Dr Max Pemberton isn’t uncompassionate or especially radical, but he assembles a team of medics whose stance on the condition is clear from the off. This is a documentary that will incense and offend many

Presenter Max Pemberton, a psychiatrist in the NHS, Daily Mail columnist and author, and the experts he has assembled, waste no time in setting out their stall in The Great ADHD Myth?. This is a documentary that will incense and offend some of its viewers, and its scepticism regarding ADHD is clear from the outset. “It’s certainly not a medical condition as far as I’m concerned,” says the former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Dr Iona Heath. “We’re going to look back and think: did we actually put a chemical cosh on an entire developing generation of brains?” says a neurophysiological psychologist. “The industry around ADHD is about making money at the cost of the misery of others,” says a former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

These represent the three main questions raised by Pemberton. The first is whether ADHD is a neuro-developmental disorder – ie do those diagnosed with the condition have different brains from those without – or whether it is a way of suppressing natural tendencies (especially those of children) and inducing behaviours that society deems acceptable. The second is how doctors should approach treatment, which most often involves amphetamines. “These are controlled drugs,” says consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Sami Timimi. “There’s good reason why we warn the rest of the population [about them].” The third question is – who benefits from the increase in diagnoses we have seen in the past decade or so? How has ADHD moved from a relatively unknown condition 10 years ago to affecting about 2.5 million people in the UK today (including a 200% increase in people being referred for diagnosis in the past five years)?

Telling the country to enjoy the heat while it burns, you have to wonder if Tice has lost all sense of reality

These are the doggiest of dog days. Times when hours turn into days and almost nothing happens in between. Days of precious R&R, when only a few politicians venture out, and then only to fend off accusations they are doing next to nothing and prove they are still alive. Much like the rest of us. The silliest days of the silly season. Days that are made for men like Richard Tice.

There are some politicians who have the gift of sounding as if they know what they are talking about. There are those who you suspect are bullshitting but still give the benefit of the doubt. Then there are the ones you only have to look at to know they are completely clueless in every way. Never within the same postcode as plausibility. A walking miracle because somehow they have managed to persuade their party association and constituency voters that what they really need is someone who is visibly dim and incompetent. August gives us space to celebrate these men and women. None more so than Dicky. The apex male of stupidity. The idiot’s idiot.

The Vampire Lestat has seduced fans around the world with his eye-popping antics. But this obsession with hot vamps goes way beyond forbidden love, bare chests and a taste for LSD-laced blood

If you want TV audiences to forgive a fictional man for absolutely anything, just sharpen his fangs and stick him in velvet. Case in point? The horny musical drama The Vampire Lestat, which became a cult hit in the US earlier this year. The show has now arrived in the UK and Sam Reid’s searing performance as Lestat has fans on their knees.

The first two seasons, which went by the title Interview With the Vampire, were about the “interview” in which Louis (Jacob Anderson) tells a journalist about his toxic relationship with Lestat. Now, the focus has shifted to Lestat – hence the new title and new narrator – as the golden-locked prince of darkness swaps centuries of secrecy for glam-rock stardom.

How do you keep audiences gripped while cycling 27km per show? From the Australian recreating a Tour de France win to a ‘toxically positive’ spin queen, we meet the acts bringing Olympian fitness to Edinburgh

Blood and sweat drip to the floor. Tears are on their way. In a small room in Edinburgh, Megan Tomei is cleat-clipped into a stationary bike, yelling above the music as she leads a high-intensity spin class gone wrong. “We take the thing you’re running from,” Tomei shouts, pink lights bouncing off her gleaming shoulders, “and turn it into fuel!” This is SpinQueen™, one of a handful of shows at this year’s fringe demanding epic endurance from their performers through the use of jazzed-up gym equipment. Employing various bikes and a treadmill to authentically illustrate the struggle for success, the pain of failure, and the escape from reality, a profoundly fit group of actors are pushing themselves to their physical limits.

Across the city, Connor Delves’s calves are worth watching. The workout from his cycling-obsessed play, Cadel: Lungs on Legs, is so powerful that people have come up to him after, wanting to touch them. “To make sure they’re real,” says Delves, who cycles a whopping 27km per show. Does he mind this attention? He shrugs. “If they’re OK with getting their hands sweaty, go for it.”

An over-investment in people-pleasing can be emotionally costly. Here’s how I’m training myself to be OK with letting people down

A few months ago, my 10-year-old daughter and I went to our neighborhood cafe. At the counter, the owner greeted us with her typical effusion of warmth and welcome. Instead of greeting her in kind, my daughter looked on with a stony expression and ungiving eyes.

My face flushed. I was embarrassed and incensed by what I perceived as blatant rudeness. You could at least smile, I thought.

Right for people of African descent to return to continent is key pillar of global push for reparatory justice from colonisers

Supporting the right for people of African descent to return to the continent has become a key pillar of the growing global push for reparatory justice from Britain and other colonisers.

When Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, visited Jamaica this month he addressed the issue of repatriation for Jamaicans and others whose ancestors were kidnapped from Africa and sold into transatlantic chattel slavery.

Prime minister urges local leaders to act as homelessness campaigners welcome move but say more needs to be done

• I won’t abandon anyone to sleep rough on our streets. That’s my £442m promise

Andy Burnham has urged local leaders to offer all rough sleepers in England a route off the streets by Christmas, as he pledges another £100m to end street homelessness.

Arguing in the Guardian that rough sleeping has become so common it now “feels like part of the scenery”, Burnham promised he would mount a Covid-style campaign to get everyone off the streets this winter.

Report’s author said findings highlighted ‘near-total failure’ to hold corporations accountable over the disaster that killed 72 people

The company behind Grenfell Tower’s flammable cladding gave more compensation to its shareholders than to victims of the disaster, an investigation has found.

Arconic, which made and sold the cladding panels found to be the “primary cause” of the rapid spread of the Grenfell fire, paid $74m (£54.7m)) to its shareholders for economic loss they incurred after the blaze.

A man, woman and teenage girl have died, while a younger girl is in a critical condition, say Sussex police

A couple and their teenage daughter have died after getting into difficulty in the sea off the West Sussex coast, police said on Tuesday.

A man, a woman and a teenage girl died after the incident in Shoreham-by-Sea, the chief superintendent of Sussex police, James Collis, said.

Fifteen fire engines tackling blaze at Landmann Way in Deptford involving 50 tonnes of household waste

Fifteen fire engines and about 100 firefighters are tackling a blaze in a south-east London recycling plant for the second time this summer.

London fire brigade said the blaze on Landmann Way in Deptford involves about 50 tonnes of household waste stored at a recycling facility.

‘First meaningful rain for a long time’ is forecast but water firms continue to ask customers to restrict use

Floods and drought could hit the UK at the same time this week, with heavy rain forecast to fall on hard, parched soil.

While some parts of the UK will have the “first meaningful rain for a long time” in the coming days, it will not reverse widespread drought conditions that have put pressure on wildlife, farmers, firefighters and water resources.

MPs’ register of interests shows hospitality and trips worth more than £12,000 and contributions from longstanding Labour donors

Donors to Andy Burnham gave almost £350,000 over the months before he became Labour leader and prime minister, with major contributors including his former adviser Sacha Lord as well as billionaires David Sainsbury and Gary Lubner.

The new MPs’ register of interests also shows Burnham declaring hospitality and trips worth more than £12,000 – many of them relating to Greater Manchester in his former role as mayor but also including £1,500 of Glastonbury tickets in 2025, where he was speaking, and £500 of tickets to Ladies Day at Aintree this year.

Migration minister asked how he intends to stop deportations of people ‘who had lived in Sweden for decades’

The deportation and removal of British citizens from Sweden over Brexit residency rights is damaging relations with the UK amid efforts to improve links with London, a Swedish MP has said.

Häkan Svenneling, representative for Vârmland, where a 78-year-old British widow, Joyce Thomas, has been given four weeks to leave Sweden after 21 years of residency, has written to the migration minister, Johan Forssell, asking what he “intends to do to stop the deportations”.

State attorneys general claim tech company intentionally designed addictive products that harm young people

Lawyers representing 29 US states have accused Meta of covering up internal research showing Instagram was addictive for teenagers. In a packed courtroom Tuesday, on the opening day of a landmark legal challenge, they said the company knew its products harmed children but hid that information from the public.

“I heard from many of you at jury selection that the health and wellbeing of kids is a shared responsibility,” said Megan O’Neill, a deputy attorney general for California, in her opening statements. “Meta didn’t do its share.”

Tributes paid to ‘great friend and collaborator’ who played with band for 56 years and died in hospice care in Texas

The ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard has died at the age of 77.

A spokesperson for the band confirmed that Beard died on 17 August in hospice care at his ranch in Richmond, Texas. His family were by his side.

Patrons at two of the chain’s London pubs were all for Tim Martin’s ban on playing music or taking calls on speaker

The terrace of the Moon Under Water Wetherspoons pub in Leicester Square was full of people enjoying the warm weather and chatting between tables – without a TikTok video or speakerphone call in earshot.

At Wetherspoons, the convivial atmosphere can no longer be punctuated by rude customers taking phone calls on blast, or playing videos without headphones after Tim Martin, the owner of the pub chain, banned both on his premises.

Twenty-nine US states are seeking huge damages, claiming Meta’s platforms were addictive by design

In 1994, more than 40 US states came together to sue one of the most powerful industries on Earth: big tobacco.

The suits brought together diverse claims centred on tobacco companies’ misleading advertising and contribution to a mounting public health crisis. They ended in a negotiated settlement with the US government, in which the companies agreed to pay more than any industry ever, and the states agreed to drop a large portion of their claims.

Russia has threatened the UK with ‘consequences’ after reports that British drones were used by Ukraine to strike targets on Russia’s mainland for the first time.

The Ministry of Defence has rebuffed these threats, saying the UK is ‘committed to providing equipment Ukraine needs to defend itself against Putin’s illegal invasion’.

Annie Kelly speaks to senior international correspondent Luke Harding

Luke’s new book Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest will be published next week

It’s impossible not be be enraged by this story of Indigenous children who were taken from their families. This heartbreaking show has been a hit in Canada – and it would be a crime for the rest of the world to miss it

Few dramas will enrage you as much as Little Bird. Not because it’s in any way hokey or problematic. On the contrary. Based on the real story of the Sixties Scoop – a period in Canada from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, when an estimated 20,000 First Nations children were forcibly removed from their families and adopted by non-Indigenous families – this heartbreaking tale is restrained and carefully measured. Melodrama is swerved, letting the injustice at this story’s core slowly metastasise.

Spread across six episodes, the series juggles two timelines – 1968 in Saskatchewan; 1985 in Montreal – tracking one family’s rupture; and the decades-long reckoning that follows. We meet Esther Rosenblum (Darla Contois), a first-year law student, at her engagement party, where her fiance David (Rowen Kahn), a doctor, mingles with his wealthy Jewish family. When his mother describes her as “exotic”, the word lodges like shrapnel. She was transplanted when she was five from the (fictional) and raised in the Jewish faith by a Canadian family.

Little Bird aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now

It has been likened to a monster, an oil rig – and the Parthenon. Now, for its 40th birthday, the astonishing London landmark has joined the Open House festival, to grant admirers a rare look around the inside

In his 2012 book A New Kind of Bleak, the critic Owen Hatherley called it “monstrous, compelling” and utterly messed-up. Back in the 1980s, a then Prince Charles suggested it had been inspired by a North Sea oil rig. But none of this stopped it from becoming, in 2011, the youngest ever building to be given Grade I-listed status in the UK.

And now, as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations, the Lloyd’s building will open to the public for the first time since 2014 for one day only during London’s Open House festival. The iconic building in the heart of the financial district was designed by architect Richard Rogers to house the global insurance marketplace. Its futuristic facade has been a celebrated part of the City of London skyline since it opened in 1986, but the interior is rarely seen by the public. Visitor galleries with a view of the trading floor have long been shut for security reasons.

Lululemon’s absurdly capacious 80-litre bag will set you back a small fortune – and it’s one of the cheapest giant holdalls on the market

Name: Big-Ass Bags.

Age: The titular “Big-Ass Bag” launched this month (but large carrying receptacles have been available for centuries).

Whether you’re trying to squeeze more into a carry-on or simply want a tidier suitcase, our expert rounds up the top cubes, from compression to lightweight

• The best suitcases for your next holiday

Nightmarish scenes reminiscent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting used to erupt whenever I travelled with a case. Skirts and shirt sleeves slithered out from under compression straps, worn clothes frolicked with unworn clothes in the lid compartment, and even the best suitcases would sometimes leave my clothing creased and jumbled.

Packing cubes have changed all that. Boxy, zippable and small to varying degrees, these organisation accessories are designed to keep items neat and separate inside a suitcase or bag.

Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia – but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. Why did nobody listen?

One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn’t have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It’s as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can’t put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can’t stop, or look back, or think straight.

But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. It comes from somewhere. It wasn’t inevitable. Things could have turned out differently. They still can. And if you look back, one thing you’ll see is that a lot of people saw this all coming. They foresaw our present when it was still the future. They thought it might turn out fabulously, a computer utopia. And they worried it might turn out disastrously. Above all, they issued warning after warning about the rise of what I call the artificial state, the replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, the consent of the governed, with the rule of people by machines. They warned of a future in which democratic deliberation would be replaced by prediction by calculation, the public sphere would be supplanted by data-driven commerce, and drones would take the place of the demos. Why didn’t anyone listen?

The new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorise, and reproduce this information at the press of a button. Most of these people are highly educated, many of them are PhDs, and none that I have met have malignant political designs on the American public. They may, however, radically reconstruct the American political system, build a new politics, and even modify revered and venerable American institutions – facts of which they are blissfully innocent.

Today we begin our drive to get everyone in for Christmas. And it will be for local communities up and down the land to decide how best to do it

• Burnham launches ‘national drive’ to get rough sleepers off streets by Christmas

I’ve always thought you can tell something about a country by what it learns to walk past. And, somewhere along the way, we’ve got used to seeing people sleeping rough on our streets.

We see people bedded down in doorways and sat outside stations, carrying their lives in rucksacks and with sleeping bags on their backs. And I think most people have the same reaction: this isn’t right; it shouldn’t be happening here. But we’ve lived with it for so long that something that used to shock us now feels like part of the scenery.

Andy Burnham is prime minister of the United Kingdom

A movement with safety, dignity and equality at its heart may now be blamed for the rightwing backlash. But within it were principles worth carrying forwards

Every once in a while, the discourse gods send a tablet down to the people, announcing that a previous era is dead and a new age is upon us. Recently, it was the “vibe shift” – a post-pandemic change in culture that encompassed everything from fashion to politics. The vibe shift consolidated with Donald Trump’s second election, a harbinger of the end of fragility and of movements for racial and gender equality – a rejection of the long 2010s with their hashtags and pink pussy hats and women’s marches and protests. The vibe shift has recently been followed by a calling of time on what has come to be known as “Woke 1.0” – a term that represents what is now seen as a culture of hysterical overreach triggered by the momentary breakthrough of movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. “Woke 1 was crazy,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this month, quoting a New York City councilman. And there we have it, time to walk back some things said and done in the giddy heat of those moments. It was crazy!

This rush to the future away from what some perceive to be an embarrassing past groups together various disparate phenomena. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Woke 1.0 (or “peak wokeness” – I wish the gods would use less trivialising ways to refer to roiling social tides, but there we are) was about politics and culture and also about the behaviours and trends it triggered. It was about concrete problems: policing of minority communities, the right of women not to be sexually harassed or violated, the systemic racism and sexism that damaged both. And it was about reforming the cultural structures that created and perpetuated those systems; asking university curricula to expand and diversify intellectual sources, recognising the long shadow of glorified imperial histories, and updating institutions – from the media to the academy – in order to enfranchise change. None of this is “crazy”.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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

The PM’s net zero pragmatism may please some voters, but as parts of the country go up in flames, it’s an increasingly hard sell

When the siren sounded on Friday night, my first thought was fire.

Weeks of unrelenting sun in the normally soggy Peak District, where I was visiting my mum, have bleached green valleys a dangerously dry, crispy blond. One of her neighbours had earlier pointed out an ominous cloud of smoke on the horizon, coming from one of the wildfires raging all summer on the moor. When that harsh, discordant shriek blared from every mobile phone in the house, I was half-braced for an evacuation order, not what turned out to be a faintly melodramatic warning to the nation to lay off the barbecues. A false alarm, of sorts, but one that felt uneasily like a wake-up call.

In her husband’s first term, her absences sparked conspiracy theories. This time, she is somehow keeping an even lower profile

Anyone seen a 56-year-old woman around lately? Tall, cinnamon blond hair, fond of a fancy hat and, to quote Vogue, occasionally dresses like a “freelance magician”. She goes by the name “Melania Trump” or “first lady”, and she appears to be missing again. According to an analysis by the Daily Beast, Melania has only made 38 public appearances this year – with the last being the World Cup final. She’s been MIA for about a month.

To be fair, this isn’t out of character. During her first stint in the White House, the first lady’s frequent absences sparked various conspiracy theories, including one that she had a body double. But it seems Melania is keeping an even lower profile during Trump 2.0. NBC reported on Monday that she’s done about half as many public events as she did at this point in Trump’s first term. A senior adviser told the outlet she “prioritises results over appearances”. I dunno about that. Her highest-profile public appearance this year was when she held a surprise press conference telling everyone not to speculate about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. This had the predictable result of getting everyone to speculate about her relationship with the dead sex offender.

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.

Trip-prepping shouldn’t be a grim exercise in minimising your milligrams. Take day outfits, night outfits, gymwear, swimwear – and prepare for an adventure

If you’re on the hunt for a streamlined way to travel internationally while only packing a toothbrush, an iPad, a single white T-shirt made of technical fabric and a lukewarm sachet of Huel, then keep scrolling. I simply couldn’t care less.

Packing for travel shouldn’t be a grim logistical exercise in minimising the milligrams of mass one must transport. It should be a prelude to an adventure – and an adventure in itself!

Max Olesker is a writer and comedian. His show Max Olesker: Making the Cut is playing at the Edinburgh fringe, until 30 August 2026

Despite declining consumption, the country will still need lots of gas in coming years but solutions aren’t forthcoming

• UK risks running out of gas by 2030s, ministers told

The penny is dropping in government. Britain, even in rapid energy transition mode, will still need a lot of gas in the years ahead – and needs to know how the gas will arrive.

It could hardly be otherwise when there are 24m households with a gas connection, largely for heating, and the pace of heat pumps adoption is miserable. Last year gas comprised about a third of the UK’s overall energy needs. Though annual consumption is in decline, the days of peak use during a bleak midwinter can still be as high as ever.

The official talk is of the government acting with understanding and flexibility. But devastated lives tell another story

There is anger about the case of Joyce Thomas, a 78-year-old retired nurse who has lived in Sweden for 21 years. Her husband died there; her son, grandchildren and home are there. Yet she has been told to leave because her post-Brexit residence application was late. Her case is appalling and predictable – but far from isolated.

The Guardian has also reported on the plight of Horace Mason, 74, who faces being deported after a court ruling, despite having lived in Sweden for 25 years. This is sad but not surprising.

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani shows Britain’s Andy Burnham that confronting billionaires need not mean the end of cooperation with Donald Trump

In November, Californians will vote on a one-off 5% levy on residents worth more than $1bn. The union-backed plan could raise $100bn, more than enough to replace federal healthcare funding stripped away by Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. About 200 very rich people would pay. But the referendum is becoming a test of whether extreme wealth can buy the political power to defeat a popular redistributive policy. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has already spent $100m backing opposition to the tax – a fraction of the $13bn bill he could face. Other billionaires are joining him. Whether voters can impose costs on the super-rich once their fortunes are big enough to shape the political process is now an open question. That alone should trouble any democracy.

It’s a long way from Mr Brin’s west coast lair of Mountain View to Andy Burnham’s Makerfield constituency. But the prime minister should heed the call from prominent progressive academics – led by the Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz – urging Britain to join a new global push to tackle inequality. Prof Stiglitz wants help creating a new UN International Panel on Inequality (IPI). This stems from the G20’s first-ever inequality report, which warned that the yawning gap between rich and poor was a human-made crisis corroding democracy and social cohesion while blocking efforts to tackle the climate emergency.

The Wordsworth Trust has acquired a second home. Cherished authors including George Eliot don’t even have one

Interest in all things Jane Austen remains high, following the celebrations of her 250th anniversary. In September, the museum based in her former home in Chawton, Hampshire, will host a Persuasion festival. But a less obvious beneficiary of this spike in interest is a museum dedicated to two writers she never met: William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The success of the BBC television series The Other Bennet Sister – which portrayed Mary, a minor character in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as a Wordsworth enthusiast – has led to an influx of visitors to Dove Cottage in Cumbria.

This has been a big year for the Wordsworth Trust, which owns the cottage, owing to its purchase of another house: Rydal Mount, two miles to the east. When this building is reopened, the poet will become one of a handful of authors, along with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, to have more than one of his homes opened to visitors.

Nik Wood says the prime minister must be tough on the causes of crime, Henry Rossi calls for him to resolve the IPP crisis, while Janet Carter considers victims of domestic abuse

As you say in your editorial (The Guardian view on early prisoner release: don’t lose sight of systemic reform, 12 August), governments of all stripes have bowed to pressure for ever longer sentencing. For instance, the killers of PC Andrew Harper would now face mandatory life sentences, campaigned for across the board. It was the unlikely figure of Douglas Hurd, the Conservative home secretary, who said that prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse. That expense is always one that is tempting for governments demonstratively to minimise.

The result is a prison service that hasn’t got room for all those the courts convict, nor enough staff or scope to reform and rehabilitate them for the benefit of society. The assault that has been made on Parole Board and probation decision-making and capabilities compounds this.

Say the thing, mend the relationship, share the story – and then get on with living, says end-of-life doula Rebecca Jo-Rushdy, while Jane Andrew thinks EM Forster said it best

What struck me most about this article (What end-of-life experts know about living well: love your wrinkles, celebrate birthdays and don’t obsess over work, 13 August) is the idea that preparing for the end of life can actually help us live more fully now.

As an end-of-life doula, I have seen how a terminal diagnosis can suddenly bring clarity. The things that once felt urgent often fall away, while relationships, memories, unfinished conversations and the question of what we leave behind become profoundly important. But I don’t believe that we should have to wait for a diagnosis to begin that work.

Vanessa Scanlan says the constituency is desperately in need of a decent MP who would offer genuine support for the problems it faces. Plus letters from Leila Roberts and Richard Ellis

I live in the Clacton constituency, in one of the surrounding villages, some distance from the town, and I agree with Sarah Elizabeth Cox’s characterisation of the town (Farage has turned Clacton into a human zoo. Here’s the truth about what’s happening here, 12 August).

When I go to Clacton to take my kids to the beach or to the cinema, there is a sudden shift in the character of the area. The deprivation radiates in some streets. It is painful to see the residents so keenly in need of a decent MP to offer genuine support for a town with so many problems being exploited by Nigel Farage.

Machines that kill without distinction, answerable to no one, leave no one safe, writes military surgeon Dr Darren Mann

Stuart Russell is right that AI’s builders fear losing control of it (Experts are warning: our AI arms race is putting humanity at risk, 11 August). But it is not only a future superintelligence’s problem; it is already loaded into weapons, where a loss of control kills a civilian today, not humanity tomorrow.

An autonomous drone told to clear a “kill box” is the genie your other columnists described (How do we prevent AI agents from going rogue? It starts with a new kind of measurement, 18 July): it does what it is told, killing whatever is inside, combatant or child. The gap between a target and a lawful target is the principle of distinction, which no instruction closes, because the instruction was lawful.

• IFA points to ‘unprecedented crisis of confidence’

• ‘Proper vision and direction for world football’ required

Gianni Infantino’s decision to sack his chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, after the Frenchman’s criticism of the World Cup sell-off plan has hardened some opposition to the Fifa president, with the efforts to force him out expected to intensify over the next few days.

On Tuesday Israel became the latest Fifa member to officially withdraw their support for Infantino’s re-election in a letter sent by the head of the Israel Football Association (IFA), Moshe Zuares.

With Pakistan at a low ebb and England at the start of semi-reset, the series at Headingly looks to be an interesting one

The history of Test cricket between England and Pakistan stretches back to 1954 and has been a vibrant one over the years. Yet, for all the memorable battles, plus the cultural ties between the two countries and a fair bit of scandal along the way, a trophy that denotes the rivalry is still to be created.

England lost the Crowe-Thorpe trophy to New Zealand this summer, will look to retain the Basil D’Oliveira trophy in South Africa this winter, and hope they can win back the Ashes next year. Trophies for encounters with India and West Indies go back so far they have been retired and replaced by new ones in recent times.

From the manager’s divorce to tension with the club hierarchy, new documentary is an honest portrayal of his difficult last two seasons

Having occupied a front-row seat for the final two seasons of Pep Guardiola’s gilded Manchester City tenure, the subject of Amazon’s A Beautiful Obsession, the surprise to me is how unfiltered the four-part series is.

Particularly, the telling of the torrid 2024-25 campaign when the wheels came clattering off in the bleakest of mid-winter plunges that featured nine defeats and one victory in 13 aura-shattering games.

• 1892 Holdings has first refusal if FSG opts to sell

• Group paid more than £2bn for initial 38% slice of club

1892 Holdings, the new investor in Liverpool, has first refusal to become the majority shareholder in the next 12 months should Fenway Sports Group decide to sell.

The consortium led by Amit Bhatia and including the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was believed to have bought 30% to one-third of Liverpool when the deal was announced on Friday. However, the agreement is for 38% of the Anfield club, meaning 1892 has paid FSG just over £2bn to become a minority shareholder. The increased stake, first reported by the Athletic, still values Liverpool at about £5.5bn.

Spain’s World Cup-winning captain has completed his move to Camp Nou where he is a natural successor to club legend

By the time Flight PTN27B started its descent into El Prat a bit before 8pm on Monday evening, a small crowd had gathered by the terminal doors, waiting for it to land. A few people stood and watched the sky, cameras out to capture its arrival. A lot more watched on their phones. In the two hours it had taken to get there from Manchester, taking off at 5.11pm, 101 minutes behind schedule, the Pilatus PC-24 had become the most tracked plane on the planet. Everyone knew that Rodrigo Hernández was on board. Unless, of course, he had been sneaked away in a catering cart.

Five days earlier, Rodri had been seen, and recorded, at Barajas airport waiting to get on a flight back to Manchester from Madrid. He wheeled a small RFEF (Spanish football federation) case with his name on, stood alone in the queue, the World Cup winning-captain just a bloke in shorts and T-shirt, and his stay in the UK was supposed to be brief, just long enough to say goodbye. The plane he was boarding was a Ryanair one: that was the detail everyone homed in on, something extraordinary in the ordinariness. This time, though, he came on a private jet, one way. His family travelled with him. He came to sign for FC Barcelona.

Women’s peloton returns after death of Finlay Tarling, who died during the Volta a Portugal last week

The 2026 Tour of Britain Women starts in Cumbria on Wednesday under a cloud after the death of the Welsh rider Finlay Tarling in the Volta a Portugal last Friday.

Tarling was in a collision with a non-race vehicle during the race’s eighth stage and, while police investigations into the exact circumstances surrounding the incident continue, the professional cycling community remains in shock.

• Premier Sports secure rights with BBC not bidding

• Nandy: ‘As a fan myself, I share fans’ disappointment’

The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has urged administrators to strike a deal to allow this autumn’s Rugby League World Cup to be shown on free-to-air broadcast after it was announced the event would be shown in the United Kingdom exclusively on subscription TV.

The BBC’s longstanding relationship with the sport has led to it consistently showing the Rugby League World Cup irrespective of where and when the tournament has been held. But that tradition will seemingly end this autumn, after it was confirmed the broadcaster would not bid for the rights to show the event, which will be held in Australia.

Prime minister responds to Russian anger over Kyiv’s use of British-made drones in ‘deep strike’ campaign

• UK politics live – latest updates

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Andy Burnham says the UK will continue to “support Ukraine 100%” after Russia threatened consequences after strikes by British-made drones.

The Russian embassy to the UK said on Monday that Britain had been deliberately escalating the Ukraine conflict and the deeper its involvement, “the higher the price it will pay”.

UKHSA rules out British produce as source of infections and says evidence points to consumption of imported eggs

One person has died and more than 200 others have fallen ill during a UK-wide outbreak of salmonella that health officials have linked to people eating imported eggs.

The 207 people affected range in age from under one year to 90 years old, according to the UK Health Security Agency, which is leading an investigation into the outbreak.

Claire Lomas was filming content for project promoting tech company’s Vision Pro headset in Jordan, hearing told

A disability campaigner who was paralysed from the chest down died after her microlight crashed while filming a TV series for Apple, an inquest has heard.

Claire Lomas, 44, who was the first person to complete a marathon with the help of a “bionic” suit, died five weeks after the adapted aircraft she was travelling in “veered off the runway” and hit a large rock while landing in Amman, Jordan.

Amid heated race with Anthropic, firm says it’s overhauling research and training and will require greater safety parameters of AI after hack

OpenAI on ⁠Tuesday said it had slowed down the ⁠pace of ⁠its ​AI development while it overhauled its ⁠research and training systems.

The company’s researchers were ⁠caught unaware last month ​when an ‌AI agent ‌under testing hacked another AI ‌firm, Hugging Face.

As adept at comedy and musicals as she was drama, Law also acted alongside daughters Sophie and Emma Thompson in a career spanning eight decades

Phyllida Law, whose prolific acting career encompassed a wide range of stage, TV and film roles – a number of which were alongside her daughters, Emma and Sophie Thompson – has died aged 94. Her personal manager, Jacky Leggo, said in a statement that she “died supremely peacefully at home, surrounded by all her family”.

Born in Glasgow in 1932, Law was accepted at the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre school – initially intending to be a stage designer but then switching to acting. She appeared in a number of Bristol Old Vic productions in the 1950s, and it was there she met Eric Thompson, a fellow actor, whom she married in 1957.

Almost 45m acres of national forests could be potentially opened to road construction, drilling and logging

The Trump administration said on Tuesday it plans to rescind the “roadless rule” that has protected old-growth forests in the US for 25 years, potentially opening up almost 45m acres of national forests to road construction, drilling and logging.

Conservationists had feared the announcement was coming since last summer after Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, targeted a rule brought in by Bill Clinton’s administration, describing it as “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development.

Scientists surprised to find all but two of 12 grizzlies were dead within a year of ‘feelgood’ release, unable to sustain their high-calorie diet and inclined to approach humans

The orphaned grizzly bear cubs were bulked up with a generous diet of roadkill, watermelon, dog food and snacks donated by the public. Their contact with carers was limited to two people. Then, after up to a year in rehabilitation, they returned home to the wilds of British Columbia.

“It’s a feelgood thing – people feel good when the cage opens,” says Dr Lana M Ciarniello, a bear specialist who tracked the Canadian yearlings in a recent study. There is a perception that bears will thrive in their natural habitat, she says. “The reality is they’re not followed up on.”

Funding boost worth $100,000 has recently materialized in form of new marmot-themed cryptocurrency

Scientists who turned to OnlyFans to help save long-running research into marmots have raised more than $100,000 after harnessing the support of another, very modern, funding avenue – cryptocurrency.

The 60-year project of continuous study of marmots – stout, ground-dwelling rodents that are the largest members of the squirrel family – across the US west was facing termination following science funding cuts imposed by Donald Trump’s administration.

Goyt Valley, Derbyshire: My patience into dusk is rewarded with a full display of unlikely calls and aerial prowess

The setting sun spread a last Iberian glow over the hills opposite before they were drained of colour and sound, and by 9pm, the world was in monochrome.

In line with national increases in their numbers and range, nightjars have prospered here recently. It seems especially so with the clearance of conifers, which has left a mix of old Scots pine and open space perfectly suited to this crepuscular ground-nesting migrant.

Bonnier Books will no longer publish UK’s top-selling true crime author following Guardian investigation

The main publisher of the bestselling true crime writer Christopher Berry-Dee has dropped the author after a Guardian investigation into allegations of violence and sexual abuse against him, which he denies. Waterstones has also removed his books from sale.

“We are shocked and appalled by the very serious allegations relating to Christopher Berry-Dee, and our thoughts are with those affected,” said the publisher Bonnier Books in a statement to the Guardian.

Staff members said Free Speech Union would ‘need to explain’ how it spent money donated by its supporters

Staff at a campaign group that claims to defend free speech in Britain said it would “need to explain” how it spent roughly £60,000 that was crowdfunded for a legal case that was ultimately fought by a pro bono lawyer.

The Free Speech Union (FSU), an activist group founded by Conservative life peer Toby Young, last year took up the case of Julian Foulkes, a 71-year-old retired police officer who had been arrested 18 months earlier after writing a social media post about antisemitism.

Bridget Phillipson writes to watchdog asking it to look into claims Tether.bet and Fispay operated without a licence

The Gambling Commission has been urged to investigate claims that companies linked to Reform UK donors and allies of Nigel Farage have been operating without a licence.

The Labour party’s chair, Bridget Phillipson, has written to the watchdog asking it to look into Tether.bet, a Montenegro-based gambling company, and Fispay, a UK company owned by Reform’s data protection officer, Mowbray Jackson.

Whether Tether.bet, and its operators, provided or advertised remote gambling facilities to consumers in UK without the required licence

Whether Fispay Ltd, or any other UK company, provided or supported gambling facilities or services to consumers in the UK without the required licence.”

Earl says he wanted to ‘write down my own thoughts and memories’ with 30th anniversary of Diana’s death ‘on the skyline’

Charles Spencer is to publish a book about his sister Diana in September.

In the book – titled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister – Spencer recounts the story of Diana’s life and the week of her death. It marks “the first time that Earl Spencer has spoken openly and at length about his sister”, according to the book’s publisher, the Penguin imprint Michael Joseph. The book will be released on 22 September in the UK.

Marco Rubio targets ICC’s Tomoko Akane and Abdoulaye Seye, who was investigating Israeli war crimes in Gaza

The US has sanctioned the president of the international criminal court (ICC) and a prosecutor tasked with investigating crimes committed by Israel during its war on Gaza.

The new sanctions designations were unveiled by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, who called the Hague-based ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”, in a statement.

Picture showing White Helmets volunteer unconscious and with bruises on his body went viral

Syrians have protested over the death of a man who was arrested and allegedly beaten by security forces, sparking widespread anger at a practice thought to have ended with the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

A crowd gathered in the city of Aleppo, demanding accountability for the security forces who are alleged to have carried out the torture, with participants holding signs and slogans such as: “Do not repeat the same oppression that we revolted against.” Protests were also planned to take place in front of Syria’s parliament in Damascus on Tuesday, as well.

Boxing champion says he will raise their daughter, Kaya, to remember the late actor’s ‘immense talent’

Hayden Panettiere’s daughter will be raised to remember her mother’s “immense talent” and “incredible career”, according to a tribute posted on social media on Tuesday by Wladimir Klitschko, the ex-lineal world heavyweight boxing champion and the late Hollywood actor’s former partner.

Their daughter, Kaya, has been raised by the Ukrainian retired boxer since 2018, when Panettiere ceded full custody to concentrate on her battles with alcoholism, depression and substance abuse.

William Heidmeyer recounts hearing ‘three volleys’ of gunfire and seeing one man holding a pistol

• What we know about Tupac Shakur’s death and what to expect from murder trial

District Court Judge Carli Kierney relayed a few questions directly from the jury to medical examiner Dr. Lisa Gavin.

“Where there any wounds to the head that you or Dr. Jordan observed or noted?”

After pubs and clubs get rates relief, authors back open letter calling for similar support for bookshops, described as the ‘beating hearts’ of high streets

Maggie O’Farrell, Philip Pullman, Katherine Rundell and Elif Shafak are among the authors supporting a campaign by independent booksellers who have urged Andy Burnham to extend business rates relief for pubs, clubs and live music venues to bookshops, warning that rising bills could put some shops at risk of closure.

A total of 234 independent booksellers have signed an open letter organised by the Booksellers Association, calling on the prime minister and the chancellor to give bookshops the same consideration as other businesses that play a significant, positive role in their communities.

Platform set to launch later this year will enable loyalty card members to sell preloved Billy bookcases and Poäng chairs

• Business live – latest updates

Ikea is taking on eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Vinted with its own secondhand selling site in the UK.

The new platform, which will enable shoppers signed up to the Swedish company’s membership scheme to connect directly to one another to buy and sell pre-owned Ikea items locally, is due to launch in the next few months.

Teen version is intended for children aged 13 to 17 and includes content protections on self-harm and sexual chats

OpenAI is launching a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers – the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence – who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship.

The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens, which launches on Tuesday, is tailored for children aged 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things such as suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than spit out answers and school essays.

Iran war prompts cost of living squeeze for workers as ONS reports unemployment rate stays at 4.9%

• Business live – latest updates

Wage growth in the UK slowed in June and vacancies hit a five-year low as workers came under pressure from a renewed cost of living squeeze amid the economic impact from the Iran war.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show average growth in total earnings, including bonuses, fell to 4.1% in the three months to June, down from 4.4% in the three months to May.

Whether Elf Lyons’ high-concept Hollywood throwback, Kate Dehnert’s disorientating rave or Ele McKenzie’s Bob Dylan fantasy, heartbreak fuels fine humour at the festival

Breakups. We’ve all been through them. Sometimes they’re mutual, sometimes not. Sometimes agony, sometimes relief. And sometimes, they’re world-shattering bereavements that seem to end, or at least upend, everything. That’s the experience two comedy shows seek to express on this year’s fringe – an experience that can’t be captured by the usual conventions of the medium. Wry wisecracks into a microphone just won’t cut it. A whole new form is required.

Perhaps formal innovation isn’t such a shock when Elf Lyons is the innovator, as almost all of this dedicated nonconformist’s work has been entirely bespoke. But even for her, The Woman on the Edge is something different: shards of a disintegrating sense of self, grafted together to suggest the journey Lyons has been on since her relationship ended, shortly before her wedding day, early last year. The conceit is that the show is being performed by a Norma Desmond-alike alter ego. A brittle and wise-cracking refugee from vintage Hollywood, smoke plumes from her décolletage as she fills in for absent Elf while keeping at bay her husband, the clown Pagliacci, on the end of the phone.

Rick Baker helped define Hollywood’s creature features with his wild makeup effects skills. From Locarno, he talks Gremlins, his love of simians– and why AI will never replace expert design

When Rick Baker was 22 years old and laying the first bricks of what would become one of the great Hollywood careers, he travelled to Hatra in Iraq with director William Friedkin to assist with Max von Sydow’s makeup on The Exorcist. “Oh, he was definitely a lunatic,” Baker recalls of Friedkin, his signature goatee and ponytail still intact, if a little more salt than pepper these days. “But he made a great movie.” Friedkin had been travelling with a fake passport, and the production was plagued by extreme heat and dust storms – but the show went on. “I did von Sydow’s hands,” Baker says. “I pretty much just held a glue bottle.”

We are speaking in Locarno, Switzerland, during the film festival, where Baker has accepted a lifetime achievement award and introduced screenings of An American Werewolf in London and The Nutty Professor – the first and fourth of his seven Oscar wins. When he completed his last big production, Maleficent, in 2014, it ended a more than 40-year career in which he made some huge contributions to popular culture. The monsters in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video? They were Baker’s handiwork. The Mos Eisley cantina band in Star Wars? That was him, too. In 1999, he leaked a story to the press to stop the studio from simply painting Jim Carrey green instead of using his designs for How the Grinch Stole Christmas; he won the argument and a sixth Oscar followed.

Online dating’s eternal bugbear reaches a horrific apotheosis in this funny, grimy and impishly directed shocker

Paola (Humberly González) is a pretty young woman about to turn 30 who hasn’t found herself a steady boyfriend – so, like many people of her generation, she’s on all the dating apps. The algorithm finds her match in Henry, who looks clean cut and kind eyed – or, at least, that’s what he seems from a very short video conversation on the phone, which breaks up due to bad signal. Paola’s sister Maria (Shaeane Jimenez) is visiting town because her and Paola’s father (Peter Butler) is going in for an operation, and warns her more trusting sibling not to accept Henry’s invitation to come to dinner at his house, away from the public gaze.

Of course, Paola should have listened to her sister. The good looking guy (played by Luke Volker) turns out to have been a catfishing lure, and the real Henry (Jacques Adriaanse) looks like what you’d get if a troll mated with a slime mould. Plus, it’s actually Henry’s deranged mother, Lucille (a fantastic Dianne Simpson) who’s been writing all those courtly messages to Paola – who is soon sedated with drugged wine and wakes up about to be raped, exactly the sort of scenario your actual mother warned you about.

Critics might have been sniffy back in 2001 but the silly summer camp comedy has endured and director David Wain has been enjoying the ‘slow-burn’ appreciation

In the summer of 2001, the film critic Roger Ebert wrote a scathing film review in song form, with lyrics set to the tune of a classic song about summer camp. “Hello muddah, hello fadduh / Here I am at Wet Hot American Summah,” it began. The review proceeded to mock the film Wet Hot American Summer in rhyme.

Twenty-five years later, the film’s director and co-writer, David Wain, joined several of its stars on the vast lawn of the Autry Museum in Los Angeles to sing the review to a crowd of thousands, many of them wearing Camp Firewood T-shirts and 80s-style sweat absorbers. The performance preceded an anniversary screening of what has become a cult classic.

A young woman sacrifices everything to find the siblings she lost in the 1960s. Plus: Ricky Gervais jumps aboard the Magical Sitcom Tour. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Atlantic
A devastating drama about the “Sixties Scoop” – when Canadian authorities enabled a mass removal of Indigenous children from their families and put them into the welfare system. Twentysomething Esther Rosenblum is investigating how she came to be adopted as a five-year-old in Montreal and is looking for her estranged siblings. Flashbacks to 15 years earlier show what happened after the night they were taken from their parents. Hollie Richardson

Josephine Ahnelt’s gentle but truthful documentary has home-movie intimacy and some incredibly touching moments

As a piece of art depicting motherhood, Judith Rohrmoser’s self-portrait of breastfeeding sticks two fingers up at the tradition of the Madonna with child. In her painting, Rohrmoser’s baby feeds contentedly, chubby cheeked and sleepy under damp lashes. The artist is less serene, looking directly at us, headphones clamped over her ears, eyes filled with what might be a roar of grief, or possibly an overwhelming sense that everything has changed.

Rohrmoser is one of five women who agreed to be filmed at their most vulnerable in the first year of motherhood for this Austrian documentary. It’s a gentle but truthful look at new motherhood, making the point that – ignore the Renaissance artists – having a tiny baby does not put you in perpetual state of bliss. The reality is exhaustion, joy, boredom, wonder and a rush of other feelings. Director Josephine Ahnelt shoots in 16mm, her camera up close, filming with the intimacy of a home video, cutting off heads to at one point zero in on what interests her: a mother snipping her baby’s tiny fingernails.

Four years since their last album, the anthemic Australian band are back with a new sound and new music about finally being ‘overwhelmingly OK’

When tickets for the first Gang of Youths shows in Australia in four years went on sale last month, a one-off show in Thirroul sold out in 45 seconds; two shows at Sydney Opera House went in minutes. Though I have loved the band for years, I was surprised by how emotional it was to see them play on home soil again in Sydney. Dave Le’aupepe, who has a claim to being the country’s most charismatic frontman, seemed to sense the mood. “Thank you for loving me,” he told the audience. “I know it’s very difficult.”

As I left the show, bewildered and tearful, I locked eyes with a stranger in the foyer who was also crying. Without saying a word, we both burst out laughing; feeling a bit silly, perhaps, but also a sense of wonder at our shared reaction. I later heard there were two marriage proposals in that audience; I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more.

Royal Albert Hall, London
With Stravinsky and Copland also on the programme, this was a lively if uneven concert

In their different ways, both Stravinsky and Copland turned to the vernacular to lend authenticity and atmosphere to their ballet scores. Stravinsky incorporated folk tunes and popular song to depict the hurdy-gurdy players and wet nurses of St Petersburg’s bustling Shrovetide fair in Petrushka. For Billy the Kid, Copland used cowboy songs to paint a wild west settlement with its outlaws, saloons and gunfights. Fast-forward 80 years and Gabriel Kahane added a flavour of folk music, though without quoting anything specific, to spice up his clarinet concerto. Written for New York Philharmonic principal clarinet Anthony McGill, the work’s European premiere formed the centrepiece of a lively concert conducted with visible enthusiasm by Ryan Bancroft.

The concerto opened with McGill slipping in seamlessly over shimmering tuned percussion and string glissandi. Elegant scalar passages led into a songful section with a jazz-meets-klezmer vibe. This is immensely likable music, with McGill a confident and stylish soloist. Orchestral textures featured pianos – both grand and muted upright – as well as celesta and percussion, the latter more often than not played unconventionally. The slow movement with its drawn-out lyrical lines found McGill cucumber cool, before eerie bowed vibraphone and a hair-raising cadenza launched a finale with a touch of an Irish jig about it. Kahane himself added a nice personal touch, taking to the stage to sing and play piano for McGill’s silky smooth encore.

(Island)
Even a couple of bafflingly misguided social commentary songs can’t detract from the joys of Flowers’ classically full-throated commitment to the Nashville bit

Here are three immutable facts about Brandon Richard Flowers: he was born just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. He is 45 years old. And he never does anything by halves. When he and his band the Killers debuted in the early 2000s, as disaffected New York cool was on the rise, he was writing scream-along choruses sung in his upper register. When the Killers were searching for a sound even bigger and grander than the euphoric Springsteen pastiche of 2006’s Sam’s Town, they didn’t think twice before recruiting Stuart Price to produce the spangly 2008 disco-rock record Day & Age.

That’s how you get a record like Thrasher. Flowers’ third solo album finds Vegas’s chosen son decamping to Nashville for a full-throated exploration of country music – not subtle, trendy Americana, but rip-snorting, honky-tonking, Nudie suit-wearing country. In many ways, Thrasher is a stylistic follow-up to the Killers’ maudlin 2021 Pressure Machine, which saw Flowers explore windswept balladry and tasteful story-songs. But that record was as forgettable as Thrasher is a hoot; Flowers wilts when he doesn’t fully commit, as was the case on Pressure Machine, and he doesn’t make that mistake here. Thrasher features many of Nashville’s most revered country musicians, including pedal steel legend Bruce Bouton, 85-year-old harmonica player Charlie McCoy, Gillian Welch’s musical partner Dave Rawlings and lauded Americana musician Margo Price.

Royal Albert Hall, London
The ferociously dynamic SCO help Fröst drill down to the rhythmic essence of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as well as works by contemporary composers

It’s a Sunday morning, and as the Royal Albert Hall darkens and the stage is suddenly back-lit, spotlighting a charismatic figure speaking sibilantly at its centre, you’d almost swear you’d wandered into an American megachurch. But the gospel preached by maverick clarinettist-conductor Martin Fröst is altogether more ancient and more primal: dance. What could be more fundamental, not just to music but life itself, he argues. And with the ferociously dynamic Swedish Chamber Orchestra helping him make his case, it’s hard to disagree.

Wagner famously declared Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony “the apotheosis of the dance”, and the SCO’s DNA project (“Dance Now Always”) transforms his description into a concert that drills down to the rhythmic essence of the symphony, seizing those cells and pulses that are its heartbeat and amplifying them into an ear-bending, time-warping sequence that suspends the work at the centre of its own musical genealogy – past and future.

A vivid and hopeful study of how culture endures in the midst of extreme violence

Towards the end of her subtly piercing book about art in wartime, Charlotte Higgins recounts an autumn visit to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, in the north-east of the country, a short drive from the Russian border. In a tranquil park, she sees a man standing in a stream, making stones balance on top of each other in a teetering tower – “a metaphor of life in that city,” she writes, “that would have seemed too obvious for a novel”.

Still, as a good novelist would, Higgins doesn’t seem to beg telling details from a place so much as have them leap to her open eye and ear. The cartoons a boy is watching that fall silent in a power cut, allowing the distant boom of explosions on the frontline to be heard. A cityscape tattooed on a young poet’s arm that cuts off suddenly where skin from his leg was grafted after he was torn up by shrapnel. Cataracts of larkspur, as Higgins describes them, in a field in the frontline Donbas region, “pouring down the hill, pooling at the bottom into a great lake of blooms … Larkspur thrives on ground where there has been recent disturbance.”

Set across three interwoven timelines, this absorbing tale of an abandoned mining town explores courage, cowardice and how history is recorded

Téa Obreht’s novels teem with conflicting narratives, treacherous landscapes and speculative fictions. Her 2010 prizewinning debut, The Tiger’s Wife, examined themes of death, miracles and outsider status in the midst of a fictional Balkan war. Her fourth novel, Sunrise, returns to a western frontier haunted by ghosts and stalked by outlaws, a territory Obreht first explored in her second book, Inland.

It is August 2024. Nina Terzic has just jumped – or was she pushed? – from a crash-landing Cessna into a lake somewhere in the mountains of Wyoming. She manages to swim to shore. There is no sign of her boyfriend Ben, who was in the plane with her, and her phone – though miraculously intact – has no signal. Nina, a postgraduate student, was supposed to be on holiday from her job as a live-in nanny in New York. We get the feeling that her relationship with Ben might have a darker underside.

This fictional memoir by Octavius’s right-hand man shows us bloodshed, betrayal and hectic jockeying for power

If you’re one of those people who thinks about the Roman empire several times a week, Robert Harris has you covered. He follows his trilogy of novels about the life of Cicero and his one-off about the unpleasantness in Pompeii with a narrative that takes us from civil war through the assassination of Julius Caesar, with all the bickering and bloodshed that follows, on to the decisive battle of Actium and Octavius’s apotheosis as Caesar Augustus. We meet Cicero, Fulvia, Lepidus, two Caesars and a burly Antony (“Imagine, if you will, a statue of Hercules with a club in one hand, a wineskin in the other”).

Here’s the clever bit: he narrates it all from the point of view of Octavius’s right-hand man, Agrippa, a much less well-remembered figure. Harris tells us he “left behind no speeches, few letters and only a couple of sentences of direct quotation”. Yet Agrippa was “effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years” and “the greatest general of the period”. Octavius couldn’t have risen without him, but he seems to have done his best to write him out of the story afterwards, according him only two passing mentions in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti.

Polish war hero Kazimierz Moczarski spent 255 days sharing a cell with an SS general. Nearly 50 years after it was published, an uncensored version of his account is appearing in English for the first time

In 1949, Kazimierz Moczarski, a leading member of the Polish resistance, was in his fourth year of incarceration when he was moved into a cell with two Nazis at Warsaw’s Mokotów prison. One of them was Jürgen Stroop – a war criminal and SS general who had led the infamous destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and was responsible for the murder or capture of more than 56,000 Jews. They shared the same four walls for 255 consecutive days.

A celebrated figure in modern-day Poland, Moczarski was regarded as a threat to the power of the postwar communist regime in the country. Like other resistance members, he was accused of collaboration and arrested. But Moczarski, who spoke German, used his imprisonment with Stroop as an opportunity to investigate a question: what turned some Germans into mass murderers, seeking to impose their “Ordnung”, order, across the world? His book about the experience, Conversations with an Executioner, was published in 1977. An instant bestseller, it was performed as a play the same year, directed by Andrzej Wajda. It is finally being published in the UK this month, in its first uncensored translation into English by Sean Gasper Bye.

Co-created by a developer and his sewing-obsessed partner, this design game is ‘the most technically challenging’ its lead programmer has ever made

When Jonathan Hau-Yoon wanted to make something as meaningful as the environmental strategy game Terra Nil, he turned for inspiration to his longtime partner. Sabrina Becker had worn a dress she made herself to their very first date, and would have studied costume design abroad had hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (a connective tissue disorder I also have) not put those plans on hold.

The pair developed a concept around the creative decisions involved in dressmaking, like trying to fit pattern pieces on to available fabric while observing the grain line (the direction of the thread in woven fabric). Other decisions followed: a 3D model on which to place garment pieces, buttons and trims with which to decorate them, clients with commissions as creative prompts.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Frogwares
Frogwares’ Lovecraftian action-horror is full of grim tenacity and pulp paperback charm, despite a few frayed edges

I’m standing in the prosthetics lab of a campy horror hospital, hunting for a preacher’s flayed face to wear so I can trick the world’s grisliest smart doorbell. Pinned to a board in the corner of the room are a dozen X-rays: shattered bones and metal splints in sepia negative, each with a note attached. It’s a stark, clinical intrusion on the theatrical gore elsewhere. It takes a beat to realise that I’m reading the stories of injuries sustained by soldiers fighting for Frogwares’ native Ukraine. Fingers amputated after severe burns. Limbs lost in mine explosions. Toes torn off by shell fire.

Like so many of my favourite PS3-era seven-out-of-tens, The Sinking City 2 is a pulpy action horror. It’s fuelled by scrappy ambition, Lovecraft fan fiction and wonderfully unhinged scenario design. A puzzle that has you determine which talking jarred brain is telling porkies. A scavenger hunt to fix a crane to move a rotting whale carcass. A gunfight amid the grisly results of a siren pop star’s fan meet-up turned battle royale.

The latest game from ‘reality-inspired’ studio the Pixel Hunt sees you transporting precious human cargo – and deciding what to do with it

Ithaca has one hell of an opening: Penelope, a disillusioned environmental lawyer, stops her car at a petrol station. But upon returning, she discovers something shocking: the unconscious body of an oil company CEO in her boot, his hands hog-tied together, dangling limply towards the vehicle’s number plate.

This tantalising eco-thriller setup is a long way off the typical knights-and-castles fantasy fare of most role-playing games, more How To Blow Up a Pipeline than Dragon Quest. But road-trip RPG Ithaca arrives via refreshingly original developer the Pixel Hunt, a French outfit that specialises in what it calls “reality-inspired” games. The studio has made a number of arresting works in recent years. One was about a Syrian refugee couple making a perilous migrant journey across Europe; another tackled the life-shattering effects of child sexual abuse. The climate crisis was always in the back of Pixel Hunt founder and Ithaca writer Florent Maurin’s mind. After all, he says, it is the uber problem of our day, the problem that touches all others. It was just a case of when, and, more importantly: “What do we say about it?”

Creative Assembly could strike gold again with this follow-up to their fan-favourite, film-inspired game … if you’re brave enough to venture outdoors

Alien: Isolation redefined Alien games on its release in 2014, bringing the original taut, haunted house theme of the first movie to fans who had mostly been fed action-packed shooters. Cowering under desks and inside lockers wasn’t a new thing; being hunted by an intelligent and lethal xenomorph that could spring down from a duct at any moment was.

“I was thinking about what we could do for a sequel while we were still finishing the first game,” reveals Creative Assembly’s Alistair Hope, creative lead on Alien: Isolation and its sequel. “But we didn’t actually start the project until around the time of the 10th anniversary. We’ve seen the response grow over time, watching [Alien: Isolation] continue to find new players, even though it’s a relatively old game. And they’re surprised there isn’t a sequel.”

Zoo Southside, Edinburgh
The acrobats in this symphony of ins and outs build and break tension as they clamber over the set together

Four performers enter the auditorium and walk among us but they’re sizing up the space not the audience. On stage is a scaffold structure with a cutaway design and a white facade featuring several doors, which soon frame a series of comings and goings. With this much slamming it’s no surprise that there’s an element of farce as the cast move in and out, become human dominoes and narrowly miss each other. No one has time to knock during the frantic arrivals. I’d recommend taking a side seat so you can appreciate the full effect.

So far so frivolous in this family-friendly Belgian production, although there’s a cheeky hint at what might be happening behind those closed doors and whether swiping right is a factor among the increasing acrobatics. Choreographed by Piet Van Dycke, the show then knuckles down to more serious tricks, with the performers undertaking a series of costume changes that are so subtle you don’t notice them at first.

Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh
Emotional group dynamics and individual skills make One Fell Swoop stand out in the crowded circus genre

You cannot move at the Edinburgh fringe for circus shows. There are so many people in this city who can climb a rope, hang upside down, swing on a trapeze – so how do you make a show special when plenty of other folks are hawking the same skills?

Melbourne company One Fell Swoop Circus have worked out a way, sprinkling a bit of magic on their festival offering. It’s a show that was originally made a decade ago, but had its Edinburgh debut last year and was such a hit that they have brought it back. Like many of the best shows, it’s really just one good idea, with all the juice thoroughly squeezed out of it across the course of an hour. That idea being: one giant rope, two pulleys, seven bodies, and everything they can do together.

At Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, until 30 August. Then touring

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

Union Chapel, London
Ahead of playing arenas this winter, Bridgers gives her third album, Lost Weekend, a stripped-back UK debut that makes its bewitching songs sound even more astounding

Three days after the rapturous release of her third album, Lost Weekend, Phoebe Bridgers invites 900 people into her bedroom to hear her play some of its devastating songs live – or at least, that’s how it feels inside Union Chapel in north London on this Monday night. With Bridgers plopped on a throw-covered sofa, surrounded by lava lamps and with a TV showing the bouncing DVD logo screensaver, it becomes easy to forget the Victorian gothic architecture looming above our heads.

This intimate scene is the indie superstar’s hugely anticipated first solo UK show since 2022, and the reverent awe in the church is palpable. Fans have obediently locked away their phones in magnetic pouches – as they will also have to on her arena run later this year – and fidget in the pews clutching CDs and T-shirts emblazoned with the artwork for her new record. You can hear a proverbial pin drop when Bridgers opens the show by belting her breakout song Motion Sickness solo with her guitar, her voice somersaulting around the domed ceiling. (After this, she is joined on stage by two bandmates, Nick White and Christian Lee Hutson.) But Bridgers, who hums with a slightly nervous energy, characteristically pierces through any solemnity by encouraging us to scream and sing along as the gig rolls on. After all, she quips: “God’s watching – fuckin’ freak.”

Summerhall, Edinburgh
With physical and vocal agility, the tricksy clown duo trigger an avalanche of misinformation in this feverish treat

Here is a show every bit as breathless as its title, stoked by bursts of high-energy 90s chart hits and delivered just as slickly by Xhloe and Natasha. Their physical precision is such that it’s almost as if these camo clowns with their rosy cheeks and tearstained eyes are executing a mission.

The duo have previously portrayed confused cowboys (And Then the Rodeo Burned Down), spiralling housewives (What If They Ate the Baby?) and spit-promise scouts (A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First). Here the terrain is recognisable from those shows yet so much more expansive as they play numerous locals, from the corner shop to the highest office, in an Appalachian town. It gives more chance to showcase their vocal, as well as physical, agilities.

Sonic’s creators explain how the speedy scamp has kept on running through generations as an enduring avatar of ‘attitude in the face of adversity’

One day in the early 1990s, I came home from university for the weekend and discovered that my dad had bought himself a Sega Mega Drive, bundled with a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I knew about Sega’s mascot of course. The launch of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game in 1991 was a landmark moment for the company, massively boosting the sales of its 16bit console in the west, ripping market share from the dominant Super Nintendo. While Mario was the family favourite, Sonic with his speed, attitude and brash visual energy encapsulated the edgy spirit of the early 1990s MTV culture. That weekend, Dad and I did little else but team up for daylong Sonic sessions, the game’s two-player mode letting us play cooperatively as we zoomed through those dense, beautiful play zones.

Thirty-five years later, I am still a Sonic fan. There have been plenty of rough times (Sonic 06, Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sonic Free Riders – sorry, I can’t go on), but there have been plenty of good ones too. (Rush, Mania and Colors, and I have a soft spot for Sonic R, a racer developed by Traveller’s Tales, which went on to make the Lego games). Few people know this rollercoaster better than Takashi Iizuka, who worked on Sonic 3 as a designer and has been series producer for almost 20 years. When he joined Sega in 1992 he wanted to work for the company’s arcade division, but after playing the original Sonic – especially Sonic 2 – he was seduced.

The untimely death of the Heroes and Scream star was a tragic ending to a life filled with darkness in an industry that still lets its younger stars down

• Hayden Panettiere: an actor so magnetic that entire shows were rewritten for her

• Hayden Panettiere – a life in pictures

• Hayden Panettiere obituary

For a little while, it looked as if maybe former child actors had shed the stigma, long understandably held, that Hollywood success at a young age would lead to tragedy later in life. Child stars from the 1970s and 1980s seemed particularly mistreated and/or self-destructive, whether born into dysfunctional Hollywood families, like Tatum O’Neal, or the result of more sui generis success, like Brad Renfro, River Phoenix or Corey Haim. But as these cases became more notorious, they seemed to act as cautionary tales for a generation of stars that seemed – broadly speaking – to be receiving better guidance, whether from family, friends or themselves.

Look at the astonishingly well-adjusted core cast of Harry Potter kids, who worked for a full decade, from their pre-teen years to young adulthood: among Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, there are more awards, charity work and seemingly happy relationships than genuine scandals. (The biggest malfeasance of anyone in the trio? Some mild tax problems for Grint.) Other awards-show fixtures like Natalie Portman, Christian Bale and Kieran Culkin have come out the other side of child stardom with terrific careers and strong reputations closer to the Jodie Foster model. Even Lindsay Lohan, whose behavior in the 2000s and into the 2010s seemed to signal impending tragedy, seems to be doing well: sober, happily married and back on the big screen last year with the hit sequel Freakier Friday. In terms of more recent young stars, a pop singer like Olivia Rodrigo appears to have much more autonomy than Britney Spears did, even in her early-2000s heyday.

Using ‘equestrian embodiment’, photographer Ayana V Jackson celebrates great horsewomen who galloped through prejudice
• The best of Arles 2026 – in pictures

With abs like Olympians and skin like hide, pole dancers are besieging the festival. We meet four high-flying, high-octane acts tackling everything from New York’s underbelly to neurodiversity

If you tell someone in Edinburgh you’re going to see a pole dancing show, they might direct you towards the so-called Pubic Triangle, where the city’s strip clubs are. But pole dance is actually a big part of the festival this year, popping up in sweaty, dazzling shows right across the fringe. Not only do these acts show off amazing physical feats, they also tell stories that range from one woman’s HIV diagnosis, to the relationship between a neurodivergent mother and son.

Since the boom of the 1990s, when Zoe Ball famously had a pole in her living room, pole has been taught at dance studios, has become a competition sport – there’s a campaign to get it into the Olympics – and made its way from cabaret stages to theatres. It’s an impressive and fiendishly difficult art.

Decades after being sexually abused, the author and doctor Frank Spinelli believed he had moved on emotionally. But alcohol destroyed his sense of security. He describes how he confronted his shame

Not so long ago, Frank Spinelli seemed to have sorted out his life. He was happily married, working as a doctor and had a sideline writing medical thrillers. He thought he had dealt with the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child – not only had he helped bring the man who groomed and abused him to justice, but also he had written a memoir about it. “I felt that I had closure,” he says. “I had the good fortune of working with some amazing therapists and I believed I had done the work and moved past it and I was a healed person.”

Little did he know that his recovery was fragile. The Covid pandemic took away his routine and structure: “All the external pillars that were tightly holding me together – the engagements at the office, the work trips.” Two years earlier, he and his husband had moved from Manhattan to a leafy suburb, from where he is speaking to me over a video call today. He was dealing with uncertainty and felt isolated. “We know one thing about shame: shame breeds in isolation.”

Two Café Cecilia stalwarts that are just the thing for the summer heat

Five years after Café Cecilia opened, a handful of dishes have become permanent fixtures, returning to the menu time and again – and this confit trout salad is definitely one of them. During the recent heatwaves, we’ve naturally shifted towards dishes that are best served at room temperature or slightly warm, and both of these recipes reflect that approach. They’re designed to serve two, but can just as easily be scaled up for a larger group. And almost everything can be prepared in advance, making them ideal for entertaining at home.

From handheld to corded, self-emptying to stick models, these are our resident cleaner’s favourite vacuums for a spotless home

• The best cordless vacuum cleaners, tested
• How to make your vacuum cleaner last longer

Buying a vacuum cleaner isn’t as easy as you might think. With so many brands and models to choose from, it can be bewildering. Sticking with established brands isn’t necessarily a safe bet, with past performance being no guarantee that the latest models will be as good. Meanwhile, prices can be deceptive, with some affordable models now closing the gap on top-of-the-range brands when it comes to cleaning performance.

You can’t know all this by browsing through a department store or online. The ideal thing to do would be to take a few models home to try them out – but good luck persuading anyone to let you do that. Thankfully, you won’t have to try because I’ve tested an array of models for you. I’ve measured each one’s ability to perform a range of real-world cleaning jobs, so you can discover the best vacuum cleaner for you.

After three dozen eggs, 30 lemons and a concerning amount of unplanned butter, our tester learned the hard way how to make the perfect ice-cream. Plus, how to buy a bike

• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

You probably know that song about ice-cream, and it’s been playing in my head non-stop for the past month. But since I tested 13 ice-cream machines at once during the hottest days of the year, it has taken on a slightly different meaning for me – particularly the screaming part.

Testing the best ice-cream makers for the Filter has deepened my appreciation for frozen desserts. After cracking more than three dozen eggs, zesting 30 lemons and running to the shops for several emergency pints of milk after an unplanned butter disaster, I feel as though I’ve finally mastered the art of making ice-cream at home.

Suri Core 1.0 electric toothbrush review: this new budget model is still sustainable – and the one I’d buy

The best electric toothbrushes for every budget – tested

How I Shop with Fred Sirieix: ‘It’s nice to buy stuff from people you know’

I spent 18 months testing the best video doorbells – here are my favourites

Do I really need air conditioning in the UK? Everything to know before you buy

‘The bar here is low’: the best (and worst) supermarket brioche burger buns, tasted and rated

Brioche buns make an indulgent, rich home for a burger, but which have the perfect fluffy texture and which come with a chemical-like plastic aroma?

• The best supermarket veggie burgers

Brioche is a fabulously luxurious dough enriched with eggs and copious amounts of butter (often 25% or more of the total dough). Supermarket brioche buns, however, are a little different: the best products contain about 6-11% butter at most and some, surprisingly, contained none at all, using replacements such as palm fat and rapeseed oil instead.

But all is not lost: even the most processed products were passable, and the best were quite delicious. I tested these straight from the packet, analysing the egg wash, type of crumb and texture. I scored on flavour, value, processing, sustainability (though most products lack standards and certifications) and animal welfare.

The bar here is pretty low, though, with most buns sitting firmly in UPF territory. Squishy, carotene-coloured and stored in plastic, they’re fabricated from a cocktail of fats, emulsifiers and preservatives, creating remarkable shelf life but unremarkable buns with little authenticity.

We put 31 electric toothbrushes to the test, from oscillating Oral-B models to sustainable brands like Suri, to find the best for cleaning power and value for money

• How to make your toothbrush last longer

If you grew up using a conventional toothbrush – essentially a stick with bristles on the end – you may be surprised to learn just how long the electric toothbrush has been around. The first was designed in the late 1930s, but that model was a long way from the sleek, feature-packed and Bluetooth-enabled beasts you can buy today.

There are now dozens of ultra-advanced versions on the market, but which ones are worth your cash? To help answer that question, my teeth have become figurative guinea pigs. Over the past 20 months, I’ve put 31 electric toothbrushes from the likes of Oral-B, Philips, Suri, Ordo, Silk’n and Foreo through their paces to separate the best from the rest. Here are my conclusions.

When ovens and stovetops just won’t do, turn to loaded toasts, open sandwiches, cold noodles and smashed cucumbers, say our no-cook experts

It’s too hot to turn on the oven or stove. What can I make for dinner that’s still substantial?
Mark, via email
This sounds like a job for Lucy Carr-Ellison, of Tart London, who is fully functioning in a no-oven household. “We moved in last year and there’s an Aga, which was amazing in winter, but we can’t have it on in summer,” she says, so toast toppers have become a crucial category of cooking: “Try rubbing toasts with garlic, adding a bit of olive oil, some grated tomatoes, lots of salt and tinned anchovies.”

Otherwise, Mark could do away with the toaster and get some focaccia, suggests Jamie Pickles, chef/co-owner of Stow and The Trof, both in Manchester: “Mix picked brown crab meat with mayo, lemon juice and mustard, and spread that over the bread.” Next, combine the picked white meat with chopped chives and coriander, lemon juice, creme fraiche and black pepper. “Mix through some tinned sweetcorn, spread that over the brown crab mayo and finish with watercress.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Restaurant critic and award-winning food writer Jimi Famurewa travels from Belfast to Edinburgh and London to meet the inventive DIY chefs stretching US, Italian and British pizza styles to come up with delicious new flavour combos

Cucumber and avocado gazpacho and addictive carrots: when it’s too hot to cook, contrast, texture and seasoning bring dishes to life

Heat brings caramelisation, char, the slow collapse of ingredients into something rich and deep, but when it’s too hot to cook, flavour has to be built differently – through contrast, texture and a more deliberate hand with seasoning. Salt, in particular, becomes transformative: drawing out moisture, softening structure, shifting raw into something more yielding. That principle underpins this carrot salad, inspired by the Japanese yamitsuki (‘addictive’) method most commonly used on cabbage, while a chilled cucumber gazpacho offers clean, cooling clarity.

A sweet, tangy and spicy chicken dish that matches well with crisp fried potatoes and apricot-glazed spring onions

I use this exact cooking method to make every kind of traybaked chicken, and this one is a blend of store-cupboard staples with the addition of fresh lime to push the flavour. Then, I love hash browns, röstis and latkes – give me crispy fried potatoes of any description, and I’m a happy girl – but I won’t lie and tell you that I love frying, because, if I can avoid it, I do: it’s messy, greasy, smelly and uses a fair bit of oil, which is pretty costly. But how to produce a perfectly crispy latke by baking? Well, I’ve managed to do it, and I’m really happy with the results.

Because I’d visited so often to print things, she made me feel that someone had witnessed the journey I was on, all the way through to its difficult conclusion

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

Mum’s disease progressed slowly at first, and then in a really big rush. After years of battling early onset Parkinson’s, in 2015 we were suddenly told she only had six months left.

I was living in Brisbane, Australia, and Mum was in a care home 600km away in Taree, so I began flying down every second weekend to visit. At the time, it was still common to print out your boarding pass – or at least, it was for me; I was a bit late to the tech game.

A trainee accountant and a company director had differing views on opportunities for young people, but could they find common ground on the new prime minister?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Margaret, 22, London

Occupation Trainee accountant and part-time arts producer

Pam and Mike couldn’t keep their hands off each other when they met. But as aging and biology have taken their toll, their sex life has suffered

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

We haven’t had sex in two years. Mike says it’s because his dick is dead

Do you really want to date, or do you just feel you should? Be kind to yourself, and maybe try real-world dating and avoid the apps for now

I haven’t been on a date in eight years and want to start next year. How can I prepare for the storm?

I want to love and care for someone. I long for a supportive, funny life partner. Should I say that to a man? And is that too much in a dating profile?

Sign-up perks may capture the attention but should the focus be on the interest-free overdraft?

• The best student deals and discounts

• An insider’s tips on student money

In the scramble to sort out university accommodation, join freshers group chats and work out how a student loan payment is meant to stretch across a whole term, there is one big decision that is easy to put off but worth getting right: which student bank account to open.

Student accounts work like any other current account but come with two extras that don’t apply to the general public: an interest-free overdraft, and a lot of perks designed to hook you in as a customer for life.

It said that was what I was due after I submitted a claim for £300 for energy exported through my solar panels

British Gas paid me more than £38,000 by mistake, then had no idea how to reclaim it. I receive quarterly feed-in tariff (Fit) payments for energy exported by my solar panels.

In May, I submitted a claim for £300, based on my meter reading, and I received an email stating that I was due £38,611.59.

Fraudsters use pictures posted on Instagram or Facebook to create emails seeking bank account details

You are on a short break in Porto and post some pictures of your family on Instagram or Facebook. With a small section of the Douro river in the background, you think it could have been taken anywhere.

A few days later, you get a text saying that your card was compromised. “We detected unusual activity while you were travelling in Porto – please verify immediately,” says the message.

You can save money at university, especially using schemes such as UNiDAYS, Student Beans or TOTUM

• ‘Watch your spending, use free perks’: an insider’s tips on student money

With rents on the up and food costing more, maintenance loans are stretched thinner than ever. Knowing how, and where, to get a discount can make a real difference.

A golden rule is to register with the big discount websites and apps – UNiDAYS, Student Beans and TOTUM – using your university email address as soon as you have one. Each has a slightly different roster of retailers, so it is worth signing up to all three.

Premixed drinks are ultra-processed products but their marketing claims create a ‘health halo’ that takes the focus away from the harms of alcohol, researchers say

Premixed alcoholic drinks are not known for their health benefits. But that hasn’t stopped a boom in products being marketed with “better for you” claims designed to appeal to younger, more health-conscious drinkers.

Labels such as “low sugar”, “gluten-free” and “low carb” are being used in advertising to promote the products, and social media influencers spruik the products under the hashtag #healthydrinking.

Melissa Davey is Guardian Australia’s medical editor

Antiviral is a fortnightly column that interrogates the evidence behind the health headlines and factchecks popular wellness claims

In an era of transparency, people are detailing their financial struggles on the internet, breaking one of the last social taboos

Discussions regarding personal finances have traditionally been taboo. But gen Z and millennials in the US are finally normalizing conversations about money, openly sharing about salaries, rent and investment strategies, but also their (sometimes substantial) debt.

In recent years, financial influencers (finfluencers) – some licensed professionals, others not – have gained visibility, sharing advice on once-covert, perhaps unsexy topics such as Roth IRA contributions, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and maxing out 401(k)s. The most popular have a big audience: for instance, Humphrey Yang, a former financial adviser, has more than 2 million YouTube subscribers, and Erika Kullberg, an attorney and financial expert, has more than 20 million followers across social media.

The differences in body types does mean that, on average, women find the exercise more difficult – but that’s not the whole story

Pull-ups are a bodyweight exercise where you hang from an overhead bar, usually with an overhand grip, and pull yourself up until your chin clears the bar. “They’re a great upper-body exercise,” says Prof Leigh Breen, a specialist in muscle physiology at the University of Leicester. “They primarily work the muscles in the back, but also recruit the arms and the core.” They’re known for being tough – particularly for women. But is that true?

“If we take the population as a whole, doing a pull-up is typically more challenging for the average woman,” says Breen. There are a few reasons for this. First, women naturally tend to carry a smaller proportion of their muscle mass in their upper body than men – and these are the muscles relied upon for the exercise. Second, women generally have a slightly higher body fat percentage than men. Because a pull-up requires you to lift your entire bodyweight, having less upper-body muscle relative to the weight you’re moving can reduce what’s known as your strength-to-weight ratio.

Here’s what experts say about how sex and exercise are linked, and whether the type, timing and intensity of movement matter

Here’s a reason to put your sneakers on: exercise can improve your sex life.

It’s not necessarily about changing how your body looks, or being strong enough to swing from the chandelier. Regular movement improves smaller, less visible bodily functions that increase your desire and capacity for sex – like the release of arousal-promoting hormones and enhanced circulation in the nether regions. Perhaps just as critically, it gets your mind in the right frame to do it.

How does a rabbi choose her shoes? Why does a psychoanalyst like slogan tees? And why does a doctor avoid wearing scrubs at work? Seven striking dressers share their surprising style stories

Andrew Geldart, 65, retired engineer, Cornwall

Daniel’s boyfriend thinks his youthful complexion is down to fancy skincare, and Jessica’s nearest and dearest still don’t know she’s had a breast enhancement …

Jessica was at a spa with her friends of more than 20 years when she noticed one stare at her bikini, lock eyes with her and laugh, before asking: “Wait, have you …?” The game was up – eight months after she’d had a secret breast enhancement, she’d been rumbled. Fearing judgment from even her closest circle, she had only spoken to two people who’d had the procedure, for advice, and told a neighbour in case she was unwell after the surgery. “My family still don’t know – most people don’t,” the 42-year-old from London says, including her two children who live between her and her ex-husband. “I’m not alone; I’ve since learned winter is the most popular time for people to get things done, then they can just hide under jumpers while everything settles in, so no one notices.”

For years, celebrities have endured public speculation about their tweakments and surgeries – but as procedures become more commonplace, “civilian” patients are facing the same questions from family and friends. And many of them are choosing to go incognito; some surgeons estimate up to 70% of their clients aren’t telling others about their aesthetic procedures. But what are the practicalities of disguising everything from breast augmentation to filler to hair transplants from your closest circle? And why are so many people spending thousands of pounds to alter their appearance – only to hope that no one notices?

Vintage classics from WH Smith, M&S and Tesco are being bought online, perhaps as part of a nostalgic return to owning tangible items

When it comes to everyday objects, a supermarket carrier bag could be the ultimate one – a thing we’re more accustomed to squeezing into a drawer or using until it falls apart than giving any special treatment.

But these most mundane items are now enjoying something of a new life.

The latest craze on Instagram reveals how quickly personal expression can be absorbed into a homogenised feed and exploited by brands

For those looking for the defining social media trend of summer 2026, it’s time to call off the search party.

A new phrase is dominating algorithms and entering the English lexicon.

Forget the vampire tales – the Eastern Carpathians deliver dramatic peaks, roaming bears and deep solitude

As the sun disappears behind the high tree line, our campfire spits and crackles. Four plump trout are sizzling on a flame-heated slab of rock, a cooking technique used by people in the Gurghiu mountains, part of Transylvania’s Eastern Carpathians, for centuries. Apart from gentle birdsong, it’s the only sound up here, 1,550 metres above sea level and far from any town or village.

“This area is very wild,” says Samir Teslovan, who drove us up through the densely forested peaks from his guesthouse in Toplița. “When I come here to the mountains, I charge my battery, charge my soul. I feel free, like the wind.”

The Jura and Three Lakes region is often overlooked by visitors, but on a lake-hopping adventure I discovered its gentle beauty as well as great food and wine

The ferry cuts across the waters of Lake Biel, creating soft ripples, as if someone has taken a brushstroke to a blue canvas. To starboard, as we approach St Peter’s Island, are gentle mountains; to port side, lie golden fields. Straight ahead, the isle looks empty and Crusoe-esque.

On the jetty, Max Frey, a boatman, historian and guide, is waiting for me. He’s a man of dates and paperwork and pulls a handful from his satchel as he greets me, thrilled at the prospect of leading a tour; Switzerland’s Jura and Three Lakes region, this idyllic nook on the French border, is often overlooked by visitors.

From a 500-year-old inn in the Italian Dolomites to a log cabin in Finland’s lake district, these boltholes offer a tranquil and restorative getaway

Steam trains, horse-drawn trams and glorious coastal paths are all part of the adventure on a new self-guided walking tour of the island

On the shores of Douglas Bay, I could barely see the sand. Crammed on to the beach, on every available inch, were tourists bustling for the best spot. Luckily, I wasn’t there at the same time. I was looking at a black and white photograph taken some 135 years earlier, displayed in the Manx Museum in Douglas, the Isle of Man’s capital. When I’d stepped off the ferry earlier that day, the crescent-shaped beach was still there – but the crowds weren’t.

The self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea has always been a haven for outsiders. From the early hunter-gatherers who ventured here in 6500BC, to the Irish Celts (who brought over Christianity in the fifth century) and Vikings who established Tynwald (one of the oldest continuous parliaments in the world) to the Victorian tourists who transformed it into a popular holiday destination.

Any new addition to your collection can contain stowaways, so you’d be wise to deploy a little patience – but how long is long enough?

The problem
There is nothing quite like the joy of bringing home a new plant. You find the perfect spot, nestle it in among your others, and stand back to admire the new arrival. What you cannot see are its passengers: a few spider mites tucked under a leaf, mealybug eggs in a joint, or fungus gnat larvae in the compost. A fortnight later, plants that were perfectly healthy are speckled, sticky or swarming, and you have no idea how it happened.

The hack
Quarantining means keeping any new plant separated from the rest of your collection for a few weeks before letting it join the others. The logic is simple: if something is going to emerge, you want it to do so in isolation, where it can be dealt with before it spreads to the whole crew.

My favourite part was sitting with couples, talking about their lives and why they wanted to marry. But I’m equally happy to have left it behind

• Read more in this series here

I was in my mid-20s in the mid-2000s when I became a professional yapper. I’d had to bow out of a career in Auslan (Australian sign language) interpreting due to injury, but could still talk under wet concrete. Studying to become a civil marriage celebrant felt logical – I wanted to know what love was, and I knew it could show me.

Being appointed by the attorney general’s department involved a Certificate III and rigorous application process. I had to prove I was “of good standing” and “believed in the definition of marriage”. As a card-carrying homosexual, I wrote about my belief in all kinds of love, including marriage. It couldn’t take that long, I thought, for us to be recognised as having committed partnerships. Waiting a long, loathsome decade proved me wrong.

More and more people are posting footage of themselves touching sharks or even riding them. This is, of course, a terrible idea

Name: Shark selfies.

Age: The phrase seems to have emerged in summer 2014 and will hopefully be retired as soon as possible.

I’ve started writing to my sister, my mum, my friends … Not everyone writes back, but when we connect it’s on a deeper level than any group chat

Last January, I received a letter. Most of my post was predictably boring – a statement from the water company, my credit card bill, the occasional update about my pension contributions – but this letter was different. The envelope felt heavier than the run-of-the-mill ones I was used to. It was postmarked Paris, a place I had little connection to, and, most strikingly, it was addressed in messy handwriting – my own.

I had completely forgotten I’d written it until it turned up on my doorstep. On a trip to Paris the year before, I had visited a letter-writing cafe. The idea was simple: you wrote a letter (usually to yourself), the cafe kept it safe and sent it a year later. So, alongside trying escargots for the first time, I wrote a letter filled with questions about my not-so-distant future and addressed it to my home, in London. What will you be doing? Where will you be living? Do you have a boyfriend?

Efforts of emergency services and military in Blaenavon appear to be working but there are fears for the future

More than three weeks after it began burning and two days after the military deployed to the area, there is hope that the huge wildfire on the hillside above the Eastern valley town of Blaenavon may finally be coming under control.

Emergency workers and soldiers described a gruelling battle against the deep-seated peat fire that has spread over 4,000 hectares (9,800 acres), putting lives, farmland and property at risk.

As warming seas push native species to cooler waters farther north, once-rare visitors have become more common

‘It sounds silly but I thought it was a person in the water waving,” says Kurt Lander, skipper of the Yellowfin charter boat, based out of Brighton. But when he grabbed his binoculars, he realised the fluttering movement he had noticed in the middle of the Channel shipping lane was a pair of sunfish.

The huge fish were lying on their sides and flapping their fins. “Apparently, they do it as a visual attraction to birds,” he says. “They’re trying to get the birds to eat the parasites off them.”

What are some of the weirdest or priciest things parents and carers have to buy

From September 2026 a new law comes into force, which will mean parents and carers in England should not have to buy more than three items of branded school uniform. Secondary and middle schools may ask for four items if a tie is one of them.

The government says it hopes the new law will “ensure the cost of school uniforms is reasonable and provides the best value for money”.

We would also like to speak to florists, groundskeepers, and professional gardeners about how they are planning for the future

The heatwaves and drought conditions across parts of Britain this summer have brought a series of challenges for food producers and those working on the land.

According to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, hot and dry weather has resulted in the earliest UK cereals harvest in at least 20 years.

We’re interested in hearing from people who have found themselves unexpectedly out of work in midlife and have struggled to get another job despite years of professional experience

For many people in their 50s and 60s, losing a job can be the start of a long and unexpected struggle to get back into work. Despite years – or even decades – of professional experience, some say they are applying for hundreds of roles without success, while others have had to take lower-paid work or claim benefits to make ends meet.

The number of people aged 50 to 64 receiving out-of-work benefits has reached 2.15 million, according to recent analysis by the Centre for Social Justice. We’d like to hear from people across the UK who have found it difficult to find work later in their careers.

We would like to hear from women who participate in the ‘looksmaxxing’ community

While “looksmaxxing” was once a predominantly male space, in recent years it has increasingly taken hold among women, with dedicated forums and apps where users have their individual features analysed and scored, with the aim of identifying areas for physical improvement.

If you’re a young woman who participates in the “looksmaxxing” community, and have been thinking about ways to optimise your appearance, we’d love to hear from you and learn more about your experience.

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