He grew up in the ghetto, became a global superstar – then gave it all up. Why did he step away from the spotlight?

Mr T explains why he’s late, but he wants to make one thing clear – this is not an apology. “You caught me in my devotion, and nothing comes before God. So I won’t say I apologise for the delay. I just want you to know that God comes first in all my life. For allowing my success, I give God the glory.”

He is here to discuss a new Netflix documentary, Untold Mr T: I Pity the Fool. At 74, he rarely gives interviews. But when Mr T decides to talk, he really does talk. What Mr T thinks, Mr T says. And I’ve never heard anyone trash the very thing they’re here to promote quite like Mr T does today.

Instagrammers have upended the British restaurant scene, and amassed followings in the millions. But has their moment already passed?

In 2017, two aspiring YouTubers going by the name Topjaw published a video posing the London foodie’s most important question: what to eat in Chinatown? They enlisted the help of longtime Instagrammer Kar-Shing Tong (better known by his username @ks_ate_here), who took them on a lovingly curated loop of the neighbourhood. Cantonese siu mei duck at Four Seasons, Chongqing-style handmade noodles at the now defunct Little Wooden Hut, and Barshu on Frith Street, where they decadently cracked a whole crab for the camera. Any of the 100,000-odd viewers who watched it at the time would be well served by its responsible (if unspectacular) recommendations. But in retrospect, the video may be of more interest to historians. In its unassuming and rapidly cut seven minutes, you can almost see the tectonic plates of the food world begin to shift.

Tong is the elder statesman: the @ks_ate_here account began in the social media dark ages, first on Twitter then on an Instagram that was dominated by static photography. He’s in his element in the video, dutifully explaining the history and technique behind the dishes. He is relaxed and affable in front of the camera, but in his own work he doesn’t show his face often – it just wasn’t the style. Topjaw is something different. Nine years ago, it was still embryonic: host Jesse Burgess sweating profusely at any hint of chilli, cameraman Will Warr unable to use chopsticks. But the formula was there. The constant checking in to see if what they’re eating truly is “the best”. Even doubled over from the heat of a spicy fish soup, Burgess’s eyes always find the camera. He holds out food for inspection and addresses the imagined viewer. The audience is out there. “KS has 40,000 Instagram followers! 40,000!” Burgess says, pointing at Tong with aspirational glee.

He is famed for creating a golden loo that was stolen and a $6m banana that was eaten. But, says the sculptor ahead of a major new show in Germany, there’s more to his work than pranks and provocation

Maurizio Cattelan, the art world’s merriest prankster, pauses when asked which object in his sprawling new Berlin show is most likely to be defaced, stolen or eaten, then emits a foghorn of a laugh. “There is no need to vandalise anything,” says the trim, soulful Italian, explaining that he has already taken care of all that, given how the work cuts villains, imposters and straw men down to size. “But,” he says, referring to the show’s more daring works, “maybe we need someone to resuscitate people.”

Cattelan, who speaks in a lilting English, grins broadly, a mischievous glint in his brown eyes. Speaking on the subterranean level of Mies van der Rohe’s weightless Neue Nationalgalerie (NNG) in Berlin, he darts between the impish and the profound in conversation, mirroring the dizzying range of his work. The silver-haired sculptor is best known for duct-taping a banana to a wall in 2019 and calling it Comedian, in a droll commentary on the excesses of the art market. The joke became even funnier when it sold for $6.2m, then hilarious when its buyer took a bite out of his purchase and swallowed it.

The race to study the North Water between Canada and Greenland before it changes has led to a bold plan for an Inuit-run protected area

Electric-blue meltwater sprays up under Terry Noah’s snowmobile as he races across sea ice extending out from Canada’s northernmost public community: Grise Fiord in Nunavut, a hamlet of 144 people closer to Murmansk in Russia than the Canadian city of Toronto. The bay’s cliffs loom higher and higher like stone icebergs as he approaches his destination across the bay.

Noah pulls his sled carefully over a seal’s breathing hole, about the circumference of a basketball. Using a custom-made winch, he lowers a submersible instrument into the sea below the ice.

Actor will play 15th-century hero in sweeping production about Welsh rebellion against English crown

There are myriad films, plays and books focusing on heroes of English, Scottish and Irish history but far fewer that tell the stories of the great figures of Wales.

A major new play about the Welsh nobleman Owain Glyndŵr’s early 15th-century rebellion against the English crown will help redress the balance this autumn.

Thousands of service personnel took part in dangerous cold war-era nuclear tests. The government owes them the truth – and compensation

In December 2018, as defence minister, I inadvertently misled parliament. Asked whether blood samples had been taken from service personnel for radiological monitoring during the nuclear bomb tests, I relayed the line provided to me by the Ministry of Defence: it was “unable to locate any information” suggesting blood samples had been taken for radiological monitoring at the tests.

I now know the reality was very different – these samples were taken across the armed services branches. But those veterans seeking compensation for serious illnesses developed after radiation exposure have been unable to access them. This is among the greatest scandals in Britain, and it must be addressed.

Tobias Ellwood is a former defence minister and the author of Ten Steps to Prevent World War Three

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

Green party leader announces run in Holborn and St Pancras constituency in north London following the resignation of former PM

• Full report: Zack Polanski to stand in Keir Starmer seat as Green party candidate

This is from the New Statesman’s Megan Kenyon on Zack Polanski standing in Holborn and St Pancras.

I reckon it’s unlikely that he will be contested (who would want to challenge the party leader) but not everyone in the Green Party thinks it’s a good idea that he’s thrown his hat into the ring. A mega few weeks ahead.

One repercussion of Polanski taking part in the by-election is that it limits the broadcast coverage he can get for the Green conference in early Oct, assuming the by-election is after that. There are fairly strict rules for election candidates - as Nigel Farage found out this summer.

The uplift, worth £10bn per year, will be funded by further cuts to the spiralling welfare bill, building on the party’s existing pledges to cut welfare by £23bn, and by reprioritising funding from other areas. This represents the largest real-terms increase in defence spending in a generation …

We will:

Dodgy Tory economics won’t fund Britain’s defences. The British people won’t forget Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives hollowed out our armed forces and blew holes in the UK’s proud international reputation.

This proposal uses the same money they’ve already spent on other things and appears to break the Tories’ so-called golden economic rule. This is just days after Kemi Badenoch promoted a key architect of the Liz Truss mini-Budget as her shadow chancellor. It’s the same old Tories – they haven’t listened and they haven’t learned.

Event is likely to be largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into a world already in a climate crisis

The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts.

The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever recorded.

Exclusive: New data shows poorer pupils and those with Send are disproportionately affected by the measure

The proportion of secondary school students in England removed from class and placed in “internal exclusion” as a disciplinary measure has almost trebled in three years, according to new data.

The data shows the proportion of secondary pupils removed from normal lessons went up from 5% in the 2022/2023 academic year to 13% in 2025/26 – a 160% increase.

Case is latest in string of post-Brexit deportations from country, which has been criticised for high refusal rate for British people to remain

The wife of a British man detained by police in Stockholm on Tuesday ahead of a threatened deportation has pleaded with Andy Burnham to get involved in the Brexit catastrophe unfolding for many British citizens in Sweden.

Charles, who does not want to be fully identified, and his Swedish wife, Lily, were summoned to the police station at 10am on Tuesday, where he was told he would be held at a detention centre and deported within the next two weeks.

Swap rates rise to three-year high as increase in oil prices leads to fears of higher inflation

• Business live – latest updates

Homeowners in the UK are braced for a jump in mortgage rates, driven by higher inflation and interest rate increase expectations amid turmoil in the global bond markets.

UK swap rates, which lenders use to price mortgages, have risen to a three-year high, as this week’s global bond market sell-off ripples through the economy.

Wayve robotaxis added to Uber app and will have human in front ready to take over if needed – but only 15 cars licensed

Londoners are now able to hire self-driving taxis for the first time, after rides in Wayve’s autonomous vehicles were added to the Uber app on Thursday.

The chances of landing a robotaxi on request immediately are slim, with only 15 vehicles so far licensed. That contrasts with the more than 100,000 private hire vehicles in the capital – roughly the same number of Uber customers who have registered to take autonomous rides.

Thousands remain missing and aid is hampered by treacherous conditions in communities almost wiped out of existence

Searching for the body of his wife in the mud, Dil Bahadur Shrestha lamented that he did not even have a shovel left. For now, he has been using his hands to try to find her as he picks through the ruins of his house.

On Wednesday morning last week, Jamuna Shrestha, his wife of 50 years, had been at home in Betrawati on the banks of Nepal’s Trishuli River, feeding her beloved chickens and goats.

Dil Bahadur Shrestha, who is searching for his wife of 50 years, Jamuna.

Musk denied he was aware Grok ever produced ‘any naked underage images’

A survivor of child sexual abuse has sued Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, alleging that its chatbot used pictures of her abuse to generate new illegal pornographic images that depict her.

“Using real images of Plaintiff and class members, Grok generated child pornography depicting Plaintiff and class members,” states the complaint, which was filed last week in a US district court in California.

Visitors to Nostell in West Yorkshire will get to see cutting-edge research into work considered the only faithful copy of Holbein masterpiece

A spectacular, internationally important painting of Thomas More and his family is to have its secrets explored as the public look on.

The open heritage science project, scheduled to begin on Thursday, is a UK first and will deploy techniques used at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam during its famous public restoration of Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Night Watch.

Thousands of heat-related deaths in record-breaking temperatures appeared to only intensify hosts’ climate denials

As the first heatwave of the record-breaking summer arrived on 23 May, GB News host Cristo Foufas was not happy: “I am sick to death of the naysayers saying firstly that we’re all going to die and that we have to put out heat alerts, because, you know, just drink some water and drink a bit less rosé in the sunshine.”

“We used to call it Darwinism,” replied co-host Renée Hoenderkamp. She is a medical doctor.

As graduates of an online training course gather from across the continent, the consensus is overwhelming: computers and saving animals go together

On a bitingly cold night in Lapalala Wilderness nature reserve in South Africa’s Limpopo province, Duncan Kanyakera watches as instructor Jacques Viljoen deploys a thermal drone in search of a lone cheetah. Once the drone has disappeared into the inky sky, Kanyakera, from Tsavo in Kenya, and 20 other conservation professionals from across Africa turn their attention to the open-air screen in anticipation.

Many of the students – from 11 African countries as far flung as Benin, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar – witnessing the demonstration have earned their places at Lapalala after performing well on an online training programme for protected area technicians (PAT) run by the Connected Conservation Foundation (CCF). Also on the course, are five members of Peace Parks staff in training.

The Hollywood hottie is back as the quarterback in disguise, in an oddball comedy that is naughty, lovable and disarmingly unique

In the first episode of season two of Chad Powers, there is but one concern: the main character’s nose has fallen off.

The TV outlet for the wacky side of movie hottie Glen Powell, Chad Powers presents itself to us having willingly taken on the burden of a ludicrous premise. Powell is Russ Holliday, a former hotshot college-football quarterback who, eight years ago, committed a career-cancelling faux pas during the televised game that was meant to make him a star. With his sporting dreams suddenly vaporised, he became an obnoxious playboy. But then, just as he felt his feet starting to scrape rock bottom, he heard that a university in Georgia was holding open tryouts for a new quarterback. Donning prosthetic whiskers, teeth, hair and an occasionally unreliable nose – a slightly more sophisticated version of a joke-shop disguise – Russ became “Chad Powers”, a southern oddball and the new star of the team, while constantly dealing with the threat of being found out and sent home.

As FromSoftware’s new multiplayer game The Duskbloods nears release, the legendary game director behind Dark Souls talks connection, pessimism and of course, feet

Since 2020’s Demon’s Souls, Japanese video game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has shown the world a different way to think about game design. His games defy convention with punishing fights, obscure rules, and unknowable, inhospitable worlds. The “Soulslike” genre – named after Demon’s Souls and its sequel Dark Souls – is now ubiquitous, influencing multimillion-sellers from God of War and Star Wars: Jedi to Hollow Knight. Miyazaki’s most recent success, 2022’s Elden Ring, which credited Game of Thrones author George RR Martin as a co-creator, sold over 30m copies and inspired Alex Garland to adapt it for the big screen at A24. It earned Miyazaki a spot on Time magazine’s “most influential” list, an accolade he shares with just one other game developer: Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyazaki is now 51 and has been FromSoftware’s president since 2014, elevated from game designer to CEO after the success of the Souls series. He has a cherubic face that could pass for 35. He rarely speaks publicly, and never on camera. When he does speak, he answers questions like one of his characters – softly, sadly, his head bowed, making eye-contact only when I am speaking. Outside the studio where we speak is the sprawl of Tokyo’s Shinjuku, an ever-changing maze where tourists get lost and pop-up stores appear and vanish without a trace. Today, a J-pop band performs in the square as the cicadas scream from the trees. A gilded statue of Melania, one of Elden Ring’s toughest bosses, looms over this dimly lit conference room inside From’s headquarters, a bonfire checkpoint away from the chaos.

Robin keeps used packaging on the kitchen ledge. Benny thinks that’s unhygienic. You decide who’s talking rubbish

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

We’ve had little flies buzzing around – I know they’re coming from the recycling

The literary critic brings his vast reading to bear on life’s most inescapable fact

Terry Eagleton is not a fan of sloppy thinking, especially when it comes to the granite fact of death. He particularly doesn’t like the attitude of Dylan Thomas who famously urged his ailing father to “not go gentle into that good night”. If the “night” – death – is so “good” then why, asks Eagleton reasonably, would Thomas want his dad to dawdle? Shouldn’t DJ Thomas, rather, be encouraged to trot towards his lovely end like an ecstatic marathon runner on the home straight?

Eagleton’s reproach to Thomas’s doublethink should not be read as panicky denial about the reality of his own mortality. To the contrary, Eagleton, who at 83 admits that he wasn’t sure whether this book would end up being published posthumously, finds it hard to think or write about much else. After a 60-year academic career spent tussling with Marxist literary theory, not to mention the epistemological void at the heart of postmodernism criticism, these days Eagleton is more interested in pondering death and how it “lacks a sense of occasion”. It might visit, for example, while you happen to be dressed in a giraffe outfit.

Misfits Together, by Bastille’s Dan Smith and To Kill a King’s Ralph Pelleymounter, is set amid the 1950s’ ‘red scare’

It was lampooned as the union of the “hourglass” and the “egghead” – the marriage, in the summer of 1956, between Hollywood superstar Marilyn Monroe and Pulitzer-winning playwright Arthur Miller. Now, a new stage musical is to give a nuanced and intimate portrait of that famous relationship, treat each as trailblazers in their own way and reveal parallels between the volatile state of the US during the 50s “red scare” and now.

The production, which opens next autumn at Leicester’s Curve, is called Misfits Together, a reference to the film Miller wrote for Monroe that was released shortly after their divorce in 1961. It is a foray into musical theatre by two indie musicians, Dan Smith of the band Bastille and Ralph Pelleymounter from To Kill a King, who have recorded the score as a studio album. The first track, Oh America, is out on Thursday.

His destructive pace and power changed the game for ever, but behind the fame and ineffable exterior of this gentle giant was a life of chaos and emotional discord

There’s an inevitable air of melancholy overhanging this profile of New Zealand rugby star Jonah Lomu; we all know how the story ended for this magnificent human specimen, who died in 2015 aged 40 as a result of a longterm kidney disorder. Lomu, of course, became a legend of the game after breaking into the All Blacks side – the ferociously high-achieving New Zealand national team, for anyone outside the rugby-appreciating universe – at the scarcely believable age of 19; his special combination of a tank-like physique, electric pace and ability to slalom at high speed gave him an almost unstoppable force in what is arguably the toughest contact sport of all. Lomu had the bulk and power of a forward (I liked the detail that he was sometimes drafted into the back of the scrum when they needed “more power”) but he was set loose on the wing, where he was twice the speed and three times the size of everyone else, and where his destructive instincts could wreak havoc.

Well, modern rugby appears to have learned the Lomu lesson; everyone has bulked up – so its arguable whether he would have the same impact today. But as this film underlines, there was a lot more to Lomu’s story than steamrolling the hapless English backline; he had a complicated relationship both with his Tongan heritage and his superstar status, the combination of which seemed to overwhelm him. Interestingly, this film (directed by Gavin Fitzgerald and Vea Mafile’o) initially appears to push the by-now customary idea that Lomu’s Indigenous heritage was an ineffable source of strength, wisdom and insight; however it soon becomes clear that this wasn’t entirely the case.

For more than a decade Caleb Stein has been photographing a communal swimming creek in Poughkeepsie, New York. Returning every summer, he documented the community at a timeless spot. He talks about the people he has met

Down by the Hudson is published by Palo Press with an accompanying exhibition opening in New York on 10 September

Small changes are what I’m aiming for – 10-minute workouts, cleaning out my handbag. Then I’m less likely to have failed come October

Are you a January resolutions or a September reset person? The latter has always felt more propitious to me, light of the exhaustion of Christmas and with the weather still on our side. Last week, when the Pavlovian response to buying new stationery (for my kids) kicked in, I found myself following a rote impulse to sort my life out by replacing the bag in the vacuum cleaner and committing to an unsustainable course of personal change. This is it! The beginning of a new way of life, driven by sharp pencils and the crispness of autumn.

I mean, it won’t last. But while most of us have read enough advisories cautioning against new year resolutions as durable, somehow September still promises the earth. I can’t shake it. As soon as the breeze picks up and the leaves start to turn, I feel my pilot light ignite – and the urge to sign up to unaffordable personal training sets in. It feels like an ancient response. I’m not writing this while leaning on a dry stone wall or managing my sheepdogs, but still; the sensory changes brought in by autumn surely activate latent energies in all of us. If you can avoid pumpkin spice and survive the costume search for Halloween, September triggers good feelings of renewal via the psychic memory of our serf forebears bringing in the harvest.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

The race to succeed Emmanuel Macron is looming, but rarely has the mood been so gloomy or the lure of extremist solutions so alarming

France, as the French travel writer Sylvain Tesson once noted, “is a paradise inhabited by people who think they live in hell”. As the campaign for next year’s presidential election hits its stride with ever more wannabes declaring their candidacies, the country is in a particularly sullen mood.

If the vote were held now, the anti-immigration populist Marine Le Pen would have a strong chance of romping into the Élysée palace, riding a wave of voter disillusionment with the entire political class and a sense that “we’ve tried everything else”. But a lot can happen between now and 18 April 2027, the date of the first round. France is also a country of sudden shocks.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

Free AI models that are as good as the investment-hungry US versions will disrupt global markets, and offer Britain a lesson

Almost from the moment it began, the end of the Chinese economic miracle has been much anticipated. Thick and fast, the books have come explaining how it will end badly. Overinvestment. A country wallowing in debt. The collapse of the property market. Political repression. The demand for democracy from a growing middle class. All have been put forward as reasons for the inevitable terminal crisis.

Even those impressed by the country’s rapid growth took comfort from the notion that the west would continue to dominate advanced manufacturing while China would be stuck assembling TVs. And while the wait for its much-predicted demise has gone on and on, China has become the workshop of the world.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

Like Johnny Depp and Chris Brown before him, Homme has got past his chequered history to retain an adoring fanbase. Almost a decade post-#MeToo, audiences no longer seem to care

As part of the promo for Queens of the Stone Age’s new album Perfecth, the band has set up a novelty complaints hotline for fans to call. “No bitching too big, no whiny too tiny,” it promises. I’ll bite: how about the fact that frontman Josh Homme’s ex-wife Brody Dalle testified in court that he head-butted her so hard that she “saw stars” and said he had fantasised about killing her? Or that he kicked a female photographer in the face? It’s certainly not what anyone’s talking about as part of Homme’s friendly neighbourhood rock star image rehabilitation: duetting on Shania Twain’s new album, taking the couch on Celebrity Gogglebox, teatime BBC 6 Music interviews.

Homme and Dalle clearly had a complicated relationship: he allegedly tried to throw her boyfriend off a balcony; he claims that she was violent towards him; both have taken out restraining orders against one another; Homme has full custody of their kids after Dalle’s boyfriend was found to have forged her signature on an application for a restraining order. Homme has recently talked about coming through a dark period, including successful treatment for cancer, and getting a handle on his vices. Nevertheless, there is clear footage of him brutally kicking the camera of photographer Chelsea Lauren back into her face, which he acknowledged in an apology video, and court testimony from Dalle alleging that a drunk Homme told her “I want to fucking strangle you right now” on one occasion, and head-butted her on another.

Young men are being taught that acts with the potential to kill are erotic. The Albanese government must urgently regulate big tech and criminalise pornography depicting strangulation

Last week, a 16-year-old girl was found unresponsive in a home on Sydney’s northern beaches. She was airlifted to hospital and died two days later. New South Wales police are investigating her death as the result of a sexual strangulation act. Sources told the ABC the deceased may have experienced a seizure following asphyxiation, and that officers were told the sex was consensual.

While that investigation has yet to run its course, speaking generally, strangulation during sex is not a new phenomenon or conversation. Just a few years ago it was relatively taboo to criticise this normalisation of violence in sex – it was often framed as “anti-kink” to raise concern about this dangerous act that is increasingly depicted in mainstream pornography.

Labour is up against a Tory party with a leader who can’t stop getting lost in her own sense of brilliance. And then there’s Andrew Griffith

Call it the gentlest of all reality checks. A quantum realignment in expectations. The faintest reminder to both Andy Burnham and Labour backbenchers that international bond markets are impervious to Manchester charm and positivity. Despite a summer of feelgood announcements from the government, there is no escaping the fact that the country is still up shit creek. It’s going to be a tough ride ahead. Nothing will come pain-free.

Still, a new prime minister has to learn to take the wins – however small – as they come along. In the wider scheme of things, a good prime minister’s questions means next to nothing: it’s nothing more than politics as performance. Yet it can set the tone and buy a prime minister some goodwill from MPs and the media. Plus, it’s a weekly event so you may as well be good at it.

‘U-turn’ doesn’t do justice to the myriad ways he found to break a pledge. Now the former PM is resigning as an MP, why did I have such high hopes?

Keir Starmer exits the British political stage as he entered it: doing the exact opposite of the thing he said he was going to do. It’s only 10 weeks since he pledged to remain as MP for Holborn and St Pancras until the next election, despite stepping down as prime minister. That’s plainly the decent course of action: a dedicated Labour man wouldn’t want to force a byelection. Even if it’s a slam dunk for the party, it inevitably draws focus and resources from more important matters. Someone who takes the business of representing constituents even a 10th as seriously as all MPs say they do would feel that the honour of those votes should be repaid.

It’s a pretty boring life for an ex-PM turned backbencher. You have to keep your counsel as a large amount of blame is tacitly shovelled your way, while keeping your opinions to yourself. But that second requirement was the one thing Starmer was really good at. Once it transpired that the opinions he said out loud were open to endless revision and denial, I was never able to figure out what the real ones were.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

The Conservative leader’s choice of a new shadow chancellor shows a lack of insight into the reasons why the party was defeated at the last election

To outlast a prime minister always counts as some kind of achievement for an opposition leader, although Kemi Badenoch cannot claim credit for Sir Keir Starmer’s downfall. Sir Keir’s wounds were mostly self-inflicted. To the extent that opposition pressure was involved, it was electoral threats from Reform UK and the Green party that stoked Labour party frustration to a regicidal pitch. The Tory leader’s role was largely as a spectator.

Mrs Badenoch still hopes to use regime change to her advantage. She thinks the economy, and fiscal discipline in particular, will be her most fruitful line of attack. In their first confrontation at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, the Conservative leader called Mr Burnham a “spendthrift” and “people pleaser” who will dodge the tough decisions required to prove Britain’s creditworthiness on international markets. She expects him to yield to Labour MPs’ demands for budget increases, which will then have to be financed with tax rises.

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

International law, European action and UK public opinion point the same way. Britain should stop helping to sustain Israeli settlements economically

In the Commons this week, the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, appeared to have accepted the principle of a trade ban between the UK and Israeli settlements, which Britain says are illegal under international law. This is long overdue. The test now is whether his promised “comprehensive reset” deserves the name. Stopping settlement-produced goods at the border is not enough. Britain should prohibit its companies from sustaining settlement activity – by financing, constructing, insuring, advertising – in territory whose occupation it regards as unlawful. The ban must have teeth.

The UK can no longer ignore the violence and pressure exerted on Palestinians in the West Bank by Israel’s government, military and settlers. There have been more than 1,400 settler attacks so far this year, according to the UN, against a record 1,800 registered in 2025. An election campaign has only made matters worse. Last month, Israel issued tenders for 1,234 homes in the 3,401-unit E1 development east of Jerusalem. The country’s ministers gave the green light for the controversial settlement – long condemned for effectively bisecting the West Bank – expressly to “erase” the idea of a Palestinian state, the creation of which the UK officially supports.

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

Helen Macdonald responds to a report by the parliamentary and health service ombudsman

The parliamentary and health service ombudsman’s findings are stark and sadly familiar (Autism and ADHD care complaints more than triple in five years in England, 26 August). A more than 200% rise in complaints, years-long waits, patients paying thousands of pounds for private care when the NHS fails them, and a system so complex that people are routinely denied rights they are legally entitled to – these are exactly the issues that the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) has been documenting and raising for years.

What the ombudsman’s report does not fully address is what happens once people are assessed and diagnosed. Too many people with ADHD and autism receive a diagnosis only to find that there is no evidence-based treatment pathway attached to it. Cognitive behavioural therapy is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence for the anxiety and depression that commonly accompany neurodevelopmental conditions, and in specific contexts for adults with ADHD itself. Yet workforce shortages mean that even where the clinical will exists, the capacity often does not. A diagnosis without access to appropriate treatment is a hollow outcome.

It is no use promising to reform politics and return power to the people without addressing the power of the big beasts, writes Paul Sawbridge. Plus letters from Marcus Hallside and Martin Knott

So much for a new way of doing politics. Even before parliament had convened under his premiership, Andy Burnham had already stumbled at the first hurdle (Burnham drops support for political funding cap aimed at curbing mega-donors, 26 August).

Despite widespread support for hard caps to political donations, and despite years of affirming support for such measures, a whisper of opposition from the union lobby has produced a screeching U-turn.

Alison Smith says food bans do not improve compliance, they create a false sense of security in patients

As the mother of a child with anaphylactic allergies, I am sympathetic to the terror that Lucy Pasha-Robinson describes (Food allergies when flying are no joke. That’s why nuts should be banned on planes, 27 August). Indeed, last summer I spent six hours compulsively cleaning on a demonstrably filthy flight. Flight crew handed out wipes to passengers “to clean your tray tables”, then proceeded to serve packets of cashews (my child’s anaphylactic nut) with drinks. My nerves were shredded by the time we arrived in Chicago.

However, I am firmly against the banning of nuts from the skies. Food bans do not improve compliance, and they create a false sense of security in patients.

Words of condolence | Autumn versus winter | More fitting names

Polly Hudson writes about how people don’t know what to say to the bereaved (26 August). Trust me, the bereaved don’t either. My parents died in a car crash. I watched people sheer away in absolute mind-numbing embarrassment, not because they didn’t care, but because they were afraid they would make it worse. Well, you can’t make it worse, trust me. And we’re not looking for poetry. A simple “I’m sorry for your loss” is perfect.
Isobel Cassidy
Ardtrasna, County Sligo, Ireland

• It seems appropriate to write about grief following a bereavement to thank the fellow Guardian letter writers who have contacted me via the letters editor. Their kind words have really helped me over the last few weeks, and are read and reread on a regular basis.
Ian Grieve
Gordon Bennett, Llangollen canal

Enzo Fernández and Sandro Tonali had big-money summer moves, but can they hold a candle to past greats?

Perhaps the only thing you really need to know about the modern midfield role is that Enzo Maresca reckons that Marc Guéhi can play it better than Mateo Kovacic. Guéhi, in reality a centre-back, started the season in midfield for Manchester City, ahead of Kovacic, the now-departed Nico González, and Matheus Nunes. In this context City’s purchase of Enzo Fernández for a club record £125m can be seen in one of two ways: either an enormous statement of intent, or a hell of a lot of money to pay for Guéhi’s understudy.

We jest, of course. Fernández is in fact a very different kind of midfielder to Guéhi, largely on the basis that he actually is a midfielder. Versatile, able to receive deep from the goalkeeper or the centre-halves; capable of recycling or progressing the ball in tight spots, driving into final-third positions as a No 8, ghosting into the penalty area and offering an advanced goal threat. Like Elliot Anderson, signed from Nottingham Forest for £116m but so long ago that in transfer window time it no longer counts, Fernández is one of the new breed of Premier League central midfielders who seems to offer everything; albeit in modest qualities, and whose primary attribute appears to be the absence of exposed risk he represents.

Action from around the County Championship grounds
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Brydon Carse may get a chance to take out his frustrations on Northants later today, if David Bedingham doesn’t bat all day– 57 not out, 1000 runs in the bag, in his last match of the season.

It was slip-catching heaven at Taunton, with Somerset’s fielders gobbling seven in Glamorgan’s first innings, and James Rew scooping up the rest. Ben Kellaway was the only man to pass 50. Somerset’s innings started under lights, but a milky sun eventually emerged to light the way and allow Somerset to steal a march on their Championship rivals, whose matches were curtailed by rain.

Irish fight legend can cap a special career by retiring as the undisputed super-lightweight champion with victory against Flora Pili on Saturday

“I won’t be like Tyson Fury, coming back again and again,” Katie Taylor told me with a little smile a few years ago as she explained how, when she finally retired, she would leave boxing for good. The moment is almost here because, on Saturday night, in front of 80,000 fans at a fevered Croke Park, Taylor will fight for the very last time. She will depart as a quietly defiant pioneer and an overwhelming force for good – both in Ireland and women’s boxing.

The fight game is full of heartbreak and broken promises, corruption and damage, but it also produces singular characters who elevate the world. Joe Louis in the 1930s, and Muhammad Ali in the 1960s, had a profound impact on American society. In a very different world today, Oleksandr Usyk is also more than a boxer. He remains an inspiration and a source of undimmed hope in wartime Ukraine.

• Forecast of unfavourable weather cited as reason

• Aircraft passed less than ‌50 feet above stadium

South African airline Airlink has cancelled a planned flypast before Saturday’s Springboks-All ⁠Blacks rugby test as the country’s aviation regulator reviews a similar display conducted by the airline last ⁠week.

Airlink said on ⁠Wednesday ​it had withdrawn its application for a formation flyby ahead of the Rugby Championship clash at Johannesburg’s ⁠FNB Stadium, citing forecasts of unfavourable weather. The South African civil aviation authority (SACAA) is conducting a compliance verification of ⁠the airline’s 29 August flypast over Cape Town’s DHL Stadium.

After a record equalling finish under Martin Ho last season and a summer recruitment strategy that has turned heads can Spurs push into the top four?

Guardian writers’ predicted position: 5th (NB: this is not necessarily Suzanne Wracks’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips)

Last season’s position: 5th

An 18-year-old who has played at two major international tournaments and the division’s top clearance maker from last season also feature

A tricky, exciting, quick and versatile midfielder, Azeez has proven himself in the Championship with Millwall over the past two seasons and now deserves a chance to test himself in the top flight.

• Kieffer Moore and Jacques Ekomié score in 3-0 win

• QPR beat Cardiff; Middlesbrough draw at Burnley

Wrexham powered to their first Championship win this season with a ruthless 3-0 rout of injury-plagued Millwall on Wednesday.

The Welsh side had drawn with Cardiff and Watford before losing at home to Birmingham prior to this match. But they bounced back in emphatic fashion in south London to kickstart their bid for promotion to the Premier League after narrowly missing out on the playoffs last term.

• British No 1 outclassed 6-1, 6-0 in second round

• Francesca Jones claims big win over Magda Linette

With the grounds of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Centre at a standstill in the middle of a furious downpour and all eyes on the only two stadium courts under retractable roofs, there was nowhere for Katie Boulter to hide as her grand slam season came to a bitter end with an excruciating 6-1, 6-0 beating by the seventh seed, Karolina Muchova, in the second round of the US Open.

Boulter and Muchova had initially been scheduled to compete on Court 17 after the men’s first round match between the rising star Rafael Jodar and Yunchaokete Bu, but as heavy rain suspended play Boulter and Muchova were quickly moved to Louis Armstrong Stadium. She was completely outclassed by a sublime Muchova, who employed her usual brand of silky shotmaking and all-court tennis.

• F1 champion first to back junior team in single-seater era

• Norris also creates legacy programme to support talent

Lando Norris has co-founded a new junior, single-seater racing team. Named LN4 Fusion it will compete in multiple championships including the feeder series for Formula One, F3 and F2, as the current F1 world champion commits to helping young drivers make it to the top level in motorsport.

Norris’s involvement, including a personal financial undertaking alongside an investment group, represents the first time an F1 world champion has directly backed a team in the modern junior single-seater era. As part of the project he has also established the LN4 Legacy programme, a driver development initiative designed to identify and support talent coming through the ranks from karting upwards and then provide assistance financially as well as in coaching, performance and career support.

PM will aim to centre talks with French president on key foreign policy issues such as Iran, smuggling gangs and EU relations

Andy Burnham will begin the process of courting European leaders when he welcomes Emmanuel Macron as the first foreign head of state to visit him in Downing Street.

The prime minister will meet the French president at No 10 on Thursday as he looks to make inroads on a number of foreign policy objectives, including curbing irregular migration and sealing a new deal with the EU.

Defence minister says he believes US backing could tip regional balance in favour of forced resettlement

Israel’s defence minister has said his country is seeking Donald Trump’s support to approve plans to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in what has widely been condemned as a potential war crime.

Israel Katz said there was “no real solution for Gaza in the end without this
migration” during a conference hosted by the Israeli news site Ynet and the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He said the Israeli government was “organised and prepared to get them out by sea, by air, by every way possible”.

Exclusive: Tobias Ellwood says he gave MPs inaccurate information in 2018 provided by his department, the MoD

• I inadvertently misled parliament over a British nuclear scandal. Now I’m demanding justice

A former defence minister has admitted misleading parliament over the existence of crucial medical records relating to nuclear bomb test veterans.

Tobias Ellwood has said he unwittingly gave MPs incorrect information in 2018 when he told them he had been unable to locate information on veterans’ blood tests after being given incorrect information by officials at the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Only shoot at Russian occupiers, president says, after three officers wounded in clash; Patriots could take years to make, says Rubio. What we know on day 1,653

Gretsch Synchromatic 160 acoustic guitar expected to sell for as much as £120,000, as star lot in auction of items owned by late personal assistant Siobhan Bailey

One of the most iconic items in George Michael’s career, the acoustic guitar he energetically strummed in the video for 1987’s Faith, is going up for auction.

The guitar, a Gretsch Synchromatic 160 with a sunburst finish to the body, has an estimated sale price of £60,000-£120,000. It comes with a case featuring the words Rockabilly Rebel pasted on it – a reference to the twangy, 1950s-referencing sound of Faith, which topped the US charts for four weeks and became a foundation stone of Michael’s post-Wham! solo career.

Appledore, Devon: By-the-wind sailors have been washed up in great numbers this summer. I stumble on a single one of these bright blue beauties

Amid the hot grit of the estuarine beach, a cool light glints. Not the habitual shade of mussel shells, nor even the shimmer of sea glass, this is a blue so bright that at first I mistake it for a kind of plastic, perhaps the discarded part of a pair of goggles.

I’m about to pick it up when something prompts me to pause, mid-swoop; an inkling that this is not synthetic, but animal.

Oil consumption plummets and EV sales soar as analysts say demand may not fully return even if crude price falls

China’s carbon dioxide emissions fell by 1% after the outbreak of the US-Israeli war on Iran, thanks to a sharp reduction in oil consumption and a steady rise in the use of electric vehicles and public transport, analysis shows.

The report reveals the role of clean energy in cushioning the price shocks caused by the strait of Hormuz crisis to the world’s biggest oil importer. It also reinforces hopes that China, which is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, may be nearing a turning point in decarbonising its economy.

El Niño is associated with weaker monsoons in India – but research suggests it can also bring more extreme rainfall

The world is bracing for a “super” El Niño, and its effects are already being felt in India, where the monsoon has brought less rain than average but more intense downpours.

Meteorologists predict that the current El Niño, which is developing over the Pacific, could be one of the strongest in living memory. India is likely to be heavily affected, particularly later in the monsoon, when El Niño’s influence tends to strengthen.

President’s order strips nearly 3m acres of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, sacred tribal sites, of safeguards

Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, has joined a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump’s decision to significantly reduce the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, removing protections from nearly 3m acres.

In July, the president approved the reduction of the sites by 90%, clearing the way to open the land to oil and gas companies. He argued in his proclamations that doing so would allow lands to be “put to a higher-priority use” and that they contained critical minerals important to “resource independence …[and] national security”.

Government pledges to find quick ‘solution’ to party funding row under pressure from Labour MPs

Andy Burnham’s government has pledged to “tackle the issue of mega-donors in UK politics” as soon as possible, with dozens of Labour MPs demanding an immediate cap on donations before the next election.

The government outlined plans for a taskforce that will look at dealing with the influence of donors giving multimillion-pound contributions and suggested ministers wanted to find a “solution” to the issue quickly.

Investigation comes amid growing calls for an end to ‘obscene’ profit-making in care sector

Private equity companies now own or partly own 11 of the 20 largest providers of fostering and children’s homes in England, as calls to ban “obscene” profit-making in children’s care grow.

An investigation by the thinktank Common Wealth found the “big four” independent fostering agencies – which provide almost a quarter of fostering placements in England – have paid out more than £200m from taxpayers to shareholders in interest payments since 2020.

Despite a long absence from parliament, Burnham showed he could hold his own and, despite some nerves, even enjoy himself

The coming months will show whether Andy Burnham fits Kemi Badenoch’s charge of a leader too obsessed with being liked to make hard choices. One thing, however, does seem clear from his first outing at prime minister’s questions: he likes saying yes.

The very first question came from a political opponent – Ann Davies of Plaid Cymru – but Burnham replied as if she was a valued constituent, saying he understood her worries about the prison early release scheme and hoped she could be reassured.

Guardian City editor Anna Isaac among those who had credentials to cover event declined

Reform UK has banned at least three journalists from its annual conference who have reported critically on the party and Nigel Farage.

The Guardian’s City editor, Anna Isaac, the investigative reporter Peter Geoghegan and the broadcaster and biographer Michael Crick were told this week that their credentials to cover the event, which begins on Thursday, had been declined.

Yorgen Fenech cleared on both charges he faced over 2017 killing of journalist that prompted global outrage

One of Malta’s richest men has been found not guilty of involvement in the murder of the anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

The verdict, which is expected to be appealed against by the prosecution, came as a blow not only to the victim’s family, but to the politicians and campaigners who regard the case as a landmark action in the fight to protect press freedom in Europe.

Bank says gold reserves held in London could be traded more easily and the move will allow it to respond more rapidly in a ‘crisis situation’

The Dutch central bank says it has moved 86 tonnes of its gold reserves out of the US and Canada to London, citing “increasing geopolitical unrest”.

De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) said gold reserves held in London could be traded more easily than those held in New York and Ottawa.

Hundreds of students fall ill in three seperate incidents in Java and Sumatra this week as criticism of president’s flagship program grows

More than 800 Indonesian students and teachers have fallen ill in separate incidents of food poisoning linked to President Prabowo Subianto’s free-meals program this week, with dozens hospitalised after they with struck with nausea, vomiting and stomach aches.

The president’s flagship free-meals program was launched last year to tackle malnutrition, with meals distributed to more than 62 million students and pregnant women across the country.

The government’s tougher stance towards the Kremlin is drawing attacks from both the far right and far left

Even before the German government laid the blame this week on Russia for an attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport, the topic of German ties to Moscow was high on the political agenda.

But the timing of the unsurprising yet explosive Leipzig announcement – days before a key regional vote – has exposed the extent to which German politics is polarised on the issue.

Landmark lawsuit claims tech company’s pay-setting system has breached privacy laws and pushed down earnings

Uber drivers have launched a landmark legal action against the ride-hailing company claiming they live in “constant fear” of a “soulless” algorithm it uses to set pay and allocate jobs.

Drivers from the UK, the Netherlands and other countries have joined the compensation claim that could run into billions of dollars. It alleges an AI-powered pay-setting system breaches data protection laws and pushes down their earnings.

The Times and many companies are accusing OpenAI of misusing their material to train AI systems without compensation

The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in ⁠a lawsuit against the New York Times, arguing in favor of the use of copyrighted writing to train artificial intelligence.

The Times accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot. Other newspapers have joined in the suit, first filed in 2023.

Tech company submits to controversial Trump order to rename body of water amid US trade spat with Canada

Apple has renamed Lake Ontario as “Lake America” for US users of its Maps app, after an executive order from Donald Trump to change the name of the Great Lake amid his trade spat with Canada.

The Apple Maps app now displays the controversial new name for the lake, which sits between New York state and the Canadian province of Ontario, for users in the US. Apple users outside the country will still see the Lake Ontario name.

Judge declines to make Google sell AdX in win for firm against US antitrust enforcers’ attempts to break up big tech

Alphabet’s Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia ⁠rejected US antitrust enforcers’ attempt to force a sale of Google’s online advertising exchange.

While the ad exchange is a small part of Google’s business, the ruling is the second powerful ⁠symbolic victory against the US Department ⁠of Justice in ​its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies.

Temi Adegbayibi started out taking pictures of the Ezra Collective and other British musicians as a hobby, then found his work exhibited at the Royal Albert Hall. He discusses Black joy and the movement and stillness of jazz

When I speak to Temi Adegbayibi on the phone, the 26-year-old photographer is on the move. He is travelling across London, then running up the stairs to his desk, fitting our conversation into the interstitial spaces of a life split between freelance photography, film production and working at the Royal Albert Hall.

His glittering portfolio includes photographs of Jorja Smith, Basement Jaxx, Fireboy DML and Ezra Collective, but like many in the creative industries, he oscillates between the glamour of the stage and the reality of making a living. “I’ve always had day jobs,” he says. “Most photographers back in the day weren’t shooting for money, they were shooting for passion.”

Guy Ritchie’s crime caper is back with the usual hijinks, swearing and men shaking their fists. But its ridiculousness is strangely comforting – and Theo James’s beefcake Eddie is so bland that he is fascinating to observe

He lives in a house, a very big house in the country. He has pectorals the size of Bentleys and wears plus-fours so voluminous they could accommodate his fleet of gundogs and still provide room for snarling groundskeeper Geoff (“I would do anyfink for you an’ this famlee”). And yet! Edward “Eddie” Horniman, 13th Duke of Halstead (Theo James), is sad. And aggrieved. A moment’s silence, please, as this powerful hunk pontificates on the unbearable lightness of being the millionaire protagonist in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen.

“Four hundred years ago, this estate spread out as far as the eye could see,” he tells Geoff (Vinnie Jones) as the camera swoops over his verdant playpen, a lavish patchwork of abundant hedges and cap-doffing deer. “But it’s been diminished. Year after year. Generation after generation. First came the apologies, then came the shame, then came the contraction. I want it back, Geoff,” he growls, hexagonal jaw stiff with emotion. “I want it all back!”

Our heroes travel back through time to San Francisco in 1986 so they can commune with aliens threatening future Earth – it’s preposterously good fun

Here is the fourth and silliest movie in the Star Trek franchise, now on rerelease for its 40th anniversary. Directed by Leonard Nimoy, it’s a film of pure shark-jumping or rather whale-jumping absurdity. The film’s opening credits proclaim, with sublime confidence in its own unquestioned pop-cultural importance in the field of space travel, that Star Trek IV is dedicated to the crew of the space shuttle Challenger, which had that year catastrophically exploded midair, killing all seven of them.

Spock has been brought back to life, as the apparent end result of all the bizarre metempsychotic plot contortions of the previous film. But the permanent and irrevocable death of Kirk’s son seems to be passed over remarkably casually. The eerie boyishness of Shatner’s Kirk, with that beaming smile, almost makes you forget that he has been through an agonising bereavement. Hasn’t he?

The brilliantly deadpan comic joins Nina Conti, Chloe Petts and Isy Suttie. Plus: A House Through Time reaches the present day. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Channel 4
Taskmaster is often funnier when one contestant has stagey contempt for the whole project. Step forward Richard Ayoade, who makes his intention to do the bare minimum very clear in this opener. A mere 22 seasons in, the show remains an effortlessly enjoyable way to spend an hour – the other comics making up the cohort are Chloe Petts, Isy Suttie, Nina Conti and Matt Lucas. Phil Harrison

For decades, thousands of unmarried mothers in the UK were forced to give up their newborns after being denied pain relief in labour so they would ‘not be a bad girl again’. This harrowing documentary hears their stories

The scale of the suffering at first threatens to make you numb to it. The 90-minute documentary Stolen Babies is as unsparing as it is unsentimental and opens with a bald statement of verified fact: “Between 1949 and 1976 over 250,000 unmarried mothers in the UK were forced into handing their newborn babies over for adoption.” State apparatus facilitated this every step of the way, supported by religious institutions. These institutions ran, or were involved with running, the mother and baby homes to which the girls and young women were banished (“They do not quickly acknowledge themselves as sinners,” notes one report on its inmates), along with self-proclaimed moral welfare societies and the NHS.

The statistics are appalling. The details are worse. Some of the women whose stories are told in the film became pregnant by boyfriends. Some were victims of rape. Joan Chambers was 14 when a teacher took her for a walk in the woods. “I trusted him, I really did … All I remember was the pain. I honestly didn’t know what was happening.”

Fifty years ago Parker was hailed as rock’s next big thing, but he picked a different path: cult records, a Hollywood diversion, an aversion to stardom. Ahead of a UK tour, he looks back at his strange trajectory

To say Graham Parker enjoyed a swift rise to fame is an understatement. He played his first live show with his most famous backing band, the Rumour, in October 1975, at the Newlands Tavern, a pub in Nunhead, south-east London. By the start of the following year, he had a record deal and was in the studio recording his debut album, Howlin’ Wind. The buzz around him was such that the sessions were interrupted by the arrival of a succession of stars – Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott among them – intrigued to hear what the fuss was about: a petrol pump attendant from Surrey who sang like Van Morrison and had written a set of smart, sharp, literate songs in between filling up cars.

The record arrived in April 1976 to vast critical excitement, a lot of it occasioned by the album’s closing track, the reggae-influenced, attitude-laden Don’t Ask Me Questions. After Howlin’ Wind came out, followed in October by Heat Treatment, things ratcheted up another notch. Parker turned up in Australia to discover the media waiting for him and a press conference arranged in the airport: they had taken the amount of music press coverage Parker was receiving to mean he was “as big as Bruce Springsteen, which was insane”. Low down on a festival bill topped by Bob Dylan, he found himself backstage collared by the headline act, eager to tell Parker how much he loved his work. There also exists a photo of Parker in Los Angeles, with, of all people, Michael Jackson, but their meeting was apparently less successful. “I said to him: ‘Michael, great to meet you, I did a version of [Jackson 5 hit] I Want You Back recently.’ And he just sort of said: ‘Ooh.’ So that,” he laughs, “was the full extent of my conversation with Michael Jackson.”

The infamous Japanese noise artist has a vast and forbidding catalogue that commands a cult fandom. Sam Andrews, 18, is vlogging his way through the lot – and taking a stand for deep listening

An Instagram Reel that looks like an 80s coming-of-age movie pops up on your feed. It’s four teenage boys in an American-style basement – comfy sofas, guitars, ping pong table – jeering and laughing. But they aren’t secretly drinking beer or planning on sneaking out. They’re brandishing a vinyl copy of Pulse Demon, the most popular album from the cult Japanese noise artist Merzbow, and subjecting themselves to its brutally harsh sound in full, for fun. “I think this is the Book of Revelation: The Soundtrack,” one guy blurts out, a vague look of fear in his eyes.

Merzbow, real name Masami Akita, is the world’s most renowned noise artist. Since 1979, Akita has released more than 400 recordings, which range from a 10-hour long album misleadingly titled Merzbient (it’s anything but ambient) to a free-noise supergroup called Flying Testicle. Since February, Sam Andrews, the video’s 18-year-old creator, has been attempting to listen to every one, and is documenting his progress online each day. “I think of my day in album-size chunks,” he says, laughing. “It’s like, get up at seven, get breakfast and then headphones in: noise.”

Irish noisemongers Gilla Band, shadowy producers Two Shell and lovable band the Big Moon have new records, and there are tours from Bob Dylan and Kelela – plus the best of jazz, global and classical

• ‘It’s easier when nobody’s watching’: inside the secretive and sublime freak-folk of @
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

The Black Bananas singer knows all the words to Rapper’s Delight and relates to AC/DC, but which song reminds her of a heartbreaking theft?

The first song I fell in love with
Van Halen’s Runnin’ With the Devil. I was five or six and I went to visit my cousin Tommy who was much older. He was on a hockey team and we went to see them practise before the game and they had Runnin’ With the Devil on really loud. I was like: “Wait, what’s this?!”

The song I do at karaoke
You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC. Me and Brian Johnson – my voice has that thing, you know?

Patrick Radden Keefe, Ben Macintyre and the Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins are among the 13 authors selected for the nonfiction award

The Guardian’s chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins joins American investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe and bestselling historian Ben Macintyre on this year’s Baillie Gifford prize longlist.

Higgins’ book, Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War, examines the role of culture in Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion, drawing on multiple reporting trips to Ukraine. Keefe, who won the prize in 2021 with Empire of Pain, is listed again for London Falling, which tells the story of Zac Brettler, a teenager who fell from a luxury London apartment after having posed as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. Macintyre’s Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy, tells the story of a KGB double agent cultivated by MI6 in revolutionary Tehran.

Simukai Chigudu’s filmic memoir details the confines and conflicts of growing up in Zimbabwe during political turmoil.

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Last week, I finally managed to snatch one read out of the jaws of a hectic summer. On a series of very long-haul flights (highly recommended as a way to break reading droughts), I fell into the world of Simukai Chigudu’s Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire. I finished the book just as I was landing in Nairobi, Kenya. In a daze, I stepped on to the tarmac in the chill of equatorial winter.

The book was about growing up in post-colonial Zimbabwe and navigating life between the ex-colonised and the ex-colonial power. But the account of Chigudu’s life also captured, in ways that sometimes left me breathless with the shock of recognition, what felt like a broader shared experience for those of us born to parents whose traumas we never understood. This week, I reflected on how Chigudu’s experience connects to that of a wider post-colonial African generation.

Deep sorrow mingles with illicit desire in this potent novella, the follow-up to a 2006 story about an isolated family in the Catalan mountains

Twenty years ago, Colm Tóibín published a steadily desolating novella set in the high villages of the Catalan Pyrenees. A woman walks out of her house and her life, starts along the mountain road and disappears in the snow. Her son Miquel, failing to find her body, waits through the dark months for the thaw. A Long Winter, which appeared in a standalone volume and then as the final story in the 2006 collection Mothers and Sons, followed Miquel through dramatically extreme circumstances and patient endurance. It was told with the most restrained prose ever likely to be employed for a son’s view of vultures circling a corpse.

Now, in The Bridge, a single year has passed in Miquel’s life and he is eking out an existence with his hurtful, unyielding father. The sheep are grazing their high summer pastures; a side hustle smuggling contraband brings in a little much-needed cash. In the bare conditions of the lonely farm, any warmth of feeling is a kind of contraband smuggled in by night; love between men is doubly illicit. The grave tenderness that grows between Miquel and his father’s maltreated servant Manolo gives The Bridge its emotional centre. These young men salve the emptiness with a few quiet words and touches. We sense their youthful beauty and resilience, their suppleness in a place of fixity.

American Scoundrel tells story of McCarthy attack dog, mob lawyer and Trump mentor – will the president be thumbing its pages?

Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark have written a book Trumpworld doesn’t want you to read. Published on Tuesday, American Scoundrel is a propulsive, horrifying biography of Roy Cohn, the New York mob lawyer whose extraordinary life charted, as the book’s subtitle has it, a “Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump”.

“I told my publicist to reach out to any of the Fox News hosts and reporters, to Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon,” Bird said. “We haven’t gotten a peep, other than Joe Rogan. He said he looked at the galleys, and he got back to my publicist and said, ‘I’m not interested.’ I’m kind of surprised. This is a serious biography of the president’s mentor, whom he publicly admires and says he still misses.”

As Rockstar’s blockbuster prepares to dominate the headlines, it’s time for the mainstream media to stop treating video games as a novelty that needs explaining

Predictably, the Grand Theft Auto VI “extended look” which premiered on Netflix last week was a success for all involved. The 30-minute preview scorched to No 1 on the viewing chart and even brought the site down for a few minutes as millions of gamers tried to watch what was, effectively, a very long teaser trailer. According to data collated by Eurogamer, more than 9,000 Twitch streamers covered the show leading to 5,227,798 hours of viewing there alone. And this was just the beginning of what will surely be two months of escalating hype – and unprecedented media attention.

Call me cynical, but I suspect the coverage of GTA VI in the media over the next few weeks will follow a familiar pattern. Mostly, it will be five-minute slots wedged in near the end of news bulletins in which games journalists, industry analysts and other pundits will be asked why the game is such a big deal, how much it cost to make and how much revenue it will generate. Perhaps a few will try to reignite the hoary old “violence in video games” debate, there will be presenters laughingly admitting they’ve not touched a game since Pac-Man, rolling their eyes and wallowing in their ignorance, in a way they never would while discussing any other art form. Somebody will venture the subversive view that “games are no longer just for kids”; somebody else will say “games make more money than films and music put together”. And that will be that, job done for another decade … or until there’s a funny story about Pokémon.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Bit Reactor
Split priorities between scripted and emergent story moments hamper an otherwise brilliant Star Wars-themed successor to XCOM

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the term “emergent storytelling”, you’ve likely experienced some of the unscripted tales that can bubble up out of a game’s systems. Perhaps you’ve led a scheming dynasty in Crusader Kings, or watched a favourite hero succumb to madness in Darkest Dungeon. Maybe you’ve surrendered yourself to the infinite yarn-spinner that is Dwarf Fortress – or read about it from the mid-00s forums where users helped popularise the term “Let’s Play” by chronicling their games in descriptive posts. Or perhaps you’ve played Firaxis’ XCOM, the alien invasion tactics hit that several key members of Zero Company studio Bit Reactor had a hand in.

Zero Company hinges on a concept as simple as it is perfect: take the complementary class abilities, tough dice rolls, and permanent character deaths of XCOM, and house them in a sci-fi setting known for spaghetti western blaster duels, last stands and heroic sacrifices. As creative director Greg Foertsch puts it, “Star Wars is about loss.” Which losses you end up mourning in Zero Company depends on you.

There are juggernauts and indie gems aplenty for when the nights draw in, from an ingenious puzzle game to blockbusters such as Marvel’s Wolverine and Call of Duty
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

After 20 years away, Capcom’s hyper kinetic action adventure returns, pitting skilled samurai Miyamoto Musashi against hordes of warriors and demons in Edo-period Kyoto. Master the complex combat then prepare for flashing blades, disembodied limbs and geysers of spraying blood.
• 4 September; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox

Before The Witcher 4 arrives in 2028, CD Projekt Red is returning us to the world of The Witcher 3 for one last foray. Looks like wind’s still howlin’

The game that graced us with Bathtub Geralt, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, arrived more than a decade ago. So it was a touch surprising this summer when developers CD Projekt Red announced a new expansion to the venerable adventure, titled Songs of the Past, for next year. It will release alongside a full remaster of the original game, which will be free for anyone who bought it back in 2015. (The studio is also working on a sequel, The Witcher 4, but that’s not due until 2028.)

As it turns out, this is all possible thanks to a partnership with Fool’s Theory, a studio founded by CD Projekt Red veterans, which took on the brunt of the development work. “We’ve had this story in a drawer for many years,” explains Marcin Blacha, VP story director at CD Projekt Red. “Of course, we moved on to Cyberpunk 2077 and now The Witcher 4, as well as our other projects. But because we knew The Witcher 4 would take time, we saw a gap in our release calendar where Songs of the Past could go. Thankfully, we were able to find the right partner to help execute it.”

Òran Mór, Glasgow
Comedy chemistry drives a play that asks if three contrasting characters – conspiracy theorist, pregnant mum, hen-do attendee – can find common ground

Trapping three nightmare neighbours in the dodgy lift of their Glasgow high-rise, Ready tae Drap has lots of sparky, slapstick humour – but not so much nuance.

Crotchety conspiracy theorist Pat (Isabelle Joss) is in her 70s and armed with barbed, uninvited observations. Saintly, exhausted Muslim mum of two Aaliyah (Tinashe Warikandwa) is on the verge of giving birth to her third child. Dry-humoured Lauren (performed by playwright Éimi Quinn) is the play’s millennial, fourth-wall-breaking narrator, clad in fishnets and bunny ears for a hen-do. It’s a classic setup: can these contrasting characters find common ground in a tight spot?

Lyttelton theatre, London
Benedict Andrews’ intense, interval-free mashup of ancient and modernist classics is a show of two halves

The Electra bit of the title refers to the Sophoclean tragedy of a daughter trapped in a cycle of vengeance, the Persona part to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film about an actor who suddenly stops speaking while performing Electra on stage.

Benedict Andrews’ drama after Bergman and Sophocles first welds the two together, then raises the concept higher by enlisting his star castings in Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss to share the parts of Electra and her murderous mother, Clytemnestra, as well as Bergman’s inexplicably silent actor, Elisabeth, and her nurse, Alma, who fall into a disturbing, mirrored relationship.

At the National Theatre, London until 10 October

As The Story – inspired by a scandal that ended a young Black reporter’s career – makes its London debut, its author explains why, two decades on, it’s more relevant than ever

If our ability to discern fake news from fact is a hot topic today, Tracey Scott Wilson was on to it more than two decades ago. As a child, the playwright’s father trained her to watch the news every night and discuss it with her three siblings. It meant that she was well placed in the early 00s to spot how stations such as Fox News were veering away from objective reporting to become angled towards a given agenda.

By this point a real-life story had been percolating in Wilson’s mind for more than two decades: in 1981, Janet Cooke, a young, ambitious Black American reporter at The Washington Post, had been exposed as a liar. Cooke had just won the Pulitzer prize for her news story about an eight-year-old drug addict, which turned out to be invented. Cooke was discredited, both for her reporting and for embellishing her CV, and was forced to hand back her prize two days after receiving it.

O2 Arena, London
The polymath rapper’s stage show, which also features SWAT teams and a warship, is truly bravura stuff – but you can’t help feeling this is an artist at a creative crossroads

A$AP Rocky dangles precariously from a helicopter, while beneath him black-clad SWAT officers brawl with his white-masked followers. This isn’t some cliffhanger setpiece from the rapper/actor’s latest film – it’s just how shows on his Don’t Be Dumb tour open. It’s a big production: there are further prop helicopters, including a smaller one up in the rafters from which he also raps (a reference to his single Helicopter), while the stage recreates the top deck of a naval warship, for reasons that never become clear.

The bizarre set underscores a sense of a man in career transition, unsure who he is any more. In the eight years since his last album, this survivor of homelessness and incarceration became a father, three times, with Rihanna; he’s pivoting towards movies – good ones – and co-chairs the Met Gala. His new record sought to redefine him as an artist, juggling more of his trademark pugilistic rap with ambitious stylistic experiments and unexpected collaborations (Damon Albarn! Danny Elfman!).

For years some have claimed a key part of the thriller was excised after the director’s sudden death – and that it provided clues to the real-life behaviour of rich predators. Now, his daughter has spoken out

Name: The Eyes Wide Shut conspiracy

Age: The erotic psychological thriller Eyes Wide Shut starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (married at the time, though that isn’t so important now) was released in 1999.

Mississippi-born Wilson, who worked across folk, pop, R&B and country, was once dubbed America’s best singer

Cassandra Wilson, the two-time Grammy-winning jazz singer, songwriter and producer has died. She was 70.

Dubbed America’s best singer by Time magazine in 2001, Wilson was best known for her genre-bending voice, which expanded the boundaries of traditional blues-based jazz and worked effortlessly across folk, pop, R&B, country and beyond. At the heart of all her work was her idiosyncratic contralto, a soulful sound distinctly tied to her roots.

Speaking at the opening of the Venice film festival, the actor-director addressed why the jury of which she is chair will only be shown two films made by female film-makers

Maggie Gyllenhaal said there is a “systemic problem” that explains why only two female directors are in the running for the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival this year.

“It’s harder for women to get films financed,” said the actor-director, who is heading up the jury of the world’s oldest cinema showcase this year.

Dancer in the Sadler’s Wells Ballet who was a snake in Tiresias, a goat in Sylvia and an autumn fairy in Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella

Pauline Clayden was one of the dancers who formed the core of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in the decade after the second world war, leading up to its royal charter in 1956. Never a principal, she was one of those talented, adaptable, highly valued soloists without which ballet companies can never survive.

Clayden, who has died aged 103, would feature in the corps de ballet and step out of it to dance leading roles. It says much about her talent that she often stepped into those created for Margot Fonteyn; for Frederick Ashton, the choreographer, she was the ideal dancer to do so.

A fragment of temperate rainforest lies on the edge of Dartmoor, and following years of conservation work, its owners have now opened up a sustainable campsite next to this fragile ecosystem

Mist blankets the valley as I wheel my camping gear down the small hill towards a clearing ringed by trees and shrubs. A picnic bench sits at its edge, angled towards the reason why I’m here: one of the last remaining fragments of temperate rainforest in Britain. I’m pitching my tent at Wray Valley Camping, a low-impact site on Dartmoor’s eastern edge between Lustleigh and Moretonhampstead, where I’ll spend five days on one of the site’s “nearly wild” pitches.

Also known as Atlantic woodland, temperate rainforests depend on a rare combination of high humidity, rainfall and consistently mild coastal temperatures where the sea moderates the climate. They once stretched from the western Highlands of Scotland down to Cornwall, covering 20% of the UK, and sheltering rare and delicate lichens and plants. Today more than 95% of our temperate rainforest cover is gone, but Devon’s near-constant dampness and its exposure to the Atlantic make it one of the last strongholds for this rare habitat.

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Every now and then the Thursday quiz pauses to ponder humanity’s ongoing obsession with setting records for things that do not need to exist. Last week we had a cat breaking the world record for toe-count and a robot running the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt. One feels a bit unnecessary, the other feels like the plot of a dystopian 1980s sci-fi film. Neither feel like things we used to actually count. Never mind. Here are 15 question on topical news, general knowledge and pop culture to amuse and delight. No anteaters were harmed in the making of this quiz. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 263

We boiled litres of water to find the best electric kettles, from hard-water heroes to vintage-style, repairable and wifi-connected models

• The best air fryers, tried and tested for crisp and crunch

Despite the march of progress, the humble kettle remains a kitchen staple. It’s what we turn to in times of strife, when spirits are flagging, or to start our day. When a visitor calls, one of the first things we often do is put the kettle on.

Many small appliances have evolved beyond their original form, but the kettle’s basic principles remain largely unchanged. Water goes in and heats until a thermostat switches it off; the water then pours out, and we enjoy a cuppa. However, the technology that goes into a kettle has been slowly improving: better insulation to keep water hotter for longer and reduce reboils; different temperature settings to suit every drink from green tea to herbal brews; and more features such as filters and concealed elements to keep scale out of our cups.

The seasons might be changing, but the muggy weather remains, and heatwaves are on the rise. Stay comfortable on the move with our tried and tested portable neck and handheld fans

• The best fans for your home, tested
• Shark ChillPill 3-in-1 fan review

So far this year, we’ve seen five heatwaves in the UK. The climate crisis means things are heating up year on year, and while we can hide in air-conditioned shops and offices, our homes can get uncomfortably – sometimes dangerously – hot.

We also have to go outside – or worse, pack ourselves like sweaty sardines on sweltering public transport. On those occasions, a portable fan can make all the difference between manageable discomfort and indulging in an inadvisable quantity of ice-cream. Their recent popularity has led to manufacturers churning out cheap-but-not-especially cheerful products that ultimately end up as clutter in your house – or worse, landfill, where an estimated 4.3m will end up this year alone.

Got that new term feeling? Embrace the September reset with tailored blazers, hints of cashmere and a surprisingly excellent tee

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Nobody has handed me a timetable in decades, but I still love that new-term energy, and this edit leans right into it. A blazer that is properly tailored, rather than assembled from buttons and hope. Closed-toe shoes to ensure a proper soft landing after months of sandals. A T-shirt from a brand I was fully prepared to be sniffy about, until it made me eat my words. And a packing solution, because the only sane way to deal with the end of summer is to plan a holiday, obviously.

There’s also a genius lip colour for lip balm addicts like me, a bag doing a very convincing impression of something 10 times its price, and one long-sold-out cardigan that was worth every month of the wait.

Whether it’s homemade ice-cream or a skirt you can wear as a dress, your August favourites suggest you’re holding on to summer for as long as possible

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After five brutal heatwaves we’d expect you to be sick of summer by now, but judging by your August hitlist, many of you can’t get enough of it. An ice-cream maker, packing cubes and travel wardrobe heroes suggest you’re determined to embrace every last drop of sunshine before summer 2026 gives way to rain and the school bell.

You’ve been thinking ahead too, though. A plastic-free lunchbox and a foolproof coffee maker will help ease you back to work and school, and there’s always undereye concealer when all the coffee in the world can’t hide your post-holiday blues.

A fresh, seasonal vegetable soup that can be made in advance and only improves in texture and flavour over time

Now that I am an accomplished sourdough maker, soon to start my own micro-bakery and YouTube channel … Only joking! Now that I can make half-decent, variable loaves of sourdough, I have become more aware of how the temperature in the kitchen affects food. Not that I was completely unaware, of course – I have curdled enough milk and neglected enough eggs – but feeding, then watching the sourdough starter in a jar, and then the dough itself, seeing how the process takes hours in winter, speeds up in spring, then takes on a foaming, bubbling and at times terrifying life of its own in summer, are lessons in living microorganisms and fermentation.

It is a shame, then, that I didn’t give the same attention to the pan of summer minestrone I had felt so pleased with myself for cooking, cutting the courgettes carefully so they looked like Trivial Pursuit scoring wedges, while drinking tea and listening for the bottle bank lorry to drop the glass into its box, and before the sun (or anyone else) was up. Even though the combined taste of minestrone and milky Yorkshire tea is interesting, I knew it had turned out particularly well. I put on the lid, left the pan at the back of the stove and went out.

Book recreates recipes from period following end of Spanish civil war when people faced food shortages

Few dishes are simpler to prepare than Spain’s signature dish of tortilla de patatas, which – aside from disputes about onions – requires nothing more than two basic ingredients and a pinch of salt. But where to begin if you have neither eggs nor potatoes?

That is the question the chef and food writer Berta Álvarez Acal sets out to answer in Recetas de Guerra (Wartime Recipes), a compilation of recipes covering the years of hunger after the end of the Spanish civil war in 1939.

Bananas often go off quickly, so use up over-ripe, brown specimens in a sugar-free dessert that will satisfy any sweet-tooth cravings

With two young kids, we get through a lot of bananas in our household. Perhaps surprisingly, though, most of them are frozen: our daughters eat them straight from the freezer most evenings, with frozen berries and yoghurt, for pudding. We normally order a stack of bananas every Saturday, and before the end of the week they inevitably start to turn brown. At this point, we peel, slice and freeze them for the children’s evening yoghurt, though sometimes, when we have a real excess, I turn them into today’s incredibly satisfying “ice-cream”. Its silky-smooth texture really hits the spot, and satisfies any ice-cream cravings without recourse to added sugar or excessive fat. The trick is to freeze the bananas in a single layer on a flat tray, so they don’t freeze into a homogeneous mass, then transfer to a container to enjoy as and when.

You’ll thank yourself for making these batch-cooking beauties to store in the freezer until the next busy worknight

I’ve called this spicy chicken and baked rice “midweek”, but you can enjoy this baby all week long. Juicy, spiced chicken, fluffy baked rice and enough flavour to make you bin that takeaway menu and raid your cupboards instead. Then some fragrant, delicate fishcakes with a lovely, bouncy texture, which are such a winner for the freezer. Taking only 10-ish minutes to cook from frozen, they save you from hunger and distraction on a busy WFH day.

I was forced to examine the idea of sexual pleasure after a tumor was removed from my spinal cord

Ten years ago, my right elbow started to hurt. The internet suggested I had tennis elbow, so I stopped playing tennis. Once the outer elbow pain moved inward, I changed my self-diagnosis to golfer’s elbow. I stopped lifting weights, competitive dragon-boating and bouldering.

For good measure, I consulted an occupational therapist about my nightly bullet-vibrator routine after reading that golfer’s elbow is common among construction workers who operate heavy-duty vibrating machinery. He listened closely and said he’d note VRI on my patient chart. I asked what VRI meant, eager to end my diagnostic journey. “Vibrator-related injury,” he responded. We busted out laughing.

Assisting an ageing loved one can start with small tasks but may lead to full-time caregiving that requires more support

Helping an ageing parent or loved one often begins with easy-to-field requests: Pick up a prescription. Drive them to a doctor’s appointment. Grab groceries.

However, light tasks – just “helping out” here and there – may eventually snowball into the avalanche of full-time caregiving, a phenomenon becoming known as “caregiver creep”. Like “caregiver burnout”, it’s not a formal term, but there is growing awareness about this slow build among healthcare providers and experts.

After a burglary, my parents decided we needed extra security. Jerry was the answer – and this hungry, handsome hound helped us all in countless ways

Jerry came into our lives because a burglar had broken in. My mum had woken in the middle of the night to find an intruder in our kitchen. He scarpered, but the psychological damage was done. Two days later, my dad came home with the cutest little rescue puppy, with traces of beagle and labrador in him. He was two months old, had a black, brown and white coat, and big, bashful eyes. We called him Jerry because we had a cat called Tom. “I’m not sure how he’ll protect us,” I said. “He will,” my dad replied.

Jerry was very laid-back and Zen. He became part of the family straight away. He also became the therapy dog we hadn’t realised we needed. With two teenagers in the house (me and my older brother) and a hyperactive younger brother, someone was always in a strop and needing to let off steam by taking him out for a walk. Each time, Jerry obliged. I’d bore him with my latest teen-romance trauma; he was a very good listener. Sometimes, he’d have five walks a day, with both of my parents taking their turn. He certainly got his steps in.

Camille had bad experiences with men, so when she met Marcus they took things slowly. Now sex is a shared joy

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

Marcus will go down on me for as long as it takes. He has a gentle touch and is an amazing kisser

As more companies turn to AI, they’re hiring freelancers to clean up its mistakes rather than create original work

Lisa, a freelance graphic designer based in Spain, noticed a shift in her work after the release of ChatGPT in 2022. She went from receiving slow one-off jobs creating logos and packaging to an onslaught of requests asking her to fix versions that were generated by artificial intelligence – from sharpening fuzzy images for printing to turning flawed designs into usable files.

By 2025, Lisa, who asked not to be fully named to avoid solicitations, said 90% of her incoming logo and packaging design requests required cleaning up AI-generated content, work that accounted for 60% to 70% of her annual income. But the grind was exhausting. Clients lowballed her;' some AI-generated designs were so flawed that she had to recreate them from scratch and she worried about being complicit in AI-driven copyright infringement. By the end of the year, she began turning those jobs down.

He doesn’t have an account with them, but is being bombarded with demands for money and threats of debt collectors

My autistic son has been bombarded for years by letters to his home from OVO Energy addressed to “The Occupier”, with demands for money and threats of debt collectors. He is supplied by Scottish Gas.

He was required to let an OVO agent into his flat to “prove” he didn’t have an OVO meter. Neither this, nor countless phone calls, has stopped the demands.

While many young people have found jobs and built careers, some have struggled to complete their courses

The crisis in the youth employment market, with almost a million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) across the UK, has placed fresh emphasis on ways of getting employees into the workforce.

The government hopes to increase focus on technical and vocational learning in England from the age of 14. In parallel, there is an ambition to create thousands more apprenticeships.

I need to take him off my family account, but it says the only way is for him to join me for a joint call with O2

My partner packed up and disappeared with his children while I was out with friends. I was left having to foot all our bills, including rent, which has made me financially stressed.

We had a family plan with O2 which meant family phones were all registered to my account. When my partner left, he stopped paying his share of the monthly phone bill, so I set about trying to remove his, and his children’s, phones from the account. O2 explained he would need to join a conference call with me and O2 to agree the transfer of the numbers in question.

There’s no excuse for being UV-reckless with these new options

Almost half of UK adults do not apply sunscreen daily. If you think even this woeful figure sounds surprisingly high, I agree with you – some surveys have daily SPF use as low as 8% in the male adult population.

My own feeling, based on hundreds of conversations with the UV-reckless, is that most would probably offer “greasy texture and feel” as their defence. And yet almost a third of the population wear moisturiser.

Studies have found that anti-inflammatory drugs can improve your mood. But what does that mean for conditions such as depression and anxiety?

Inflammation is the immune system’s response to injury or infection. If you cut yourself and the area becomes red and swollen, that’s inflammation: immune cells are rushing to fight germs and repair tissue.

But inflammation can also occur in the body during illnesses, and a low level of inflammation can arise from obesity or ageing. “A marker of that inflammation tends to be elevated cytokines in people’s blood,” says Prof Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London and author of Immune Health: A Myth-Busting Guide. “They’re the molecules immune cells use to communicate with each other.”

More and more young people are engaging in sexual strangulation. But experts say there’s no safe pressure – and we have to start talking to teenagers about it

When touching someone’s throat, it can only take the pressure of a handshake to cause serious injury, unconsciousness or death. These injuries, which include brain damage and stroke, are often internal and invisible, showing up days or even months after the initial incident occurred. Experts say many who participate in sexual choking are not aware of the risks.

Choking or sexual strangulation is common among young people, says Prof Heather Douglas of the Melbourne Law School. In a 2024 survey of 4,702 Australians aged between 18 and 35, she and her research team found that 57% reported ever having experienced sexual strangulation; 51% reported ever having strangled a partner and 43.9% reported participating in both.

The public health emergencies in 2022 and 2024 saw the virus reported in 145 countries, but in the new cases children appear particularly affected

A fresh outbreak of mpox in Guinea Bissau – the country’s first – means the virus formerly known as monkey pox is back in the headlines. So what has changed?

Since 2022, there have been almost 190,000 lab-confirmed cases of mpox reported worldwide in 145 countries. Before then, outbreaks of mpox tended to be relatively small and in a handful of African countries, where the viral infection was known to be endemic.

September is the most fun time of year to shop, but it can also be dangerously seductive. Keep your wits about you with these tips

I used to love back-to-school shopping when my children were little. The miniature highlighter pens, the name labels, those pop-out pencil cases from Smiggle, even the intergenerational wrangling over when the price of a water bottle becomes unreasonable. I love the ceremony of new beginnings. The curtain-raising drama of it all.

Luckily for me, you don’t have to grow out of back-to-school shopping even though your children do, because in fashion September is considered the start of the new year. This is eminently sensible, because this time of year is a much better moment for a restart than January. The actual new year is dark and bleak and makes resolutions and projects feel intimidating rather than exciting. But right now, the evenings are still light, and while I’ve still got a bit of a tan pretty much anything feels possible.

Looking for an alternative to fast fashion, Eve Ogden Schaub decided to create a garment from homegrown flax

From crop tops to shorts and brightly patterned dresses, many of today’s clothes are the result of fast fashion. But one woman is taking a radical approach to challenging this trend by growing her own dress.

Eve Ogden Schaub is in the midst of a project to create a linen garment made from flax she is growing at home, documenting the process in videos shared on her Instagram account.

Due to its ubiquity in fast fashion, gen Z are pushing back against the synthetic material and using it as an insult

In 2015, Kate Moss called an easyJet pilot a “basic bitch” and a catchy new insult meaning obvious and uncool hit the mainstream. Had it happened in 2026, Moss might have used the word “polyester”, reportedly gen Z’s new favorite diss, levied at cheap-looking videos on TikTok, and sometimes at other users’ taste.

But its use as a figurative insult also echoes a literal backlash against polyester, now the most-produced synthetic fibre on the planet.

The ‘dad’ look favours straight lines and muted colours, while ‘dudes’ prefer baggier clothes with adornments

There is a competition going on at the US Open this week and it’s not the one involving rackets and balls. Instead, leading men who are not entered into this year’s draw are serving looks rather than aces.

Tennis legend Roger Federer took to the court on Tuesday in navy blue polo shirt and shorts, navy blue sweatbands and navy blue socks. The cuts were trim and the top was tucked in. The young Spanish player Carlos Alcaraz wore a Nike vest, untucked and the colour of Ribena, maroon shorts, and trainers that looked like a sweetshop counter.

Distilleries are the backbone of Islay’s economy and tourist trade. Thanks to their success, other businesses – from breweries and farms to restaurants and chocolatiers – are now thriving and adding to the island’s appeal

The Paps of Jura disappear into the mist as I pedal along the shores of Loch Indaal, and the rain cloud I’ve been racing finally catches up. I stash my hire bike at Port Charlotte youth hostel, quickly change and make it to Lochindaal Seafood Kitchen just before the downpour.

I’m soon warmed, by the welcome then by a bowl of creamy fish chowder. “We’ve plenty of fresh seafood just in,” is all the temptation I need to order the seafood plate. It’s a bowl for one, but a hungry one, and soon I’m picking and cracking my way through piles of fat langoustines and crab claws, with hot whisky-butter scallops and plenty of bread and butter.

The famous pueblos blancos in southern Spain’s Sierra de Grazalema natural park teem with wildlife amid a limestone wonderland of peaks

‘The wind is in from Africa / Last night I couldn’t sleep.” Joni Mitchell has ear-wormed her way into my head as my wife and I step out from Zahara de la Sierra into the mountains of Sierra de Grazalema natural park. The Africa bit probably comes from yesterday’s visit to Zahara’s castle museum. Here, high above the tiled terracotta mosaic of village rooftops, we learned how the recapture of this picturesque hill town was a turning point in the Reconquista – the military campaign of the 1400s that saw the Catholics retake southern Spain after seven centuries of Moorish control. As for sleep deprivation, I may just have overdone it on last night’s tapas.

Either way, Africa feels present as we tramp through the countryside of Andalucía, if only in the wildlife. The painted lady butterflies drifting over the flower-spangled verges, the turtle doves purring from the olive groves and the booted eagle drifting overhead: all are summer visitors recently blown in from the great continent to our south.

Pierogi are a religion in Poland, but I’d never been a believer. Could a recce in the charming Baltic city convert me?

I used to live in Poland. I worked in a fish-and-chip shop in the western city of Poznań, boning cod and peeling potatoes for £1.50 an hour. With the exception of that job, I enjoyed everything about my time in the country, not least the food. I liked the chicken broth with noodles, the slippery herring, the knuckles of pork the size of basketballs, the cold beetroot soup that beats gazpacho hands down.

One thing I was less delighted by were Polish dumplings – pierogi. It wasn’t that they weren’t nice – they were – it was more that they didn’t seem to warrant the extreme levels of affection and esteem Poles often bestow on the doughy parcels. By being ambivalent about them, I was going against a well-established grain.

Want to avoid the crowds in Florence and Siena? Escape to these islands, from lively Elba to tiny, car-free Giannutri

Scattered between the Tuscan coast and Corsica, the seven islands of the Tuscan archipelago offer a striking contrast to mainland Tuscany. All are part of a protected national park, but each has its own character – some are lively, others tiny and sparsely inhabited. Montecristo and Gorgona are only accessible via strictly limited guided tours, but here’s a brief guide to the highlights of the other five.

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For a decade I lived with a fear so bad that I once tried to climb out of a tube carriage while it was in motion. Then a hypnotherapist told me to ask my parents one very important question

In 2000, I had been living in London for just over a decade and working at EMI Records for five years. I had moved to Brixton from Surrey – where space and peace were generally abundant – in the late 80s, and I’d noticed I was becoming increasingly anxious and claustrophobic, particularly on public transport.

As things got progressively worse, I had a string of distressing panic attacks. Every time, it felt like the world around me was closing in. Then, in July 2003, during my daily commute between Brixton and the South Bank, I had a panic attack so intense I tried to climb out of the tube carriage doors. Thankfully, other passengers held me back until we arrived at the next platform – but I knew the problem was no longer something I could ignore.

Inkpen, Berkshire: From lurid yellow to a moorland brown; from the scent of fire smoke to sheep urine. It’s amazing what some rainfall can do

After an entire heat-baked summer without rain, the land looks strange and unlike itself. Fields, banks and grassy margins are the lurid yellow ochre of climate fiction – the mise en scène captured with eerie relevance in the recent BBC TV drama The Rapture.

There are cracks so deep in Weaver’s Field that the farmer can push his arm in up to his elbow. Spots of bird’s-foot trefoil and sky-blue chicory (the latter on uncannily short stems) polka-dot the otherwise dead pasture. Sentinel field oaks seem unaffected, but shallow-rooted beech trees, familiar in giant caterpillar shapes on the downs, shed shrivelled brown leaves and a poor, early beechnut mast. Gnarly field maples are almost leafless, while sycamores bracket the green with their browning leaf-curl. Even in the keepered woods, laurel has wilted.

Girls Gone Bible is on tour in the US, touting a regressive ideal of femininity through discussions of abstinence and mental health struggles

At first glance, the crowd gathering outside a music venue in Red Bank, New Jersey, could have passed for a group of sorority rush hopefuls – or Ella Langley fans on their way to the country star’s show. Most of them were under the age of 30. They wore cowboy boots, maxi sundresses and soft, bouncy blowouts, scrolling on their phones outside the doors as they waited for friends to arrive.

But one accessory gave them away: the Bibles they toted. These women were there to pray.

Selling direct to public helps squeezed farmers control prices and improves access to food in rural areas

Fizzy drinks, packets of crisps and bars of chocolate: for decades, vending machines were known as a place to grab a quick snack.

Now one family of farmers is trying to change that by bringing vending machines offering fresh milk and local produce – including scotch eggs, sausage rolls and brownies – to villages and other rural locations.

The political thinker became famous for declaring the triumph of liberal democracy. Thirty-seven years on, he explains what he really meant and why he made the rare journey from right to left

There are not many public intellectuals who can say they’ve been cited by Capt James T Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, but Francis Fukuyama is one of them. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, William Shatner’s character is in a reflective mood, and speaks to the Klingon chancellor. “Some people think the future means the end of history,” Kirk muses. “Well, we haven’t run out of history quite yet.”

When the film came out in 1991 and in the years that followed, you’d often hear comments like that. They were nods to a thesis so famous it hardly needed spelling out. It debuted in a 15-page essay written by Fukuyama, then a 36-year-old thinktanker, which was published in the National Interest, a right-leaning journal of US foreign policy, in the summer of 1989. There was a question mark in the title: it was called The End of History?. In book form three years later, it became The End of History and the Last Man. But these were subtleties that, as we shall see, got lost.

Shore leave in Pattaya, known for its red light district, comes after reports of deteriorating living conditions onboard the vessel during record stint

At Pattaya’s Hard Rock Cafe and hotel, the city’s mayor and police officials, along with women in traditional Thai dress, waited to greet the sailors who were arriving in civilian clothes, bags slung over their shoulders, off the buses.

The USS Abraham Lincoln’s crew of 5,000 had not been on shore for nearly nine months, a record-setting uninterrupted time at sea.

AI datacentres are almost universally unpopular. They are loud, unsightly and drain environmental resources, with most of the profits generated flowing back to the US companies that build them – and the statistics against them are piling up.

Guardian reporter Hettie O’Brien visits Brick Lane in east London, where people are trying to resist plans for a 5,200-sq metre datacentre being pushed through by the government, to find out why people hate them so much

We would like to hear from people who live in an area where there are plans for AI datacentres to be built – or who already live near one

The Scottish National Party and the Greens have backed a moratorium on new developments of AI datacentres, as part of a growing backlash against the boom.

There are currently around 450 large data centres across the UK. These warehouses contain computing infrastructure that power cloud services and, increasingly, AI.

We want to hear from young people who have chosen to start their own businesses rather than follow a traditional career path

A growing number of Gen Z are starting their own businesses, with the number of Start Up Loans taken out by young founders rising by 132% over the past five years, according to analysis by the British Business Bank. Meanwhile, Hiscox analysis of Companies House data found nearly 400,000 Gen Z directors are now running UK-registered businesses.

We’d like to hear from people aged between 18 and 29 who have started a business about what inspired you to do it and how you got started. How is your business going? What have been the biggest challenges and rewards? Do you see yourself continuing to run your own business in the future?

We would like to hear from frontline or key workers about how the heat has affected them in the workplace this year

With record high temperatures across the UK this summer we want to hear from those whose work meant they couldn’t escape the extreme heat.

August 13 marked the hottest day of the year so far with temperatures reaching 38C in London and 37C recorded in other parts of the country; this marks the first year temperatures of 37C and above have been recorded on three separate days in the UK. Climate scientists are saying the incoming Super El Niño is likely to deliver more record breaking hot weather next year.

Floods and mudslides have swept away houses and roads with many hundreds missing

More than 1,400 people are still missing and 392 have been confirmed dead after the flash floods and landslides on the Nepal-Tibet border.hit the Himalayan border areas of ⁠Nepal and in ​Tibet in China. An avalanche of ice and rock triggered massive flash floods causing widespread damage to villages and infrastructure.

Officials said hundreds of travellers from countries including India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Malaysia, were reported missing.

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