Humans have been secretly abusing aliens for almost 80 years in this big-hearted thriller starring Josh O’Connor as a worried whistleblower and a never-more-magnetic Emily Blunt as a weather forecaster channelling UFO chat

The old school is the new school in this very enjoyable and entirely ridiculous space-alien conspiracy adventure from screenwriter David Koepp and director Steven Spielberg; it is cheerfully mischievous and deadly serious in equal measure. It has something of Hitchcock from North By Northwest, Christopher Nolan from Inception and Spielberg from pretty much every other movie he’s ever made. Spielberg incidentally appears in the trailer for this film, disclosing that, hand-on-heart, he really believes in its contents, in the way I imagine CS Lewis believed in Aslan and the secret Narnian sovereignty of Peter and Susan.

Only Spielberg could get away with taking two of the world’s best-known hoaxes – Roswell and crop circles – and treating them with judicious deadpan respect. With heartfelt idealism, Spielberg also asks us to believe that should the ultimate truth come out, people everywhere would be terribly upset at the way captured aliens have been vivisected. (I suspect that would be very far down the list of our concerns.)

When politicians talk ‘common sense’ it’s time to worry; when the Tory leader does, it’s time to be doubly vigilant

You know how it is. You’re a middle class, straight white man in his 60s in A&E. Possibly the most disadvantaged person in the entire country. You complain of chest pains. In the adjoining triage queue there is a black woman with what looks like a broken toe. You know what happens next. The black woman is seen within minutes. You have a cardiac arrest on the waiting room floor.

Said no one ever. There may be times when there simply aren’t enough staff in the A&E department. There may also be times when a doctor under pressure fails to make the right diagnosis. But no one for a minute believes they are being deliberately kept waiting any longer than necessary. The founding principle of the NHS is predicated on patients being treated according to the severity of their condition.

Whether it’s water-saving showerheads or natural sponges, these easy swaps cut waste and make your bathroom a little kinder to the planet

• The best refillable beauty products for a sustainable routine

As a sustainability journalist, I’ve often despaired at how unsustainable our bathrooms are – from water use to plastic bottles to chemical-heavy cleaners. However, there are ways to reduce their carbon footprint. As water becomes increasingly precious, hacks for our loos that cap its usage are useful, as are smart showerheads that cut down on water, particularly as baths these days feel like a guilty indulgence.

Swap plastic-packaged and chemical-loaded products, such as bleach and multipurpose sprays, for eco-friendly ones, and buy secondhand good-as-new fixtures. From bamboo loo roll to solid shampoo bars, here are my tips for a more planet-friendly bathroom.

Sabrina Carpenter, a car crash, a urinal, Kate Moss and, of course, those perplexing green lasers: Confessions II has it all. Let’s make some sense of it …

Madonna’s new video is called Confessions II because it’s the follow-up to her album Confessions on a Dance Floor, released in 2005. Nope, wrong: that was not more than 20 years ago. That was last week. Years are for little people. Madonna can hold back the passage of time with the power of her imagination, and that has always been true. But what, exactly, in a 10-minute video that brought the house down at the Tribeca festival and has since been watched more than a million times on YouTube, is Madonna trying to say? It feels a bit rude to ask, like asking Jackson Pollock what all the squiggly lines mean. So think of it as a homage to the woman who invented rudeness.

The president’s new Craposseum is the perfect venue for Vance, Hegseth and others to battle for favour. Fight, fight, fight indeed

On behalf of the US administration, the American embassy in London has published a notice advising the UK government not to ban social media for the under-16s. Thanks, but … we didn’t ask? Or perhaps that’s uncharitable. It’s actually a privilege to take child protection lectures from a country where the leading cause of death in children and adolescents is gunshot wounds. Are we allowed to suggest a surprisingly obvious way to help with that grimly perennial problem – or is international advice just a one-way street?

Either way, lectures from Donald Trump’s administration have not been in short supply in recent days, with the US defence secretary deciding that a D-day commemoration address was a seemly moment to dump all over Europe. It’s always painful to be reminded of Pete Hegseth, with his fundamentalist “body art” and Mr Whippy hair – primarily because it dilutes the purity of one’s loathing for JD Vance. (Who, it won’t have escaped you, was also on the international lecture circuit last week.) But standing at the podium in Normandy, Hegseth had just phoned in some stuff about how wars are won, when he got to the needle-scratch subject-change you sensed he’d made the transatlantic journey for. “Sadly,” began this here-it-comes moment, “today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive.”

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Once mocked internationally, the UK became a gastronomic hotspot in recent decades – London was hailed as the foodie capital of the world. Now many Michelin-starred restaurants have closed and the rot is spreading

It’s 9am on a weekday morning and although I’ve just finished my porridge, the chef Richard Wilkins is making my mouth water. “My signature dish is soft Scottish langoustines wrapped in very thin, crispy pastry, served with Japanese sushi rice and a langoustine bisque.”

His other specialities include turbot in a spinach and champagne sauce, buttery wagyu steak with English peas, and raspberry millefeuille. Sadly, I won’t be able to sample any of them and neither will anyone else. At the end of April, Wilkins took the painful decision to close his west London Michelin-listed Restaurant 104 after seven years.

Crowds gather at sites across Belfast after Sudanese man charged for attempted murder

• Full report: Man seriously injured in Belfast stabbing Starmer describes as ‘sickening’

Badenoch said, after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, it was right that people wanted to ensure this did not happen again.

It led to the Macpherson report, she said.

[It] wanted to put right what went wrong with policing in the 1990s.

However, in attempting to do so, it also enshrined a principle which I believe is wrong that a racist incident is racist if it is perceived as racist by the victim or any other person.

Equality law, properly designed, should protect us all in the same way. It should be a shield, not a sword.

It should protect people from discrimination. It should protect people from being treated differently because of their race, sex, religion, sexuality, disability or age.

Trump earlier said that US ‘must’ respond to Iranian downing of an American military helicopter

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are close allies with a deeply complicated and often strained relationship that has shown signs of fracturing over recent days. The Guardian’s senior international correspondent, Julian Borger, has looked into how the two leader’s diverging political priorities are undermining ceasefire negotiations. Here is an extract from his analysis piece:

Trump and Netanyahu went to war together against Iran on 28 February but fell out of step within days, as soon as it was clear that the quick victory and regime change promised by the Israelis was unlikely to materialise. From then on, their interests have increasingly diverged.

Once Iran closed the strait of Hormuz, the spike in the oil price and the interruption in the flow of globally traded chemical products became a political threat to Trump. Despite Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, Democrats have a plausible shot at capturing at least one chamber of Congress in November elections, undermining his authority. More immediately, the president would clearly prefer to steer clear of global distractions while he hosts football’s World Cup.

Investigation alleges former editor-in-chief of Sport Newspapers introduced woman to David Sullivan, who is accused of sexually exploitative behaviour

The BBC presenter Tony Livesey is to “step back” from his radio show after allegations were raised about his previous career as the editor-in-chief of David Sullivan’s Sport Newspapers.

The BBC said Livesey, 62, would be stepping away from presenting his late-night 5 Live show for “a short time” while the corporation considers the issues raised by a Panorama investigation, which accused Sullivan, a billionaire and co-owner of West Ham United, of sexually exploitative and predatory behaviour towards women over several decades.

Leon O’Leary threw a smoke grenade and Connor Bishop a traffic cone at officers during disturbance in Southampton

Two men who threw a smoke grenade and traffic cone at police during the violence in Southampton that followed the sentencing of Henry Nowak’s killer have been jailed.

Leon O’Leary, 41, from Basingstoke, Hampshire, was sentenced to three years and one month after throwing a smoke grenade at officers.

David Stroud grabbed a woman’s hair and asked if he could kiss her two days after legislation took effect

A train passenger has become the first person to be sentenced under a new harassment law after a prosecution brought by the British Transport Police (BTP).

David Stroud, 44, grabbed a woman’s hair and asked her “can I kiss you?” on a rail journey to London on 3 April, two days after the new legislation came into force banning harassment motivated by a person’s sex.

US embassy came out against UK’s proposed under-16 social media ban, which would affect American firms

White House displeasure over the prospect of an under-16 social media ban will not deter the UK from cracking down on tech platforms, the British government has said.

The technology secretary, Liz Kendall, told the Guardian she was not concerned “in the slightest” by the Trump administration’s intervention in the debate over restrictions, after the US embassy in London posted a notice warning against a ban.

Activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, shared video of his meeting with Errol Musk

Tommy Robinson has travelled to Russia, where he has met Elon Musk’s father, Errol, in a Moscow hotel.

Robinson – who has been issuing calls for his supporters to take to the streets across the UK over a bloody knife attack in Belfast – shared video of his meeting with Musk, whose son has been a vocal supporter of Robinson, on Monday.

• England 3-0 Ukraine

• Carter 14, Stanway 37, Mead 67

England had to settle for a place in the World Cup playoffs despite cruising to a 3-0 victory against Ukraine, as Spain’s 6-1 win in Iceland forced England to finish in second spot.

It is the first time that England have failed to top their World Cup qualifying group for nearly 25 years, since missing out on a place at the 2003 World Cup, back when the major tournament finals only included 16 nations overall. Being involved in the playoff this time around is not as concerning as it might initially sound – a revamp of the format has meant that only four European sides will qualify automatically, down from nine automatic qualifiers four years ago.

Luca Parmitano to pilot all-male crew of four paving way for planned first human landing on Artemis IV in 2028

Jared Isaacman, the Nasa administrator, hailed the creation of “Earth’s first starfleet” on Tuesday as he revealed the Artemis III crew and details of the next stages of the space agency’s project to return humans to the moon.

An Italian astronaut, Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency (ESA), will be the pilot of the planned two-week mission to lower Earth orbit next year that will test lunar landers from private companies Blue Origin and SpaceX.

The rapid spread of footage shows how social media is pivotal in enabling far-right agitators to mobilise internationally

Filmed at about 10.30pm on Monday night on a Belfast street, bystanders captured the moment when a man, believed to be a Sudanese asylum seeker, wielded a knife over another man he had pinned to the ground.

By Tuesday, the clip had become the latest transnational “trigger event” – in the mould of the Southport killings and the case of the murdered 18-year-old student Henry Nowak – as far-right activists from Britain and beyond seized on it.

Kemi Badenoch has vowed to reform the Equality Act in what is viewed as an attempt to win back support from Reform voters.

The Conservative leader, who also served as equalities minister from 2020 to 2022, wants to scrap the public sector equality duty – a legal requirement that forces public institutions to to actively consider how their decisions affect equality.

Nosheen Iqbal speaks to community affairs correspondent Aamna Mohdin

In a wide-ranging interview, an upbeat Ukrainian president also discusses Donald Trump, King Charles, and how Kyiv is prepared to share its experience of drone warfare with the west

Sitting down with the Guardian in London, Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems cheerful. More than four years after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, he believes Europe’s biggest war since 1945 appears to be slowly turning in Ukraine’s favour. The military situation is the most promising it has been for Kyiv for two and a half years, Zelenskyy says. “We can’t say Russia is losing this war. But we can say they are losing the initiative each day, day by day,” he insists.

Over the past week the Kremlin has suffered a series of setbacks. Long-range Ukrainian drones have hit Putin’s home city of St Petersburg, setting fire to oil terminals and sending smoke billowing above the skyline. Similar attacks have crippled occupied Crimea. A key supply road is littered with burning lorries and tankers and the peninsula seized by Russia in 2014 is experiencing severe fuel shortages.

Ewan Murray is in North Carolina to report on Scotland’s first World Cup since France 98. He answered your questions on Steve Clarke’s selections, his outsider tip and what Scotland-Haiti’s equivalent of the ‘Frey Bentos trophy’ would be

KTwoDJF asks: I know that there is technically a path to it, but what are the chances USA will be knocked out of the tournament by Iran ?

I have the USA being knocked out by Belgium. But I also have the USA winning their section; the mood in this country does not seem to suggest much confidence at all in that happening.

The line is breaking up here, I can’t hear your question. Apologies.

This bleak investigation into allegations against the former West Ham owner and porn baron David Sullivan is incredibly valuable. It needs to spark widespread change – not least for all the women who’ve come forward

At this point, is it even worth saying that British football has a problem with safeguards around club ownership? In the context of the various sports-washing petrostates, incompetent investment conglomerates, oddball entrepreneurs and publicity hounds who control the purse strings of “the beautiful game” in the UK, West Ham United’s billionaire owner David Sullivan didn’t seem that much of an outlier. By the end of his tenure, West Ham fans largely hated him. But while they had their reasons and many of them were entirely valid, they didn’t always seem connected to either his business dealings or his tabloid past.

Football fans are nothing if not morally flexible. They (perhaps, in the interests of full disclosure, I should say “we”) will overlook almost anything if there’s a trophy or two finding its way into the cabinet. While Sullivan’s recent decision to step down as West Ham’s owner has been widely celebrated in east London, that’s mainly a result of the club’s recent relegation from the Premier League.

This summer’s hottest rivalry no longer belongs to the BBC and ITV, but football’s online and streaming presence

For the first time since the BBC and ITV began sharing World Cup coverage in 1966 their local rivalry will not be the main broadcasting battleground this summer.

In keeping with the first World Cup staged across three countries the expanded 48-team tournament will play out as a global media event, with YouTube and TikTok broadcasting live action for the first time and Netflix streaming a daily TV show, Gary Lineker’s The Rest is Football, with the previously homespun podcast relocating to Times Square for almost six weeks.

What will life be like in 2034? Will kids surf in quarries – or live in the woods since they think Earth is hollow? We meet the film-maker behind Gener8ion, whose dark predictions have a habit of going viral

One of the standout videos of Visions of 2034, a new audio-visual exhibition from film-maker Romain Gavras and musician Benoit Heitz (AKA Surkin), is a blackly comic twist on conspiracy theory culture. In God Hates Space, some young people have defected to the woods somewhere in middle America due to their fringe beliefs, chiefly the idea that the Earth is actually hollow: trenchant stuff in an age when twentysomethings are becoming off-grid libertarian homesteaders, and popular influencers claim that Kendrick Lamar sent “demons through the TV screen” during his Super Bowl half-time performance.

But here’s the rub: God Hates Space, with its creepy-crazy images of fascism and crackpot conspiracy, was made more than six years ago in Ukraine, before the war. Its aesthetic – which Surkin describes as a combination of “confederate” and “Monster energy drink” – is prescient, not referential. “We shoot these videos and sometimes it takes a while for them to get released,” Surkin says. “The future is catching up with us. It gets dumber way quicker than before!”

The bottom of the ocean has barely been explored, but every journey to the deep reveals wondrous new lifeforms. As underwater mining gains momentum, we risk destroying one of the Earth’s last great wildernesses

On 8 March 2014, at 1.20am, Malaysian Airlines flight 370 veered off its scheduled route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. An hour later, military radar spotted the plane heading west over the Andaman Sea. Six or seven hours later, it is presumed to have crashed somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean, one of the least studied bodies of water in the world.

Just how little we knew about this part of the ocean became clear during the subsequent search for the missing aircraft. Before a proper underwater search could even begin, a vast stretch of seafloor had to be mapped. Over the next three years, a team of ships from Australia, China and Malaysia scanned the bottom with a combination of submersible robots and ship-borne sonar. Together, they charted a swath of ocean roughly 1,500 miles long and 150 miles wide, encompassing an area the size of France. The maps produced from these scans revealed a lost world, full of undersea canyons, crevasses, volcanic plateaux and a single, enormous cliff taller than the Swiss Alps. Even the abyssal plains, thought to be some of the flattest areas on the planet, were home to previously uncharted hills.

Booze, laughter and football chants: the British right are relishing what they see as their George Floyd moment

The climate phenomenon is intensifying an already unequal global economy

Players and fans denied visas, the spectre of ICE raids on stadiums, Pete Hegseth’s latest speech ... By the end of this contest, the nature of this US government will be even clearer

Whenever my kids and I are stationary in the same room, within five minutes they will have started talking about football. Every now and then, a name will float out that I recognise – Jude Bellingham, say – but most of the time it lacks the dramatic texture to hold my attention. Everyone is either a genius or an irretrievable loser.

There’s a lot of counting. “Would you watch a play in which everyone was either entirely wise or entirely stupid and the rest of it was mainly a body count?” I ask, trying to wedge myself back into the conversation. They reply: “Hello? Romeo and Juliet?!” then go back to the shortcomings of La Liga, so I go back to looking at my phone.

If you like the idea, but are too ashamed to admit it in the midst of this hot divorcee summer, listen up! There are some very good reasons to get wed

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment something shifts from unfashionable to taboo, but it feels as if we’re there. With a “hot divorcee summer” on the horizon, more than half of single American women believing they’re happier than their spliced sisters, and nearly 70% of college-educated singles pessimistic about finding the right partner, what was once vanilla has become a baked alaska hot take. Even having a boyfriend has been deemed embarrassing, so steel yourselves: this is controversial. I write, dear reader, in praise of marriage.

Wait! Please! Put down your torches and pitchforks for a moment, and hear me out. I’m not advocating for any kind of tradwife nonsense, or unobtainable romcom fantasy. I’m talking normal, ordinary, messy, cosy, frustrating marriage.

One plan would see young workers offered early access to a slice of future pensions. It’s not perfect, but we need bold ideas

While we wait with nail-biting anxiety for the voters of Makerfield to decide the fate of the country, the prospect of renewal at the top provides a fertile time for breeding ideas and confronting great problems. Alan Milburn’s searing analysis of the first generation ever to do worse financially than their parents did at their age opens the door to people with solutions to this crisis. Now is the time to bring them out.

Among the thinktanks, voluntary sector and business organisations coming forward with ideas, this week the Social Market Foundation (SMF) is offering an inventive plan to help ease the growing inequality between those young people gifted some wealth and the majority who have none. We are now in the time of the “great wealth transfer”, with an estimated £5.5tn to be passed down by the baby boomer generation in the UK over the next three decades. My lucky generation had everything for free. Ordinary salaries bought homes easily and property values rocketed to make homeowners wealthy beyond all expectations, even as the UK has gotten relatively poorer compared to other European and North American countries.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Becoming the world’s first trillionaire is only going to supercharge this sense of impunity and bring us one step closer to full-blown oligarchy

“Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about,” Elon Musk wrote in February on Twitter/X, the social network he bought for $44bn. He capped the statement with a sad face emoji.

Alas, Musk’s information is outdated. A 2024 study found a substantial difference in happiness between the wealthy and people who are low income. “A greater feeling of control over life can explain about 75% of the association between money and happiness,” the study’s author noted.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead

Russia’s ‘spring offensive’ is failing and Kyiv’s drones have brought the war to Moscow and other cities. Europe must strengthen Zelenskyy’s hand further

Last week, Vladimir Putin responded with characteristic disdain to an open letter from Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling for face-to-face talks. Declining to mention Ukraine’s president by name at an economic forum in St Petersburg, he said that he saw “no point” in a meeting and insisted that all Russia’s war aims, including the annexation of the entirety of the eastern Donbas region, were on course to be met.

Mr Putin is “in blood stepped in so far” that agreeing to a ceasefire while those messianic goals remain unachieved may seem more politically dangerous than continuing a war which has cost an estimated 500,000 Russian lives. But as a concerted Ukrainian drone attack on St Petersburg the next day vividly illustrated, his confident assertions are increasingly belied by facts on the ground and in the air.

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

A new scheme to support care leavers’ relationships is welcome. But loneliness is one problem among many

It might sound obvious that – as Benjamin Zephaniah wrote – “People will always need people / To make life appealing / And give life some meaning.” But the care system has not always behaved as though relationships are a condition of human flourishing. So it is good to see this simple yet crucial idea reflected in the latest announcement about support for care leavers in England. The broken connections that become a feature of too many young people’s lives are increasingly recognised as a key reason for their later vulnerability.

Some local councils already have support in place for young people who want to reconnect with relatives, trusted adults such as former teachers or social workers, and old friends. Last week the government announced a national version, billed as a Who Do You Think You Are?-style service for care leavers, with an initial budget of £8.4m. The hope is that supporting older teenagers to restore links will reduce the risk of isolation and help them to find their feet. While many care leavers already make a successful transition to independent living, they face disproportionate risks of homelessness, poor mental health, prison and even death.

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

Joseph Hanlon and Derrick Cameron respond to an article by Aditya Chakrabortty about a backward-looking government that remains in Tony Blair’s thrall

Mozambique knows the importance of the zombie Blairites that Aditya Chakrabortty writes about (Zombie Blairites still have British politics in their grip – it’s time to break free, 4 June). In December, the UK trade envoy Calvin Bailey MP was in Mozambique to sign an agreement for £400,000 in UK government funding for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. It will deliver “specialised technical assistance” to support the development of the Mphanda Nkuwa dam and hydropower project.

The dam is just downstream from the Cahora Bassa dam, one of the largest in Africa, and successfully run by a Mozambican state company. Mozambique already has the technical capacity, but it knows that in an era of decreasing aid, it needs to keep the zombie Blairites on side. Especially when the UK government pays.
Joseph Hanlon
London

Jane M Card, Tim Wicks and Rev Dr John Caperon respond to an article about the Bayeux tapestry’s journey to the UK

Your article on the loan of the Bayeux tapestry to the British Museum states with admirable caution that Harold II is “represented in his final scenes in the embroidery with an arrow in his eye” (‘Of course we will give it back’: Bayeux tapestry set for secret journey across Channel, 3 June). But was this always the case?

In 1816 the Society of Antiquaries sent their historical draughtsman Charles Stothard to draw the Bayeux tapestry. Where the threads had worn away, he put in the stitch holes. These plainly show the arrow in Harold’s helmet, not his eye.

An individual needs to make a risk assessment if they choose to wild swim, just as they do when they ski, climb or ride a bike in traffic, says Nick Hopewell-Smith

I’m not among those offended by young people seeking relief in cool local waterways in hot weather (The row at Hampstead Heath is about far more than a few thoughtless swimmers in a heatwave, 3 June). Nor do I find the growing trend for wild swimming irritating in any way. The author of Waterlog – my erstwhile English teacher and friend, the late Roger Deakin – did more than most to popularise wild swimming. His view was that if you saw a sign that said “No swimming”, it was as likely as not that locals had been swimming there habitually – and possibly for centuries.

He also suggested that in an age of encroaching sanitised living and “health and safety”, river authorities and landowners alike were wont to put up “No swimming” signs to absolve themselves from the burden of responsibility or the expense of providing accessible lifebuoys. Roger once remarked, possibly playfully, that the presence of a prominent lifebuoy post was clear evidence of an attractive swim site, rather than any imminent danger per se. Of course, he wasn’t suggesting that young kids should just ignore official warnings, and as a committed environmentalist he would be among the first to be enraged by casual damage to bird nests and breeding grounds.

Responding to an article by Polly Toynbee, Patrick Diamond says the party must have courage to think anew. Plus letters from Tom Kelly and Michael Orton

Polly Toynbee is right to argue that Labour, and the centre-left more broadly, need the genuine debate about ideas they unwisely avoided before the last general election (British politics is fractured and chaotic – but at last it’s brimming with ideas for the future, 2 June). They must have the courage to think anew. The issue is not merely how to face up to the immensely difficult challenges Toynbee cites, of soaring wealth inequality and an inadequate tax base coupled with rising pressures on public services, but how Labour understands its core purpose and ideological mission.

In the 1950s and the 1980s, successive defeats compelled the Labour party to reappraise its core principles in the light of the changing nature of capitalism and the role of government and markets. It should be just as thoroughgoing today.

• Arsenal forward still struggling with achilles injury

• ‘Bukayo is just not there yet. Some things are missing’

Bukayo Saka continues to play through the pain of an achilles injury, according to the England manager, Thomas Tuchel, and must be managed carefully as the start of the World Cup looms large.

The Arsenal winger joined up with the England squad in West Palm Beach on Saturday after being given an extra week off after his involvement in the Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain. Tuchel gave a similar break to his other Arsenal players Declan Rice, Eberechi Eze and Noni Madueke.

Questioned in France but championed from afar, the departing head coach has forged a legacy that no one – bar, perhaps, himself – would dare dispute

Follow the verdant path towards the Château de Clairefontaine and you are met by a three-metre replica of the World Cup trophy accompanied by two stars, representing France’s World Cup triumphs. Didier Deschamps had his hand in both of them, captaining his side to victory in 1998 before repeating the feat as manager in 2018.

The ‘98 World Cup final was France’s first ever but Les Bleus have now participated in four of the last seven end games, with Deschamps involved in three of them. In North America, he will have one final shot at reaching another. These are the expectations, moulded by past success. Deschamps has taken France to three major finals in his 14-year stint as manager. “We’re among the favourites,” he says as he sits down for the interview. “It isn’t a taboo word for me. If we have this status today, which seems logical and legitimate to me, it’s because of everything that we have done, the results we achieved.”

Luis Díaz is the leading light of an extremely well-supported team still built around the 2014 golden boot winner James Rodríguez

This article is part of the Guardian’s 2026 World Cup Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 48 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from three countries each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 11 June.

Fifa has found its tournament squarely caught up in the second Trump administration’s aggressive border restrictions

For successive men’s World Cup tournaments Fifa has managed to bulldoze its way through costly immigration and entry requirements. In 2014 Brazil passed a law granting free temporary visas to ticket holders, and for Russia and Qatar, the respective autocracies bypassed traditional border friction using Fan IDs and Hayya cards as makeshift visa entry documents that also provided free public transport. Not so in 2026, where Fifa has found its tournament squarely caught up in the second Trump administration’s aggressive border restrictions. Here are some of the people that have been affected.

As football’s greatest spectacle comes to North America, our cartoonist creates a heartwarming narrative around the Fifa president

• Buy a cartoon | David’s favourite works of 2025

• And his latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

• England captain considering his long-term future

• ECB continuing investigation into nightclub incident

Ben Stokes is highly unlikely to be included in England’s squad for the second Test against New Zealand after the 35-year-old asked for space and time to consider his long-term future amid the fallout from a nightclub incident in the early hours of Monday morning.

The England and Wales Cricket Board is determined to bring the latest furore surrounding the culture of the men’s Test team under control before the start of the Women’s World Cup on Friday, with a temporary end to Stokes’s time as captain expected to be confirmed when the squad is announced within the next 48 hours.

• 44-year-old victorious alongside partner Victoria Mboko

• Pair win 7-6 (2), 6-2 over Melichar-Martinez and Routliffe

At the most tense moment of Serena Williams’s comeback to professional tennis, the score uncertainly balanced at 5-5, 30-30, an audience member could no longer hold her tongue. Her voice booming across all corners of Andy Murray Arena, she shouted: “Come on Serena, come on Victoria. You got it!” From the stands, a sneering spectator responded by stating that he did not understand a single word of those cheers.

Williams, however, understood perfectly. She nodded warmly towards the fan, then she stepped up to the baseline and fired down a 120mph service winner en route to a decisive hold.

• Real Madrid reveal they have made offer for Argentinian

• Arbeloa departs club, paving way for Mourinho return

Real Madrid have revealed they have had a €150m (£129.4m) bid for Julián Alvarez rejected by city rivals Atlético Madrid. The Argentina striker has scored 49 goals in 106 appearances for Atlético since joining from Manchester City in 2024.

The 26-year-old, whose contract runs until 2030, reportedly wants to leave and has been linked with Arsenal and Barcelona. Florentino Pérez vowed before his reelection as Real’s president to submit a club-record offer for an unnamed “great player”.

• Women’s head coach to select staff for New Zealand tour

• ‘My plan is to pick the brains of those who have gone before’

Jo Yapp, the women’s British & Irish Lions head coach, revealed that she has spoken to Andy Farrell to pick “the brains of those who have gone before” as she begins her preparations for the inaugural tour.

Yapp, who was in charge of Australia at the World Cup last year, was appointed last month as the head coach for the 2027 women’s Lions tour of New Zealand. Farrell was the head coach of the men’s winning tour of Australia in 2025 and is the Ireland head coach.

• Videos show Spurs fans having jerseys ripped off

• Players from both teams say incidents are unacceptable

Players from both teams in the NBA finals have condemned apparent attacks on San Antonio Spurs fans by supporters of the New York Knicks.

Videos circulating on social media showed Spurs fans having their jerseys ripped off on the streets of New York in the aftermath of the Knicks’ loss in Game 3 of the finals at Madison Square Garden.

• Sage guided Lens to second place in Ligue 1 this season

• Glasner likely to join Milan after rejecting Feyenoord offer

Crystal Palace are poised to appoint Pierre Sage as Oliver Glasner’s successor after holding productive talks with the Frenchman.

Sage, who guided Lens to the Coupe de France and second place in Ligue 1 this season, is understood to have agreed terms on a two-year deal with the option of a 12-month extension. Compensation for the 47-year-old must be resolved but that is not thought to be an obstacle.

Young sprinter up against the ‘big boys’ for the first time but he still takes life in the spotlight in his stride

Life comes at you fast, especially when you are Gout Gout. In April, the 18-year-old prodigy became the fastest teenager over 200m in history. Then last month, he finally got his own bedroom for the first time, having bought his family a new six-bedroom house in Brisbane. Now, in Oslo on Wednesday, he is one of the headline acts in his first senior Diamond League race.

Excited? You bet he is. “It’s definitely a special event, knowing that it’s my first race against the big boys,” he says, with a smile that lights up a drab summer’s day. “It’s a different ballgame for sure.”

The town where rugby league began may find itself without a top division team unless plans for a new stadium come to fruition by 2030

Saturday afternoon was meant to provide a glimpse into a different, more optimistic future for Huddersfield Giants. But in the end, it was another stark reminder of why rugby league in the West Yorkshire town is facing an existential fight.

Super League has been thriving lately but if there is one place where the game has stagnated, if not regressed, it is in the town where rugby league was born in 1895. Huddersfield have struggled for much of the summer era, barring the odd flirtation with the elite, but the past 18 months have been bleak even by those standards.

• Pair are friends and will play golf together at college

• Tournament will start at Shinnecock Hills next week

Miles Russell was among two 17-year-olds who earned a spot in the US Open on Monday. Still to be determined was whether Russell brings his caddie from the 36-hole qualifier – the son of three-time champion Tiger Woods – to Shinnecock Hills next week.

Russell, the No 10 amateur in the world, survived a bogey on the first playoff hole and grabbed the fourth and final spot from the Florida qualifier. Charlie Woods is one of his close friends who has the same commercial agent and is following Russell to Florida State to play college golf.

Bosses of M&S, Sainsbury’s and Tesco among those writing to Starmer that the ‘ladder of opportunity’ is wobbling

• We would like to hear from young people in the UK about their job-hunting experiences

Some of the UK’s biggest retailers are planning to write to the prime minister urging him to tackle the youth unemployment crisis, with signatories expected to include the bosses of Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.

Lobby group the British Retail Consortium said it had drafted a letter to Keir Starmer calling for action, and is circulating it among its 200 members, which include all the main UK retailers (with the exception of Games Workshop) as well as smaller shops. The letter is expected to be published on Wednesday.

The death of the 11-year-old, named only as Lyhanna, has pushed the issue of male violence against girls to the top of the agenda

A lawyer for the family of an 11-year-old girl whose disappearance and murder sparked protests across France has called for more funding for the struggling justice system, amid a political row over the French state’s failure to tackle sexual violence against children.

“Frankly, if the justice system had more resources, this tragedy and all the others wouldn’t have happened,” said the family’s lawyer, François Roujou de Boubée, on Tuesday. “The victim’s family and I trust in the justice system. So enough is enough.”

Gabriel Raimondo put his A-levels on hold to run in Channel Islands and ‘represent the younger voice’

Most politicians who win an election in Jersey are probably satisfied with a pat on the back from their supporters and a mention in the local newspapers.

But after becoming one of the youngest politicians in the world, Gabriel Raimondo received a message of congratulations from Donald Trump.

Labour backbenchers disappointed as new trade guidance over illegal settlements stops short of outright ban

The UK in alliance with a group of other western powers including Australia, France and Norway has announced it is imposing sanctions on six firms and one individual involved in enabling and financing the recent upsurge in settler violence in the West Bank.

However, the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, disappointed many of her own backbenchers by stopping short of banning trade, saying instead the government was only issuing updated advice to British firms not to become involved in any economic activity with the illegal settlements.

US spy-tech company to challenge London mayor’s intervention after he raised concerns over breach of procurement rules

Palantir intends to sue the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, after he blocked a contract between the US spy-tech firm and the Metropolitan police.

The Met had planned to use Palantir’s software to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations, until Khan intervened in late May, sparking a row between the UK’s largest police force and the mayor’s office.

Third of world’s energy needs should come from electricity by 2035, says Murat Kurum, as priorities set out for this year’s UN climate summit

The world should aim to meet a third of its energy needs from electricity within a decade to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the host of the next UN climate summit has said.

While about a third of global electricity generation already comes from renewable sources, other energy-intensive sectors – chiefly transport, heating and industries – have lagged behind. Close to four-fifths of final energy still comes from fossil fuels, as a result.

The arid Barind region was transformed by aquifer wells but now the water system is collapsing under the pressure of the climate crisis and decades of extraction

In the parched fields of north-west Bangladesh, where the earth hardens into cracked red clay beneath an unforgiving sun, farmers in the Barind region say they are watching the foundations of rural life disappear underground.

For decades, groundwater transformed Barind – one of Bangladesh’s driest regions – into a productive agricultural belt. Deep tube wells allowed farmers to grow rice, wheat, maize and vegetables year-round across land once defined by drought.

Datacentre off Shanghai coast uses less power and water than land-based equivalent

The world’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre has started operations off the coast of Shanghai, as China presses forwards with solutions for energy challenges created by the country’s artificial intelligence boom.

The Shanghai Lingang undersea datacentre demonstration project, which launched in May, has a capacity of 24 megawatts. It is a joint effort between HiCloud Technology and China Communications Construction, a state-owned company.

Global effort needed to limit effects of pollution, industrial fishing and climate crisis, World Ocean Assessment says

The world’s oceans are under “severe and accelerating” pressure from human activities, with the rate of sea-level rise double that of a decade ago, according to a damning assessment from the United Nations.

The “intensifying” stressors, which include pollution and large-scale industrial fishing, are cumulative, said the report, resulting in widespread biodiversity loss and putting ocean systems under “severe strain”.

Co-op academy in Blackley to close for day after students were locked down in classrooms during attack

A schoolgirl has been arrested after two students and a staff member were stabbed at a school in Manchester.

Students were put into lockdown and told not to leave their classrooms after emergency services were called to the Co-op academy in Blackley on Tuesday morning.

Reform had previously suggested Farage would be ‘steering clear’ of event, modelled on US conservative gathering

• UK politics live – latest updates

Nigel Farage will be headlining at an American conservative summit brought to the UK by Liz Truss next month alongside hard-right speakers, despite his party previously suggesting he would be “steering clear”.

The Reform UK leader has announced he will speak in July at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which claims it wants to “save Britain, save the west”.

Father and mother of Annabel Rook praise her dedication to helping others and want to focus on her legacy

A retired Old Bailey judge has paid tribute to his daughter after her killer was jailed for life.

Clifton George, 45, was sentenced on Tuesday to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 23 years after being found guilty of the murder of Annabel Rook, 46, whom he stabbed in the living room of her home in Stoke Newington, north London, in June last year.

New dangerous dogs law after spate of attacks in England and Wales could fine people or have their pet seized

A new crackdown on XL bullies and other dangerous dogs will make it illegal to leave children under 12 alone with them in England and Wales.

There has been a spate of attacks on children by dogs from certain dangerous breeds, including one on a 10-year-old girl who died last year after being attacked by the family pet, an XL bully. A nine-month-old baby was also mauled to death last year by a dog of that breed.

Geoffrey Wall is alleged to have flown over 900 flights domestically and internationally between 2009 and 2025

A former Air Canada pilot has been charged after flying for years without a proper license, Canadian police have said.

Geoffrey Wall, of Barrie, Ontario, is alleged to have operated as an airline captain between 2009 and 2025 without a license to fly large commercial passenger planes, according to Peel regional police.

Southern Poverty Law Center releases report as US government pursues federal fraud charges against group

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) finds hard-right groups have increasingly expanded their influence across the US government, which is pursuing a federal fraud case into the civil rights organization.

Tuesday’s report – which identified 1,263 hate and anti-government groups in operation throughout 2025 – comes less than two months after it was indicted by the government it says the hard right has infiltrated.

Decarlos Brown Jr to stay in custody while receiving treatment for remainder of case over Iryna Zarutska’s death

The man accused of fatally stabbing Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte commuter train in August has been found incompetent to stand trial in federal court for now, the US attorney’s office for the western district of North Carolina said on Tuesday.

Decarlos Brown Jr, 35, is accused of killing Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, on a Charlotte light rail train in a case that drew national attention after a surveillance camera video depicting the violent attack was released.

Banks, crypto firms and Kremlin oil reserves also targeted in 21st set of measures since full-scale invasion of Ukraine

The EU hopes to ban Russian soldiers from entering its territory as part of further sanctions against Moscow that also target banks, crypto firms and the Kremlin’s oil revenues.

Announcing the proposals on Tuesday, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said: “We propose for the first time to ban from entry into the European Union anyone who has served in the Russian armed forces since the beginning of the war. So Europe stays off limit for anyone who has participated in the invasion of Ukraine, as simple as that.”

Tech company says it ‘caught and disrupted’ NSO Group’s attempts to access accounts in Jordan and Lebanon

A spyware firm has been targeting WhatsApp users with malicious links in contravention of a US court order forbidding it from doing so, Meta has said.

In a post, Meta said WhatsApp had “caught and disrupted spear phishing attempts” by NSO Group, which a spokesperson said targeted a handful of users in Jordan and Lebanon. It had also caught the group creating “test accounts and groups” on WhatsApp.

175-year-old Stoke-on-Trent company says Christopher Bailey’s investment will ensure continued production

Christopher Bailey, the fashion designer who turned the British trenchcoat maker Burberry into a global brand, has acquired the Stoke-on-Trent company Burleigh Pottery along with a small group of private investors.

The ceramics company, founded in 1851 and best known for its intricate floral designs, said Bailey’s investment would ensure that production of its cups, saucers and plates could continue without interruption at the city’s Middleport Pottery site.

Price of dairy product has risen fivefold after users of GLP-1 medications advised to increase protein consumption

The growing popularity of weight-loss drugs has fuelled global demand for whey protein, sparking concerns among industry experts over a potential shortage.

The price of whey has risen fivefold to record levels as companies race to secure supplies amid a boom driven by growing use of GLP-1 drugs, such as Mounjaro, which often require higher protein intake to preserve muscle mass.

Tech company received infrastructure relief as its five biggest UK divisions generate £32bn in revenues

Amazon’s main division in the UK was handed a £7.6m tax credit last year by HM Revenue and Customs, despite profits at the retail-to-streaming company surging by more than a quarter to £355m.

Amazon UK Services – which employs 66,000 staff, the vast majority of the company’s 75,000 employees in Britain – said it owed £9.1m in “current tax” last year.

In an extract from Aftershock, a definitive new history of dubstep, DMZ’s Mala, Coki and Loefah recall the bass drops and pacifist mentality that went into their creation

By the turn of the millennium, British electronic music had some growing pains. The jungle and drum’n’bass scenes that energised the 1990s were running out of creative gas, and garage had shifted from the moody underground into champagne flash and chart hits. Across pockets of London, Croydon and Essex, a tiny group of artists coalesced around a new idea. After 15 years of high-octane beats, they decided to strip the breakbeats, hard partying and cliquishness out of dance music, focusing instead on soundsystem fundamentals: bass, space and togetherness. From there, dubstep was born.

As we approach the 25-year anniversary of dubstep’s beginnings, I’ve documented the genre in my book, Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep: an oral history of its origin story told through 28 artists and key figures. Some of the most influential are part of DMZ, a record label and party series led by south London DJ-producers Mala, Coki and Loefah, and MC Sgt Pokes. With its anti-VIP ethos, DMZ became one of dubstep’s driving forces, and earlier this year, Mala and Coki performed at Fred Again’s residency at London’s Alexandra Palace: their influence is shifting to a new generation of fans.

From Thundercat’s all-star funk to Kacey Musgraves’ hymns to solitude, we look at some of our favourite music of the last six months from across the pop spectrum

• Listen to a Spotify playlist of every album here

This cosy medical drama does exactly what it sets out to do – soothe viewers’ souls with a celebration of smalltown values and secret goodness. It’s TV where nothing will distress you

Well, what in the cultural cringe is going on here? Of all the things I could possibly have imagined the US would take an interest in to the point of executing a straight-to-series commission, Doc Martin would not have been one of them. And yet here we are: Dominic Minghella’s creation, starring Martin Clunes as a crotchety GP in the fictional sleepy Cornish village Portwenn, which ran for 10 series on ITV between 2004 and 2022, has been tweaked for a new market and relabelled Best Medicine because it never really worked as a pun on Dr Martens anyway. Like 99% of puns, actually, but that’s probably a discussion for another time.

Clunes is now Josh Charles. The character’s name is Dr Martin Best instead of Ellingham, otherwise the new title wouldn’t work, and he went to Harvard medical school instead of Imperial College London. But he is still cantankerous – by medical teatime drama standards, which is to say that he barely approaches normal human levels of irritability. And he is still a vascular surgeon who developed a fear of blood, had to abandon surgery and decided instead to inflict his lack of bedside manner on the good people of Port Wenn, now two words and in Maine, where he used to stay in the summer as a child.

Best Medicine aired on Sky One and is on Now

Everyman theatre, Liverpool
Julia Cranney’s play illustrates complex processes as it explores one woman’s plans to start a family but it hops too quickly through her life

Adoption and the care system are at the emotional centre of Julia Cranney’s new monologue. There are hoops to jump through, questions that require you to crack your soul open and hope bubbling beneath it all. Mat (Paislie Reid) and her partner, James, are drawn into early permanence, a pathway in which babies and toddlers are placed with prospective adopters who initially foster them. There is, however, always the possibility that the child could return to their birth family.

The script valuably sheds light on that process but Cranney’s play hops through Mat’s life too quickly to have a potent impact. When we meet her she is isolated, not keen on kids and working in a pharmacy. Then, she falls head over heels for James. Soon their relationship is flourishing, she has bonded with his daughter and they are making plans to start a family of their own.

In an often chilling new documentary, the chefs of brutal leaders from Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein, talk about their unusual lives behind the scenes

Kim Jong-il loved pepperoni pizza. Saddam Hussein couldn’t resist a fish barbecue. Idi Amin reportedly had the capacity for an entire roasted goat. The menus may have differed, but the appetite was the same. For history’s most notorious strongmen, the dining table doubled as a stage for power. For the cooks who served them, every meal came with extraordinary stakes. “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”

In his latest film, How to Feed a Dictator, which premieres at the Tribeca film festival this week, five private chefs recount their intimate experiences serving some of the world’s most feared dictators and the ever-present dangers that came with the job. Based on the 2020 book by the Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski, the 95-minute documentary probes the fraught terrain between morality and survival, asking viewers to consider the choices these chefs made – and the choices they never really had. Structurally, the film is something of a tasting menu, serving up sobering morsels of human atrocity within the trappings of a decadent cooking show. It makes for especially uneasy viewing on an empty stomach.

Yes, it’s a documentary on a sobering topic. But when you’ve got an endless stream of blockbuster names spouting irresistible gossip – plus Nigel Farage being a total panto dame – you can’t help but have a ball

Let’s get one thing straight immediately: no documentary about Brexit should be this much of a hoot. The dread many felt when the referendum result came in – a fear that reactionary populism was on the rise and Britain was entering an era of managed decline – has only bloomed like mould in the intervening decade. Brexit was the source of much inadvertent comedy, of course, but to see it treated so irreverently en masse does leave a bit of a bad taste. Laughing at a YouTube compilation of politicians accidentally saying breakfast instead of Brexit? Fine. Chortling along with Nigel Farage as he reminisces about tensions between Dominic Cummings and Arron Banks? Tittering as Boris Johnson blathers about losing a tennis match to David Cameron during which the prime minister tried to secure his support for remain? No thanks.

Still, there is something extremely difficult to resist about Brexit: A Very British Civil War, a talking head-heavy chronicle of the period between the 2015 general election and the referendum itself. Rather than get bogged down in po-faced sincerity or hand-wringing about integrity (like the remain campaign!), it deals almost exclusively in attention-grabbing bombast (like the leave campaigns!). From the off we’re blasted with Brexit-flavoured juice. Vote Leave bosses “didn’t really want to win”, says Farage. Johnson’s position had “nothing to do with the EU,” says George Osborne. “It was Game of Thrones.” Johnson denies this, stifling a smile. “Everybody says I did this in order to be PM. I would have become prime minister anyway.”

As he publishes a memoir, the pioneering guitarist talks about rejecting spandex and hair metal, his fears for breakthrough hit Black Hole Sun – and completing nine unfinished Soundgarden songs

Kim Thayil has always felt like an outsider. For example: the Soundgarden guitarist has lived in Seattle, a city infamously addicted to coffee, for more than four decades, but only started drinking the stuff himself during lockdown. “I was pretty against-the-grain to my Seattle friends, who always wanted to meet up at coffee shops,” he grins, cradling a freshly brewed cup of java in his kitchen. “My girlfriend in the 80s and 90s even worked at the original branch of Starbucks and made coffee with a French press every morning. But I drank tea, because my parents are Indian.”

Thayil’s Indian heritage also set him apart from his peers. In his new memoir, A Screaming Life, he writes that when he and bassist Hiro Yamamoto formed Soundgarden in 1984, the group was “two-thirds Asian”, and that “as liberal and accepting as the punk scene was, it was still largely white, and I was ever aware of that”. Nevertheless, Soundgarden went on to become pioneers of Seattle’s grunge movement, a multiplatinum-selling, critically acclaimed, Grammy-winning group whose breakthrough hit, Black Hole Sun, transcended their gnarly milieu to become an enduring anthem.

Former US soccer player Merritt Mathias looks at times when the beautiful game has been a political football. Plus, a deep dive into who is funding Reform UK

Former US soccer player Merritt Mathias (pictured above) and journalists Musa Okwonga and Julio Ricardo Varela are a fascinating team of “football/soccer time-travellers”. They trace the history of how global power has tried to influence the game and make it political. After setting the scene with musings on this year’s World Cup, they first look at the 1934 tournament in Mussolini’s Italy, which Uruguay boycotted. Hollie Richardson
YouTube and Spotify, episodes weekly

As she prepares to mark 70 with a birthday concert, the musician talks about her destructive mindset – and the steps she took to finally make sense of her life and music’s part in it

It was 2023. The holiday of a lifetime, in Australia, had begun, after two weeks at the Australian festival of chamber music, in which I’d played viola in several of my own works. I had fretted about this for months, not really believing that I could stand up as a soloist and deliver. Even as a full-time viola-player in the 80s, I avoided solo playing – always feeling more at home in larger chamber groups. But as my husband Peter and I set off on our holiday, I was euphoric. I had performed with the marvellous young pianist Joseph Havlat, with the legendary accordionist James Crabb and virtuoso trumpeter David Elton – and all had gone well.

But then came a horrible realisation: I had not asked for the concerts to be recorded. This had been a moment in my life that would never be repeated. And I hadn’t captured it. I sank into despair. The fact that this is a pattern in my thinking didn’t make it any less painful: the more wonderful the event, the more likely I am to find regrets to attach to it. It is a destructive mindset I have learned to live with, but for years I had no idea why my head seemed compelled to ruin every joyful memory.

Tired, emotional and besieged by fans and enemies alike, by 1966 the Fab Four were ready to quit touring for good. A new collection of images by rock photographer Jim Marshall captures their last gigs

The Beatles played their last official concert on 29 August 1966, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Jim Marshall’s pictures capture the group at a pivotal moment, when they are already feeling nostalgia for what they are leaving behind.

Two months earlier, the Beatles had finished precording Revolver, a glittering collection of pop gems. The next day they boarded a plane to begin a global tour during which they would play nothing from it. They were not being perverse; it was simply that none of the songs lent themselves to live performance. On stage, they were a four-piece band. They could hardly play anything as complex as Eleanor Rigby or Tomorrow Never Knows to tens of thousands of fans.

There are some advantages to being an older debutant, including knowing what it’s like to fail and not having your new novel overshadowed by early literary promise

Recently I was at a film event where I was introduced to a big producer by a very nice actor. The actor said, “this is Patrick, he has a debut novel coming out soon.”

The producer looked me up and down and said, “You took your time.”

This bleak but brilliant tale of enigmatic alien entities and slow social collapse exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now

M John Harrison’s prose has thrilled me since I was a teen. It has thrilled others, too, including Angela Carter, Deborah Levy and Robert Macfarlane, but snobbery about the genres in which he made his mark – science fiction and fantasy – has hindered the respect his achievement deserves. His rigorously realistic novel Climbers, published in 1989, looked as though it might change that, but subsequent work has remained genre-fluid and uncompromisingly peculiar.

In the 1970s and 80s, he wrote stories about Viriconium, a fabled city crumbling into decadence and anarchy. These swashbuckling yet sinister tales functioned as escapist adventures for readers who preferred a far-flung nightmare to the contemporary humdrum. But in the 21st century, the world we inhabit has become utterly fantastical and Harrison has no need to revisit Viriconium; his anarchic, disintegrated metropolis is London and The End of Everything is set in an unnamed town on the Kent coast.

What does it mean to push the boat out, and can peacocking be more than just a beautiful gesture?

A friend’s mother once told me that for a couple of years in the 1980s – as the Conservatives were waging war on the miners and she spent late nights at Marxist-feminist reading groups – she wore an almost daily uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. On her wedding day she broke with habit and put on a dress she had bought, at great expense to her, that was fun, sexy and, although she didn’t use this word, flamboyant. The next week at the school she taught in she saw a colleague wearing it. “Nice dress,” she said. “It’s OK for work,” her colleague replied, “but I wouldn’t wear it out.”

I found myself recalling this anecdote as I read Jack Parlett’s memoir-cum-cultural history of our attempts to push the boat out. To make any effort is to risk embarrassment, to be seen either as ridiculous or hopelessly naive. One way to avoid those charges is to use playful or cynical irony. Parlett finds examples of this in Oscar Wilde and what the cultural critic Susan Sontag once described as camp, a worldview obsessed with artifice and performance. Although Flamboyance is not a polemic, it’s clear that its author sees something lacking in these efforts at self-fashioning. The book is couched as an alternative; Parlett presents flamboyance as a model for how to live a life that not only “burns with a resistant energy” but “puts politics back into the picture”. In practice, this means that he has little patience for the notion of art for art’s sake; he insists, for example, that there is no making sense of flamenco without understanding the history of fascism in Spain.

The Pulitzer-winning author of Less has crafted a breezy confection of fish-out-of-water wit, insecurity and self-discovery set in an Italian paradise

‘There’s a place in Italy in need of someone. Why don’t you look into that?” Inspired by his two-year stint directing a writers’ residency, the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside Florence, with these words American author Andrew Sean Greer launches a hapless, clueless innocent into the Tuscan hills and the embrace of its eccentric aristocracy, in the person of the eponymous Coco, Baronessa Lisabetta.

Variously known as “our young man”, Gio and Giovedi, Villa Coco’s narrator is here to fill the post of “adjutant” for the Baronessa. His duties include pruning roses, emptying drains, hunting the Baronessa’s mortal enemy, the pine marten, and cataloguing the dilapidated Villa Coco’s contents. Among the camel saddles and hat racks, he is assured, lurk priceless works of art, including a Picasso and a Botticelli. He joins a staff consisting of a Sri Lankan cook, her husband and a Lebanese factotum; they share in the sisyphean task of keeping Villa Coco going, and the Baronessa out of harm’s way.

Hundreds of video games were shown at June’s annual bonanza. After watching more than 15 hours of showcases, our video games editor picks the highlights

The sequel to a revered 2014 horror game from British developer Creative Assembly: this time you must evade the xenomorph on the surface of a storm-ravaged colony world.

Released just before the World Cup kicks off, this upstart football game is positioning itself as a credible alternative to EA Sports FC

This month something extremely unusual happened in the video game world: someone launched a new football game. It used to be that the market could support a vast array of contenders, from arcade kickabouts such as Super Sidekicks and Hat Trick Hero, to serious simulations named Actua Soccer or This Is Football, to eccentric oddities such as Namco’s LiberoGrande which made you experience the whole match as a single onfield player.

For the past decade plus, however, the scene has been dominated EA’s Fifa series, now EA Sports FC. With the exception of Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, now eFootball, there have been few competitors – and few plucky upstarts.

90s PlayStation fans, rejoice: California studio Toys for Bob is making Spyro: Realms Beyond, intended to ‘inspire love, joy and laughter’

As the gaming mascots of millennial childhood have been resuscitated one by one for a nostalgic audience, one has remained notably absent: 1990s PlayStation hero Spyro. A new game starring the purple dragon was announced at tonight’s Xbox Game Showcase – the first original title since 2008. Called Spyro: A Realm Beyond, it is being developed by studio Toys for Bob in California and will be released in spring 2027 on Xbox, PlayStation 5, PC and Nintendo Switch 2.

It features a freshly redesigned Spyro with his trademark quiff, voiced by Tom Kenny, the original star of the games. Unlike in the original Spyro titles, players will be able to take flight at any time. “[We’re] leaning into the true capabilities of being a dragon,” explains creative director Lou Studdert. “It’s really engaging … the player is making decisions how they fly. They are diving down to sustain speed. They are using fire-breath to light campfires, to create an updraft to get lift before flapping their wings.”

PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox; Yacht Club Games
This brilliant adventure creates a whole world from one character with a unique ability

You could mistake Mina the Hollower for something found on the liquid-crystal display of a Game Boy Color around the turn of the millennium. Like the pocketable Zelda and Pokémon games of the time, it presents a kind of snow-globe reality that you peer into from above, relying on imagination to decipher each two-colour clump of pixels into a tree, or a skeleton, or a cloaked mouse wielding a hammer twice her size.

This is Mina, our hero: she jumps, she moves at a clip, and she can delve downward into the soil or floorboards, tunnelling underfoot for a moment or two before popping back up, like an inflatable forcibly submerged in a swimming pool. This is her signature move, perfectly elastic in sensation – the way the released button springs back against your thumb! – and in application. The burrow-jump is an excavation tool, unearthing any treasure you happen to dig through, and a navigational one, used to hop over gaps, reach high-up spots and nose into tiny hidden spaces, where more treasure almost invariably awaits.

Royal Academy, London
Bowie karaoke in a cupboard, a gross David Gamble self-portrait and Harriet Porter’s serene silver pot are a welcome distraction from the tidal wave of landscapes and famous artists’ hand-me-downs for sale

This year’s RA Summer Exhibition is less awful than usual. It’s still full of some of the worst art you’ve ever seen – way too many Michael Craig-Martins and Bob and Roberta Smiths – but its awfulness is definitely a bit less awful.

This relative less-awfulness is partly thanks to Ryan Gander, the conceptual artist who is the coordinator of this year’s exhibition. He’s brought a little bit of strangeness to this stuffy old show, a bit of weird discomfort to the world’s oldest open submission exhibition, where amateurs get to have their tiny drawing of a flower totally eclipsed by a massive Tracey Emin nude. What a privilege.

Wigmore Hall, London
The quartet communicated intimately and naturally in a programme of music by Shostakovich, Ravel and Stravinsky

A hushed chord sustained by the second violin, viola and cello. Fragments of a melody played as a distant memory by the first violin, which reached slowly upwards to a final crystalline harmonic. Pizzicato, diminuendo, silence. In this captivating performance by the Danish String Quartet, stillness settled over the closing portion of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 3 in F Op 73 like heavy snow. Bow changes became impossibly seamless. The quartet’s silken tone appeared to exude eerily, disconnected from the basic friction of hair on string.

Such quiet control was all the more striking in the wake of jagged, impassioned solo interjections, deeply incised octave unisons and phrases pursued as if the musicians’ survival depended on it. There was articulation so spiky it was percussive – all contact, no resonance – and passages that sounded symphonic in their velveteen richness. Yet there were also moments of polite levity and luminous classicism. The atmospheric gearshifts were sometimes imperceptibly gradual, sometimes violent, but rarely visible: beyond describing itself as “relatively bearded”, the Danish String Quartet is not an ensemble given to choreographed spectacle.

Richmond theatre, London
Society tries to quash the quirks of a spirited eccentric in Peter Quilter’s new play that fails to go beyond its lead character’s unworldliness

There are some good jokes in Peter Quilter’s new play and Maureen Lipman knows how to land them. “Some do cocaine, I do cabaret,” she shrugs as Allegra, whose singing is annoying her neighbours. “The ironic thing is it’s the cabaret that gets up people’s noses.”

Allegra’s spontaneous serenades – at the butcher’s, the bakery, the hairdresser – are increasingly unwelcome in her village. Waiters march her out of restaurants, and even the local choirs have banned her. Her brother Ronen (John Middleton), worried for her health, employs a Czech care worker to make sure she eats. Every now and then Lipman gets a twinkle in her eye, a shimmy in her shoulders, and launches into a tune.

At Richmond theatre, London, until 13 June. Then touring until 4 July and at Harold Pinter theatre, London, from 8 July to 8 August.

White Cube Bermondsey, London
A body falls through the sky, figures flail and thrash, while sagging skin and brittle limbs are scrawled on every work. This is the German painter’s last collection – and it’s both brutal and beautiful

On one wall, a body falls calmly through a serene blue sky. On the opposite, splat, it’s landed with a thud on the blood-spattered mud. You don’t need to be an expert in image analysis to figure out what Georg Baselitz’s final paintings are about: death was coming for him, and he knew it.

Baselitz died in April aged 88 years old. He was one of the most influential, recognisable painters of his generation, and this body of work was his last. It’s impossible to look at these paintings and drawings and not see them through the lens of death. They feel like a final attempt to come to terms with life and what it has meant, and a desperate, furious, chaotic reckoning with the end of it all.

The theatrical prequel to the Duffer Brothers’ smash-hit Netflix series is to shut down in the West End and on Broadway this winter, after selling more than 1.5m tickets

The London and New York productions of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the theatrical prequel to Netflix’s TV blockbuster, are to both close this winter. The stage spectacular will have run for just over three years in the West End, where it won two Olivier awards, and for just over 20 months on Broadway, where it won four Tony awards. The final performance at the Phoenix theatre in London will be on 27 December and the last show at the Marquis theatre in New York will be on 3 January.

The announcement, made on Tuesday, comes as a surprise considering the TV series’ phenomenal continued success. The November launch of the fifth and final season broke viewing records for an English-language series on Netflix, with 59.6m views in the first five days, and even caused the streaming service to crash within minutes of the episodes first becoming available. In February, it was widely reported that the New York stage production was being filmed for future release, but Netflix has made no such official statement.

Audience members said baby’s cooing and gurgling ruined Branagh’s return to the RSC after 30 years, with some seeking refunds

Boatswain! The opening scene of Shakespeare’s seminal play The Tempest, in which Prospero conjures up a violent storm to shipwreck his treacherous brother, is enough to wake up anyone – let alone a baby.

Audience members at a matinee performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production, starring Kenneth Branagh as Prospero, complained after a baby gurgled and cooed its way throughout the entire first half.

Enter our competition to snag lunch for two, an arty blanket and a year of free Tate entry as part of our partnership with Tate for Emin’s A Second Life exhibition

This summer, as part of our partnership with Tate for their Tracey Emin: A Second Life exhibition, we have an amazing prize up for grabs.

A Second Life is the largest ever exhibition of Emin’s work, and features career-defining sensations alongside works never before exhibited.

A special-edition one-year Tate Membership for you and a friend

Lunch for two at Tate Modern

A Tracey Emin Teacup and Pancake blanket (worth £200)

An exhibition catalogue for A Second Life

A Tracey Emin tote bag

A Tracey Emin cap

The promotion starts on Tuesday 9 June 2026 and closes at 11:59pm on Sunday 5 July 2026.

Open to residents of the United Kingdom aged 18 and over.

By entering this competition, you consent to the use of your personal data by the Guardian and Tate as set out in these terms and conditions and the Guardian’s privacy policy located here. The Guardian and Tate will not pass your details to any third party not referred to in these terms and conditions and/or the privacy policy located here.

Your information will be used to administer the promotion only in accordance with our privacy policy, located here, and Tate’s privacy policy, located here.

A special-edition one-year Tate Membership for you and a friend

Lunch for two at Tate Modern

A Tracey Emin Teacup and Pancake blanket (worth £200)

An exhibition catalogue for A Second Life

A Tracey Emin tote bag

A Tracey Emin cap

Musician who spliced jazz, funk and blues, including in a spell on a major label in the early 1980s, was celebrated as ‘fearless’ by his family

James Blood Ulmer, the US guitarist celebrated for his avant garde splicing of jazz, blues and funk, has died aged 86.

A statement on social media said he died on 3 June. “His music was fearless, and so was his spirit,” his family added in another statement.

Still hoping to meet ‘the one’? While you’re waiting, one dating expert says you should romance someone you’re not totally smitten with. It could be the start of something beautiful

Name: Practice dates.

Age: The term date – to mean romantic dating – was inadvertently coined by American columnist George Ade in 1896, when he described a “date book” used by a shop cashier to record all her meetings with suitors. Practice dating is a 2026 concept.

Felines have long been associated with feminine power – and these women are embracing a cliche used to bring them down

To support 700 cats, you need roughly 1,350lb of food a week. But that’s just the dry stuff, which isn’t a balanced enough diet for a cat. You also need 1,000 cans of wet food.

Next, 600lb of litter, because cats, like all living things, need a place to do their business. Sixty rolls of paper towels to clean up the many messes that will occur. Nine gallons of laundry detergent, six gallons of dish detergent, 200 large trash bags and 400 kitchen trash bags.

Our writer found a surprisingly effective way to cut down his smartphone use. Plus, what to eat while watching the World Cup – inspired by all 48 teams

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I recently learned through Apple’s Screen Time app that I was spending about eight hours a week on my phone browsing Reddit and Instagram. That’s 17.3 days a year spent consuming entertaining but ultimately pointless fluff. So my piece looking for solutions for phone addicts was highly personal.

The warning signs are if your phone is the first thing you look at in the morning and the last thing you look at in bed, says Prof Marcantonio Spada, emeritus professor of addictive behaviours and mental health at London South Bank University and chief clinical officer at Onebright, who I spoke to for my article.

Swimwear season is upon us – so here’s our pick of the most flattering, practical and comfortable costumes

• Jess Cartner-Morley’s June essentials

The trick with swimwear shopping is to stick to well-established criteria. Your priorities, of course, are comfort, support, coverage and price. But while your demure black one-piece might cover those bases, you shouldn’t settle for a costume that does the bare minimum.

Take tummy control swimwear. If you want support in that area, you don’t have to avoid bikinis. Try a high waist pair with a built-in control panel, or a tank top. Ruching is fairly standard these days (as is a tie at the side) and does the trick by tucking everything away. If in doubt, wear something printed to distract.

From spicy South African relish to Scottish tattie scones, food is an integral part of watching the beautiful game. Here’s how fans around the world fuel match day

• International recipes inspired by the World Cup

The biggest World Cup ever is surely going to mean the most ever watching parties around the world. With 48 countries competing, why not take inspiration from global cuisine to serve your friends and family something more adventurous than crisps and lager this summer?

Football, after all, is a sport of rituals – from fans wearing the same “lucky pants” to watch every game, to placing the name of an opposing team in the freezer – and that extends to eating and drinking, too. This doesn’t just mean booze; in nations where alcohol is prohibited, for example, tea and traditional sweets provide the social lubrication. South American fixtures are fiestas of churrasco (barbecues), chimichurri and a lot of cheering, while in regions where cafe culture thrives, baked goods and strong espresso are more commonly enjoyed during matches than half a cider and some pork scratchings – even at 3am.

Summer is here, and your May favourites show you’re feeling the heat

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Our on-again, off-again relationship with summer finally went official in May, with temperatures soaring across much of the UK. Many of us sweltered in the heat, ordering fans to try to get a good night’s sleep during the unprecedented heatwave, and shade shelters to keep us out of the sun’s glare.

But we also couldn’t help embracing that summer feeling, with many of your May favourites reflecting a little more time spent outside. Many of you got back to nature and went camping, with some of your fellow readers’ top camping products making the list, such as an ingenious washing line and a flying disc. From comfy holiday sandals to a cult favourite K-beauty SPF, these were your favourite things in May.

Keep things simple, outsource and prep ahead where you can, and never forget the golden rule of canapes …

My daughter is getting married: what vegetarian and vegan canapes can I make at least a day ahead?
Sue, by email
“Canapes need to be no more than two mouthfuls,” says Barney Desmazery, author of One Dish Four Ways, “unless you’re going to provide something to eat them from, but in my book they’re then no longer canapes.”

You’ll not want anything too labour-intensive. “Sue is going to be making them tens or hundreds of times over, so outsourcing some work with store-bought ingredients is an easy win,” says Richard Makin, AKA School Night Vegan and author of Stress-Free Dinners. Also remember that, as with most things in life, less is usually more: “Good ingredients always triumph over complicated recipes,” says Desmazery, who recalls a wedding he once attended in Liguria, Italy: “There was a round of aged parmesan with knives for guests to break off shards, and that was great.” Granted, parmesan isn’t one for Sue’s vegetarian/vegan spread, but you get the idea.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Served with a sauce full of sweetness and acidity – and a splash of sherry – this is a simple but deeply Spanish dish

Duck is one of those ingredients that feels rather special, but is actually very simple to cook. It’s something I always enjoy taking my time with, so it’s tender and full of flavour, and for me what really makes this particular dish are the cherries, even more so when they’re picotas from Extremadura, where I’m from. They’re small, sweet and full of sun, and a crop we wait impatiently for every year. When you cook with them, they bring a beautiful balance of sweetness and acidity to the rich duck, while the addition of a touch of amontillado transforms this simple dish into something that’s deeply Spanish. And remember, it’s always worth using a good sherry and enjoying the rest with the meal.

A simple harissa and cream cheese sauce brings a flourish to this easy dinner

One of my favourite kitchen shortcuts? Harissa and cream cheese mixed to make a sauce. The cream cheese rounds out the heat from the harissa, and together they work perfectly with everything from beans to pasta – or, in today’s case, both. Spring greens add welcome colour, and the whole lot is spiked with lemon at the end. It’s one of my most-made pasta dishes.

Dip tips: a good mix of North African spice, seasoning, colour and texture is guaranteed to get the palate excited for the meal ahead

Dips are never just accompaniments at our restaurant, the Barbary in central London, but a way of building flavour from the outset. They set the tone for the meal, so it’s important not only to have a variety of spice and seasoning, but also contrast in colour and texture, not least to get the palate excited straight away. These early-summer dips, inspired by the former Barbary Coast (Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia), are all best served with grilled flatbread, seeded crackers and fresh vegetables. The kaha kaha and machluta dips are both somewhere between a dip and a salad, and go especially well with grilled chicken, while the fava is good with grilled fish.

Like many couples, my husband and I bickered over who would do what and who did more. We came up with a radical solution

It was when my second child was born in 2021 that I realised I needed a new system for parenting. We were coming out of lockdown, and I was tired and overwhelmed. During the pandemic, my husband and I had built our own mini unit in the UK, as our families lived in the US. I had decided to start my own literary agency as soon as my daughter was old enough to start nursery at six months. It wasn’t ideal timing, but I wanted to start as soon as possible.

I approached finding a parenting system the way I think many women of my generation do, with the same intensity that we would have approached a school dissertation. I decided to crowdsource my research: I watched videos of home-schooling mums in the US demonstrating their morning routines, I read every parenting book I could, I listened to podcasters interviewing mothers who seemingly “had it all”, and listened to others who argued that “having it all” was impossible.

Chronicling your humdrum, solitary life has become an online trend. It’s certainly perplexing. Is it also empowering?

Name: Loneliness influencers.

Age: A few months old.

He walked out of his way to get me on to the right street, then handed me the brolly saying, ‘Here, you take this’

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

It was bucketing down, absolutely pouring. I was on my way to a birthday dinner but got lost in central Sydney’s labyrinth of streets, so I ducked into an internet cafe to look up directions to the restaurant. I then wrote those directions down by hand – such were the times!

As I stepped out of the cafe, I realised just how bad the weather had become and how ill-prepared I was for the rain. As I stood waiting to cross the road, swiftly getting wet, a man waiting for the lights in the opposite direction offered up his big rainbow umbrella to share. I gratefully accepted and, still a little unsure of where I was going, asked if he knew the way to the restaurant.

Nicky and Dan share an outlook on life shaped by their experiences of loss – and it has ignited their sex lives
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

I thought: I’ve found someone else who wants to live every moment like it’s their last – he gets it

Also: Anthropic advocates for a ‘pause’ on AI advancement – days after filing to go public on the US stock market

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the US tech editor at the Guardian. Today we’re discussing Donald Trump’s neediness for AI and the contradictions of Anthropic’s safety-first posture.

OpenAI confidentially files for initial public offering on US stock market

Apple debuts revamped ‘Siri AI’ and new child safety features for iPhones and iPads

The Guardian view on children and the internet: rolling back big tech’s untrammelled power | Editorial

Silicon Valley including Meta has embraced Maga politics, says Nick Clegg

Bernie Sanders’ AI sovereign wealth fund plan is good. But we think this is better | Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier

Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land

Billions spent and hypothetical returns: the AI boom explained with six charts

‘A driver of political violence’: how the breakneck AI boom is fueling anti-tech extremism

The line is vital for our elderly relative’s care, but after 20 calls BT seems unable to resolve the problem

My elderly aunt, who lives alone, has been unable to receive incoming calls for more than two months after BT switched her analogue service to Digital Voice.

Her care is overseen by a rota of relatives who check on her and arrange medical appointments and in-home help.

Bereaved relatives have been bombarded with calls, emails and letters addressed to the deceased

ScottishPower sent a debt collection letter to my house demanding £130 owing on my late brother’s gas account. I am his sole executor and had informed it of his death.

The company, meanwhile, owed a £430 credit on his electricity account. It eventually paid this with a cheque issued in my late brother’s name, which could not therefore be cashed.

Buyers are ripped off after assuming online stores were genuine because they are recommended by an AI tool

You want to buy a new bag and so you ask ChatGPT for help. You have always liked Russell & Bromley so you ask ChatGPT what is popular there at the moment.

The artificial intelligence (AI) assistant gives you cross body, shoulder, casual and formal options with the prices listed beside them. You click through from the sources to what looks like the official Russell & Bromley site and buy your new bag, which is conveniently on sale.

Influencers often brand sugar as inherently harmful – but not all sweet foods are created equal

‘It’s a common myth,” says Dr Emily Leeming, a dietitian at King’s College London – and one that thrives on social media. The confusion, she says, often comes from people cutting out sugary foods and feeling better. But that can be because removing ultra-processed sweet treats improves the overall quality of a diet (making more room for wholefoods).

Leeming says influencers who call sugar “toxic” often see it as inherently harmful – solely responsible for weight gain, poor blood sugar control and heart problems. But in controlled studies where calorie intake is kept the same, diets high in sugar don’t appear to worsen weight loss, metabolism or key health markers. “It’s not ideal nutritionally if you’re missing out on fruits, vegetables and whole grains,” Leeming says, “but sugar isn’t in itself directly harmful in that context.”

Doctors say diagnosis is usually clinical and doesn’t rely on a blood test, with symptoms often starting in the mid-40s

There’s a special frisson to period changes in your mid-forties. Every deviation from your usual pattern can feel like a harbinger of the menopause transition, also known as perimenopause.

One might spend years staring at their underwear, wondering: am I or aren’t I?

Keren Landman MD is an independent health reporter who is also trained as an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist, with experience serving as a disease detective at the CDC and conducting HIV and malaria research in resource-poor countries. Her public health newsletter is called Landmansplained

Drug that stops cancer cells hiding and a breakthrough for pancreatic cancer among highlights from Asco conference – but there were also notes of caution

Doctors, scientists and researchers shared new research about ways to tackle cancer at the 2026 American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco) annual meeting, the world’s largest cancer conference.

The event in Chicago, attended by 40,000 health professionals, featured more than 200 sessions and 2,700 poster presentations on this year’s theme, “the science and practice of translation: improving cancer outcomes worldwide”. Here are the five biggest takeaways.

As demand for cobalt, gold and other minerals grows, mining is accelerating deforestation in the Congo basin – and increasing the risk of deadly Ebola outbreaks

For decades after the discovery of Ebolavirus in 1976, outbreaks of the disease were relatively small and contained, affecting a few hundred people at most.

Not any more. In recent years, outbreaks of Ebola have been much larger, affecting thousands and even tens of thousands of people across multiple countries. The 2014 outbreak of Ebola in west Africa infected more than 28,000 people in 10 countries on three continents. The current eruption, which began in early May and shows no signs of abating, has caused 363 confirmed cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has crossed into Uganda.

Sonia Shah is the author of five books including Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, and writes the newsletter Cross Pollinations on Substack

From France’s catwalk looks to Virgil van Dijk’s classic approach, these are the teams and players to watch

The 2026 World Cup may not kick off until Thursday, but the fashion tournament has already begun, as teams arrive at training camps across the US.

Fashion moments range from the outfits players wear to get to training, to the suits worn on planes and their training gear. The French team’s training camp in Clairefontaine became something of a catwalk this week thanks to the style of players such as Jules Koundé and Kylian Mbappé. Meanwhile, brands including Loewe, Gabriela Hearst, Patta and the rapper Drake’s Nocta have worked with teams on suiting and training gear.

A higher price does not necessarily mean better fabric, fairer pay for workers or greater sustainability. To guarantee you’re buying ethically, experts say, you need to dig a little deeper

Does paying more for a T-shirt mean that it’s more likely to be ethically made?

In short (sleeves): no. People who spend their time investigating fashion companies’ supply chains and employment practices seem united in the conclusion that money cannot necessarily buy us a clear conscience.

The sundress is back – here’s how to make it short but not (too) sweet

One sunny day recently, I looked around and realised that every woman in my vicinity was wearing the same dress. Not the same dress, exactly. But the same dress. A maxidress, colourful but in a tasteful sort of way. Floaty, probably with a tiered skirt. Wholesome and vaguely rustic, but also a bit fancy. You know the dress I mean, because if you have been at any outdoor event between 2019 and about last Thursday, you have had the same experience. The maxidress has colonised summer dressing, and it’s out of control.

So I am here to tell you that the maxidress must die. Ha! Not really, but also sort of yes, really. It started so well. When the maxi first landed, it beguiled us all. Floor-length, after all, was new fashion territory for anyone born after about 1965, so it felt fresh and exciting, plus you could go to a party in flat shoes and not have to shave your legs. Result! But somewhere down the line the maxidress has got a bit Motherland. It has become a garment that somehow represents the tense negotiation between prettiness and exhaustion that defines modern womanhood. A dress you wear for a holiday selfie that you retake 14 times before posting on Instagram with a joie-de-vivre caption.

Think self-tan is too much effort – or too risky? Not any more. The latest products are so simple to use you can just go with the glow

I can’t be without a facial self-tan in spring/summer. Keen to offload heavier coverage foundations that can slip, slide and suffocate in the sunshine, I reach for a subtle tanner as a warmer, lighter and, truly, easier base layer for makeup.

People wrongly imagine self-tan to be too effortful, fiddly and risky, and understandably wonder where to slot it into their skincare routine, but a new crop of facial self-tanners simplifies both these issues.

Matosinhos was built on fish, but today its retro seafood restaurants and canneries sit alongside great art spaces, museums and landmark architecture

This once declining industrial city is on the up, but not so much that it has been ruined – yet. See it now, mid-gentrification, before its humble seafood restaurants become overpriced and its beautifully curated museums and galleries overrun.

The newly designated Joyce Country and Western Lakes Unesco Geopark in Galway and Mayo celebrates a 700-million-year geological history that has produced a unique terrain and rich cultural heritage

‘If you take all these springs together in terms of flow, it’s by far the largest in Ireland, and one of the biggest systems in the world,” said Dr Benjamin Thébaudeau, geologist for the newly designated Unesco Joyce Country and Western Lakes Geopark in western Ireland.

Over a few days, I discovered that this massive system of limestone springs and caves is the engine that drives this landscape, in the same way as an underground train network powers a city. It’s a place where rivers disappear into limestone fissures and subterranean lakes, and where roads twist through drowned valleys beneath mountains shaped by fire and ice.

Rallying the kids can be chaotic and frustrating, but from Interrailing all the way to Turkey to Vespa rides in Naples, these trips brought families together

Finland has been named the world’s happiest country for nine years running, but arriving in Helsinki, dishevelled from one of my first flights with my nine-month-old baby, I was less interested in national rankings and more in having a nice nap. My husband, Jake, and I had emerged from the fog of newborn life and the idea of a holiday felt possible again. My ambitions were small: a sunset beer, a walk in the woods, reading a few pages of my book uninterrupted.

A week-long mountain trek with two young children felt like an ambitious undertaking – but they loved every minute

It’s said the 19th-century Parisian flâneur, intent on not rushing past the beauties of the street, would take a tortoise on a lead to set the pace. I thought about this as my donkey bent his head to another thistle and I turned my attention to the view, waiting for him to finish. Every way I looked, layers of mountains receded in deepening shades of eggshell blue. There were no sounds but the wind, the squeals of marmots and the giggles of my two young kids. I was extremely, uncomplicatedly happy.

Our donkeys were on loan from Burrotrek, a small outfit run by Swiss-born Denise Wirth. Twenty years ago, Denise spent four and a half months walking the Camino from Switzerland to Santiago de Compostela with two donkeys. She liked Spain, and she loved donkeys, so she settled on the idea of offering donkey treks in the Pyrenees. She has not looked back. For much of the year she is based where she settled, near Cadaqués, and offers a variety of self-guided itineraries through the vineyards in the foothills and along the Mediterranean coast, with trips lasting between a day and a week. But for the summer months, when temperatures soar, she relocates with her donkeys to Cal Jan de la Llosa in the province of Lleida, a gorgeous ruin of a farm several miles up an unpaved track. From here, she lends her animals to people who, for whatever reason, have a romantic notion of what it might be like to take a donkey up a mountain.

Few things are more feared than a dementia diagnosis. Now people living with the condition are fighting against damaging stereotypes and demanding proper medical support

When Maxine Linnell, 78, a retired psychotherapist living in Leicestershire, learned that she had dementia four years ago, the diagnosis proved less challenging than some people’s reactions. “What was striking was how many people’s attitudes changed almost immediately … they stop seeing you as a person and see only dementia, some professionals included. Like this is the end and everything after will be devastating.”

The assumption that you go overnight from diagnosis to late-stage dementia isn’t confined to family and friends. Julie Hayden, a nurse and social worker from Yorkshire, was diagnosed nine years ago at the age of 54, long after sensing that something was wrong but being constantly told that it was depression or menopause; her doctors still associated dementia with old age and didn’t consider that she might have had young onset. “At the point of diagnosis,” she recalls, “most of us are told: ‘Well, it’s dementia, nothing we can do about that. Best go away and get your end of life affairs in order.’”

She starred in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, had to stoop when she danced with Fred Astaire, then became world-famous – and a gay icon – in the original Batman series. But her life behind the scenes has been just as interesting ...

Julie Newmar is showing me her secret garden: an oasis of greenery around her house in Brentwood, Los Angeles, that is crammed with trees, flowers, sculptures and labyrinthine paths. It feels like a little piece of old-school Hollywood, untouched by the world outside. “Here, try one,” Newmar says as she leans over from her mobility scooter and picks me a blueberry from a bush. “Isn’t that nice?” It’s a well-maintained jungle of begonias, jasmine, geraniums, fruit trees, and above all, roses. She has 90 varieties, she says, including one named after her. “That one’s Marilyn Monroe,” she says, pointing out a creamy pink one. “Doesn’t it look like her flesh?” Monroe’s former house is just up the road, she mentions. Newmar has lived here for decades with her son, John, who has Down’s syndrome. They spend a lot of time out here.

“I would say my life is about beauty,” Newmar says. “I want to be a beautiful old woman; beauty in the garden; beauty in your behaviour, in your treatment of others. Because we all know that life’s a circle. All this stuff comes back. And in my 90s now, one has evolved. Big things happen now and they’re more in the metaphysical, they’re in the ‘what can I do for others?’ Because I’ve already done it for myself.”

Brigg, Lincolnshire: With harvest approaching, we’re putting the glorious long evenings to good use, and both humans and insects are working hard to protect the crops

There’s something magical about the long evenings in June, the warmth and the way the setting sun casts long shadows across the fields. The extra hours are much-needed though as there is plenty to do.

We’re in the run-up to harvest in July, so if the weather is dry we walk up and down the seed crop tramlines, pulling out (rouging) unwanted wild oats, brome and blackgrass. They drop seeds that could contaminate not only our ground, but potentially someone else’s. Strict numbers govern how many of such plants are allowed per hectare in a seed crop, and independent inspectors check the results. Government officials in the Animal and Plant Health Agency will even walk the higher quality seed crops.

The theory is that breathing near your plants releases carbon dioxide, boosting photosynthesis and growth

The problem
We’ve all done it. Walked past a drooping fern, crouched down and given it a few encouraging words (whether you admit it to other people is a different matter). We are told it’s actually good for our plants, so should we all be chatting away to them to help them thrive?

The hack
Speaking to your plants is said to encourage growth. This is because breathing near them releases carbon dioxide, which they absorb during photosynthesis. More CO2 means faster, healthier growth.

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. Do they feel supported? In Walthamstow, east London, we meet a group of carers as they are collected for a rare night off that brings a sense of community and a glimpse of fun for a few hours every few weeks. It’s hosted by Satvinder, a tenacious council worker who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough and provides them crucial emotional support.

This film 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.

This word for outdoing or outshining others originated in the manosphere, but is now thoroughly mainstream. Why is it so popular – and should we be worried about slang that arises from toxic subcultures?

Until recently, if someone had said “mog” to me, I probably would have assumed they were talking about the children’s book cat created by the late great Judith Kerr. If asked about “mogging” or being “mogged,” I would have been completely baffled. But for many members of gen Z and gen Alpha (or anyone who is just a bit too online), the slang term, which means to outdo or outshine others, is everywhere.

Mogging’s origins are in the manosphere, where it began as a verb derived from the acronym “Amog” (alpha male of the group). In misogynistic forums in the 2010s, to “mog” came to mean to outdo someone in terms of sexual desirability. Mogging has been adopted by “looksmaxxing” influencers such as Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular, who encourage men to try to alter their looks – sometimes in extreme ways – to increase their “sexual market value”. Such an influencer might talk of “frame mogging” another person in a photo or video – a variation on mogging that specifically refers to being more muscular.

Cockroach Janta party began as online joke but is growing into one of the most unexpected challenges to country’s rightwing government

The call out to the youth of India was simple: “Get ready to swarm the streets of Delhi with peaceful and loving dissent.” They came in their thousands.

The weekend marked the first public protest of the Cockroach Janta party (CJP), a movement that began as an online joke, but which has swiftly grown into one of the most unexpected challenges to the indomitable power of the country’s rightwing Narendra Modi government – driven by millions of discontented and disillusioned young people.

Andrew Sparrow has been writing the Guardian’s daily political live blog for more than 15 years. How does he cope with the relentless psychodrama of British politics?

On Monday at 14:12 BST, the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow posted two sentences announcing one of the largest government document dumps in British political history:

The Cabinet Office has published the Mandelson files.
They are in three volumes.

Many people despair at the quality of governance in Britain at the moment, but in one respect we are living through a golden age; if you are interested in contemporary history, and learning about what actually happens at the heart of government, then you can now – sometimes – access the sort of information never available before …

Last month a minister compared [the documents being published today] to the evidence released as part of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. But the Chilcot inquiry took place in the era before WhatsApp, and it was publishing secret memos – intended for circulation within Whitehall. WhatsApp messages are a lot more personal; reading them is like being able to eavesdrop on a private conversation.”

How did you find it? Did it help in your efforts to find work?

Keir Starmer has announced a new AI work assistant tool dubbed a “job centre in your pocket” to help job seekers get into work.

In a speech at the start of London Tech Week, the prime minister said the new AI job tool will “help those out of work find the right jobs, create their CVs and get back into work”.

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