If you have to consult the Reddit thread ‘am I too old for Coachella?’, then the answer is probably ‘yes’

This morning, over breakfast, in the course of discussing the week’s news, I happened to say the word “Coachella” in front of my two scornful 11-year-olds, whose heads snapped up from their screens in unison. “How have you heard of Coachella?” said one in amazement. “How have you heard of Coachella?” I replied. They exchanged a look with which I’ve become increasingly familiar – namely, the “here we go” look reserved by the very young for the very middle-aged. “What is Coachella, then?” I said, to which they replied: “It’s where influencers go.”

This is, of course, an accurate summary of what the California music and arts festival has become in the 27 years since its inception, but that’s not why I bring it up. The festival, which is running this week, has featured by Jack White, FKA Twigs and Sabrina Carpenter, but most of the publicity has gone on the audience; specifically, on the attendance of Justin Trudeau, the former prime minister of Canada, who, along with his girlfriend, Katy Perry, was photographed dancing to Justin Bieber and squatting chairless on a kerb, red plastic cups perched on their knees.

‘Trauma-bonding’ with his future wife on Big Brother, selling their wedding pics to OK!, walking off Buzzcocks, writing hits for stars like Kylie and Olly Murs … as the singer returns, he looks back at a tumultuous career

‘I hated being famous,” Samuel Preston says. “I hated, hated, hated it.” Twenty years ago, Preston, who presented himself by his surname to emulate Morrissey, was experiencing a very intense type of notoriety. He had been NME-famous with Worthing band the Ordinary Boys, whose socially conscious ska-influenced indie-punk had a strong cult following known as the Ordinary Army, thanks to hits such as Boys Will Be Boys. But his stint in the 2006 edition of Celebrity Big Brother, and the national interest in his will-they-won’t-they relationship with fellow contestant Chantelle Houghton – the fake “celebrity” sent in to dupe the B-listers – was what sent his profile through the roof.

After leaving the show, he says, “I was on loads of Prozac. I was in a weird space.” Now, after years living on-off in the US, becoming a successful songwriter for hire (to the likes of Kylie Minogue, Cher, Olly Murs, Liam Payne and Jessie Ware), and surviving a near-death experience and OxyContin addiction, Preston is making a comeback with the Ordinary Boys. The band’s new single Peer Pressure is their first music since 2015 (not counting a Christmas single with Olly Murs).

Francia Márquez, the country’s first Black vice-president, opens up about the strains in her relationship with the president and the obstacles she has faced: ‘The Colombian state is a racist state’

In the historic centre of Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, a gallery of portraits at the vice-president’s official residence displays the faces of all former vice-presidents since the country became a republic in 1886. All of them are white.

When the current president and vice-president leave office in August, the wall will include an Afro-Colombian face for the first time: Francia Márquez, 44, the first Black woman to become vice-president in a country where at least 10% of the population is Afro-descendant.

Journalist Will Coldwell tells the story of how a British businessman was imprisoned in Dubai – and how his family finally got him home

When Albert Douglas found out he was facing a long prison sentence in Dubai, he tried to escape the UAE … and failed. What followed was years of court proceedings, time in prison and even, Douglas says, beatings and torture.

In recent years, scores of business owners, unsuspecting tourists and influencers have been detained in Dubai – caught up in an opaque legal system, charged with breaking laws they may not even have been aware of.

From people marrying digital companions to CEOs excited about how people whose jobs are replaced can ‘adapt’, this is terrifying watching. But Perry is the perfect host

There is a fun game you can play while watching Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future, the three-part documentary presented by the artist on the subject of artificial intelligence, its uses and its possible ramifications. Gather a group of friends, press play, and see which of you loses your mind first.

Will it be during the opening interview with Andrea, who recently married Edward, the AI companion she created to be “the man of my dreams”. She – or her idealised online avatar – wore “a beautiful matt satin gown” and he gave a speech about their “unconventional but strong” love. Will it be during the discussion of how you have intimate relations with a disembodied entity (“self-love is important … he’s very encouraging”)? Or will it be when she reveals that the joy she has found with Edward “has poured back” into the relationship she has been in for seven years with (human) Jason? “We’re happier than we’ve ever been.” Jason, perhaps wisely, does not offer himself for interview.

The crowd were getting anxious and players are either missing or off form but they have still reached the Champions League semi-finals

And so I am become a meme. Towards the end of this game, already booked for standing on the edge of the pitch whirling his arms in a balletic, immaculately groomed pose of horror, like an oversized wedding cake figurine at the world’s most distressing wedding, Mikel Arteta could be seen pulling his jumper up over his eyes to obscure the spectacle in front of him. Not so fast, Mikel. We’re all in this together you know.

At the final whistle, with a controlled, job-done 0-0 safely in the bag, Arteta could be seen striding out in front of the post-match column of Arsenal players, conducting the crowd, an urgent, compact, dark-haired figure with, from a distance, something of the business-casual Tom Cruise about him.

Reports that Lebanese officials were not aware of plans for talks revealed by US president in social media post

• US and Iran in indirect talks to extend two-week ceasefire

The military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader warned that Tehran would sink American ships in the strait of Hormuz if the US decided to “police” the narrow waterway.

Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who was named as a military adviser by Mojtaba Khamenei last month, also threatened to take American soldiers hostage if they came ashore and “demand one billion dollars for each captive”.

UK economy smashes forecasts with 0.5% growth in February, but economists fear growth will now slow sharply due to Iran war

The UK’s growth acceleration in February is likely to be “short-lived”, due to the Iran war, warns Andrew Hunter, associate director and senior economist at Moody’s Analytics:

“The 0.5% month-over-month jump in U.K. GDP in February, and slight upward revision to January’s data, echoes the earlier improvement in the surveys and suggests the economy had more momentum at the start of this year than previously thought.

However, with those surveys weakening quite sharply in March as the Middle East conflict sent energy prices soaring, this upturn is likely to prove short lived.

Missile and drone attacks on the port city of Odesa killed six people, with other fatalities recorded in Kyiv and Dnipro

Russian strikes killed at least 12 people in Ukraine, local authorities have said, after Moscow pummelled its neighbour in overnight attacks.

Missile and drone attacks on the southern port city of Odesa killed six people, the head of the city’s military administration, Sergiy Lysak, wrote on Telegram on Thursday.

Map reveals most severe concentrations of ammonia emissions, which are dangerous to health and environment

Ammonia pollution hotspots have been identified in areas with some of the greatest numbers of intensive pig and poultry farms in Britain, research has revealed.

A new map for the first time reveals the most severe concentrations of ammonia emissions are clustered in Lincolnshire, Herefordshire and Norfolk. These regions all have a high density of intensive poultry and pig units that drive dangerous levels of ammonia, according to researchers from Compassion in World Farming (CiWF) and Sustain.

Resignation announced of Jai Patel, whose liquidated crypto firm was relaunched as Stack BTC this year

The chief executive of a bitcoin company promoted by Nigel Farage has left his role as the venture attempts to convince investors that it is going to deliver “long-term value” for shareholders.

Stack BTC was launched to much fanfare in March this year, with Farage and former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng becoming some of its first shareholders. The company says its founder is Paul Withers, a friend of the Reform UK leader who owns a gold bullion company that Farage has also promoted, Direct Bullion.

Rising demand from children with special needs means the £140m required could come from government grants

Councils in England need to hire 1,400 more educational psychologists at a cost of £140m to meet demand from children with special needs such as autism, according to a new report.

Research by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) found huge regional variations and chronic shortages in qualified educational psychologists working with schools, and concluded that a 40% increase in the workforce was needed to iron out the differences between the best and worst-off areas.

Data assessed from 17 clinical trials of anti-amyloid drugs found no ‘meaningful effect’ on cognitive decline

Drugs that have been hailed as a gamechanger for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease make no noticeable difference to patients, according to an extensive review.

The analysis of clinical trials in people with mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia found that the effects of anti-amyloid drugs on cognition and dementia severity over 18 months were “trivial”, with improvements in functional ability “small at best”.

Scientists say finding is ‘very concerning’ as collapse would be catastrophic for Europe, Africa and the Americas

The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.

Fundraising under way to fix uneven floor at Dry Doddington’s 14th century church as stone slabs shift

A church in the Midlands that leans more than the Tower of Pisa is in need of more than £100,000 in repairs to renovate its wonky floor.

Dry Doddington’s St James church tower in Lincolnshire is famous for its jaunty angle of 5.1 degrees, compared to the landmark in Piazza dei Miracoli, Tuscany, which has a lean of about 3.97 degrees.

Residents are trying to raise money for the Grade II-listed building, which was built in the 12th century.

Transfer of medical services from hospital to former Wilko store is improving healthcare access and boosting footfall

It is a revolution that might just save the NHS – and the high street. Imagine being able to have your eyes tested, mole examined or get an appointment with a consultant without going to your local hospital – and maybe fit in some shopping or a cinema visit afterwards.

That, increasingly, is what people in Barnsley are doing after an unprecedented relocation of medical services from the district general hospital into a purpose-built outpatients centre in the Alhambra shopping centre, which is getting a new lease of life thanks to the experiment.

Informal migration, plus climate change and rising numbers of cases globally, are complicating the tireless efforts of the landlocked African country to eradicate the killer disease

The freezer is filled with blue-lidded tubes of cows’ blood, ready to be defrosted and used to feed the colony of mosquitoes. “Also, you can use your arm,” says Nombuso Princess Bhembe, who tends the mosquitoes at Eswatini’s national insectary, an unremarkable building in the town of Siphofaneni, part of the southern African country’s push to eliminate malaria.

But the landlocked nation of 1.2 million people, formerly known as Swaziland, is facing headwinds from not only the climate crisis, aid cuts and insecticide resistance but also economic migration from countries with higher case numbers.

Dougie and Teresa don’t see eye to eye when it comes to supermarket packing. You decide whose argument checks out

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

She says if you’re bagging stuff at the checkout, you’re holding up the people behind you

He just doesn’t understand the system. The packing shelves at the back are there to help customers

Mould’s fearsomely loud power trio Sugar rode the wave of grunge, but called it quits when the scene lost its innocence. Now the band are reuniting – before it’s too late

The beating heart of Sugar was always the sound of Bob Mould’s guitar: a colossal, metallic, thunderous thing, like a sonic boom you could whistle. “It was incredible, being engulfed by that wall of sound,” remembers bassist David Barbe from his office at the University of Georgia, weeks before the group are due to play their first shows in more than three decades. “Bob was so loud, there were times on stage when I could see Malcolm drumming, but I couldn’t actually hear him.”

“I didn’t wear earplugs when I started playing with Bob,” adds Malcolm Travis, the aforementioned drummer, from his home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. “But soon afterwards, I did. It was just deafening.” And while everyone involved is 30 years older than the last time they played together, age has not withered them; anyone who’s caught Mould playing solo in recent years will attest that his guitar is still fearsomely loud.

The premise – Instagram influencer is confronted by pioneer reality – is genius. But does this high-concept debut live up to the hype?

Could Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear be the first great tradwife novel? This was my hope: finally, a literary response to the unhinged social trend of women cosplaying “traditional Christian values” – pronatalism and obeying one’s husband – to large social media followings. I am not immune to hype, and Yesteryear has been hyped to high heaven, prompting massive auctions for the rights, and landing a film deal with Anne Hathaway.

You have to admit that the premise – Instagram tradwife wakes up in what appear to be the actual pioneer days, and finds that traditional wifedom is not as much of a hoot as her whitewashed social media re-enactment had implied – is genius. As one of the “Angry Women” our heroine Natalie so disparages, I was looking forward to some sweet schadenfreude.

Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac are a miserable couple who run a country club and get blackmailed in a rich v poor potboiler that has been done so much better before – not least in the stunning first series. What a shame

We may have to start calling it White Lotus Derangement Syndrome. This is a condition spreading through the television commissioning system since Mike White debuted his brilliant anthology series five years ago, whereby drama is produced by setting poorer Americans alongside richer Americans in a location the latter choose to come to and the former can’t escape. In The White Lotus, they are the staff and guests at a variety of luxury resorts. In Sirens, the personal assistants of kabillionaires. In whatever Nicole Kidman is in they can be single mothers with children at assisted places at schools with the cashmere-clad elite, servants to expats nursing secret sadnesses in luxurious apartments, masseuses and other service providers at exclusive spa retreats, or exploited or sexually harassed nannies to people who think nothing of exploiting or harassing their nannies. In non-Kidman derivatives, the dogged blue collar viewer-avatars can also include cops, struggling novelists or academics. Unless the academic is a tenured professor, in which case the underdog becomes a sexually harassed student, who should probably unionise with the nannies.

Now we have the second season of Beef to join the throng. The first, starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong both doing career-best work, played out to near-universal acclaim as the story of a minor altercation in a car park between their two characters that gradually transformed credible pettiness into a credible psychodrama that built to an operatic climax. The new one stars Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac as a married couple who oversee the running of a luxury country club. Josh is the general manager (with a penchant for gambling and camgirls), Lindsay is the interior designer-cum-hostess (with a penchant for restoring the social status she had as a posho in her native England and an icily ruthless streak). They are both frustrated with where life has led them – so close to real money, but so far from having it themselves.

Sid Lowe is our Spanish football correspondent, based in Madrid, and has been covering a very busy beat for years. He will be answering your questions from 12pm BST

Sid Lowe is the Guardian’s Spanish football correspondent, based in Madrid, and has been covering an increasingly busy beat for years. And after a busy week of action in the Champions League, La Liga and beyond, post your questions below the line; he’ll answer as many as he can from 12pm BST.

In the meantime, here’s his report from Madrid, where Atlético knocked Barcelona out of the quarter-finals, plus Andy Hunter’s dispatch from PSG’s win over Liverpool.

Redevelopment of the National Sports Centre would be a boost to locals and those who have fought for its return

“There were trees growing out of the main stand and on the indoor track and no one was doing anything about it,” says Jim Powell of the groundswell of despair at a crumbling Crystal Palace barely a couple of years after the Olympics were hosted to acclaim across the other side of London.

A month before Sir Mo Farah secured his second gold of London 2012 on Super Saturday, he had swept to victory in the 5,000m when Crystal Palace hosted its final London Grand Prix. But that summer’s Games appeared to signal the beginning of the end for the venue that had been the home of British athletics for the previous two decades.

A long list of contenders want to be president in 2027. But with anti-establishment sentiment dominating the national mood, outsiders have the advantage

Wanted: politician capable of appealing to the moderate right, centre and moderate left to beat hard-right populist Jordan Bardella in the run-off of France’s 2027 presidential election. The search began in earnest after last month’s municipal elections, in which the left held on to most big cities while conservatives or the far-right National Rally (RN) hoovered up smaller towns. This year will be a marathon race to select a single candidate to face Bardella, 30, or his patron, Marine Le Pen, 57, in the final round. Le Pen remains ineligible unless an appeals court in July overturns her sentence for embezzlement of EU funds.

All opinion polls give the anti-immigration, Eurosceptic RN a sizeable lead in voting intentions for the first round. Bardella, the party’s smooth-talking but inexperienced leader, is polling as high as 38%. Barring a miracle, he seems sure of a place in the run-off. That leaves only one slot for a candidate who can reconcile mainstream conservative and liberal centrist supporters of outgoing President Emmanuel Macron, and then win over sufficient socialist, green and even radical-left voters.

The $95 bus trip to Foxborough highlights a tournament unique in modern times – one that ultimately makes no secret of its disdain for the paying public

Like any journalist with an unerring nose for an offbeat feature, my interest was sharply piqued by this week’s announcement of the $95 bus ride. What magnificent accoutrements might conceivably justify the £70 fare for a half-hour journey from south Boston to Foxborough? An at-seat shiatsu? A pool deck? A five-course dining experience? A brief but moving Céline Dion set in the aisles? At the very least, I felt I owed it to my profession to find out for sure.

Alas upon closer investigation, the Boston Stadium Express being launched for this summer’s World Cup appears to be an entirely regular bus journey on an entirely regular bus with entirely regular bus seats. Your non-refundable ticket – no child concessions – entitles you simply to be dropped off a 15-minute walk from the ground, and picked up again from the same place. There is, in short, no more complex rationale for the Boston organising committee to charge £70 than the fact that they can, and the World Cup only comes once, and if you don’t want to pay then some other rube will.

Every wave of new tech has come with a doomsday scenario. But governments just aren’t planning a human response on the scale required

The transition to a world of artificial intelligence has given a whole new meaning to the concept that capitalism can only renew itself through creative destruction. This is the idea that clapped-out technologies have to be replaced by new ways of doing things, even though the process can be brutal.

That has been the way of things for every new wave of inventions since the dawn of the industrial age in the mid-18th century, but with machines now displaying cognitive skills, able to both think and learn, the potential for economic disruption is all the greater.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

Each party has its own version of nationalism to offer voters in May’s Senedd election: closer ties to England or more independence for Wales

It’s fair to say that the UK will change after the elections on 7 May. But few places will change as thoroughly as Wales. The polls suggest that after the vote our next Senedd will be led by either Plaid Cymru or Reform: this would make it the first time in 100 years that Welsh Labour is not the largest party in Cymru. However, Plaid and Reform’s visions for Wales are polar opposites – and their supporters are torn between two wildly different visions for their country.

When you look at the Plaid and Reform manifestos, the differences are immediately apparent. First of all, Plaid’s document is a chunky 74 pages compared with Reform’s 18. Plaid dedicates huge amounts of ink to explaining how the party is going to fight for concessions or increased power from Westminster on everything from tax to rail devolution. Contrast that with Reform’s leader in Wales, Dan Thomas, who said that a Reform government in Wales would not “pick a fight with Westminster” except on the “one matter of immigration”.

Weirdly, Keir and Kemi looked more secure in their jobs as a modicum of coherence entered their exchanges

Credit where credit is due. The last few prime minister’s questions have been an exercise in nihilism. The embodiment of existential futility. Questions asked by Kemi Badenoch but not even a pretence by Keir Starmer of answering them. It was like the worst days of Boris Johnson’s time in No 10. We’d have learned more if both leaders had chosen to read out some names from an old 1980s phonebook.

But to everyone’s surprise – not least Starmer’s – this week Keir did make a reasonable fist of listening to Kemi’s questions and giving a reply that was more or less coherent. Well, up to a point. Obviously he didn’t answer the one question that really counted. The one about when the defence investment plan would be published. But you can’t have everything. And, to be fair, it is a tricky one. Both sides of the house know that the UK needs to spend more on defence. Especially now the US seems to have become the enemy. But no one can agree on how to pay for it.

Once you start noticing “it’s not X, it’s Y” as you scroll online, you can’t fail to register it. I’ve become so hypervigilant that it has seeped into my subconscious thoughts

If you’ve never seen Jim Carrey’s 2007 psychological thriller The Number 23, then congratulations. It is a film about a man who sees the number 23 so many times that he ends up going bonkers. I used to think this film was stupid. However, now I appear to be living it.

My own personal number 23 is a rhetorical device: “It’s not X, it’s Y.” Everywhere I look, there it is. Whenever I hate myself enough to scroll through Facebook’s wilderness of algorithmically suggested posts, I find myself being smacked in the face with sentences such as: “Self-improvement isn’t a trend, it’s a lifestyle shift,” and “The small wins aren’t just moments, they’re the majority of your life.” Once you notice it, it becomes impossible to ignore. This weekend during a Peloton class (I know, shut up), I heard an instructor bark a variation of “this isn’t X, it’s Y”. Yesterday, a character did the same during a TV show I was reviewing, and I dropped a star from its score in retaliation.

Millions have died as a result of disastrous US-led military adventurism. But there have been no consequences for those who championed it for so long

What an admission. “The threat of terrorism” from the Middle East, an influential US columnist wrote a fortnight ago, “was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it”. If the US had “not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s,” he added, “Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking” it. He went further still: “Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of ‘who we are’ but because of where we are.”

After a quarter of a century of disastrous US wars in the Middle East, that may sound like common sense. But this is Robert Kagan, one of the godfathers of neoconservatism, the creed that zealously championed military adventurism at the height of the era of US exceptionalism. In the 1990s, he repeatedly agitated for war with Iraq, a demand that became a rallying cry after 9/11, when he insisted that “the Iraqi threat is enormous”.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Keir Starmer can’t be blamed for the crisis in the Middle East, but he has to reassure people that he is prepared for its long-term consequences

Public reassurance is one of the first duties of the government in difficult times. The early months of the Covid pandemic offer a case study in how to get this wrong. Boris Johnson was paralysed by indecision and denial of the severity of what was unfolding. Panic-buying cleared supermarket shelves of essential goods.

Sir Keir Starmer is unlike Mr Johnson in temperament and work ethic, but he too is struggling to get ahead of events in a global crisis. It isn’t easy when the origin of turbulence is a superpower gone rogue. Donald Trump’s impulsive actions can’t be anticipated with epidemiological precision like a virus.

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.

Science rarely produces identical outcomes. Mistaking this for failure turns caution into an excuse for inaction

A new set of studies out this month suggests that as many as half of all results published in reputable journals in the social sciences can’t be replicated by independent analysis. This is part of a long-running problem across many research fields – most visibly in the social sciences and psychology, though concerns have also been raised in areas of biomedical research.

The latest work is a seven-year project called Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (Score), which has now published three studies looking at 3,900 social science papers. It found that newer papers, and those published in journals requiring extensive sharing of underlying data, were more likely to be reproduced. Separately, medical research faces its own constraints: differing patient caseloads and limited sample sizes mean that, in practice, it can resemble the social sciences more than laboratory physics. Clearly, policymakers should be cautious of any claims that don’t have a wide and robust base of evidence.

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

Responding to an article by the PM, Caroline Lucas says he must be clearer about climate risks, Molly Scott Cato says we must reverse Brexit and Dr Victor Ajuwon applauds Labour’s directness. Plus, letters by Toby Harris and Dr Tracey Elliott

Keir Starmer’s warning that the UK should not be at the mercy of events abroad is well made (The Iran war is a warning: Britain must build resilience – at home and with our allies in Europe, 9 April), but would carry more weight were he to level with the British public about the full breadth of the crises we face. It is extraordinary that nowhere in an article devoted to resilience did he find space to include the growing threat posed to the UK by the dramatic decline in the health of nature around the world. It is even more extraordinary – and, frankly, unforgivable – given that his own intelligence chiefs at the joint intelligence committee (JIC) have recently spelled it out for him in no uncertain terms.

In a report that the government shamefully sought first to suppress and then to redact, so that some of the most alarming warnings were removed, the JIC warned of “cascading risks” from the degradation of some of the planet’s most important ecosystems, including conflict, increased competition for resources and economic shocks. Six ecosystems “critical for UK national security” are all “on a pathway to collapse”, some potentially within five years – in other words, they face “irreversible loss of function beyond repair”. The UK’s heavy reliance on food and fertiliser imports means our food security is particularly at risk, threatening food shortages, higher prices and civil unrest.

Dr Helen Holt and Dr Peter Davis respond to an article by Polly Toynbee on the latest round of strikes by resident doctors

Polly Toynbee is right that it is time to stop the doctors’ strikes (Both doctors and the government are handling this strike badly – that’s why there is no end in sight, 10 April). She suggests that doctors are not feeling the pain of industrial action, but this is far from true. We are anxious about our patients and their cancelled appointments and procedures; we are exhausted covering work that we are not familiar with; and those being paid overtime for shifts they don’t want to do are uncomfortable about the financial impact on the NHS.

Many of us reluctantly supported industrial action at the beginning, with a government that wasn’t listening – wanting to support junior colleagues whose pay had fallen far behind contemporaries. Now we see how divided and conflicted resident doctors are too, and we long for a resolution. We recognise that the strikes are harmful. Communication and diplomacy are skills we pride ourselves on, and politicians have never needed them more than now. Diplomacy is the way to resolve this crisis for our NHS as well.
Dr Helen Holt
Consultant physician and chair of the medical staff committee, University Hospitals Dorset

Prof Michael Krawczak says the required molecular genetic testing comes at a cost, but should not be ruled out as it was in a recent court case

I read with great astonishment your article regarding the court of appeal’s decision on proving paternity in the case of a child whose father could be either one of a pair of monozygotic twins (Court of appeal says it cannot rule on which identical twin fathered a child, 30 April). I was particularly surprised by the court’s statement that it was “not possible” to say which twin fathered the child. This is definitely not true. The germ cells of monozygotic twins differ with sufficient probability and to a sufficient degree to allow their respective children to be clearly assigned to either of them using molecular genetic techniques.

I and my colleagues first presented the idea for this approach back in 2012, and clearly demonstrated its practical feasibility in 2018. Of course, the required molecular genetic testing entails considerable costs (currently in the five-figure range). However, whether such costs would be so “very significant” (the court’s words) as to preclude genetic testing seems highly questionable, given the potential consequences of inaction for those involved.
Prof Michael Krawczak
Kiel University, Germany

Madge Christopher was featured in an article on Storm Goretti, then Robert called

My photograph appeared in your article on the aftermath of Storm Goretti (‘It has been traumatic’: the Cornwall landmark left battered by Storm Goretti, 3 April), and now I have an extraordinary tale to tell.

Within a day or so of the publication, I received an email from a man called Robert who said that, more than 50 years ago, we had worked in the same local government establishment, which was an office with a small number of employees. But there was more…

Longsuffering hooker, who warmed bench for 21 Tests and lost part of a thumb, is getting RFU recognition at last

Initially, Andy Simpson thought it was a Saturday morning wind-up. Someone from the Rugby Football Union museum was phoning to tell him that, at the age of 71, he was finally a capped England player. Given he had retired without featuring in an officially recognised Test – “the first thing you think is: ‘Who’s taking the mickey here?’” – his scepticism was understandable.

But no, it was totally legit. Simpson is among 47 former players now basking in a warm, rosy glow that had previously eluded them. Having trawled through its archives, the RFU has deemed that several fixtures against full-strength national teams – including a 1986 contest between Italy and an England B side containing Simpson – were effectively Test matches. The long wait is over and the golden oldie debutants have been invited to attend a special, if belated, capping ceremony on 8 June.

• Funding for $5bn tour could be cut back

• Saudi focus now more on football and esport

The future of LIV Golf is in doubt, with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund preparing to cut funding for the $5bn rebel tour.

LIV executives were late arriving at the tour event in Mexico City this week after being called up to a meeting in New York, with uncertainty over the immediate future first emerging at the Masters in Augusta last weekend. Rumours that LIV could even be shut down had begun to circulate on social media on Tuesday evening, with officials from the tour declining to respond.

When the dust kicked up by an utterly scintillating two-legged struggle had settled, Bayern Munich could bathe in the glow of a win for the ages and linger dreamily on the prospect of a semi-final against Paris Saint-Germain.

It is the tie most neutrals wanted but the bar for entertainment has been raised sky high now. Real Madrid should curse themselves, and one of their number in particular, for letting things career out of their control at the death; the sadness for those with no skin in the game came from being deprived an additional half-hour of the near ceaseless thrills both teams were serving up here.

Rumors about the reporter and New England head coach Mike Vrabel flew all week. The conclusion to the saga was all too predictable

Dianna Russini, one of the NFL’s most high-profile reporters, is photographed holding hands with New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel at a fancy resort in Sedona, Arizona. Rumors fly. Vrabel and Russini, who are both married to other people, issue statements denying the assumptions of something untoward. But the firestorm only grows. Russini resigns from her post at the Athletic, Vrabel continues with his job as usual.

The female reporter’s career is in shambles. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for the male head coach.

• Allegations relate to Liam McDonald’s time at Redditch

• They include a claim that he bet against his own team

The Football Association has opened an investigation into allegations of a breach of betting regulations by the Kettering Town manager, Liam McDonald.

The allegations are understood to be historic and relate to McDonald’s time as manager of Redditch a decade ago. They include a claim that he bet against his own team. The FA’s betting rules enforce a strict ban on any participants in the game from Step 4 upwards placing any bets on football anywhere in the world.

• Forward could be out until 2027 with suspected achilles tendon rupture

• Ekitiké is club’s leading goalscorer this season with 17 goals

The Liverpool striker Hugo Ekitiké will miss the rest of the season and the World Cup with the injury he sustained against Paris Saint-Germain on Tuesday, Didier Deschamps has confirmed.

Ekitiké suffered a suspected achilles tendon rupture in the first half of Liverpool’s Champions League quarter-final second leg defeat and could be sidelined until next year as a result. The full extent of the 23-year-old’s injury has not been confirmed – he underwent scans on Wednesday and Liverpool are expected to provide an update later this week – but the head coach of the France national team has ruled Ekitiké out of his plans for this summer’s World Cup.

• Iraola leaving at end of the season

• Rose out of work since March 2025

Bournemouth are in advanced talks with Marco Rose to replace Andoni Iraola as their head coach. The German has emerged as the leading candidate and a deal for him to take over at the end of the season could be agreed by the end of this week.

Bournemouth have also given strong consideration to moving for Ipswich’s Kieran McKenna, but Rose is available now and boasts a strong CV. McKenna’s contract contains a buyout clause and no negotiations can be held with him before the end of the Championship season. The Northern Irishman is trying to lead Ipswich back into the Premier League and the club are likely to resist any attempt to take the 39-year-old away from Portman Road.

England have a long way to go yet before booking flights to Brazil, but Esme Morgan, Lotte Wubben-Moy and Lucia Kendall impressed against Spain

Everybody keep calm. England sit top of their qualifying group with a 100% record after beating Spain, but there remains a very long way to go before anyone can start booking flights to Brazil for 2027. Let us cast aside that sensible advice, though, and begin to look at the players who enhanced their prospects of selection because, whether England continue this winning streak or not, their target is to win a first world title and there is no hiding from that challenge. So who has staked a claim?

Of those who started at Wembley on Tuesday, eight look nailed on to be in the first-choice XI for the World Cup. That octet of Hannah Hampton, Lucy Bronze, Alex Greenwood, Keira Walsh, Georgia Stanway, Lauren Hemp, Lauren James and Alessia Russo will be central to Sarina Wiegman’s plans for Brazil, together with senior players such as Leah Williamson and Ella Toone when they return after injuries, plus the “clutch moment” saviour that is Chloe Kelly, who was on the bench.

Safety charity warns deaths are rising overall and closely linked to deprivation

People in the north of England are twice as likely to be killed in accidents than Londoners, with accidental deaths clearly linked to deprivation, a report has found.

The research, from safety charity the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), highlights vast regional differences in accidental deaths, which have also seen an overall increase.

Woman, 47, and man, 46, held on suspicion of arson endangering life after attempted Finchley attack

A 47-year-old woman and a 46-year-old man have been arrested on suspicion of arson endangering life after an attempted attack on a synagogue in Finchley, north London, as part of an investigation into what the Metropolitan police described as an “antisemitic hate crime”.

The force said the woman was arrested at an address in Watford just after 4.45pm on Wednesday, while the man was arrested at 7.15pm in the Watford area. Both suspects remain in police custody.

Company has received about £8.7bn in renewable energy subsidies since 2012, despite claims wood pellets are not sourced sustainably

The owner of the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire received record subsidies of almost £1bn for burning trees to generate electricity in 2025, a climate thinktank has calculated.

The company was paid £999m last year for generating about 4.5% of Great Britain’s electricity from its biomass plant, costing each household £13 a year, according to analysts at Ember.

More landlords having to cut prices to secure tenants, Rightmove data shows

Average private rents have stopped rising in Great Britain after almost a decade of increases, as more landlords cut their prices to secure a tenant, data shows.

The typical advertised private rent outside London for properties coming on to the market remained flat at £1,370 a calendar month in the first three months of 2026, according to the property website Rightmove.

Petrol production hit and full extent of damage unknown after ‘unprecedented’ fire at Viva plant in Corio

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Geelong oil refinery fire: what we know so far

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

An explosive fire at a Geelong oil refinery – which supplies half of Victoria’s fuel and 10% of Australia’s – has been extinguished, with the impact on petrol production and the extent of the damage still unknown.

The blaze at the Viva Energy facility in Corio – one of two refineries left in the country – broke out just after 11pm Wednesday, with Fire Rescue Victoria alerted to the blaze by multiple calls to triple zero reporting explosions and flames.

Energy crisis unfolding in Middle East has added political urgency, and more funding, to transform South Korea’s solar industry

In Guyang-ri, a farming village of 70 households about 90 minutes south-east of Seoul, people gather for communal free lunches six days a week. The meals are funded by the village’s one-megawatt solar installation, which generates roughly 10m won ($6,800) in net profit each month.

“Residents eat lunch together every day, so we see each other’s faces, talk together,” says Jeon Joo-young, the village chief. “Bonds and solidarity between residents become much stronger. Life becomes more enjoyable.”

Researchers find increase in whale deaths in the bay, largely because of collisions with vessels on busy shipping route

Gray whales have historically been a rare sight in the San Francisco Bay. They trek from the warm lagoons of Mexico’s Baja California more than 10,000 miles (16,000km) north to the Arctic region to feast on shrimp-like animals during the summers, seldom stopping in the busy shipping corridor for prolonged periods.

But in recent years, that story has changed in a dire way. A new study, published this week in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, has found that gray whales in the bay have been dying at alarming rates, largely due to collisions with vessels.

The Avá-Guarani community have received little recognition of the destruction of their land by the Itaipu dam on the Paraguay-Brazil border

When the Indigenous leader Teodoro Alves was a young child in his community of Ocoy-Jacutinga, on the border between Paraguay and Brazil, a river ran through it. The Paraná River, which rises in Brazil and flows south through Paraguay to the Río de la Plata between Argentina and Uruguay, once structured the lives of Avá-Guarani people along its banks.

That continuity, Alves says, was broken in the 1970s with the construction of the Itaipu hydroelectric dam, which submerged their lands and displaced hundreds of families. “I saw the Paraná River before the Itaipu dam was closed. Now I see an immense lake. The river died completely. It died with the Avá-Guarani people,” Alves says.

Analysis shows whales’ coda vocalizations are ‘highly complex’ and remarkably similar to our own

We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered.

Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has found.

UK’s biggest supermarket voices caution for year ahead despite annual profits rising 8.5% to £2.4bn

• Business live – latest updates

Tesco has warned that profits could fall back in the year ahead amid “increased uncertainty caused by the conflict in the Middle East”.

The warning came after the UK’s biggest supermarket hit its highest share of the market in a decade.

Lack of funding leaving police forces failing to keep pace with two-thirds annual increase in referrals, says report

Child victims of online sexual abuse are being inadequately protected from further harm because police forces are struggling to cope with an increase in this crime, his majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary has warned.

Michelle Skeer said: “Without investment and coordination, the situation will worsen and children could be put at further risk.”

Eluned Morgan says US under Donald Trump is ‘not partner it once was’ with Iran threats and ‘contempt’ towards UK

Wales’s first minister has called on Keir Starmer to suspend a big joint defence project with the US, saying that under Donald Trump the country is “not the partner it once was”.

In a statement on Wednesday, Labour’s Eluned Morgan cited the US president’s “contempt” towards the UK and his threat to “annihilate” Iran as reasons to halt the development of the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (Darc) programme in Pembrokeshire, part of the Aukus defence partnership between the UK, US and Australia.

Keir Starmer conducts much of Britain’s diplomacy himself, but beneath him is a team of trusted advisers

The first foreign official JD Vance met with after he returned from peace talks with Iran in Islamabad this week was not a diplomat or foreign policy official – it was David Lammy, the UK’s justice secretary and deputy prime minister.

Lammy will follow his trip to Washington, where he saw the vice-president and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, with another to Barcelona, where he will represent the UK at a conference of global progressives, and then one to the Gulf.

Senator’s fourth attempt for resolutions fails, but votes show growing appetite among Democrats to impose limits

Bernie Sanders on Wednesday led a failed effort to block the sale of bombs and bulldozers to Israel, but the votes revealed a growing appetite among Democrats to impose limits on US weapons transfers to a longtime US ally.

It was the fourth time Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, had forced consideration of resolutions cutting off military aid for Israel in the Senate, all of which have been rejected by the chamber’s Republican majority, and many Democrats.

Officials report severe flooding in Saipan hospital, fierce winds and toppled utility poles in wake of Super Typhoon Sinlaku

Some hard hit areas of the Northern Marianas could be without power and water for weeks after the Pacific Ocean islands were battered by a super typhoon, an official has said.

The only hospital on Saipan, a US territory that is the largest of the Mariana Islands, experienced severe flooding and on Thursday there had been reports of big resorts losing backup generators, said Ed Propst, a former lawmaker who works in the governor’s office.

Wednesday’s strike brings the total of those killed in US military strikes on alleged drug boats to at least 177

Three people were killed in a US strike on another alleged drug-trafficking boat, the fifth such deadly attack in as many days, military officials have announced.

US southern command said it conducted “a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations” in the eastern Pacific, without naming the alleged group, in an X post.

Trump reiterated his claim that Powell is doing a ‘bad job’ as justice department continues with criminal investigation into Powell over renovations at the Fed’s headquarters – key US politics stories from 15 April at a glance

Donald Trump threatened to fire Jerome Powell if he stays on as US Federal Reserve chair past the end of his tenure and doubled down on a criminal investigation into renovations of the central bank’s headquarters.

As the White House pushes Trump’s new nominee to take charge of the Fed, Kevin Warsh, Powell has a month left in the role. The possibility of Powell staying on as chair past 15 May, the official end of his term, has grown amid mounting scrutiny of Trump’s approach to the Fed in the Senate, which is required to approve Warsh’s nomination.

Exclusive: Climate action blockers including Saudi Arabia, Russia and major fossil fuel firms set to make extra $234bn by end of 2026

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies banked more than $30m every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran, according to exclusive analysis for the Guardian. Saudi Aramco, Gazprom and ExxonMobil are among the biggest beneficiaries of the bonanza, meaning key opponents of climate action continue to prosper.

The conflict pushed the price of oil to an average of $100 (£74) a barrel in March, leading to estimated windfall war profits for the month of $23bn for the companies. Oil and gas supplies will take months to return to pre-war levels and the companies will make $234bn by the end of the year if the oil price continues to average $100. The analysis uses data from a leading intelligence provider, Rystad Energy, analysed by Global Witness.

Verdict in states’ case says concert giant stifled competition in ticketing industry, raising pressure for changes

Concert giant Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had a harmful monopoly over big concert venues, a Manhattan federal jury has found, dealing the company a loss in a lawsuit over claims brought by dozens of US states.

The jury deliberated for four days before reaching its decision on Wednesday in the closely watched case, which helped peel back the curtain on a business that dominates live entertainment across much of the world.

Narwhal Labs ad for ‘AI employee’ contains strapline: ‘She outworks everyone. And she’ll never ask for a raise’

A British AI company that recently secured millions of pounds of investment has been accused of running a misogynistic and sexist advertising campaign.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has received at least seven complaints about the campaign by Narwhal Labs, which includes an advert depicting a woman next to the strapline: “She outworks everyone. And she’ll never ask for a raise.”

Conflict is pushing up price of energy and food, fuelling higher borrowing costs and hitting growth, report says

• Iran war escalation could trigger global recession, IMF warns

The Iran war risks triggering a rise in global debt levels, forcing governments to choose between cushioning a cost of living shock and maintaining sound public finances, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

Against a volatile backdrop of the Middle East conflict, the Washington-based fund said the war could add to the already strained position of government finances throughout the world.

PlayStation 5 (version tested), Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Capcom
Engineer Hugh is sent from Earth to investigate a malfunctioning research station and meets a young android who helps him fend off murderous mechs

When Pragmata was announced alongside the PlayStation 5 in 2020, its shiny trailer promised slick sci-fi action in outer space. While it certainly delivers those futuristic thrills in spades, what I didn’t expect was a tender tale of paternal love. This is Capcom’s belated, surprisingly soulful first entry into gaming’s sad dad genre.

In this near-future fiction, a corporation named Delphi has established a research station on the moon’s surface to experiment with advanced 3D printing tech, using “Lunafilament” to easily recreate everything from tools to entire buildings. Predictably, things soon go very wrong. As the station suddenly goes dark, engineer Hugh is sent from Earth to investigate.

Pragmata is out April 17; £49.99

Peter Farrelly’s World Cup-themed buddy movie winningly channels the juvenile charm of his 90s classics

If another Gulf war, classic price-gouging tactics and long-distance stadium treks have you down about this year’s World Cup, consider the alternative from the director who gave us Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. Balls Up is the fourth major feature that Peter Farrelly has helmed solo since he and his brother, Bobby, drifted into separate pursuits. And even though this comedy flies well over the crossbar set by those instant classics, Prime Video at the very least should have given it the chance to stand on its own merits in a theatrical release – where, one suspects, this ribald delight would have had little trouble finding an audience, especially among football fans looking for an escape from the doom and gloom the host nation has brought to this year’s tournament.

A note of caution to viewers who think they may have time to build up to show-stopping hair gel-style gags: this buddy comedy is filthy right out of the gate. (Welcome to the streaming era!) Paul Walter Hauser is Elijah, the sheepish product designer exec behind a revolutionary, testicle-shrouding male prophylactic that his teetering company is trying to position as the World Cup’s official condom. Mark Wahlberg is Brad, the hotshot salesman who closes the deal with the Brazilian travel ministry, then promptly blows it by seducing the cabinet minister, Santos (Benjamin Bratt), into an innocent toast that triggers a relapse from nine years of sobriety, culminating in an 8-ball rager that goes viral.

There’s a hint of PD James about this cuckoo in the nest story starring Paula Beer as a depressed pianist

German director Christian Petzold, the Chabrol of modern European cinema, delivers an elegant and disquieting psychological mystery of the sort that doesn’t interest today’s British film-makers, though this one appears to have more than a taste of PD James or Ruth Rendell. There’s also a hint of Joseph Losey’s Accident. It is about family dysfunction and grief and unnervingly lays out the aftermath of a sudden violent trauma. The faint suggestion that the film itself has gone into a kind of shock could have layered the proceedings with something infinitesimally dreamlike and unreal, an atmosphere often to be found in Petzold’s films. What makes this film interesting is that it isn’t heading for a macabre twist or chilling denouement but something positive and even redemptive.

Petzold’s longtime female lead Paula Beer plays Laura, a brilliant pianist studying music in Berlin, clearly in a fragile and depressed state. We are ultimately to see her on stage performing the third movement of Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, the dreamily rippling A Boat on the Ocean, which gives the film its title. Paula is stuck in an unhappy relationship with boorish would-be music mogul Jakob (Philip Froissant), who one tense afternoon loses control of his open-topped sports car in the Brandenburg countryside. The results are catastrophic for Jakob, but Laura, thrown clear from the passenger seat, miraculously survives with hardly more than a scratch.

A country girl’s search for answers in the belle époque is ingeniously intercut with the adventures of her ragtag descendants in Cédric Klapisch’s film

The original French title of Cédric Klapisch’s new film is La Venue de L’Avenir, or The Arrival of the Future; it is an entertaining sentimental fantasy, a chocolate-boxy ensemble picture in Klapisch’s distinctive style, inventing a romantic backstory to the career of Claude Monet and his contemporary, the pioneering photographer Félix Nadar.

These two whiskery bohemians are effectively involved in a Mamma Mia-type paternity puzzle concerning the drama’s female lead. Adèle (Suzanne Lindon) is a fictional young woman who during the belle époque makes a fateful journey to find her errant mother in Paris, leaving behind her sweetheart and the village where she was brought up, in the countryside near Monet’s home town of Le Havre. Her life and times are rediscovered by her descendants in the present day, and we intercut enjoyably between past and present.

Prepare for wedding chaos in Camilla Whitehill’s sharp series. Plus: it’s the Apprentice final. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, Channel 4
Series one of Camilla Whitehill’s comedy ended with best friends Maggie (Nicola Coughlan) and Eddie (Lydia West) parting ways, in part because of Maggie’s struggles with bipolar disorder. A year later, they’re reunited as bridesmaids at a friend’s wedding. Maggie is focused on her recovery from lithium poisoning and keen to prove she’s in her “stable girl era”; Eddie has a new Maggie in crystal-wielding “light worker” Whitney. What could possibly go wrong? Lucinda Everett

A legal dispute led to Letty Lynton, the golden age superstar’s controversial drama, being sealed away. Only now can audiences see what all the fuss was about

Joan Crawford was one of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s golden age, but one of her most famous, and controversial, films has not been screened legally since January 1936. Ninety years later, thanks to her grandson, that is all about to change. The 1932 MGM film Letty Lynton tells the lethal tale of a Manhattan socialite, her fiance and her vindictive ex-lover. It was a hit at the box office – although something of a conundrum for the critics. They just couldn’t understand how MGM had managed to sneak such a risque story past the censors. That was only the start of the trouble.

MGM had wanted to buy the rights to a play called Dishonored Lady, written by Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes. This was a hit on Broadway in 1930, but its booze, drugs and sex content meant it had already been designated by the Hays office as “unfit for motion picture adaptation”. MGM only backed out when the authors demanded $30,000 – and the Hays office made it clear they wouldn’t give an inch, not on a story about a woman they considered a “nymphomaniac”. Instead, for just $3,500, MGM bought the rights to Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel Letty Lynton, which, just like Dishonored Lady, was inspired by the real-life case of Madeleine Smith. In 1857, Smith, a Scottish socialite, was tried for murder, accused of poisoning her lover with arsenic after he threatened to use her love letters to expose their affair and jeopardise her engagement.

She brought Irish Gaelic to Top of the Pops, featured on soundtracks including Titanic and King Arthur and showed that folk could find pop success
• Clannad singer and harpist Moya Brennan dies aged 73

Moya Brennan’s voice was an unusual instrument to arrive in the Top 20 in November 1982, especially on a Top of the Pops episode featuring the very different delights of A Flock of Seagulls, Eddy Grant and one-hit wonders Blue Zoo. As light as a leaf in the air, it provided a sacred counterpoint to the low, looming drones of a Prophet 5 synthesiser, and, in its breathy solo lines, guided the layered harmonies of her Clannad bandmates – her brothers and uncles – to somewhere new. A week later, Theme from Harry’s Game – the closing song on a radical Yorkshire TV series about The Troubles that played out over three consecutive nights – had jumped to No 5 in the charts, the highest ever position for a song sung in Irish Gaelic.

The lyrics were about the never-ending cycle of life, and how all things must pass, plucked from a proverb from a book of her grandfather’s, by her brother and bandmate, Ciarán. Even to non-speakers, Brennan’s voice sounded like a new kind of spiritual guide, much needed in the anxious early days of Thatcherism and only a few months after the IRA London park bombings. Her impact also expanded the transportive possibilities of traditional music in film and TV. Brennan’s voice became a mainstay of soundtracks, later among them ITV’s Robin of Sherwood series, Titanic and the 2004 feature film adaptation of King Arthur starring Keira Knightley, entering public consciousness in a way similar to how the avant garde output of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop had in the 1960s.

Blending minimalism, ambient and folk music in the former Czechoslovakia, the couple made pilgrim-like tours around Europe, beguiling everyone they met. Fans including the National’s Bryce Dessner explain their allure

The Czech duo Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi often seemed out of time. From the mid-80s, the married couple filtered minimalist composition, ambient and folk through baroque instruments, honing their craft in Prague’s churches and monasteries to create a mysterious combination of modernism and old European music against a communist backdrop. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the Havels’ unhurried music didn’t rush to match the new pace of capitalism in the country. Instead, they would tour Europe by rail and bus, describing themselves as “pilgrims who wander and play”, as Vojtěch said in a 2009 documentary directed by Vincent Moon. Whether playing their string instruments or minimalist piano etudes for four hands, the pair merged into a symbiotic life-form.

The couple saw themselves as acting in service of the music, “of this energy between us and the audience”, said Irena. “Something that can only be shared together, going through us, when the ego is a little asleep.”

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

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

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

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

• Indian music legend Asha Bhosle dies aged 92

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

The horrifying story of the Catholic-run institutions that incarcerated thousands of women and girls

Many readers, and surely most Irish readers, will finish this book in a state of white-knuckled rage, mingled with sorrow and at least a pang of guilt. It is a detailed, thoroughgoing and appalling account of the Magdalene laundries, the most famous, and most infamous, among Ireland’s extended and varied landscape of penal or correctional institutions, which operated for most of the 20th century (the last of the laundries was closed in 1996).

As the academic Louise Brangan points out in The Fallen, it is easy to become confused by the number and variety of prisons, mental asylums, orphanages, workhouses and homes for unmarried mothers that proliferated in Ireland between the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the late 1990s. However, the Magdalene laundries were unique. Dr Brangan writes: “In a regime distinguished by its excessive inhumanity, the Magdalene laundries were its deep end. In 1951, when the laundries were at their height, for every 100,000 males, 27 were in prison … [while] for every 100,000 females, 70 were in a laundry. These were not peripheral: they were Ireland’s main carceral institution.”

A man who meant to be a priest is faced with a moral crossroads in this ambitious and affecting first novel

Jon Doyle’s debut novel tells the story of Mack O’Brien, a young man who went to a seminary to study for the priesthood but was asked to leave because he had no real calling, and has therefore returned to his family home in Wales to work out what to do with his life. Cheek by jowl with his ailing, deeply religious mother, and a father struggling to process the grief of his own parents’ recent deaths, he finds himself drawn into participating in a local theatre production – playing a disciple in Owen Sheers’s now-legendary Passion of Port Talbot, an immersive community-led re-enactment of the crucifixion that took place over several days in Port Talbot in 2012, starring Michael Sheen.

Mack is recruited after a steelworker from the plant where he works as a security guard drops out of the show. Material enough for a novel already, one might think, but all this becomes more or less background noise when, on the same night he agrees to be in the play, Mack bumps into Siwan, a young woman he was close to at school. Siwan’s mother was an environmental activist who ended up going to prison for her protests. Siwan had visited him at the seminary on the day he agreed to leave the priesthood and said to him, “forgive me father, for I am about to sin”. The nature of the sin she is intent on committing becomes the focus of the novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a post-apocalyptic landscape of cutthroat scavengers, surprisingly peaceful players are opting to team up and open up – a phenomenon that’s intriguing game developers and psychologists alike

The video game Arc Raiders is set in a lethal imagining of an apocalyptic future for humanity. Survivors have been forced to live deep underground in colonies while mysterious, murderous AI machines patrol the surface. Only the desolate ruins of former cities survive, and reckless human “raiders” take trips topside to conduct dangerous scavenging missions.

For all the menace of these armed robots, called Arcs, the deadly droids are not the biggest threat in this hugely popular game, which was released late last year and has sold more than 14m copies. Raiders operate with the constant anxiety that another person will shoot them on sight and steal their loot. Mercilessness is rewarded in this kind of competitive, high-stakes world.

‘Unc’ (short for uncle) is meant to disparage older players, but the industry should make games for all generations

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

While researching women’s experiences in multiplayer video games recently, I came across this thread on the subreddit about Bungie’s latest live shooter, Marathon. “I’ve played a lot of shooters, and as a feminine-presenting player tbh it’s often a struggle,” it reads. “I’ve heard all the ‘get back to the kitchen’ jokes … ​But Marathon has been completely different, guys. I haven’t had a single issue, people have been incredibly kind and helpful… ​The community feels genuinely welcoming to everyone.”

The top-voted reply? “Benefit of being an unc game.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temple church, London
An unlikely alliance cut a swathe through folk songs, Janáček and music from Australia and New Zealand in an eclectic and beautiful evening

Many musical instruments are basically bits of hollowed-out wood, and if you think of it that way then the four played here by the enduringly experimental Brodsky Quartet and William Barton – violin, viola, cello and yiḏaki, or didgeridoo – don’t seem such distant cousins after all. This programme, already widely toured outside the UK, is well run-in – a good thing, considering that Barton’s didgeridoo was stuck in airport baggage control and arrived at the venue barely half an hour before the concert. It mixes up the two hemispheres in unapologetically eclectic fashion. Barton’s opening didgeridoo monologue segues into a Purcell Fantasia, and Robert Davidson’s Minjerribah – a lyrical evocation of place in which the didgeridoo, although a later addition by the composer, seems an essential and persuasive voice – rubs up against the yearning spikiness of Janáček’s String Quartet No 1.

It was Barton whom we heard first, offstage. Through a soundscape of whistles and pulsing low notes, he conjured a sense of vastness that spoke to the feeling of space under the Temple church’s arches. Throughout, the building’s warm acoustic seemed to render everything beautiful even at moments when, in the Janáček in particular, the Brodskys might have been aiming for more harshness. And it helped carry viola player Paul Cassidy’s voice as he sang his own arrangement of She Moved Through the Fair, the other performers weaving atmospheric detail around him. This established a fitting folk-song context for Barton’s own, weightier Square Circles Beneath the Red Desert Sand, which followed with Barton as vocalist and player.

Various venues, Leeds
Roderick Williams could breathe life into a telephone directory, but found much better material in his recital with Iain Burnside. A later concert featured atmospheric soundscapes from local composer Martin Iddon

Leeds’s top-tier celebration of the vocal arts continues to push the envelope. Two vastly different concerts were typical of director Joseph Middleton’s determination to think outside the box while honouring the festival’s roots in the traditional recital.

Haiku, which premiered last year in Minnesota, sprang from the fertile brains of baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Iain Burnside. The roughly 90-minute programme revolved around eight poems taken from a collection of haiku written by Japanese Americans interned during the second world war. Libby Larsen’s settings – sung in both English and Japanese and collectively entitled Mobile/Not Mobile/ … – are distilled musical morsels, stuffed with imagination, exploring themes of exile, detention and deportation.

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

• Our architecture critic on the building

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

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

Traverse theatre, Edinburgh
Jess Brodie’s monologue about life on the brink of parenthood is both witty and gripping

There are few transitions in life more profound than becoming a parent. Out go late nights and long lie-ins. In comes responsibility. It is an experience that demands redefinition, turning you from cared-for to carer, solo player to team captain. Even as it approaches, you know it will change you.

This is the still point of the turning world that playwright Jess Brodie identifies: not the birth, but the moment before. A time to look back, reflect and reappraise as much as to speculate on the unknown path ahead.

Actor known for playing Monica Sutton in Coronation Street, her many stage roles, and film and TV appearances with her father, Donald Pleasence

On 1 January 1968, viewers of the TV soap opera Coronation Street experienced a mild culture shock as a clump of hippies decked out in floral shirts, Afghan coats and John Lennon spectacles temporarily took over the house at No 11, former home to Elsie Tanner. Among the somnambulant invaders was Monica Sutton, who plucked the black wig dreamily from her head as she entered, and handed it to the bemused tenant. Offered a snack, she replied: “I’ll have a tomato, darlin’.” She then contemplated the food as if hypnotised by it. “Blows my mind,” she sighed.

The hippies scarpered four episodes later, but television audiences over the next half a century became accustomed to the wan, haunted face of Angela Pleasence, who played Monica with such economical wit.

Two recent books about Morrison attempt to make sense of her legacy as a writer, editor and thinker on Black life

When I think of Toni Morrison’s novels, I often think of the poet Lucille Clifton’s response to Gorilla, My Love, the debut short story collection by “the other Toni”, Toni Cade Bambara: “She has captured it all, how we really talk, how we really are; and done it with both love and respect. I laughed until I cried, then laughed again. I loved it! She must love us very much.”

Published in 1972, Bambara’s collection roves through a Black girlhood filled with wit, tenderness, play and betrayal with a rhythmic intensity that moves the way a blues lyric drifts into memory. Morrison edited the book, the first fiction acquisition of her 16-year tenure as an editor at Random House. The Tonis were both single mothers navigating multiple forms of literary labor, and they became fast friends.

Regulator says tool, which creates reports for humans to review, has helped classify entire UK catalogue of HBO Max

TV shows including The Pitt and a Game of Thrones spinoff have received age ratings in the UK after the British Board of Film Classification deployed AI to help flag contentious scenes.

The BBFC developed a tool to identify content that triggers compliance issues, such as violence, nudity and bad language. The flagged scenes were then passed over to BBFC staff for human review.

Perry denies the allegations, shared by Rose on social media, calling them ‘dangerous reckless lies’

Police are investigating claims Katy Perry sexually assaulted the Australian actor Ruby Rose at a Melbourne nightclub more than a decade ago, allegations the American pop star strenuously denies.

Victoria police on Wednesday said in a statement: “Melbourne sexual offences and child abuse investigation team (SOCIT) detectives are investigating [an alleged] historical sexual assault that occurred in Melbourne in 2010.

British designer aims to bring eco-friendly awareness to the high street in second collection with retailer

Stella McCartney, the luxury fashion designer who refuses to use leather, fur or feathers, is returning to the high street for a sustainable collection with H&M.

The collaboration between the British designer and the Swedish retail company will go on sale in May.

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

It is time for the Thursday news quiz, where even the most distinguished appearances can conceal a lingering doubt. A perfectly groomed moustache may suggest authority – until, thanks to our illustration from Anaïs Mims, it starts curling into a question mark of its own. Fifteen questions await – frankly rather more on the general knowledge side than topical news because the quiz master has been on holiday in Brighton and wrote most of it in advance, but it is what it is. There are no prizes, but we always enjoy hearing how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 243

Squeeze the day with our expert’s pick of the best juicers, from cold press to anti-clog to budget

• In the US? Read the best juicers in the US
• The best blenders, tested

Long before we became a nation of smoothie lovers, with blenders gracing our worktops, the health-conscious kitchen was always home to a juicer. Those early models could be tricky to keep clean, or require herculean effort to produce a mere dribble – but modern juicers are more efficient, easier to maintain, and can often produce more than just fruit juice.

There are some solid reasons to buy. Homemade juice is the original health drink: squeezed straight from fruit and vegetables, it has none of the preservatives sometimes found in shop-bought blends, nor is it treated to make it last longer or stay the right colour. Juicers can, however, leave behind some of the important fibre found in fruits’ skin and flesh.

Best juicer overall and best on a budget:
Nutribullet juicer

Best compact centrifugal juicer:
Philips Viva Collection juicer

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

• The best hair straighteners – tested

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

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

Best hot brush overall:
GHD Duet Blowdry

Best budget hot brush:
Revlon One-Step Volumiser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The best chef’s knives – tested

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

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

Penne may be the default short pasta all-rounder, but this variation on an alpine classic is soft, warming and a bit special

In December 2023, the magazine La Cucina Italiana ranked Italians’ favourite pasta shapes, according to data gathered by Unione Italiana Food (“the leading association in Italy for the direct representation of food product categories”). I love this sort of thing. According to the UIF, by processing NielsenIQ data (comprehensive market research, consumer intelligence and retail measurement), they identified the five most popular shapes from over 500, and examined how preferences vary in different regions.

In first place was spaghetti, while penne came in second, with these two shapes – which also takes in thinner spaghettini, chunkier spaghettoni and both ridged and smooth penne – accounting for 78% of all pasta sold in Italy in 2023. The regional variations of three, four and five are as follows: in the north-west and north-east, fusilli, short pasta and mixed pasta for broth or minestra; in central Italy, short pasta, fusilli and rigatoni; in the south, mixed pasta for broth or minestra, short pasta and tortiglioni. It has to be said that the regional variations are a bit baggy, considering that short pasta takes in eight shapes: conchiglie, farfalle, mezze maniche, orecchiette, pasta mista, penne again (which is confusing), paccheri and trofie. All of which is justification for calling this week’s column the second highest-ranking pasta shape in Italy with potatoes, cabbage, butter and cheese (while also noting that you can instead use the shapes ranked number three, four and five).

This Lombardian ‘village cake’ is simple, delicious and endlessly adaptable

Old sourdough is my secret ingredient. To stop it going mouldy, I take it out of any plastic packaging and keep it in the bread bin with plenty of airflow around it – that way, it will dry out slowly, rather than turning mouldy. Any odds and ends, meanwhile, I store in a cloth bag to use in various dishes, from pangrattato (or poor man’s parmesan) to strata, a savoury bread-and-butter pudding.

My new favourite recipe discovery for using up stale bread is today’s torta paesana, or village cake, from Lombardy. The best way I can come up with to describe it is that it’s a bit like a firm baked custard.

Savoury, sour, funky and spicy – it’s no wonder there are multiple uses for a lime pickle

I’m obsessed with lime pickle. It’s savoury, sour, funky, spicy and full of bold personality that enlivens anything it’s smeared on. It’s made by salting and fermenting limes with chillies and spices for a fierce, flavour-packed condiment that’s traditionally eaten as a side to poppadoms or with simple dal and rice. Over the years, I have also folded it into grilled cheese toasties, marinades for fat prawns to barbecue in the summer or made compound butters with it to smother over sweet potatoes before roasting. It’s an instant flavour bomb and my pantry is never without a jar.

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

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

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

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

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

Graham, 76, Pangbourne

Occupation Property manager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IW, Northampton

There are many options, from cards to buy now, pay later. We find out the best – and the effect on your credit score

Until recently, if you wanted to buy something you couldn’t afford upfront, you reached for a credit card or took out a loan. Now, when you get to the checkout, you are likely to be faced with other options, including buy now, pay later (BNPL).

With so many ways to borrow, the true costs and complexities aren’t always clear. Which option will actually save you the most money in the long run? And how might each option affect your credit score? We spoke to financial experts to get some answers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might think of breathing as automatic, but dysfunctional breathing can arise even if you’re healthy

We’re often taught that breathing is automatic. We barely think about it, as with blinking or the quiet, constant work of the heart. But many otherwise healthy adults have dysfunctional breathing.

“Dysfunctional breathing, also known as breathing pattern disorder, is when breathlessness and/or difficulty in breathing is felt,” said Dr Stephen Fowler, a professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Manchester. It can occur outside the context of any disease. If a related condition is present, like asthma, the breathlessness might feel disproportionate to that condition, he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the promise of stronger, healthier hair could never quite tempt me to use products as opposed to cutting it. Until now …

There are few brands one can credit with having changed the beauty game, but the launch of Olaplex just over a decade ago invalidated the assertion that the only way to fix damaged hair is to cut it.

It used a patented ingredient (the unpronounceable bis-aminopropyl diglycol dimaleate) to strengthen and rebuild all types of hair bonds ravaged by bleach, colour and other chemical or heat treatments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lincolnshire village, the height of fashion a century ago, offers fascinating history, a woodland cinema, excellent cycle routes and a deeply restorative feel

It was 6.30am, the cockcrow slot at Jubilee Park lido, and still not quite light. I hadn’t wanted to come this early – it was the only time I’d been able to book. But as I slid into the pool – heated to a delicious 29C – I realised it was a gift. Vapours rose dreamily into cool air laced with owl hoots and the whiff of dewy blooms, and I swam into a sunrise that became more vivid with every stroke. A man in the next lane paused to admire the reddening dawn too; he was hungover, he said, but had come to do his morning lengths nonetheless. A cure of sorts.

Bath, Harrogate, Buxton – Woodhall? This Lincolnshire village isn’t one of Britain’s headline spa towns. Most probably don’t know where it is – 18 miles (29km east of Lincoln, for the record. But at the turn of the 20th century, Woodhall Spa was among the most fashionable places to be seen, to be healed.

The vertiginous Valais canton offers adventures aplenty, from abseiling down gorges to wild swims in glacial pools – and nights swapping hiking tales in mountain huts

Thick grey-green mud squidges through my toes as I step into the icy, irresistible water. I’m on the descent from the Britannia Hut at the foot of the Allalinhorn in the Valais canton of the Swiss Alps, and this turquoise pool of glacial meltwater has been on the horizon tempting me for an hour. I peel off all five layers of clothing and plunge into the murky water. After a night in a shared dorm without showers it’s bliss.

In winter, the jagged ridges of the Valais are the domain of expert skiers and ice climbers, but in summer the lower slopes become accessible to hikers, with the added bonus of the ski lift infrastructure. You can be surrounded by dramatic peaks with the security of well-marked trails ranging from gentle strolls to serious alpine routes. I’m here to hike to mountain huts, test my nerves on via ferrata routes, and fill my city-dweller lungs with clean Alpine air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Delaney’s addiction issues started when he was a teen and worsened through his 20s. Eventually, an argument with his mother led him to change everything

Thomas Delaney never used to believe he was “good enough to be loved”. Growing up, he internalised the hurt he saw playing out at home. “I thought I was useless, I wasn’t a nice person … I even thought that my mum and dad didn’t love each other because of me.”

When I visit him (and his extremely affectionate black-and-white cat, Figaro) at home in Glasgow, Delaney, dressed in a jumper printed with the words “nicotine is dumb”, is frank about the impact his childhood had on him. “I had suicidal ideations from a very, very young age because I assumed that, if I was dead, maybe my mum and dad wouldn’t be arguing.” Later, he became addicted to ketamine. At his most unwell, he weighed just 38kg (6st).

In the past few months, there has been a boom in tradwife novels, while the accounts of influencers only grow more popular. What is it about this culture that makes it so compelling to young women?

‘No one I know wants to go spend their one wild and magical life being a shill for some billionaire tech asshole,” says Shannon, a character in Yesteryear, the buzzy new novel about a tradwife influencer by Caro Claire Burke. Shannon is a gen Z woman who is working as a producer for the protagonist, Natalie, a 32-year-old social media star seemingly with more than a little in common with some aspects of the real-life influencer Hannah Neeleman, who rose to fame documenting her life as a wife and mother on her ranch, Ballerina Farm.

“Just so they can breastfeed in a broom closet someday,” Natalie quips back.

From the moment I started climbing the 7,000-metre peaks of the Pamir mountains in Tajikistan, something felt off. What followed will stay with me for ever

I didn’t have a reason for my terrible feeling of dread – and that was part of the problem. From the moment I arrived in Tajikistan with my boyfriend, Tim, to climb two 7,000-metre (23,000ft) peaks, something felt off. It wasn’t a fear I could name: it was more like a constant, unnerving low hum.

A helicopter dropped us off – landing on a jagged glacier that was to be our base camp and act as a refuge from avalanches from the towering peaks that surrounded it. The helicopter flew far too low, skimming the glacier ice that looked sharp enough to tear it open. You could see it from the helicopter because there was a gaping hole in the back – a part was missing because it was so old.

Chip upgrade brings pro-level power, long battery life and plenty of storage, but the Air now faces real competition

Apple’s latest MacBook Air is its most powerful yet, comes with double the starting storage and is better than ever for getting work done and as the benchmark for a consumer laptop. But this year the new lower-cost MacBook Neo has muddied the waters.

The M5 MacBook Air starts at £1,099 (€1,199/$1,099/A$1,799) for the 13in version, which is £100 or equivalent more than last year’s excellent M4 version, but comes with at least 512GB of storage. It sits above the £599 MacBook Neo and below the £1,699 M5 MacBook Pro, making the Air Apple’s mid-range machine.

Screen: 13.6in LCD (2560x1600; 224 ppi) True Tone

Processor: Apple M5 with eight or 10-core GPU

RAM: 16, 24 or 32GB

Storage: 512GB, 1, 2 or 4TB SSD

Operating system: macOS 26 Tahoe

Camera: 12MP centre stage

Connectivity: wifi 7, Bluetooth 6, 2x Thunderbolt/USB 4, headphones

Dimensions: 215 x 304.1 x 11.3mm

Weight: 1.23kg

Some campaigners are frustrated at slow pace of change, while those impacted are trying to work out what it means day-to-day

A year ago, the supreme court made its landmark judgment on single-sex spaces. In a long-running case against the Scottish government brought by gender-critical campaigners For Women Scotland (FWS), the court ruled that, for the purposes of the Equality Act, the legal definition of a woman was based on biological sex.

The judgment has significant ramifications for who can access women-only services and spaces, such as refuges or toilets. But most service providers are still awaiting practical guidance on how to apply the ruling.

Leaders of Poland and Germany hail Péter Magyar’s majority as a turning of the tide – but analysts say there were other reasons for defeat of prime minister

For Poland’s Donald Tusk, the crushing defeat of Hungary’s illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orbán, after 16 years in office was evidence that the world was no longer “condemned to authoritarian and corrupt governments”.

Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, also believes the two-thirds majority secured by Orbán’s centre-right challenger, Péter Magyar, in Sunday’s elections was “a clear signal against rightwing populism” that showed “the pendulum is swinging back”.

Researchers identify wrecks at the bottom of the sea from as far back as fifth century BC, from Europe and beyond

Spanish archaeologists exploring the bay that curves between the southern port of Algeciras and the Rock of Gibraltar have documented the wrecks of more than 30 ships that came to grief near the Pillars of Hercules between the fifth century BC and the second world war.

Over the millennia, the bay, which sits at the north end of the strait of Gibraltar that separates Europe from Africa, has swallowed everything from Phoenician and Roman vessels to British, Spanish, Venetian and Dutch ships – as well as the odd aeroplane.

We would like to hear your experience of job interviews that were conducted partially or wholly by AI

Companies are increasingly using AI in their hiring processes – including conducting job interviews themselves. With this in mind, we would like to hear your experience of job interviews that were conducted partially or wholly by AI.

If you’re having trouble using the form click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here.

We would like to hear parents’ views on their children’s school meals

The government is to announce an overhaul to school food standards in England that will lead to dishes such as fish and chips and steamed sponges being banned. The new rules, which are part of efforts to lower the rates of childhood obesity, will apply from September.

We would like to hear parents’ views on their children’s school meals. Does your child like eating them? Has there been a change in quality? Have you recently considered switching your children from school dinners to packed lunches?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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