, as tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Madrid to protest against the country’s deepening housing crisis, the retired schoolteacher was among a small group who had sought to take the protest one step further.

The country is struggling to address a rise in attacks, with a record 13 people – mostly children – killed this year for body parts, which some believe can bring good fortune

Not long after midnight in late May this year, three men barged through the door of the small room where Nicole Soalala lived with her family on the outskirts of Toliara, a coastal city in the south of Madagascar. Her husband got up to ask what they wanted, but they attacked him with a piece of wood and an axe.

Soalala, 32, grabbed her youngest child, Landricia – an 18-month-old girl with albinism – and hoisted her on to her back, holding her there with a piece of fabric she started to wrap around herself. Her eldest daughter, 15, hid under the table with her other two children, aged six and three.

As a business journalist, Nilsson began rigorously reporting on the power players of the adult industry, who prefer to remain in the shadows. Along the way, she uncovered how porn has shaped the internet – and our lives as a whole

There was a time, a few decades ago, when the men who owned the world’s biggest pornography businesses were happy to be famous. They paraded a lifestyle they hoped looked glamorous, appearing in public dressed in silk pyjamas or with a woman in swimwear on each arm. Porn moguls like Hustler’s Larry Flynt or Playboy’s Hugh Hefner were household names.

“Say what you want about these old perverts, who once set the tone of our sexual culture, but at least you knew who they were and what they were selling,” Patricia Nilsson writes in her new book, Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else. “These days, the men calling the shots are nowhere to be seen.”

What’s good and what’s going off this autumn in the world of food

Manchester

Demand for Scotland’s most famous export has slumped, with industry facing job cuts and closures

Obscured by the Scottish countryside on the outskirts of Kirkcaldy, Cluny bond is, in effect, a small town built to store whisky. By the time the latest set of warehouses are finished on the former opencast coal mine, Diageo’s 220-hectare (544-acre) maturation campus will be able to store almost 3m casks of Scotch. The drinks multinational needs the space.

After a 15-year boom turbocharged by the Covid-19 pandemic, demand for Scotch whisky has slumped around the world. Distilleries have paused production across Scotland to avoid adding to the glut of supply, known as a “whisky loch” – the equivalent of a “wine lake”.

It’s often thought of as the problem, but what if the right technology could help us switch off and live more in the moment?

• The best screen-free activities

With the continued backlash against AI and growing concern about our reliance on screens, an analogue life has never looked so appealing. I haven’t gone so far as to get myself an analogue bag just yet, but I have done a relatively complex puzzle and read five physical books this year, which is already two more than in 2025.

But it also struck me recently that I have, somewhat conversely, been using digital tools to do a lot of analogue activities. What if tech could help us live more in the present and reduce our screen time, while benefiting our physical and mental health in the long run?

As a new book on the Paisley Park polymath is released, author John McKie explains why Prince’s 1987 album is the ultimate showcase of his genius

By the early 1980s, Prince had cemented his place as a pop heavyweight with the phenomenal success of his 1999 album, as well as becoming a movie star thanks to Purple Rain. Even when his second film, the old Hollywood throwback Under the Cherry Moon, bombed worldwide in 1986, he notched another massive hit off its soundtrack with Kiss. It didn’t matter if audiences didn’t understand; Prince kept moving forward.

That restless spirit propelled Prince’s final masterpiece, 1987’s Sign o’ the Times, as he dabbled with different directions. Anything seemed on the table: maybe he would drop another album with his backing band, The Revolution, or he would explore his feminine alter-ego Camille with a self-titled album. He even, at one point, wanted to put out a triple album, a reasonable response to the vast collection of music that Prince was creating. “Sometimes when people are in a place of transition, they’re distracted,” said John McKie, whose new book Prince: A Sign o’ the Times follows the pop legend’s career through the lens of this classic. “For Prince, he focused on his music.”

Everton’s great lost talent of the 90s explains the drinking culture that enveloped him as a teenager, his time in jail, struggles with depression and how he got clean

“I was just a kid and no one was there for me,” Billy Kenny says as he wipes away the tears of hurt and regret on a September afternoon in Liverpool. “I’m angry with Everton for not looking after me.

“Listen, I’m no angel. I’ve played my part, but there are other people who played their part in the demise of Billy Kenny. So I’m still bitter and frustrated today, at the age of 53. It was an absolute waste of talent.”

A journalist charts a quarter century of geopolitical hubris and economic overreach

Like many Britons born in the 1980s, the journalist and Guardian columnist Owen Jones came of age with Tony Blair’s platitudes ringing in his ears. Politics at the turn of the millennium was a story of temporary dispensations mistaken for eternal truths: the definitive triumph of free market ideology; US military supremacy; a rules-based global order. As Jones recounts in his new book, these certainties would come crashing down over the next quarter of a century amid a succession of economic failures, foreign policy disasters and political crises.

Indeed, “the west” itself – as a shorthand for the US plus the wealthier western European nations – feels almost quaint today, given the increasing unilateralism of the administration in Washington. But in the 2000s it was part of the lexicon, as if the hemisphere were a political actor in its own right. Revisiting the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are reminded not just of their horrific death tolls (totalling half a million, by conservative estimates) but also their total strategic failure; the 2021 evacuation of Kabul airport, Jones writes, was “among the starkest images of American decline yet broadcast to the world”.

Japan once had a reputation for statement architecture – yet many buildings have been torn down since 2000. A new book reminds us of their futuristic beauty

I felt a duty to write about the Tang dynasty and its incredible social and cultural sophistication – but also to connect my Chinese past with my child

During the Tang dynasty, which lasted from the seventh to the early 10th century, Vikings were raiding the coasts of what today is called Europe. In the small archipelago now known as Britain, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms flitted by. Meanwhile, in Mesoamerica, after 3,000 years of flourishing, the Maya civilisation was collapsing. In the east, China had been united for nine centuries and the Tang dynasty was already a proverbial high point of world culture.

‘Taking back control’ turns out to be staggeringly expensive. That’s something to mull over as budget day approaches

Every 100,000 immigrants lost to the UK costs the treasury £7bn, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. That figure is unsurprising if you’ve been concentrating at all – the calculation was made in 2024 – but at the same time completely staggering. Nobody ever says, “The chancellor’s going to be in trouble because of all those lost immigrants”; few people remark on, let alone decry, the very large numbers of migrants who have been lost due to policy decisions.

And then, as budget day approaches, brute facts and mathematical realities assert themselves: migration numbers have been falling faster than anticipated. And if you take all the measures you can to discourage international students, skilled workers, all imaginable young, mobile people who work and don’t get ill, while at the same time preventing with all your might any legitimate employment opportunities for asylum seekers, you will suffer a hit to the national coffers.

Here in Liverpool, the PM’s ambition for the party – and the country – is evident. There should be no complacency, but also no fear

His ambition is big enough to see from space as he promises the “biggest change to Britain in 40 years”. Andy Burnham pledges what no prime minister until now has dared to, breaking the long spell of Thatcherism. Her sham monopoly markets in public services have crashed. The chancellor, John Healey, promises a “new age of industrialisation”, breaking with her era of industrial desertification. The social care system she blew into disconnected privatised fragments will become a national care service. Something new is waiting to be born.

Things happen fast. Only a year ago, the Labour party was on its knees in despair, thunderstruck to find Nigel Farage ruling the roost so soon after its landslide win, with Reform UK 12 percentage points ahead of Labour’s dismal 22%. Farage was the most popular leader, with a 30% favourability rating, compared with Keir Starmer’s -71%. When Burnham came to Liverpool last year he had no seat, no prospect of a challenge and a numbskull national executive committee bent on barring him, his charisma wasted.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Republicans could lean on congressional procedure to defy the will of voters. But if they try that, the Senate has a clear way to fight back

Having lost his mail-in ballot case, Donald Trump will likely resort to ever more extreme ways to try to hold a Republican Congress in November’s elections.

His last-ditch effort to count Joe Biden out in 2020 was for Republicans to “investigate” states Biden narrowly won; proclaim fabricated allegations of “stolen elections” to be true; and then reassign those states’ electoral votes to Trump. I have previously described how that same playbook could be used to try to steal the midterms if a Democratic margin of victory in the House is relatively narrow.

The Israeli prime minister’s remarks at the UN weren’t just motivated by personal animosity

In a boastful and defiant speech to the United Nations on Thursday, Benjamin Netanyahu called out a list of villains he insisted are intent on destroying Israel and promoting an anti-Jewish conspiracy by accusing Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza. He singled out the leaders of Hamas, Iran, Qatar and Turkey, among others. But Netanyahu spent considerable time on the global stage attacking an unusual target: Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City.

Netanyahu accused Mamdani of promoting antisemitism, falsely claimed that he supports Hamas, and argued that since the mayor took office in January, “many Jews no longer feel safe in New York.” The Israeli leader also criticized Mamdani’s wife for liking social media posts that supported the Palestinian cause soon after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. Overall, Netanyahu seems to have devoted more time in his nearly 40-minute speech to singling out Mamdani than any other political leader, including Israel’s traditional enemies.

Die Linke’s surge was propelled by a compelling promise: for voters to have the freedom to stay in their city. This is how to fight back against the far right

The German leftwing party Die Linke won the state elections in Berlin on 20 September. It’s unclear whether the party will be able to form a coalition, appoint its lead candidate Elif Eralp as mayor, and follow through on her core campaign promise: to socialise the housing stock of the city’s biggest real-estate companies. A barrage of accusations started to circulate immediately after the results came in. Even by the standards of present-day polarisation, the pitch was extreme.

On the basis of one leaked chat and one rapper’s performance, the party was described as schmoozing with criminal clans and endangering the lives of Berlin Jews. Accusations of antisemitism prompted the Greens and the SPD – potential coalition partners – to question any potential cooperation, while “alt-right” opinion-makers suggested that “Hamas and Hezbollah” had won the elections, or that the German Democratic Republic (the old East Germany) was about to come back. Alice Weidel of the rightwing AfD alleged that Die Linke intended to “shoot the rich”.

Most MPs are clinging to this year’s Beckettian slogan, but the chancellor brought his own brand of despair

It could be just me, but I’m beginning to find that all this “hope” stuff is getting me down. Everywhere you go at the Labour party conference, you are being urged to “Hope Again”. It’s on the screens in the main hall and on banners in the exhibition area. It’s on T-shirts, balloons and coffee mugs. It’s all just a bit much. Overkill. You now bump into Labour MPs who are visibly collapsing under the strain of having to walk around with an optimistic perma-grin. And the conference is only into its second day. Come Wednesday they will all be on intravenous Valium.

What does “Hope Again” even mean? Is it an instruction? Have we all been hoping in a highly unsatisfactory way so far? Are we being sent back to hope school to learn how to be more upbeat? In which case, I rather think these remedial classes in hoping will be wasted on me. I’ve always been a bit miserable. It feels a bit like someone going round and telling you “Smile. It may never happen.” Or to “Keep calm and carry on.” There are also distinct echoes of Samuel Beckett: Fail again. Fail better. Only in Liverpool it’s: Hope again. Hope better.

A reckless decision to authorise an Orange Order parade with a notorious history has deepened the political crisis in the Northern Ireland executive

The last time that the Orange Order successfully marched from Drumcree parish church down the Garvaghy Road, a mainly Catholic part of Portadown, it required a British army presence and a lockdown of locals forced off their own streets. The 1997 parade was preceded by loyalist death threats and followed by nationalist riots, in which more than 160 people were injured. The lengthy track record of lethal violence and disorder associated with the march led the Parades Commission – established the following year as part of the peace process – to ban it.

On Sunday, however, in scenes that rolled back the years in deeply unwelcome fashion, the old traumas and hostilities were recklessly allowed to resurface. Unfathomably, after a routine decision to renew the ban this year was challenged on procedural grounds, the commissioners reversed their ruling late last week and permitted a march to go ahead on a limited scale. The entirely predictable result was a tense standoff and a political crisis in Stormont, after protesters blocked the Garvaghy Road route until the early hours of Monday morning.

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John Healey has offered a vision, but an energy shock will mean households and businesses need to be offered help in the budget

In his first speech to Labour party conference as chancellor, John Healey offered prudence with a purpose in a speech stylistically redolent of his former boss Gordon Brown. Mr Healey made fiscal credibility the condition for his goal of turbocharging apprenticeships for young people, funding for unions to reskill workers and spending on defence to create manufacturing jobs. The speech’s imagery was canny: miners, shipyards and submarines give “reindustrialisation” a recognisable Labour history. He also faced the future with a clever line about British workers “harnessing AI, not being outrun by it”. His message was that the “politics of hope” will be earned through “fiscal discipline, good work and through strong industries”.

The new Labour chancellor sounded like New Labour when he claimed that it was “not progressive to allow a bigger and bigger benefits bill”. What was lacking was a plan for care work, public services and the energy transition. Mr Healey clearly has a story about the supply of properly trained workers and another one about revitalising industry, but he offered little explanation of how enough good jobs will be created across the wider economy. Labelling a defence contract “industrial renewal” does not prove it is the best use of state capacity.

Readers respond to the guilty verdict against the football club for breaking the Premier League’s financial fair play rules

Thirty six years ago, the team I support, Swindon Town, were severely punished for financial irregularities that pale into comparison with those of Manchester City (Manchester City found guilty of breaking Premier League’s financial fair play rules, 25 September). We were initially sentenced to be relegated two divisions but, after appeal, refused entry to Division One. It was an incredibly painful experience for us as fans and I feel for those City fans who have enjoyed the last years so fully, but now see it tainted through no fault of theirs.

At the time, a number of journalists made the case that, as off-field crimes had resulted in on-field success, the punishment was fitting. What is different this time is the scale of the offences and the amount of on-field success. Once the appeal process has concluded, and if Manchester City still face punishment, a proportionate scaling up of consequences from those that we experienced in 1990 could mean that club facing relegation and removal of titles.

Gordon McDougall recalls finding the original children to feature in the documentary strand that started in 1964

In your editorial on the Up series (20 September), your point is well made that exposing seven‑year-olds on television today would expose them to dangers not encountered in the 60s. However, Seven Up! was made in the early part of 1964, not 1963 as you stated, and it was the brainchild of Tim Hewat, the producer of World in Action.

As he was leaving the series, the oversight was given to the Canadian director Paul Almond and, for our first jobs after passing through training, Michael Apted and I were given the task of finding the original 20 children (14 of whom were followed in subsequent films). The show was seen as a one‑off and it was only at the instigation of Denis Forman, then CEO of Granada TV, that the follow-up, 7 Plus Seven, was commissioned in 1969. I was too busy running the Stables Theatre Club to work on it, so Apted directed it alone.

Readers respond to Zahaan Bharmal’s experience of getting to grips with the Yorkshire dialect

Zahaan Bharmal’s observation on the north-south pronunciation divide (Could we be about to see the end of northern English dialects? My experience – and the science – says aye, 23 September) is neatly corroborated in Rosie Webb’s otherwise delightfully rhyming children’s book Chimpanzees in Dungarees: reading aloud to our grandchildren, my Mancunian partner is forced to southernise the page about “gir-ar-ffes in scarfs”. A dozen miles from Webb’s Bristol base is a place that exemplifies the third, south-western variant: the long “aa” sound. I mean Bath, aka Baaff or Barth. The cities are close, but one is posh, the other not so much.
Tony Benjamin
Bristol

• Please inform Mr Bharmal that up here in t’north as every Yorkshire (and Derbyshire) man knows, kegs can only store beer and the like. But kex is an umbelliferous flower to be seen while strolling through a meadow wearing your keks.
Stuart Garside
New Mills, Derbyshire

Dr Chris Garrard responds to an article about George Osborne assuming that Palantir founder Peter Thiel’s visit to view the Bayeux tapestry would remain secret

As the chair of the British Museum, George Osborne is a holder of public office with a duty to be transparent. His comment that “it wasn’t like we expected anyone to know” about the billionaire Peter Thiel’s private view of the Bayeux tapestry suggests his loyalties lie more with the founder of Palantir and friend of Jeffrey Epstein over the openness that a national museum should demonstrate (George Osborne ‘thought Peter Thiel’s Bayeux tapestry visit would be secret’, 19 September).

Osborne then made the claim that the museum would shut down without unethical corporate sponsors such as BP. In fact, just a few weeks ago London’s Science Museum ended its decades-long partnership with BP, joining Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and others. Last year, 91% of members of the Museums Association also ratified a new code of ethics, which says that museums should “Transition away from sponsorship from organisations involved with environmental harm (including fossil fuels), [and] human rights abuses”.

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The lights of Lang Park have gone down, the flamethrowers are roaring, and the music is pumping as the stadium announcer reads the two line-ups.

Irankunda, unsurprisingly, gets the biggest roar from the almost sell-out crowd. Big Sam-Kerr-but-for-the-boys energy.

We have to be a little bit sharper in front compared to the last game, and hope everything will be okay.

For us, it’s another test… I think we will play a little bit different from the first game. It is a test and I would like to know about the young players who have a lot of quality.

• Villa have two points from first four league matches

• Arroyo took charge of women’s side in January 2025

Aston Villa have sacked their women’s manager Natalia Arroyo with the side second-bottom of the Women’s Super League with two points from four matches.

Arroyo was appointed in January 2025 and guided Villa to safety before finishing ninth in her first full campaign. That season ended with four successive defeats and the poor form has continued.

• Uefa accused of trying to influence presidential election

• Fifa court filing denies claim of FFE undervaluation

Fifa accused Uefa of waging a “misinformation campaign” and trying to influence the race for its presidency as world football’s governing body urged a US ⁠court to reject a discovery ⁠request linked to a ​controversial investment proposal.

Last month Uefa asked a US federal court for permission to obtain testimony and documents for use in a planned criminal complaint in Switzerland against Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, ⁠over an abandoned plan to transfer World Cup commercial rights into a subsidiary called Fifa Forward Enterprise.

Featuring: a teenager taking a debut hat-trick, a win for one of cricket’s nice guys, and a hard summer for ground staff

Tom Norton
Not many people take a hat-trick on their Championship debut. Even fewer when they’re a teenager. But in early May, 18-year-old Norton roared in like the north wind against Somerset and wrecked their top order. His delighted teammates chased him around Sophia Gardens, patting his impressive beard. By August, he’d been ruled out of the rest of the season with a stress fracture of the back. But, even without him, Glamorgan survived their first year back in the top tier, and batters will be nervously waiting in 2027. He made quite the first impression.

• Captain Leah Williamson back after injury to face Greece

• Sarina Wiegman names squad for World Cup playoff

Lexi Potter, the Chelsea midfielder, has received her first senior England call-up for the Women’s World Cup qualifying playoff against Greece, while neither Ella Toone nor Chloe Kelly has been named in Sarina Wiegman’s squad.

Calls for the inclusion of the 20-year-old Potter had grown significantly this term after her strong form for Chelsea, including her starring role in Sunday’s 1-0 victory over Arsenal. Wiegman has also called up the uncapped 18-year-old midfielder Erica Meg Parkinson and the London City Lionesses winger Freya Godfrey, and there is a return after injury for the captain Leah Williamson.

• Manor Solomon angry at Ireland’s stance over Gaza

• ‘They hate us and we don’t like them’

Manor Solomon claimed Israel was “10 times better” than Ireland as fallout intensified from their Nations League match and stated bluntly: “They hate us and we don’t like them.”

Players in the Republic of Ireland side stared at the ground during Israel’s anthem and their staff faced away from the pitch. Ireland’s players also chose not to shake hands or exchange pennants with their opponents in protest at Israeli military actions in Gaza which have killed tens of thousands of people.

Billy Meredith helped win City their first major honours more than a hundred years ago, was banned by the FA – then went and repeated the trick on the red side of Manchester

When the Manchester City decision finally dropped, the Guardian’s verdict was damning. “FOOTBALL SENSATION – MANCHESTER CITY’S GRAVE OFFENCES – HEAVY PUNISHMENTS”, the headline read. “It is now proved that the club had for years systematically broken the rules of the Football Association by very unscrupulous means.”

But these words weren’t written last Friday. Instead they were penned more than 120 years ago, at the culmination of English football’s first big illicit payments scandal.

Players across the league are leaving their teams up north to return home. It’s prompted questions around money, tax rates, geopolitics and respect

Back in September 1925, Frederick Wilson, sports editor at the Globe, explained the fear among hockey fans that Canadian teams might not be able to compete for players against the new US teams like New York or Boston that were entering the pro league. “Will it be a matter of money?” Wilson headlined his piece. And for about a century, money was the recurrent nexus of the Canadian hockey panic, proven by franchise departures and depleted buying power.

At the time, Wilson reassured everyone that, no matter the big US cash, everyone on the ice would be Canadian anyway. “It will be some years before the [US] will be in a position to furnish players,” he wrote. He was right about that. It took a long time for the US to catch up to Canada in on-ice talent. But now that it has, should we expect Americans to want to play anywhere else than the US? For 100 years Canada has worried that the US would just buy all the best hockey players. But now it makes its own and, as the new NHL season gets underway on Tuesday night, they want to go home.

Secretary-general warns Russia ‘continues its reckless campaign of hostile actions against Nato allies’

Rutte begins by recalling a drone shot down in Lithuanian airspace by Nato fighter jets two weeks ago.

He says “the repeated drone incidents along our eastern flank showed the evolving nature of the threat, and we are strengthening our integrated air and missile defence.”

“We are adapting and reinforcing our posture against drones.”

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Newsflash: the number of mortgages approved by UK lenders has fallen to its lowest level since the end of 2023.

Just 54,918 new home loans were approved in August on a seasonally-adjusted basis, new Bank of England data shows, as rising borrowing costs deterred potential home buyers.

The average 2-year fixed residential mortgage rate today is 5.93%. This is up from 5.91% the previous working day.

The average 5-year fixed residential mortgage rate today is 5.94%. This is up from 5.93% the previous working day.

NHS trusts also report disruption to supplies last winter of co-codamol and blood pressure medication ramipril

Hospitals are being hit by shortages of key drugs used to provide pain relief, prevent blood clots and tackle high blood pressure.

Dozens of NHS trusts in England have encountered scarcities of aspirin, the painkiller co-codamol – a combination of paracetamol and codeine – and ramipril, a blood pressure tablet.

Four-hour production featuring star-studded cast will be performed at London County Hall

A play based on the trial of the men who drugged and raped Gisèle Pelicot will come to London for one night only this November – and promises to feature a star-studded cast.

The four-hour production of The Pelicot Trial: Tribute to Gisèle Pelicot has been performed around the world, including in New York City and Avignon, the city in France where the trial took place. This autumn, it is coming to London County Hall, the home of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution.

GPT-6.1 Astra showed deceptive behaviour and tried to use external tools despite knowing it would be unsafe

• As AI models go rogue, do you still trust OpenAI and Anthropic to stop them? I don’t and neither should you

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OpenAI is scrapping the release of a next-generation ⁠AI model after researchers raised safety concerns ⁠during internal testing.

The model, GPT-6.1 Astra, was expected to appear in ChatGPT and ⁠Codex in October, designed to handle more complex tasks without human assistance.

Food and Agriculture Organization urges governments to make forest restoration a national priority

The world faces a “narrowing window” to restore forests essential for food security and resistance to the climate emergency, a United Nations report has warned.

More than 489m hectares (1.2bn acres) of forests have been cleared since 1990, while an even greater area is degraded, the world body said in a call for governments to make forest restoration a national priority.

People living next to a chemicals plant near Blackpool were tested for ‘forever chemicals’. Last week they received the alarming results

Last February, I got a call from a woman called Sam Hammond. We had been speaking on and off for a while over her growing concern that her garden could be affected by pollution from a nearby chemical plant.

That morning, Sam had been hand-delivered a letter from her council informing her that her pet ducks’ eggs, reared in her garden, were contaminated with Pfas chemicals.

Miatta Fahnbulleh says Britain must look at how costs are recovered – and that could mean money off bills

Billions of pounds worth of green levies could be taken off bills, the energy secretary has said, as the government investigates funding green infrastructure through taxes instead.

Miatta Fahnbulleh is looking at how green projects are funded, including varying levies between customers and funding them all through general taxation.

Indigenous communities play crucial role, as ‘genetic bank’ area of wetland offers hope for critically endangered reptile

In the 1990s, conservationists in Cambodia feared the Siamese crocodile had disappeared for good. Fishing and hunting had devastated the species throughout the 20th century, leaving populations across its native south-east Asia on the brink of extinction.

But in villages dotted among the wetlands of the remote Cardamom mountains, Indigenous Chorng communities still reported seeing them. Passing this knowledge to researchers surveying the area in 2000 led to an official recording of the species – and bolstered the mission to revive the population.

Local fire and rescue service says last week’s tragic incident highlights risks the batteries can pose

A fire that left a mother and her three children dead was caused by a lithium-ion battery, firefighters in Merseyside have said.

An electrical event caused the battery, of a type commonly used in vapes, ebikes and e-scooters, to go into “thermal runaway”, Merseyside fire and rescue service said.

Anger over Israel’s war in Gaza is mobilising British voters, according to Aimee Shalan

Palestine has become a domestic electoral issue in Britain for the first time, according to the incoming head of the country’s largest Palestinian solidarity organisation.

Aimee Shalan, who will take over as director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in November, joins the organisation as demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza have snowballed into what organisers describe as one of the most sustained protest movements in modern British history.

Speaking to Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey at the Labour party conference in Liverpool, Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, said a mark of her success or failure would be whether she could get bills down and said she would do so. She also challenged Reform UK and the Tories on their climate inaction, saying they would eventually ‘bow’ because they were on the ‘wrong side of history’.

Row comes amid rising division and a tendency towards cynical political posturing in Northern Ireland

Three decades ago, it took the deaths of three Roman Catholic children – the Quinn brothers, Jason, nine, Mark, 10, and 11-year-old Richard – in a petrol bomb attack to bring an end to the Drumcree dispute. “No road is worth a life, let alone the lives of three little boys,” the Orange Order’s County Armagh chaplain said at the time.

It is perhaps extraordinary to think that this could ever have needed saying – but that was then. Northern Ireland is very different place today.

These men in Maine, Georgia and Florida shared no ties – until they became casualties in the latest phase of Trump’s anti-immigration campaign

• Gone in 90 seconds: an ‘invisibilized’ ICE is arresting more people than ever

It was 7am on 13 July this year. A warm, sunny morning, as residents of Biddeford, Maine, left their homes, got into their cars and began their commute. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero came out of the apartment he lived in with his partner and daughter and drove off in his white car. Minutes later, neighbors heard three pops. Durán Guerrero was dead.

More than 1,200 miles (1,900km) away in Ocilla, Georgia, Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was shuffled on to a bus. Private sector guards and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were beginning the process of transferring him and several other immigrants from one detention center to another nearly two hours away. Ten minutes into the ride, he became unconscious. Doctors at a nearby hospital pronounced him dead.

Outrage over treatment of alleged offenders, members of Chi Phi fraternity, has grown since lawsuit was made public

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Prosecutors in New York said on Monday that they have reopened an investigation into the alleged gang-rape of a student at Cornell University after an outcry over “leniency” shown to seven fraternity members named as the perpetrators.

According to lawyers for the student, who filed a civil lawsuit against the university and her alleged attackers earlier in September, only two members of the Chi Phi fraternity were expelled after the October 2024 incident, in which she said she was drugged and repeatedly raped over the course of seven hours.

Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

Effect of elevated screen exposure could be as significant as parental behaviour and premature birth, report says

The effect of high screen time on children is as significant as parental behaviour and premature birth, if not greater, a global study has found.

Researchers examined data on more than 2.8 million children across 64 countries and concluded that elevated screen exposure could affect children in areas including academic achievement and emotional problems. It is one of the largest ever studies on the subject.

One in 60 adults Fiji lives with HIV but a recent emergency declaration may help address key issues such as syringe sharing

On a recent Friday night, Dr Kesaia Tuidraki’s medical team parked its mobile clinic outside McDonald’s in downtown Suva, Fiji, and grabbed any kid they could to be tested for HIV. Of the 97 people screened, mostly teenagers – some on their way to get a burger, others to buy drugs – one in six tested positive.

“Children are suffering, children are dying, and if that doesn’t move you I don’t know what will,” Tuidraki, country director of Medical Services Pacific, tells the Guardian.

OpenAI chief scientist also among authors of report on prospect of ‘most consequential technological development in history’

Two of the “godfathers” of modern AI and senior executives at OpenAI and Anthropic have warned governments to prepare for an AI “intelligence explosion”, which they say could be the most consequential technological development in history.

A report co-authored by the Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and the Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, considered godfathers of modern AI for their work in the field, urges politicians to act now before there is runaway progress in the technology.

World’s biggest economies release lists of products in latest move away from trade war – but no strategic goods are included

The US and China have released reciprocal lists of goods worth about $30bn each on which they plan to cut tariffs, ranging from consumer electronics and agricultural products to artificial flowers and live dolphins.

The announcements are the latest tack away from the intense trade war between the world’s two largest economies that dominated much of last year, though major strategic products are not included and no timeline has yet been given for the reductions.

Chipmaker says new system was designed to prevent AI agents from going rogue amid incidents at top companies

Nvidia on Monday unveiled a new security platform that the chipmaker said can stop artificial intelligence agents from going rogue.

The company announced a $150bn stock buyback the same day, the largest in US corporate history.

Supermarket chain declares ‘increasing confidence’ in its growth plans after posting record annual revenue of £19bn

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Aldi says it is stepping up investment in the UK with plans to spend £900m and open more than 40 stores.

The company, which operates 1,092 budget supermarkets in the UK and Ireland, revealed sales rose 5% to a record £19bn last year. It opened 40 stores but profits slipped by £2.6m to £433m as it cut prices despite cost inflation.

This tale of broken hearts and broken people moves from the Troubles of 70s Northern Ireland to an unforgiving London of squats and payphones

Louise Kennedy’s first novel, Trespasses, was one of those rare triumphs, a debut that was not only rapturously received by critics but adored by readers around the world. A story of forbidden love set during the Troubles in 1970s Belfast, it was an international bestseller, translated into more than 20 languages. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s prize and scooped debut fiction of the year at the British Book awards. A four-part television adaptation with Gillian Anderson aired last autumn on Channel 4.

Inevitably Kennedy found herself lauded as an overnight success – much was made of her 30-year career as a professional chef – but in fact she had been writing short stories for a decade and to considerable acclaim; her first collection, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac, was published in 2021. Included in that book was Belladonna, the story of Róisín, a young girl from Belfast who moves south with her mother and, ostracised by her new classmates, becomes friendly with the couple who live across the road. Like Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the prickly and precociously bright Róisín misinterprets the dynamic of her neighbours’ marriage to disastrous effect.

Spanish drama about people leaving their old lives behind plays out like a literary novel, with Manolo Solo excellent as a discombobulated gardener

Out of the blue, a woman walks out on her husband. Bags packed and ready to go, at the last moment she crumples up the letter she has written to him and vanishes from their Madrid flat. So begins this drama featuring not one but three characters disappearing without a trace from their lives; it sounds soap opera-ish, but mostly The Portuguese House unfolds as polite elegant drama, told with such rich novelistic detail it often feels like it’s getting into the minds of the characters.

Manolo Solo gives an excellent performance as the left-behind husband, Fernando, an introspective mild-mannered geography professor. After his wife’s disappearance, Fernando goes on holiday to Portugal, where he meets a gardener called Manuel. When Manuel drops dead of a heart attack, Fernando decides – like his wife – to leave his old life behind; he assumes Manuel’s identity and takes a job as the gardener at a Portuguese country estate. The owner, Amália (Maria de Medeiros), senses that this intellectual man with glasses and a clumsy way with the loppers is not the man she hired, but doesn’t push it – possibly because she is attracted to him.

This Luxembourg-made movie about a couple who venture east to save their son features some impressive film-making

Stippled with first-world guilt about income inequality even between fellow EU member states, this Luxembourg-made horror sprinkles a bit of liberal fairy dust over what is otherwise a pretty straight-up, if twisty, horror setup: a grunting, inarticulate and physically disfigured big baddie stalks the normie protagonists who shouldn’t have come round these impoverished parts. Think Grand Duchy Chainsaw Massacre, though admittedly without any chainsaws. There are sullen locals, a dilapidated farmhouse full of ominous clutter, ill intentions and horrible maiming.

The unlucky visitors here are former couple Greg (Malik Zidi) and Anne (Brigitte Urhausen), who are co-parenting little Leo (Leo Todesco), a pre-adolescent who is lying in a hospital bed while waiting for a crucial organ transplant. A little time has to elapse before we learn that control-freak Anne blames likable doctor Greg for Leo’s condition because he took his eyes off the kid for just long enough for him to get hit by a car. But Greg is trying to make it up to her by accompanying his ex on a trip to an unnamed eastern European country (where folks speak Bulgarian) to acquire the organ Leo needs on the black market, their glide path lubricated with lots of cash and pre-arranged bribes to border guards and the like.

From ‘recycled chicken’ being sold on a stall to Bongbong fanboying over the Fish-Slapping Dance, Palin’s travel shows always explore fascinating things that others don’t. It is a reminder that his work is increasingly precious

There is a moment in episode one of Michael Palin in the Philippines where our host surveys a group of children swimming gaily in the harbour of Pangasa, a tiny island in what western atlases traditionally refer to as the South China Sea. “Oh, if only I were young again,” he muses. “Eighty-one would do!”

Palin is now 83 and into his fifth decade of travel presenting, which is longer than he spent as an active member of Monty Python. Naturally, he is not a dynamic or imposing presence on screen. His insights are applied with a soft, broad brush and jokes like the one about pining for the lost vigour of his early 80s are his metier now: simple, classic, corny, even.

The star of Heated Rivalry does his best in this in this human-trafficking yarn, which gets progressively ickier and more exploitative

Sketchy in every sense of the word, this sci-fi thriller is set in the not-too-distant future in a dystopian concrete city (actually mostly Bucharest looking like itself), where life is cheap but screenwriting conceits are clearly expensive, given most of the main ones here appear to be borrowed from other movies. Brother-and-sister twins Baxter (Connor Storrie, from Heated Rivalry) and April (Lilly Krug) are struggling to get by and mooching around the fringes of the criminal world, doing jobs on a spectrum of legality, though nothing especially harmful to themselves or others. He does petty crimes and she makes wigs and sells downloads of her own uncannily clear dreams (a nod to neglected 90s classics Strange Days and Until the End of the World where dream tech played key roles).

Unfortunately, Baxter and his screw-up associate Ronny (Tourialay Akbari) fall into debt to and afoul with local kingpin Klein (Serban Pavlu), whose persistent use of Yiddish phrases and general parsimoniousness sets up the characterisation just on the edge of antisemitism. When Baxter cleans out his and April’s joint accounts and still comes up short, someone takes April and her archive of recorded dreams/memories. Suddenly, the action jumps ahead five years in the future and April is both still missing and yet, at a local brothel, all too ubiquitous where it seems she’s been cloned to make numerous sex workers.

‘The day Saff came into the studio with red hair, I said, “We’re gonna be massive!” It was the missing link’

We always had a vision of mixing acid house with indie rock, and we managed to rent a space and build our own studio in London’s Shoreditch area, long before it got trendy. I had a little vocal booth called Hattie Jacques, in honour of the Carry On films but also because it’s Cockney rhyming slang [for shakes]. We spent all our money rewiring it, and that’s where we wrote, recorded and produced Ready to Go – 100 mixes later!

Daring to defy the norms of political lobbying, the ex-US president is becoming a podcast mainstay – and is opening up about the books that inspired him. Plus, is the Richard Gere gerbil rumour true?

Barack Obama is now a podcast mainstay (good on him for not just defaulting to questionable lobbying). His latest Audible show – via his and Michelle’s company, Higher Ground – is a six-parter about the books that have inspired him, from James Baldwin to John le Carré. The first guest is Tom Hanks, who joins him for a frank chat on parenting and family, prompted by Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning novel Gilead. Hannah J Davies
Audible, out now

Southbank Centre, London
Paraorchestra’s immersive performance of Music for 18 Musicians was immaculate and exhilarating; London Sinfonietta and the Radiohead guitarist’s vibrant tribute to the almost 90-year-old composer followed

Two birthdays were celebrated at Southbank Centre’s Steve Reich-fest. First, the composer himself, a supremely influential artist who has shifted the classical music dial over decades with his evolving yet instantly recognisable soundworld. He turns 90 on 3 October. And then there was Music for 18 Musicians, one of his signature works, which notches up a half-century this year. An immersive performance of the latter invited the audience to mingle with an ensemble dotted around the Clore Ballroom, the collective grins on faces proof positive of the work’s enduring power to raise the spirits.

Doing the honours was Paraorchestra, Charles Hazlewood’s enterprising collective of disabled and non-disabled musicians, who brought Reich’s kaleidoscopic music to life with ironclad discipline. Freed from fixed seats, the itinerant audience peered at musicians on podiums as if they were objects in an exhibition, marvelling at the precision of polyrhythmic marimba players, or grooving in a central mosh pit with a flexuous quintet of dancers who persuaded children and grandparents alike to go with the flow. Line dancing, disco lights – this exhilarating performance had it all.

The Pussycat Doll went roller skating to the Beach Boys and is ‘completely over’ Gangnam Style. But what song makes her cry every time?

The first song I fell in love with
When I learned to drive and got my first car, I felt this real freedom. I’d put the windows down, blare out Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are) by Pras, featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Mýa, and sing at the top of my lungs.

The first single I bought
Every Friday night we’d go to the roller skating rink, and I couldn’t wait for them to play Kokomo by the Beach Boys, from the Cocktail soundtrack. So I bought it on cassette from Best Buy in Warrensburg, Missouri.

From the Beatles and the World Cup to racism and homophobia, the latest instalment in Kynaston’s series captures a society in the throes of change

In February 1965, the civil rights activist Malcolm X visited Smethwick, in the Midlands, where the Conservative-run council was planning to buy up houses to stop the area becoming a “coloured ghetto”. He wanted to see how bad the racism was and he experienced it first-hand when refused service in a pub. White residents thought his visit a “disgusting” intrusion. Nine days later, back in the US, he was shot dead.

Britain in the mid-60s is associated with Carnaby Street, the Beatles and miniskirts, not racism. But what Black people endured, from a colour bar on property to the abuse of Leeds United winger Albert Johanneson as a “golliwog”, is no less a period marker than Harold Wilson’s pipe, Twiggy’s haircut, Mary Whitehouse’s clean-up TV campaign and Bob Dylan’s use of an electric guitar. David Kynaston doesn’t underplay the excitements of the period. But he rightly emphasises that the rotten old 50s – patriarchal, homophobic, class-divided and bigoted – wouldn’t just fade away.

Multi-flavoured Golden Wonder crisps displacing Smith’s plain; one-third of new marriages now civil marriages; pubs reluctantly installing fruit machines; Jimmy Hill’s Sky-Blue revolution at Coventry City; AA patrols no longer required to salute; picture rails, seen as dust traps, removed en masse from Victorian and Edwardian houses; Boots from 1965 at last consenting to sell condoms; arrival of open-plan offices; arrival, too, of the hot drinks vending machine; no car more iconic of modernity than the Mini Cooper …

In the Danish writer’s latest novel, an eminent scientist withdraws to the countryside

When Gunn Haven, an eminent professor of astrophysics at an urban university, moves to rural Denmark, she tells a local newspaper: “It’s to do with the sky.” From the outset of Range, Danish author Dorthe Nors’s fifth full-length novel, it is apparent this is not the whole truth. Soon after arriving, Gunn is compelled to trespass along a nearby track to look at a farmhouse with collapsed gable walls, her curiosity driven by personal interest rather than scientific inquiry. A woman pulls up in a dark blue BMW. She is dressed in “hunter’s camouflage, fleshy-faced. And ponytailed. Weapon raised: a phone, filming Gunn.” Gunn reluctantly retreats.

Gunn is distracted by this woman, Krista, who works at the local potato flour factory. Gunn should be working on a general introduction to astrophysics, “the Work”. Instead, the Professor finds herself wondering what “Gable Woman” would do if she came to “the Institute”, where Gunn researches “light from the oldest galaxies”. She would draw a dick on a blackboard, Gunn imagines, “with a small titillated smile”. Gunn is more generous to promising young scientists. She pays for a former student to travel to America. Closer to home, she begins to help Jenny, the teenage daughter of her hairdresser, with a school project on black holes. Jenny is an “uneducated creature” who smells “faintly of iron”, with a “faint red to the cheeks, from shyness or cold. Oddly sexless, and she had been here before, but with her mother.”

Her debut earned a record-breaking YA book deal – then came her fallout with Hollywood. The author talks about the pressures of success and why she is pictured on the cover of her new novel

There is a photograph of Tomi Adeyemi staring out from the cover of her new novel, The Siren. It is an arresting image: her face fills the frame, unsoftened by a smile, her piercing gaze fixed directly on the viewer. “It’s terrifying – like the Mona Lisa, staring at you everywhere,” she says, laughing.

Using an author portrait on the cover of a novel is highly unusual, and a decision that Adeyemi says is a statement of ownership. After 12 years spent inside the world of Children of Blood and Bone – the first book in the YA trilogy that made her a literary star and its film adaptation which has become a source of profound distress – Adeyemi wanted this book to belong unmistakably to her.

As her latest novel about Daphne du Maurier is published, the bestselling author reflects on age and creativity – and why at 83 she has no plans to stop

My generation of writers is dying. Of Granta’s fabled list of 20 Best of Young British Novelists, 1983, six are gone, including our most princely satirist, Martin Amis. We’re all approaching birthdays where the cake is too small for the candles. Some of us are wounded: Salman Rushdie by an attacker’s knife, Julian Barnes lives with blood cancer, others with the fatal hurt of being forgotten.

But what’s the likely fate of those of us who are surviving – for now? Do readers still love us? When Barnes announced that he was signing off because of illness, was he also intuiting that the younger generations had heard enough from us old birds and geezers who were young when Sean Connery had dimples, when David Hockney first coloured his hair yellow?

PlayStation 5, Xbox, PC (version played); Bandai Namco
The game generates blood-pumping moments as you twist, turn and weave through the skies, while your locked-on missiles speed away to obliterate an enemy plane

The core appeal of any Ace Combat game lies in the moment when the beautiful clouds part, the sunlight glints off your perfectly rendered state-of-the-art fighter jet, and guitar-shredding music kicks into overdrive as your locked-on missiles speed away to obliterate an enemy plane. All of that is 100% present in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. What’s new is the way it delivers its unexpectedly compelling story.

Set in the Earth-like alternative world of Strangereal, where every country is absolutely obsessed with fighter planes and giant superweapons, Ace Combat drafts you into the role of a fake ace pilot called the Wings of Theve – a propaganda invention to raise the morale of a besieged nation, similar to real-life rumours about Ukraine’s Ghosts of Kyiv. You rapidly find yourself becoming an actual legendary pilot, soaring through the skies with your buddies and raining hell upon your oppressors as everybody cheers on the radio. Speaking of ghosts, you have one in your ear – your predecessor, whom nobody else can hear, a gravelly voice waxing lyrical about flying, war and whatever else is on his mind as you flit about.

I’ve been holed up in an flat, affectionately dubbed the ‘brotel’, with my son for weeks – and we’ve revisited the first game we ever played together

I have spent the last three weeks living with my 22-year-old son in a two-bedroom flat he has dubbed the ”brotel”. We cook curries and watch Lanterns. We barbecue meat and analyse Tarantino movies. We get pizza and we play video games. Boy, do we play video games!

The first game I ever played in co-op with him was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, when he was five. He wasn’t the most accomplished sidekick, not so great at placing a mobile gun turret while under fire from what seems like a bazillion enemy soldiers, but we had a laugh. It started the video game bond between us before his sister introduced him to Banjo-Kazooie and Rayman, and he stopped being a preschool warmonger. Probably for the best. So how would it be tackling the same game nearly two decades later?

They offer advice, referee card games and manage players’ tantrums – we caught up with some of the volunteer profs who keep the competitive game going at this year’s world championships

Professors may be the most revered characters in the fictional world of Pokémon (apart from perhaps the Gym Leaders). In Pokémon Red and Blue, Professor Oak greets the player in a pixelated lab coat, and later provides trainers with their first battle partner; since then, each successive generation of games has introduced another professor to aid and guide trainers through their journeys. If you’ve ever played a Pokémon game, they are often the first people that you meet, apart from your in-game mom.

But you may not know that there are also real-world Pokémon professors – volunteers who help organise the game’s competitive communities around the world. Instead of lab coats, they can be seen at events wearing red Pikachu-mascot shirts labelled “staff”, paired with black trousers and shoes.

From highlighted ledges to characters telling you what to do, blockbuster games are increasingly taking the challenge out of playing – and players are pushing back

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Marvel’s Wolverine, the latest action game from Sony’s stable of expensive blockbuster-factory studios, has had an unfortunate launch. Reviews were decent, if not stellar, but a series of viral video clips from reviewers and streamers have made it the scapegoat for a patronising flavour of game design that gamers have hated for decades. This clip, from Skill Up’s review, shows the player entering a beautiful wintry landscape before being overwhelmed by visual cues telling them what they’re supposed to be doing there. Sonar pulses point you in the direction of objectives. Targets – which, it bears emphasising, are shaped like targets – get an extra reflective visual effect so you know you’re supposed to pay attention to them. A trail shows you not just where to go, but where the level’s sole hidden collectible is.

It is hand-holding to the point of parody. Indeed, it reminded me of the sniggersome Mario in Unreal Engine satirical videos that makes the social media rounds every few months (“A mushroom? I should take a look at this”). Skill Up’s clip has been followed by hundreds of others, gleefully ripping into Wolverine with ironic savagery. In one much-copied clip, a streamer simply lays down his controller during a motorbike chase sequence and watches as Wolverine speeds on regardless, bouncing off the scenery as the game plays itself.

Pitlochry Festival theatre
In what feels now like a premonition of the climate crisis, Siobhán Redmond is compelling as the everywoman putting on a brave face in an unforgiving landscape

Samuel Beckett’s play is always staged with a radiant brightness. It is hot enough to set a parasol alight. If, on its premiere in 1961, that resonated with audience anxieties about nuclear Armageddon, in 2026, it feels like a premonition of the climate crisis. Is this how it ends?

Emma Bailey’s set is a dune of bleached-white sand, clumps of sea grass forcing their way through into a scorched environment, baked by Colin Grenfell’s lighting. When Forbes Masson crawls out of his hole as Willie, keeping his back to us, he reveals nothing more than his neck and shoulders, raw and sunburnt, his scarred head protected by a handkerchief (used).

New Diorama theatre, London
Passionate production based on testimonies from Gaza poses many questions regarding Israel’s actions but gets overwhelmed by fact-delivery and form-switches

How do news outlets cover war in a region where independent foreign journalists are blocked entry? What to make of the reports of the Israel-Gaza war by the western press in relation to the livestreamed footage on our phones?

These are some of the questions that come to mind when thinking about Israel’s actions in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023, and bringing apocalyptic brutality and death tolls. This 90-minute production by British-Romanian collective BÉZNĂ theatre asks many more in its polyphony of satire, song, graphics, snatches of history, absurdism and sincerity. The four-strong cast – comprising Maryam Abu Khaled, Sara Masry, Luca Kamleh Chapman and Sofia – juggle it all in a series of mini lectures, dramatised dialogue, poetic monologues and meta theatre.

Chichester Festival theatre
A narcotic, orgiastic woodland party clashes with the traditional values of John Major’s Tory party in Justin Audibert and Hannah Joss’s exuberant production

The Shakespearean canon contains the term “love juice” twice, both in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So, though purists might be furious, that druggy usage – and Fairie King Oberon’s access to potions that “make eyes roll” – offer textual justification for Justin Audibert and Hannah Joss staging the play around a narcotic, orgiastic woodland party in the summer of 1994.

At that time, prime minister John Major was introducing legislation to ban “illegal raves”. Egeus (Henry Everett), an Athenian courtier in the source, becomes Chief Constable of West Sussex, surnamed Anderton, an allusion to Sir James, a Thatcher ally whose Bible-inspired policing saw him called God’s Copper. Duke Theseus becomes MP for Chichester, a seat held by the Conservatives for a century from 1924. With one character wearing Major rosettes on her breasts, a PM often derided as dull is becoming a theatre star: the National next year stages a James Graham bio-drama, Major.

Menier Chocolate Factory
Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s 85-minute monologue and Paul Farnsworth’s immersive set deserve better than a Broadway museum piece text on the Breakfast At Tiffany’s author

Truman Capote’s core creative life was brief, peaking between the jolly novella Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1958) and the genre-influential “nonfiction-novel” In Cold Blood (1965).

Blocked by drugs and drink, he spent two decades not writing a soi-disant masterpiece, Answered Prayers, although magazine publication of early chapters led to ostracisation by socialites who found the novel to be too nonfiction.

At the Menier Chocolate Factory until 14 November

The photographer’s photos are so meticulously staged that viewers often assume they were taken in a studio – not behind a London nightclub or in an Australian goat field

One bright spring day, the photographer Damien Frost arrived at a farm in Gungal, outside Muswellbrook, New South Wales. Goats grazed in a paddock, eucalyptus trees stretched into the brilliant blue sky and a tin shed weathered in the sun. Frost walked into the shed and entered another world.

“It’s a drag studio,” says Frost. Lining the walls were dozens of wigs and rails of flamboyant outfits belonging to Beverly Fabulosity. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It was a very Priscilla scenario.”

Frost grew up in Australia and is now based in London, where for more than a decade he has photographed drag queens and club kids for his acclaimed Night Flowers series. Since late August, he has been back in his home country, commissioned by Newcastle’s New Annual festival to photograph night owls in and around the city. These new portraits are being exhibited alongside a selection from Frost’s archive at Watt Space gallery as part of the festival.

Nearly a decade after it was first staged, Jocelyn Bioh’s study of girlhood in 1980s Ghana is better than ever in irresistible new production

After its 2017 premiere off-Broadway, School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play transferred to Los Angeles, was remounted in New York the following year, and has since been staged in over 75 theaters across the US, plus a successful run in London. It’s easy to see why – Jocelyn Bioh’s one-act comedy has a familiar structure, richly detailed characters, and an onslaught of delicious barbs. Plus it has the good sense of an 80-minute runtime.

Its splendid Broadway debut is not content with being a mere victory lap, though, in a freshly glorious production helmed by Whitney White. Having staged Bioh’s Tony-winning Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, the director knows her way around an all-women ensemble, and often counts upon a team of usual suspects to make her shows pop: Nikiya Mathis, who won a special Tony for Jaja’s hair and wig designs, and Qween Jean, whose costumes enlivened the Pulitzer-winning Liberation, ensure there’s always visual splendor onstage.

Royal Academy of Arts, London
They’ve marginalised Matisse and given Picasso the cold shoulder – and what’s left seems more informed by pedantic geography than sensual art

The French Riviera is not a place. It is a dream of paradise, one of those Arcadias we long for – timeless, perfect worlds saturated with light. In the modern age, artists found theirs in the south of France. Yet this exhibition misses the point entirely. Instead of the modern myth of the Med, what we get here is a pedantic obsession with the geography of France’s southern coast. Artists get rewarded for which bit of it they painted. This leads to some serious distortions.

The neo-impressionists – the dot-fixated movement led by Paul Signac – and their paintings of the Côte d’Azur get a grand, spacious setting. That’s OK; though when you’ve seen one pixelated shoreline, you’ve seen them all. What’s baffling is that Henri Matisse and the Fauves have been squeezed into a smaller, less weighty adjoining display. The revolution that Matisse and his friends enacted at the seaside town of Collioure, replacing nature with the colours in their heads, was far more radical, exciting and visually brilliant than Signac and co. I couldn’t fathom it.

Previously unreleased material comes as Wonder marks 50th anniversary of album with arena tour

Stevie Wonder has expanded the scope of what was already the most epic studio album in his catalogue, 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life.

Four unheard songs from the recording sessions have been released today as a new EP of the same name, marking the 50th anniversary of an album which won album of the year at the Grammys and contains a number of Wonder’s landmark tracks including Sir Duke, As and Isn’t She Lovely.

Being kind to your jeans and shirts by laundering them less will keep them looking great for longer, says fashion editor Hannah Rochell

I have an emotional attachment to my most reliable clothes. There’s my favourite pair of socks that are back on my feet as soon as they’re clean. The trusty pair of trousers that not only have an elastic waist (comfy!) but make an ordinary T-shirt look part of a really well put together outfit. And then there are my best jeans. I wouldn’t say they’re lucky, per se, but good things seem to happen when I wear them. Oh, and I pretty much never wash them.

Many of us own an item of clothing that we perceive as “lucky” and, anecdotally at least, we’re often reluctant to wash it. Perhaps because we don’t want to rinse off the “luckiness”. Or maybe it’s because we’re beginning to understand that washing clothes too often can do more harm than good.

The smartest wardrobe investment might be looking after the items you already own, says fashion editor Hannah Rochell

What do you think of when you hear the word flares? The counterculture of the late 1960s? Pictures of your parents in the 1970s, perhaps. For me, it’s the Wrangler bell-bottoms I bought secondhand in 1995. They were already 20 years old, but completed my vintage look of Adidas T-shirt and shell-toe trainers in a contemporary way.

Bootcut jeans, the bell-bottom’s slightly toned-down cousin, were huge in the early noughties before skinny jeans took their place. But our love for flares couldn’t be suppressed for long; they were back on the catwalks as soon as 2015. Fast forward another 11 years to Claudia Winkleman’s celebrated wardrobe for The Traitors at the beginning of 2026, and it was full of, you guessed it, flares.

We tried humane traps, wire wool, hardcore cleaning regimes. Nothing worked. In the end, I wondered if the mice in our house were the real residents, while we were the intruders

Some of the happiest years of my 20s were spent in a house-share in east London. Four of us were crammed into a three-bedroom terrace where the dining room had been turned into a bedroom. My housemates were my closest friends. We were young women with the kind of intense-bordering-on-codependent dynamic that becomes unsustainable later in life, when you have long-term partners, pets and children. We lived together, we went out together, in the summer we took our Argos tent to festivals together. We stayed up late discussing love-life and work dilemmas, often crowding round a phone to draft text messages.

We were also not particularly clean, which meant our cluttered, chaotic house was the ideal home for mice. At first we told ourselves it was just one mouse we saw running along next to the skirting board or darting behind a sofa. But a quick scan of the internet confirmed our fears that it’s never just one – mice are social creatures, and they were likely in a nest-share similar to our house-share. A female mouse gives birth to a litter of five to eight mice and can be pregnant up to 10 times a year. We read forum posts that claimed mice were doubly incontinent (something I’ve since learned is fake news), and our horror began to grow.

Apple’s cheapest desktop computer is no longer a bargain but its newest, fastest chip makes it a pocket powerhouse

Apple’s latest Mac mini brings real speed and power for far more than everyday tasks in a practically pocketable form you can fit almost anywhere.

The impressive new desktop machine is the first to receive an update to Apple’s latest M6 chip while remaining smaller than a headphones box. It is the cheapest computer Apple sells with an M-series chip, but like every other memory-containing piece of electronics, it has been hit by RAMageddon, driving up the starting price to £899 (€1,049/$899/A$1,449) from the £599 or equivalent of its M4 predecessor.

Your other favourites included a lovely lamp, timeless jeans and a heated airer. Hunker down, anyone?

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It may be unseasonably warm, but September’s bestsellers list tells us you’re definitely in an autumn state of mind. Some of you are embracing the unofficial new year with a backpack perfect for commuting or a bento box to avoid overpriced work lunches. Others are leaning into the darker evenings with a vibe-boosting portable lamp and a comfy mattress topper.

From a pocket umbrella and a heated airer to a gorgeous pen and cashmere scarf, September’s favourites make it clear that you’re ready to hunker down, get back to the grind and, most importantly, get cosy.

With autumnal comfort food in mind, it’s time to find the perfect pot for pies, gratins and roasting. Our chef put nine casserole dishes, from Le Creuset to John Lewis, to the test

• The best frying pans for every kind of cook

We are now firmly in slow-cooking season. Each weekend, you’ll likely find me tinkering over a pot in the kitchen, glass of wine in hand, tunes on, before retiring to the sofa to watch a film while the scent of beef shin ragu wafts through the house. A good casserole dish is essential to bring this vision into reality.

Many of my favourite meals emerge from them – from stews and lasagnes to gratins and pasta sauces. The quality of your casserole dish plays a vital role in how pleasurable the process of cooking such things is, so I’ve put some to the test.

We sift through the sweet and the sour of the creamy citrus dessert, but which ones are overloaded with additives and which are more generous with the juice?

• The best supermarket party cakes

Lemon cheesecake is traditionally made by whipping cream, cream cheese, sugar and lemon, then pouring that on to a base made from melted butter and crushed biscuits (butter, flour, oats, sugar), before putting it in the fridge to set. That’s eight ingredients max, yet the average for today’s store-bought versions is 24.

Every cake in today’s test falls firmly into the ultra-processed food category and typically contains at least five ingredients that aren’t found in domestic kitchens. Although real lemon juice or concentrate features in every one, lemon oil and acidity regulators are used to ensure that tart, lemony flavour.

Forget a head-to-toe overhaul. Whether it’s swapping loafers for lace-ups or mixing your metals, try these styling tweaks to give your look a fresh seasonal spin

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You know what I always think looks really chic? When someone is dressed timelessly, but with just one element that brings the outfit bang up to date. A look that is 90% personal style, 10% zeitgeist. That is such a good formula.

Being head-to-toe in new trends is not cool these days. It can look a little overeager, and your clothes end up wearing you rather than the other way around. But a look that plays it completely classic can feel a little safe.

A rich and sweet chicken main and a punchy tart to round off the meal

Despite the back-to-school, back-to-work vibes of September, I also think it’s a time of celebration. There’s the feeling of new things, with apples, corn, walnuts, squash and mushrooms appearing at the markets, and my garden has finally emerged from its drought-induced slumber, as if coming out of a trance – it is greener, more alive, reawakening. There’s still the odd bit of warm weather in which to play, too, so light up the grill, get creative in the kitchen and dance like it’s June again.

Transform two tins of baked beans into this creamy curry

Masala baked beans, tadka baked beans, curried baked beans, spicy baked beans; all avatars of spice-laced baked beans are a mainstay of British Asian kitchens. We were raised on this stuff – use as a toastie filler, to smother jacket potatoes, or scoop them up with roti. Enter baked beans butter masala. With a sharp sweetness, a versatile tin of baked beans already has all the foundations required to build a brilliant butter masala, so all we’re doing is dressing them up. I like to think of it as though the beans are donning a frock made of all the good stuff: butter, cream and spices.

This recipe is an edited extract from Modern Masala, by Sanjana Modha, published by Quadrille at £25. To order a copy for £22.50, go to guardianbookshop.com.

Spoons at the ready for 83-year-old Maria’s rustic risotto with pork and saffron, and Rita’s polenta-style rice with a punchy sauce

If I were to say “Italian rice”, you might well think “risotto” and “the Po Valley”. However, these two recipes come from Sardinia and the Marche, mainly because I wanted to share a few easy, not-laden-with-rules Italian rice dishes.

With its garish ‘grellow’ colour, mythological origins, secret recipe and limited supplies, the herbal liqueur made by French monks is now the coolest thing to order at the bar

It’s just after 9pm in drizzly Belleville, Paris. Too late for cocktails, too early for bedtime, but up the steep hill that straddles the 19th and 20th arrondissements, digestif hour is in sight.

In the past few years, more and more Parisians have been reaching for a glass of Chartreuse, an intensely green/yellow herbal liqueur with a folkloric backstory involving Carthusian monks, cholera and a recipe of omertà-like secrecy.

It seemed like a good idea to get a puppy with my partner, but then he left me. Single life was hard at first but my disobedient dog made me laugh again

In the spring of 2024, my boyfriend and I lay in bed scrolling through photos of puppies. What about this one? Or that one? We had only been dating for six months or so, but had become besotted quickly, making long-term plans and talking about our future.

Then I found the one: a scruffy, small terrier with black and brown markings on his back that looked like the world map and eyes like Galaxy Minstrels. We named him Dennis to connect him to my mum’s terrier, Beano, because she was ill at the time and I’d failed to provide her with a grandchild. A puppy was the consolation present.

Burnout or breakup are constant dangers when one partner carries too much of the mental load of looking after the home and family. Here’s how to spread the burden more evenly

Many households have an imbalance in domestic duties, and women often struggle from carrying the weight of the organisational side of life. Here, mental load experts share the secrets to having a more equitable home – and the rewards that can be gained from it.

My son adores helicopters, so we waved as hard as possible as it flew past. Then it suddenly looped and came back around

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

My sister lives in Ukraine; I live in Australia. We had gone five long years without seeing each other when we finally reunited during a trip to Los Angeles. One day we took my three-year-old son to the beach and spent the afternoon catching up.

We had a lot of conversations about people and kindness that day. I told her how I had noticed a softer side to men since having a son. As a woman, you’re often wary of construction workers, for example – what might they say to me when I walk past? But now when I pass a building site with my son, the workers often let him play with their radio, or beep a tractor to make him laugh. It was very heartwarming and gave me a whole new perspective on the other sex.

How did a solicitor who is the leader of the English Democrats and a Norwegian national fare on Brexit, surveillance and Ukraine?

Robin, 68, Essex

Occupation Solicitor

Government announcement sparks a rally in FTSE-listed housebuilders, but there are still a lot of unknowns

• Labour’s modest reheat of help to buy is worth a try

The government will unveil a fresh scheme to help people on to the housing ladder next month but a debate is already raging over whether it is first-time buyers or housebuilders who will be the biggest winners.

At the weekend, Andy Burnham announced plans for Your First Home, which aims to give a helping hand to first-time buyers who do not have the luxury of being able to call on the “bank of mum and dad”.

We are living in a collapsing property because of cost-cutting and delays over our subsidence claim

LV= General Insurance is forcing a family with three young children to live in a collapsing home because of cost-cutting and delays.

We lodged a claim for subsidence damage to our extension and conservatory in 2023. Instead of authorising the repairs recommended by independent experts, LV= has spent years stalling and proposing inadequate, superficial patching methods.

Savers face a dilemma: lock down the deals now or wait, with offers tipped to ‘get even better’

• Britain’s low-paid urged to sign up to savings scheme offering cash bonus

Returns on the top fixed-rate savings accounts are at their highest level in years and still climbing, with some now paying up to 5.25%.

It leaves those with money to put away facing a choice: lock into some of the best interest rates on offer in several years or hold your nerve in the hope they get even better?

Now TFL is threatening to seize goods for four penalties for a car I’ve never owned

Bailiffs turned up at my home to seize goods over four unpaid Ulez fines issued by Transport for London (TfL) that have nothing to do with me.

The saga began two months ago when I received four enforcement notices from CDER Group relating to a vehicle I have never owned.

There may be almost no research on pet aversion during and post-pregnancy, but it may not be particularly rare

About three weeks into her first pregnancy, Sylvia Luu began to loathe the smell of her border collie mix, Ranger.

Luu could hardly be in the same room as Ranger without becoming nauseous. His drool repulsed her, and she found the smell of his fur so disgusting she wore a nose plug all day.

Experts share what you need to know about GLP-1-related hair loss as the side-effect gets more attention from researchers

About 20 million people across the US, UK, and EU are taking GLP-1 receptor agonists like tirzepatide and semaglutide (Ozempic or Mounjaro are common brands) for weight loss and type 2 diabetes. As their use has surged, we’re learning more about their side-effects. One that’s been getting a lot of attention from researchers lately: hair loss.

In one survey of people who take these medications, 20% of respondents experienced hair shedding, although the lack of high-quality data from a randomized, controlled trial to assess this side-effect makes it difficult to know exactly how common it is.

I was a healthy 34-year-old when a mass of blood vessels ruptured in my brain. It took three neurosurgeons and a risky 16-hour operation to fix me

On a Sunday in May 2017, I was at the gym and using a chest press when there was this pop. It wasn’t a sound – it was more like a sigh in my body. There was no pain, but I went limp. I shuffled along the wall to some mats. I thought I was having a stroke, but I wasn’t slurring and my eyes and arms seemed fine. But my left leg felt numb – it was the weirdest feeling. Lying on my back with my legs bent, both knees stayed upright when I looked at them. When I looked away, the left one fell to the side.

I ended up in A&E for hours at nearby St Thomas’ hospital in London. I was 34, healthy and had started regaining feeling in my leg, so they theorised it was a bruised spine and thought it was safe to discharge me. Overworked staff and shift changes meant that when MRI images of my brain went missing, nobody tracked them down.

Madeleine Finlay sits down with her co-host and Guardian science editor, Ian Sample, to discuss three science stories from the week, including a study that offers a clue in the age-old debate about whether sex differences are present from birth or a product of socialisation. Also on the agenda is the super El Niño, which is predicted to lead to 450,000 deaths in the next six months, and an answer to why the UK’s meningitis outbreak earlier this year was so big.

The late designer’s niece echoes his sense of relaxation, as the house seeks to prove itself to potential buyers

A year after the death of Giorgio Armani, the Italian fashion house he founded in 1975 is facing increasing uncertainty about its future ownership.

In his will, Armani, who ruled over the business for 50 years, instructed his heirs to sell an initial 15% stake of the company within 18 months of his death. If a private sale does not materialise, an IPO is mandated to take place. Now there are reports the group is readying itself for formal talks with the French conglomerate LVMH, the beauty giant L’Oréal and the eyewear group EssilorLuxottica – three of Armani’s preferred acquirers – over the possible sale of a minority stake.

Critics say partnership between Mounjaro maker Eli Lilly and fashion giant suggests thinness is an aspiration

The fifth iteration of Vogue World, overseen by Anna Wintour, took place in Milan on Tuesday night. Gigi Hadid and Jennifer Lopez provided theatrics on the catwalk, but it was one of the event’s backers that caused the biggest stir.

Eli Lilly, an American pharmaceutical company that manufactures a wide range of medicines, including weight-loss jabs Mounjaro and the Foundayo pill, was listed in the event credits as one of its “fashion adjacent” sponsors.

A look evoking memories of All Saints and Destiny’s Child has fashion editors, Brad Pitt and the high street all blending in

Discussing their style while in All Saints, Nicole and Natalie Appleton said earlier this year that some things don’t change: “Army trousers and combat trousers will always be a staple with us.”

If, for a long time after All Saints’ noughties heyday, the sisters would have known this look was not the height of fashion, things have changed in 2026. Judging by those attending shows at London fashion week this month, camo is very much back.

With Jennifer Lopez providing some star power, the Italian house’s Milan show came at a crucial time for the brand

Earlier this week Jennifer Lopez walked down the Vogue World catwalk in Milan wearing a black beaded A-line bustier dress from Dolce & Gabbana. On Saturday, she sat in the front row at the Italian house’s womenswear show in a three-piece velvet suit from the same brand, her look topped off with a baker-boy cap.

The reminder of Dolce & Gabbana’s inimitable celebrity connection is no coincidence. In a turbulent luxury market, the brand has found itself trying to navigate a nearly £400m debt pile.

A new direct train service connects the far south of Sweden to the Norwegian capital in just over six hours, with the option of stopping off in the seaside town of Varberg or lively Gothenburg en route

‘This carriage is due for modernisation. Don’t miss the opportunity to experience 90s Germany style,” reads the sign on the door to the dining carriage. The couple inside aren’t missing theirs: they’re taking endless selfies in the clinical pink-and-turquoise carriage that looks like a hospital canteen and smells like cinnamon buns and strong filter coffee.

I’m on Snälltåget’s iconic red-shelled train, on the Swedish rail company’s new route from Malmö to Oslo – a 6.5-hour journey along Sweden’s picturesque western corridor. Until now, the journey between the two cities involved long bus rides and fragmented train transfers. This direct line is easier and cheaper, with tickets starting at £11 each way. It’s already a hit, shuttling more than 25,000 passengers since launching this summer.

‘Kölsch is not a drink, it is a religion’ in Cologne, and it’s only brewed in and around the German city. But which of the many beautiful, storied beer halls serves up the best?

There’s a saying in Cologne, repeated with the mild smugness of people who know they’re right: kölsch is the only culture you can drink. It sounds like a line lifted straight from the tourist board’s brochure. Then you spend a day working your way around the city’s traditional brewhouses and realise it’s a statement of fact.

Since 1997, kölsch has held a protected geographical indication within the EU, guaranteeing that any beer bearing the name is brewed within 50km of the city and made strictly to the Kölsch-Konvention. That agreement, signed in 1986, defined the style as “a light, highly attenuated, hop-accentuated, clear, top-fermenting ‘vollbier’ [full-beer]”, restricting production exclusively to the local area. It is, in effect, the champagne of pale ales: locally adored and tied to a city that has always insisted on doing things its own way.

Get inspiration for your next short break with our pick of self-catering accommodation, from a sleek Highlands retreat to a cabin with a hot tub on a Somerset vineyard

• 15 great small hotels, inns and restaurants with rooms for an autumn stay in the UK

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From a cosy Cornish inn with open fires to a boutique hotel in Northumberland, these new and revamped boltholes tick all the right boxes

• 15 great cottages and cabins for an autumn escape in the UK

Don’t water based on the month or the season – be led by what the plant is actually doing

The problem
Cutting back on watering for winter has become so ingrained that people start rationing by the calendar, giving plants just a fraction of the water they had in summer, because the season changed.

The hack
The advice to reduce is because, as light levels drop, most houseplants slow their growth, use less water and dry out more slowly, so watering as you did in summer risks waterlogging the roots and causing rot.

I used to be terrified of socialising, certain I would embarrass myself the moment I opened my mouth. And as for dates …

As with a lot of teenagers, social confidence was not my strong suit. Throughout my time at school in the early 2010s, I hated the prospect of new social situations and would often lie awake at night overthinking the day to come.

What I now know to be social anxiety I dismissed as just nerves at that young age. Although I knew something wasn’t quite right, for most of my early teens I managed to disguise my discomfort. Sharing a friendship group with my twin sister meant I could hide behind my sibling.

When the Mr England contest put out a call for entrants, only seven people signed up. Now, with 13 days to go until the final, the organisers are getting desperate

Age: At least two years old.

Appearance: A hunkless vista, as far as the eye can see.

The Marches, Shropshire: On a day of micro-dramas past and present, we witness a Welsh victory over the English, just as it was 861 years ago

I’m telling the story from a pub in the bailey opposite the ruins of Oswestry Castle. There in 1165, Henry II, the Angevin (Anglo-Norman) king of England, gathered troops from the Marcher Lords to advance on an alliance of Welsh princes for control of the Marches.

The previous Sunday, 861 years later, we went the same way as Henry’s army to Chirk Castle, Castell Y Waun a’r Ardd, to see a re-enactment of the Battle of Crogen. The present castle wasn’t built back then and the battle at Crogen was in the Ceiriog Valley below. Henry had sent woodsmen to raze woodland in the valley to remove the Welsh advantage, but he left one oak, Quercus petraea, at which Owain Gwynedd gathered his army.

A teenager struggling with climate anxiety searches for hope in an unexpected place – writing letters to imprisoned activists. Max, 14, is on a quest to understand the human stories behind direct action and why so many climate protesters are in prison​. As replies begin to arrive, a dialogue bridging generations unfolds and connection transforms despair into purpose. ​When Max writes to the judge presiding over a high-profile trial​, he is surprised to hear the letter referred to in the judge's closing remarks

Removal of war debris, in which lives, memories and unexploded Israeli bombs lie buried, is one of largest clearance operations in modern history

It took all day to clear a section of road in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood in Gaza City. At the end of it, Ahmed Alyan, a UN engineer, was exhausted, surrounded by mountains of rubble despite the day’s work.

“I feel as if we are holding a spoon and trying to empty the sea,” Alyan said, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead after a long, hot summer day.

Scientists are racing to understand how fires behave to predict and prevent them as hotter summers create tinderboxes

From the scorched heathlands of the New Forest to the smouldering valleys of south Wales and burned-out homes in Stourbridge, an extraordinary summer of wildfires has left its mark across Britain.

To most of us, these charred landscapes may look like pure devastation, but to a trained wildfire investigator they are full of clues. Heat-scorched leaves can become frozen in position, preserving evidence of the wind direction as the fire passed through. Soot or staining on rocks, the pattern of fallen grass and bracken, and even how those stems have burned, provide further information about how the fire itself moved.

Ukrainian forces airdrop supplies to city where bodies are left to be eaten by dogs because of deadly risk from drones

The phone message sent out of Russian-occupied Oleshky was grimly matter-of-fact: food had finally run out for the 2,000 or so civilians, including 50 children, remaining in the city and its surrounding villages.

“We’re in Oleshky [and] we can’t get out. We’re going hungry … Right now, I’ve got absolutely nothing to eat,” read the message from a woman in the besieged city who was waiting to be evacuated by the occupying forces.

If you have been affected by the events in Gloucestershire you can share your experiences or news tips direct with our journalists

Five men were arrested on suspicion of explosive and terrorism offences after armed police stopped three vans near RAF Fairford in the early hours of Sunday.

Dozens of households in the Cotswolds village of Whelford were subsequently evacuated during the operation and have still not returned to their home.

There were 13,464 reported assaults against passengers and members of the public on the mainline railway in 2025-26

The number of reported assaults on Great Britain’s railways has risen to a record high of almost 25,000 incidents in a year, data published by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) shows.

There were 13,464 reported assaults against passengers and members of the public on the mainline railway in 2025-26, up 36% on the previous year and the highest number recorded by the ORR since it started tracking the figures in 2004.

We’d like to hear from people in England who used the government’s previous equity loan scheme to buy their first home about how it worked out for them

The government has announced plans for a new scheme to help first-time buyers purchase a home. The programme, called “Your first home”, is intended to help buyers in England who have a regular income but have been unable to save for a large deposit or don’t have financial support from their family.

We’d like to hear from people who used the previous help-to-buy equity loan scheme. Did it help you buy a home you otherwise couldn’t have afforded?

How has loneliness affected you? Please share your experience

We live in an age where we have better tools for communication and connection than ever before, and yet we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic.

In 2025, a World Health Organization report identified that 1 in 6 people globally are lonely. The report defined loneliness as “the painful feeling that arises from a gap between desired and actual social connections.” Perhaps, most strikingly, the age bracket that had the highest levels of loneliness was 13–29-year-olds.

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