If the monarch thought his sniffy letter would put Harry and Meghan at a disadvantage, he doesn’t understand how the celebrity world works

Once again, it has been a lively week for the Real Housewives of Windsor franchise, with Harry and Meghan back in the UK for precisely 12 days before the king fired out a letter via the lord chamberlain on Monday, reminding viewers that the Sussexes are “private citizens” and not to treat them as working royals. You have to say the producers on this unscripted reality show are truly at the top of their game with these targeted provocations. Harry and Meghan duly took the bait and issued an intemperately hurt rejoinder – but we’ll get to that in a bit.

First, let’s deal with King Charles’s missive to “relevant senior stakeholders across government, the military and Lord Lieutenancies”. Ugh. Not to be too aesthetically sensitive, but I think we can all live without the sovereign being reduced to the ghastly language of “relevant senior stakeholders”. What next? Seeking “buy-in” for ribbon-cutting events and referring to posies as “high levels of audience engagement”? It does all rather reinforce the idea that the Windsors’ cringe-makingly self-styled “the firm” really is some dreary mid-range company with a wan Meet Our Team page on its website, in which Prince William – carefully photographed without a tie – explains that he “enjoys long walks with the dog and is a passionate Aston Villa supporter”.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

What a Time to be Alive! by Marina Hyde (Guardian Faber, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham collected the testimony of 24 insiders who helped remotely target Gazans’ homes. They explain how they got these self-professed ‘small cogs’ to talk about the killing

On a darkened rooftop in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence officers outline the details of their work. These men tell us how they helped develop an AI mapping tool that trawled for phone signals and recommended apartment buildings in Gaza to bomb. Indirectly, they admit, they are responsible for thousands of deaths, but they never spoke up because that wasn’t their place. “My role is technical,” says one. “I’m just a small cog,” says another.

NAZA – directed by the Israeli film-makers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham and produced by the Guardian – is a chilling documentary about a mass slaughter that was authorised at the highest levels of government. But it is also, primarily, about the process, the system, the little links in the killing chain. Szor and Abraham build their film around the accounts of 24 anonymised military and intelligence insiders. NAZA, we learn, is an acronym used by the intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prefer to target Hamas terrorists in their homes at night – and if they live with their family, or in heavily populated neighbourhoods, too bad. At one point, a source claims, approval was given to kill 500 NAZA for one Hamas member.

Matthew Klimow recalls the day a hijacked airliner crashed into the headquarters of the US defence department in Arlington, Virginia

“All day I had been a good soldier: stolid, resolute, unemotional, rational, and dispassionate,” writes Matthew Klimow, recalling the wave of emotion that overwhelmed him as he arrived home from the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. There was sadness for the lives lost. But there was another emotion, too: humiliation.

“We, as a nation, had been humbled,” writes the retired army colonel, who remained at the Pentagon even after it was struck by a hijacked airliner, killing all 64 people onboard and 125 inside the building. “The fighting force of which I was part had been impotent, unable to protect our fellow citizens. The darkness I felt matched the darkness inside my house as I opened the door.”

Toronto film festival: Erin Doherty plays a happily single mother in a downbeat town courted by an enigmatic James McAvoy in this expertly taut drama

Erin Doherty and James McAvoy both bring their A-game in this startling, involving movie from British writer-director Paul Andrew Williams, whose productivity and creativity continue to be an industry tonic. It’s an eerie mystery drama that Doherty and McAvoy perform with ferocious commitment. There’s something of Atom Egoyan or even M Night Shyamalan here … and I even found myself wondering if Williams intended us to think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Laertes’ lines about his father, Polonius: “… to his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms / And like the kind life-rend’ring pelican, / Repast them with my blood.”

We are in a downbeat British town, perhaps somewhere in the London estuary, a place to which a candy factory provides employment. Mina (played by Doherty) is a smart, capable single mum to 9-year-old Jamie (Smylie Bradwell); she works on the production line in cap and hairnet like all the others: much liked by everyone there. She is not fussed by the absence of Jamie’s dad and is perfectly content with hanging out with her friends and her sister (Liv Hill).

The US president is ever more wayward – and has little interest in defending Europe. The constitution may hold him to account, but we can’t wait

If Americans vote for a Republican majority in both houses of Congress in November, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” But they must not spend it in Canada or China or anywhere else outside the US. So said Donald Trump in Texas on Wednesday in advance of the forthcoming midterm elections. He further told voters to “Pretend that I’m on the ballot”. It was a climactic moment in an almost two-hour rant.

Trump does not have the required trillion dollars in his pocket, and it would be illegal to disperse such a sum without congressional approval. In any case, JD Vance now appears to have rowed back on the promise.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Do you gain weight once you stop using them? Do they make your face saggy? Can they improve your mental health? Experts explain whether 13 common beliefs about GLP-1s are true or false

FALSE “GLP-1 medications mimic Glucagon-like peptide-1 – one of the hormones involved in appetite regulation. It doesn’t completely suppress hunger, but it is powerful,” says Dr Federica Amati, nutrition lead at Imperial College School of Medicine and author of The Appetite Reset. “The medicine is about 1,000 times stronger than what we naturally produce from our gut,” she explains. As food passes through the gut, cells called L-cells sense the nutrients, which sparks the production of the GLP-1 hormone. Without the drugs, these bursts of GLP-1 production last a few minutes. “It’s a bit like a sparkler. In comparison, the drugs are like a bonfire that roars for a week,” says Amati. Because the GLP-1 hormone stays in your body for longer if you are on the drugs, you feel fuller faster and your appetite gets suppressed, but you will eventually get hungry.

Bill’s failure in Commons sparks anger among its supporters after Lords blocked earlier legislation

A renewed attempt to legalise assisted dying has been voted down by MPs in a decision that is likely to scupper the idea for a political generation, sparking anger among supporters after an earlier bill was blocked by the Lords.

A private member’s bill put forward by Labour’s Lauren Edwards, which would have permitted assisted dying in England and Wales in certain limited circumstances, was defeated by 286 to 270 at second reading, the first chance MPs have to vote on a measure.

Chip Roy, Republican US representative from Texas, openly wondered where the government would get ‘well over $1tn’ for supposed payouts

On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.

The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.

Letter from 70 MPs and peers follows Anthropic employee’s claim new technology could wipe out humans

• AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts: but how seriously should we take them?

More than 70 MPs and peers have urged Andy Burnham to back a ban on the creation of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and lead an international movement to stop the technology after a week of warnings from experts of a 10% chance it could kill all humans.

Fifteen former government ministers, along with the former head of the civil service Robin Butler, senior Labour MPs including John McDonnell and leading Conservatives, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National party MPs have written to the prime minister. They urged him to throw the government’s weight behind a bill, tabled in the Commons on Tuesday, that would prohibit ASI – an as-yet-nonexistent AI that would outcompete human capabilities in most domains.

Darren Conway pleads guilty to voyeurism and encouraging a husband to abuse his wife

A man has admitted using an online sexual abuse network to commit a host of sexual crimes, along with another man, against the latter’s unconscious wife.

Darren Conway, 52, pleaded guilty to 11 charges at Wood Green crown court. They included voyeurism, possession of extreme pornography and encouraging the other man to sexually abuse his wife on Conway’s behalf.

UK employment tribunal examines whether Rockstar Games unlawfully fired 31 staff for trade union activity

A worker fired by the makers of Grand Theft Auto has said he believed employees were put on a “watch list” after signing a petition about remote working.

Dayne Oram told an employment tribunal in Glasgow examining whether Rockstar Games unlawfully fired 31 employees for trade union activity on Friday that he thought the company started keeping an eye on a group of workers after the petition was sent to leadership in 2023.

Labour’s Catherine Atkinson says she will give students £5,000 paid to her by paper that falsely accused her of concealing private school education

A new scholarship supporting state-educated students will be inadvertently funded by the Mail on Sunday (MoS), using a payout it made after being threatened with legal action by the Labour MP Catherine Atkinson.

The Derby North MP says she will use the proceeds of about £5,000 from the newspaper to fund scholarships for local law students at the University of Derby who – like her – attended state schools.

Far-right German party’s newly elected representatives face fresh scrutiny as it tries to form government in Saxony-Anhalt

• Why is the AfD’s state victory significant and what might happen next?

The Alternative für Deutschland is facing scrutiny over the suitability of some of its prospective new MPs – including a former Stasi officer and a former pornography actor – just days after its historic win in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

Presented by the AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, for a photocall in the state capital of Magdeburg on Thursday, some of the members-elect were revealed to have a range of questionable backgrounds, including criminal records, Stasi pasts and connections to far-right networks.

Many are rooting for vocal critic Catherine Connolly to let rip in Dublin meeting, but others hope she holds back

Catherine Connolly, Ireland’s president, once said she abhorred Donald Trump’s policies. In his sole previous comment on Connolly, the US president seemed to think she was a man. Now that they are about to meet, Ireland is holding its breath.

Trump is to fly into Dublin on Saturday morning for a two-day visit centred on golf. But before making it to his beloved greens, protocol obliges him to meet a woman who has given every impression of loathing him.

Proceeds are in a UK account amid a dispute about how the money should be used and a separate criminal investigation

Funds from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC have earned at least £175m in interest while locked in a UK bank account, new accounts show, leading one analyst to describe the company housing the frozen cash as “the most profitable football business in the world”.

Accounts for Fordstam, the company through which the billionaire Russian oligarch owned Chelsea, show that the proceeds of the sale completed in May 2022 have risen from £2.3bn to nearly £2.5bn.

The world’s most powerful country responded to the worst terrorist attack in its history by inflicting terror of its own – around the world, and at home

• US marks 25 years since 9/11 – latest updates

As clear as that cloudless September morning, Jenna Jacobs McPartland remembers the moment everything changed. “I was cleaning the bathroom and watching the Today show in the background and nine months pregnant,” the 52-year-old recalls by phone. “I think they were showing ‘Today throws a wedding’ when the news broke in.”

A plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. McPartland did not know that her husband, Ariel Jacobs, was attending a conference at its Windows on the World restaurant. “I called his office to say, ‘Hey, turn on the TV. Do you guys know what’s going on?’ His assistant said, ‘Oh my God, Jenna, he’s there.’ The whole world disappeared and there was this sort of hollow collapsing feeling.”

25 years on from the terror attacks that killed almost 3,000 people in New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, the dark legacy of September 11 continues to unfold in the US and across the world. A throughline can be drawn from that day in 2001 to much of the geopolitics and conflicts of today.

Annie Kelly speaks to the Guardian’s international security correspondent, Jason Burke, about how 9/11 changed the world

MSF-run centre offering intensive psychological care has received more than 350 referrals since opening last year

Azad*, an asylum seeker from Iran, recounts his story in a gentle and mild manner, seated in the stillness of a therapy room at a trauma clinic in Birmingham.

The centre, which opened its doors in July last year to address the “unmet mental healthcare needs of those seeking sanctuary”, is run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders. It provides specialised trauma-focused psychological care for refugees and asylum seekers in the city and surrounding areas.

Opponents say proposed law change for England and Wales was ‘unsafe and unworkable’ after bill is narrowly defeated

As it became clear that MPs had voted against the assisted dying bill, campaigners who had fought for a change in the law looked broken. Standing outside the Houses of Parliament, many wearing pink caps and T-shirts with slogans such as “Give me choice over my death”, they held on to each other for comfort. Some were in tears, others stood in shocked silence.

MP Lauren Edwards, who sponsored the bill that would have allowed terminally ill adults in England and Wales with six months or less to live to seek medical assistance to end their lives, said its failure to pass was disappointing “for the many thousands of terminally ill people and their loved ones who were given hope when the Commons voted for this bill last year”.

Sweden has ordered more Britons, including vulnerable people, to leave post-Brexit than any other EU country

He arrived with nothing other than the clothes he wore that morning. Hours later he was banged up in a detention centre close to a Stockholm airport to await deportation.

Charles, a former business director from Cambridge, who did not want his full name published, moved to Sweden in 2017 to be with his Swedish wife, Lily, and applied to remain after Brexit, before the deadline of December 2021.

Tired of squashed sarnies and spilt dressing? From stainless steel to insulated to plastic-free, here are the lunch boxes for kids and adults we rate the most

• The best water bottles

If packed lunches are a high-stakes game in your household (as they are in mine), the right lunch box is crucial. There’s nothing worse than opening the lunch you’ve been looking forward to since 8am to find yoghurt has leaked on to your sandwich and your cucumbers have dried out.

A lunch box may look like a simple bit of kit, but keeping food contained from kitchen to school dinner hall or workplace desk is a surprisingly demanding job. And the humble lunch box has come a long way from the simple plastic tubs that used to contain our clingfilm-wrapped, squashed sandwiches at school. Today, you can find bento boxes with multiple compartments, stainless steel containers, silicone pouches and leakproof designs promising to keep everything from yoghurt to salad dressing safely contained.

MotelX – Portugal’s only film festival dedicated to horror – hopes to inspire local film-makers by showcasing world-class scares. Now in its 20th edition, its directors say truly nerve-shredding cinema is its holy grail

If horror happens in the dark, the midnight movie showing was once the perfect way of gauging the genre’s health. But those days may be over. “When we were a film club, our first ever cinema screening was Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer in 2003, and it was full,” says Pedro Souto, co-director of Lisbon’s horror-centric MotelX festival. “But you don’t have that many people at midnight any more. I don’t know why.” He’s right: the midnight slot I attend – of the gore-bathed Indonesian kung fu flick Ikatan Darah – is only half full. Only a few appreciative chuckles when meat-cleavers plunge into craniums suggest the old midnight spirit still lives.

No need to panic, though: horror has simply embraced the light. With the genre exploding in the 2010s and 2020s, and blockbusting grosses this year for the likes of Obsession and Backrooms, MotelX is able to gorge itself on this cultural jugular. Now in its 20th edition, the festival has expanded to 11 days, with more than 170 films from 40 countries. Flashy branding – a howling gimp and the signature X, both in inflatable PVC – is dotted on around city billboards. At the opening ceremony, a gigantic birthday cake – the self-same gimp emerging from a lake of gelatine “blood” – is massacred by the punters within 20 minutes. Crowds seem abundant at most screenings, dominated by a heatwave look (dark singlets, shorts and sweaty tattoos) best described as “goth Decathlon”.

Aspirational clobber, hot horticulturists and a TikTok content rise suggest gardening has never been cooler

You could argue that photosynthesis, soil bacteria, chlorophyll and germination, by their nature, never go out of style. But somehow, as the news broke this week that Monty Don would step down from Gardeners’ World after 23 years behind the shovel, gardening is having a moment in the sun.

On Saturday, New Balance will launch a pair of trainers alongside the jewellery designer Bleue Wickham-Burnham in a campaign fronted by Don himself, photographed shrinking into a bush with a pair of the trainers around his neck. In high fashion of late, the gardener Charlie McCormick became the face of JW Anderson’s spring 2027 campaign, and Alfie Nickerson, who grows flowers biodynamically in Norfolk for his brand Burnt Fen Flowers, has recently been plucked by Jimmy Choo for its autumn campaign, Wild Rose. Catwalks have been mossy, designs have been mycelial.

What started as a school project about plucky fictional kids in animal masks sparked an obsessive fanbase and a major label deal. Now the artist behind it all – known as Yaelokre – is ready to reveal themself

Harpy Hare by Yaelokre is the kind of song you might expect to have gone viral in the 1520s, not the 2020s. Backed by guitalele (that’s a guitar/ukulele hybrid), the lullaby begins with the line “Harpy Hare, where have you buried all your children?” performed by fictional kids from the equally fictional world of Meadowlark who are depicted in fey illustrations wearing animal masks. But two years ago it became an unlikely TikTok hit, reaching No 1 on Spotify’s Global Viral Songs chart.

That was in summer 2024, when the world of Meadowlark was a bit more DIY. Not only was its creator still making tracks and illustrations from their “diary turned storybook” in their bedroom, there was no Reddit community around them yet and only the faintest of whispers about Yaelokre online. These days, Keath Ósk, the Icelandic-Filipino artist behind the project, has almost three million monthly Spotify listeners; last year they played a sell-out UK and Ireland tour, and they have just released their first album under their own name, delighting a following of gen Z and queer listeners who write fan fiction about Ósk’s world and cosplay as their hand-drawn characters, prompting questions on Reddit such as: “My costume has bells [on it], should I remove them for the concert?”

The Centre of Chinese Contemporary Art closed in 2021 after a series of controversies. Now it’s been relaunched under a new name – and with a new mission

In March 2020, the visual artist JJ Chan was assembling video footage for a group exhibition scheduled at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester. Centred on family VHS tapes, and titled A New Constellation: Chinese Diaspora Now, the artwork was an exploration of Chan’s emotionally complex relationship to Hong Kong, their parents’ birthplace. When Chan asked for guidance after the sudden departure of the initial curator, the artist discovered that the gallery did not employ anyone who was Chinese: 12 out of the 13 staff members were white, while most of the front-facing (unpaid) volunteers were of Chinese descent.

Fearing their art would be shaped through a white lens, Chan withdrew and published an open letter to the centre, writing: “My experience, and my trauma, are being used as a leg-up into an industry for an already overrepresented demographic.” Later that year, the organisation recruited seven artists of Chinese heritage to address the lack of diversity before that initiative was cancelled when the artists raised issues surrounding institutional racism with the gallery. The artist-led working group subsequently petitioned for an international boycott of the institution resulting in the resignation of six board members and several employees. After closing due to Covid in 2020, the arts space never reopened.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

The al-Qaida leader envisaged an economically battered US withdrawing from the Middle East – and a global Muslim uprising. Then the tide turned

On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.

The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.

AI agents have hacked databases and taken on a life of their own – now is the time to pause risky research before it is too late

Another day, another horseman of the apocalypse galloping over the horizon. Lately we have heard from so many AI doomers – tech whistleblowers popping up to warn that their work is probably going to kill us – that we’re becoming almost blase about it. Humanity wiped out within a decade? Well, only if another world war or the climate crisis doesn’t get us first. Since it’s never clear whether the tech threat is real, or just a twisted form of hype from an industry that drums up investment by making their products sound more powerful than they really are, most of us settle for trying not to think about it too hard.

But something about the AI researcher Jacob Coxon’s very public resignation from the cutting-edge American lab Anthropic, via a post on X arguing that he can’t keep working for companies “gambling with our lives”, has cut through where bigger names have not. Most chillingly, he claimed that colleagues still at Anthropic aren’t staying because they think he’s wrong about the dangers of pursuing self-improving super intelligence – the holy grail of machines that are not just smarter than humans but capable of building their own even more powerful successors, evolving independently of humans – but because they’re afraid of ceding the field to people with fewer scruples. His colleagues, Coxon said, talk routinely about the “endgame” or the “crunch time”, meaning that what they do in the next year or two will decide the fate of humanity. Whether that’s true or simply self-aggrandising techbro delusion, what he describes is an industry now practically begging to be saved from itself.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

For now, it is Palestinians who are being killed and displaced. But ideologies of supremacy and domination threaten us all

Last week, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, put out an AI-generated video that showed a conveyor belt of overweight Palestinian prisoners – dreaming of food and education – entering one of his prisons; he pops the dream bubbles above their heads and they come out emaciated and crying. Ben-Gvir is building an execution site for Palestinian prisoners with spectator booths, and he recently showed up at Damon prison in northern Israel and taunted female prisoners who complained about the poor conditions. He is digging a moat around a new high-security jail and planning to introduce crocodiles to patrol it. In all this, he has the approval of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while the law that he championed mandating the death penalty for Palestinians deemed terrorists by military courts and convicted for lethal attacks is built on public support.

Sometime around 2017, many Palestinians and their supporters in the global media felt a change. Articles about Palestine no longer drew the hate mail we’d been accustomed to and events in support of Palestinian rights were hardly heckled. It seemed that people were less and less convinced by the image long cultivated by Israel and its supporters – the bearer of “western values” in the Middle East, the home to the “most moral army in the world”, a country acting only in self-defence – while it regularly assaulted Gaza and continued to expand its illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Ahdaf Soueif is the author of Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground

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The reluctance of later administrations to repudiate Bush-era torture and endless detention laid the groundwork for recent violence

If George W Bush’s abusive response to the September 11 attacks had been prosecuted rather than swept under the rug, Donald Trump would be less able to pursue his lawless policies. We can’t rewind history, but we can learn from our historic failure.

Twenty-five years ago, on a clear and crisp morning, I was sitting in the Human Rights Watch office in the Empire State Building with an unobstructed view of the World Trade Center towers as al-Qaida operatives flew two commercial jets into them. The horror of the attack required a response, but Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, chose to react by throwing out the rulebook. They deployed torture and endless detention without trial in Guantánamo.

I’ll miss Monty Don, and I know I’m not alone in finding the show a balm for the soul. But this is the perfect opportunity for a shake-up

It’s finally happened. National treasure Monty Don is hanging up his TV garden shears and saying goodbye to Gardeners’ World after more than 20 years as the BBC show’s lead presenter. I’ve been a grower for more than a decade myself, and Monty has been a steady and wise omnipresence throughout my journey – especially as he’s been on the right side of contemporary gardening debates over the environment and wildlife, and the use of chemicals and peat in horticulture.

That is where the overlap between our worlds of growing end, though. My modest patch of a few veg beds at the end of a small, chaotic and mostly gravelled garden is a universe away from the two-acre dreamscape that is Longmeadow, Don’s garden at his home in Herefordshire. I suspect I’m one of millions who’ve looked longingly at Monty’s remarkable space and the impressive infrastructure (not to mention hired hands!) that make it so special, and cursed the fact that such an ideal garden will never be within reach of us ordinary folk. That’s not to say that it hasn’t been a glorious setting for Monty to share his abundance of plant wisdom from, but now that the search for his replacement is presumably on, perhaps this is an opportunity for a little reimagining.

Claire Ratinon is an organic food grower and writer

Plus, AI doom-mongering, a drag Ann Droid and how your toilet flush can give you norovirus

In a news cycle to make everyone older than gen Z feel ancient, we start the week anticipating the 25th anniversary of 9/11 at the end. Social media floods with poignant interviews and images from lower Manhattan that day, triggering memories for the rest of us of where, who and how young we were. Ridiculously, I was having my eyebrows done in Hendon, north London, and came out to find a white van pulled over at a crazy angle to the curb, doors flung open, radio cranked up, and people stopped in the street to listen. I remember looking over the city and wondering if I’d seen jets, or explosions.

Keeping people in charge means little if supercomputers determine the evidence, choices and time on which their decisions depend

If there were a 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity, no responsible government would leave its development to companies racing to build it. Yet until recently, that seemed to be the case. The warning was all the more ominous because it was made by a researcher at Anthropic, the trillion-dollar AI company behind the Claude chatbot. The dangers of AI-enabled pandemics or attacks on nuclear systems are real. Countries need not agree on democracy or trade policy to accept this.

The US and China will hold, reportedly, their first bilateral AI-safety talks before a planned White House summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Despite their tech rivalry, neither Washington nor Beijing can make the most advanced AI safe on their own. A US-China settlement won’t be able to say how AI works everywhere. Countries deploying AI must help write the global rulebook. The odds on an extinction event are shortening. This week Anthropic said that it identified five cases in which attempts were made using its models to support biological weapons development. It banned the accounts. In one case, a platform sent requests rejected by Claude to a rival with weaker safeguards. AI safety, clearly, cannot be that of the least responsible model.

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Audacious robberies are a staple of popular culture. But for museums, crimes like this week’s theft of two Renoirs are an existential threat

Marc Allégret’s 1956 comedy Plucking the Daisy stars a young Brigitte Bardot as a first-time author who breaks into the Balzac house museum in Paris under the mistaken impression that her brother lives there. The plot revolves around her unwitting theft of an extremely rare book – and performance of a striptease in a desperate effort to raise the cash to buy it back.

Seventy years on, the lax security that could make such a sequence of events even vaguely plausible is no longer a joke. Museums across the world are scrambling to react to a spate of thefts that has left them in a state of shock. Last year’s break-in at the Louvre, by a gang who gained access using a furniture lift and took €88m (£76m) worth of French crown jewels, is thought by experts to have inspired copycat crimes. While French police believe that they have caught the culprits, treasures including a tiara have not been found.

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.

Readers respond to the move announced by Ed Miliband to impose sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements

As a religious Jew, I am disappointed at the reaction of some of our communal leaders and bodies to the sanctions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements (UK accuses Israeli ‘terrorists’ of ethnic cleansing in West Bank with government backing, 8 September). Many Jews in the UK are horrified by the Israeli government’s actions, which include promises from some ministers of burying the idea of a Palestinian state, and turning a blind eye to unchecked settlement expansion and escalating settler violence.

While much of the British media may choose to platform one view as being representative of the Jewish reaction to these sanctions, I would point to organisations such as Yachad and Na’amod, which provide an alternative anti‑occupation narrative. It is also frustrating that the opinion of the chief rabbi is upheld by news organisations as though he is the Jewish version of the pope: he isn’t.

The set books for English literature GCSE make grim reading, says Rachel Stott

Hollie McNish makes a strong point about the content of the current GCSE English literature syllabus (‘Bold, brilliant, thrilling’: leading authors on the novels every school should teach, 5 September). During the Covid pandemic, friends of mine described the challenge of cheering their teenage daughter through GCSEs at that difficult time. Her set books were Macbeth, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and first world war poetry. A couple of years later I asked my niece which books she was reading for GCSE. She said: Macbeth, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and first world war poetry. Is this corpse-rich literary diet really the healthiest we can offer our notoriously anxious and doom-laden youth?

In her introduction to the article, Kate Mosse outlines clearly the challenges for schools and for the Department for Education in revising the syllabus. Here’s a radical suggestion: bury the corpse of English literature GCSE and teach literature only for pleasure up to age 16.
Rachel Stott
London

Margaret Squires responds to an article about the wartime meteorologist James Stagg, whose work is dramatised in a new film

Is there any chance of getting a weather tsar in the model of Group Capt James Stagg, the wartime meteorologist, to adjudicate between weather forecasts (How meteorologists recreated weather that helped decide second world war, 8 September)? Suppose I were holidaying in Fort William this week and really wanted to climb Ben Nevis on Thursday. According to the BBC forecast on Wednesday, the worst I could expect would be light rain, and if this was coming up to the end of my holidays, I might go for it. I might not know about the Mountain Weather Information forecast or the Norwegian forecast, which would make it clear that I was in for a soaking.
Margaret Squires
St Andrews, Fife

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Dr Richard Bradbury responds to a travel article about the Polish city, home to one of the largest Jewish ghettos during Nazi occupation

I was shocked to read your travel article detailing the delights of Łódź without a single mention of the city’s past as the site of one of the largest ghettos during the second world war (A city break in Łódź, Poland’s capital of cinema and factories, 5 September).

The article says: “I ask Anna how Łódź fared in the second world war. ‘It was not too badly damaged,’ she says. ‘Both the Germans and the Russians wanted the industry intact.’” I wonder how the surviving family members of the perhaps 200,000 people who died after being herded into the ghetto, often to work as slaves for the Nazi war effort, would feel about that.

Updates from first men’s semi-final at 8pm BST, 3pm EST
Andrew Lawrence: in praise of five-set tennis | Mail Billy

Karen Khachanov emerges from the tunnel first, followed by Alexander Zverev. Apparently the German was a minute or two late because he needed some extra time in the toilet – we’ve all been there.

On Arthur Ashe Stadium, a retired servicewoman sings the American national anthem before the players come out. Flags are flying at half mast around the grounds today on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Arthur Ashe was also lit up blue from dusk until dawn this morning.

English top flight’s forwards are not well represented on the list, reflecting a season of set-piece grapple, but 2026-27 already looks brighter

Premier League representation is low when it comes to the 16 attacking players on this year’s Ballon d’Or shortlist. Manchester United’s Bruno Fernandes and Manchester City’s Erling Haaland are there but Cole Palmer, one of the nominees in 2025, is out after an injury-hit year and English football’s shift towards physicality and set pieces last season is summed up by none of the forwards from the best team in the country making the cut.

The trio giving Arsenal a presence – Gabriel Maghalhães, Declan Rice and William Saliba – are all defensive minded. Arsenal won the league but their forwards are not regarded as elite. Injuries played a part, denying Martin Ødegaard, Kai Havertz and Bukayo Saka fluency, but Mikel Arteta’s side were not loved by neutrals. There was respect rather than admiration for their defensive rigour. There was an argument that a lack of ambition after going 1-0 up stopped Arsenal from beating Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final.

England reached World Cup semis yet midfielder did not play a minute. But he is key to Manchester United in derby

It was a sight the England press pack became increasingly used to seeing after the team’s World Cup matches over the summer. Kobbie Mainoo was invariably the first to leave the dressing room, walk through the mixed zone – eyes dead ahead, features impassive – and board the bus.

It was as if he could not get out of the stadiums quick enough and the further England progressed the more pronounced it started to feel. There was a real gap between Mainoo and the next England player to depart the stadium in the knockout rounds. The Manchester United midfielder is inscrutable, even in the heat of battle. It is part of his enviably unflappable temperament. It was no great leap to imagine what lay behind the mask – tremendous frustration as Thomas Tuchel kept on leaving him out.

• Pakistan’s ninth-wicket pair put on 121 in 123 balls

• ‘You’ve got to give a bit more credit to them’

Marcus Trescothick described Pakistan’s late-innings onslaught as a “perfect storm”, after the 21-year-old debutant Razaullah and the 36-year-old Mohammad Abbas combined to score 121 off 123 balls and force a fraying England to come in on the fourth day to chase a target of 130.

The interim coach refused to characterise England’s frequently puzzling efforts in the field as embarrassing as Razaullah plundered nine sixes and four fours on his way to a score of 81, and Abbas two sixes – as many as he had scored in 46 career Test innings before the start of this series – in his 42, insisting: “You’ve got to give a bit more credit to them [rather] than trying to target everything that we’ve tried to do.”

• Norwegian leaves rival Hocker trailing to claim $150,000

• Briton Jazmin Sawyers second in the women’s long jump

It is a scene that has become gloriously familiar down the years. Jakob Ingebrigtsen leaving the world’s best athletes gasping in his slipstream, holding one imperious finger in the air, revelling in his athletic genius. But this victory over 5,000m at the inaugural Ultimate Championships carried extra sweetness – and spice.

The sweetness? That came from winning a mammoth first prize of $150,000 after an achilles injury he feared might derail his career. And the spice? Well, that was provided by the way Ingebrigtsen utterly obliterated his great American rival Cole Hocker, a man he had branded a “coward” just a week ago.

• Scores level at 4-4 after day one

• Europe fail to make advantage pay in fourballs

The rain poured and the United States roared. Hope had cascaded through the European contingent at this Solheim Cup during Friday afternoon until the sort of fightback that endorsed the sense that, come Sunday evening, the US will have won this trophy in a foreign land for the first time since 2015. This compelling day concluded with the scores level at 4-4. For Europe, it had promised to be so much better.

After a morning session that closed all square at 2-2, Europe surged ahead in three fourball matches. This felt like validation for Anna Nordqvist, the home captain. She had opted not to deploy any of the four players who returned two foursomes points – Maja Stark, Linn Grant, Leona Maguire and Esther Henseleit – after lunch.

Fight offers revealing snapshot of boxers once facing uncertain futures after positive drug tests now vying for a welterweight world championship

Four years ago Conor Benn’s career was thrown into limbo after two positive drug tests scuppered his blockbuster fight with Chris Eubank Jr. Two years ago Ryan Garcia was serving a one-year suspension after testing positive for ostarine at the time of his greatest victory.

On Saturday night they will each be rewarded with an eight-figure payday when they meet at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas for Garcia’s WBC welterweight championship. The purses have not been disclosed, although reports have put the combined pot at around $30m (£22m) with each fighter expected to haul in roughly $15m.

New hybrid street circuit has fast corners and virtually no margin for error – but limited overtaking opportunities

In Madrid’s Puerta del Sol this week, Formula One fans were not shy in calling on the gods to look kindly on their favoured drivers on a newly built circuit that appears punishingly unforgiving.

Legend has it that rubbing the paws or backside of the bear in the famous El Oso y el Madroño statue at the square’s heart confers good luck. The drivers may well need it. Day one of action at the Madring track began with F2’s Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak careening into the barriers and his car catching fire, leaving the onlooking George Russell shocked before the F1 drivers took to the wheel.

• Pinarello Q36.5 rider Dunbar wins stage by 14 seconds

• Mas maintains his 1min 37sec cushion in red jersey race

Irishman Eddie Dunbar secured a stunning last-ditch victory on stage 19 of the Vuelta a España as Spaniard Enric Mas maintained his overall lead with only one mountain stage remaining before Sunday’s finale.

The 30-year-old caught and passed Colombian Santiago Buitrago with just 300 metres left of the mountainous 210km slog from Vélez-Málaga to Peñas Blancas.

Rampant Yemeni fighters take control of island in narrow point of Bab al-Mandab strait, which Saudi is relying on for oil exports

• Why the rapid Houthi advance matters and what’s at stake

Yemen’s rampant Houthi forces have captured the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab strait, expanding their control of the narrow waterway, one of the ​world’s vital shipping routes.

The Iran-aligned Houthis took control of the volcanic island after forces allied to the UN-backed, Aden-based government left in the latest of a dramatic series of reverses along Yemen’s west coast in recent days, including the loss of the port city of Mocha on Thursday.

Greens accuse Labour of hiding position to avoid criticism before contest, in which Zack Polanski is standing

A decision on approving the controversial Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea is to be delayed until later this autumn, with the Greens accusing Labour of hiding their position before the crucial Holborn and St Pancras byelection.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, had been poised to give her recommendation to approve the Jackdaw field off the coast of Aberdeen next week.

DUP education minister accused of dragging feet before revising guidelines on uniform

Schools in Northern Ireland must give girls the choice to wear trousers as part of their uniforms as well as for PE and games, according to revised guidelines.

From next year schools would no longer be able to prohibit female pupils from wearing trousers, Paul Givan, the country’s education minister, said on Friday. “Today, I am taking that decision, that will be formally communicated, schools will be hearing from me,” he told the BBC.

The 23ft-long trackway, consisting of four three-toed footprints, two left and two right, date from 66.5m years ago

The first known series of footprints from an adult Tyrannosaurus rex has been found in North Dakota by a team of scientists.

The 23ft-long trackway – consisting of four three-toed footprints, two left and two right – was first identified in the south-west of the state, in the dinosaur fossil area known as Hell Creek Formation, last year by researchers from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Colorado and Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.

Substitution with jack mackerel, a different species, because of dwindling stocks is criticised by consumer group Which?

If you’ve recently opened a tin of mackerel and thought there was something fishy going on, you may have been right. An overfishing crisis means that instead of traditional mackerel, some now contain a different fish with a similar name, prompting concerns that shoppers are being short-changed.

Over the past year big brands such as Princes, as well as some supermarket own labels, have replaced traditional tinned mackerel fillets with jack mackerel fillets.

Findings on decline of species such as Arctic tern and turtle dove published alongside flyways pledge at Kenya summit

One in nine migratory birds are threatened with extinction and 45% of migratory species such as cuckoos, turtle doves and Arctic terns are in decline, according to a global report.

The migratory slender-billed curlew was officially declared extinct last year, the first global bird extinction in mainland Eurasia and Africa in recent centuries. Worldwide, seven migratory bird species have been confirmed or are suspected to have become extinct over the last 150 years.

Customers seeking greens at one Berlin outlet are dealing with some very local supply chains indeed

Walking into the Felix Thomas REWE supermarket in Lankwitz, Berlin, customers are immediately presented with a choice of greens: romaine, rocket, iceberg. But last month, a new option joined the selection: Lankwitz loose-leaf lettuce. A combination of head lettuce, romaine lettuce, Lollo Rosso, and dark green easy leaf lettuce, its yellow packaging makes it stand out in a row of green. But it’s not just the flashy packaging that makes it distinct. Unlike its neighbouring lettuces, which come from regional farms or all the way from Italy, these greens were grown just a few metres away – or rather, a few metres up. “Frisch Vom REWE Dach” or “Fresh from the REWE roof”, the bags read.

Rooftop farms are nothing new: in cities such as Paris, Hong Kong, Copenhagen and New York, similar farms supply food to adjacent food retailers or even restaurants. This model has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation (and its associated costs), minimise the urban heat effect, make use of dead space and perhaps even improve the relationship between buyers and their food.

Tornadoes kill hundreds each decade in the US. These researchers are investigating why some storms produce twisters – despite the fatal risks

On a narrow road in southern Iowa, my phone shrieked.

Tornado warning. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building.

An artisanal mining boom driven by war and poverty is causing a public health emergency, as chemicals poison soil, water and society

In Abu Hamad, on the banks of the Nile, verdant orchards, gardens and fields once produced a bounty of dates, citrus fruits, winter grains and cereals for the towns and cities of eastern Sudan, including Khartoum and Port Sudan.

Today, the land looks drastically different. Trees have been cut down, agricultural areas cleared, and farms have been replaced by shops and commercial sites. Dotted around the town and its outskirts, more than 700 mounds of grey waste are poisoning the soil, water and air. The mounds are the toxic remnants of artisanal gold mining, a practice that began in about 2008 and has intensified over the past six years.

Charity condemns ‘disgraceful’ intimidation and insists it will continue core purpose of saving lives at sea

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) has had a “significant” boost in donations since becoming a target of far-right agitators protesting over small boat crossings.

The charity’s staff and volunteers have been subjected to “online and physical abuse” after involvement in a rescue on Sunday in which a dinghy carrying asylum seekers was brought into Portsmouth.

Rights groups say those missing after being deported under one in, one out deal include dozens of age-disputed children

• UK politics live – latest updates

Hundreds of asylum seekers including at least 41 age-disputed children who were removed to France under the “one in, one out” deal have disappeared, human rights organisations have said.

The pilot scheme was hailed as “groundbreaking” by the former prime minister Keir Starmer when he and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced it in July 2025. Under a treaty drawn up for this agreement, it forcibly returns small-boat asylum seekers to France in exchange for others brought legally to the UK from France.

At least 760,000 children in England and Wales missed lessons as more than 1,700 schools closed or finished early

The gruelling heatwave that hit the UK in June caused pupils to miss more than 15m hours of lesson time as soaring temperatures forced hundreds of schools to close, according to a study.

The research found that at least 760,000 schoolchildren in England and Wales missed lessons owing to closures during the heatwave – one of five in the UK this summer – as temperatures inside some classrooms topped 40C (104F), leaving pupils and staff suffering from heat stress, nausea and headaches.

UK government reviewing allegations about My Surrogacy Journey after complaints about medical costs

The UK government has said it is reviewing allegations about a British-owned surrogacy service after surrogates in Mexico who faced health complications including a hysterectomy had their insurance claims rejected.

The Department of Health and Social Care is considering whether the UK-based provider My Surrogacy Journey should remain listed on gov.uk as one of four domestic surrogacy agencies available to intended parents, after its Mexican sister company received complaints.

Soprano whose strength lay in her ability to invest her characterisations with dramatic force

The Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubas, who has died aged 87, was admired internationally, not least in Great Britain, where she lived at the start of her career, and Vienna, where she and her husband later made their home. What lent her lyric soprano voice, which may have lacked the voluptuousness and amplitude of other celebrated singers, its distinctive nature was its tightly focused tonal quality (occasionally criticised as plangent), combining inner strength with a touching vulnerability. She was also an excellent actor (her exemplar was Maria Callas), her stage portrayals tellingly incarnating the often wounded women she played.

Outstanding among these was her Violetta in La Traviata, which encompassed the character’s frailty, her zest for life, her exuberance and her inescapably tragic situation, in performances that were throbbing with passion and almost unbearably intense. The cumulative sweep of the phrases in her dazzling rendition of Sempre Libera, as captured in a celebrated Deutsche Grammophon recording with Carlos Kleiber, and the profoundly poignant Dite alla Giovine, in which she bids farewell to the past and to life, demonstrate perfectly the qualities for which Cotrubas is remembered.

Three facilities in two days struck as bombardment of Ukraine’s capital enters new phase of intensity

• Europe live – latest updates

Petrol stations in Kyiv have been hit by jet-powered drones in a wave of targeted Russian attacks as the bombardment of Ukraine’s capital enters a new phase of intensity.

At least two people were killed and 12 injured in strikes on two petrol stations on Friday morning, according to the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko.

Fans from around the world gather for star’s long-awaited performances after break because of neurological condition

More than 30,000 Céline Dion fans have gathered in Paris for the Canadian singer’s long-awaited return to performing on Saturday night, four years after she revealed her diagnosis of stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological condition.

Thousands more people without tickets have flocked to a series of giant karaoke events across France to belt out Dion’s famous power ballads, in celebration of the star’s health stabilising enough for her to return to the stage.

Phra Wachirayan Wi arrested alongside woman he was filmed having sex with in latest scandal to hit country’s clergy

Police in Thailand have arrested a senior Buddhist monk on suspicion of embezzling $2.8m intended for his monastery, alongside a suspected female accomplice he was filmed having sex with.

The case is the latest scandal to hit the clergy in the Buddhist-majority country, after a sex and extortion case involving senior monks last year prompted public outrage and calls for greater scrutiny of temple finances.

From Shropshire to Hamburg, depleting reserves and spiralling costs are spawning a continent-wide energy crisis

Bridgnorth Aluminium has faced down Brexit, Covid and repeated energy shocks in recent years. But this winter is bringing extra “stress and pressure”, says its head of sales, Adrian Musgrave.

Musgrave’s company makes rolled aluminium, used in packaging, construction and the manufacture of items such as cars and batteries. Like many stretched industrial businesses across Europe, Bridgnorth Aluminium faces a looming threat of soaring energy bills, which Musgrave describes as “just worry upon worry”.

Report says widespread autonomous vehicle adoption would put hundreds of thousands of private hire jobs at risk

Taxes on self-driving cars should be introduced now in the UK to offset the rise in congestion and threats to jobs they pose, a thinktank has urged.

The first robotaxis on London’s streets only started this month, but government projections are that up to 40% of cars sold could have self-driving capability by the middle of the next decade.

Businesses, charities and other groups sign letter calling for levies to be paid by the government

More than 120 organisations including big businesses and charities have called for the removal of “hidden taxes” added to energy bills to help reduce costs for consumers and prevent businesses closing.

In a letter to the chancellor the signatories – including Energy UK, business trade body the CBI, End Fuel Poverty and Age UK – called for levies amounting to 10% of energy bills that fund policies to be paid for by the government. John Healey is to present his first budget on 28 October.

National Audit Office calls for greater transparency on £70bn programme that is running over budget and behind schedule

• Speed up electricity grid upgrade or else face higher bills, warns UK watchdog

It’s an open secret in the energy industry that “the great grid upgrade” – the £70bn programme to rewire the nation’s electricity transmission network to enable clean power by 2030 – is running over budget and behind schedule, and may end up costing consumers and businesses more in their bills than advertised.

How far behind? How much more? It is impossible to get straight answers from the bodies overseeing the massive spending programme, which may continue at an even greater scale into the 2030s. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Desnz), its in-house body, the National Energy System Operator (Neso), and Ofgem, the supposedly independent regulator, publish acres of information on narrow matters, but none provides a clear big-picture assessment: how is the grid upgrade really going?

More than 100 lenses inside Luke Jerram’s Pollenarium let visitors see the outside world as insects would

From the outside, it looks a little like something out of the Teletubbies.

In fact, the new installation by the Bristol artist Luke Jerram represents a grain of pollen, and the inside represents an insect’s compound eye.

Theatre Royal Stratford East, London
In Ava Pickett’s tense play, Michelle Dockery’s heroine returns to a Towie-styled world where the violence and misogyny are all too recognisable

‘And Zeus created … Essex.” Playwright Ava Pickett set her award-winning debut, 1536, in her home county during Tudor times: her latest has Helen of Troy returning home to a Towie-style living room at the end of an English civil war.

An Adidas-clad Messenger functions as chorus, bringing us up to speed on this new England where angry men have rioted and petrol-bombed, wreaking havoc in Helen’s name after she left her husband, Marcus, for a so-called “foreigner”. The cream carpets and glass coffee tables belong to Cee – Helen’s best friend, married to Marcus’s big brother Mario – and it’s here that the men arrive with a shivering Helen to toast their victory with prosecco.

At Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, until 10 October

Toronto film festival: the chilling true story of a woman who tried to hide from her wartime crimes gets turned into a strangely inert misfire

The first scene of the 60s-set drama The Housewife is a closeup of a whistling kettle, an early “wink, wink” sign that we’re watching a story where tensions are set to boil but also that we’re watching a film of minimal subtlety.

Perhaps if it had been pitched closer to its adjacently named cousin The Housemaid, as a silly, sensationalist thriller, such heavy-handed decision-making would feel more well-suited. But instead, while some scenes flirt with the idea of something juicier, this is a stuffy and stodgy slab of self-serious, old-school Oscar bait complete with all the shouting, crying, throwing and finger-pointing one would expect. Think overcooked rather than slow simmer.

The Housewife is premiering at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution

The latest adaptation of Culpable trilogy author Mercedes Ron, about a ballet dancer and her security guard, has more holes than plot and chemistry that barely generates a spark

Here is Prime Video’s latest Mercedes Ron adaptation, following the massive ratings success of her Culpable trilogy (My Fault, Your Fault, Our Fault). Drawn Together tells the story of a ballet dancer falling in love with her bodyguard. It’s meant to be darker and sexier than the Culpable movies (which were derived from YA-aimed novels), but has all the erotic charge of leaf mulch. It’s the worst of all worlds – trash minus any froth or fun, trash with pretensions. Fans no doubt will be instantly at home in its glossy world of the ultra-wealthy, all the budget blown on cream-coloured furnishings and jodhpurs.

Ester Expósito is Marfil, a 20-year-old student and ballet dancer from Spain living in New York. One night, she is abducted in Central Park and wakes up two days later in hospital with no memory of what happened. What Marfil doesn’t know is that her billionaire father Alejandro (Pablo Molinero) is an organised crime boss, and he hires bodyguard Sebastián (Hugo Diego Garcia) as 24/7 protection for Marfil. In a film with more holes than plot, this stands out as especially preposterous. No father alive would risk hiring smouldering Sebastián (think Tom Hardy’s hot young Spanish cousin) as security for his daughter.

Eileen and Keen Umbehr were convinced the wrong person was convicted for double-homicide. After sending Pulitzer-winning journalist Joe Sexton 2,714 emails about it, he agreed to investigate – and it led to a messy entanglement

HBO is no stranger to true crime, though its offerings tend to be more prestige than your average, with documentaries such as the unrelenting sex cult nightmare The Vow and The Yogurt Shop Murders, a measured reinvestigation into the deaths of four teenage girls in Texas in the 90s. They have form, too, in drily funny sagas, such as McMillions, about a high-stakes conspiracy to fix the McDonald’s Monopoly promotion. Rarely are their documentaries both solemn and bizarro, with the exception perhaps of The Jinx. An unnerving tale of millionaire real estate heir turned convicted murderer Robert Durst, it occasionally lingered on the stranger points of his story, like the time he shoplifted a $6 sandwich for kicks.

All this makes sense, really: it’s not like most homicides lend themselves to a deadpan retelling. A Killer Story is not laugh-out-loud funny, either. But this very meta three-parter manages to tell not one but two killer stories, one disturbing and the other absurd. The first concerns a woman, Dana Chandler, who is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her ex-husband and his new girlfriend. The second is about a true crime-obsessed stranger, Eileen Umbehr, who becomes fixated on the case, spamming a journalist with tips. The emails from Umbehr were, says Joe Sexton – previously of the New York Times and investigative newsroom ProPublica – “a crazy assortment of shit … I [didn’t] know whether to call the cops on her or fucking hire her!”

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor star in a gorgeous love story that spans decades of yearning, while Guy Ritchie brings Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill together for a slick action caper

Feted young actors Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor have teamed up for this melancholy romance about music and missed connection. Mescal plays Lionel, a gifted musician who meets a more scholarly academic, David (O’Connor), while studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, in the midst of the first world war. Reunited after armistice, the two travel around rural Maine together, recording their folk music on the new-fangled “wax cylinders” and – ultimately, fleetingly – falling in love. Director Oliver Hermanus’s previous work includes Living, the Bill Nighy-starring re-imagining of Kurosawa’s 50s classic Ikiru, and this is a similar symphony of longing and decade-spanning desire.
Saturday 12 September, 7.50am, 2.50pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

(Reprise)
The 80-year-old continues his tireless output, delving into the past for inspiration to variable results – though two lengthy brand-new songs are real showstoppers

You can’t fault Neil Young for his industry. Second Song is his second new album of 2026: the first, a double live set called As Time Explodes, was released just over three months ago. Indeed, at 80, his work schedule seems mind-boggling. Since 2020, he’s released nine new albums, a 30-minute EP, five self-directed films and three more films directed by others, 10 archival live albums, six archival studio albums and two immense box sets. He has embarked on tours with his longstanding backing band Crazy Horse, his recently convened backing band the Chrome Hearts, and solo. He has gone to public war with Spotify, Amazon, Ticketmaster and – briefly – the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury, and penned umpteen op-ed pieces about politics, the environment and corporate media for his online newspaper the Times-Contrarian. When he recently cancelled a European tour citing exhaustion, it was hard not to think: well, I’m not surprised.

You do find yourself wondering if his workload is such a good thing: not just for an elderly gentleman’s health but also for the quality of his output. Young has always prized spontaneity over finesse, but some of his more recent releases have suggested that at least a soupçon of finesse might not go amiss. Last year’s Talkin to the Trees, however, seemed to cross the line that separates the instinctive from the dashed off. Young frequently sounded as if he was making the material up as he went along, with nugatory results: “When today has come and gone, I might be singing my new song,” he offered on Family Life. “Might be short, it might be long, but I’ll be singing my new song.” If some of the melodies sounded familiar, that’s because they were. Not one but two tracks echoed the tune of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land; First Fire of Winter was essentially Young’s 1970 masterpiece Helpless with different lyrics; Thankful rewrote 1992’s Harvest Moon.

Sometime Zach Bryan backing vocalist Heaven Schmitt started Grumpy as a solo project. It’s now a six-piece band, blending alt-country with jubilant solidarity

From Brooklyn, US
Recommended if you like Wednesday, This Is Lorelei, Alex G
Up next Unfindable Ring released 23 October

“Found family” is something that queer people talk about a lot: finding your people and sticking with them is necessary in a world that often seems to want you quiet at best and dead at worst. Grumpy began as the solo project of frontman Heaven Schmitt, in between stints collaborating and touring with country-pop star Zach Bryan as a backing vocalist. It’s now a six-piece band with predominantly trans members; some of the group have dated or are dating, and they all work collaboratively on recording, producing, mixing, creating artwork and making music videos.

The sax star turned his back on fame to embrace free jazz. Caught on a tape machine hidden in an overcoat, newly revealed recordings show how he did it

In August 1965, at the height of his fame, saxophonist John Coltrane headlined the DownBeat jazz festival in Chicago. Taking to the stage with a new member of his band, young experimentalist Archie Shepp on tenor, Coltrane’s quartet blew through a series of jagged and free improvisations, straying from structured compositions and, instead, hurling down sheets of sound so loud and aggressive that they reportedly caused widespread walk-outs. DownBeat’s own reviewer later wrote: “They gave as tasteless a display of musicianship as I’ve ever heard … Shepp and Coltrane seemed to be more interested in trying to out-honk, out-squeal and out-bleat each other than in playing music.”

That 1965 performance should have been a triumphant moment, after five years of Coltrane’s star ascending. Since leaving Miles Davis’s “first great quintet”, with whom he had recorded what would become the bestselling jazz album of all time – 1959’s Kind of Blue – Coltrane founded an entirely new harmonic language in jazz with the 1960 release of his solo LP Giant Steps, had a radio hit with his 1961 version of The Sound of Music’s My Favourite Things and, in January 1965, formulated his own spiritual imagining of jazz music with the Grammy-nominated album A Love Supreme. He was already a giant of the genre, contributing dozens of compositions to the standard repertoire, but two years later, in 1967, aged just 40, he would be dead of liver cancer.

(Ghostly International)
Unpredictable and utterly beguiling, the septuagenarian beloved by Harry Styles brings a hint of mischief to his innocently charming songs

Haruomi Hosono is one of the most influential figures in Japanese music. In 1969, his psych-folk group Happy End were the first rock group to sing in Japanese; decades later, their song Kaze wo Atsumete was rediscovered for the Lost in Translation soundtrack. He was also an integral member of electronic pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, and scored movies and video games, while his solo albums swing from foundational city pop texts to experiments in ambient and arch exotica.

Now 79, with disciples including Van Dyke Parks and Harry Styles (who named 2022’s Harry’s House after 1973 solo album Hosono House), he still makes whatever music he wants. His 23rd solo album is wilful, playful, unpredictable and utterly beguiling. Rooted in the Japanese concept of omoiyari, roughly translated as compassion, these songs are big-hearted, focusing on warmth and positivity: opening reverie Note of Mothership features a chorus of overlapping voices murmur-singing “we are mothers”; the sweet Happy Holiday repeats its title over an enchantingly simple melody; Sincerely is a sleepy, Leon Redbone-esque strum.

Massif by Garth Nix; Revolution in the Heart: Stories Inspired By Ursula K Le Guin edited by Jonathan Strahan; An Immaculate Deception by Isabela Livino; Serenity Falls by CJ Tudor

Massif by Garth Nix (Gollancz, £25)
The bestselling fantasy author’s first science fiction novel for adults is set three centuries from now, when humanity has spread out to the stars. The colonisation of other planets has been enabled by contact with mysterious aliens, and with much of the population split into competing economic spheres, war over territory is raging between the two biggest: United Earth Government and the Mars and Beyond Prosperity Sphere. This war in space is possible only because the godlike aliens continue to supply us with spaceships – but why? What do they want? Answers must await a sequel to this compelling, action-packed space opera with wonderfully weird aliens.

Revolution in the Heart: Stories Inspired By Ursula K Le Guin edited by Jonathan Strahan (Titan, £22)
The authors of these 15 original stories range from the well-established (Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link, Molly Gloss) to newer writers (Chana Porter, Ai Jiang, Vandana Singh). A few make direct reference to Le Guin, but most reveal her influence subtly, by shared interests in questioning established ideas and imagining other ways of living, whether among non-human beings, in the future, on other worlds, or in ours. My favourites include Sarah Pinsker’s Travelling, Home, about a young woman in present-day America seeking her place in the world, Ann Leckie’s Five-Eyed Jane, an ironic look at misunderstandings among aliens, and Karen Joy Fowler’s Blaumont, a dark fairytale that’s as disturbing and thought-provoking today as Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Probably the best original anthology of the year: a must-read.

With a character inspired by Wittgenstein, this exploration of the mysteries of the universe draws on multiple philosophical traditions

For several years I ran community groups that involved reading books aloud with other adults. Sharing the experience of reading in that way made me notice how, when one or more of us was baffled by a story, this bafflement was rarely experienced without an accompanying sense of mild anger. It was so easy to make us, the readers, angry – at the characters; at the author; perhaps even at the nature of this reality on which we’d lost our grip. We were confronted with the fact that our capacity to understand the world was limited. We didn’t like that.

Irish author Adrian Duncan’s fifth novel, A Thought Without Collision, takes risks with this bafflement: it relates and conveys an experience of being mystified by the universe. As it opens, in Ireland in 1923, it is becoming apparent that six-year-old Catherine has exceptional academic gifts, and that her father’s farm is failing. In the next chapter, set in 1951, Dr Josef Alois, a Tyrolean émigré academic in his mid-50s, is living in his self-built house on the east coast of Scotland. He is alone until Catherine reappears, “a handsome woman in her mid-thirties”, and now an Oxford professor. The second chapter ends starkly: Alois “is more unwell than he believes and will perish in one month and eleven days”.

Beautifully written by her daughter, this is a funny and intimate eulogy to the 60s star of The Avengers who went on to specialise in fierce, complicated women

The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra? I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time. In an interview with Michael Parkinson, she observed how marriage was “all rather pagan, don’t you think? … A lot of women see it as security. Well, I’m not a woman who yearns for security.”

Taking over from Honor Blackman as the high-kicking Emma Peel in the 1960s spy series The Avengers, Rigg refused to play subordinate sidekick to Patrick Macnee’s Steed, turning her character into a beacon of female empowerment. When Rigg learned that not only was Macnee paid significantly more than she was, but the camera operator was too, she demanded a raise. She got it, but that didn’t stop the press from labelling her as a grasping diva. Fifty years later, she told Newsnight: “Equal pay. That’s what feminism means to me, only that.”

An American Chinese student studies Mandarin in Taiwan, in this heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family secrets

What is Taiwan? A former Japanese colony? A centre of the semiconductor industry? A democracy overseen by American imperialism? China’s next military target? An island of Austronesian Indigenous tribes? Is Taipei a cultural emblem of Taiwan, or just another booming global capital out of touch with the rest of the country? What stories will Lily Chen, an American Chinese student at Yale and Rebecca F Kuang’s funny and deadpan protagonist in Taipei Story, discover in this melting pot while spending 10 weeks learning Mandarin?

A prolific maverick with rare satirical wit, Kuang has built a career debunking authoritative institutions. Babel (2022) highlights the prejudices of the British empire through a fantastical Oxford translation institute; Yellowface (2023) transplants a heist thriller into the dark heart of American publishing; Katabasis (2025), a journey into the underworld, gives the academic inferno at Cambridge a new lease of death. Centring on a tough Mandarin language school, Taipei Story explores the torture, hilarity and pretension of learning a second language, but here Kuang also offers a heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family wounds.

We have a first play of the forthcoming Tomb Raider remake and speak with its developers. Can they improve on the gameplay without losing what made the 1996 original such a classic?

We join Lara Croft in St Francis’ Folly – inspired by the Unesco-listed monasteries of Meteora in Greece – as the light shines through the cracked ceiling and a flock of bats glide across the vast ruins below. When Lara leaps down to the monastery’s crumbling pillared courtyard, it becomes clear that these screeching, leathery creatures aren’t just set dressing. As they lurch towards her with unpredictable movements, she dispatches the swarm with a flurry of gun fire and panicked punches.

It’s a suitably cinematic reintroduction to our heroine and her very first adventure. Co-developed by longtime Lara custodians Crystal Dynamics and Polish studio Flying Wild Hog, Legacy of Atlantis is a reimagining of the classic 1996 game Tomb Raider, and this familiar cliffside location is now brimming with new life and believable detail. Yet while our reunion gets off to an auspicious start, I have my concerns. It feels like reconnecting with an old friend at the pub, only for them to begin spouting conspiracy theories two pints in.

PlayStation 5; Insomniac Games
Logan is well realised by Liam McIntyre and some exquisite character art, but there are lapses in narrative and emotional arcs and some of the combat feels like a chore

It was always going to be difficult to follow Spider-Man. Insomniac’s three games based around the web-slinger are masterpieces of superhero wish fulfilment, allowing you to swoop above a depiction of Manhattan alive with graffiti artists, roving journalists and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, his life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems the ideal protagonist for a moody action adventure. Yet somehow this well-made game falls short of its potential.

Set years before the founding of the X-Men, Marvel’s Wolverine sees a disenfranchised Logan falling back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination and the X Team are out to stop him – but there is a secret buried in Wolverine’s past that’s about to cause an eruption. It’s a decent setup, filled with the sort of intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we expect from the X-Men.

Once hailed as the future, even the likes of Google, Sony and Microsoft have struggled to make streaming games fun, fast or affordable

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In August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza.) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future.

Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later.

Historically a new Grand Theft Auto game inspired controversy around violence – but this time people are getting exercised about its romance

There was never any doubt that Grand Theft Auto VI’s extended look would elicit a viral reaction from the internet. Having won the Game Awards’ Most Anticipated award twice consecutively, Rockstar’s forthcoming crime opus is one of the most frothed-over games in recent memory, or indeed ever. It’s nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.

One aspect of the game has provoked an unexpectedly vehement response on social media: not violence, but romance. Protagonists Lucia and Jason are in love, you see, and as a player, part of your job is keeping their spark alive and their relationship strong, so that their criminal escapades are underpinned by a strong connection to one another. Holding hands, enjoying a date at the beach, spontaneously texting one another when apart – all of these interactions will strengthen their bond. You’ll be putting in a lot of work to ensure this couple thrives, which is why some people have come to believe that playing GTA VI counts as micro-cheating.

Camden Art Centre, London
These portentous works, based on scans of a real asteroids, seem to warn of societal collapse, but this first UK exhibition of the US sculptor needed a simpler approach

Corporations are already selling off mining rights to asteroids. These massive balls of rock and ore and minerals and ice up in space, far out of the reach of humanity, and mostly named after ancient Greek or Roman goddesses, are being traded like real estate by greedy suits with telescopes.

There are half a dozen asteroids in American sculptor Liz Larner’s exhibition at Camden Art Centre, her first institutional exhibition in the UK, plonked on the floor like they’ve just burned through the atmosphere on their way in from space. Each one is based on a Nasa scan of a real asteroid and then re-formed out of glittery, gritty ceramic. They’re gleaming symbols of corporate greed, ecological collapse and sexism – comets of misery, sent from the future to crash land on Finchley Road.

Southbank Centre, London
Wang’s avatar performs music from Ravel and Debussy to Prokofiev and Liszt while dizzying virtual worlds take shape around her in this virtual reality installation

It might be the first time that a soloist at the Last Night of the Proms is simultaneously giving another performance in another London venue. Playing With Fire is an installation that lets the pianist Yuja Wang be in two places at once – or perhaps in two universes. Nine pieces of music conjure nine luminous dreamworlds for an audience wearing VR headsets: Disney’s Fantasia on steroids.

A collaboration between the pianist, the director Pierre-Alain Giraud and artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, produced by Vive Arts and Atlas V, it has already been seen in Cannes, Paris and Shanghai, and now has a home in London until new year.

Marylebone theatre, London
Darren Raymond’s update drops Rylance’s impostor into a Jamaican-Nigerian wedding, with clever rhyming couplets but less political sting

Spitting posh platitudes through false teeth so bucked they might enforce a liquid diet, raking one hand across an oily comb-over while the other holds a Bible as tight as a manbag stuffed with gold, Mark Rylance extends the long English tradition of comedy vicars to a French source: Molière’s 1664 comedy Tartuffe, about a trickster who fakes piety to defraud a devout family.

The original targeted the Catholic church, the arrows sharp enough that the archbishop of Paris threatened excommunication to any Catholic who saw the play, forcing Molière to write a new version, The Impostor, where the fakery was less directly sacred.

Royal Opera House, London
This revival of Kaspar Holten’s 2014 staging puts the focus on the Don’s psychology. Aigul Akhmetshina’s Elvira is a standout performance in a strong cast

Post #MeToo and #TimesUp, Mozart and Da Ponte’s tale of a predatory sex addict feels more pertinent than ever. Kaspar Holten’s 2014 staging, revived here with care and clarity by Greg Eldridge, may not be played in modern dress – Anja Vang Kragh’s semi-stylised costumes and Es Devlin’s Escher-inspired revolving set locate the action somewhere between 1850 and 1900 – but the contemporary resonances come over loud and clear. If only it wasn’t so frustratingly inconsistent.

In Holten’s hands the overture becomes a visual as well as a musical tour de force. Luke Halls’ video design starts small, scrawling a single woman’s name on the grey stone facade. Soon, however, the trickle swells to a torrent as a catalogue of sexual conquests appear before our eyes. Projections are a constant throughout with scribbles, ink blots and splashes of blood spattering scenery and singers alike. In the famous Champagne Aria, images of buildings, rooms and staircases rotate at dizzying speed with the Don standing in the eye of the storm anticipating his latest binge. Remarkably, they rarely distract from the action, a testament to Bruno Poet’s dextrous lighting design.

Hating The Apprentice? Bored silly of House of the Dragon? Given up on your favourite soap opera after 50 years? Guardian readers share the shows they can’t bear to watch

We loved this show for the first four or five seasons. It had a really good mix of candidates, different ages and walks of life. I think it was after season nine that we started to feel the programme was losing its authenticity. Contestants started to look like homogenous Love Islanders, all the same demographic – 20-30 age bracket, highly polished body image, eye on a post-show influencer career, etc. It lost its uniqueness and became just another reality show. Ngaire Vine, 56, Derbyshire

Cellist and a member of the Allegri String Quartet in recordings of Schubert, Brahms, Elgar and Britten

In 1967 the cellist Bruno Schrecker, who has died aged 97, was invited to join the Allegri String Quartet when William Pleeth left it. He was delighted to take up a place that he had declined in 1953, when it was founded with Eli Goren as leader; membership continued to change, and the ensemble remains active today.

Bruno, above all a chamber musician and recitalist, remained with the quartet for the next three decades, until 1998. His convivial personality, irrepressible humour and determination always to get right to the truth of any piece enabled him to remain friends with his Allegri colleagues.

A blue lady strides across the fourth plinth, Beryl Cook and friends gather in Bicester, and Spain repurposes a traffic junction – all in your weekly dispatch

Tschabalala Self
A rollicking triumph of a statue that spreads good feelings and smiles in the heart of the capital. Saucy genius.
• Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square, London

The written forum allows members of the public to vent their fury at the movies they’ve seen – and the festival organisers

In an industry that is reliant on the fickle vagaries of taste, film festivals exist to establish facts. The reason why film-makers still go through the rigmarole of ferrying their cast to the red carpets of Venice, Cannes or Sundance is the need for empirical evidence of unambiguous quality: a solid-gold prize, a top score on the critics’ grid, a record-timed standing ovation that will convince every doubter that this is a great film.

Film festivals, in turn, need beautiful A-listers to attract coverage and sponsorship, and hence there is a constant risk that these annual events become gigantic hype machines, in which every turkey is a classic and every half-hearted performance a masterclass.

Preppy is back in the zeitgeist, says designer, blending sportswear codes and collegiate chic at New York show

Tommy Hilfiger’s front row was a slam dunk. The Knicks are the kings of New York right now, so scoring Josh Hart, Karl-Anthony Towns and Miles McBride, three of the team’s stars, for the guest list of his New York catwalk show was a victory. Travis Kelce, who is co-designing another upcoming collection with Hilfiger and had been rumoured to attend this event with his new bride, was a no show, but you can’t win them all.

Tommy Hilfiger is all about sport. The design vocabulary of oversized jerseys, team stripes, rugby shirts and letterman jackets draws heavily on the visual language of the stadium. Kelce, whose NFL tunnel walks have become a catwalk of their own, is the latest in a line of sporting ambassadors that includes Thierry Henry, Rafael Nadal and Lewis Hamilton. Hilfiger has long stood for a certain glossy stars-and-stripes Americana – its graphic red, white and blue logo is a riff on the flag – but American identity is delicate cultural territory right now. Sport, which unites audiences across all backgrounds and political allegiances, gives the brand a wholesome place to congregate. “People really like him,” Hilfiger said backstage, explaining why he chose to collaborate with Kelce. “He’s really humble, down to earth, sweet, fun, and funny. And a superstar athlete.”

A new exhibition in London celebrates the influential hairstylist whose clients include Janelle Monáe and Zadie Smith. She explains her story – and why she’s on a mission to ensure stylists are trained to work with all hair types

When Charlotte Mensah was a young child growing up in Accra, Ghana in the 1970s, she would spend hours watching her aunties having their hair intricately threaded, an ancient African technique where hair is wrapped tightly using yarn or thread. She didn’t know then that she would go on to become one of the most influential hairdressers in the UK. Renowned for championing natural black hair textures, she has worked as hairstylist to singers Janelle Monáe and Erykah Badu, and the writer Zadie Smith.

According to Smith, in an essay she penned about Mensah’s magic earlier this year: “Charlotte can make a great mane of braids appear where previously there were only split ends and hair loss.”

Whether it’s soft serve or sorbet, gelato or fro-yo, the Ninja Creami Scoop and Swirl is a faff-free way of making all your favourite frozen treats

• The best ice-cream makers for your home

For me, ice-cream isn’t only for summer. It’s my dessert of choice all year round, and a good ice-cream maker ensures it’s always readily available. When I put more than a dozen models through their paces earlier this year, one thing became clear: the most important feature in any machine is ease of use.

On that front, the Ninja Creami really scored highly for me. I’ve used the original NC300 model for a few years, and I like its simplicity and that it’s easy to clean. Nowadays, though, we expect our appliances to do a little more – and when it comes to ice-cream, the current craze is soft serve.

After months of testing and countless hours seated, our endurance sitter picked the best office chairs for every budget

• The best gaming chairs – tested

What’s the most important thing when you’re spending hours in front of a computer? Is it having the fastest internet? The sharpest screen? The perfect keyboard? No. When you’re spending most of your day on your bottom, the most crucial element is what’s directly underneath.

With a good office chair, you can handle a long working day without any feelings of discomfort. With a bad one, you can expect backache, neck ache, tender glutes and assorted nagging pains. Who wants to return to work when the last day left you feeling achy and decrepit?

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The creative director talks 80s knitwear, joyful knickers and a love of Boots with the Filter

• How I Shop with Millie Mackintosh

Laura Jackson is a creative director and broadcaster who works across design, food and culture. She co-founded the homewares website Glassette in 2021 and later founded the skincare brand Rocco. Her broadcasting career spans television, radio and digital.

Jackson launched a collection with British jewellery brand Astley Clarke in September 2026, featuring gemstones, celestial motifs and tarot symbolism.

Christmas might be months away, but beauty Advent calendar waiting lists are filling up fast. From cult favourites to cruelty-free picks, here are the ones worth buying

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As I write, an ice-cream van has just parked outside my flat. It’s the middle of this year’s umpteenth heatwave, and I’m finally understanding the appeal of a cold shower. That can only mean one thing: it’s time to start testing the best beauty Advent calendars.

I wish I was joking, but many beauty brands and retailers have been curating their 2026 beauty Advent calendars since before last Christmas. And since these calendars offer a selection of high-end cosmetics, bestselling beauty staples and new launches at far less than their usual combined price, they’ve become a festive staple for beauty fanatics.

The coffee and cream pudding has always been popular. But now it’s inspired a dedicated cafe and countless products, from drinks to ice-creams to buns. What’s behind this big cultural craving?

When Giancarlo Fanigliulo opened Marrone, a cafe dedicated to tiramisu in London’s Soho in August, he hadn’t anticipated he would sell out within two and a half hours. “I was expecting a buzz, but I wasn’t expecting queues around the corner,” he tells me. “It was insane.”

This kind of excitement about the Italian dessert is not a one-off – we are, it seems, living in an age of tiramisu-mania. Nearly all of the high street coffee chains have offered some kind of tiramisu coffee as a seasonal special (in the US, Dunkin’ currently has four different tiramisu-flavoured drinks on its menu). Meanwhile, Haagen-Dazs and Carte D’or now sell tiramisu ice-cream, London chain Buns from Home offers a tiramisu-flavoured croissant-dough bun and social media is awash with tiramisu recipes and videos of “tiramisu drawers” – trays of the dessert ready to serve out of drawers in chefs’ kitchens – as popularised by the viral one at Manchester pasta restaurant Onda.

‘The doors that aren’t open to us in the rest of the city, we open for ourselves here,’ Maria Cristina de Sales says

Even at the age of nine, Maria Cristina de Sales knew exactly when to ask her mother’s colleagues at the slaughterhouse for a piece of the pig they were butchering: when they got close to the pork leg, her favourite part.

When she grew up, Sales followed the path of many others from Brazil’s deprived north-east and moved south in search of better work opportunities. She arrived in Rio de Janeiro and, unable to afford a home in tourist-heavy south zone, moved to a favela further north.

The classic Mexican combo of espresso and Licor 43 gets a shot in the arm with a decent hit of cold-brew coffee liqueur

The carajillo is a ubiquitous drink found across Mexico, and it comes in many forms. Some bars simply pour espresso over ice and add a shot of Licor 43, while others shake coffee with the liqueur and serve it straight up. Whatever the variation, the non-negotiables are coffee and Licor 43. Our version takes those two core ingredients and lengthens the drink with a light, delicious cold-brew coffee liqueur. It’s the perfect serve for a warm afternoon, a sweet after-dinner treat or an uplifting nightcap.

Tom King, head bartender, Cometa, London W1

Make the most of the early-autumn glut of fruit with this quick, squidgy-crumbed bake that’s bursting with berries

Every year, I get annoyed with myself for not making the most of blackberry season, and then it’s gone before I’ve had a chance really to enjoy them. They’re such great berries to bake with, and here I’ve scattered them in a simple ricotta cake. It’s a quick, one-bowl bake with a perfectly squidgy crumb that’s bursting with fruit.

There’s a risk in trying to get our girls away from frilly skirts that we swing all the way to a different kind of enforcement, advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith writes

• Read more Leading questions

I am the mother of a six-year-old girl, and I have relatively progressive views about gender. Among other things, I try to give my daughter a choice of clothes that are practical – T-shirts, leggings – and that tend to be unisex in colour scheme. There are no overly fussy and frilly skirts and dresses in pink and sparkles in her wardrobe. As much as possible, I try to buy non-sweatshop brands. These choices are part of a world system of values I want to show my daughter – that being a “girl” is so much more than just wearing a frilly dress; that we can have well-made things without contributing to the suffering of others.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand, loves buying these sorts of clothes for her granddaughter. She is a kind and caring woman, and this is one of her love languages. These clothes are often gauche, overly feminine, expensive and poorly made.

Jasper stands accused of being wasteful but feels aggrieved that Mindy says he’s being lazy. Is this a race to the bottom? You decide

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

Opening new products when old ones aren’t empty is wasteful – and he does it to avoid cleaning up

As weight loss drugs have risen all around the world, it has reshaped users’ relationships for better and for worse

As GLP-1 use continues to rise in the US and the UK, people’s bodies are being reshaped – as are their relationships.

“Relationships tend to develop a sense of equilibrium and predictability over time,” says Dr Lindsey Berisha, a licensed clinical psychologist who has worked with clients using GLP-1s for over 10 years. “When one partner undergoes a significant change, it can shift that equilibrium, and even positive change can create uncertainty for both partners.”

He was the gorgeous furry tabby who made my day, even when he waltzed into my flat just to finish my takeaway. Now he’s a campus celeb, with a part-time job guarding the doors of the village shop

In 2022, when I moved into halls of residence at the University of Sheffield, my biggest concern was no longer having a furry friend to come home to, as I’d had a cat since I was 11 years old. Then I met Harold.

My first encounter with this gorgeous tabby was quite unusual. One day, in our 10-bed flat, a flurry of messages appeared on the group WhatsApp chat after my fellow roommates caught an intruder on the sofa, innocently munching on my leftover pizza.

From an energy-efficient bungalow in the South Downs to an historic chapel in Northumberland

Solid battery life, snappy performance and quality software make for a great smaller phone with a killer camera

Google’s latest Pro phone is out to prove it has the best camera on a smartphone while embracing customisation, allowing you to change the look and feel of your photos far beyond simple filters even if that means making them technically worse.

The Pixel 11 Pro packs the best of Google’s hardware and software into a still-pocketable and easy to handle frame, instantly making it a contender for best smaller phone of the year.

Screen: 6.3in 120Hz QHD+ OLED (495ppi)

Processor: Google Tensor G6

RAM: 12 or 16GB

Storage: 256, 512GB or 1TB

Operating system: Android 17

Camera: 50MP + 48MP UW + 48MP 5x tele; 42MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 7, UWB, NFC, Bluetooth 6, Thread and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (1.5m for 30 minutes)

Dimensions: 152.7 x 71.9 x 8.4mm

Weight: 204g

Transport for London has fined me and warned that if I don’t pay it will possibly destroy my car

I paid the £12.50 London Ulez charge on my Amex card within hours of driving through the zone. I was then fined £90 for non-payment. According to my card issuer, Transport for London (TfL) had failed to collect the £12.50.

TfL’s letter threatened a £180 fine, rising to £360, and possible destruction of my car, if I did not pay. My appeal was rejected.

Thefts spike during freshers’ week so make sure you choose a good lock and check your insurance

For hard-up students, a bike is a low-cost way to travel. But with cycle theft at an all-time high, experts are urging young people not to skimp on insurance and to buy a good lock.

Recent data from Aviva shows one in five (19%) of insurance claims involving student possessions relates to bicycles.

Can blending these popular fruits in a smoothie adversely affect the berries’ nutritional benefits? Experts weigh in

This year was shaping up to be a banner year for bananas: they were lauded as “2026’s big viral taste”, landed pride of place as Prada’s new lip balm flavor, and were even deemed “the next pumpkin spice”.

But this summer, the Mel Robbins Podcast featured Dr Rhonda Patrick, a biomedical scientist, who said that adding banana to a blueberry smoothie could adversely affect the nutritional benefits of the berries.

Research finds temperature and amount of hot drinks consumed heightens possibility of developing disease

Drinking very hot tea and coffee triples the risk of developing cancer of the gullet, the world’s largest study of the link between them has found.

The findings show that people should let very hot cups of tea and coffee cool down until they are comfortable to drink, in order to reduce their risk of the disease, cancer experts said.

Key regions of the brain linked to movement, learning and emotions were affected and may lead to cognitive problems

Babies born to mothers with anaemia have smaller brains, particularly in key regions linked to movement, learning and the regulation of emotion, according to a study.

Researchers said the differences, first detected at the age of one, could lead to cognitive problems when children started school.

Who’s more likely to steal sweets from a child? According to science, it’s the rich. A study seemingly confirming our suspicions about the moral behaviour of the wealthy was one of the winners of the 2026 Ig Nobel prizes, which honour research that makes you laugh and then think. Science editor Ian Sample tells Madeleine Finlay what the researchers think could be behind the phenomenon, and they explore some of the other awards, including one for a surprising quality we look for in our friends and another for a biomechanical definition of kissing

He put personality into boxers, collaborated with the pope (sort of) and is to thank for novelty socks. The British designer’s new book reveals there’s more to Smith than his stripes

In July, the British designer Paul Smith celebrated his 80th birthday and he has now released a memoir to mark the occasion. Threads: My Life in Style tells Smith’s story, from growing up in Nottingham and leaving school with no qualifications to selling suits to celebs, including Gary Oldman and David Bowie.

Here are nine of our favourite lesser-known takeaways from the book.

I’ve always cinched my outfits at the waist, but shifting to a looser silhouette has helped me keep my cool in more ways than one

This was the summer of the Great Untuck. The long hot summer of 2026 finally taught me to do what fashion has been nagging me about for years, which is to quit tucking in my shirts and T-shirts. To stop assuming that the top half of an outfit must be neatly cinched by the waistband of the skirt or trousers.

It wasn’t a style epiphany, to be fair. It was just too hot to do anything else. An extended run of hot weather at home changes how you dress. In the old-school type of British heatwave, which lasted about half a week, I was too giddy with excitement at not having to wear a cardigan to think more strategically. But this summer was different. And eventually I discovered what hot-climate cultures have always known, which is that loose, generously sized clothing that maximises sun protection while minimising skin contact is way more pleasant to wear in the heat than anything short and tight.

Designer mixes burnt-out velvet and shredded denim with a mythology that keeps getting more profitable

The opening show of fashion’s month of catwalks was not on the official schedule, but Viola Davis and Cynthia Erivo were snuggled on to celebrity-packed benches in a cathedral-sized marble hall where tapestry-hung walls and a gilded coffered ceiling framed a view over lower Manhattan.

Ralph Lauren, 86, took his bow at the end of this women’s wear show casually dressed in a varsity jacket spelling out New York. In an industry obsessed with youth and novelty, Lauren is more relevant than ever in his ninth decade.

From face tints and self-tan to summer scents, these lightweight buys saw me through multiple heatwaves

You’ll normally find me looking back on my favourite products of the past 12 months at year’s end. But this summer has been so freakishly hot and sweaty it has required its own toolkit and, by extension, its own list of exceptionally well-performing products that deserve rapturous commendation.

The first is Refy’s Skin Base (£30), a sheer face tint so thin and so lightweight it has been all I could bear to wear since July. It’s suitable for all skin types, but not at all appropriate for those who hate any hint of shine. While the texture is totally ungreasy, breathable and so comfortable as to be imperceptible, it does look unmistakably dewy, so avoid if you’re devoted to matte. Personally, I take the view that, in this heat, one might as well steer into the skid, but I am, admittedly, at an age when a juicier look works in my skin’s favour. Anyway, this is makeup that truly feels like absolutely nothing, and what it lacks in coverage can be made up with concealer where needed. Maximum points from me (I wear shade 140N).

Your top culinary discoveries, from Bled cake in Slovenia to sardines in Portugal and seafood soup in Spain

• Tell us about autumn days out in the UK – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Last August, the smoky aroma of grilled sardines drifting over the beach in Portimão woke me up from my sunbathing on the beach. Attracted by the aroma of barbecued fish, we found ourselves in the old port where, for €12, I was served two delicious sandwiches on rustic bread of sardines in garlic and olive oil, with a small cold beer. I sat down, ate and chatted with locals on benches at simple communal tables. The important thing seemed to be to enjoy food together. The next morning, a reenactment of the fishing boats arriving loaded with fish, as they once were, was a real spectacle – complete with guitar playing, drum-banging and excited seagulls whirling and wailing above in the hope of a feast. Later, concerts and dancing animated the town as the party for the sardine festival went on well into the night. Cooking demos and dishes including sardine-based soup and salads, added to the enjoyment. I never imagined such pleasure could be had from the simple sardine.
Joe

Repurposed railway lines make accessible and family-friendly walking and cycling routes. Here are some of the best, from Somerset to the Highlands of Scotland

Start/finish Coombs Road in Bakewell to Blackwell Mill in Chee Dale, but there are lots of access points along the way
Distance 8.5 miles
Cycle, hike or ride a horse along the Monsal Trail to explore a swathe of Derbyshire’s industrial history. This former stretch of the Midland Railway line winds past the imposing structures of two 18th-century cotton mills, through illuminated railway tunnels and over the Headstone Viaduct, which gives glorious views of the River Wye and Monsal Dale below. Interpretation and listening panels along the route explain the area’s history, geology and wildlife, while a short detour on to Monsal Head offers a panoramic view of the viaduct itself. Pause here for lunch or a pint at the Monsal, or stop in at Hassop Station Cafe, which offers bike rental alongside hefty sandwiches, homemade cakes and wood-fired pizza at weekends.
monsaltrail.org.uk

A remote 18th-century chapel deep in Sami lands is the goal of the Präststigen, a 37-mile trail that traverses some of the country’s most spectacular scenery

I wasn’t exactly in “Sunday best”, but I had made some effort. Well, I’d changed my underwear for the first time in a couple of days and given myself a baby-wipe bath. Still, as we filed into the chapel at Alkavare, I felt more a member of an expedition than a congregation. We sat on the low wooden benches, waterproof jackets rustling and leather walking boots stamping on the flagstone floor to keep warm. Fortunately, the priest, Mogens Amstrup Jacobsen, appeared to be a “man of the Gore-Tex”, as well as a man of the cloth, as he unzipped his own black rain jacket to reveal his dog collar. As the service began, the Arctic wind whipped through cracks in the dry stone walls, insulated only with reindeer hair, and candles flickered in their brass sconces.

I had hiked to Alkavare following the Präststigen, or “Priests’ trail”, a 37-mile (60km) route from Kvikkjokk that could stake a claim as Europe’s wildest pilgrimage route, and certainly one of its most beautiful. The Präststigen follows the path that priests would once have taken to the chapel, built in 1788, to perform a service each summer, and today, on the last weekend in July, intrepid hikers and perseverant pilgrims can attend that same service.

Conservationists have helped Cantabrian brown bears claw their way back from the edge of extinction in the beautiful mountains of Asturias – and carefully controlled nature tourism allows visitors to see them

Once upon a time, in the woods outside Pola de Somiedo, lived a family of Cantabrian brown bears. The villagers reported sightings of a mother bear who had lost a leg to a hunter’s trap, her two cubs and two adult males, either of which might have been the father. In those days, at the end of the 1980s, they seemed to be the last of their kind in this part of Asturias. Meanwhile, the wider population dropped to about 60 bears across the surrounding Cantabrian mountain range that gave the species its name.

They have since clawed their way back from the edge of extinction here in northern Spain, and nature guide Luis Frechilla believes their numbers may now be upwards of 500 again. “They’re still classed as endangered,” he tells me, until the official count hits 1,000. But relative abundance makes them much easier to see today in Somiedo natural park – one of Spain’s first such protected areas, established in 1988.

Some people don’t understand my lifelong enthusiasm for roadside stop-offs – now visiting and cataloguing them is what I do for a living

When I was 10 years old, the highlight of my summer holidays was going to work with my dad, who is a lorry driver. For a couple of years in the mid-2000s, I’d excitedly climb into the cab next to him and we’d set off on a 10-hour trip. My job was to follow the AA Road Atlas, and I’d joyfully track the services marked on the map as we thundered along.

My dad thought stopping was a waste of time, but his designated rest stops were my favourite part of the trip. Depending on the journey, we might stop for two or three meals. I always hoped at least one would be at a Little Chef. I loved their Olympic Breakfast, a massive full English, and every meal was rounded off with a lollipop – what more could a 10-year-old want?

Vines are a beautiful addition to an edible garden, yet will only thrive with plenty of light and shelter

My garden faces east-ish and gets a decent amount of sunlight, but it’s fairly exposed and can be cool, so plants that need really warm weather don’t like to grow here. Yet, there’s a corner by the back door that’s a pocket of sun and shelter, and a wise former occupant decided to plant a grapevine there. If I hadn’t inherited this mature grapevine, I can’t imagine I would have thought to plant one, but if you’ve got the right conditions they’re a lovely addition to an edible garden.

First you have to choose whether you want to grow wine grapes or dessert grapes. Wine grapes are smaller and less palatable – but hardier – than dessert grapes, which generally need to be grown in a sturdy greenhouse in order to fully ripen. Grapevines can be sourced from plant sellers and garden centres, and most will have been grafted – so make sure to choose a vine that is best suited to your soil type and local climate.

Since Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, there has been a 63% rise in Americans renting properties in Scotland. Politics is one reason – but there are many other surprising motivations …

Four years ago, when Tammi Gaw, a 50-year-old property adviser, moved from Washington DC to Glasgow with her Scottish partner, friends and family laughed at her. “People back home kept asking me: ‘Ha ha, why would you want to move to Scotland, where it rains all the time?’ Now those same people are asking me: ‘Hey, how do I move there?’”

They are not alone. According to data from Rightmove, 28% of inquiries from Americans about buying a home in the UK are about Scotland, a larger number than for London. And a recent survey from lettings platform Goodlord reported a 63% rise in the number of Americans renting properties in Scotland since Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024.

(Sony)
Alongside supple and distinctive accounts of Rhapsody in Blue and the Piano Concerto and Preludes, the French pianist showcases his jazz chops in reinterpretations of Gershwin’s timeless songs

Ever since Lucas Debargue took fourth prize at the 2015 international Tchaikovsky competition, he’s refused to be pigeonholed. His distinctive journey brings him now to George Gershwin, complementing the piano concerto and preludes with beguiling original explorations of the composer’s songs in the form of a dozen études. His supple account of Rhapsody in Blue is based on Gershwin’s solo piano arrangement, to which he adds his own partly improvised cadenzas. Like everything here, it comes up fresh as a daisy.

The Piano Concerto in F brings Debargue’s jazz credentials to the fore (he cut his teeth on the club circuit). The Orchestre de Paris under Elim Chan provides an admirably clear and concise accompaniment. The edge-of-your-seat stakes are reminiscent of André Previn.

Since June, an app has allowed survivors, who are overwhelmingly women, to see exactly where their stalker is

On a large screen in a control centre in eastern Seoul, a dot representing a man closes in on a woman. The dot changes direction, and the distance reading between them falls from 845 metres to 792.

On the woman’s phone, the same map is loading. A probation officer rings her: the stalker is approaching, don’t panic, officers have been dispatched. The man is a stand-in and the scenario is staged, but the system is real.

Before the release of a joyful film on the history of the Sheffield band, frontman Cocker and director Garth Jennings talk dark times, taking inspiration from Abba – and why there could yet be another record

When the director Garth Jennings first moved to Paris, Jarvis Cocker, who was living there, dropped in on his old friend. “And I nearly got you arrested,” the Pulp frontman recalls. It was bonfire night, and Cocker had taken some welcoming fireworks over to Jennings’ place. “It turned out Garth’s apartment was quite near to the – not an army base, but what’s it called?”

“The École Militaire,” says Jennings.

We would like to hear your experience of seeing the Bayeux tapestry exhibit at the British Museum

The British Museum’s Bayeux tapestry exhibit opened on Thursday 10 September, and has already broken the British Museum’s record for the number of tickets sold in one day.

Have you seen the Bayeux tapestry at the British Museum? How far did you travel to see it? Tell us all about your experience below.

From renting and troublesome landlords to buying or selling a home, send us your UK housing questions

Are you dealing with a problem with your landlord or tenancy, wondering about buying or selling a home, or facing another housing issue?

We’re planning to launch a new column answering readers’ questions about housing in the UK and helping them understand their options.

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached

The Guardian is looking for single men of all ages to talk honestly about the experience of being unattached. Whether you are 16 or 100, we want to hear the unvarnished truth about what it’s like to live as a single man today.

Are you trying to find love? Or are you happy living life as a bachelor? Do you find the experience of modern dating – with all its red flags and height requirements – to be a minefield? Or are you attracting more attention than ever before?

We’d like to hear from people in the UK who have accessed medical cannabis from a private health provider and find out about their experience

In 2018 Theresa May’s government changed the law to allow the NHS and private providers to prescribe cannabis-based medical products.

The NHS prescribes medical cannabis for a few conditions such as children and adults with rare, severe forms of epilepsy and people with muscle stiffness and spasms caused by multiple sclerosis (MS). However, the vast majority of prescriptions for medical cannabis are being issued through private healthcare.

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The 25th anniversary of 9/11, Russian strikes in Kyiv, wildfires in Indonesia and Sabalenka at the US Open – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing