In 1993, she squeezed a $333m settlement from a Californian energy company in a scandal over contaminated water. Three decades later, she has a new target in her sights – and it’s global

When Erin Brockovich woke to find 30 emails from people from the same town, she realised something was going on. People email Brockovich all the time because of what happened in 1993, when she was instrumental in suing Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) on behalf of residents of the town of Hinkley, California, whose groundwater had been contaminated. The case resulted in a settlement of $333m – then the largest ever payout for a direct-action lawsuit. When she was immortalised by Julia Roberts in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, she became the hero we didn’t know we needed, a modern day Joan of Arc. She had won against PG&E with no formal legal training.

The emails she received a few weeks ago were about datacentres. In April, she put a callout on her website asking for anyone with concerns about one near them to get in touch. Within a month, 3,862 people had replied. Tech companies have needed datacentres to power their technology “for ever”, she says, but the new ones being built to power AI? “This feels like Hinkley on steroids.”

Experts raise alarm as firms aiming to maximise assets and sell for profit become more involved in vital public services

• ‘Financial pandemic’: £1 in every £11 spent on UK public contractors goes to private equity

• Nurseries, vets and shops: the sectors where private equity plays a big role

Private equity companies have slowly and invisibly increased their involvement in public services – from elderly care homes to fostering placements for vulnerable children – with some unintended consequences.

Take Compass Community, a private equity-backed firm which provides children’s homes, fostering services and schooling for children with special educational needs (Send).

Air conditioning can bring significant benefits but also real harms. The answer is for it to take its place alongside a comprehensive state plan for climate adaptation

As Britain reels from Europe’s worst ever heatwave, many households are, for the first time, seriously considering air conditioning. Leftists have often been critical of AC, pointing out that there are cheaper, more ecological ways to combat severe heat. But with decades of underinvestment leaving the UK dismally unprepared to handle further heatwaves, is it time to rethink the progressive position on air con?

Like many new technologies, air conditioning can bring significant benefits but also real harms, contributing to external air temperatures and global emissions. Dogmatically denying these harms, as AC boosters tend to, is unhelpful, but likewise refusing to explore how mechanical air-cooling systems could play a more productive role in progressive climate adaptation is just as blinkered.

Phineas Harper is a writer and curator

As tens of thousands are freed, female survivors are increasingly reporting gender-based violence in the compounds, previously thought to hold mainly men

Late one evening in October 2023, Sarah* felt labour pains starting. It was 11pm, but at the cyberscam compound inside Laos’ Golden Triangle, workers were logging on for a long night shift, scamming Americans online.

Every night, workers sat at their computers until the early hours, building fake profiles of glamorous, jet-setting women on Facebook and Instagram. Sarah trawled the web to find older men to target with messages, where she fawned over their jobs, asked how their day had been and exchanged photos of luxury travel and beach trips. Each conversation she had was meticulously designed to follow a multi-day script, and monitored by bosses who walked up and down the long rows of desks.

They used to mean crusties, hippies, all-male lineups, near riots and burning toilets. Now, from Dorset to Inverness, there’s a festival – and a costume – for everyone. What caused this boom? And is there a dark side?

It’s 7pm on the first day of Gala festival in Peckham Rye park and dry ice drifts into the trees as grime MC Novelist, born just miles away, raps about a south London bus. “Four eight four! Going on raw on the 484,” he spits with a grin, bouncing like the sweaty moshpit in front of him. There are already hands in the air for this hyperlocal elegy when the DJ teases the next instrumental, Skream’s unmistakable Midnight Request Line – dubstep’s greatest ever anthem.

Gala is one of the first festivals of the now overflowing British summer season. That same weekend, Black Water County kicked off the Cursus cider and music festival in Dorset, Fatboy Slim headlined the Radio 1 Big Weekend in Sunderland, and scores more fizzed into action, from Elderflower Fields in East Sussex to Devauden in south Wales, Slam Dunk in Hertfordshire, Dot to Dot in Nottingham, as well as Sidmouth jazz and blues festival and Chippenham folk festival.

After the England captain announced his international retirement, we look back at the highs and lows of the all-rounder’s incredible career

Makerfield MP on course to be PM will argue for more decision-making in regions and communities as he sets out 10-year platform for government

Andy Burnham will pledge to deliver “good growth in every postcode” by overseeing a significant transfer of power out of Whitehall to local communities as he sets out his case for a decade as UK prime minister.

In his first major speech since winning the Makerfield byelection, Burnham will argue for decision-making to be devolved to regions and communities to drive economic growth locally, replacing the current top-down national model.

Almost £24.4bn of government money went to private equity-run firms in year to April 2025, Guardian analysis shows

• ‘Treating children like cattle’: what happens when private equity takes over a UK care home?

• Nurseries, vets and shops: the sectors where private equity plays a big role

One pound in every £11 of UK government spending on contractors went to private equity-controlled companies last year, research shows, including key services such as transport, waste management and healthcare.

Politicians and economists have raised concerns over the “financial fragility and sharp cost cutting” created by private equity-backed firms, which often have high levels of debt, and the “conflicting interests” in running public services for maximum profit.

Volunteers provide counselling and funeral directors donate coffins after loss of at least 1,430 lives

The bodies turn up on motorcycles, in the backs of cars or the load beds of pickup trucks: victims of a natural disaster that has shaken an already fragile nation to its core.

“[Yesterday], the entire street was packed with people arriving with deceased relatives,” said Camila Rodríguez, a psychology student who is offering emotional support to grieving families at the Bello Monte mortuary in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

Spending watchdog says high-speed rail project must be put on stable footing to avoid repeat of costly past failures

Revised plans for HS2 should not be put into action until the government is confident they can be delivered, according to the public spending watchdog.

The project to build the high-speed railway must be put on a stable footing to avoid a repeat of past failures, the National Audit Office (NAO) said in a report.

Experts and activists back Mike Tapp’s proposal for care worker exclusion that led to row with Shabana Mahmood

Doubling the leave to remain timeframe for care workers to 10 years is “cruel and unconscionable”, according to workers rights campaigners who back a Home Office minister’s proposal to exclude the cohort from the government’s immigration plans.

Mike Tapp is at the centre of a political row with the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, after writing an article in which he said migrant care workers should be excluded from plans to retrospectively change the length of time people must work before they can permanently settle in the UK.

British-born, older men among those most likely to have disease found only postmortem, say researchers

One person a week dies with undiagnosed and therefore untreated tuberculosis in England, a study has found.

British-born, older men were among those most likely to have TB diagnosed only after death, researchers said, suggesting healthcare workers could be overlooking the possibility of the disease in these patients.

• British No 1 had been due to open campaign on Monday

• Withdrawal marks latest injury setback for 23-year-old

Emma Raducanu has been forced to withdraw from Wimbledon because of the right-foot injury that she has struggled with in the buildup to the Championships.

Raducanu, who was seeded 30th, had been scheduled to face Antonia Ruzic at 1pm on Monday on No 1 Court. In a statement, Raducanu said: “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but sadly I’ve had to withdraw from this year’s Wimbledon.

Timir Ahmed Mohamed, 34, charged with five counts of attempted murder after alleged incident on Ealing Broadway

A man has been charged with attempted murder after a vehicle hit pedestrians on a busy west London road.

Timir Ahmed Mohamed, 34, has been charged with five counts of attempted murder as well as dangerous driving, failing to stop, failing to provide a specimen of breath for analysis and criminal damage, the Metropolitan police said on Sunday.

Research suggests travel scams are on rise as experts advise doing some detective work to make sure holidays are real

Holidaymakers have been advised to carry out amateur detective work to ensure they do not book into fake accommodation this summer, as research showed a third of travellers had seen an increase in potential travel scams on social media.

Consumer experts have urged holidaymakers to do a reverse image search on photographs of holiday homes and check their locations on an online map to verify they are real.

While it can transform firms for better or worse, the use of private equity in essential services is attracting scrutiny. Here we examine some of its more contentious elements in the UK veterinary sector

Private equity could be the two most controversial words in business. For its supporters, it can bring investment, expertise and efficiency to a company. For critics, it is a one way ticket to profiteering, cutting costs and losing staff.

The arguments over private equity are particularly fierce when it is used in the public sector, particularly the NHS.

Many thousands of children live with at least one parent working abroad in what is one of the EU’s poorest countries

Maria’s day runs differently to those of most 11-year-olds. By the time other children in her home town of Târgoviște are still waking up, she’s making sure her grandmother takes her morning pills.

After school, before she starts homework, she helps with cooking and cleaning, and gives her grandmother her treatment again. When her grandmother needs to see a doctor – sometimes across town, sometimes a two-hour bus ride to Bucharest – Maria* is the one who takes her.

Mike Bell was 53 when he got the diagnosis that changed his life – and 61 when he learned it was wrong. He felt relieved, but also totally adrift

When he was 61, Mike Bell, who had spent eight years living with a Parkinson’s diagnosis, saw a new consultant. Though he still had pains, tingling, tremors and skin problems, Bell had stopped taking his prescribed medication and his symptoms had not worsened. Further brain scans were arranged – “everything, in every possible position” – after which Bell was “de-diagnosed”.

He still felt unwell, with unexplained pains, but he didn’t have Parkinson’s. In that moment, he says, he “lost his roadmap”, his sense of community with other people he had met with the same illness and his work campaigning for better understanding of the condition.

Most swimwear relies on synthetic fibres, but some brands are taking steps to reduce their impact. We’ve rounded up the best bikinis, swimsuits and men’s trunks made from recycled and alternative materials

• The best sunglasses with UV protection

If your summer holiday is beckoning, you may have swimwear on your mind. And if you want to get some new gear with your responsible hat on, you may feel out of your depth. Swimwear needs to work hard, stretching to fit us and our movements, while withstanding tough environments like salt water, sunlight and chlorine. This generally means our bathers will be made from a human-made, petroleum-based fibre like nylon or polyester, but are there more environmentally friendly options out there?

“Better [swimwear] should first and foremost mean longer lasting and higher quality,” says Helen Lofts, a circular economy advocate and founder of the swimwear brand Davy J. “Nylon and polyester fibres are incredibly hard-wearing and robust but the elastane they’re woven with to form a stretch fabric is often not. The quality and density of the fibre weave within the fabric will determine how robust they are.” This means cheap, thinner swimsuits will start to go see-through and degrade much quicker than those with quality lining and a tighter weave.

JD Vance’s Christian vision is thoughtful – but impossible to square with the political company he keeps

At the heart of this strange, perhaps rather poignant, book is the biblical question: “What must I do to be saved?” Not in the crude sense of how to secure a place in heaven, but as an urgent challenge to a whole repertoire of destructive assumptions and habits endorsed by the majority culture. Vance’s famous first book, Hillbilly Elegy, chronicled, among other things, the impact of substance abuse on generations of the rural poor. It is not too much of a stretch to see this book as a vision of the modern west through the lens of addiction and its generational effects. Except, this time, it is the norms and expectations of elite modernity that are as lethal for the ambitious young professional as fentanyl is for the less privileged.

Vance offers a diagnosis that is not particularly original, but derives its force from the intensity of the personal questioning he undertook to arrive at it. The US vice president describes with clarity the pervasive mechanisms, in education and the professional and political worlds, that induct us into wanting what others want – not what we regard as inherently desirable. Most of us instinctively desire emotional security, meaningful work and, perhaps above all, hope and joy in nurturing the next generation, introducing them to a world of value and promise. One of the most telling moments in the book is the spectacularly successful young Vance’s painful bafflement when faced with the challenge of becoming a parent: “I knew exactly how to help my kid get into a good college but was woefully underprepared to make him a good man.”

This antioxidant may enhance the protection sunscreens provide, but it is no substitute for them

Sunscreen does two important jobs. It is largely used for its UVB protection benefits – blocking the rays that cause sunburn and are a major contributor to the development of skin cancer. But it also blocks UVA radiation, filtering out the rays that lead to signs of ageing.

Vitamin C does neither of these things, says Rosalind Simpson, a professor of dermatology at the University of Nottingham. That said, it is thought to help prevent sun damage in a different way.

Designed to mirror the stock market, they are an easy and cheap way to save. Here’s how to start investing in them

Tracker funds have been around for about half a century, providing investors with access to a range of assets without them having to make difficult and risky decisions.

Built to follow the fortunes of a given financial market index, trackers do not need management teams, which means they generally come with low charges. If you have a workplace pension, you probably already invested in one without realising it. If you want to start investing, you are likely to be directed towards a tracker fund.

Camera, wifi and design updates bring welcome upgrades to Ring’s top model in wired or battery flavour

Ring’s recent revamp of its popular video doorbells with a more modern design is led by the top-of-the-line Video Doorbell Pro 3, which gains much-needed upgrades with a 4K camera and better wifi plus new interesting AI features.

The new doorbells are sleeker but keep the unmistakable two-tone Ring colour scheme, button, logo and ringtone. Battery models start at £80 or equivalent, with the top model costing £219.99 (€249.99/$249.99/A$329.99) with either a battery or wired, which is roughly in line with the competition.

As Canada’s players and staff huddled on the pitch to savour reaching the last 16 for the first time, the overhead Spidercam and the cameras belonging to the host broadcaster were the only outsiders present for Jesse Marsch’s impassioned victory speech. “You guys are Canadian heroes today, Canadian heroes for the future children of this country who play this sport,” he said, wagging his right index finger at different squad members, before a series of whoops, cheers and applause.

If that was a sacred, special moment, then so was the sight of Marsch kissing the Canada crest on his grey zip-top before embracing Ismaël Koné, who took to the field to join the celebrations on crutches after surgery on a broken leg.

Thomas Tuchel’s side have struggled in open play in the US but midfielder’s partnership with his captain has started to change that

Thomas Tuchel faces an attacking conundrum. England have to extract the maximum output from Harry Kane while getting other players to contribute more. Jude Bellingham’s performance against Panama showed how both sides of this equation can be solved.

Kane has scored 13 goals in Tuchel’s 17 England matches, with no other player contributing more than three. He scored a penalty and a header from a corner against Croatia, then blazed over the bar from a rebound in the Ghana match. There was little of note created for him in open play.

Vini Jr has been a star at Real Madrid for a long time. Now he is truly delivering for his country at a World Cup

“I’m so happy to see you happy. Living a dream. It’s Brazil,” wrote Vinícius Júnior on Instagram after Brazil’s 3-0 win against Scotland. In the accompanying photograph he was holding his arms open – in the style of his Real Madrid teammate Jude Bellingham. When Bellingham pulled out that pose after scoring for England at Euro 2024, he famously shouted: “Who else?” When Vinícius found the net it felt more like he was saying: “I’ve arrived.”

It took a while. Vinícius won his first cap in a 1-0 friendly defeat to Peru in 2019 and was mostly on the bench when Brazil hosted the Copa América in 2021. He didn’t score his first international goal until his 19th appearance – a 4-0 thrashing of Chile in a World Cup qualifier in 2022. By the time the World Cup kicked off in Qatar later that year, he had added clinical finishing to his speed and there were greater expectations.

Two teams with plenty of connections meet in a ‘clash of titans’ at one of the World Cup’s most picturesque venues

Morocco manager Mohamed Ouahbi had just been asked what would inspire his players to justify the feverish expectation hanging over them. Would they turn to the example of history, or would they draw on something else? “The biggest motivation the players have is to put on the jersey and represent the country,” he began. “That is motivation enough to move mountains.”

It would be some feat if they managed to alter the geology of Cerro de la Silla, the claw-shaped double peak that overwhelms the skyline around Estadio Monterrey, where Morocco and the Netherlands will play in the World Cup Round of 32.

Search for Steve Clarke’s replacement must look outside the country’s borders to avoid future World Cup disappointment

There was one element of the Scottish Football Association’s otherwise baffling decision to give Steve Clarke a four‑year deal weeks before a World Cup ball had been kicked that made sense.

When assessing alternatives to Clarke as the Scotland manager, it is apparent that paucity of talent among the country’s footballers is replicated in the coaching ranks. Clarke’s sudden resignation places the SFA in a position it was not only desperate to avoid but requires something it typically lacks; out‑of‑the-box thinking. Clarke has spared himself and his paymasters an acrimonious, lengthy goodbye while placing them in precisely the quandary they thought they had seen off.

The forefronting of macho personas like Cain’s is cynical, and misses the reality of my generation’s experiences

• BBC was aware of concerns over Ashley Cain’s ‘toxic masculinity’ online

Recent weeks have not been good for Ashley Cain, the former footballer and now former presenter of BBC Three’s Ashley Cain: Into the Danger Zone. While he was once seen as a catch for a legacy broadcaster keen to win back the attention of young men, the Guardian brought to light a number of disturbing posts made by the presenter, describing women as “slags”, “sluts” and “bitches”, as well as tweets joking about hitting and choking women. Although the BBC has announced the axing of Cain’s show, and said that its vetting process “clearly failed”, new reporting in the Guardian shows concerns about Cain’s online comments were raised with the BBC last year.

Questions remain about why nobody apparently thought to run a background check in the first place, and why concerns about Cain were apparently ignored. Cain’s attitude was not exactly a secret. After his football career, he appeared on Ex on the Beach and became known for seducing fellow contestants. Then he gained a big following on Snapchat for posting videos of himself having sex with women. In 2015 he denied accusations of capturing and sharing sexually explicit photos and videos of a woman without her consent. A scroll through his prolific and public social media profiles (“talcum powder pimp slap these bitches already!”) would have revealed several troubling statements. In an Instagram post he said, “I don’t deny it. I don’t excuse it.”

Rohan Sathyamoorthy is a 20-year-old writer from south-west London

Countless spaces for adults with complex needs have been shut down. If Andy Burnham wants to fix social care, keeping them open must be a priority

Wellington House is in north Brighton, and known to the people who frequent it as Welly. It has the austere look of an old Victorian school, but what goes on inside is all about care and empathy. The building is the home of the city’s last council-run day centre for adults with complex needs, autism and learning disabilities, 21 of whom are reckoned to be regular attenders. One of its “service users” has been going there for 40 years; another has clocked up 24. Many of them know the staff as friends and confidants; for their carers, the time they spend at Wellington House represents precious respite.

That is the human picture; the accompanying tale of budgets and bureaucracy is altogether harder and colder. After five other council day-centre closures in the city over the past 20 years, Welly may well be on its way to the same fate. Brighton and Hove city council says its proposed shutdown will save £400,000 a year, and it will ensure that everyone’s “individual needs” are met elsewhere, thanks to schemes and services provided through what it calls “the independent sector market”.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

If Andy Burnham chooses the energy secretary, Labour could fully use the benefits of net zero to promote growth and jobs

It should have been a great week for Ed Miliband and his mission to decarbonise the UK economy. Western Europe has experienced one of its worst ever heatwaves, providing powerful evidence of the need to transition away from fossil-fuel-driven energy production to reduce the carbon emissions that are contributing to global heating.

Instead, however, he has been attacked by an unholy alliance of trade unions and leading City figures, apparently determined to prevent him becoming chancellor in the cabinet of the presumptive new prime minister, Andy Burnham.

Josh Ryan-Collins is professor of economics and finance at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

As extreme weather events become more common, economists say government will need to take more active role to protect consumers

Anyone attempting to notch up a productive day’s work in the searing heat of southern England this last week was left in little doubt about the impact of extreme weather.

But the economic effects of the climate crisis for the UK are not confined to the many hours lost to quietly perspiring – or fetching kids dismissed early from scorching classrooms.

ChatGPT relieves me of my discomfort, but in doing so it robs me of contemplation, of the holy ground between question and answer

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

As a person of faith raised in a religious household, I have a fairly clear picture of what prayer means to me. Prayer is the practice by which I draw closer to God, petition for my needs and desires, request guidance and ask forgiveness.

The deal has always been that in times of trouble I cast my anxieties and questions and emerge with either some answers or some sustaining sense of peace. Take it to the Lord in prayer, the song goes.

Yes, they’re filthy and annoying. But they’re also far smarter and more interesting than you’d think if you just watched one throwing itself against a window pane

I consider myself a broadly live-and-let-live sort. I don’t eat animals and treat my garden as a habitat for wildlife, including greenfly, blackfly and the slugs eating all my strawberries. I love bees and tolerate wasps. We’re all just trying to survive; I get it. But here are some things I have said recently (minus the expletives that made up the majority of each sentence) to houseflies: “You’ll be dead soon, because I’m going to murder you”; “Get out – I hate you”; “If you don’t leave, I’ll kill you”; “Shut UP”; “That’s it – you’re dead.”

I can’t stand flies. Bloodlust boils in me at the sight and sound of a bluebottle casually vibing in the fruit bowl, buzzing frantically around my office or banging against the window again and again like a dopey drunk. Opening windows in search of a heatwave cross-breeze has brought them buzzing in; they seemingly have no inclination or ability to leave and it’s driving me wild.

The latest work buzzword describes feeling under-stimulated at your job – but you can break free from workplace monotony

There is a woman I know who works in the accounts payable department at one of my clients. She’s in her late 40s and she’s been doing the same job for at least 10 years. Entering payables, reconciling expense accounts, matching documents, calling suppliers.

Sound boring? Not to her. She’s happy, enjoys the routine and appreciates her employer. She’s not “rusting-out” – the latest workplace buzzword.

Unfair changes to student loans and concerns about job prospects must be weighed against the life-changing potential of education

Is going to university financially worthwhile? New research on graduate incomes is unlikely to help the beleaguered sector’s reputation. Even though most benefit from an earnings premium, worth around £100,000 on average over a lifetime (after tax and student loan repayments), the finding that one in four people end up worse off proves that there are no guarantees. The premium has shrunk by around 30% compared with forecasts from six years ago.

The study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) could be viewed as a vindication of the latest British Social Attitudes survey. It found that the proportion of people who think a degree is not worth the time and money has risen from 14% to 34% in 20 years. While the research predated Rachel Reeves’s most recent, unfair worsening of the terms on which graduates repay loans, it arguably reflected reduced confidence in the government’s commitment to protect the graduate earnings premium, as well as anxiety about salary prospects and the economy more broadly.

The court martial system for personnel on overseas airbases serves US interests – but what about those of their host nations?

A British victim of crime, on British soil, might reasonably expect their assailant to be tried in the British justice system. That was not Sarah Steele’s experience. US military police quickly took charge of investigating her assault by Jacob Wulfson in late 2023, and the airman was prosecuted in a US court martial – for a crime that took place off duty and off base, in an English city. Downing Street said on Friday that it was “very concerning” that the case never reached the Crown Prosecution Service, and the Ministry of Justice has said it will look into it.

Dr Steele waived her anonymity to speak to the Guardian about the “distressing and degrading” experience, casting light upon the little-known US military justice system and its use within the UK. Wulfson was convicted of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted of sexual assault and “aggravated sexual contact” by an all-male panel of air force officers stationed at the same base, RAF Lakenheath. Legal experts said the latter offence would probably have been categorised as rape in a British court. Dr Steele faced invasive, aggressive and lengthy questioning; her attacker chose not to testify.

Strikes on oil refineries and energy facilities are not ‘morale bombing’, says Tim Dee-McCullough, while Dr Natalie Kopytko says such attacks save lives in Ukraine and Nathan Gabriel Wood decries a ‘false moral equivalency’ drawn between Russia and Ukraine

Prof Christian Enemark’s letter (‘Morale’ bombing Moscow is not justified, 25 June) articulates a position of admirable moral consistency, but one that risks being fatally disconnected from the strategic and moral realities that Ukraine faces.

The professor rests his argument on a bright-line distinction between combatants and civilians – a distinction that has genuine force in international humanitarian law, but which becomes considerably more complicated when Russian civilians fund, staff and politically sustain a war machine that has systematically targeted Ukrainian hospitals, schools, apartment blocks and energy infrastructure.

Priscilla Alderson asks how long the NHS will survive under a Burnham-Streeting government

A fall in NHS waiting lists is presented as a government success (From the NHS to new homes, Starmer’s successes and setbacks, 23 June). NHS authorities have paid providers £33 per patient to remove thousands of them from the lists, many still in great need, and a survey of nearly 2,600 people in England found 16% had used the private sector in the past year.

Fewer names on the lists help the government to seem to “reduce backlogs” and “meet waiting time targets”.

Dr Anthony Isaacs on an intervention by prominent Israelis threatening legal action against their government over an ‘ideology of ethnic cleansing’ in the West Bank

The leaked letter signed by significant figures in the Israeli political and cultural establishments, including former prime ministers and heads of the security services, threatening legal action over an “ideology of ethnic cleansing” in the occupied West Bank, is an important intervention (Israeli former leaders and security chiefs threaten legal action over ‘Jewish terrorism’, 24 June).

Notably, while making comparisons with European anti‑Jewish pogroms in the 19th and 20th centuries, they also draw attention to the way in which Israel’s actions have fuelled antisemitism around the world.

A reader highlights how little safety or security there is for leasehold flat owners if the freeholder wants to monetise roof space

Your article on the National Leasehold Campaign highlighted the financial injustices of leasehold ownership, but there is another growing problem that deserves attention: rooftop development on occupied blocks, which was highlighted also by a letter published in response to the article.

I am a leaseholder in north London and planning permission has been granted for additional storeys to be built on top of our building. Like many leaseholders, I bought my flat believing that I had security in my home, only to discover that the roof above it could later be treated as a development opportunity over which I had virtually no control.

All-rounder was a superb player but it was his vulnerability, personality and passion that won the hearts of England fans

Ben Stokes has been a magnificent player for England, and leaves a legacy of individual brilliance and inspirational leadership. However you want to judge him, whether it is the quality of his bowling, his batting and his fielding, his sometimes heroic determination, or the character that makes him uniquely able to connect with teammates and with the public, he is among the very best.

The way he became such an important figure in English cricket, and the fact that he is a seam‑bowling all-rounder, means he will always be compared with Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff, but unlike them he excelled also at captaincy. He is a man of great empathy, which makes him unusually good with young players, at making them feel comfortable in an environment that can be difficult to enter.

Briton was No 4 seed a year ago before injury struck but is working back to fitness with Andy Murray’s help

There were many times in the past year when just watching tennis was painful for Jack Draper. Twelve months ago, the Briton was riding high, ranked a career‑high No 4, having won his first Masters 1000 title in Indian Wells.

The subsequent year has been the most difficult of his career, with an arm injury – a bruised humerus – causing him to pull out of the US Open and miss the Australian Open this year, while a knee injury in the spring forced him out of the French Open. He returned last week in Eastbourne, reaching the semi-finals.

• George Russell wins for Mercedes; Ferraris 5th and 8th

• Hamilton says: ‘We have a good car but are down on pace’

Lewis Hamilton said Ferrari’s underwhelming performance at the Austrian Grand Prix represented a reality check for him and the team after the euphoria of his first win with the Scuderia at the last round in Spain.

Hamilton finished in fifth at the Red Bull Ring, after a race where Mercedes’s George Russell took victory from pole position ahead an enormously quick Max Verstappen, whose Red Bull had made great strides with upgrades the team brought to Austria. Hamilton had moved to second in the championship after the last round and was looking so competitive that he was being touted as a potential title contender, but he has dropped back to third, behind Russell and his teammate Kimi Antonelli, the championship leader.

• Swiss rising star runs 1:53.80 – the third fastest ever

• Trayvon Bromell shocks Noah Lyles in men’s 100m

The oldest world record in track and field history stretches all the way back to 25 July 1983 – to the same week, in fact, that Elton John’s I’m Still Standing was released in the UK. But this increasingly looks like the year that Jarmila ­Kratochvilova’s imposing women’s 800m record may finally tumble.

Britain’s Olympic champion Keely Hodgkinson reckons she can break that record time of 1min 53.28sec in London next month. The trouble she faces is that the brilliant 22-year-old Swiss star Audrey Werro has pushed ahead in the race to achieve the two-lap equivalent of landing on the moon.

• Saracens 52-14 Trailfinders

• Eight tries for winners in front of 8,000 fans

Saracens just needed three ingredients to play Trailfinders off the pitch and win their first Premiership Women’s Rugby title in four years: clinical attack, brick-wall defence and an immense kicking game. Not only did they execute their gameplan but the experience of being in their sixth final in eight seasons was devastatingly clear, despite having to play with 14 players for 20 minutes.

The first-time finalists Trailfinders had hopes of causing a huge upset after knocking out the three-time defending champions Gloucester‑Hartpury in their semi‑final. But wasted chances meant that even Meg Jones’s solid performance was not enough to inspire another shock. Instead Marlie Packer, who scored two tries and was sent to the sin bin, won her fourth top-flight title to toast nine years at Saracens. In a poetic twist, she lifted the trophy as Sarries co‑captain alongside Zoe Harrison at the venue she will be playing at next season, as she is making the switch to Harlequins.

Exclusive: £75m publicity drive will ask people to treat water as precious resource and cut daily use by 28 litres

The biggest ever campaign to encourage the public to reduce their water use will launch this week, as the UK emerges from record temperatures attributed to the climate crisis.

The £75m publicity drive, called Let’s Save Water, will advise and encourage people to treat water as a precious resource and has a target for everyone to cut their daily use by 28 litres – or two large buckets – from the current average use of about 140 litres a day.

Tehran attacks Bahrain and Kuwait amid efforts to open strait of Hormuz without Iran’s direct oversight

• Fresh hostilities in Gulf suggest US-Iran memorandum was too broadly worded

A new round of escalating strikes between Iran and the US has continued, further undermining the fragile interim peace agreement between the two countries, and prompting Donald Trump to threaten violence that would ensure Iran “will no longer exist”.

On Sunday, Tehran launched drone and missile attacks against Bahrain and Kuwait after new US strikes on sites in southern Iran, and threatened a “complete halt” to negotiations to end the war. Trump said that a moment might come soon when he abandoned talks and the US would “militarily finish the job”.

Russia’s president says Ukraine’s attacks on infrastructure are causing ‘obvious’ but not critical problems

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, acknowledged that the country was suffering from “a certain shortage” of fuel in an interview published by the Kremlin on Sunday, after repeated Ukrainian strikes in their four-year war.

Kyiv calls the attacks fair retribution for Russia’s near-daily barrages on Ukrainian civilians and energy infrastructure since its February 2022 offensive.

About 31 in every 1,000 facing haemorrhage or severe tears, NHS figures show, in trend described as ‘national crisis’

• How a Romford maternity ward was able to turn the tide after a ‘requires improvement’ rating

Women in England are at their highest risk of suffering a serious injury while giving birth since records began in 2020, NHS figures show.

The rate of women sustaining the most serious type of tear during childbirth rose to 31.1 in every 1,000 in January, February and March – the highest since monitoring started in 2020.

Princess becomes first royal to climb highest mountains in Scotland, England and Wales, 18 months after cancer remission

The Princess of Wales has completed the Three Peaks challenge to raise money for a cancer charity, becoming the first member of the royal family to achieve the feat.

Catherine, 44, revealed in a message on social media she had successfully taken on the trek not only as a physical endeavour but “to give something back” and raise awareness of the wider impact of serious illness.

Home-grown food may become a niche product for wealthy in our supermarkets as British farmers’ incomes plummet

For Liz Webster, who farms 647 hectares (1600 acres) in Wiltshire, south west England, the latest impact of Brexit has been particularly brutal. About £400 per animal has been wiped off the price she can get for her beef cattle, a hefty blow at a time when all the inputs – feed, energy, fertiliser – are going through the roof.

The fall in price, on livestock that typically fetch £2,000 to £3,000 per animal, is the result of a flood of cheaper meat arriving from Australia, the result of one of the new trade deals the government has signed since the UK left the European Union. Prices for beef in the supermarkets have remained broadly the same, but farmers have seen their income plummet.

As temperatures soar across Europe, cities are struggling to adapt, further exacerbating socioeconomic divisions

The heatwave afflicting western Europe is the worst ever, with the combination of heat and humidity fuelled by the climate crisis making scores of cities feel unliveable. While for some the adverse impacts amount to disturbed sleep and sticky days in the home office, low-income families are often worse affected by cities’ lack of adequate adaptation measures, with women at the sharp end.

“[It] throws a grenade into every vulnerability you already have,” says Asad Rehman, chief executive of Friends of the Earth, pointing out that vulnerable or marginalised groups often bear the brunt of climate crisis-based hardship globally.

Economist Prof Mariana Mazzucato says governments must ‘get back their mojo’ and believe they can change the world

Good governments have a vision. They know what they want to achieve, can articulate why, and work out in public how to get there. They don’t just spout slogans about economic growth – because growth is meaningless unless we know what it is for. They understand that there is no trade-off between solving social problems and boosting the economy, and aim to do both, while avoiding rigid fiscal rules that defeat their own purpose by strangling public investment.

If this sounds like a critique of what went wrong with Keir Starmer’s government, it is also a lot more. Mariana Mazzucato, a professor in the economics of innovation and public value at University College London, is a world-renowned economist, adviser to governments, chair of international commissions, prolific author, and PhD supervisor to at least one poet. She was the thinker who inspired Starmer to fashion his political project around five key “missions”, now largely forgotten in the mire of scandals, U-turns and infighting that beset his premiership.

Three pumped storage hydroelectric power station sites in Scotland on list of 16 long-duration electricity storage plans

• Business live – latest updates

Great Britain’s first new major hydropower projects in more than 40 years are expected to move ahead after the energy regulator gave a provisional green light to three proposals as part of a plan to reduce the country’s reliance on energy imports.

All three of the new pumped storage hydroelectric power station projects are due to be built in northern Scotland, where the region’s lochs will act as natural reservoirs to serve the hydropower stations.

Commissioner calls for overhaul of state support after reporting 10% rise in young patient referrals last year

More than 1 million children were referred to mental health services across England last year, with referrals up 10% from the year previous, according to a report by the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza. She said the country faced a “crisis” in young people’s mental health.

The number of patients who had an active referral to children and young people’s mental health services across England surpassed 1 million for the first time in 2024-25. This was almost double the number recorded in 2018-19, and an almost 10% rise on the previous year.

Exclusive: Sadiq Khan plans to use new powers after local council opposes city scheme for seasonal pedestrianisation

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, plans to override opposition to al fresco dining in Soho after the local council failed to apply to a scheme for seasonal pedestrianisation that is being introduced across the capital this summer.

From 2027, restaurants in London’s entertainment district will be allowed to put chairs outside in the warmer months despite a longstanding local row on the issue.

NAO inquiry follows suspension of payments after erroneous records that claimants had emigrated

An HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) anti-fraud crackdown that stripped 23,000 families of their child benefit failed to “adequately consider” the policy’s impact on claimants, an official report has found.

The report by the National Audit Office followed HMRC’s decision to suspend payments after flight records provided by the Home Office purportedly showed thousands of parents had emigrated.

Scheme aims to help 60,000 people aged 18-24 into work as part of push to cut welfare bill and tackle youth jobs crisis

Employers in Great Britain will be given £3,000 for every long-term unemployed young person they hire under government plans to reduce the welfare bill and joblessness.

The scheme, which will be available to firms from Tuesday, is aimed at helping 60,000 people aged 18-24 enter work over the next three years.

Matthew Ashley Foster-Smith, from Dorset, is accused of killing Natalia Villalba in an apartment in Bogotá

A British man has been arrested in Ecuador after the body of a woman was found inside a suitcase in Colombia.

Matthew Ashley Foster-Smith is alleged to have caused the death of 36-year-old Natalia Villalba in an apartment in the Chicó neighbourhood of Bogotá on 18 June, local authorities said.

Dozens of civilians reported dead by Taliban after latest violence between countries that fought war in February

Pakistani airstrikes in three eastern provinces of Afghanistan killed 36 civilians and wounded 163 others, the Taliban government’s deputy spokesperson has said as attacks between the two countries showed no sign of abating.

Pakistan’s information minister, Attaullah Tarar, said the operations on Sunday night were aimed at a terrorist group his country blamed for a deadly militant attack in Karachi that killed three security personnel over the weekend.

Former president calls Trump ‘a loser’ and criticizes his attempted makeover of Washington. Key US politics stories from Sunday 28 June at a glance

Joe Biden has said Donald Trump has diminished America’s standing in the world “more than any president in history”.

The former president delivered remarks highly critical of his successor, while giving the keynote address at a gala in Hanover, Maryland, hosted by the state’s Democratic party, which is hoping to help wrest control of Congress away from Trump and his Republican allies during November’s midterm elections.

Five students and five instructors dead along with pilot after plane fell suddenly near aerodrome, says prefect

A skydiving plane has crashed in north-eastern France, killing all 11 people onboard, according to the region’s prefect.

The parachuting-school plane crashed near Nancy at 11am, said Yves Séguy, the prefect of the Meurthe-et-Moselle region.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Over in Korea, two of the country’s chipmaking giants and the Seoul government have announced a massive manufacturing expansion costing more than half a trillion dollars, to address the shortages of AI chips.

President Lee Jae Myung pledged to cement South Korea’s leadership in the industry with investments worth more than $576bn over several years covering semiconductors, AI data centres and robotics.

“We must secure the core elements of AI faster than any other country.

Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centres are the triple axis for our great leap forward.”

UK telecoms group’s 50/50 venture ends more than 18-month search for a buyer of its international operations

• Business live – latest updates

BT and the US mobile company Verizon are to combine their international businesses, ending the British telecom group’s more than 18-month search for a buyer.

Verizon will pay a $625m (£473m) “equalisation” fee to BT to guarantee equal voting rights in the new 50/50 joint venture, the companies announced on Monday. The deal is expected to create a company with more than 3,000 customers across about 180 countries and $4bn in combined annual revenue.

Resolution Foundation calls for extra funding for apprenticeships and increase in number of youth support grants

• British firms to get £3,000 for every long-term jobless youngster they hire

Ministers should reject calls to reverse employment tax increases as a way to boost jobs for young people in favour of extra funding for apprenticeships and increasing the number of youth support grants, according to a leading thinktank.

The Resolution Foundation said an in-depth study showed a cut in employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs) and a reduction in the minimum wage for under-21s – measures demanded by business groups – would do little to promote the chances of younger workers finding a job.

Value of some chip manufacturers have tripled, or more, driving Asia Pacific stock markets sharply higher

Shares in chipmakers have surged in the first half of this year as investors piled into companies that make the hardware underpinning the AI boom, according to analysis.

Investors have driven up the value of semiconductor and memory chip manufacturers, whose profits have soared during 2026, at the expense of some large software companies, which have fallen out of favour this year.

The Happy Valley actor is lined up as the lead in German director Thomas Ostermeier’s first Shakespearean play in English

James Norton is to take on his first major Shakespearean stage role and play Hamlet in the West End next year.

The King & Conqueror star said it was a “privilege” and “pretty terrifying” to be cast as the tragic prince in the acclaimed German director Thomas Ostermeier’s production next autumn. Norton was last on stage in 2023 in the harrowing A Little Life, based on Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, which the actor described as the hardest thing he has ever done.

Show at Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin is biggest ever celebration of an East German female artist in a state museum

Gabriele Stötzer remembers the days when she had to decide: “Am I buying a sausage, or film for my Super 8 camera?”

Stötzer was one of the most radical artists in communist East Germany, and her desire to create was born in defiance of and in spite of the material conditions and oppressive restrictions of the GDR regime.

The inside story of the men who ruled the tennis courts, starting in the 1970s. Plus: the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tapes. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, Channel 5
Just in time to get you in the mood for Wimbledon, this four-part series explores the careers of the only 29 male players who have made it to No 1 in the ATP rankings. It begins in the 1970s (arguably the liveliest era in tennis history) with the controversial but charismatic figure of Ilie Năstase, a Romanian with a sweet backhand and a bad boy reputation. Phil Harrison

Film-maker Maria Stoianova mines her father’s video diaries from the 1980s and 90s to document the decline of communism – and his obsession with western shopping malls

Here is an interesting film which does not render up its meaning easily: a personal piece about memory, and an enigmatic essay about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union as it was experienced by one family in Ukraine, based entirely on home-movie video footage. It is innocent and transparent, and yet subtly encumbered by the sadness of history. I can imagine Adam Curtis quoting this in its entirety for some new compilation about the post-communist 20th century.

Film-maker Maria Stoianova presents us with video clips shot by her dad, Mykhailo Stoianov, an ice skater and ice dancer with the Ukrainian national ice ballet company who, throughout the communist 1980s and into the new era, toured the US, Canada, the Middle East and western Europe. (Mykhailo even played Blackpool in the UK.) The skaters were a privileged cultural group, encouraged by the Soviet state as diplomatic standard bearers and a source of hard foreign currency, but closely monitored by the KGB at all times; Maria remembers her father recounting a tense conversation with an intelligence officer about working for them.

It’s Curb Your Enthusiasm in britches and bonnets, poking hole after hole in American lore – and it’s so audacious it will make your jaw drop. Brace yourself!

‘I hear America singing,” wrote Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. He didn’t say that the song was “USA! USA!” backed by a klaxon and accompanied by a foam finger. For a country evangelical about its superiority, there is a dark and sizable underbelly they would prefer to ignore. A pretty big overbelly, too. Yet every society has its truth tellers – and they’re generally obnoxious types who can’t let things go.

Who better to educate America on its history, then, than Larry David? Loads of people. But none of them have a series on HBO, executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: An Almost History of America reimagines key scenes from 250 years of US history, as if they were a series of rapidly escalating, socially awkward celebrations of epic pettiness. In other word, it’s Curb Your Enthusiasm in britches and bonnets. I’m excited.

The first time I saw the film, I convinced myself I didn’t like it. Now it’s one of my favourites

I was 14 years old the first time I saw two men kiss on screen. It was 2006, and my mum had rented Brokeback Mountain from our local Blockbuster. She said it was a “special” movie night for “just the two of us”.

For the next 134 minutes, I watched two sheep herders, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), fall in love in the beautiful Wyoming countryside, only for that love to be suffocated by rigid expectations of masculinity and self-contempt. The film culminates in Jack’s untimely death, and alludes to the possibility that he was the victim of a vicious homophobic hate crime.

Nicky Woolf’s investigation into a rightwing YouTuber reveals much more than state interference in social media. Plus, why did a kid pretend to be Steven Spielberg’s nephew?

Lauren Southern tells journalist Nicky Woolf she feels as though she’s in a spy movie, “but the dumbest ever made, because I’m just a YouTuber”. Along with other members of the right-wing commentariat, the Canadian found herself linked with the Kremlin when a company she had worked for was revealed as a front for the Russian state. Her candour is striking, as Woolf’s investigation unfolds across six uneasy chapters. Hannah J Davies
Audible, all episodes out now

Tipped by Lorde and Billie Eilish, the New York musician twists sublime folk and chaotic synths into bewitching new shapes

At first Shane Lavers can’t get through. Then he’s on video call but I cannot speak. When we finally make a clear connection over the phone, I can hear that he’s surrounded by nature, with faint snatches of birdsong at the edge of his measured, slightly gravelly speech. The musician who performs both in and as Chanel Beads (it remains unclear even to its core members whether they’re a band or a solo project) is on location shooting a music video somewhere on the coast of North Carolina. Encountering him as a disembodied voice, never mind one competing with worldly twittering and chirping, somehow feels more fitting than it would for most other musicians.

For years, Lavers has honed in on a cryptic, panoramic sound that ricochets from catchy, shout-along rock music to flare-ups of dissonant experimental noise. If the typical payoff of a pop song is to encapsulate a clear emotional arch in three-minute, verse-chorus structures, the appeal of a Chanel Beads track is much more unwieldy. Earlier singles such as Ef, Police Scanner and Male Friendship flicker in and out of focus, establishing a ground-floor of groove, only for Lavers and his bandmates to upend it with swelling strings, chiming guitar and ear-splitting samples. Lyrically, his songwriting gathers around an unstable emotional core that is so dense in its unspoken feeling that it manages to achieve an aching kind of orbit. It’s Lavers’s great talent to handle all of that swirling intensity while keeping everything suspended in the air.

Now 84, the voice of Heat Wave and Jimmy Mack is releasing a new album. She answers your questions on Marvin Gaye, popularising the roundabout and why she hates cover versions of her songs

You were part of perhaps the richest and most exciting era of music since the German and Italian classics of the 19th century. How was it for you and what made it all tick? eamonmcc
William Stevenson discovered me after I had won an amateur contest. It was like a dream come true that a producer would come and approach me and say, “You have talent, come to Hitsville, USA.” I took his advice and showed up the next day unannounced and was immediately placed in a position as secretary [at Motown Records]. It felt real good that I was at the right place at the right time. It was magical to me and it’s all been just a glorious ride.

The Motown production line is sometimes compared to the production line of cars in Detroit. Is there anything to that, do you think? mesm
Motown and Ford are synonymous. My dad worked for Ford and [Motown founder] Berry Gordy worked there as an employee. It taught Berry Gordy the way to represent and how to manage and how to give people assignments. He called it Motown or Motortown. So, it’s all combined: Motor City, Detroit, manufacturing, making music as an assembly line.

They were a big 00s buzz band – but looked in danger of fading out. Empowered by fatherhood and anger at war and AI, the New Yorkers explain why they ‘really showed up’ again

Suits. Gnomic poetry. Moody, insistent riffs. It used to be that you’d know what to expect from NYC rockers Interpol. The band’s first two albums, in the early 00s, were blockbuster successes, shifting half a million units each thanks to dramatic songs also fit for jerking around at an indie disco. Interpol duly jumped up to a major label, but then quickly fell back down again. Their talismanic bassist Carlos Dengler quit, and the band settled into a decade of solidly successful but pretty predictable albums. The most recent, 2022’s The Other Side of Make Believe, only reached No 178 on the US charts.

So it’s a bit unexpected that their upcoming eighth album, This Mirror Weighs a Ton, is their masterpiece. “We just all really showed up,” frontman-guitarist Paul Banks says of a band that has swelled to a quintet as two touring musicians, bassist Brad Truax and keyboardist Brandon Curtis, become full-time members. “The lyrics on the last record, it’s really hard for me to identify with what I was doing,” Banks continues. “I felt as if I made some mistakes.” What were they? “I don’t want to draw attention to them! I just didn’t want to walk away with that feeling again.”

Writing about home life doesn’t have to be humdrum argues the author of Natural Disaster – just look at world-spanning, taboo-shattering works such as Ducks, Newburyport and All Fours

‘There’s no place like home,” Dorothy declares at the end of The Wizard of Oz, as she departs the dazzling Emerald City for Aunt Em’s Kansas farmhouse. It’s a powerful metaphor for the way the domestic sphere is often portrayed in art: action, adventure and drama happen “out there” in glorious Technicolor, with the home rendered by contrast in sober sepia tones. Home may be the place we ultimately yearn for, but only once we have left it behind.

While working on my second novel, Natural Disaster, I was periodically plagued by the potential pitfalls of putting domestic life front and centre. The story takes place over 24 hours, following a woman who plans to spend her final day of maternity leave having a nice time with her two small boys (spoiler: it doesn’t go to plan).

As his new novel is published, the US author talks about nurturing the next generation of creatives, debating Sam Altman – and why he writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay

At Dave Eggers’s suggestion, we’re starting the interview by life drawing together. The novelist dropped out of art school but has been drawing for decades, and his new book is set in the art world. Prudence, our model, stands before us with her palms open, nude but for a pair of black knee-high socks. This, unsurprisingly, is an interview first for me. Eggers shows me how to hold my pencil at arm’s length and use my thumb to measure Prudence’s proportions. Since the pandemic, he’s been organising regular life‑drawing sessions in the book-lined offices of McSweeney’s, the publishing house and literary journal he founded in San Francisco in 1998. He loves the element of chance in figure drawing – you never know which sketch will work out – and believes it helps cultivate empathy.

How so, asks Prudence, helpfully interviewing him for me, because I’ve been thrown off my game. “I feel like in three hours of drawing a human, you learn so much about them and there is so much affection that comes from carefully trying to get them right,” he says.

The writer and newly installed University of Sydney professor on the lure of Berlin, authors versus AI, and writing ‘from a place of admiration’

Anna Funder is mere days into her new role at the University of Sydney when we meet there on an overcast Friday afternoon; she waves vaguely in the direction of her new office and says she hasn’t yet unpacked. So, with her encouragement, I gamely agree to play tour guide around my alma mater and continue to until, about halfway through the interview, she starts telling me about the architecture – at which point it becomes clear how her easy and self-effacing manner can function as a smokescreen for the sharpness of her mind.

As we set off past the beds of majestic fig trees and the manicured lawns surrounding the university’s sandstone quadrangle, passing backpacked students and fresh graduates posing for photos, I ask the newly installed professor of practice in creative writing what her own experience of studying creative writing was like. She looks stricken: “We’re starting with a confession.

A mouse detective; a fresh take on the Odyssey; a dangerous wish; and the world’s most watched reality TV show

My Dad Can by Stephen Lightbown, illustrated by Claire Sahara Lemp, Quarto, £7.99
Iris’s dad can turn into dinosaurs, unicorns, anything she imagines – though some people see Dad’s wheelchair and believe he can’t do anything. This soft-smudged, colourful picture book celebrates the playfulness and creativity of parenthood.

The Fluffy Futon by Yuichi Kasano, translated by Cathy Hirano, Gecko, £12.99
When Grandma spreads a futon on the sunny porch to air, it’s so fluffy that kittycat, Grandma, hen, chicks and the whole household join each other for a nap in this delightful picture book, perfect for enjoying at bedtime.

Normal Golf Game takes a tiresomely easy genre and makes it infernally difficult. Which deserves a round of applause

I have always struggled playing golf. I wish I didn’t. It’s a beautiful game in concept. A leisurely walk in the sunshine, slapping a ball around, sandwiches and beer consumed during and after play. Sure, you have to dress like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, and getting membership of an actual club is more complex than joining the Freemasons (although many offer a two for one deal with this), but you don’t have to be fit, you don’t have to even run. It is the only outdoor sport where a fat dad can be the best in the world.

The premise couldn’t be simpler: get the ball in the hole. But there is nothing worse in sport than knowing what you have to do and not being able to do it. Just ask amateur parachutists.

The blockbuster launch is expected to dwarf the box office takings of the year’s biggest movies with one industry analyst predicting it could make $1bn within an hour

It is, quite simply, the most anticipated piece of entertainment since the Star Wars prequels and now, at last, you can reserve a copy. At midnight last night, Rockstar opened preorders on Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest title in the epic open-world gangster adventure series, five months before its 19 November release date on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X.

Prices have also been confirmed, with the standard edition costing $80 in the US, £70 in the UK, and €80 in Europe. An Ultimate Edition (£90/€100/$100) will include exclusive in-game cars, clothes and weapons – the developer has confirmed that there will also be in-game stores that are only open to Ultimate owners. Anyone who pre-orders the game will get a Vintage Vice City pack filled with 80s apparel and other nostalgic items, which look to be straight out of Don Johnson’s Miami Vice wardrobe.

As football fans revel in the real world tournament, its digital counterparts continue to stumble in capturing the ​hyped up ​atmosphere

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I come with a warning to all football fans: if you’ve been enjoying the World Cup enough to think, “I’d like to re-enact this on a football video game”, do not go to Netflix and play Fifa World Cup: Launch Edition, the officially licensed game of the tournament, which streams via your smart TV or computer. Developed by the virtually unknown Delphi Interactive, it’s a juddering, dated calamity, with sluggish controls (via your phone, once you’ve downloaded the app) and commentary courtesy of Clive Tyldesley that delivers all the excitement of a robotic train station announcement.

Until this, it was largely agreed that the worst World Cup football game in history was World Cup Carnival, the first official Fifa tie-in, which was released on various home computers in 1986. Publisher US Gold thought it had a deal with the Manchester studio Ocean Software to repurpose its acclaimed title Match Day, but the agreement fell through. With three months to go before Mexico 86, US Gold was forced to effectively rebadge a dire 1984 sim, World Cup Football, by the fading developer Artic. To add some value to the package, the game was released in a fancy big box complete with a fixtures chart, a World Cup facts poster and some flag stickers. Nobody was fooled – the World Cup Carnival was a critical and commercial disaster.

As phrases like easter eggs and looksmaxxing enter everyday language, what other words from the world of video games might soon be mainstream?

Twenty years ago, video games were seen as a niche hobby dominated by hardcore enthusiasts, tucked away in obscure online forums and gaming meet-ups. Back then, the idea that governments would use footage from Call of Duty and gaming terms such as “killstreaks” as war propaganda would have been absurd. Then the 2010s happened: nerd culture popularised, previously online-only spaces began to meld with the real world, and gaming went mainstream.

Now, gaming references have entered common parlance – at the end of 2024, video game terms including “cheat code” and “cutscene” were even added to the Oxford English Dictionary – and they increasingly crop up in politics, too. Earlier this year, the official White House X account posted footage of military strikes on Iran interspersed with footage from the video game Grand Theft Auto. Six days later, another video was posted, this time interspersing military footage with clips from Nintendo’s 2006 game Wii Sports. Video game references aren’t reserved for the political right, either: in February 2026, Democrat representative of New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quipped, “Why does this guy always talk like a World of Warcraft npc [non-player character]?” in response to a post on X by Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff.

Royal Court, London
Hunger and TB, as much as imperialism, are triggers for the assassination that precipitated the first world war in Rajiv Joseph’s tragicomic reimagining of the plotters’ progress

Most of us have written an essay on the origins of the first world war, exam-cramming the names of Bosnian Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip and his victims – Austrian-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie – in Sarajevo almost exactly 112 years ago. A textbook answer is that their assassinations militarised Europe.

However, a student who answered a question on the origins of the 1914-18 conflict with the farcical speculation in Rajiv Joseph’s 2025 play Archduke might face a retake. Unemployed and diagnosed as a “lunger” (consumptive), Princip (Stanley Morgan) receives a “job” offer from Apis (Marc Wootton), a Slav nationalist who recruits Gavrilo and two other starving sick youths, Trifco (Abraham Popoola) and Nedeljko (Chris Walley), by filling their minds with a rant on historical wrongs and their bellies with the menus of his devout housekeeper, Sladjana (Janice Connolly). The lungers’ hunger is a major motivation, a recurring metaphor involving fancy sandwiches.

Polka theatre, London
Marietta Kirkbride’s enchanting take on the Arthur myth brings silliness and songs when young Grace travels back in time with Merlin the wizard

Here is a sparkling new take on the King Arthur legend for the ages – and all ages – from Bucket Club theatre company. Our tale begins with young Grace waiting in A&E, Lego stuck up her nose and her brother hurt following a squabble. When Merlin appears in hospital, weaving a tale of mysterious adventure, Grace is pulled into an epic quest packed with enchanted forests and sparkling underwater realms. In the closing scenes, when Arthur finally pulls that famous sword from the stone, loud gasps ripple through an enchanted young audience. Magic.

Writer Marietta Kirkbride’s contemporary take has lots of smart jokes for the parents to enjoy and a helping of Gawain the Green Knight thrown in for good measure. There are witty nods to today’s political climate, with a sixth-century England languishing without a king and struggling to find a leader with any sort of vision. But the children always come first and the storytelling is consistently brisk, bold and full of heart.

In a collaboration with young British dancers, supported by Oxford’s new Schwarzman Centre, the Memphis dancer tackles US history’s ‘broken promise’ of equality in a performance filled with spark

Way back in 2011 – that’s ancient in internet terms – Memphis street dancer Charles Riley, aka Lil Buck, went viral in an unlikely partnership with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, dancing to Saint-Saëns’ The Swan. Buck’s dance, a style of footwork called jookin, sees him glide across the floor with boneless grace, walking on air. Unlike a lot of hip-hop and street dance (and contemporary dance too), which is heavily rooted to the earth, jookin goes the way of ballet, sidelining gravity.

Buck’s career since has seen him dancing with Madonna, Alicia Keys and Mikhail Baryshnikov; he’s worked with Versace, Spike Lee and Cirque du Soleil. Now his latest collab is with Oxford University, where he was invited to be a visiting fellow at the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, built with a £185m donation from US private equity billionaire and Trump donor Stephen Schwarzman, whose portrait hangs at the entrance of what’s an impressively vast and light space with a concert hall, two theatres, gallery and cinema. It also houses a range of the university’s humanities faculties and the new Institute for Ethics in AI, the idea being that these disciplines might work together and close gaps between academics and artistic practitioners.

Metronome, London
Spitalfields music festival opened, by chance, with this beautifully performed and dramatic revival of baroque cantatas by Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre

With temperatures at Shoreditch Town Hall reaching a sweltering 41 degrees, Spitalfields music festival was forced to cancel the first event of its 50th anniversary season. As a result, this concert of rare baroque cantatas, simply staged and stylishly sung, was the inadvertent festival opener.

Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre was quite a player at the court of Louis XIV. Singled out by the Sun King aged five, she went on to become the first French woman to write an opera, and her works were both published and widely performed. Alongside her keyboard music, she’s best known today for her two sets of biblical cantatas. Musically straightforward, they follow the recitative and aria pattern of the day. What makes them fertile ground from a dramatic perspective, however, is the way the storytelling flips back and forth from third-person narrative to the protagonist – or in one case protagonists – of the tale.

I decided to combine my need to top the leader table with my daily step count – which is how I found myself walking 10 miles a day while reading out sentences in Japanese, German, Spanish and French

Hugh and I were driving from Washington, DC, to the Sea Section, our house on the coast of North Carolina, when I noticed a dot with legs traversing the hem of my untucked shirt. “There’s a tick on me!” I said.

He looked down at my lap. “Well, throw it outside. It’s nothing to get hysterical about.”

Why do scary movies thrill some viewers and send others running for the hills? Our writer gets to the bottom of his fear of the genre – with the assistance of Freud, clinical researchers and his six-year-old self

I am six years old, and I am watching a man turn into a werewolf. The film is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 comedy. I am staring up at our black-and-white TV fixated on the werewolf transformation unfolding in slow motion and I begin to scream so inconsolably that my parents must carry me upstairs to calm me down.

That night was the beginning of my lifelong fear of horror films and of the supernatural, of darkness and of being alone in a house.

The actor dances his insecurities away and wells up at a particular Eric Clapton song. But which double act brings out his inner cockney?

The first song I fell in love with
When I was a little boy, we had a caravan on the Isle of Sheppey, and I remember hearing My Sweet Lord by George Harrison one summer. It’s about searching for God, and I’ve always thought the way it moves from Hallelujah to Hare Krishna is really beautiful.

The first single I bought
Big Time by Rick James from Paul’s Music on London’s Cambridge Heath Road. Even at a young age, I liked my funk. I’ve only been addicted to two things in life – funk and praise.

The director of The Producers hits his century as a uniquely beloved entertainer who embodies his conviction that ‘comedy is the opposite of death’

Mel Brooks’ story is that of the US and Jews and American Jewish comedy. He was born on the kitchen table of a tenement in Brooklyn a century ago in the same month Marilyn Monroe made her own entrance on the opposite coast. The son of European immigrants, Brooks was brought up by his mother after his father died when Melvin was just two years old. He was a small, sickly child and the youngest of four brothers, perhaps an explanation for an almost pathological desire for attention. In the words of his colleague Larry Gelbart: “Mel thought when he got slapped in the ass by the doctor who delivered him that was applause, and he has not stopped performing since.”

In his youth, Brooks’ preferred method of making a noise was playing the drums and he was actually taught the instrument by Buddy Rich. Neither could possibly have known at the time that they would both go on to have seismic effects on the two great American artforms: comedy and jazz. That youth, like so many others, was interrupted by Adolf Hitler. The teenage Brooks joined the army and participated in the Battle of the Bulge. If one is looking to understand the artist’s fearlessness or his utter commitment to mocking Nazis for the remainder of his days, those war years provide ample explanation. It may also explain his assertion that “comedy is the opposite of death”.

A landscape of forbidding peaks west of Bilbao plays host to an improbable world full of wild flowers, animals and resilient cheesemakers

Halfway across the first glacial depression, I leave the footpath to stand on a snow patch, disturbing a spider that runs off across the frozen crystals. A few yards farther along, the mountainside is awash with colour: tiny Alpine flowers alive with bees and crickets in a world surrounded by jagged peaks. A pair of chamois watch from a crag, then clatter off up an almost vertical face. Having stopped walking, I’m cooling down fast and put on a jacket. I am in Spain, I tell myself, during a European heatwave.

When I tear myself away from the wildlife, my hiking group are distant dots on a path that is snaking up a wall of rock. This is the Picos de Europa mountain range in northern Spain, a cluster of peaks rising to more than 2,500m and famed for the steepness of its slopes. I set off in pursuit, catching up with the group as they scramble over a ridge to find an unexpected view: a gun turret from a second world war aircraft carrier that is now a mountain refuge hut. (Cabin Verónica was cut from the USS Pulau in 1961 at a Bilbao breakers’ yard and dragged up here by mule.)

Francis Tolu works at his family’s restaurant in Spain and also competes in pizza acrobatic contests internationally

Francis Tolu is a freestyle pizza champion. For those who don’t know what that is, he uses pizza dough to compete in acrobatic performances. He can make pizza blindfolded; he also throws pizzas in the air and sets them on fire. Among his achievements are the 2026 masters acrobatics title at the World Pizza Games, and four wins at the Pizza world championship.

Then he returns to work, serving customers at Pizzeria Venezia in Alginet, Spain, the restaurant his family has owned for 40 years.

From frozen hot-water bottles to a frizzy hair hack – our fashion team share their wisdom

• The best summer sandals for men and women

On a typical day in high summer you’ll come across two types of people: those who suffer and those who revel. Perhaps you’re a bit of both – you love beaches, but hate hay fever. Or perhaps you burn in the sun, but live for the longer nights sipping pink gin outside.

Believe it or not, there are elements of summer that even the Guardian’s fashion desk struggles with, which is why we’ve compiled this summer survival guide.

Our expert put in the hard yards to find the top coolers to keep your wine crisp, whether you’re hosting, picnicking or just want to plonk your bottle in something stylish

• The best no- and low-alcohol wines for when you’re off the booze

I’ll admit to being a bit of a wine cooler sceptic – at home, at least. Don’t get me wrong: I love a crisp, cool glass as much as the next summer rosé guzzler. The temperature at which we serve wine is important, but I’m wary of any inessential gadgetry that threatens to take up prime real estate in my already cluttered kitchen.

What’s more, wine coolers are misleadingly named. In most cases, they don’t actually cool a bottle of wine – ie, bring down its temperature – but maintain it. This is the point of one on a restaurant table; for those who order a bottle (admittedly a dying breed), it can be kept at a relatively consistent temperature for the duration of their meal. For everyday drinking at home indoors, however, there isn’t much need for a cooler – we can keep returning the bottle to the fridge in between pours. But as picnic season approaches, coolers can come into their own. No one wants to ruin the romance of alfresco dining with warm wine. And bringing a wine cooler to a picnic definitely shows you mean business.

Best wine cooler for hosting and overall:
Peugeot Equilibreur

Best wine cooler for a picnic:
Le Creuset sleeve

As temperatures soar across the UK, chill your space – and avoid energy-guzzling aircon – with our pick of the best fans, from tower to desk to bladeless

• The best portable neck and handheld fans
• Dyson HushJet Mini Cool fan review

Our world is getting hotter. Summer heatwaves are so frequent, they’re stretching the bounds of what we think of as summer. Hot-and-bothered home working and sweaty, sleepless nights are now alarmingly common.

Get a good fan and you can dodge the temptation of air conditioning. Aircon is incredibly effective, but it uses a lot of electricity … and burning fossil fuels is how we got into this mess in the first place. Save money and carbon by opting for a great fan instead.

Best quiet fan for the bedroom and best overall:
AirCraft Lume – preorder now for delivery early July, or consider the cordless version (£179) or table fan (£129) for faster delivery

Best budget fan and best desk fan:
Devola desk fan – currently out of stock

Whether your patch is big or small, tackle long grass and tricky corners with our tester’s pick of the top cordless and corded models. Plus, how to protect wildlife when trimming

• How to create a more eco-friendly lawn

You can mow your lawn as little or as often as you like, but it won’t look truly perfect until you’ve neatened up the edges. As with most garden tasks, you can do this manually, using a decent pair of edging shears – or, if you’re not a fan of manual labour, you can use a grass trimmer instead.

Rather than traditional cutting blades, grass trimmers usually use one or two lengths of nylon string about 1.6mm thick. A motor spins this so fast that it stiffens and can shear through light vegetation such as grass and weeds.

Best grass trimmer overall:
Stihl FSA 50

Best budget grass trimmer:
Mac Allister MCI1198GGT

Grains are such a staple of Lebanese cooking that you could devote an entire book to them. Here are two shining examples: a tabbüleh-style southern dish and a Sunni speciality for dessert

If bread is the main staple of Lebanese cooking, grains and legumes are next, and there is hardly a meal without one or the other. Bulgur wheat is the preferred grain, especially for rural communities of all confessions; in the old days, they grew their own wheat to make it, harvesting, threshing and parboiling the wheat before drying it in the sun and sending it to the local mill to be ground into fine and coarse grades to last the household until the next harvest. In fact, given the sheer number of recipes across the country, I could have easily devoted a whole book to Lebanese recipes for grains alone.

It may have only just opened, but this restaurant has about it the feel of a family taverna that’s already been here for about 62 years

There’s a brand new Greek-Cypriot taverna in Covent Garden, London, that’s offering taramasalata, souvlaki, spanakopita, kleftiko, kaimaki ice-cream and all the rest. Yet Zylia, which is pale, humbly furnished and deliberately homespun in its styling, somehow has about it the feel of a family taverna that’s been here for about 62 years. You know the sort: up a cobbled back street, with a beleaguered 98-year-old yiayia doing the dishes, a one-eared dog on the step waiting for lamb titbits, and a toilet that’s essentially a cleaning supplies cupboard, as well as home to 200 tins of olives.

Zylia has none of those things, by the way, and its feel is more down to clever interior design mixed with a thoughtful, authentic menu. Then again, you’d expect clever things from chef Nick Molyviatis and hospitality veteran Barry Karacostas. You might link Molyviatis more with Thai food, both at Kiln, where he used to be head chef, and the tarted-up, much-hallowed second rendition of Singburi, which relocated to Shoreditch last year; Karacostas, meanwhile, has recently been working with Arcade, a growing chain of London-based food halls. This is where things get doubly interesting, because Zylia is considered part of the new Covent Garden Arcade, except that, unusually, it has its own front door, its own brick walls, its own website and its own identity. It’s definitely part of Arcade. But it isn’t. Step out of Zylia and into Arcade to spend a penny, and you may as well be walking from a sun-battered Kefalonian alleyway into a Hitchcockian hotel lobby of rich woods, lacquered finishes and oxblood leather banquettes.

This Arcade/Zylia venture is testament to the wibbly-wobbly world of modern hospitality. Ten years ago, the likes of Dalston’s Street Feast and a thousand nationwide copycat street-food concepts told us that bricks-and-mortar dining was old hat. What we wanted, they insisted, was open-plan, wooden benches, ad-hoc ordering, confused queues, no servers; apparently, we wanted a bun fight over bao with all involved clutching buzzers. Now, in 2026, not only do chic, sexy food halls such as Arcade feel more formal and glossy than, say, The Ivy, they’re even hatching separate spaces on their sidelines with brick partitions and individual personalities. For the sake of argument, let’s call these annexes “restaurants”.

Interpretations of Greece’s most popular street food abound, but whose version of these smoky, juicy skewers is the best?

I’m aware that, fittingly, I’m dancing across hot coals by tackling souvlaki: in her book Taverna, Georgina Hayden devotes an entire page to the subtle differences between Greek and Cypriot barbecued meat kebabs (souvla, souvlaki, kalamaki, kontosouvli … the list goes on), yet, as Carolina Doriti observes in her beginner’s guide, “the beauty of souvlaki, Greece’s most popular street food, is its simplicity”. Though I’d steer you elsewhere for a more definitive explanation of what qualifies in different places, the name comes from the word souvla, or “skewer”; souvlaki is the diminutive, and it’s usually cooked on small skewers rather than on a big spit. That’s all you need to know, because – although what’s on there, how it’s seasoned and what accompanies it changes according to region and season – the ancient pleasure of smoky, juicy, grilled meat (as featured in the Iliad!) or indeed vegetables, remains the same wherever you go.

Forget vinaigrette: if you really want to make the most of these leaves, apply some heat, herbs or double cream and bacon

When wild lettuce plants were first domesticated in the Caucasus 6,000 years ago, the crop was the seed, which could be pressed into oil. As cultivated plants migrated west through Egypt into Europe, the Greeks and Romans transformed them into salad leaves.

There are now hundreds of commercially grown varieties of lettuce, available all year round. But if you do grow them, you’ll probably be in the midst of your annual glut right now. And while lettuce is not difficult to give away – nobody hates it – in my experience it doesn’t make for a very exciting present.

Graham and Josephine were friends for years, but after their spouses died they discovered a mutual attraction – and a fondness for adventurous sex

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

Our sexual preferences cover everything from vanilla to being tied up and spanked

You say you don’t put him under pressure, but he seems to feel it. Could you be overcompensating for your initial reluctance to have children?

My husband and I have one son, in his late 20s. We’ve always been devoted to him, keep in touch on a weekly basis and see him about once a month (he has a busy job and has recently started a new relationship, which seems to be making him very happy).

I never really wanted children, possibly due to my traumatic childhood: an absent, mentally ill father; and a single, emotionally imbalanced mother who made me the centre of her life. When my husband talked about having children, I gave it careful consideration and decided in the end to give it a go. Once our son was born, I embraced motherhood fully. We both adore him.

Philip, 74, an antiquarian book dealer, meets Carol, 66, who is retired

What were you hoping for?
Reciprocated love at first sight (I don’t ask for much in this life). To meet a kindred spirit who might even become a partner.

First Liza Shaw and Rohan were housemates, then they had a casual relationship. But a protest at Woomera would deepen their emotional connection

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

I met Rohan in 1998 in Lismore, New South Wales, where we were both going to university. Before that, I’d noticed him around town in his sarong and peacock feather earrings. He was distinctive and slightly dandyish, sometimes wearing dresses on campus. I had another partner at the time but our mutual friend introduced us, and Rohan and I became housemates.

We bonded living together and hosting dinner parties, where we’d talk about life and politics well into the night. I was intrigued by his friends. One time Rohan invited a member of the Black Panthers to come and stay at our house.

A niche type of fraud is lucrative enough for criminals to set up fake websites with dodgy software to harvest your data

After holding them for a few years, you have decided it is time to cash in your cryptocurrency holdings. The problem is, it is so long since you set up the digital wallet which manages them on your laptop, you have forgotten the lengthy access code.

Stressed at the thought of losing thousands of pounds, you search and download a program which promises to recover the 24-word “seed phrase” which gives you access to your cypto assets.

A pair of debenture tickets changed hands this week for a sum far beyond the means of ordinary tennis fans

Like many of us, Marcos Ortega enters the Wimbledon public ticket ballot every year in the hope of seeing some championship tennis. In seven straight years of trying, however, he has never got lucky. So he was delighted – initially, at least – to learn there was a way to secure a ticket for every game played on Centre Court.

But Ortega’s hopeful delight quickly turned to anger when he discovered that it would cost him £293,000.

From a London tower near reservoirs to a Plymouth townhouse close to a historic saltwater lido

Changes due to take effect next year for stocks and shares Isas have become clearer, prompting concern

The way you can invest in Isas will change next April, and for under-65s that will mean a reduced limit on the amount of money that can be saved tax-free in a cash Isa.

This week, the new rules became clearer, prompting concern among investors that they may have to pay tax on some of their holdings.

The hotter it gets, the faster our bodies lose water. Obviously, we need to replace it – but is anything better than plain H₂O? And does timing matter? Here’s what the science says

Hydration is important. In temperatures like those we’re increasingly seeing in much of the world, sweating can be the only way for our bodies to cool down, and our thirst isn’t always the best indicator of how much water we’ve lost or need. The consequences of not being sufficiently hydrated as temperatures creep towards the 40s can be severe, and can kick in much faster than most people realise. The good news is that remembering to drink plenty of water at regular intervals throughout the day will be enough for most people to avoid the worst. But if you’d like to understand why dehydration is so dangerous, whether you really need extra electrolytes, or if a cup of tea really can cool you down, read on.

To start with, it’s helpful to understand that our bodies are producing heat – and therefore losing water – all the time. “All the cells in our body are constantly using fuel for energy for various different processes, whether that’s movement or just staying alive,” says Dr Lewis James, a lecturer in sport, exercise and health sciences at Loughborough University. “About 75 to 80% of the energy that we use appears as heat.” If we didn’t have any way of dissipating this heat, then even lying on the couch would see your body temperature rise about 1.3C in a single hour (already enough to make you noticeably feverish) – but of course, we do. Normally, we lose a decent amount of heat through a combination of convection and radiation: the blood vessels in our skin dilate, allowing the blood to be cooled by the outside air. The problem is that when the external temperature goes up, this process becomes less effective and eventually stops working altogether. At this point, our main way of losing heat is through sweating: our bodies produce tiny droplets of warm water mixed with trace minerals, which (usually) evaporate on contact with the air, drawing heat away from the skin in the process. And as we rely more on sweating, it’s increasingly important to replace the fluids our bodies are losing.

Those partial to a pint may be relieved to know a modest of amount of weak beer may actually be beneficial

• European heatwave live – latest updates

As Europe endures a record-breaking heatwave, countries are taking steps to keep people safe and prevent health services from becoming overstretched. Parisians face a temporary ban on drinking alcohol in public to reduce the pressure on the hospitals after a four-fold rise in cardiac arrests in a 24-hour period.

We look at why drinking alcohol can be dangerous in a heatwave.

Mobility can’t be tracked on a leaderboard, but it can help you feel better and make daily tasks easier

Fitness is often measured through numbers: how much weight a person can lift, or how fast or far they can run. But one important metric is harder to quantify: mobility.

Mobility gets overlooked, because the relevant exercises do not “have the instant visual appeal of traditional workouts”, says Tyler McDonald, certified personal trainer and senior brand manager for the National Academy of Sports Medicine.

How to start meditating

How to start weightlifting

How to start budgeting

How to start running

90/90 hip switches: Sit on the floor with the front leg bent at a 90-degree angle (thigh out in front of you and calf perpendicular to you) and the back leg bent at a 90-degree angle (thigh out to the side, calf roughly parallel to you). Slowly rotate your knees to the opposite side without lifting your feet off the floor. “This is fantastic for opening tight hips,” McDonald says.

Cat-cow stretch. With your hands and knees on the ground, arch your back towards the ceiling, dropping your head between your arms. Then, slowly drop your back and raise your head and glutes towards the ceiling. This helps with spine mobility.

World’s greatest stretch. Yes, this stretch has quite the name, but for good reason. Start in a plank. Bring the right leg forward into a low lunge position. Stretch the right arm overhead towards the ceiling, twisting the upper body. Then, bring the right hand behind the head and attempt to touch the ground with the right elbow. “It hits your hips, hamstrings and upper back all at once, making it incredibly efficient,” says McDonald.

Callum Turner wore one for three-day wedding to Dua Lipa, but the perennial favourite has never really gone away

If Dua Lipa’s Chanel wedding dress was among the most anticipated fashion moments this summer, her new husband Callum Turner’s wardrobe is proving just as influential. But forget the bespoke Louis Vuitton morning suit – it’s all about his polo shirts, which he wore in Palermo during the couple’s lengthy nuptials this month.

Turner’s polo of choice is a £75 terrycloth version by the French brand Octobre Editions, but he is far from the first to champion the preppy top that spans celebrity, sport and politics alike. During England’s first game at the World Cup against Croatia, the team’s manager, Thomas Tuchel, wore a merino wool polo shirt from Marks & Spencer. Pundits watching World Cup games – including Gary Neville and Patrick Vieira – were also wearing polos. For their post-match assessment of the Netherlands v Japan match, Roy Keane, Ange Postecoglou and Neville each wore a polo shirt in mint green, cream and beige respectively. And just last weekend, Andy Burnham appeared shortly after his Makerfield byelection win wearing a blue polo shirt with jeans and Birkenstocks.

As Andy Burnham stuck to his ‘cool dad’ look while the UK sweltered, many in the Paris fashion pack did the same

For many, dressing for an extreme heatwave means wearing as little as possible. But for some men, not even record-breaking temperatures can dissuade them from pulling on their favourite pair of jeans.

This week as temperatures in the UK rose sharply on the back of the climate crisis, Andy Burnham stuck to his tried and tested “cool dad” combination of dark jeans with a dark blue (not black as he pointed out to Kemi Badenoch) T-shirt as he made his way to London to be sworn in as MP for Makerfield.

Brollies are becoming year-round must-haves, as designers from Burberry to Blunt cater to people ducking out of the sun

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A bottle of water and a handheld fan are regularly deployed to keep cool while out and about in hot weather. With temperatures reaching record levels for June, though, a new heatwave accessory has emerged: the sunbrella.

On high streets around the country, people wielding umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun have become a common sight. On Thursday, as the Austrian Grand Prix declared a heat hazard, Lewis Hamilton was spotted in the paddock holding a Ferrari red umbrella that matched his race suit. And they’re popping up on catwalks, too. At the Dior show during Paris fashion week on Wednesday, guests including the actors James Marsden and Mike Faist were handed large cream umbrellas to help ease their discomfort as temperatures hit 38C.

Influential designer of men’s clothes who was inspired by workwear, military kit and expeditionary gear

“I’m like a big giant sieve of history and I just turn it into the clothes,” said Nigel Cabourn of the inspiration for his decades of quietly influential designs for men’s clothes. To Cabourn, who has died aged 76, history meant war – his grandfather’s memories of trenches in the first world war, his father’s stories of Burma in the second, even his own awareness of the US M65 field jacket and other uniform novelties of the Vietnam war, as paired with jeans by students and protesters post-1968.

He was passionate about mountaineering and exploring too, especially Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Everest, and the Antarctic expeditions of Shackleton and Scott. He was also a football fan, thrilled sartorially by the dark-clad figure of Lev Yashin in goal for the Soviet Union in the 1958 World Cup.

These traditional restaurants are the culinary backbone of this gastronomic capital, but finding the real deal means tackling offal – and red wine – for breakfast

I first went to a bouchon as a 20-year-old Erasmus student. I’d accidentally ended up spending a semester of my year abroad in the Auvergne countryside, which meant every weekend I’d thumb a ride to the nearest big city – Lyon. I didn’t know much about Lyon, except that it was famous for its food – in particular the hearty fare served up at these traditional restaurants with their red gingham tablecloths and chalkboard menus. So when I found myself eating stringy, overpriced beef muscle that cost more than my night at a hostel, I wondered what the hype was about.

But after nearly five years living in the city, I’ve now learned how to avoid the tourist traps (which largely line Vieux Lyon between souvenir shops selling fridge magnets and sweet shops). Historically, most bouchons weren’t in Lyon’s old town anyway, writes Yves Rouèche in Histoire(s) De La Gastronomie Lyonnaise, but in the neighbourhoods of Vaise, Croix-Rousse and La Guillotière, the gateways to the city in the Renaissance period where merchants and travellers stopped for the night.

From cliffside views of Lake Garda to post-hike saunas in Sweden, you share your most memorable walking trips

• Tell us about a cooler European coast – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

If you have a head for heights, then you can “walk with the gods” on the Sentiero degli Dei. It’s cut into the vertiginous hillside high above the Amalfi coast, offering heavenly views all the way to Capri and beyond. Ten breathtaking kilometres later, you’ll rejoin the earthly hordes of Instagrammers in the undeniably beautiful but crowded Positano. A super-convenient combined bus and ferry ticket from Travelmar takes you from any of the coastal towns to the start of the walk, in the lovely hamlet of Bomerano, in Agerola, and from Positano back to your base.
Brian

With Cambridge South about to welcome its first passengers, it’s an ideal time to explore some of the university city’s lesser-known treasures on foot or by public transport

Flat fields of poppies and ox-eye daisies stretch out to a wide horizon. There are butterflies, vetches, salad burnet. Skylarks sing overhead and a cuckoo calls from the trees near the river. Legend has it that the poet Lord Byron swam here as a Cambridge undergraduate and, 20 years later, Charles Darwin surveyed its beetles. Heading through flowering meadows towards a nature reserve known as Byron’s Pool, I’ve walked a mile from the new £250m Cambridge South station.

Opening to passengers on 28 June, Cambridge South will be the first Great British Railways-branded station. The towering Biomedical Campus next door is Europe’s biggest medical research facility, with about 40,000 visitors a day. The station itself, with its 1,000 cycle-parking spaces, living roof and solar panels, feels like a model for sustainable transport.

This long-distance coastal trek takes in towering rock faces, isolated beaches and tasty pitstops

The fluorescent green gaiters seemed a ridiculous suggestion, but prove a godsend as we plod across the sand. “I bet you’re glad I told you to get a pair of these bad boys now, aren’t you?” my friend Luke jokes. We’re marching across a wide, crescent-shaped, honeyed beach. The sun is high in the sky and slivers of light flicker through a thick sea fog, as 6ft waves crash and fizz, their white foam licking the towering limestone cliffs.

I’m in Portugal, in the west Algarve, with two friends, hiking part of the Rota Vicentina, or Fishermen’s Trail, a 140-mile (226km) trek that runs from Lagos to São Torpes in Alentejo. Traversing cliffs that lead to wild, remote beaches like this one is part of the trail’s calling card. As the name suggests, it was originally carved out by fishers to reach otherwise inaccessible fishing spots along the Atlantic Ocean. Now it’s part of the Rota Vicentina, a hiking and cycling route spanning 466 miles across Portugal.

Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: With summer’s great silence coming, we must enjoy the birdsong while we can – as I have done with my local conifer crooner

I have two summer earworms right now. The first is O Sole Mio, the jingle of our local ice-cream van, the second is a particular phrase that our resident blackbird keeps singing. Four notes, moving down the scale but ending slightly on the minor: that’s his party piece, delivered after a jazzy performance that includes dozens of other motifs. He likes to bellow it from the tallest tip of the conifer tree that sways over the road, and I can’t stop whistling it.

He will have developed this refrain over years, and like all musicians, he will have started off shakily. If I didn’t notice it last season, it was probably because he was still a shy apprentice, his song unfinished as he practised quietly to work out his preferred combination of notes.

It’s tempting to treat overwhelm with clever fixes – but that might be part of the problem

According to my Instagram feed, I am not doing enough. Not spending enough, not saying enough, not taking enough care. I feel more sure of this than anything. And it’s bringing out an irrationality I’m not proud of: one afternoon, in between screengrabs of masked men snatching civilians from their homes, videos of wellness influencers evangelising “anti-trauma” hip stretches, and carousels of political action items disguised as catchy memes, I am served a targeted ad for a “Don’t Talk to Me About AI or I’ll Kill Myself” crochet pattern; and even though I have never crocheted anything in my life, I find myself looking up the materials to get started … on Etsy to avoid supporting any big, Maga-oriented corporations.

It’s overwhelming, this general pressure, palpable not only on social media but throughout the larger culture: today’s most urgent issues, from technological end times to tight hips, can only be solved by squeezing as much into the day as humanly possible.

A psychotherapist and a town councillor might not see eye to eye on a citizens’ assembly, but did one of them have a change of heart about the monarchy?

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

Gavin, 70, Stroud

Occupation Retired, and a town councillor. Previously, he was an industrial chemist, a business systems analyst, and a debt specialist for Citizens Advice

Aiden is an unforgettable young caregiver in Walthamstow, east London, who has been looking after his mum for over half his life. Every few weeks, Aiden and other young carers get a rare night off thanks to tenacious council worker Satvinder, who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough. This film joins them as they reclaim a few hours of their teenage lives back.

Is Mum OK? is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them. There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class.

The mayor hopes to ‘write a new chapter in the party’s history’ – and recent democratic socialist wins prove he might be able to do it

In the back yard of a Brooklyn bar, beneath strung-up lightbulbs and swaths of fabric that swooped like great sails, an ecstatic crowd greeted Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, and his victorious ally, Brad Lander. These Democrats also had a withering verdict on their own party establishment.

“To me, centrists can go fuck themselves,” said Léa Zimmerman, 34. “They’re fucking useless, they don’t stand for anything, and if they do stand on something, it’s pathetic. I’m done with pathetic, performative people.”

One of the leading figures in the UK motor industry who tried to turn British Leyland around and later became managing director of Peugeot Talbot in Coventry

One of the heroes of the British motor industry in the late 20th century, Sir Geoffrey Whalen, who has died aged 90, was bloodied in the interminable, but ultimately futile, battle to make British Leyland succeed, yet his achievement was to keep mass-market car manufacturing alive in Coventry for an extra 20 years from the time he became managing director of Peugeot UK in 1984.

Having started out in industrial relations for the National Coal Board in Scotland, Whalen was 30 before he moved to be divisional personnel manager for AC Delco, the components arm of General Motors in Dunstable, Bedfordshire.

Draft resolution seeks to shield board members and security forces from potential prosecution for work in Gaza

The UN-sanctioned Board of Peace announced by Donald Trump earlier this year to rule Gaza is planning a sweeping grant of legal immunity for itself, according to a draft of the resolution obtained by the Guardian. The draft language would also let the organization obtain public property in Gaza “free of charge”.

The four-page resolution, labeled “sensitive but unclassified”, extends broad protections to every member of the Board of Peace and its administrative affiliate, the office of the high representative (OHR), as well as to the Palestinian technocrats, international military forces and nonresident contractors lined up to perform work in Gaza. It defines legal processes from which they would have immunity as “any arrest, detention or legal proceedings in the courts or other entities in Gaza”.

We would like to hear from Cape Verdeans in the UK and across the globe on the team’s progress in the tournament

Cape Verde is enjoying a fairytale World Cup, with their performance becoming the story of the tournament.

There was the shock 0-0 draw with Spain in their tournament debut. Then on Sunday, there was another when they drew 2-2 with two-time champions Uruguay in Miami. After drawing 0-0 with Saudi Arabia in Houston, they have reached the round of 32.

We’d like to hear from people in the UK about their experiences of trying to buy or sell a flat in recent months. Have there been any issues?

Getting on the property ladder is an achievement in Britain but for some flat-owners the home-ownership dream has turned sour.

High service charges, fire safety issues, and onerous leasehold conditions are among the issues that have affected flat valuations over the past decade. There are reports of owners, particularly in London, currently selling at a loss.

Our wildlife series Young Country Diary is looking for articles written by children, about their summer encounters with nature

Once again, the Young Country Diary series is open for submissions! Every three months we ask you to send us an article written by a child aged 8-14.

The article needs to be about a recent encounter they’ve had with nature – whether it’s a nesting bird, a beetle on the move, a field full of flowers.

How did you cope? What do you remember of that period of hot weather? Tell us and share your pictures

The record temperature for June set in Hampshire in 1976 is expected to be surpassed during this current UK heatwave.

The highest June temperature on record of 35.6C was set on 29 June 1957 in London. This was then equalled on 28 June 1976 in Southampton during that year’s heatwave.

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For most teenagers, the last day of school is about summer, freedom and new beginnings. At a military school in western Ukraine, it marks the end of years spent living, studying and training together – and, for many, the first step towards a career in the armed forces at a time of war

The school in western Ukraine is home to about 400 cadets from across the country. On paper, it resembles any other high school, where students study mathematics, physics, English and history before taking the same national exams as their peers. But the daily life for these cadets is different.

As cadets wait to march out for the graduation parade, one straightens her classmate’s collar