‘Critical debate’ about party’s identity and direction looms if it loses control of Senedd next month after 27 years in power

Welsh Labour is the democratic world’s most successful election-winning machine, coming first in Wales in every general election since 1922 and every devolved election since 1999. Come next month’s Senedd election, however, this history-making run is expected to end.

Labour’s collapse has left a vacuum, and former Labour voters are going to opposite ends of the political spectrum. Plaid Cymru and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK are neck and neck in the latest poll, although coalition maths make it highly unlikely Reform would be able to form a government.

Cyber-attacks, disinformation and blockading of supplies. This is what living in a war zone can look like now

We are at war. Four words that sound ludicrously melodramatic on a sunny spring day, when all may not be exactly right with the world – but when you can still shut your eyes to a lot of it just by switching off the news and cracking on with life. No bombs are falling, no bullets flying, no sirens sounding. Though the idea that Britain is already under a form of hybrid attack is commonplace in defence circles, politicians still mostly skirt around it; and it was jolting at first to hear the Labour MP (and former RAF wing commander) Calvin Bailey make the case for conflict being our new reality at a conference hosted by the Good Growth Foundation thinktank last week in London. But then he started to unpack his reasoning for why war is no longer what you think it is.

If war can be considered an assault on five fronts – against a country’s political leadership, critical infrastructure, essentials such as food or fuel supplies, civilian population and armed forces – then Britain is arguably now being attacked on the first four without a shot being fired. Think of rampant, Russian-generated political disinformation on social media and attempts to bribe British politicians; of Russian submarine surveillance of the British undersea cables carrying most of our internet traffic, or the four “nationally significant” cyber-attacks recorded every week; of the blockading of food and fuel supplies through the strait of Hormuz. Think, too, of Keir Starmer’s warning in the Sunday Times last week of conflict with Iran coming home to British civilians via “the use of proxies in this country”. He didn’t elaborate, but counter-terrorism police say they are investigating whether a spate of arson attacks on synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses and Iranians living in Britain may have been sponsored by Tehran – a thugs-for-hire tactic familiar from the Russian playbook for sowing division and hate.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Severing ties with the US can take more than a year and cost thousands of dollars. But Paul, Ella, Margot and thousands of others feel they have no choice

When Margot went to renounce her US citizenship earlier this year, she wasn’t able to do it in the UK, her home of 30 years. The waiting list to renounce US citizenship at the London consulate is more than 14 months. It’s a similar story in Sydney and most major Canadian cities. Many European cities currently have six-month waiting lists.

So Margot found herself in the lobby of the consulate in Ghent, Belgium. One wall was covered by a picture of Boston Harbour, where she was born. The other had three portraits: Donald Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, their faces glistening – to her mind, with sadistic triumph (the lighting may have been a factor). Momentarily, she felt caught in a vice: everything she loved about her nation; everything she hated. Then she went in, swore under oath that she knew what she was doing, wasn’t being coerced, and wasn’t renouncing her citizenship for the purposes of tax avoidance. The official’s tone was neutral, slightly bored.

A certain image of the tiger mom – strict, cold and demanding – is ubiquitous in popular culture. Why?

In January 2011, the English-speaking world was introduced to a new kind of villain. She arrived in the form of a viral Wall Street Journal article with the headline “Why Chinese mothers are superior”. The author, a relatively unknown Yale law professor named Amy Chua, outlined her strict rules for her two daughters: no sleepovers, playdates or school plays – and no complaining about not being in the school play, either. They were expected to be the top students in all subjects at school (except gym and drama). When her seven-year-old refused to play a song on the piano, Chua threatened her with no lunch, no dinner and no birthday parties for four years until she complied. Another time, after the same daughter misbehaved, Chua branded her “garbage”.

The backlash was swift and vicious. Chua was called an abuser, a stereotype peddler, a shock jock. The article was an extract from her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and Chua did her best to explain that, in the book, she reckons with the limits of her parenting. But it was too late: the controversy had taken on a life of its own. Many Asian American writers responded by sharing their ambivalence or anger about having been raised in this way. “I grew up with a tiger parent and all I got was this lousy psychological trauma” declared one such blog post. Suddenly a ubiquitous but private dynamic was being held up for public debate. There were endless letters, op-eds, blogs, tweets, Facebook posts. My grandparents in China, who are as removed from the American commentariat as one could possibly be, asked me about the American lady boasting about getting her kids into Harvard and giving Chinese people a bad name.

Apple laptop sets new performance bar with more storage, new chips and plenty of options, but now has two-tier specs depending on processor

Apple’s Macs have been on a roll this year with the brand new budget MacBook Neo and a faster MacBook Air M5, but now it’s time for its workhorse MacBook Pro to be upgraded with the fastest, most powerful M-series chips.

The latest MacBook Pro comes in two screen sizes and a large range of chip and configuration options. The 14in version starts with the M5 chip costing £1,699 (€1,899/$1,699/A$2,699) and then jumps to the more powerful M5 Pro from £2,199 (€2,499/$2,199/A$3,499) before climbing further for the 16in version or the top M5 Max chip. A pricey machine for professional workloads.

The crypto tycoon has given millions to Farage’s political parties. But who is Christopher Harborne and what does he want in return?

One balmy evening last year at the Kamalaya wellness sanctuary in Thailand, the resort manager welcomed guests to a talk on longevity and anti-ageing medicine. The first speaker was a Thai doctor with impeccable credentials. The second was the resort’s owner, Chakrit Sakunkrit, who is better known as Christopher Harborne. And Harborne doesn’t only own a resort – he could be one of the richest people alive.

The Guardian’s investigations correspondent, Tom Burgis, tells Helen Pidd that Harborne is by far and away the biggest donor to Nigel Farage, stumping up two-thirds of Reform UK’s funding. And one of the donations was also the largest single donation by a living donor to a British political party ever.

The prime minister faces a standards investigation over Mandelson affair and testimony from Morgan McSweeney

Keir Starmer has told Labour MPs to “stick together and fight together” as ministers launched a massive operation to shore up his fragile position before a critical day for his premiership.

The prime minister faces the double threat of a standards investigation into his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US and potentially damaging testimony from Morgan McSweeney, his former chief of staff.

Monarch to allude to recent strains in special relationship in speech to both houses during four-day state visit

King Charles is expected to allude to recent strains between the UK and US in a rare address by a monarch to the US Congress as he will underline that “time and again our two countries have always found ways to come together”.

The king’s remarks in a speech to both houses on Tuesday will come after Donald Trump has threatened to tear up a trade deal signed by the UK and US, mocked the Royal Navy and insulted the UK prime minister.

Lord committee says chancellor and recent predecessors have allowed themselves too little room for manoeuvre

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Rachel Reeves should aim to run a “significantly larger” buffer against her fiscal rules, according to a report from a House of Lords committee that says the UK’s public debt is on an unsustainable trajectory.

The chancellor raised taxes at last year’s budget in order to more than double the “headroom”, or buffer, against her fiscal rules to £22bn – some of which is expected to be eroded by the impact of the Iran war.

NAHT survey says widespread disrepair forcing closure of playgrounds and classrooms, with Send facilities also hit

Half of headteachers say parts of their school are either out of use or unfit for purpose due to leaks, damp, mould, asbestos, ageing boilers and malfunctioning fire doors, according to a new survey by the National Association of Head Teachers(NAHT).

Among those who say their schools are suffering, almost three-quarters (73%) say they have toilet blocks that are either closed (8%) or not fit for purpose (65%).

Police warn of violent pornography and ‘toxic’ influencers as suicides outstrip homicides for third year running

The first teenage girl has been identified as having been driven to kill herself after domestic violence, as police chiefs blamed violent pornography and “toxic” influencers for being behind a rise in teen abuse.

Suicides after domestic abuse have outstripped homicides for the third year running, according to the Domestic Homicide Project, which records deaths in England and Wales after domestic abuse.

Rabbis Charley Baginsky and Josh Levy say criticising Israeli government is not disloyalty but a Jewish obligation

The UK’s most senior progressive rabbis have warned that Israel’s current political direction risks becoming “incompatible with Jewish values”, while insisting that criticism of the country’s government is “a Jewish obligation” rather than an act of disloyalty.

Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy, co-leads of Progressive Judaism – the newly formed movement representing around a third of synagogues in the UK – said Israel’s trajectory could pose an “existential threat” not just to the country itself but to Judaism.

German chancellor suggests Trump administration is being outwitted at negotiating table by Tehran

The US is being “humiliated” by Iran’s leadership, according to Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, who suggested the Trump administration was being outwitted at the negotiating table by Tehran.

Two days ago Donald Trump cancelled a trip by US negotiators to Islamabad for indirect talks with an Iranian delegation. A previous round in the Pakistani capital two weeks earlier, when JD Vance, the American vice-president, led the US delegation, broke up without progress.

Tees Transporter Bridge and a former working men’s club in Barrow-in-Furness among sites at risk of decay or neglect

Teesside’s Transporter Bridge, a disinfecting station in Hackney and a former working men’s club in Barrow-in-Furness have been included on a list ringing alarm bells for Victorian and Edwardian heritage.

The Victorian Society has published its annual top 10 endangered buildings list, intended as a way of drawing national attention to at-risk places in England and Wales.

Japan Airlines will introduce the robots for trial run at a Tokyo airport amid country’s surge in inbound tourism and worsening labour shortages

Japan’s famously conscientious but overburdened baggage handlers will soon be joined by extra staff at Tokyo’s Haneda airport – although their new colleagues will need to take regular recharging breaks.

Japan Airlines will introduce humanoid robots on a trial basis from the beginning of May, with a view to deploying them permanently as a solution to the country’s chronic labour shortage.

Yip Shun-Ting Carbon returns for the first time to his apartment to salvage belongings after last year’s fire that killed 168 people, including his mother

The Yip family once imagined moving to a country house, all three generations under the same roof, with their own vegetable garden and away from Hong Kong’s dense high-rises. A devastating fire, Hong Kong’s worst since 1948, took that future from them, leaving behind little but rubble and blackened walls.

“Whatever we can retrieve is a bonus,” says Yip Shun-Ting Carbon, aged 36, who lost his mother, Pak Shui-lin, in the inferno in November last year that killed 168 people at a large residential complex under renovation.

They’ve been imprisoned, tortured and spied upon. Now dissidents from Europe’s last dictatorship are bringing the sights, sounds, smells and even tastes of brutal repression to the world’s biggest festival of art

In a studio down a residential road in west Warsaw, a group of former political prisoners are cutting golden stems of wheat to 90cm lengths and stacking them, ready to be shipped to the Venice Biennale. A giant ball made of books banned in the neighbouring country of Belarus – Harry Potter, Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, an illustrated history of kink – rests on the claw of a bulldozer. There is the sound of laughter, organ music and an angle-grinder, as surveillance cameras are attached to a towering iron crucifix.

This is Official. Unofficial. Belarus., the first major art project by Belarus Free Theatre (BFT). Unusually, this work by the exiled troupe has no performance element but has instead been created by painters, sculptors, composers and even the man recently voted world’s best chef. Rasmus Munk has been concocting a dish at his two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen that will taste of detention under an authoritarian regime, the subject of the entire installation. A scent has been commissioned, too: it will smell like a freshly dug grave in the Belarus countryside in late August, laid with rotting flowers.

A new documentary travels around the world to identify the roots of ultra-mania – the fan movement that’s part progressive and sometimes criminal

‘Ultras” – hardcore football fans renowned for their stunning stadium displays and gang-like loyalty – were once a subculture confined to Italian stadiums. But since the late 1960s the movement has spread through global football terraces and become a more elevated cultural obsession.

Books on the subject include my own Ultra and James Montague’s 1312 (the numbers stand for ACAB, an abbreviation of “all cops are bastards”). Netflix has not only commissioned one film, Ultras, about a Neapolitan gang, but also three longer series: Puerta 7 (based in Argentina), Furioza and The Hooligan (both set in Poland).

Half Man is the story of two 1980s schoolboys and their entwined lives. Plus: a reality series following first-time daters. Here’s what to watch this evening

10.40pm, BBC One
Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer comes to regular telly, having premiered on iPlayer last week. Mitchell Robertson and Stuart Campbell are both superb as weak Niall and violent Ruben, a duo of 1980s schoolboys. We flash forward to glimpse Jamie Bell and Gadd himself playing them as adults – who are about to form a toxic lifelong bond. Jack Seale

It cheerily addressed letters to my late spouse, and threatened penalties if he terminated his contract

After my husband died suddenly, I discovered he had been paying £171 a month for our EE broadband and TV contract. EE initially offered me a monthly deal at £44.99 on the phone.

There followed two letters, one day apart, cheerily addressed to my late husband. The first stated that he would have to pay £1,007 to terminate his contract; the second giving a termination fee of £520. The letters told him he could take the contract with him when he moved house.

From the Cambrian Mountains to Cardigan Bay, the 83-mile Teifi Valley Trail is a grassroots initiative designed to revive a once-thriving area

Up here, the river was a mere gurgle; a babbling babe finding its way into the world. A few sheep roamed, a kite wheeled and a spring-clean wind ruffled the tussocks on the barren hills and rippled the pools. It was a stark yet striking beginning. As we followed a brand new fingerpost, skirted Llyn Teifi – the river’s official source – and picked up the fledgling flow, there was a sense great things lay ahead, for us both.

The Teifi rises in Ceredigion’s Cambrian Mountains – the untramped “green desert of Wales” – and pours into Cardigan Bay 75 miles (120km) south-west. It’s one of the longest rivers wholly within Wales and, historically, one of its most significant: the beating heart of the country’s fishing and wool-weaving industries, 12th-century abbeys at either end, Wales’s oldest university en route.

In the Sierra Tarahumara, gangs ‘disappear’ those who resist their lucrative illegal tree-felling operations

Decades ago, the children of Rochéachi village in the Sierra Tarahumara – pine-covered mountains of north-west Mexico’s Chihuahua state – would run through the forest by night. In the rainy season, they would collect fireflies whose glimmering light would flicker through the hollows of the pine trees.

“We had peace. We used to walk and play and be together,” says one mother of three, who asked to remain anonymous, about the forest she once knew. “Now, children can’t go out to play. We don’t know what might happen.”

Maria Lax’s images are inspired by the phenomenon of ‘stray sod’, in which patches of enchanted land are said to lead astray anyone who steps on them

The Italian PM has walked a tightrope between Europe and the US. But the Iran war – and Trump’s attacks on her – have changed everything

The news last week that the Trump administration sounded out Fifa, world football’s governing body, about replacing Iran with Italy at this year’s World Cup jolted insiders and pundits on the beautiful game. It has also cast fresh light on the unusual and evolving relationship between Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni.

In recent weeks, the Italian prime minister’s standing as the darling of the US right has been imperilled by an unexpected rift with the Oval Office. Trump dramatically distanced himself from his Italian ally over her refusal to join US attacks on Iran in an interview. “I’m shocked at her. I thought she had courage, but I was wrong,” the US president told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Riccardo Alcaro is head of research at IAI, Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome

Sunday’s landmark in London was not only unexpected, dramatic and historic – it was a once-in-a-generation moment

A few years ago at the London Marathon, organisers wheeled out an industrial-sized treadmill called the Tumbleator. Then they tempted curious onlookers with a simple question: can you keep up with Eliud Kipchoge? The answer was obvious. But that didn’t stop people trying. Most lasted a few seconds before comically flying off the back into crash mats.

The Tumbleator has a fresh poster-boy now: Sabastian Sawe, who on Sunday claimed track and field’s last holy grail by running a sub two-hour marathon. Imagine sprinting 17 seconds for 100 metres, and then sustaining it across 26.2 miles. Or setting your treadmill at 4min 33sec per mile pace and carrying on for 1hr 59 min 30sec. It sounds ridiculous, impossible, laugh-out-loud stupid … until you realise that is what Sawe did in London.

There’s no point searching for a saviour without a genuine change in direction. Real courage is necessary – because Labour still has time to fix what is broken

If not Keir Starmer, then who? That’s altogether the wrong question. What matters is not who but what comes next. A black cloud of near terminal despair has fallen upon Labour MPs, but seeking a saviour is a useless endeavour until they decide what it is they want to do.

The party is facing a cataclysm in next week’s local elections. MPs will watch their councillors, the backbone of their local parties, vanish. Can they avoid panic? In their slough of despond they need to stop and think. Look at it this way: they have three full years ahead with a vast working majority of 165. They have the power to do everything the country most needs. Sunk so low in the polls, they have nothing to lose and nothing to fear (but fear itself). This chance may never come their way again, and they will regret it for ever if they throw it away, vainly chasing lost popularity through overcaution, trying to appease everyone while pleasing no one. By starting again unconstrained they can regain some lost respect.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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

As Britons threaten to oust their fifth PM in seven years, maybe voters need to ask themselves whether it’s only the politicians who are to blame

At what point, as you consider the prime minister’s shortcomings more in sorrow than in anger, as you size up likely successors and try to wonder, idly, whose wallpaper we’re on in Downing Street, do you start to think that you, the electorate, are the problem? If Keir Starmer falls on his sword, we’ll be on to our sixth prime minister in seven years. “The first five guys were just the wrong five guys” starts to sound like the kind of thing Liza Minnelli would say, called upon to account for a life of torch songs. It’s the kind of thing Italy would say. Doesn’t there come a point in every electorate’s life that it has to splash some cold water on its face?

I think this is more or less where the grownups are landing, on the question of our present turmoil. Starmer is reportedly readying his MPs to vote down any prospective sleaze inquiry, which should be pretty straightforward, given the size of his majority. Finally, the guy discovers what his landslide is for: preventing a parliamentary process identical to the one he himself used to bring the last guy down. Sorry, the last guy but two. Seriously, people, if we reject all this, we make ourselves ungovernable, consign ourselves to the civic equivalent of a life on the shelf, always questing after some fresh bureaucrats, only to tear them apart when things get ugly.

It seemed like a fait accompli that Hoyle would deny the application for a Commons vote – but he had other ideas

What the hell has Keir Starmer done to upset the speaker? Was it that row they had after prime minister’s questions a few weeks back, when Keir appeared to have taken objection to Lindsay Hoyle’s ad libbed remarks about not being responsible for Starmer not answering any of the questions? Has Hoyle finally had enough of the government announcing policy decisions in press conferences and media briefings, rather than in statements to the House of Commons?

Or is Lindsay just a bit bored? Perhaps he has decided to liven things up a bit in the dog days of the current parliament. Go out with a bang. Place himself centre stage. Lights. Camera. Action.

On the runway at Gatwick, the visceral reality of forced removals was laid bare. If only more could see what is done in our name

It’s Gatwick airport, mid-afternoon, and on the runway there is turmoil. Public policy playing out in full view of the public. Voters, citizens, seeing what they don’t normally see.

“Murdaar, murdaaaaar,” screams the bucking, brawling, brawny man as a clutch of male security officials, with solid intent and hi-vis yellow jackets, collectively fight to pin him into a seat at the back of the airliner. “Me caaan go back a Jamaica,” he hollers, the visceral sound reverberating around the 777. “Dem kill me bredda. Dem a go kill me.”

Hugh Muir is executive editor, Opinion

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.

The hit success of the critically reviled Michael Jackson movie shows that his fans only want to see the good – not the truth

It’s not unusual to see a gulf between the quality of a blockbuster hit as described by critics, and the greater acceptance of that film as determined by its viewing public. But it’s been a while since a movie quite as derided as Michael has been quite this big of a hit. This biography of pop star Michael Jackson is already one of the bigger-grossing musician biopics of all time; even with a steep second-weekend drop, it’s on its way to becoming one of the biggest global hits of 2026 so far.

Perhaps more notable, however, are the vast, chasm-sized reality gaps that have been opened up (or at least enlarged) by the film’s half-blessed, half-cursed existence. First, there’s the gap between the realities of Michael Jackson’s life and what this estate-approved biography is willing (and in some cases legally able) to depict – a disparity that’s part of any work of biographical fiction but that feels vaster here for a number of reasons. Scale over that one, and you might next encounter the related gap between the film that was originally planned, which was going to cover most or all of Jackson’s life, and the film that’s being released in theaters, which leaves off in 1988 before teasing a sequel. That change is owed in part to a bizarre snafu where the film-makers and estate didn’t realize they didn’t have the legal right to depict one of the people who accused Jackson of child molestation in 1993 (his estate claims this version of events to be “inaccurate and irrelevant”).

The monarch must do his best to wrest some diplomatic advantage from an ill-timed trip, which Donald Trump will treat as a personal tribute

When King Charles’s mother became the first British monarch to address the United States Congress in 1991, she spoke in the aftermath of the US-led response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in which more than 50,000 UK troops participated. Queen Elizabeth II used the occasion to celebrate the role of the transatlantic alliance in upholding the rule of international law: “Some people believe that power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” she told her Capitol Hill audience. “So it can, but history shows that it never grows well nor for very long.”

Different monarch, different times and a very different America. As the king embarks on a four‑day state visit to the United States, a foiled assault by a gunman believed to be targeting members of the Trump administration illustrated the extent to which political violence has become endemic in a deeply polarised country. Globally, Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran (and prior to that the abduction by US special forces of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro) underlines that in the view of the present White House, the possessors of military might have the right to set their own rules.

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.

Scrutiny of the impact of technology on children’s lives and education should be welcomed

A new law banning mobile phone use in schools in England, which ministers reluctantly agreed to last week, is on one level the result of political manoeuvring by Liberal Democrat and Conservative peers – who forced their hand by threatening to derail the schools bill. Until now, the government’s position has been that advice to headteachers was sufficient. But whether or not a ban turns out to be helpful, the campaign reflects deepening public concern about the degree to which powerful tech companies can be trusted.

From messaging platforms where pupils and teachers interact, to appointment-booking systems and research carried out in lessons and at home, digital technology is deeply embedded in education. This should not be expected to change. Classrooms rightly reflect the wider world that they are part of. But the current push towards stronger scrutiny of screens in schools – and in young people’s lives more broadly – is justified by accruing evidence about their impacts.

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.

Andrew Watson and Phil Williamson respond to an article by George Monbiot about the weakening of a crucial Atlantic system

George Monbiot (A catastrophic climate event is upon us. Here is why you’ve heard so little about it, 23 April) notes that, according to a recent paper, some scientists believe that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is more likely than not to “collapse”, implying a complete cessation. This is important because the Amoc brings substantial warmth to western Europe.

In fact, the authors of the paper project an increased chance that the Amoc weakens by 50% by the end of the century under continued fossil-fuel emissions. Concerning as that is, they are projecting a slowdown, not a collapse. The outcome is not certain and with sustained efforts to reduce emissions there is still time to avoid the worst outcome.

Readers respond to the continuing saga around the appointment of the former US ambassador

Regarding Gaby Hinsliff’s article (Two men made mistakes over Mandelson – only one has lost his job. That should haunt Starmer, 24 April), most would concur that the prime minister has the most important job in the country. It is also one of the most demanding jobs, if it is to be done well. So would it not be better to help Keir Starmer instead of trying to hound him out of office for an error made in December 2024 that has been corrected?

Would it not be better to support him in the job we elected him to do instead of him having to spend time and energy defending himself against his implacable adversaries? Would that not be preferable to replacing him with someone chosen by a small contingent of the elected party? Can we not learn from the chaos caused by the last government in switching prime ministers?
Michael Goodhart
Grantchester, Cambridge

Poverty is far more pressing for many people, writes Lynsey Hanley. Plus letters from Martin Pitt and Michael Bulley

Reading Alexander Hurst’s column on the frictionless experience of life promised – or threatened – by AI algorithms, I was struck by how little I recognised the picture he painted of daily experience being stripped of the friction necessary to furnish it with meaning (To be human is to live with friction. That’s something AI boosters will never understand, 23 April). Rather, isn’t it the case that, bar the mega-rich, we’re all suffering from an excess of friction due to rising living costs, an avoidably dilapidated public realm, poor housing and innumerable related stresses?

I belong to a volunteer group that twice a week cooks hot meals for homeless and destitute people in central Liverpool. The hot meal they collect from us may be the only relief they get that day from the constant, grinding analogue hassles of invisibility, illness, disrespect and material poverty: the only recognition they receive that a degree of comfort is a prerequisite for survival. The specific depredations of AI, created and encouraged by men without souls, seem so distant in these cases as to be nonexistent.

Peter Mandelson’s walkies | Farage and Trump | EV charger issues | Bard brutality | Pay your taxes

I was interested to read that Peter Mandelson was seen going to the park to walk his dog “like a weekending solicitor on his way to an egg and spoon race” (Walking the dog and braving the paps, 25 April). Are there other professions known for their love of children’s games? Maybe a retired GP going to play musical chairs, or a pair of award-winning architects en route to a three-legged race?
Lesley Warner
Ilford, London

• Re Graham Head’s point about Nigel Farage (Letters, 23 April), if the job of the US ambassador is to be an obsequious boot-licker at the court of King Donald, Farage was eminently qualified. If he’d been appointed, he wouldn’t be where he is now. And we wouldn’t be where we are now either.
James Wilkinson
Shrewsbury, Shropshire

After starting the 1986 world championships as a 150-1 outsider victory against Steve Davis led to watching tennis with royalty and being mobbed in Tesco

“It was like a strange dream,” Joe Johnson says as he remembers becoming the world snooker champion 40 years ago as a 150-1 outsider and former gas board and factory worker who was the father of six children. Johnson had never previously won a game at the Crucible and he had struggled for years to make a living as a pro.

It was a time when Britain was “snooker loopy” and Johnson played characters such as Bill Werbeniuk who, in 1985, beat him in the first round while drinking a staggering amount of beer.

• Brazilian going in the summer after four years

• Interim manager says the situation is ‘pretty clear’

Michael Carrick ruled out any ­reversal of Casemiro’s departure from Manchester United in the summer after the Brazilian scored in ’s 2-1 win against Brentford.

The midfielder’s header on 11 ­minutes was his ninth goal in the ­Premier League, second only for United to Benjamin Sesko, who ­registered just before half-time to seal victory.

Run of five defeats could lead to awkward queries this week, including why £124m of attacking talent is being underused

Eddie Howe is braced for forensic questioning by Newcastle’s Saudi Arabian owners at a Northumberland country house hotel in the middle of this week. Matfen Hall sells itself as a venue for rest and relaxation but Newcastle’s struggling manager knows that, with his future at St James’ Park in the balance, a scheduled “summit meeting” with the club’s chair, Yasir al-Rumayyan, and other key figures from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) could prove stressful.

“It’s something we do every year,” says Howe, referring to the annual spring event at which the ownership quiz departmental heads. “But obviously things will be slightly harder for me this time.”

Al-Ahli won for the second successive year, but few outside Jeddah will remember proceedings fondly

As far as head-butts in major finals go, it wasn’t quite Zinedine Zidane in 2006, but Zakaria Hawsawi’s lunge forwards in Saturday’s AFC Champions League Elite final connected with Tete Yengi’s jaw and dropped the stunned Australian, almost a foot taller, to the ground.

With the score 0-0 between Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ahli and Machida Zelvia of Japan midway through the second half, it all took place on the touchline of the King Abdullah Sports City Stadium in Jeddah, right in front of the referee and the shocked Al-Ahli fans who feared their team’s chances of a second successive continental title had gone.

After recent seasons with a defined bottom three, a handful of nervous clubs are aiming to beat the drop to the Championship

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It was a good weekend for Nottingham Forest, although perhaps not as good as it looked like it might be on Friday night. That evening, when they handed Sunderland their record defeat at the Stadium of Light, winning 5-0, Forest must have been expecting to pull away from at least one of their relegation rivals. As it turned out, though, they ended the weekend where they began, five points clear of third-bottom Tottenham and three clear of West Ham with four games remaining after both the London strugglers also won.

It was a classic Saturday afternoon in the relegation battle, the sort that is rare these days with games so spread out over a weekend. But Tottenham’s match at Wolves and West Ham against Everton kicked off at the same time, which meant that Tomáš Souček’s goal six minutes after half-time not only prompted celebration at the London Stadium but also anxiety among the Spurs fans who had travelled to Molineux. Then João Palhinha put Tottenham ahead with eight minutes remaining and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall levelled for Everton with two minutes to go. Had it stayed like that, Tottenham would have been out of the relegation zone on goal difference. But Callum Wilson scored for West Ham two minutes into injury-time, lifting them back above Spurs and within three points of Forest.

• The Guardian named as sports publisher of the year

• Jonathan Liew wins columnist of the year for fifth time

Guardian Sport won two top prizes at the prestigious Sports Journalists’ Association’s awards evening on Monday.

The Guardian won sports publisher of the year at the SJA British Sports Journalism Awards night while Jonathan Liew was named columnist of the year for the fifth time in eight years, as well as winning bronze in the football journalist of the year category. Suzanne Wrack won bronze in the women’s football journalist of the year and Andy Bull won bronze in the sports feature writer of the year (long form) category.

• Fans warned of uncertainty around protests and policing

• Lise Klaveness set to raise concerns over ICE with Fifa

This summer’s World Cup will be a “bonanza of sportswashing” according to human rights organisations, who claim the Trump administration is using sport as a political tool to “cover up abuses”.

With supporter groups warning they have “absolutely no clue” what will happen to fans if they do “stupid stuff” in the US during the tournament, the Sport and Rights Alliance (SRA), which includes Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International, has called for more to be done to ensure the protection of individual rights at the World Cup, which begins in six weeks.

• ‘Signed, sealed, delivered,’ says promoter Eddie Hearn

• Joshua takes on Prenga in Riyadh warm-up in July

The most hyped and regularly ­postponed fight in recent ­British boxing history will apparently take place this year after Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury agreed terms to meet in the ring. Long in the ­making, and coming far too late in the faded careers of both former world heavyweight champions, the much-delayed showdown will be a guaranteed money-spinner for the fighters and their backers.

Eddie Hearn, who promotes Joshua, could barely contain his glee in an Instagram post that said: “Signed, sealed, delivered! AJ v Fury is on! The biggest piece of business we’ve ever done but more importantly the one we’ve always wanted. Biggest year of AJ’s career coming up, the comeback is on.”

• Greaves triumphs at Players Championship

• ‘I never thought I’d win one of these. Never’

Beau Greaves has made darts history by becoming the first woman to win a PDC ranking title. The 22-year-old beat three former world champions at the Players Championship in Milton Keynes, seeing off Rob Cross, Gary Anderson and Michael Smith.

Greaves completed a nailbiting 8-7 victory over Smith in the final with a stunning 142 checkout. She said: “I can’t believe it. I was up a fair few legs and I started to think about it. It caught up with me.

The RSF leadership, accused of committing genocide, used UAE as a ‘safe haven’ for family members and their wealth, records show

A network linked to the leadership of a militia accused of genocide has amassed a vast property portfolio in Dubai as part of a sprawling “paramilitary-industrial complex” across Africa and the Middle East, an investigation has revealed.

Family members, sanctioned individuals, and entities linked to the leader of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have acquired more than 20 luxury properties, worth £17.7m, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to the Sentry, a US investigative group.

Russian backing for the ruling junta has not stopped rebel fighters striking significant blows in recent days

• Mali in turmoil after insurgents seize towns and kill defence minister

When Assimi Goïta, the leader of Mali’s military junta, sat down with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in the Kremlin last summer, it symbolised Moscow’s commanding sway over Mali at the expense of the west.

As the two men spoke, roughly 3,500 miles to the south, about 2,000 Russian troops were propping up the regime in the landlocked desert country, as part of Moscow’s broader push for influence across the Sahel region.

Pakistan officials dismiss Afghan media reports and official statements about strikes on university in Kunar province as ‘blatant lie’

Mortars and missiles fired from Pakistan on Monday struck a university and civilian homes in north-eastern Afghanistan, killing seven people and wounding at least 85, Afghan officials said.

Pakistan denied the accusation of targeting a university.

Jay Bryant’s admission came more than two decades after the rapper’s killing, but he didn’t name others involved

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Nearly a quarter century after rap star Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC was shot to death, a man admitted in court Monday to a role in a killing that stymied investigators for decades.

Jay Bryant pleaded guilty to a federal murder charge, telling a judge that he helped other people get into a recording studio to ambush the DJ, born Jason Mizell.

Lawyers for Avara Foods and Freemans of Newent say legal claim backed by 1,300 people is ‘entirely inferential’

Lawyers for one of the country’s biggest producers of industrially farmed chicken have attacked a claim that they are responsible for pollution in the River Wye and River Usk.

More than 1,300 people have signed up to sue Avara Foods, its subsidiary Freemans of Newent and the local sewage company Welsh Water for extensive and widespread pollution in the rivers and their catchment areas.

Global conference told benefits should not come at expense of well-protected environments

The energy transition must not be used as a fresh excuse to plunder Indigenous territories, delegates at a groundbreaking global conference on phasing out fossil fuels were warned.

High oil prices and war in the Middle East have boosted the attraction of renewable technologies in many parts of the world, but the economic, security and climate benefits should not come at the expense of well-protected natural environments, Indigenous leaders said at the weekend.

Widely dispersed wind farms and solar panels are harder to target than fossil fuel power stations, Michael Shanks says

Renewable energy will boost the UK’s national security and make the country more resilient against potential aggression or sabotage, the government’s energy minister has said.

Michael Shanks said widely dispersed wind farms and solar panels were much harder to target than large-scale fossil fuel power stations. They are also not vulnerable to supply shocks, such as the current oil crisis caused by the US-Israel war on Iran and the soaring gas prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

‘Coalition of the willing’ gathers in Colombia to try to bypass petrostate blockages of Cop summits and chart fresh path

The world’s first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, takes place in Santa Marta, Colombia, from 24 to 29 April. A “coalition of the willing” – including 54 countries and various subnational governments, civil society groups and academics – will try to chart a new path to powering the world with low-carbon energy.

Labour, Plaid Cymru, Reform, the Greens, the Tories and the Lib Dems set out competing plans but offer little detail on how they would pay for them

The parties most likely to win the Senedd election next month offer radically different futures for Wales, but all six are facing criticism for not being “upfront” in their manifestos about the fiscal challenges the next Welsh government will face.

Labour, Plaid Cymru, Reform UK, the Green party, the Conservative party, and the Liberal Democrats are standing for the Senedd, which is expanding from 60 to 96 seats under a more proportional voting system.

Advent of Reform has radically altered the dynamics of the campaign and parties are responding accordingly

Polls predict a gravity-defying fifth term at Holyrood for the Scottish National party – albeit on a much reduced vote share – but the advent of Reform UK has radically altered the dynamics of the election campaign. The manifesto pledges set out below reveal how established parties are responding, however, a lack of engagement with an estimated £5bn hole in Scottish government finances by the end of the decade has prompted economists at the independent Fraser of Allander Institute (FAI) to accuse all parties of “a collective bout of fiscal denial”.

John Edwards says he is fully cooperating with ICO’s independent inquiry into ‘HR matters’

The UK’s information commissioner has stepped back from his job after the data protection regulator launched an independent workplace investigation into unspecified “HR matters”.

John Edwards, the national watchdog for information rights, data privacy and transparency among public bodies, said he was cooperating with the investigation in a post on his LinkedIn account.

Green party byelection winner says ‘you can smell the alcohol when people are in between votes’

When Hannah Spencer spoke of her shock that in Westminster “you can smell the alcohol when people are in between votes”, she may not have expected such a lively response.

The Green party MP, who won the Gorton and Denton byelection in February, made the comments in an interview with the Joe website, saying she was “really uneasy” about the drinking culture in parliament.

The case is part of a national redistricting fight with high stakes for the November midterm elections

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Virginia supreme court justices on Monday questioned whether the state’s Democratic-led legislature complied with constitutional requirements when it sent a congressional redistricting plan to voters, in a case that carries high stakes for the balance of power in the US House.

The new districts, which could net Democrats four additional seats, won narrow voter approval last week. But a Republican legal challenge contends the general assembly violated procedural rules by placing the constitutional amendment before voters to authorize the mid-decade redistricting. If the court agrees that lawmakers broke the rules, it could invalidate the amendment and render last week’s statewide vote meaningless.

Journalists face rising threats while media ownership is concentrated in fewer hands, leading civil liberties group warns

Journalists in the EU face increasing levels of harassment, threats and violence, while news outlets are owned by a shrinking number of proprietors and public trust in the media has plummeted, a report has found.

The Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties) said the findings of its fifth annual media freedom report, released on Tuesday, should place EU officials “on high alert”, with media freedom and pluralism “under sustained attack” across mainland Europe.

Fundraiser for Ukraine was among targets, Lithuanian authorities allege; Kyiv collars Israel over Russian shipments of stolen Ukrainian grain. What we know on day 1,525

Efforts continue to free two trapped passengers in wreckage after long-distance train collides with commuter train outside Jakarta, injuring 81

The death toll from a train collision near the Indonesian capital Jakarta has risen to 14 with another 84 injured, the train operator said on Tuesday, as rescuers worked to extract survivors still trapped in the wreckage.

The collision between a commuter train and a long-distance train happened late on Monday in Bekasi, just outside Jakarta.

Sources say staff have been asked to pack up final stock and equipment after waves of closures

Jewellery and accessories chain Claire’s is closing its final UK stores on Monday with the loss of more than 1,000 jobs and ending three decades on British high streets.

Sources said staff at Claire’s, which had 154 stores when it collapsed in January, had been asked to pack up the final stock and equipment with the remaining outlets to formally close after successive waves of closures in recent weeks.

Deal comes five years after Shell sold its US shale business and is its biggest acquisition for a decade

Shell has agreed to buy Canadian shale producer ARC Resources for $16.4bn, five years after Europe’s biggest gas and oil producer sold its US shale business.

The deal, which includes $13.6bn in cash and shares and taking on ARC’s $2.8bn debt, would be Shell’s biggest acquisition since it bought BG Group a decade ago.

Critical week for global economy as banks expected to issue warnings over conflict driving up prices

The world’s most powerful central banks are poised to hold borrowing costs unchanged this week amid growing concerns over the unfolding inflation shock from the Iran war.

In a critical week for the global economy, each of the central banks in the G7 are expected to issue warnings over the risks from the Middle East war driving up prices for households and businesses.

Musk’s lawsuit accuses Altman of fraud, while OpenAI says that Musk is ‘motivated by jealousy’

A trial between two of Silicon Valley’s biggest tycoons kicked off on Monday in California, the culmination of a years-long bitter feud. Elon Musk has accused Sam Altman of betraying the founding agreement of the non-profit they started together, OpenAI, by changing it to a for-profit enterprise.

Jury selection began at a federal courthouse in Oakland with Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers presiding. As she began, she assured the dozens of prospective jurors that this trial wasn’t going to be highly technical, despite it centering around artificial intelligence. “This is just a case about promises and breaches of promises, it won’t get technical at all,” she said.

Vivid, tactile details make Lutz’s biography a beautifully textured and convincing read

Both Emily Brontë and her only novel Wuthering Heights have been called “deranged”, “crazed” or (especially online, in the wake of the recent film) “unhinged”. So it’s a relief to read a biography where she comes across, instead, as more grounded, steady, sane. Deborah Lutz, whose 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects made such an impression, anchors her narrative in solid things: the too-short bed Emily squeezed herself into; the pockets she stuffed with paper, pencils and moorland treasures; the laundry she looked after, including stockings with “AB5” sewn into them to indicate they were her sister Anne’s fifth pair. Lutz’s Emily is an eminently practical woman who wrote “while baking, in front of a peat fire perched on a little stool, or while walking” and who “used the tactile keeping of order as a prop and prompt to lose herself in the sublimity of art-making and moor-haunting”.

For Lutz, Emily’s writing is also “tactile”. She counts the sampler Emily made at 10 as one of her “earliest extant writings”, and while other scholars have dismissed it as a collection of copied platitudes, Lutz notices that one line Emily stitched, from Proverbs – “Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?” – suggests that maybe she was already thinking about wuthering. She lovingly describes the little books the Brontë children made as “delightful, tiny objects to match their toys and still-small selves, texts holding secretive and insular qualities”. She calls the one-page diaries Emily made with Anne “a new writing practice, one that feels distinctly modern, even avant garde”, as they crammed in descriptions of their cooking, their chatter, their animals, their made-up heroines; stream of consciousness nearly a century before Virginia Woolf.

After Donald Trump’s second election, I realised the insidious hold my phone had over my life. So I turned to something I’d loved in childhood to better occupy my attention

After a long day of looking at screens for work, I used to go to bed and stare at my phone until I fell asleep. When not doomscrolling news headlines, I’d crash out to hateful comments on social media or revisit workplace dramas via mobile versions of Teams and Slack. I was always plugged in.

It was a ritual that would start well before bedtime. As the evening wound down, I’d surf algorithms for hours on end, barely paying attention to whatever television programme was on in the background, only half-listening to conversations around me. Whether it was the incessantly dystopian news cycle, toxic opinions on pop culture, or posts railing against obtuse LinkedIn speak, there was always another online scab to pick.

Nigerian actor and director Iyabo Ojo’s entertaining but imperfect tale about warring clans unfolds across Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania

This Nigerian thriller unfolds mostly in the bustling city of Lagos but it makes excursions to Ghana and Tanzania and casts actors from all three countries, making for a diverse, textured tale that is thoroughly entertaining. That said, there are still plenty of imperfections, especially in the editing, and the acting ranges from professional and polished to amateur and awkward, so it’s a bit of a bumpy ride. Still, it is yet more evidence that the increasingly well-financed Nollywood industry can hold its own internationally, and grow audiences beyond Africa.

Even if a male character’s run for president is a major engine of the story, this is very much a female-centric film, encompassing women across several generations in an assortment of configurations, often far from harmonious. That comes across very clearly in an early scene in which we see bossy matriarch Aisha Williams (Mercy Aigbe), wife of aspiring politician Marcus Williams (William Benson), having a screaming match with her sister-in-law as members of the household look on aghast. A complicated character to say the least, Aisha can turn on the charm when she needs to, for example when her son, aspiring actor Mandla (Enioluwa Adeoluwa), brings home his fiancee Simisola (Prisca Lyimo) to meet the family. But as soon as Aisha meets Simisola’s aunt Bridget (Bimbo Akintola), a devout preacher, the hospitality spigot is abruptly turned off. By degrees, we learn that there’s a long history between the two older women who are connected through familiarity with Simisola’s birth mother Arinzo (played by director Iyabo Ojo) who everyone thought had died years ago.

Yes, the beachside sexperiment comes with endless hands-on intimacy therapy, which could easily feel shocking, excruciating or just plain dull. Instead, it’s a jolly, wholesome joy

Here are a few things Virgin Island is not. The Channel 4 series, in which 12 adult virgins travel to Croatia to take part in a three-week intimacy retreat, isn’t graphic, explicit, tawdry or tasteless. For reality TV, it doesn’t even feel that exploitative: unlike many other formats, you get the sense that everyone involved is crystal clear about what they are here to do and how it will end up looking on television.

It’s what they are here to do, however, that makes watching Virgin Island a mind-boggling experience. Whatever the reason for remaining a virgin, the remedy is broadly the same. With the help of various sex therapists, the participants are encouraged to tune in to their desires, expose their bodies and experience sensual touch via professional “surrogate partners” – a treatment that can (and, in the first series, did) extend to penetrative sex.

The Great Moose Migration has become a ‘slow TV’ sensation, keeping audiences worldwide glued to the beasts’ epic trek – even if they’re rarely spotted on screen. We go behind the scenes with its makers

On a crisp bright early spring afternoon on a small uninhabited island in the Ångerman river in northern Sweden, the stars of The Great Moose Migration are proving suitably elusive. Just as they do, for the most part, to viewers of the world’s biggest slow TV phenomenon – a three-week-long, 450-hour, free-to-view continuous livestream from the Västernorrland wilderness that has a global audience of millions mysteriously captivated every year, despite precious little happening at all.

Hardcore watchers will be lucky to spot an älg, as they are called in Swedish, making their annual crossing of the Ångerman en route to richer summer pastures north any more frequently on average than about once every 400 minutes. But among this landscape, which moose have traversed for 6,000 years, traces of the illustrious beasts are everywhere if you know where to look for them. After a bit of raking among some lingonberry bushes, The Great Moose Migration producer and co-creator Stefan Edlund eventually finds a firm round lump of dried moose dung to hand me. “It’s a bit gross,” he acknowledges, “but they only eat plants.”

Arterton power-walks stylishly through Tom Bradby’s slick crime caper that takes itself so seriously even the saucy stuff is solemn. Slow Horses this is not

Another week, another glossy espionage drama in which agitated politicos scour the corridors of power in search of something, anything, to differentiate the thing from its predecessors. But what? ITV’s Secret Service rummages through its faux-leather briefcase for fresh ideas. Not the easiest of tasks, given the number of cliches that swirl around the genre’s cufflinks. But God loves a trier. And Secret Service is nothing if not tenacious.

Might a protagonist who juggles family life with a secret job as an MI6 agent count as a USP, it wonders, nodding at Kate Henderson (Gemma Arterton) and her tousled action-bob. No? How about a plot that divides itself between Whitehall and a more exotic, if no less treacherous, location such as, say, Malta? Or many scenes in which actors in wool-blend car coats stride purposefully past the SIS building while shouting things like: “You’re the bloody home secretary!” and: “Tell that to the prime minister!”

The Dutch ex-punk and Jim Jarmusch bandmate talks about his passion to free up a hidebound repertoire and make its strings ‘a real pop instrument’

Nobody can accuse Jozef Van Wissem of doing things by halves. The musician, very likely the world’s most notorious contemporary lutenist, owns a sonic arsenal of eight of the string instruments: some bespoke, and all boasting remarkable features. With them he has created a huge body of work, nearly 50 titles to date. Another album, This Is My Blood is released this May.

Each Easter, Van Wissem settles down to compose a new record. He finds the peace of Warsaw, where everyone has “gone away for the holidays”, more amenable for work than “noisy” Rotterdam, where he also has a flat.

Even though she was unwell, the last surviving Ronette was full of poignant memories and saucy asides when I met her last year. And she had a rich life after pop success

• Nedra Talley Ross dies aged 80 – news

Nedra Talley Ross wasn’t a household name any longer, but she had been once upon a time. When she turned 18 in January 1964, George Harrison was among the guests who helped her celebrate. She and her cousins were feted, surrounded, adored. For she and her cousins were the Ronettes, the girl group above all others, the sound of teenage emotional extremity set to soaring, symphonic pop. Nedra was the last surviving Ronette and now she is gone.

Nedra’s cousins were Veronica and Estelle Bennett, and the three of them had sung and danced and played as long as they could remember. She was only a Ronette between 1963 and 1967, but in a few short years she was part of some of the greatest pop ever recorded: Be My Baby, Walking in the Rain, Sleigh Ride and the rest. Not that she was taken with Phil Spector, who produced them. “I wasn’t impressed by him, and he didn’t stir me with what he was saying, didn’t scare me with what he was doing,” Nedra told me when I interviewed her just before Christmas last year. “He was quite arrogant, and who wants to deal with an arrogant person?”

The half-human, half-horse star has bounced back from the brink with a grass-themed album that’s ‘a love letter to Mother Earth’. Is it true she was discovered by Whitney Horseton?

‘I’m trilingual because I speak English and German – but also neigh. We could have done the interview in horsey.” Welcome to the world of DJ and pop provocateur horsegiirL, AKA Stella Stallion, the Berlin-based half-human, half-horse, whose potent mix of Eurodance, 90s techno, happy hardcore and gabba has polarised the dance music community. On one side of the paddock are her loyal fans, or “farmies”, who fully accept the horsegiirL lore – that she was born and raised in the idyllic Sunshine farms, surrounded by animal friends, and later discovered by local legend Whitney Horseton. Lurking on the other side, near the manure, are the dance bros who derided Stallion’s meteoric rise in 2022 – aided by viral sets at HÖR Berlin and Boiler Room – as a cheap gimmick that highlighted how far dance music had strayed from its roots.

“I don’t remember his name,” laughs Stallion, 26, “but some legendary DJ from, like, 1902, said, ‘This is the face of commercialisation.’” She’s speaking from Brazil, where she is currently shooting a video for That’s My Beach, a sunkissed pop gem taken from her forthcoming climate crisis-focused debut album, Nature Is Healing. “I had to laugh because at that point I was mainly playing small underground queer and trans raves. It just showed what they were actually protecting, which was a very different space to where I see myself.”

The broadcaster’s thoughtful new interview series is an impressive feat. Plus, former tennis champ Maria Sharapova fronts a new female-orientated chatshow

The Girls creator has endured brickbats and breakdowns – but she doesn’t always make it easy to feel sorry for her

At the end of last year, Netflix released Too Much – a sickly, indie-sleaze romcom about an American transplant who falls for a troubled British muso. It was created by Lena Dunham and her musician husband Luis Felber, and apparently loosely based on the couple’s backstory. It felt, to many critics, like second-screen fare, decidedly Lena Dunham-lite. Was this really the same person who had given us the spiky, self-absorbed world of Girls, the millennial Sex and the City complete with brutal situationships, toxic besties and, er, one of the main characters accidentally smoking crack?

Famesick sheds almost all the Richard Curtis-isms to find that old, controversy-courting Dunham alive and – if not exactly well – then learning to cope with it. Her second memoir (Not That Kind of Girl was published in 2014) charts the chronic illness and seemingly unending stress that came to define her 20s and 30s after she had snagged her own HBO series aged just 24. The afflictions described across its 400 pages include – though are not limited to – OCD, colitis, the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, endometriosis, early menopause, PTSD and addiction to both opioids and benzodiazepines. At one point, Dunham accidentally sets herself on fire; at another, she panics about how Vogue will cover up the impetigo on her face, “a waterfall of golden blisters, turning a sickly green as they dried”. The book is scattergun and sometimes lacking in self awareness (who cares that Dunham had to give her designer booties up, like contraband, when she entered rehab?). It’s also undeniably frank and exhaustive: a lifetime of therapy condensed into something you could conceivably rip through in a weekend.

Leaders have thrown up walls and barriers throughout history – but their effects are unpredictable

Four millennia ago, a Sumerian king, his frontier beset by nomadic tribes fleeing prolonged drought in their own lands, ordered the construction of the world’s first border wall: a 177km-long boundary laid in stone between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Since humanity’s earliest city-states and kingdoms arose in ancient Mesopotamia, walls, ditches and fences have defended territory, marked the edges of empires and projected political power across the void. But the world’s first border wall failed. It now lies buried beneath Iraq’s desert sands. Rome’s legions abandoned Hadrian’s Wall long ago, and the iron curtain’s razor-wire fences fell with the eastern bloc’s collapse in the late 1980s.

The Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton author branches out with the tale of a Massachusetts teacher haunted by trauma

The American author Elizabeth Strout famously persisted throughout years of rejection to publish her first novel when she was in her 40s, and the hard work has certainly paid off. She won a Pulitzer prize in 2009, and has been nominated multiple times for the Booker and Women’s prizes. The Things We Never Say is her 11th book.

Strout, who grew up in Maine and New Hampshire, writes mainly about small-town America and the mostly white, working-class people who inhabit it. She’s interested in the small details of ordinary lives: people’s joys and disappointments, marriages and infidelities, and the lasting effects of trauma. The fictional world of a Strout novel often extends into subsequent companion works: Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, was followed by Olive, Again in 2019; the characters first seen in her 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton reappeared in Oh William! in 2021 and Lucy by the Sea in 2022. In 2024, Strout took this world‑building to another level when Lucy, Olive and other recurring characters were brought together in Tell Me Everything. She has charted her fictional worlds so extensively across interlinked novels and stories that readers often think of her characters as their personal friends.

The reaction among officials in Germany to his bestselling novel has been hostile. As Mayfly Season is published in the UK, its author explains why

A few weeks after the German publication of his debut novel in 2024, author Matthias Jügler received a call from an employee at the German government agency tasked with investigating the human rights abuses of the socialist east.

The call wasn’t overtly threatening; Jügler was asked to explain what historical source material he had consulted for Mayfly Season and which period he was planning to tackle in his next book. But it came after another government official had accused him of traumatising some of his readership, and after the organiser of a reading had asked him to bring along documents proving the plausibility of his book’s plot.

Genki Kawamura’s eerie new film expands on a haunting video game that leaves players lost in endless subway tunnels. He explains how this makes viewers and players face their worst fears

Genki Kawamura is something of a polymath. A bestselling author, film-maker, script writer and producer – he is also a lifelong gamer who grew up playing and being inspired by the games of legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto. His latest project Exit 8, now in cinemas, is a fascinating adaptation of the Japanese horror game, developed by a lone coder based in Kyoto, operating under the name Kotake Create. “I was captivated by its game design and the beauty of its visuals,” says Kawamura. “At the same time, I watched many streamers play it. As I did, I realised that although the game is incredibly simple, each player creates their own story, and each streamer brings their own unique reactions. It felt like a device that could reveal something fundamental about human nature.”

The concept behind Exit 8 the game is simple. The player finds themselves trapped in an endlessly looping section of a Tokyo subway station. Viewing the narrow, brightly lit corridors in first-person, you pass the same posters, the same silent commuter, the same locked doors over and over again. The only way to escape is to spot anomalies each time you pass through – maybe the eyes on a poster start following you, maybe the commuter stops and smiles – at which point you have to double back the way you came. Complete eight runs without missing an anomaly and you get to leave through the eponymous way out. There’s no story, no reason for it at all. The mystery is part of the appeal.

PlayStation 5; Housemarque/Sony
As a fast-firing spaceman, one minute you’re invincible, the next you’re dead – with every battle like watching a firework show through a kaleidoscope

On the planet Carcosa, mangled, blackened trees and crimson flowers take root next to the ruins of some ancient alien civilisation, flanked by statues contorted in pain, tearing at their marble skin. There are metallic tunnels deep underground, chasms of impossible size snaked with cables, so you feel as though you’re exploring the intestines of some giant machine. There’s a House of Leaves quality to these spaces, which shift and change and clearly weren’t built for humans.

You are Arjun Devraj (played by Rahul Kohli), a space security guy who’s on a mission to find missing colonists on an alien world before it all goes a bit Event Horizon and you become the next lost expedition. Classic. There’s some unethical space capitalism happening out here, and Devraj himself is a bit of a traumanaut who brought way too much mental carry-on luggage for this extremely long-haul flight. But it’s nothing that shooting some aliens won’t fix, right?

From mega hit Clair Obscur to the genius Blue Prince, the winners at this year’s event help me refocus on why games really matter

The 22nd Bafta game awards were on Friday, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took the biggest game prize. This makes it only the second game ever (after Baldur’s Gate 3) to win top prize at all five of the main awards shows: the Dice awards in Vegas; the Game awards in LA; the public-voted Golden Joysticks in the UK; the Game Developers Choice awards in San Francisco; and now London’s Baftas, the final event to celebrate the gaming output of 2025.

I’ll be honest: I was hoping for a different winner. Blue Prince, an eight-year project by the visual artist and former film-maker Tonda Ros, is the most extraordinary thing I played last year. It’s the game where you inherit a sprawling mansion that changes shape every day, and you must navigate its ever-shifting blueprint to find its secret room. I went so deep on this game that I was still playing it and thinking about it weeks after solving its initial mystery, piecing together bits of opaque lore from Reddit threads. I think it deserved at least one best game award (apart from ours).

The iconic game that came to define 8-bit programming still conjures flutters of nostalgia 40 years on – all thanks to a 15-year-old tea boy who worked a Saturday shift in a computer shop in Greater Manchester

If you were playing games on a home computer in the early 1980s, you knew about Chuckie Egg. No question. This simple-looking platform game had you wandering around a chicken shed, collecting eggs and avoiding the patrolling hens. But when you reached level eight, a large duck was suddenly let loose and would stalk the player like a feathery missile, completely changing the pace and tactics of the game. It was a boss battle before boss battles existed.

Everyone knew about Chuckie Egg because everyone could play it. Originally released on the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro and Dragon 32 in the autumn of 1983, it immediately topped the charts, encouraging its publisher, A&F Software, to begin porting it to as many machines as possible. Around 11 conversions followed, including the Commodore 64, Amstrad and Acorn Electron. I first played it on the BBC computer in my school library, but I also had it on my C64 and a friend played on his Speccy. Like Manic Miner, Bruce Lee and Skool Daze, it was woven into the tapestry of British 8-bit gaming culture.

Show curated by Edward Enninful will highlight era’s ‘do it yourself’ attitude and shift focus away from Cool Britannia

Steve McQueen’s first major film, a Chris Ofili painting in tribute to Doreen and Stephen Lawrence and images of clubbers at the Haçienda will be exhibited at Tate Britain as part of its 90s exhibition.

The show will explore art and fashion during a decade that reshaped Britain’s cultural identity and “established conditions that are still with us”, said Edward Enninful, the former editor of British Vogue who is curating the exhibition.

Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Oxford
The Sohmen Concert Hall’s acoustics made Scottish Ensemble’s Shostakovich pinprick clear, while the Great Hall showcased Devlin and Muhly’s ‘choral installation’

In 1676 London musician Thomas Mace proposed a bold idea. Instead of enduring the “inconveniences of talking, crowding, sweating and blustering”, audiences should be able to enjoy music in a dedicated space: a “musick room … convenient and fit to perform in”. For the first time concert-going was open to anyone for the price of a ticket, though this hungry new audience had to wait until 1748 and the construction of Oxford’s Holywell Music Room – Europe’s oldest custom-built public concert hall – for the fulfilment of Mace’s vision and a room of their own.

Since then, concert halls have become a mirror to changing fashions, priorities and politics. Compare the gorgeous fantasy of the 19th-century’s Royal Albert Hall to the sleek postwar functionality of the Royal Festival Hall. In Oxford the Holywell has since been joined by several others, though none without their issues – until now.

Riverside Studios, London
Jeffrey Longford is pedantic and superior in Farine Clarke’s medical drama – griping at everything from hospital data systems to gender-neutral loos

Heartsinks, in doctors’ private and profane lingo, are difficult patients who conjure dismay in the hearts of the medical professionals they come to see. So Dr Jeffrey Longford (Aden Gillett) reminds his friend and fellow GP after dealing with a “fit as a flea” hypochondriac who returns, week after week, albeit always with a slice of cake.

Jeffrey becomes something of a heartsink himself when he turns from doctor to patient after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. The real-life cases of Paul Kalanithi (in When Breath Becomes Air) and Henry Marsh (in And Finally) show how difficult it is for doctors to adjust to the patient role. In the case of Jeffrey, it is simply annoying: he insists the oncology receptionist use his “doctor” moniker rather than her pet endearments of “lovey” and “poppet”; he is pedantic, superior and generally full of complaint in the waiting room, griping about the electronic medical data system, the hospital’s layout and its gender-neutral loos.

Sadler’s Wells East, London
At 67, the mercurial Lecavalier is in the I’ll-do-whatever-I-want phase of her career, choreographing solos that are worlds away from cosy retirement

Louise Lecavalier is known for dancing with David Bowie (on his Sound + Vision tour and Fame 90 video) and for being the face of Canadian dance company La La La Human Steps in the 1980s and 90s. She’s also known for being contemporary dance’s most athletic, acrobatic performer, hurtling through the air like a flying bullet, launching into barrel jumps, corkscrewing on a horizontal axis.

She’s always been an exceptional dancing body, and that still holds true at the age of 67, where Lecavalier seems to have entered the uncompromising, I’ll-do-whatever-I-want phase of her career, choreographing her own solos that are worlds away from any idea of cosy retirement.

Lecavalier comes scampering backwards on stage, dressed in long coat and hood (druid vibes). Skittish as she bounces on the balls of her feet, her body quivers and quirks with a febrile quality, playing out compulsive repetitions to the restless bpm of a techno soundtrack.

Lecavalier’s movement hints at echoes of dances past – wisps of a balletic port de bras, or some entrechat jumps; a burst of hip-hop footwork – but all through a blurred filter. She’s a distinctive, mercurial presence: somewhere between witchy raver, manic pixie dream grandmother and earnest artist of the avant garde.

Danses Vagabondes is inspired by Carlo Rovelli’s book Écrits Vagabonds, a collection of essays wandering through disparate topics, the thoughts of a roaming mind. Lecavalier, too, is in constant motion, scrolling through all these impulses with a tight, nervous energy that’s strangely engaging. Although when the tempo slows the wandering goes a little off course.

It’s hard not to marvel at the way Lecavalier’s body is still very much at her command – she can still kick her leg to her shoulder, but that’s by the by. It’s harder still not to marvel at this dancer’s unquenchable maverick spirit.

• At Sadler’s Wells East, London, until 27 April

Hollywood actor says she would not have been horrified by sites because Amanda Ghost was allegedly bullying her at time

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Hollywood star Rebel Wilson has denied lying as she maintains she had no involvement in websites that attacked a producer with whom she is feuding.

The Pitch Perfect star is being sued by Charlotte MacInnes, the Australian lead actor of the musical comedy The Deb.

At a talk on her latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, Smith said she ‘sometimes’ reads male novelists, but more often seeks the wisdom of older female writers like Helen Garner

“I don’t know when I read men any more”, the writer Zadie Smith told a literary festival audience on Sunday.

“It does happen sometimes, but it’s completely flipped compared to the reading I did when I was young,” she continued.

The singer’s company filed three applications on Friday after Matthew McConaughey launched similar strategy

Taylor Swift has filed applications to trademark her voice and image in a move seemingly designed to protect against AI misuse.

On 24 April, Swift’s company TAS Rights Management filed three trademark applications, Variety reports. Two of these are sound trademarks that cover Swift saying the phrases “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor.”

Teatro La Fenice says Beatrice Venezi let go for making ‘repeated offensive’ statements

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Teatro La Fenice, the prestigious Venice opera house, has fired its incoming music director after she insinuated its hiring practices were nepotistic, with jobs “practically passed down from father to son”.

After months of controversy over the appointment of Beatrice Venezi, La Fenice Foundation said on Sunday it had decided to “cancel all future collaborations” with the 36-year-old conductor and pianist.

Social media is awash with content about food intolerances and the symptoms to look out for. But figuring out whether you actually have one, and what’s triggering it, is surprisingly difficult. One avenue people are gravitating towards is at-home testing. Madeleine Finlay sits down with health and lifestyle journalist Rebecca Seal to unpick the science behind these tests. Rebecca explains how they purport to work, how accurate they actually are, and how we can all investigate what we might be intolerant to, without breaking the bank. Rebecca’s book Irritated: The Allergy Epidemic and What We Can Do About It, is out now.

‘They’re all junk, and should be banned’: the trouble with at-home food intolerance tests

Order Rebecca’s book from the Guardian Bookshop

A fun, shareable Tunisian chickpea soup for a party, a one-pan moussaka, and a fragrant, layered, chocolate viennetta

Traditionally, this would be a Tunisian breakfast, and it’s not a million miles from one of my favourites, Egyptian ful medames. But here I’m proposing it as an evening offering: make a big pot of delicious flavourful chickpeas, then lay out a spread of accompaniments (pickles, olives, capers, boiled eggs). Second, a good traditional moussaka is a wholesome but time-consuming process, but that’s not the case with this simplified version, which you can easily make on a weeknight. Finally, you might not be surprised to learn that this basil viennetta was one of the most popular recipes when we were testing dishes for my new book, MEDesque. First, of course, because it tastes unreal. Second, because everyone got a huge tug of nostalgia, and third, because everyone became giddy with excitement, trying to figure out what the flavour was.

You told us your favourite subscriptions for cutting costs and reducing household waste. Plus, Anya Hindmarch’s shopping secrets and marathon essentials

• 33 easy plastic-free kitchen swaps

Whether they’re full of harmful chemicals or packaged in plastic, it’s no secret that many household cleaning products aren’t great for the planet. But “taking a more sustainable approach to washing and cleaning doesn’t have to be inconvenient”, said Hannah Rochell in her recent roundup of the best sustainable subscriptions. From vegan washing detergent in a natty recyclable tin to compostable scourers, her guide is full of delivery services that make greener living less effortful.

Her list wasn’t exhaustive, though, so we asked you for the subscription services you swear by for cutting costs, reducing household waste and making your life easier. (And no one has any commercial links to these companies – we always check.)

‘A cherry-cola colour and funky, acidic aroma’: the best supermarket balsamic vinegars, tasted and rated

The best fake tan for a sunkissed, streak-free glow – tested

Ditch power tools, build a hedgehog highway: how to create a nature-friendly garden

How I Shop with Anya Hindmarch: ‘I would label everything if I could’

The best hair straighteners for foolproof styling, tried and tested by our expert

Inspired to run your first 26.2 miles? Seasoned runners share their go-to kit, from race-day shoes to free apps (plus five UK marathons you can still enter)

• The best running shoes for every runner

When you first start running, the marathon – all 26.2 miles of it – seems like an impossible distance. Whether you’ve taken the plunge at your local parkrun or got round your first 10k, the thought of anything longer probably feels like it’s beyond you.

But this running milestone is more achievable than you think. My first marathon was Brighton in 2018, and on crossing the line, I knew I’d been bitten by the bug. Three more marathons and three ultra-distance events later, I’m gearing up for number five in Berlin this September.

Our resident product tester sips and puckers his way through a range of high-street balsamic vinegars

• The best supermarket gherkins

The old adage that you get what you pay for definitely applies to balsamic vinegar, no matter whether it’s an independent brand or a supermarket’s own-label. The best are made in Modena, Italy, and carry at least IGP (protected geographical indication) status. Though that’s not the strictest certification, it’s still a mark of quality, assuring the product has been made following certain guidelines.

None of the vinegars I tested had PDO (protected designation of origin) status, which is a more coveted certification with strict guidelines and a 12-year ageing process, and which explains why it can cost upwards of £1,200 a litre.

Whether you’re a beginner, an ultra-runner or a speed demon, our expert clocked up more than 50km in each trainer to find the perfect shoe, no matter your goal

• The best running watches, tested

Whether you’re just starting Couch to 5k or well on the way to the 100 Marathon Club, finding running shoes that suit your pace, physique and running style is mission-critical. The right shoes can help you run better, ward off injury and, most importantly, help you to build the consistency that unlocks the biggest fitness and mental health gains.

The first step out of the door is the hardest, and uncomfortable shoes are just another barrier between you and that sweet endorphin release. Yet with dozens of brands – from Hoka, Adidas and Nike to New Balance, Saucony and On – hundreds of styles, and enough tech jargon to make Susie Dent’s head spin, finding your solemate can be a challenge in itself.

Best running shoes overall:
Saucony Endorphin Azura

Best value running shoes for speed:
Kiprun Kipride Max

Literally a mix of white (blanc) and red (rouge) grapes, the light, fresh tipple is popping up in bars around the world. Move over rosé and orange wine ...

Twenty years ago, a winery could do well selling one white and two reds, says Konrad Pixner, a northern Italian winemaker who set up his vineyard, Domaine de L’Accent, in Languedoc, France, in 2019. But today, importers and bars always ask: “Do you have something new?” So up in the hills, surrounded by deep gorges and limestone plateaus, Pixner is constantly experimenting.

After a good harvest in 2023, Pixner walked into the shed he shares with other winemakers at 4am to find that his biggest vat of white wine, pressed from carignan blanc grapes, had overflowed during fermentation. He had run out of space, so he quickly “pumped the white juice into the tank where whole bunches of carignan noir were,” he says, and left them to ferment for 10 days together. In contrast to rosé, made from red grapes left for a short time with their skins on before being pressed, he created “blouge” – a light, fresh wine blended from white and red grapes that’s best served chilled. It has now caught on among creative vintners around the world.

A pasta bake combining tender chicken and hearty chickpeas, and a Middle Eastern spring salad layered with spices, refreshing herbs and sweet peas

My ideal way of entertaining is completely fuss-free, with everything prepared ahead of time so I can enjoy being with my guests rather than worrying about cooking. I like to put big, generous dishes in the middle of the table, such as this one-tray chicken, pasta and chickpea bake, alongside a fresh salad, so everyone can serve themselves and share a simple, delicious meal.

Impala is like no restaurant I’ve ever been to, yet it somehow has echoes of almost all of them

Late last month, Impala drove into Soho already flaming hot in the hype stakes: this was a sizzling booking to brag about even before executive chef and co-founder Meedu Saad had turned on the stoves. Impala, after all, is a Super 8 restaurant, the group that has, among others, Tomos Parry’s Brat in Shoreditch, which has been constantly, unfalteringly brilliant since 2018. It also runs Parry’s second baby, Mountain, which is likewise wonderful; sometimes weird, yes, but always wonderful. Long before that, back in 2016, they opened Kiln, the famed live-fire Thai counter hangout that cheffy boys in beanies have tried and failed to emulate all over Britain, while Super 8’s beginnings were with the boundary-pushing and much-loved Smoking Goat. That is nothing less than a litany of solid-gold bangers, and now they’ve unleashed Impala by Saad, the former head chef at Kiln.

In any normal restaurant review, it would have been common to have by now established what type of food Impala actually cooks – north African? Middle Eastern? Mediterranean? British?, etc – but in this odd, dreamy and defiantly dark nook in Soho (every single one of us in the room, even those with perfect vision, had our iPhone torches on just to read the menu), narrowing down its origin story is not quite that simple. “Bird’s tongue pasta braised with spiced oxtail?” someone asked over the loud jazz. “Molokhia, braised jute leaf and shoulder of cull yaw sheep?” queried someone else. It went on: aish baladi? Ftira? “Bird’s tongue pasta is the Egyptian name for orzo,” I ventured, adding that I thought molokhia might be a bit like spinach, but never have I been more ready for a server to turn up and ask: “Guys, may I explain the menu?”

We choose a beef tartare with a smoky, sweet Tunisian harissa and crunchy chunks of deep-fried bread as brittle as pork crackling. We scoop honey bread through an insanely good mush of pounded white beans topped with chunks of pungent bottarga. There are rustic pillows of that aish baladi, an Egyptian wholegrain bread that here comes with a fresh, rich harissa paste, and langoustine kibbeh and sun-dried wheat all wrapped in a neat perilla leaf cone.

From avocado to hemp, extra virgin olive and rapeseed, the shops are packed with various oils. But what is worth spending money on? And are any of them actually better for you?

The world of cooking oils is confusing. I keep spotting new ones on supermarket shelves, trumpeting their health claims. Cold-pressed avocado oil, extra virgin macadamia oil, organic coconut oil, premium hemp seed oil … Even familiar oils are mired in controversy. Is it OK to cook with olive oil? Should you avoid seed oils? Meanwhile, prices keep rising – earlier this month, Walter Zanre, the CEO of Filippo Berio UK, said supermarkets were “taking the mickey” out of customers over olive oil pricing. I asked the experts which oils are really worth splashing out on.

I had presumed I would love her instantly – but a traumatic birth led to devastating numbness

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was waiting for an overwhelming rush of love, but when I looked at my newborn baby what I felt was utter despair. No matter how much I smiled at her, crooned at her, fed, patted, caressed and changed her, I was absolutely numb.

I had yearned for her. Growing up in Italy, I was surrounded by images of perfect motherhood. Every rural crossroad has its tiny shrine to the Madonna and Child. I was certain by the end of my teens that I wanted to have at least one baby.

The actor and producer on being a teenage model, making My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the secret to long-lasting love

Born in Hollywood in 1956, Rita Wilson’s first role was in The Brady Bunch at the age of 15. She went on to appear in Frasier and The Good Wife, as well as romcom classics such as Sleepless in Seattle and Runaway Bride. She produced the highest‑grossing romcom of all time, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as well as Mamma Mia! and A Man Called Otto, which starred her husband, Tom Hanks, and son Truman. Alongside her career on screen, she has released music since 2012. Her sixth studio album, Sound of a Woman, is out on 1 May.

My mum took this photo of me in Hollywood. I’d just started high school and was joyful, open and optimistic.

It feels as if your work and your identity are fused. You’ll get through this, but you may have to use this time to consider other careers

I’ve been a teacher for more than 20 years and loved it. I had promotions every couple of years and was happily making my way up the ladder. This year, however, I was made redundant because of restructuring and this has thrown me into a feeling of complete confusion. I have tried to find roles at the level I was working at, but have not been successful. It has left me feeling lost and unclear.

The last five years within education have felt fraught. I left the previous school I’d worked at because I felt the headteacher was unable to support me following the death of my mum. The school before that I left after whistleblowing on a senior leader for bullying. I am worried the repeat issues and feelings of being unhappy all come from me, and somehow I am seeking out conflict or issues.

Gillian Kennedy met Wade Freeman while working in a remote desert community. She was impressed by his playlists, and his generous spirit

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

In 2007 I’d been single for a few years and had just returned from a year volunteering in a village in Bangladesh. Six months after arriving home in Sydney I decided to take up a teaching job in Mulan Aboriginal community in the Kimberley, halfway between Broome and Alice Springs, population 120.

The first term was difficult. I got along well with my housemate, Kylie, and we’d met friendly nurses and people from the surrounding communities. But we didn’t have access to a vehicle so spent our weekends working. I felt quite lonely and isolated.

The airline refused a refund or credit for our group of 14 after a brain tumour diagnosis for my two-year-old child

We were organising our wedding for this June when the happiest period of our lives became a nightmare.

Our two-year-old daughter was diagnosed with an aggressive grade 4 brain tumour requiring immediate life-saving surgeries. The prognosis is devastating.

Secondhand car buyers urged to carefully inspect vehicles, while owners told to beware tests that are suspiciously quick

• Rise of the ‘ghost owner’: 18,000 UK vehicles in use without proper records

You have just bought a secondhand car. It was older than you wanted, but were reassured because it had recently passed its MOT.

Within a few days, you notice a problem with the steering and take it into a garage to be checked. As well as that issue, they find the tread depth of the tyres is so low it should not have passed the test.

Some people are put off by myriad investment options. Here is a guide to the key decisions to help you choose

• ‘Savvy Squirrel’ ad campaign looks to push Britons towards investing

The UK government is keen to encourage people to invest. If you are thinking of dipping your toe into the stock market, an Isa is often the best way, as it lets you protect any gains from tax. Here’s how to get started.

Lucy O’Brien was shocked when she discovered how high interest rates were leading to ballooning debt

Like many of my drowning-in-debt “plan 2” student loan comrades, I didn’t think twice about diving straight into a master’s degree, bright-eyed and fresh out of my undergraduate course in 2021.

To say I was naive to the additional financial burden would be an understatement. Even less did I think that, four years after finishing my master’s, I’d be using the savings money I’ve built up – which I’d planned to put towards a deposit to buy my first property – to pay back my postgraduate loan in full. And yet here I am.

Men tend to have a higher ratio of muscle to fat, but women respond just as well to resistance training

This is a common misconception, says Prof Leigh Breen, a muscle physiology specialist at the University of Leicester, though it’s easy to see where it comes from. Men typically have a higher ratio of muscle to fat than women, largely because of differences established during puberty, when testosterone levels rise significantly in males. Women, by contrast, tend to have a higher proportion of body fat – linked, in part, to oestrogen.

“Although there is a relationship between testosterone and the amount of muscle mass we have, this doesn’t determine how effectively we can build muscle with resistance training,” says Breen. “Women have much lower testosterone levels – around 15 to 20 times lower than men. There is a perception that men gain muscle more easily because of higher testosterone and more androgen receptors in muscle, but that’s not quite right. If you look at relative change – the percentage increase – men and women respond very similarly to training.”

Exclusive: Health Foundation says Britain is ‘going backwards’ compared with most other rich countries

• Findings on healthy life expectancy in UK shed light on its deteriorating health

People in the UK are spending fewer years in good health than a decade ago, prompting concern that the population’s health is “going backwards”.

The sharp decline in Britain’s healthy life expectancy, the amount of time someone spends free of illness or disability, is in sharp contrast to its recent rise in most other rich countries globally.

NHS struggling to cope with record numbers, which Cancer Research UK says puts progress on survival rates at risk

The number of people in the UK being diagnosed with cancer has reached a record high, with one person diagnosed every 80 seconds, a report reveals.

Cancer Research UK found that more than 403,000 people were being diagnosed with the disease each year. The rise is largely due to a growing and ageing population, as people are more likely to develop cancer as they get older.

Knowing the difference between hunger and appetite, and understanding the sensory cues behind them, can help us make better decisions about what we eat

Imagine you’re in a meeting room when someone brings out the biscuits – a packet of Jammie Dodgers, perhaps, or a nice little plate of custard creams. Maybe you want one and maybe you don’t, but the chances are the people around you are all responding differently: someone will grab a couple straight away, someone else will eat one without seeming to notice, another will barely be aware the biscuits exist, and someone will spend the whole meeting wanting one but not taking it. Our appetites and responses to food vary wildly – but what’s going on behind the scenes to govern them? And has modern food somehow hijacked the process? Grab a biscuit (or don’t) and settle in.

“First, it’s important to distinguish between hunger and appetite,” says Giles Yeo, a professor of molecular neuroendocrinology at the University of Cambridge and the author of Why Calories Don’t Count. “Hunger is a feeling – it’s what happens in the run-up to you deciding you need to eat something. Appetite is everything that surrounds why we eat – including hunger, fullness and reward, or how you actually feel when you eat. Those three sensations all use completely different parts of the brain, but they all work together.”

To celebrate the release of the film Mother Mary, starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, in which a fashion designer creates a comeback dress for a pop star, we weigh up the best performative looks

“Dressed like a fabulously turned-out carrion crow,” is how our reviewer described the gothic, avian-like get-up PJ Harvey wore to perform her journalistic and theatrical ninth album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, in Brixton, south London, in 2016. The dress was the work of Harvey’s longtime friend, the Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester, and epitomises the more dramatic stage looks – melodramatic but pared-back – that Harvey turned to for her later, darker albums. As she said of the clothes: “For me, it’s about the ability to meet the world. And it is a second skin, isn’t it? It’s protection, as well. It’s a very big part of clothing, the feeling of protection, particularly in Ann’s clothes.” Who would have thought that someone who earlier in their career took to the stage in Spice Girls co-ords and hot-pink catsuits would wind up in such serious Belgian high-fashion? Ellie Violet Bramley

Film sequel reveals how luxury brands have turned the tables on once-dominant magazine editors

The National Gallery was the grand setting for the party that followed The Devil Wears Prada 2’s London premiere this week. Donatella Versace held court in a roped-off area beneath Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey.

Meryl Streep, reprising her role as Miranda Priestly – Anna Wintour’s fictional alter ego – wore a red satin Prada coat as a nod to the film’s title and black sunglasses as a wink to Wintour. Glossy magazine editors from Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, flown in for the night, nibbled on fried chicken served with caviar and dishes of mac and cheese presented theatrically under silver cloches.

Wiltshire town councillor Andrew Edwards, who has large collection of neckwear, is a regular at committee hearings

It was blockbuster viewing for politicos across the country: the livestreamed grilling of Olly Robbins. While the sacked Foreign Office civil servant was billed as the star of the show, for many he was upstaged by a well-dressed man wearing a cravat.

“I’ve got a big collection,” said Andrew Edwards, the scene stealer in question.

The 1980s band are being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year – but why does singer Sade Adu’s pared-back look still resonate in 2026?

Earlier this month it was announced that Sade, the British group fronted by Sade Adu that found fame in the 80s and 90s, would be inducted into the 2026 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And although the music is indisputably worthy of such a distinction, if there were a similar accolade for style, Adu would have been inducted a long time ago.

With her scraped-back hair, red lipstick, hoop earrings and penchant for simple black dresses or denim and polo necks, she has become the last word in understated – but somehow unattainable – style.

Beyond the Tuscan capital, there are exquisite towns with Medici fortresses, stunning frescoes, Roman amphitheatres – and not a selfie stick in sight

First, it was Barcelona, Venice and Dubrovnik. Now, Florence has joined the most overtouristed destinations in the world: its 365,000 inhabitants shared their city last year with 4.6 million visitors. The director of the city’s Accademia gallery – home to Michelangelo’s David – talked in 2024 about “hit and run” tourism, describing visitors “on a quick in-and-out mission to take selfies … trampling the city without contributing anything”. Local author Margherita Calderoni describes Via Camillo Cavour, a street leading to the Duomo, as a “rancid soup” of chain restaurants and “shops selling plastic trinkets from who knows where”.

Although steps are being taken – the city council has introduced a ban on new short-term lets and is promoting sights in lesser-known neighbourhoods – tackling overtourism is a challenge. And other Tuscan cities, such as Siena and San Gimignano, are suffering too. But beyond these honeypots, Italy’s fifth-largest region is full of glories, with not a takeaway chain or selfie stick in sight. Here are six of my favourites.

Clear waterfalls, mountain meadows and high-altitude refuges are just some of the highlights of this less-visited part of the stunning range, shared in a new guide to the region

The “forgotten” Dolomites lie to the east, far from the crowds of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo and Val Gardena. Belluno is the main gateway, two hours north of Venice by train or a drive up the A27. From here, the upper Piave valley leads into the quieter Friulian mountains. The land rises gently, opening into pasture, then stone lifting into spires above the meadows.

Traditional local councils, the Regole di Comunità, still manage the land and forests collectively here, sustaining artisans and alpine farmers in scattered hamlets shaped by shared work and resilience. Pastìn (a minced, seasoned blend of pork and beef), malga cheeses and polenta, once staples for long days in the mountains, are still shared over grappa at the end of the day. Beyond the hamlets, paths lead towards Monte Pelmo or drift into the beech woods of Cansiglio, where deer call at dusk. It’s a fine place to experience mountain culture, and these are some of my favourite places.

From cycling in the Cinque Terre to sipping espresso at a secret spot overlooking the Colosseum, here are some of your Italian highlights

• Tell us about great beach bars and restaurants in Europe – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

When we visited Venice, we stayed in Padua. It’s half an hour to Venezia Mestre (Venice’s mainland suburb), trains are frequent and cheap, as long as you avoid expresses, and easy to book if you have the Trenitalia app. You’ll find accommodation and restaurants significantly cheaper if you are based in Padua and day trip into Venice, and Padua is worth exploring in its own right. There are also trains to Vicenza, Verona, Bologna and Bassano del Grappa – we found it the perfect base for a public transport trip in north-east Italy.
Fergal O’Shea

In the 1980s ‘the Antwerp Six’ put Flanders on the fashion map. Now a major new exhibition celebrates the designers’ legacy and provides the perfect excuse to visit Belgium’s vibrant second city

You know you’re in a city that takes its fashion seriously when even the Virgin Mary is dressed head to toe in couture. A short walk from Antwerp’s old town, with its ornate medieval guild houses and cobblestone streets, is the baroque church of St Andrews. Like many of the city’s Catholic churches, it has beautiful stained glass windows, an exuberantly carved wooden pulpit and more artworks by Flemish masters than you can shake an incense stick at. But we’re here to pay homage to an art form of a different kind.

In a quiet chapel, an elegant 16th-century wooden statue of the Madonna is clothed not in her usual blue cloak, but a dress of pale gauzy fabric, trimmed with a collar of white pigeon feathers, custom made by renowned Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester. It’s a bold statement but one that’s entirely in-keeping with a city where a love of fashion seems woven into the fabric of everyday life.

There is no wrong way to journal, say experts, and putting pen to paper can help with mental health and clarify thoughts and feelings

• How to start … anything: expert tips for trying something new

Humans have been jotting down their feelings and experiences for millennia. The earliest example of a diary is over 4,500 years old, written on papyrus by a mid-level official who helped in constructing the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Since then, other noteworthy diarists have included Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Audre Lorde and also me. (One guess as to which of those intellectual powerhouses recently journaled about getting a tummy ache after eating too many Swedish Fish.)

The search for work has become crushing for many, scrolling through limitless unsuitable job ads. Is there a way out of this cycle?

Name: Doomjobbing.

Age: Old, but increasing in frequency.

The solution to today’s puzzle

Earlier today I asked you this slippery question. Here it is again with the solution.

Snakes in a cage

The uptick in children focused on skincare has some experts concerned about body image and mental health. But others warn of the risks of rushing to ‘medicalise’ new trends or behaviours

Sephora stores are being overrun with tweens pumping product testers. Eight-year-olds film themselves on “Sephora hauls” and GRWM (get ready with me) videos, applying collagen boosting serums and retinol creams for their nonexistent wrinkles. And party bags are stuffed with face masks and fluffy headbands, instead of glitter and gummy bears.

The rise of “Sephora kids” is a widely reported issue but the uptick of children “obsessed” with skincare has some experts concerned about the long-term effects of age-inappropriate products and increased occupation with appearance at such a pivotal age.

Valentina was seven when Ivonne first went to jail in Ecuador for selling drugs. Nine years later, as Ivonne faces another prison sentence, they discuss the trauma of living apart – and their lasting bond

Six months ago, 16-year-old Valentina was watching TV with her cousin and younger brother at her home in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, when she received a call from her mother, Ivonne. She had been arrested again, and was in prison. She wouldn’t be coming home for a while.

The pair had been living together since Ivonne’s last prison sentence ended in 2023, and the thought of being separated again was devastating.

Valentina, aged seven, with her mother, Ivonne, at home in Quito, Ecuador in 2016. After Ivonne was jailed for marijuana possession she was unable to be with her daughter for three years

He shot the YBAs boozing, canoodling – and shaking up the art scene. Now the photographer has found inspiration in some other unruly characters: his lurchers. We join him for walkies in rural Suffolk

‘Finn! Finn! FINN!” Johnnie Shand Kydd is having trouble keeping his inquisitive lurcher in sight. Finn may be an incredibly sweet-natured dog but he’s hard of hearing – and has previous for disappearing on this particular walk.

At least the photographer has experience in dealing with unruly characters. In the 1990s, he found himself embedded with the Young British Artists, granted free rein to shoot the hedonistic, chaotic and wildly creative art scene that birthed Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and more. Shot in black and white, these images upended the convention for artists posing in their studios, easels in hand. “I just wasn’t interested in that at all,” says Shand Kydd. Instead, his photographs capture Hirst balancing a tower of hats on his head, Emin in a rubber dinghy with Georgina Starr, a newly pregnant Sam Taylor-Johnson (then Taylor-Wood) and a whole load of partying, boozing and canoodling.

With his stand against Trump, the pope has shown the far right doesn’t have a monopoly on Christianity. If people of good faith push hard, the future could be redefined

In the same way that America’s shambolic war on Iran has turned Donald Trump into the most effective EV salesman the world has ever seen, so his attempts to defend said war have produced another unlikely outcome: the rise of a genuine and global theological debate. Led by Pope Leo but extending across Christian denominations, it’s producing the sudden recognition that a kind of progressive Christianity long given over for dead seems to be stirring. Christ is risen, as it were – and if people of good faith push hard, the future could be redefined in powerful ways.

This story has developed so rapidly, with so many steps, that it’s hard to remember them all. When America launched its cruel attack, there was widespread reporting that some officers were exhorting to treat it as a prelude to the second coming. That provoked no pushback from the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, a representative of a tattooed Christianity (not that it matters, but have these people not read Leviticus?); indeed, with each press conference Hegseth edged closer to a revival meeting, invoking God’s blessing on his bombing and pillaging. “We are hitting them while they’re down, which is the way it should be,” he said.

We want to hear from you about the rise of child skincare trends

Children as young as two are appearing in TikTok videos demonstrating their skincare routines, a Guardian investigation has found, raising concerns about the beauty industry’s reach. Dermatologists say children do not need multi-step skincare and warn the trend may be fuelling anxiety about appearance from an early age.

We want to hear from parents of children of primary school children or younger. Have your children asked for skincare products or felt pressure to follow routines they’ve seen online or heard about from friends? Have you noticed changes in how they think about their appearance? Do you have concerns?

If you’ve changed your holiday plans, we’d like to hear from you

Rising fuel prices, aviation fuel prices, and changes to travel rules such as the new EU border system, EES, are causing some holidaymakers to reconsider their travel plans. Holiday companies have predicted an increase in bookings for UK summer breaks after a jump in interest from Britons fearful of flight cancellations linked to the Iran war.

Have you changed your summer holiday plans in light of recent world events? We’d like to hear from you.

We’d like to hear from people who are in a throuple or who used to be in one, and what their relationship was like

The Guardian’s Saturday magazine is looking for throuples to talk honestly about the experience of love and commitment.

We’re particularly interested in talking to throuples living together under one roof, as well as throuples who are raising children as a unit of three parents. Is it easier to manage the chore rota and childcare when there are more adults in the room? Or more difficult?

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

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

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

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