Lisa O’Carroll reports on the ‘resetting’ of the relationship between the UK and the EU

This week, the Guardian reported that Labour is planning to bring in new legislation that will forge closer ties between the UK and the EU. Nearly 10 years on from the Brexit vote, the Guardian’s senior correspondent Lisa O’Carroll speaks to Helen Pidd about what a UK-EU reset would look like.

Lisa and Helen also discuss the strength of the EU in the wake of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in the Hungary elections on Sunday.

The Middle East on fire, a spat with the pope – and he posts himself as Potus Almighty. Will his disciples now see that their messiah has feet of clay?

You hear such a lot from Maga Republicans about how liberals think Trump voters are stupid. But not nearly enough about the far more salient point: that Donald Trump thinks Trump voters are stupid. Naturally, nobody deplores his own people as passionately as a populist, but even by those exacting historical standards Trump really does regard his supporters as a honking great throng of halfwits. How else to explain his seemingly retrofitted claim yesterday that the AI picture he posted of himself as Jesus was “me as a doctor”. Er, no. After it incensed leading figures in the Christian right, which makes up a large part of his voter base, the US president later deleted it, lamenting of these idiots that he “didn’t want anybody to be confused. People were confused.” Yeah, people are stoopid.

Alas, as you’ve no doubt seen, controversy still attends this image Trump shared on his Truth Social/True Sociopath platform. It depicts Trump in Jesus robes and holding a glowing orb of something – presumably heavenly light or radioactive material he omitted to tell Congress about – which he is transmitting restoratively into the forehead of some midwestern Lazarus. I’m sure we’d all love to know how the AI prompt for it could be “show me Donald Trump as a doctor”, or indeed how the LLM of choice would react when called out on its subsequent error. “You’re right – I overstated that. I shouldn’t have implied the US president is a benign deity who can raise the dead. To clarify – he’s a malignant narcissist and a tumour on the world. Thanks for catching that.”

Whether it’s everyday grime or dust mite poo, your mattress might be dirtier than you think. We asked the experts about the best way to remove stains, smells and allergens

• The best mattresses – tested

Your mattress is not just furniture, it’s family. You drool and sweat into it for hours, have sex on it, and shed millions of dead skin cells into it every night. It shares your DNA. Romantic or disgusting? Either way, that thing needs a wash.

Sticking a mattress in the washing machine is clearly about as feasible as putting the car in the dishwasher, but at least you can hose a car down and leave it to dry in the sun. With a mattress, especially one that contains foam (like most of the mattresses I’ve reviewed for the Filter), care, patience and a little bit of ingenuity are required when cleaning, or you could end up damaging it.

The MoD shows little sign of learning from its mistakes – no wonder the Treasury is reluctant to agree to its demands

George Robertson, Tony Blair’s first defence secretary, a former Nato secretary general and an author last year of the latest in a series of evasive strategic defence reviews, accused Keir Starmer on Tuesday of a “corrosive complacency towards defence”. He said the prime minister was not willing to make the “necessary investment”.

Lord Robertson could have directed his fire elsewhere. He must know that no government department has been so complacent in the face of years of devastating evidence of waste, profligate contracts, and policy decisions that have avoided confronting new but increasingly clear security threats to Britain and other western countries.

When your boss asks to meet, do you assume you’re about to get fired? Experts explain this common pattern

Your boss asks you for a meeting later in the week; you have never received negative feedback, but you automatically assume you’re about to get fired. Thoughts begin to swirl as you imagine the consequences: soon, you’ll be unemployed and unable to pay your rent.

Or, perhaps, when your partner is a little late coming home, you visualize a terrible accident on the motorway, their car crushed in the pile-up.

The Tory leader, now seemingly more gentle, is blessed with the ability to forget everything that happened the day before

Please sit down. Loosen your clothing. Do not adjust your screen. Take several deep breaths. Close your eyes. Imagine yourself in your happy space. Your life might not be quite the same again.

Hard to believe, but Kemi Badenoch has had a psychological makeover. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not talking a complete personality change. There hasn’t been a miracle. A laying on of hands by Donald Trump (AKA Christ the Redeemer). Kemi is still unable to stop herself from saying the ridiculous. It’s more that her madness has been somewhat diminished. Made more user-friendly. It only really resurfaces at prime minister’s questions. For reasons that aren’t quite clear, Keir Starmer is triggering for her.

US president says negotiations could restart in Islamabad under ‘fantastic’ Pakistani army chief Asim Munir

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Donald Trump has said that US-Iranian peace talks could resume in Islamabad over the next two days, and complimented the work of Pakistan’s army chief as mediator.

The US president was speaking on Tuesday to a New York Post reporter who had gone to Islamabad for the first round of ceasefire talks over the weekend. After an interview discussing prospects for negotiations, the reporter said the president had called her back “with an update”.

Analysis by IFS shows George Osborne’s mortgage schemes launched in 2013 had little effect on social mobility

Higher-income households were the biggest beneficiaries of George Osborne’s Help to Buy mortgage schemes, introduced in the 2010s, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) thinktank.

Launched by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government in 2013, Help to Buy involved two separate schemes aimed at making home ownership more achievable in a period of rapid house price growth.

ASA rules ads on Instagram and Daily Mail website broke ban on promoting items high in fat, salt and sugar

Lidl and Iceland have become the first companies to have ads banned after the introduction of rules cracking down on the marketing of junk food in the UK.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been policing the ban on ads featuring junk food on TV before 9pm, and in paid online advertising at any time of the day, since 5 January.

Growth forecasts cut for US and global economy, while UK suffers sharpest downgrade in G7

• Reeves arrives at IMF with little leeway to prove its UK downgrade wrong

A further escalation in the Iran war could trigger a global recession that would affect the UK more than any of the other G7 nations, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

Against an increasingly volatile backdrop, the Washington-based fund said the economic damage from the Middle East conflict was steadily rising as it cut its growth forecasts for 2026 based on the impact of the war so far.

Sheinbaum has recently been taking a firmer stance with the US, defying pressures where other countries have caved

The Mexican government has voiced concern about the deaths of its citizens in US custody, with Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum also pushing back against the Trump administration’s decision to impose an energy blockade on Cuba.

The progressive Mexican leader has walked a careful line with Trump for more than a year, addressing provocations with a measured tone and meeting US requests to crack down on cartels more so than her predecessors, in an effort to offset threats of tariffs and US military action against gangs.

Measure by Jamie Raskin follows statements by Trump about annihilating Iran and post depicting himself as Jesus

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox

House Democrats on Tuesday proposed creating a commission that would work with JD Vance to remove Donald Trump from office under the 25th amendment, should they determine he is no longer fit to serve.

The measure, introduced by Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, follows a series of statements from Trump, including his recent warning that Iran’s “whole civilization will die” if it did not capitulate to his demands, and a social media post that depicted him as Jesus Christ.

Exclusive: Fiona Hill, a former White House chief adviser, joins ex-Nato chief in criticising Starmer’s leadership on defence

A co-author of Britain’s strategic defence review has joined criticism of Keir Starmer’s leadership on military policy, warning of a “bizarre” lack of urgency in defence planning.

Fiona Hill, a former chief adviser to the White House on Russia, echoed the concerns of George Robertson, her co-author with Gen Richard Barrons on the strategic defence review (SDR), over what he had called the prime minister’s “corrosive complacency”.

Passengers can book a four-hour session in the bunk beds from May for Auckland-New York flights but airline cautions against smuggling in children

Economy passengers on Air New Zealand’s ultra-long-haul flight between Auckland and New York can book a spot in the airline’s bunk-bed style sleeping pods from May, which will take to skies in late 2026.

In what the airline says is a world first, six full-length, lie-flat sleeping pods, are squeezed into the aisle of the new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. The pods, known as “Skynest”, will include fresh bedding, a privacy curtain, ambient lighting and kit with eye-masks, skincare, earplugs and socks.

French child, six at time of 2019 attack, suffers setback in recovery after January operation

The family of a boy thrown from the 10th-storey balcony of the Tate Modern seven years ago said it feels as though his recovery has taken a “sad step backwards” after surgery.

The unnamed French child was six when he was seriously hurt in an attack by Jonty Bravery at the London attraction in August 2019.

The US blockade of ships using Iranian ports has come into force but several Iran-linked tankers have passed through the strait of Hormuz since it began. The blockade is designed to put pressure on Iran, whose economy is dependent on oil and gas exports. It comes after peace talks between Washington and Tehran at the weekend ended without a deal.

Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour

Ousted Viktor Orbán had previously blocked releasing funds; Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Iran war means US ‘has no time for Ukraine’. What we know on day 1,512

The change in Hungary’s government could help unlock €90bn for Ukraine and give a “new push” for it to join the European Union, the bloc’s expansion chief said Tuesday. Marta Kos, speaking on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank spring meetings, described the Hungarian election on Sunday – which saw long-ruling nationalist prime minister Viktor Orbán defeated – as a “big win for Europe.” “I expect, personally, that this will have a positive effect on the accession process,” Kos said. She also said it would help unlock a major loan needed to prop up Ukraine’s budget. Orban had an effective veto on the funds, angering other EU leaders. He had tied the veto to a dispute with Ukraine over a damaged pipeline carrying Russian oil.

Britain will announce extra support for Ukraine worth millions of pounds on Wednesday as senior ministers hold a series of meetings with their international counterparts. In Washington DC, chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to confirm a £752m payment to Kyiv ahead of a meeting with Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko. The payment, part of a £3.36bn loan, is intended to help pay for weaponry including long-range missiles, air defence systems and drones.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday told a German broadcaster that US peace negotiators “have no time for Ukraine” because of the war in Iran, and bemoaned disruption to deliveries of US arms. Zelenskyy told public broadcaster ZDF that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who have helped broker talks with Moscow on ending Russia’s war on Ukraine, were “constantly in talks with Iran” at the moment. Describing the pair as “pragmatic”, Zelenskyy said they were trying to “get more attention from Putin in order to end the war”. But “if the United States does not put pressure on Putin (...) and only engages in a gentle dialogue with the Russians, then they will no longer be afraid”, he said.

Norway and Ukraine will strengthen their bilateral defence cooperation, including by producing Ukrainian drones in the Nordic country, the Norwegian government said on Tuesday. Under the agreement, Norway will support the production of drones in Ukraine, while the latter will share data, information and knowledge with Norway, Oslo said in a statement. Ukrainian drones will also be produced on Norwegian territory, it said. “We can learn from the experiences that Ukraine is making in this hard-won fight against the Russian aggression,” prime minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told a joint press conference with Zelenskyy. “It is crucial that we learn from these experiences,” he said.

US officials announced on Tuesday an extension of sanctions relief on Russian oil company Lukoil for fuel stations outside Russia as the Trump administration seeks to mitigate spikes in crude prices. The action by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) means Lukoil-branded stations in countries like the United States can continue to serve customers through 29 October. The measure allows the gasoline stations to conduct transactions “in the ordinary course of business” such as procuring motor supplies, making insurance payments and processing employee payroll, OFAC said.

While some US visitors back their president, shopkeepers who serve the papacy and tourists support the pontiff

On the wall of the back room of an optician’s in Borgo Pio, a neighbourhood in Rome that borders the Vatican, hang the photos of five popes dating back to the late 1970s, charting both the recent history of Catholic church leaders and the shop itself.

As its owner, Walter Colantini, who fitted glasses for one of the pontiffs, gestured towards them, he recalled the diplomatic strain between the Vatican and White House over the 1991 Gulf war.

From showstopping fabrics to mind-expanding photos and an opening show celebrating Black British music, the real value of London’s new museum will surely lie in the art it inspires

Outside the V&A’s new outpost in east London, a nondescript young person stares blankly out across the old Olympic Park. This five-metre-tall sculpture is generic by design, an amalgam of “images, 3D scans and observations” of local people. It is easy to see why Thomas J Price’s idea appealed to a museum eager to engage with the area’s diverse communities – here is the quintessence of east London youth, executed at the scale of Michelangelo’s David – but by smoothing out the differences between individuals it sends out a confusing message.

To aggregate data and identify common denominators is, after all, the logic of the algorithm. So the worry is that this museum will likewise second-guess the desires of its audience based on predictive models, guiding visitors towards things they are predisposed to “like” and away from opinions they are presumed not to share. So it is a relief to find, on entering the building, a vision of how people make and cultures meet that is infinitely richer, more heterogenous and more open-ended than those first impressions suggest.

The chef spies on failing eateries then visits them at night to unearth their secrets – with results that are quite often nauseating … and yet surprisingly emotional

It’s 1.07am in Washington DC, and Gordon Ramsay is in a baseball cap, driving. His destination: Parthenon, once a thriving neighbourhood joint where White House power-brokers ate Greek. But 36 years after it was opened by Pete, who left Zakynthos for a new life in America when he turned 18, Parthenon is in such a state that one of its staff has contacted Ramsay and arranged for him to break in overnight.

Kitchen Nightmares was a decent runner for Channel 4 in the UK, but the US remake was a bigger hit, lasting for more than 100 episodes – so this follow-up has a lot to live up to. Gordon Ramsay’s Secret Service overreacts to the challenge by keeping the basic format (our man lovingly bullying bad restaurateurs into being good), then hurriedly throwing on garnish after garnish.

Air pollution caused by wildfires is another blow to northern Thailand’s tourism industry as businesses suffer amid war in Iran

The Doi Suthep temple in northern Thailand is known for its spectacular views of Chiang Mai and the lush forested mountains that surround it. Over recent weeks, though, visitors can see little of the city beyond a thick cloud of grey haze.

Persistent wildfires have caused intense air pollution across the north of Thailand, forcing three provinces to declare emergencies and triggering spikes in pollution-related illnesses.

The taboo-busting, Tony-award-winning show has returned. But how will its 00s attitudes land today? Will they still sing Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist and If You Were Gay?

There are certain problems you might expect when rehearsing a West End musical. Then there are the problems arising today, regarding the flaccidity of a prominent performer. “This one’s too floppy,” protests actor Noah Harrison, who is struggling with the choreography because his dance partner lacks backbone. No offence is taken, mind you: the culprit is made of felt. It’s time to swap out this cloth character for a sturdier one, and there are plenty to choose from. Row upon row of Sesame Street-alike puppets flank the room, each awaiting its moment in the spotlight.

This is Avenue Q, the Broadway-to-London hit, with songs by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, and book by Jeff Whitty, now revived to celebrate 20 years since its West End premiere. When it first launched, its mixture of multicoloured kids TV puppets, real-world problems (sex, racism, the housing crisis, existential drift) and outrageous songs felt truly out of the blue, and secured it Tony awards for best musical, best book and best score. But the young people to whom its story was addressed are now all grown up, and a new generation could benefit from the tale it has to tell.

The abundance of choice on dating apps has led to some people discovering that romance is dead and they are just Mr or Ms Right Now

Name: Placeholder partner.

Age: As a phrase, new. As a concept, less so. It’s probably become more prevalent with the abundance of dating apps.

With a summer glut on cards, customers are being urged to use more energy when renewables are abundant

• Great Britain households to be urged to use more power this summer as renewables soar

Great Britain is on the brink of a record-breaking summer for renewable energy, which could lead to the first periods of zero-carbon electricity in the history of the power system.

These green milestones are an important step towards the government’s goal of creating a 95% gas-free grid by 2030 to power the electric vehicles, heat pumps and greener factories that will help the UK to reach its climate goals.

The 1990s series set her career alight; then came 30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and countless theatre triumphs. She discusses Tina Fey, Stephen Sondheim and why it would take a broken leg to keep her off stage

‘I’ve been on three television shows that moved the needle a little bit,” says Jane Krakowski. “It sounds obnoxious for me to say it, so hopefully you’ll phrase that as if you said it.” In fact, I did also say it: the first was Ally McBeal, from 1997 until 2002, in which she played Elaine Vassal, an idiosyncratic character in a groundbreaking show. The kind of people who liked to sit around arguing about telly and post-modernism talked constantly about what kind of feminism McBeal was iterating, in the late 90s, with its scatty, neurotic heroine, such an unfamiliar screen trope of Career Woman, but somehow so much closer to life. Krakowski was almost the photo-negative of Calista Flockhart’s title character: brassy, eccentric, unconcerned by others’ opinions. Similarly, her character in 30 Rock, Jenna Maroney, acted as the bookend to Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon – Krakowski untouched by self-awareness, Fey beset by it. That ran from 2006 until 2013, and two years later, Fey’s follow-up, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, featured Krakowski as Jacqueline White, a magnetically unlikable wealthy socialite, in a fictional world so surreally improbable that it feels like a high-wire act only this particular cast could have pulled off.

You could split hairs about whether Ally McBeal invented the “dramedy” or just honed it, and the question of Fey’s comic sensibility could suck you in like quicksand. But in each show, Krakowski creates a character that you cannot imagine having landed, fully formed, on the page. She is expressive in a way that’s so high-voltage but so controlled, funny in a way that feels so instinctive but so deliberated, that the dialogue and the performance seem to explode together like two chemical elements.

How a reductive worldview is stripping meaning from our most valued activities

• This article was originally published as The six-second hug on Aeon.co

For decades, films out of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios have opened with Leo the roaring lion, garlanded with the motto ars gratia artis: art for art’s sake. Given that MGM is a money-making behemoth, we might doubt the sincerity of this high-minded sentiment. Still, it certainly expresses one of the few legitimate reasons why people should make movies. Art for the sake of anything else – profit, self-promotion, propaganda – isn’t really art at all, or at least not in its purest sense.

It therefore came as a bit of a shock to see a recent advert for the National Art Pass, which gives holders free or discounted entry to galleries and museums around the UK. The tagline “See more. Live more” sounded right: art does indeed enrich our lives. But it turned out that the “more” here was purely quantitative, not qualitative. “Grow some years on to your life with art,” proclaimed the main slogan, followed by: “Spending time in galleries and museums could help you live longer.” Art not for art’s sake, but for your heart’s sake, the fleshy not the spiritual one at that. This messaging around the arts has become ubiquitous, with Arts Council England promoting the idea that “engaging in creative and cultural activities has proven health benefits for individuals and communities”.

In the US, the birth rate for 15- to 19-year-olds dropped 7% last year. But what seems like good news for society has been lamented by some leading Maga figures

Teenagers these days, eh? Instead of having unprotected sex and popping out babies, they’re wasting their time on TikTok, or something. According to a recent report, the teenage birth rate in the US fell by 7% in 2025. While this might seem like a positive development, it has been a cause of dismay among the Maga-adjacent crowd.

Take Fox News, which ran a segment framing the drop in teen pregnancies as alarming. “We still have 3.6 million births a year,” noted the medical analyst Marc Siegel. “But the problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15 to 19, the fertility rate is down 7%, and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation.” I’m sorry, that’s a problem?

When I’m seen changing a nappy, surprise on people’s faces tells me the bar isn’t just set low – in many contexts it doesn’t exist

The slow, weeks-long reckoning that followed my son’s birth three months ago was something no book had prepared me for. What crept up on me was a dawning existential realisation, somewhere between one overnight feed and the next, that everything had quietly reorganised itself while I was too exhausted to notice.

For nearly a decade I’ve been building my identity as a men’s health psychologist and researcher – testing it, recalibrating, working out how I want to operate. By the time my son, Arty, arrived, I knew that version of myself reasonably well. What I hadn’t reckoned with was the second identity that came with him: one that needed to find its place inside a life that was already fully furnished. This one didn’t come with a mentor, a peer group who’d been through it or years of iteration to draw on. It just arrived, and I was expected to know what to do with it.

We must hope this vote will be the start of a wider backlash – and send hard-right populism back to the fringes where it belongs

The forces of darkness rolled back on Sunday. The mighty combined power of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s America were defeated in Hungary, as European liberal democratic values triumphed.

The populist-nativist right put their all into keeping Viktor Orbán in power. The US vice-president, JD Vance, mid-war in Iran, took time out to parade his patronage in Budapest, one month after the hard-right US Conservative Political Action Conference took place there. In January, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in a video endorsing Orbán, with salvoes of support from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen. Herbert Kickl of Austria’s Freedom party declared that “a patriotic wind is blowing across Europe”. Maybe, but not in their direction. Patriotism does not belong to them.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink?
On Thursday 30 April, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss how much of a threat Labour faces from the Green party and Reform UK – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here

With the ejection of Trumpian hero Viktor Orbán, Hungarians demanded a restored democracy. Now, Europe must support them

To be in Budapest last Sunday evening was to see history again being made on the Danube. As rapturous crowds gathered on the riverbank opposite the brightly illuminated parliament building, chanting “Ria-ria Hungaria!” and “Hungary-Europe!”, we all knew that the implications of the dramatic election victory for the Tisza party of Péter Magyar go far beyond this one central European country. The result is very good news for Ukraine and the European Union. It’s correspondingly bad news for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the US president, Donald Trump, those twin backers of Viktor Orbán’s regime. The critical question now is whether Hungary can be the first country in the world to emerge from such a far-reaching populist erosion of democracy – the “Orbánisation” Trump is trying to emulate in the US – and whether Europe has the political will and imagination to enable it to succeed.

Already on Friday evening, standing amid a huge crowd of young people at a “system-changer” concert on Heroes’ Square, I felt the energy for change. In the very square where, back in 1989, I watched a fiery young student leader named Viktor Orbán call for the end of the weary old communist regime and for the Russians to go home, I now saw a new generation of Hungarians calling for the end of a weary old regime led by this same Orbán and his Fidesz party. “Filthy Fidesz!” they cried and, yes, “Russians go home!” For everyone knows that today’s Orbán is Putin’s man in Brussels.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His book The Magic Lantern contains an eyewitness account of the young Orbán’s 1989 appearance in Heroes’ Square

I actually don’t want to make my work easier. We should demand authenticity if we care about the sort of society that comes out the other end of this so-called revolution

I never thought I’d have to write these words but here I am: my name is Peter and I am human.

What seems like a self-evident proclamation needs to be made now because the misuse of AI is transforming considered op-eds such as this into “slop-inion” that is infecting the editorial pages of reputable media outlets.

The Grand National, Masters, Paris-Roubaix and Champions League put it ahead of even July’s mighty trifecta

The thought struck me on the last rattler back from the Grand National, as Avanti’s wifi faltered somewhere outside Crewe and the Masters stream on my phone froze yet again. I was watching the world’s best golf tournament, on a train journey back from the world’s greatest steeplechase, having seen the best football match of the season – Real Madrid against Bayern Munich – earlier in the week. Is there a better month in the sporting calendar than April?

Augusta always delivers. Club football hits peak levels of drama and jeopardy. Then there is Aintree, Paris-Roubaix, the start of the County Championship cricket season and the World Snooker Championship. To round it off, the life-affirming sight of the great and the ordinary doing remarkable things at the London Marathon. “April is the cruellest month,” writes TS Eliot in The Waste Land. But he was not a sporting man and was living in very different times.

A former Nato chief demands more cash while fixing Britain’s global role. Before billions are spent, ministers must define the purpose of its military

George Robertson’s claims about the prime minister’s “corrosive complacency” over Britain’s safety made headlines. But it is a howl of pain, not a sober security analysis. The former Nato secretary general and author of the government’s strategic defence review (SDR) wants Downing Street to back his view of Britain’s role in the world – as Robin to America’s Batman – with billions of pounds of cash. But his argument takes for granted what should be under scrutiny: Britain’s global military role itself.

Donald Trump’s threats over Greenland, his disregard for international law and his U-turn over the Chagos deal expose the fragility of Britain’s defence assumptions. Before spending billions, those commitments must be re-examined. Lord Robertson’s claim of a £28bn black hole assumes that the current strategy is the correct one. But if that strategy – with its emphasis on global deployment and alliance commitments – is open to question, then the funding gap may reflect overstretch rather than insufficient spending.

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

A devastating ‘war of atrocities’ will continue as long as the United Arab Emirates and others back the belligerents

“Bloody unacceptable.” The UN’s top official in Sudan, Denise Brown, abandoned the language of diplomacy in addressing the failure to tackle a devastating three-year conflict which has been overshadowed by Ukraine, then Gaza, and now Iran. The humanitarian crisis has dominated discussions of Sudan, she argued: “How about focusing on finding a solution to end the war?”

The international conference convened in Berlin on Wednesday is intended to inject a sense of urgency, as the conflict enters its fourth year. Since Sudan’s generals turned upon each other, having overthrown the civilian government, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. Four million have fled abroad to other fragile nations, and millions more are displaced internally. More than half the population – approaching 30 million people – are acutely food insecure. Much of the capital, Khartoum, lies in ruins.

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.

Responding to an editorial on antisocial behaviour in the capital, Sum Kung writes that young people are demonised, while David Hutchinson and Jacqueline Simpson respond to an article by mayor Sadiq Khan

It is right to reject the hysterical fiction of London as a city in moral freefall after the disorder in Clapham (Editorial, 8 April). But the deeper issue is not only exaggeration. It is the ease with which young people, once visible in public space, are turned into signs of disorder before they have done anything at all.

Society does not merely fear what some young people do; it fears their collective presence. Teenagers gathering on a high street are too quickly read as menace, excess or incipient criminality. In that sense, the language surrounding Clapham matters as much as the incident itself. Terms such as “feral”, “swarm” and “gang” do not neutrally describe behaviour. They help produce a belief in the young person as threat, as someone to be monitored and contained rather than understood socially.

Alexandra Lucas asks what has to happen for our government to act, rather than simply condemn Benjamin Netanyahu, while John Deards notes Alan Bennett’s prescience on Donald Trump

You report that Donald Trump asked Benjamin Netanyahu to be more “low-key” in Lebanon (Netanyahu says there is no ceasefire in Lebanon as Israel launches fresh strikes, 9 April).

As someone who is Palestinian Lebanese, I know exactly what that means. The West Bank is low-key. The world isn’t watching, so the killing and dispossession continues – door to door, quietly enough that most people won’t realise until Israel has taken the whole of the West Bank.

Steve Jones responds to Max Lury’s report of seeing a big cat on Dartmoor as a child, and not being believed

I believe you, Max Lury (A moment that changed me: I saw a big cat on Dartmoor – and no one believed me, 8 April). I was walking across Exmoor in 1982 as part of the outdoor education module in my teacher training. A college friend and I (we are both biologists) were walking across an area of rough grassland with shallow ditches running across and slightly down the slope, which had a mixture of overgrown heather and gorse along the top of the far side of the ditch.

We were in good visibility about 70 to 100 yards away from this particular ditch, mid-morning, when we saw a large, tan-coloured, low-slung animal running away from us down this ditch. It had a blunt face and a long tail with a bushy bit at the end. The tail curved upwards, and in the act of running, the creature arched its back to allow its front legs to project further forward.

Prof Julian Wiseman challenges claims made by another letter writer and says poultry may cope easily with more than one grain

Ruth Tanner’s comments (Letters, 9 April) cannot be left unchallenged. She says “the fast-growing, low-welfare breeds we use rely solely on the import of soy for feed – the only grain they can be fed”. Initially, this gives the impression that soy is the sole component of a poultry diet, which is untrue. Diets are a combination of several raw materials balanced to supply all the energy and nutrients required.

Furthermore, poultry may cope easily with more than one grain; in fact, the major component of UK poultry diets is wheat (usually home-grown, not imported). True, soy is the best balanced plant protein source, but there has been a substantial research effort into investigating alternatives, either home-grown or from other northern European countries (for example peas, canola, lupins, sunflower, potato protein concentrate and corn gluten) that do need supplementing with pure amino acids (as does soy). Finally, soy is imported from North and South America in boats that go nowhere near the strait of Hormuz, so trade is not influenced by the current situation in Iran.
Prof Julian Wiseman
Emeritus professor of animal production, University of Nottingham

It felt routine in the end, the imperious champions of Europe through to another Champions League semi-final, Luis Enrique waving politely to the VIPs up in the Sir Kenny Dalglish stand having cavorted around Anfield following Paris Saint-Germain’s victory here last season, and a despondent Mohamed Salah bidding farewell to the Kop after his final European outing in a Liverpool shirt. But this was no routine departure from the Champions League for Liverpool.

Having exited the FA Cup quarter-final 4-0 and with a whimper, Arne Slot’s side exited the Champions League quarter-final 4-0 on aggregate but with a fight. For 72 minutes they also had hope, went toe-to-toe with the finest unit in Europe and kept on pressing despite the loss of Hugo Ekitiké to a potentially serious injury and a debatable decision to give – and then take away – a penalty with the capacity to change everything. It will be of little consolation to Slot and his team that, for the second successive season against PSG, taking the fight to Luis Enrique’s champions and putting the fright on them brought no reward at Anfield. The damage inflicted in Paris last week proved irrepairable.

• World Cup qualifier: England 1-0 Spain (Hemp 3’)

• Lionesses win sides’ first meeting since Euros final

A resolute England gave their chances of ­automatic qualification for 2027’s World Cup a ­tremendous boost as they beat the world champions, Spain, at Wembley and demonstrated they are strong enough defensively to hold off the most technically gifted squad in the women’s game.

In a closely fought match in which both teams missed some ­gilt-edged opportunities, the sides were ­ultimately separated by two moments where the ball bounced extremely close to the line; one where it did cross the goalline and another where it did not.

Defeat never tasted so good. At the end of a battle in which both teams had fought and both had bled, in which they had suffered but above all played, a huge banner was unfurled at the Metropolitano. “We give everything to win the cup,” it said, and, boy, had they. For the first time, Diego Simeone had seen his team lose a Champions League knockout game at home, but it didn’t matter: instead there was delirium, the club’s anthem belted out louder than ever before. “Buah! You don’t know how lovely it is to be among the four best teams in Europe,” the coach said.

They had waited a long time for this. Ten years and one day later, Atlético Madrid eliminated Barcelona to reach the semi-final of the Champions League again. “This is the third time we’ve done this – against Messi’s Barcelona, against Lamine’s Barcelona – and it isn’t easy,” Simeone said; the other two times, in 2014 and 2016, they reached the final to which they are so desperate to return and exorcise the ghosts from Lisbon and Milan. “I’ve been here 14 years and never stop feeling emotional,” Simeone said. “I told the players: thank you, thank you, thank you. For the things we do, the faith we have.”

• EFL in race against time to hear charges

• Club alleged to have breached P&S rules

West Brom could be given a points deduction that relegates them from the Championship after the season has finished as the club contest charges of breaching the English Football League’s profit and sustainability (P&S) rules.

With the Championship league season concluding on 2 May the EFL is running out of time to hear the charges against West Brom, which relate to an alleged breach of the £39m loss limit in the three-year period culminating in the 2024-25 season. EFL sanctioning guidelines state that any punishment for a P&S breach must be applied in the campaign after it took place, which in West Brom’s case means this season, but the rulebook does not give a definitive cutoff point so it is unclear when the season ends.

We delve into the best stories on how sport is changing around the climate crisis, and what can be done to navigate a way forward

• To subscribe to The Hotspot, just visit this page

Nelson Mandela said: “Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.” Too optimistic? In 2026, almost certainly. Sport is still a common language, uniting unlikely groups like an all-powerful Esperanto, but it is in trouble.

The pitches we play on, rivers we swim, seas we surf, mountains we climb, parks we run in, air we breathe – all are being degraded by the burning of fossil fuels as the climate crisis turns the sporting landscape upside down.

• Photos prompted investigation by The Athletic

• Russini seen as one of NFL’s top reporters

NFL reporter Dianna Russini has resigned from The Athletic less than a week after photos of her and New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel prompted an internal investigation at The New York Times-owned sports outlet.

The New York Post last week published the photos of Vrabel and Russini at an Arizona resort and said they were taken before the NFL owners meetings that began in Phoenix on 29 March.

• Saints just three points off second after 3-0 home win

• Ipswich slip to 2-0 defeat at battling Portsmouth

Southampton have moved just three points off automatic promotion after a 3-0 victory over Blackburn, coupled with Ipswich’s 2-0 defeat at Portsmouth.

The hosts extended their unbeaten run to 18 games in all competitions with a comprehensive victory at St Mary’s, secured by first-half goals from Cyle Larin and Ryan Manning and a late strike from Cameron Archer.

• Manager’s future has been talking point for months

• Players told of exit after training on Tuesday afternoon

Andoni Iraola has informed Bournemouth he will leave the club when his contract expires at the end of the season. He is expected to consider his options this summer with ­several Premier League jobs potentially arising.

The 43-year-old’s departure could also open the door for the Basque to join his boyhood club Athletic Bilbao, but the former Borussia Dortmund head coach Edin Terzic is thought to be the frontrunner to succeed Ernesto Valverde.

• ‘It is never acceptable to take law into own hands’

• Barrister tells court future of stables now in doubt

The Welsh Grand National-winning trainer Evan Williams has been jailed for three years for attacking a dog walker who was on his land.

Williams, 55, repeatedly struck Martin Dandridge, 72, with a hockey stick during the assault. Dandridge, from Swindon, suffered injuries including a fractured arm in the incident on Williams’s land at Llancarfan in south Wales in December 2024.

Interior minister is ‘highly determined’ to block US rapper from performing in the southern city in June due to his past antisemitic remarks, sources say

Kanye West has announced he will postpone an upcoming concert in France, just after reports emerged that France’s interior minister is seeking to block the US rapper from performing due to his antisemitic remarks.

“After much thought and consideration, it is my sole decision to postpone my show in Marseille, France until further notice,” the rapper, legally known as Ye, wrote on X.

Filing seeks to overturn seditious conspiracy charges of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers members who laid siege to US Capitol in 2021

The US Department of Justice has requested that a federal appeals judge overturn convictions for members of far-right groups Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who were previously found guilty of seditious conspiracy in connection with the violent siege of the US capitol in 2021.

Jeanine Pirro, the Donald Trump-appointed US attorney for the District of Columbia, signed separate motions on Tuesday to vacate convictions for a slew of individuals, including the Proud Boys’ leaders Ethan Nordean and Joseph Biggs as well as Stewart Rhodes, a former attorney who founded the Oath Keepers’ militia.

Strike marks third deadly attack on vessels in region in four days, and the killing of 174 people since September

• Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox

The US military said it killed four more people in a boat strike in the eastern Pacific ocean on Tuesday, marking the third deadly attack on vessels in the region in four days.

The US Southern Command, which oversees military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced the killings in a social media post, claiming, without providing evidence, that the men killed were “narco-terrorists”.

British aid to double as 19m people face acute hunger, but summit unlikely to end conflict amid Saudi-UAE tensions

The British foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, will urge Sudan’s warring parties to “cease bloodshed” during a major conference on Wednesday, which analysts believe is unlikely to deliver a significant step towards peace.

The talks in Berlin – held on the third anniversary of the start of Sudan’s ruinous war – are expected to help address a catastrophic funding shortfall that is compounding the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Studio and television business, ESPN, certain corporate functions and more to see workforce reduced, source says

Walt Disney’s new chief executive, Josh D’Amaro, announced layoffs in an email to employees on Tuesday, as he looks to streamline the company’s operations.

About 1,000 positions will be eliminated, according to a person familiar with the development.

The government hails the ‘green revolution’ as a solution to economic decline, but some young jobseekers say the rhetoric does not match their experience

On paper, Jake Snell, 19, sounds like the perfect candidate for a role in the UK’s burgeoning green energy sector. He has high grades in maths and physics A-level, a distinction in BTec engineering and another distinction in an extended engineering diploma. He has also done work experience at an engineering company.

He is from Lowestoft, a coastal town in Suffolk, outside Great Yarmouth. Both towns contain areas that fall within the most deprived 20% in England and are part of a wider pattern of coastal places with low employment opportunities.

Amid growing evidence of fungi’s key role in ecosystems and storing carbon, African scientists are championing the need to preserve ‘funga’ as much as flora and fauna

Madagascar has long been celebrated for its remarkable wildlife, with the vast majority of its species – from ring-tailed lemurs to certain species of baobab trees – found nowhere else on the planet. But when discussing the island nation’s endemic treasures, fungi are often left out of the conversation.

Yet “fungi are some of the most important things in the world”, says Anna Ralaiveloarisoa, a Malagasy scientist. “They feed 90% of terrestrial plants. Without them, there is no life on the Earth.”

Exclusive: Ministers accused of trying to keep investment firm’s withdrawal from partnership with NatureScot under wraps

A funding deal to raise £100m from private investors for urgently needed nature restoration in Scotland has fallen through without the Scottish parliament being told.

The Guardian has learned that Aberdeen, the investment firm, decided to withdraw from a partnership with the agency NatureScot to raise at least £100m for conservation projects from commercial and private investors late last year.

Rising temperatures and extreme drought are driving more destructive spring fires across the Great Plains. This year, forces aligned to create the perfect storm in Nebraska

In a normal year, the vast grasslands that roll across the American Great Plains would be starting to green. But at the center of the US, where most of the nation’s beef producers graze their herds, this spring brought fire instead of moisture, leaving more than a million acres black and barren.

Multiple blazes raged across Nebraska, where the records for the annual acreage burned were obliterated in a single month. The state logged the largest blaze ever recorded when the Morrill fire cascaded across more than 642,000 acres (260,000 hectares) before it was contained in March.

Refugee Council criticises Labour’s decision, saying military sites are unsuitable and ‘more expensive than hotels’

Hundreds of asylum seekers have been removed from government-funded hotels while others have been sent to live in army barracks, the Home Office has announced.

Eleven “asylum hotels” in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland have been closed, as first reported by the Guardian, and more will close “in the coming weeks”. About 350 claimants have been moved to the Crowborough military camp in east Sussex, described by a spokesperson as “basic accommodation”.

Health secretary says NHS is ‘failing women’ and pledges to end ‘gaslighting’ by doctors

Wes Streeting has vowed to stop women being “gaslit” by doctors as he relaunches the women’s health strategy for England.

Speaking before the publication of the renewed strategy on Wednesday, Streeting said the NHS was “failing women” and set out measures to help them access the healthcare they need.

Group including former cabinet minister Anneliese Dodds also calls for robust defence of climate policies

A group of Labour MPs is to propose a series of new policies to defeat rightwing populism, including a Swiss-style deal with the EU, lower electricity prices, a robust defence of climate policies and a reduced dependence on Washington.

Among those contributing to a new collection of essays is the former cabinet minister Anneliese Dodds, who calls for a fundamental reappraisal of the UK-US relationship, saying alliances should be based on “a hardheaded assessment of which nations share our values and goals.”

Exclusive: Victoria and Albert Museum has deleted maps and images deemed sensitive by Beijing censors from exhibition publications

One of the UK’s leading museums has accepted demands by a Chinese firm that publishes its catalogues to remove images that fall foul of the country’s censorship laws.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has agreed to requests by the Chinese printing company to delete maps and images from at least two recent exhibition catalogues, according to documents released to the Guardian after freedom of information requests.

Grand jury brings manslaughter charge over fatal 2024 operation where patient died on table

A surgeon in Florida has been indicted for manslaughter after he wrongly removed a patient’s liver instead of his spleen during an August 2024 procedure.

Thomas Shaknovsky, 44, was indicted by a grand jury in Tallahassee on Monday after prosecutors said he botched the surgery of 70-year-old William Bryan, of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Virginia signs national popular vote bill into law, joining interstate compact with 17 other states and District of Columbia

A national majority vote for president is one step closer to reality after the Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger, signed the national popular vote bill into law, joining an interstate compact with 17 other states and the District of Columbia.

Under the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, states would assign their presidential electors to the winner of the popular vote, regardless of the results within the state. The compact takes effect when states representing a majority of electoral votes – 270 of 538 – pass the legislation and thus would determine the winner of the presidential contest. With Virginia, the compact now has 222 electors.

The family of Marie-Thérèse, from Brittany, fear for her health after she was cuffed and placed in a detention centre

An 86-year-old French woman who moved to the US to marry her 1950s sweetheart is being held in a crowded detention centre in Louisiana after she was arrested by immigration agents and cuffed by her hands and feet.

The family of the woman, named only as Marie-Thérèse, said they feared for her health as French consular officials attempted to secure her release. One of her sons told the Ouest-France newspaper that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had treated his mother like a hardened criminal.

Trawler set off from Bangladesh and reportedly capsized due to heavy winds, rough seas and overcrowding

About 250 people are missing after a boat carrying Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi nationals capsized in the Andaman Sea, according to the UN’s refugee and migration agencies.

The agencies said the trawler carrying more than 250 men, women and children reportedly sank due to harsh weather and overcrowding. It had departed from Teknaf in southern Bangladesh and was bound for Malaysia.

Meg O’Neill to return to upstream and downstream divisions after shift away from low carbon push

BP’s new boss has set out plans to reinstate the company structure the fossil fuel supermajor ditched six years ago as part of its failed attempt to reorganise the business to pursue a green agenda.

Meg O’Neill told staff that the 117-year-old company would return to a “simpler, stronger” two-business arrangement including an upstream oil and gas production unit and a downstream business focused on refining and distributing fuels and retail activities.

Recent losses on loans in relatively unregulated sector are not a systemic risk to financial sector, says JP Morgan boss

The boss of JP Morgan, Wall Street’s biggest bank, said a downturn across the $3tn private credit market would not put financial stability at risk, adding that losses would have to be “very large” before the pain rippled out to major banks.

Dimon played down the potential impact that a series of private credit loan defaults would have on the wider financial system, arguing that while there were some areas of of weakness, the unregulated industry did not pose a “systemic” risk.

Decision to reduce duty-free quotas by 47% aimed at curbing Chinese imports

The EU is to go ahead with plans to double tariffs and halve quotas on imports of steel from July, in a move designed to curb Chinese imports but which could damage UK exports to the bloc.

The decision by EU lawmakers and member states after late night talks on Monday, will reduce duty-free quotas by 47%. Exact country allocations have yet to be determined.

Japanese carmaker will add self-driving abilities to 90% of cars in future and cut a fifth of its models

Nissan has said it will add self-driving abilities to the vast majority of its cars and cut a fifth of its models in the latest stage of the Japanese carmaker’s drawn-out turnaround efforts.

Ivan Espinosa, Nissan’s chief executive, said the company was pinning its hopes on “AI-defined vehicles”, with an aim of installing autonomous driving technologies on 90% of its vehicles in the future.

The festival might feel more corporate than ever but enthusiasm remained sky high with Bieber fever, a Demon Hunters surprise and a pop takeover

Even in the best of times, Coachella can be a heavy lift – long drive, perhaps longer lines and, if you do it right, extremely long days of careening between live music sets under the intense desert sun. Every year, North America’s largest music festival generates a round of buzz and scorn in near equal measure for good reason – the sky-high prices, the deluge of cringey social media boasts, the overwhelming vibes of influencer culture. Yet the faithful keep returning (and the agnostics keep tuning in online), forking over a minimum of $649 for a three-day pass or securing a brand deal to witness what continues to be the most expansive and comprehensive music slate in the country, a genuinely exciting mix of up-and-comers gunning for a breakout set and you-had-to-be there moments such as, say, the return of Justin Bieber …

While Bieberchella dominated much of the conversation on the ground this year – his low-key but sufficient Saturday headliner set drew perhaps the biggest crowd in festival history – Coachella 2026 offered plenty of range for those not interested in the comeback of the millennial icon. Coachella may be the one thing in America currently safe from actual inflation – there was no rise in ticket prices this year, though I have to imagine that, like last year, over half of attenders are on payment plans. But the inflation mindset prevails. Following its so-called flop era two years ago, when underwhelming headliner billing led to the slowest ticket sales in over a decade, the festival has returned to conversation-dominating form with a more is more approach: more international artists catering to more potential attenders; more infrastructure (a new underground movie theater, the Bunker, was tailor-made for Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia audiovisual experience); more investment in an impressive livestream operation, as the festival continues its shift from in-person experience to global event/brand; more surprise DJ bookings – the xx’s Romy! John Summit! – that overflowed the EDM-heavy Do LaB.

The Louisiana band came to a tragically early end in the 90s, but after going viral they’ll soon play stadiums with System of a Down. They look back on the claggy riffs and circle pits

‘It’s a mind-blower,” says singer Dax Riggs on the surprising TikTok-driven renaissance of the renowned 1990s psychedelic sludge metallers Acid Bath. “In the front row you’ll see an old fan and next to them is a 13-year-old kid singing all the words,” adds guitarist Sammy Duet. “What the hell is going on here?”

Formed in the Louisiana bayou in 1991 with oppressive, swampy sounds soundtracking tales of drugs, death and decay, Acid Bath deftly hopped from treacly, melodic grooves to bluesy licks and fast-chugging thrashers, sometimes in the same song. “Society here was totally decrepit and unfair in a lot of ways, but the beauty of the landscape is supreme,” says Riggs of the backwater wetlands that loomed large in their psyches. Their claggy, peculiar southern gothic style burned bright, before the death of bassist Audie Pitre in 1997 brought their journey to a close.

Music from Charli xcx can’t save David Lowery’s dour chamber piece, despite some flashes of dazzling style

For a certain stripe of pop fan, diva worship comes along with having a high tolerance for their unique flavor of psychobabble. So when Anne Hathaway, as the titular singer in David Lowery’s Mother Mary, declares that her new single Spooky Action is about Einstein’s “transubstantiation of feelings”, I ignored the snorts from those in the theater beside me. Finally, I thought, fondly casting my mind back to when Lady Gaga would talk about her music as a reverse Warholian explosion: a pop star who is not afraid to lean into high-concept nonsense. My generosity quickly faded when I began to realize that Mother Mary – the character and the film – was missing a crucial component for any modern pop star worth their salt: self-awareness.

Mother Mary is a one-time music A-lister in search of a comeback after a mysterious event that has taken her out of commission. She seems … haunted, and is experiencing a fashion emergency to boot, unable to find anything to wear for her imminent return to the stage. Three days before she is due to make her big appearance she turns up in the rain at the gothic mansion of fashion designer Sam Anselm (an enjoyably over-the-top Michaela Coel), looking like a rat caught in a monsoon, begging for an outfit that “feels like me”. Sam has moved on considerably since she was Mother Mary’s partner in fashion, and perhaps her lover behind closed doors too. In fact, she entirely loathes the pop star. “You are a carcinogen, you are a tumor,” Sam says in an amusingly ominous voiceover. “The bile is rising.”

A killer itch and a trapped group of strangers make for a tense, if uneven, horror that balances grisly shocks with sketchy character drama

This horror is set in a world where a highly contagious disease causes itching so severe that the scratching proves quickly fatal; finally, a film targeting the under-served eczema community! The body horror elements are realised extremely effectively, with a woman literally tearing at her skin being the most effective set-piece. Alas, the film doesn’t have the scope (on what was clearly a modest budget) to indulge in very many of these. Much of the rest of the runtime is the pressure-cooker conversation that occurs between a motley crew of so-far-uninfected civilians caught out at a department store. While the reason they are trapped is horrific, this makes the film at least as much a character study as it is a horror, with variable results.

Scenarios from classic films which the film-makers may have had in mind include the hard-pressed band of isolated scientists confronting a shape-shifting monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing, the mismatched duo defending a defunct police station under siege in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, or even a non-John Carpenter film, Night of the Living Dead, in which survivors hole up in a farmhouse. The key to these types of films is a blend of genre excitement and character dynamics. It would have been great to see more of this from Itch!: on the one hand, a slightly bigger budget for more of the gnarly effects it pulls off so well in some brief scenes, and on the other, a sharper script to serve the human aspect.

A shallow plot and advert-adjacent cameos justify the critics’ condemnation of Nintendo’s latest film. But there’s sincere affection for the universe here, too

I was bracing myself for the worst when I headed into the cinema with my children to watch the new Super Mario Galaxy movie over the Easter break. The reviews have been memorably dire. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it worse than AI; Empire deemed it a “humourless, hysterical trudge”. It’s been vilified even more than the first Mario movie, which film critics also hated.

I am a lifelong Nintendo fan, though – I literally wrote the book on the company – so even if it was terrible, there was a possibility that the Mario-loving child within me might temporarily take over my critical faculties and get me through it. That’s what happened with the first Mario movie, which I found to be perfectly OK. I was not actively offended by it, as the film critics seemed to be; audiences seemed to land mostly in my camp, if the huge discrepancy between its audience ratings and review ratings were any indication. Could the sequel really be that much worse?

An animator records the shaggy dog stories of his Indigenous brother in a loopy, hallucinatory animation

The call for better self-representation for minorities in cinema has been loud and long over the last decade, and if it means more left-field work like this loopy, brain-fried but thoroughly affable animation about the lives of a Canadian Cree Indigenous family, then keep it coming. Roughly describable as Cheech and Chong meet Tristram Shandy, Endless Cookie consistently interrupts itself and lampoons the methods of its own creation – especially the fact it took half-brothers Seth and Peter Scriver nine years to finish the thing. At one point Seth, in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Toronto, announces he has another deadline extension: “Cool!”

Animator Seth (who voices himself) heads up to the Shamattawa First Nation community in Manitoba to tape his half-brother Peter (also voicing himself, as do other family members); Peter’s mother, unlike Seth’s, was First Nations. His tales are of the shaggy-dog variety – featuring the 12 pooches on their property, two of whom actually are called Cheech and Chong – as well as the seven kids in residence. The stories are manifold and strange: teepee construction; a botched murder stakeout involving a caribou; Peter’s angry-punk stint in 80s Toronto; a friend accosted by a clingy snowy owl; a drawn-out saga about the embarrassment of mangling his hand in his own animal trap.

After being dropped by his label, the British-Nigerian singer became huge as an independent artist. So why did the Brit awards snub him? Ahead of arena dates, he reflects on his journey so far

“I’m not looking at a crowd tonight,” Odeal says hours before his first ever Brixton Academy performance in late March. “I’m looking at my people; aunties, uncles, friends, peers and supporters.”

Dressed in loungewear and stretched across a leather sofa backstage at the south London venue, the British-Nigerian singer seems calm, as if he’s exactly where he expected to be. The 26-year-old has the type of fame particular to the British R&B scene: adoration and many millions of streams from the genre’s global fanbase, to the point where he’ll soon play arenas across the US in support of R&B megastar Summer Walker – though is yet to have much mainstream recognition beyond that.

After her death aged 92, we look back on the vast and varied catalogue of one of India’s greatest vocalists, who brought actorly skill to her Bollywood playback performances

• Indian music legend Asha Bhosle dies aged 92

With more than 12,000 songs to her name, Indian playback singer Asha Bhosle is one of the most recorded and well-known voices in Bollywood cinema. Born into a musical family, with her father Deenanath Mangeshkar working as a singer for regional Marathi theatre and film throughout the 1920s and 30s and her older sister Lata Mangeshkar becoming a Bollywood playback singer in her own right, Bhosle entered the industry at just 10 years old with this debut performance in the Marathi film Maze Baal. Duetting with Lata, Bhosle’s melismatic falsetto in the song gives voice to the playful innocence of the film’s central love-child. Keening and crystal-clear, her vocal immediately cuts through the rollicking instrumental and already displays the yearning emotion that would become her signature as her voice matured.

How to Fail’s Elizabeth Day and historian Dan Jones dissect the mistakes of Richard VIII and Anne Boleyn. Plus, Kylie Jenner lets her guard down to Kid Cudi

How to Fail’s Elizabeth Day teams up with historian Dan Jones for this new series about screw-ups from times gone by. Fast forward through the university reunion (they were at Cambridge together) and it quickly gets entertaining. Their first episode challenges Shakespeare’s vision of a villainous Richard III, while a future episode will consider the “Ross and Rachel of early modern history”, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

Royal Festival Hall, London
Young performers brought tremendous quality and personal touches to a concert of works from Wagner to pop star Jacob Collier, under the focused guidance of new principal conductor Alpesh Chauhan

There’s always more at an NYO concert. More players: 160 this time, crammed on to a platform that seems full with half that number. More of the energy that comes with the fact that, for every player, this is a very special occasion. And, in recent seasons, more stuff to remind us that these are teenagers, not hard-bitten professionals.

This time there was a semi-choreographed walk-on to a mashup of Raye and Chaka Khan, with the percussion taking the lead and the assembled orchestra eventually joining in. There was a short speech from one of the players before each work – somewhere between pointing out a personal connection with the music and giving superfluous justification for its inclusion. And as an encore – sung, not played – there was Jacob Collier’s Something Heavy, with a bit more choreography.

The former children’s laureate missed the announcement of the award in Bologna due to post-Brexit passport rule changes

Michael Rosen, the poet and author known for books such as We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and Chocolate Cake, has won the 2026 Hans Christian Andersen award for writing in recognition of his lifelong contributions to children’s literature.

The former children’s laureate is the fourth Briton to win the award, following Eleanor Farjeon, Aidan Chambers and David Almond.

Biography mingles with fiction as Levy explores the avant-garde writer through the story of three female friends in Paris

The narrator of Deborah Levy’s witty scherzo of a “fiction” – “novel” isn’t the word for this uncategorisable book – thinks that Gertrude Stein would have liked Sigmund Freud. She imagines them enjoying a cigar together while their wives make small talk. Would Frau Freud “have exchanged her recipe for boiled beef with Alice B [Toklas]’s recipe for hashish fudge”? The two never met (though with her interest in the “bottom character” and his in the “unconscious”, Stein and Freud would have had plenty to talk about), but that barely matters. This book is full of things that don’t actually happen, of relationships that are not what the people involved suppose them to be, of digressions and fantasies and encounters that are imagined but never take place.

It all starts with a lost cat. The cat is called “it”: lower-case “i” followed by lower-case “t”. This causes all sorts of linguistic confusion, highlighting the way we use the word “it” to mean something indeterminate (as in the first sentence of this paragraph), or something trivial, or something tremendous. The phrase “lost it” recurs, the “it” meaning – variously – one’s mind, sympathy with Ernest Hemingway, daring to be as unconventional as Gertrude Stein, the stream of consciousness “flowing under the mowed and manicured golf courses on which men swung their clubs in the 21st century”, the temptation to smile while being undermined by a patronising man, the drudgery of housekeeping, the thing – which might be obedience or shame – that holds an artist back from becoming a modernist … or love, or one’s mother, or a black-and-white cat with one deformed ear.

Don’t be fooled by the A-Z treatment – this thoroughgoing guide asks deep questions about the art of autobiography

“I’ve had a life and I’ve also had a life as a life writer”: Blake Morrison opens his tour d’horizon of arguably literature’s most expanding and expansive genre with a flash of his credentials and an implicit call to further inquiry. What constitutes a life, and what can it mean to write about it? Can you write about your own from inside it?

Before his bestselling and highly praised account of his father’s life and death, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was published in 1993, Morrison had a life as a poet, a critic and a literary editor. And perhaps his interest in penetrating the mysteries of another’s interior world was already in evidence: a few years earlier, he had written The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, in which he had attempted to capture what newspaper reports had missed of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe (“So cops they lobbed im questions / Through breakfast, dinner, tea, / Till e said: ‘All right, you’ve cracked it. / Ripper, aye, it’s me.’”).

Sparks fly in this homoerotic dance of desire and betrayal, from a powerful new voice in Irish literature

Toxic masculinity, that repressed and repressive male energy that does so much to fuel brutality and abuse, sometimes finds itself on the brink of a vulnerable homoeroticism. In Djamel White’s debut novel All Them Dogs, a vividly propulsive neo-noir, two violent men discover that murderous desires can lead to love as well as death. This is a fast-paced crime thriller with a psychosexual twist, set in a dangerously Freudian arena of Eros and Thanatos.

On the run for five years after killing a man in a gang fight, Tony Ward has returned to the badlands of west Dublin under the protection of a local crime boss. Teamed up with tall and sullen enforcer Darren “Flute” Walsh, Tony is back on his home turf grafting a grim routine of collecting debts and drug dealer’s dues. Propelled through a world of old scores and hard knocks, our protagonist is a shark who has to keep moving simply to survive. But when he and Flute are called upon to kill a failing dealer, their brutal conspiracy becomes a visceral dance of desire and betrayal.

As The Super Mario Galaxy Movie storms the box office, we look back at the best forgotten games inspired by Tetris, Lemmings and … vitamins?

It should be no surprise that the latest Super Mario movie is smashing box office records – despite the, let’s say mixed, reviews. Nintendo’s iconic plumber has been a pop culture staple for 45 years, starring in some of the bestselling video games ever made, from the original Donkey Kong through to the joyous Super Mario Bros Wonder and the chaotic Mario Kart World.

But as with any storied showbiz career, there have been some lesser works. Who can forget – or actually remember – Hotel Mario, a door-shutting puzzle game for the doomed Philips CD-i console? Or what about Mario Teaches Typing, a 1992 educational game for the PC in which players navigate the Mushroom Kingdom by … correctly inputting words. Yet there have also been genuine treasures lost along the way. Here, then, are seven of our favourite much-overlooked Mario odysseys.

As real astronauts vanish behind the moon, games have long tried to evoke the fragile quiet of drifting through space

• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Last week’s launch of the Artemis II space mission was a stunning spectacle, the 17-storey-high rockets erupting into cacophonous life before wrenching the craft through the Earth’s atmosphere. But the images that have come since hold just as much impact: the tiny Orion craft and its four-person crew drifting silently through space, further and further from home.

In his autobiography, the Apollo astronaut Michael Collins described this feeling perfectly. Left in the command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on the lunar surface, he wrote: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”

PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox, Nintendo Switch 2, PC; Deck Nine/Square Enix
Max and Chloe, the two teen protagonists of the 2015 game, reunite as adults – giving players the chance to finally finish their journey

In 2015, Life Is Strange stood out for two reasons: its female protagonists, a depressingly rare feature at the time, and its unique brand of millennial cringe. The thirtysomething Frenchmen who created this series may not have had the best grasp of the 2010s teen lexicon, but they did have a good gauge on what’s important about any coming-of-age story, and that’s the relationships between the characters. Max Caulfield, the shy, time-travelling wannabe photographer, and Chloe Price, the traumatised, punk-rock tearaway, had a memorably intense friendship. It was the heart and soul of that game, and now, 11 years later, they are reunited as adults in this final chapter of their story.

For a lot of players, Max and Chloe felt like more than best friends. The game’s original developers were not brave enough to make this explicit in 2015, but newer custodians Deck Nine retconned a romantic relationship between Max and Chloe into 2024’s Life Is Strange: Double Exposure. You can still play Reunion as if the two really were just friends, resulting in some awkward ambiguity in some scenes. Whichever way you slice it, though, this is a game about first love, and how it always stays with you, even when its object does not. And damned if it didn’t make me feel something.

We are paying more for a PlayStation so that idiots can use ChatGPT to mislead people on dating apps – something is rotten in the state of gaming

• Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

When the PlayStation 5 launched almost five and a half years ago, it was listed at £449 in the UK. If you were to buy one at the recommended retail price today, it would be £569.99, or £789.99 for the updated Pro model. Sony has just raised the price of its console by another £90, the latest in a series of hikes. This is unprecedented: consoles have always decreased in price over time (until they become retro collectibles – the other day, I saw someone asking £200 for a SNES on Vinted). So, what’s going on?

Unfortunately, this is another case of artificial intelligence ruining things for everyone. AI data centres need lots and lots and lots of computing power to be able to present you with lies whenever you Google anything, and this has pushed up demand and pricing for RAM and storage. This isn’t the only reason prices are rising – the wars in Ukraine and Iran have caused global economic disruption, and rampant inflation has eaten into many companies’ bottom line. But AI is the cause that’s easiest to get angry about, because it doesn’t need to be this way.

Wagnerites rejoice! Parsifal and the climax of Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed Ring cycle are in the pipeline. The director of opera talks about scoring a bullseye, the storms that rocked last season – and how to avoid sending audiences to sleep

The morning I meet Oliver Mears, the director of opera at Covent Garden, I’m still walking on air. The day before I’d seen Wagner’s epic Siegfried, the third part of the Ring cycle. Nearly six hours long, it is an immersion into a world of gods and giants, heroes and warrior women – but also profound and poignant human relationships. With the remarkable Andreas Schager in the title role among a superb ensemble cast, it is the Royal Opera at its best. On the way to his office, Mears walks through the backstage labyrinth. Singers are warming up; wardrobe people are discussing a costume’s last-minute fix; and a couple of mice scurrying across the canteen lend a bohemian atmosphere. Heaven (give or take the rodents).

Mears tells me about next season: course after course of operatic banquet. There will be a new Parsifal, conducted by music director Jakub Hrůša and directed, in his house debut, by the “brilliantly charismatic and interesting” Kazakhstan-born Evgeny Titov. There’s a new Un Ballo in Maschera by Verdi, with another director fresh to the house, the “stylish and rigorous” German Philipp Stölzl. There’s a return for Richard Jones’s brilliant production of Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová with Hrůša conducting – whose interpretation of Janáček’s Jenůfa last season was one of the musical experiences of my life.

Richmond theatre, London
Archive footage and fresh commentary shed light on the craft and chaos of interrogating big names such as OJ Simpson and Donald Trump

What are these shows, in which veteran entertainers regale us with clips from their glorious careers, if not attempts to grasp one more round of applause – without having to generate any new material? The virtue of Ruby Wax’s contribution to the genre is that she’s disarmingly upfront about this. In a show about fame-hunger and the experience of celebrity, it feels very on point. Co-hosted with her longtime TV producer, Clive Tulloh, Absolutely Famous finds Wax talking us through clips from her BBC show When Ruby Wax Met …, on which she interviewed the 90s’ and early 00s’ most controversial individuals: OJ Simpson, Imelda Marcos and a certain New York businessman whose notoriety was at that stage (oh, innocent times!) still in its infancy.

There’s no point pretending we experience the shock of the new: Wax has already reflected on these interview experiences in a retrospective for the BBC. There’s no denying either that the footage, plus Wax’s insights, make for a very entertaining evening. Here she is talking (and acting out) sexual positions with Pamela Anderson, and here she is being read the rulebook by a steely Madonna. Marvel as Simpson mimes stabbing Wax with a knife, and peek through your fingers at her encounters with Donald Trump and Bill Cosby – whose loathing for their assertive female interviewer seethes across the screen.

Touring until 7 July

Soho theatre, London
The unassuming US comedian and musician turns her journey to motherhood into a witty, bittersweet and beautifully judged show

‘I know this show can be uncomfortable,” says Riki Lindhome, sat at her keyboard after a song about pregnancy loss. But if Dead Inside is never cosy viewing, it’s funny, entertaining and emotionally involving to a high degree. Hardened viewers of trauma-comedy, a staple of fringe festivals in recent times, may feel jaded at the prospect of “a one-woman musical comedy about my fertility journey”. Their faith in the form will be wholly refreshed by this American’s beautifully judged hour, chronicling her by turns sad, amusing and gobsmacking efforts to become a mother.

Something about the modesty of the undertaking is key: few autobiographical shows feel less “me, me, me”. Lindhome signs off most of her songs with a demure “that’s it”; the production values (right down to the disembodied hand sticking out of the wings to operate a bubble machine) are unassuming. Our host would, let’s face it, prefer not to be telling this story about frozen embryos, failed IVF, seven surgeries in one year, untimely relationship breakups and being classified as an “undesirable candidate” to adopt a child.

Brecon Cathedral
Created in just a week with a cast of rising stars and amateur singers, Mid Wales Opera’s production – and its heart-wrenching ending – is a remarkable achievement

Mid Wales Opera undertake their OpenStages productions with a positively missionary zeal, nurturing both their local communities and up-and-coming singing talent. So full marks – if not the full five stars – to them for this staging of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, realised remarkably over a single intensive week of work. Given the way the composer tailored his 1689 opera for the ladies of Josias Priest’s boarding school in Chelsea, it was an entirely appropriate choice.

A motley crew of amateurs formed a chorus variously portraying Carthaginian courtiers, followers of a witches’ coven and sailors. Well-schooled in the characteristic physical gestures and movements, with singing similarly ranging from lusty roistering to sadly sober, they gave it their all. The greater vocal polish came from the young cast, some already launched on singing careers, all handled with the utmost care by conductor Jonathan Lyness, notably in his accompaniment to their recitatives.

Actor Timothée Chalamet was credited by RBO’s chief exec with inadvertently boosting ticket sales through his high-profile critique of the art forms

The head of the UK’s Royal Ballet and Opera has thanked Hollywood actor Timothée Chalamet for inadvertently boosting ticket sales and engagement through his high-profile critique of the art forms last month.

While promoting his Oscar-tipped film Marty Supreme in March, the star expressed his relief that he was working in cinema, rather than opera or ballet, “where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this any more.’”

Ahead of our upcoming Guardian Live event with Tracey Emin, we’re inviting readers around the world to be part of the conversation.

On Friday 24 April, Emin will join the Guardian’s chief culture writer, Charlotte Higgins, live from Tate Modern, to reflect on 40 years of her extraordinary career, from the raw, confessional works that defined a generation to the powerful pieces shaped by love, illness, survival and renewal.

If you can’t be there in person, this is your chance to take part.

A new book uncovers the yearning romance that fueled the Aids-era artists’ life and work

Andrew Durbin, author and editor-in-chief of Frieze Magazine, spent almost five years writing The Wonderful World That Almost Was. This dual biography of photographer Peter Hujar and sculptor Paul Thek, two gay artists who made extraordinary work in the years before and during Aids, focuses on their friendship, creativity and collaboration spanning more than 30 years. They died within a year of each other, in 1987 and 1988, both from complications from Aids.

The work and lives of Thek and Hujar have come storming back into the cultural conversation in recent years. Hujar was played by Ben Whishaw in Ira Sachs’s poetic 2025 film, Peter Hujar’s Day, and his images have been used as cover art for an Anohni and the Johnsons album and Hanya Yanagihara’s bestseller A Little Life. Thek’s equivalent moment has been slower; his most important works were large-scale installations in Europe, all lost, and which, as Durbin tells me, “everyone loved, but few could experience. And when they were finished, there wasn’t much left to sell. But I think his moment is about to come.”

The Grammy and Emmy-winning ‘first lady of Celtic music’ was credited with popularising Irish music and lyrics

Moya Brennan, the lead singer of Irish folk group Clannad, has died aged 73.

In her later years, Brennan had been living with pulmonary fibrosis and faced the possibility of a double lung transplant. A statement from her family said she died peacefully in the company of loved ones in her native County Donegal.

Now I’m being threatened with debt collectors because I don’t have a tenancy agreement or a mortgage

British Gas opened an account in my name for an address that I have never occupied, and sent me a £571 bill. It declined to open a complaint because I “refused” to provide a tenancy agreement or mortgage statement which, since I’ve long since paid off my mortgage, I don’t have. It is now threatening me with a debt collection agency.

IW, Northampton

At the height of Covid, hundreds of cancer patients had mastectomies without the reconstruction that would normally accompany them. They would eventually get the surgery, they were told – but for many that promise feels more meaningless by the day

Every time she lifts her arms to get dressed or hang out her washing, Julie Ford gets a painful reminder of one of the most terrifying experiences of her life. At 7am one day in April 2021, she had gone into hospital, alone and wearing a mask, to have her right breast and lymph nodes removed in a bid to stop breast cancer from spreading. Later that day, still groggy from the anaesthetic, in pain and with surgical drains hanging from both sides of her chest, she had staggered to the door with the help of two nurses. She was eased into a friend’s car and driven home to fend for herself.

While Julie’s breast had been removed, it was not reconstructed. Usually, both procedures are carried out in the same operation. But as reconstruction using tissue from the patient’s abdomen is a complex, eight-hour procedure requiring a large surgical team, it was considered “non-essential” and paused by most NHS trusts during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hot brushes promise bouncy blow-dries and voluminous curls – without the salon price tag. We put 14 to the test to reveal the best, from budget buys to multistylers

• The best hair straighteners – tested

Few things put a spring in your step quite like a beautiful, bouncy blow-dry from your favourite hair salon. However, if you don’t want to spend your days – or your money – at the salon, then a hot brush could be just the styling tool you need.

As the name suggests, a hot brush is a round or paddle-shaped hair-styling tool that either heats up like a straightening iron or uses warm airflow like a hair dryer to dry and style your hair. Depending on the shape and size of the brush, a hot brush can give you anything from a straight, sleek style to volume and lift, or even red-carpet curls.

Best hot brush overall:
GHD Duet Blowdry

Best budget hot brush:
Revlon One-Step Volumiser

Our tester hauled, hurdled and army-crawled his way to crowning the best carry-on luggage. Plus, Michelle Ogundehin’s shopping secrets and meal kits, tested

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

Want to get fit, quick? Try testing the best cabin bags over a muddy assault course in Leeds. Seldom have I showered so gratefully or slept as soundly as I did after this product test.

The first and thorniest challenge was logistical. How would I get a selection of suitcases – the seven top performers in routine testing – from my house to the West Leeds Activity Centre, on the other side of the city?

The best spring jackets for women: 12 favourites for every forecast

The best mascaras for longer, fuller and fluttery lashes: 12 favourites worn and rated by our beauty expert

How I Shop with Michelle Ogundehin: ‘We grownups have enough stuff already’

‘A good, strong squeak’: the best supermarket halloumi, tasted and rated

The best water flossers, tested for that dentist-clean feeling

‘Fresher than anything in a shop’: the best recipe boxes and meal kits for time-poor foodies, tested

Whether you want budget, organic or vegan, these are the best meal delivery services from our writer’s test of nine

• The best chef’s knives – tested

Recipe box services are the best thing to happen to time-poor foodies since, well, sliced bread. They’re cheaper than a takeaway, often less processed than a ready meal, and much more culinarily adventurous than beans on toast.

You have to do the actual cooking, but not the shopping. Recipe boxes contain every ingredient you need (well, most do), often in the exact measurements required. “Meal kits” cut hassle even further by including preprepared stocks, sauces and other flavour bombs, plus ready-chopped veg. All you have to do is put them together following the steps in the recipe, which can take less time than queueing at a supermarket checkout.

They’re pricier than the competition, but have key features: the music doesn’t skitter when you step out of Bluetooth range and they can handle water and dust

• How do Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 compare against hearing aids? I put them to the test

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

Over the past eight years, I’ve reviewed dozens of portable speakers from every top brand. And I can confidently say that Sonos makes three of the best portable speakers of them all.

There’s Sonos Play, the brand’s newest portable and the Goldilocks of its lineup in size, sound and features. The Roam 2, a Toblerone-shaped speaker that’s small enough to go anywhere. And the Move 2, a powerhouse that doesn’t sacrifice bass performance.

The little one:
Sonos Roam 2

Don’t be scared of cooked rice: our experts share safe ways to turn yesterday’s leftovers into something delicious

How do I store cooked rice safely, and what can I make with it the next day?
Michael, by email
“It’s a bit of a running joke with rice, because I think of all the people in China who aren’t spreading their leftover rice immediately on to a tray to cool and are still alive,” says Amy Poon, of Poon’s at Somerset House in London. “But I have to be responsible and say: cool the rice as quickly as possible, within the hour, and put it in an airtight container and pop it in the fridge [or freezer] straight away.” The reason being, as food science guru Harold McGee notes in his bible On Food & Cooking, “Raw rice almost always carries dormant spores of the bacterium Bacillus cereus, which produces powerful gastrointestinal toxins. The spores can tolerate high temperatures, and some survive cooking.” In short: good storage practices will prevent bacterial growth, not to mention open a whole world of dinner opportunities.

“Rice is the most versatile grain to have around as extras,” confirms Ping Coombes, author of Rice, but there’s another benefit, too. “When rice cools, the molecules rearrange into tighter bonds in a process called retrogradation.” This, Coombes continues, creates resistant starch, and the more resistant the starch, the slower the release of energy. “Eating chilled, pre-cooked rice makes it release sugar molecules into the blood stream more slowly, promoting the feelings of fullness for longer and preventing big variations of blood sugar.” But back to Michael’s prospective meals.

You don’t need a yard or balcony to get going. We asked experts for their advice on how to grow your food

Maybe it’s because I’ve lived in cities my whole life, but I can’t think of anything more luxurious than popping out to your garden and eating a fresh tomato straight from the vine. How decadent to enjoy its crisp, bright flavor and the smug satisfaction that you coaxed this food into being with your own hands.

But what does becoming a modern-day Demeter actually entail? What if you don’t have a yard, or even a balcony? And is it worth growing your own food when supermarkets exist?

Have a forage for buttery and tender young nettles (or wild garlic), and turn them into a cheesy, Spanish-style omelette

When I was growing up in the small village of Talaván in Extremadura, Spain, we never ate nettles. They were wild plants that grew along the edges of the fields, and the sort you tried to avoid: like many children, I learned about them the hard way, brushing against them while playing and getting stung. It was only when I came to the UK that I first saw nettles used in cooking, which surprised me: suddenly, this wild plant had a place in the kitchen. Now, whenever I visit my mum, Isabel, I see them everywhere. It makes me smile to think that at this year’s Chelsea flower show I will be cooking among a world of magnificent plants and gardens. Perhaps not too many nettles on show, but who knows?

A hearty dish that makes a great get-ahead breakfast for busy mornings

My go-to cheat ingredient for a dash of heat is White Mausu’s peanut rāyu – it has a gentler flavour profile than, say, Lao Gan Ma crispy chilli in oil, and works perfectly in this dish of creamy, lemon-spiked beans and eggs. I recommend using jarred white beans for the speediest cook time. For an easy, get-ahead breakfast, make and chill the spinach and beans the night before, then reheat the next morning and crack in the eggs when the beans are piping hot.

A university researcher and a property manager may have found (some) common ground on leaving the EU – but what about affordable homes?

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

Graham, 76, Pangbourne

Occupation Property manager

Studying on different continents is a challenge for Veronika and Fabio … Can their young love go the distance?

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

There have been days when we’ve been on the phone for 10 hours at a stretch

When I’ve flown back to see her, we’ve tried to make up for lost time

Turn your attention to your internal landscape rather than the next building project. Make your next project yourself

My wife and I are in our late 60s. The past 20 years have felt like treading water, as all my funds are tied up in a property that, for complex reasons, I am unable to sell. We are both creative. Over the past year or so I’ve made some improvements to our house, things that make people say wow. I enjoy seeing their pleasure, but their praise isn’t hugely important to me. In fact, I am somewhat reclusive. I do not enjoy being part of a wider community and I’m content with a handful of close friends.

Last year my father died, and after a period of despair, during which I found myself contemplating suicide (I did not share this with my wife), I turned first to Samaritans, then a therapist.

Alda feels Rachel should follow jewellery ‘rules’, but Rachel likes to mix things up. You decide whose argument rings true
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I know she’s expressing herself, but when you mix everything up, it looks thrown together and cheap

They’re not Alda’s hands to worry about – I like my mismatched mess. Why does it matter to her?

Swedish retailer continued to advertise partnership with Soly and failed to offer me any advice

I am one of many left thousands of pounds out of pocket after signing up for solar panels via Ikea’s website late last year.

Ikea had partnered with the European installer Soly, and the fact the panels were being advertised via such a well-known company gave us confidence.

Fraudsters send emails claiming storage is full or nearly full, then trick people into clicking on links that can expose bank and personal details

For a while you’ve been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full”. They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take aren’t being uploaded.

You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of 99p a month for more storage. But it seems that you can’t keep putting off the inevitable: you have received an email which says your iCloud account has been blockedand your photos and videos will be deleted very soon. To keep them you need to upgrade immediately, it says.

All children born in the UK between September 2002 and January 2011 have a CTF – but £1bn has not been claimed

At some point in the midst of 2009 I made a decision that would change my son’s life: I started paying £10 a month into his child trust fund account.

It didn’t seem like much but, almost 18 years later, thanks to the performance of the stock market and the original government payment, he’s about to get about £10,000. At first he had no idea what to do next, financially, and he’s not alone.

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The interiors guru talks museum shops, sake and loft insulation with the Filter

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

Michelle Ogundehin, former editor-in-chief of Elle Decoration magazine, is the head judge on the BBC’s Interior Design Masters and co-host of Grand Designs: House of the Year. She trained as an architect and also works as a commentator and consultant, as well as being a trustee of the Design Museum.

Her bestselling first book, Happy Inside, explores how home shapes health and happiness; her forthcoming book (spring 2027), Your Powerful Home: 4 Steps to a Home that Heals, looks at your home as a partner in your wellbeing, an ethos she shares through her Happy Insiders Club, which offers guided monthly coaching.

Having diverse microbes in the gut has been promoted as a way to boost immunity, but studies suggest it’s more complicated than that

The trillions of microorganisms that live in and on our bodies – known as the microbiome – have been hailed as the key to better immunity. “Lots of studies correlate the types of bacteria in your microbiome with health and disease across almost every mental and physical condition,” says Prof Daniel M Davis, head of life sciences at Imperial College London and the author of Self Defence: A Myth-busting Guide to Immune Health. “But most of that evidence is correlative, and we still need to understand exactly how the microbiome affects health.”

Scientists often look at one measure: diversity. In other words, how many different species of microbes live in the gut. “The more diverse your microbiome is, the more it seems to correlate with not being ill.”

TikTok users increasingly say the app has steered them toward diagnosing medical problems not yet identified

Malina Lee, a 31-year-old wedding baker based in San Antonio, Texas, joined TikTok during the Covid pandemic lockdowns in 2020. Like many people at the time, she was bored and began using the platform to pass the time and advertise her business. She didn’t expect a cancer diagnosis.

Four years after Lee joined the app, a commenter with the username “PickleFart” told her that her neck looked asymmetrical in a way that could suggest she had a goiter – an enlarged thyroid gland – and that she should get it checked out. The anonymous amateur clinician turned out to be right – Lee had thyroid cancer, received treatment quickly, and, less than a year later, was cancer free.

Data on almost 28,000 patients suggests understanding gene variations could improve treatments for obesity

Scientists have discovered how genetics may help explain why weight-loss jabs work better for some people than others.

Variations in two genes involved in gut hormone pathways, which regulate appetite and digestion, may help account for different weight-loss results or side-effects when taking glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP1) medicines.

Designer who left fashion house in January said to be considering options for his 40% stake ahead of talks with lenders

Stefano Gabbana left his post as the chair of Dolce & Gabbana at the start of this year, the fashion house he co-founded with his then partner, Domenico Dolce, has said.

The Italian luxury brand said Gabbana had tendered his resignation, effective as of 1 January, “as part of a natural evolution of its organisational structure and governance”.

Don’t save them for holidays – with the right styling white trousers will be the linchpin of your spring wardrobe

Her rare cover appearance with Meryl Streep may be to promote The Devil Wears Prada sequel, but it also marks a shift from elusive editor to carefully curated personal brand

In the world of magazines, when someone announces they’re leaving a job, their colleagues will traditionally present them with their own personalised mock-up of the magazine’s front cover. Perhaps their face is superimposed on the body of a previous celebrity cover star. There are probably some witty cover lines referencing memorable office moments or their favourite snacks. It’s a rite of passage – and this week, Anna Wintour was bestowed with her very own cover. But instead of a jokey imitation bidding her adieu, it was the real, glossy deal, coming to a newsstand near you on 28 April.

In a somewhat surprising effort to promote the forthcoming The Devil Wears Prada 2, Vogue’s May issue sees Wintour share the cover with Meryl Streep, whose steely Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of the fictional title Runway, is said to have been inspired by Wintour. “Seeing Double. When Miranda met Anna” reads the cover line. While Wintour has fronted various industry titles, including Interview in 1993 and Ad Week in 2017, it’s the first time an editor has placed themselves as the subject. In another fun twist, both Wintour and Streep are wearing Prada.

After decades of focusing on faces, manufacturers, beauticians and surgeons are offering us younger-looking hands. Is this more about money or scientific progress?

I lay my hands on the table, palms down, for inspection. I’m in the consulting room of the president of the British College of Aesthetic Medicine (BCAM) in London. Like most people, I use my hands a lot. I type for hours a day. I go bouldering, which means I have a lot of calluses. I cook, clean, cup my chin while staring out the window. What I’ve never done is to look at my hands as objects of interest in their own right. They’re an afterthought. The means to an end. But now that Dr Sophie Shotter has picked them up in hers and is weighing my flesh and pushing at the skin with her thumbs to see how it moves, I can see faint ripples of diamonds, the texture of crepe paper.

“Your facial skin is very clear, very smooth. When we look at your hands, you’ve got a bit more of that laxity going on,” Shotter says. “You don’t have pigmentation. You’re not covered in sunspots. But the veins and tendons testify to a loss of volume. The extreme end of that is one day we get what people describe as ‘old lady hands’ – significant volume loss with skin fragility overlying it.”

Taking a leaf out of Kenneth Grahame’s book, our writer spends a few days getting lost among the woods and riverside villages of Oxfordshire and Berkshire

Strolling through a deep tangle of beech trees to get some fresh air after a long drive, I think of the scene in Kenneth Grahame’s wistful story The Wind in the Willows, where Mole gets lost in the Wild Wood. “There seemed to be no end to this wood, and no beginning, and no difference in it, and, worst of all, no way out.”

I’ve come to South Oxfordshire to explore what was once Grahame’s old stomping ground. Although I don’t share his character’s fear of the woods, I do share his own wonder for this part of the country, close to suburbia yet wrinkled with pockets of wildness. It’s one of those spring days when the light feels elastic and daffodils brighten the verges of muddy lanes. The moon is rising, however, and smoke drifts from the chimney of a cottage just beyond the woods. Nocturnal creatures may be rousing but I’m feeling the pull of a cosy burrow. I leave the trees and head back to my accommodation, Bonni B&B, in Hill Bottom.

Good wine, cheap tapas, ramshackle decor and a sense of history are the key ingredients of these Madrileño institutions. I went on a bar crawl to find my favourite

The first hurdle to overcome when searching for the Spanish capital’s top bodegas is the correct interpretation of the word “bodega”. It is defined as a warehouse, winery, wine cellar and wine shop or bar specialising in wine. In Spanish slang it can also mean a convenience store.

I asked several people working in the Madrid wine trade, and they all struggled to define exactly what a bodega is – and sometimes disagreed with each other. For example, while La Bodega de los Reyes fits the description because it has a wine cellar, a nearby bar owner said it couldn’t be classed as a bodega as it was just a wine shop.

On the north coast of Spain you can see some of the world’s oldest art, explore a stunning medieval village, then watch surfers ride Atlantic swells

Exploring the area west of Santander feels like being in a time machine. Within a half-hour drive of the Cantabrian capital on Spain’s green northern coast, you can stumble upon prehistoric cave art, a perfectly preserved medieval town and a laid-back beach resort.

When I began my weekend trip, it was raining, so my journey started in the Upper Paleolithic period, at the Cave of Altamira, a Unesco world heritage site, staring up at some of the oldest art on Earth. Well, almost. The original cave was largely closed to the public decades ago to protect the fragile paintings, so we were inside the Neocueva, a painstakingly reconstructed replica built beside it that costs just €3 to enter.

While Málaga battles overtourism down the coast, this ‘forgotten’ working port city revels in its outsider status

Perched high on the battlements of Almería’s 10th-century Alcazaba, looking over the mosaic of flat roofs tumbling down to the sea, I’m reminded of author Gerald Brenan’s travel classic South from Granada, and his impression upon arriving in Almería in 1920: “Certainly, it seemed that the sea was doubly Mediterranean here, and the city … contained within it echoes of distant civilisations.”

A British adventurer, Hispanist and fringe member of the Bloomsbury group, Brenan had walked to Almería from where he was living near Granada, apparently to buy extra furniture in preparation for a visit from Virginia Woolf and friends. A century later, my journey here in a 30-year-old van from London is somewhat less notable, but as I marvel at the almost surreal incandescence of the Med, and the maze of ancient streets below me, I too am aware of a sensation of time travel.

They won’t save an unhealthy plant, but they do create better growing conditions in rooms with no airflow

The problem
Most plant advice focuses on light, water and soil. Air barely gets a mention, yet stagnant indoor air is one of the less discussed reasons houseplants struggle. Fungal spots, mould on the compost surface and pest infestations like mealybugs can all be traced back to a room with no airflow. We open windows in summer but rarely think about what happens in winter.

The hack
Running a small fan near your houseplants is said to improve stem strength, discourage mould and reduce pest pressure. In the wild, plants experience constant gentle movement; a fan replicates this indoors.

My special skills included driving a small car filled with helium balloons, memorising children’s names – and tolerating parents’ behaviour

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

From the age of 16 to 22, I was a children’s entertainer. Most often a fairy, sometimes a witch, ballerina, princess or mermaid – with conspicuous legs underneath her tail. One time, hilariously, a ladybug.

The hourly rate was excellent, the costumes were cute and the tiny customers even cuter.

Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

The solutions to today’s puzzles

Earlier today I asked you these three puzzles. Here they are again with solutions.

1. Battleships

I found Chilly literally frozen to the spot beneath a Detroit dock, warmed her up and took her home. She’s now part of the family

Earlier this year, I was walking along the marina in the Jefferson Chalmers neighbourhood in Detroit, Michigan. It was a terribly cold winter; the water had frozen over and everything was coated in a thick layer of frost. Suddenly, a sound caught my ear – the loud cries of a tiny animal.

I didn’t know what it was at first, or where exactly it was coming from, but I kept hearing it – so I decided to turn around and walk towards the wailing. Suddenly I spotted a little kitten, trapped between the wooden dock and the plank of metal underneath it. I realised its paws were stuck, frozen to the metal, and it had been crying out to be rescued.

Workslop refers to AI-generated work that seems polished but is flawed and in need of heavy corrections

Ken, a copywriter for a large, Miami-based cybersecurity firm, used to enjoy his job. But then the “workslop” started piling up.

Workslop is an unintended consequence of the AI boom. It’s what happens when employees use AI to quickly generate work that seems polished – at least superficially – but is in fact so flawed or inaccurate that it needs to be heavily corrected, cleaned up or even completely redone after it’s passed on to colleagues.

When the UN special rapporteur published her report Anatomy of a Genocide in March 2024, she was lionised by some and demonised by the Trump government. She describes what happened next

In retrospect, arranging to interview Francesca Albanese in a cafe was not the best plan. Before we could start, the waitress wanted a photo with the Italian human rights lawyer. So did the cashier. Then the cook came out of the kitchen in his whites for a group photo. Some of the customers wanted their turn. Albanese was gracious with all comers and chatty in three languages, so the process took some time.

Albanese, 49, has been getting similar rock star welcomes everywhere she goes lately, which is not the norm for unpaid UN legal experts. In other times, her job title – UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 – would sound like a recipe for obscurity. She is one of more than 40 special rapporteurs, human rights experts appointed to do pro bono investigations and reports on areas of concern.

Industry experts say booking of controversial US rapper was calculated risk that has implications for all festivals

The fallout over Wireless announcing Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) as its 2026 headliner was both swift and considerable.

Last Sunday, major sponsors of the three-day festival, including Pepsi and Diageo, began to withdraw their involvement in the face of a significant backlash to Ye’s shocking pronouncements on the Jewish community and the Holocaust. UK Jewish groups threatened to protest if the shows went ahead. Keir Starmer called the decision to book the rapper who wrote a song titled Heil Hitler “deeply concerning”.

Have you experienced reactions from other people when using your blue badge? We’d like to hear from you

Scepticism about people’s right to a blue badge, as well as discussion of Motability, has created an atmosphere where disabled people are facing public questioning about their eligibility for the measures.

Some disabled and chronically ill people report that they have been accused of “faking” their impairment while using their blue badges. Others say they have been accused of “scrounging” after using a car believed to be via Motability.

Have you been affected by the recent rise in mortgage rates? What will this mean for you?

The crisis in the Middle East is also being felt far beyond the region, with the conflict undermining broader business and consumer confidence.

One aspect of this has been the impact on the UK mortgage market.

We’d like to hear about the local election leaflets you’ve received from political parties in your area

Have you received local election leaflets through your door? We’d like to see them. In an era of political turmoil, we’re particularly interested to see who each political party sees as their rival in their local area.

You can tell us about the leaflets you’ve received – and share pictures of them – below.

If you’re living or working in the region and have been impacted by the US-Israel conflict with Iran, we would like to hear from you

With Iran and the US agreeing to a two-week conditional ceasefire, we would like to hear how people living, working or travelling in the Middle East have been affected by the conflict.

Whether you are in the region or impacted in other ways, please get in touch.

Wake up to the top stories and what they mean – free to your inbox every weekday morning at 7am

Scroll less, understand more: sign up to receive our news email each weekday for clarity on the top stories in the UK and across the world.

Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fashion or food, we’ve got something for you

Get smart, sustainable shopping advice from the Filter team straight to your inbox, every Sunday

The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.

A weekly email from our star chefs featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideas

Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from our star chefs, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent.

Sign up below to start receiving the best of our culinary journalism in one mouth-watering weekly email.

Upgrade your space today, with eight emails packed with tips to brighten up your home - whatever your budget

Embrace your space: the Guardian’s House to Home newsletter is bursting with tips and tricks to help you boost your bedroom and give your living room some love.

Sign up any time, and get eight emails direct to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world