Most allotment holders say the heat has meant more work for smaller crops, although some have found a silver lining

After a summer of repeated heatwaves and exceptionally dry weather in the UK, rain has brought some relief this week, but drought remains widespread and experts warn it will take weeks of sustained rainfall for water supplies to recover.

For people growing their own fruit and vegetables, it has been a challenging and sometimes surprising season. The Guardian spoke to growers across England about how they are adapting to a hotter, drier climate.

This punishingly hot and dry summer will probably be followed by another wet winter. But it’s nothing compared with what Britain will endure in years to come

This summer could be the hottest, driest and deadliest in English history. Successive heatwaves have so far claimed almost 3,000 lives. Nearly three-quarters of England and all of Wales is in drought, while key reservoirs are parched. Across this brown and stickily unpleasant land, from Grimsby down to St Ives, hosepipe bans are in force, while music festivals are staged not on green fields but in giant dust bowls.

Just how bad is it? I asked a leading climate scientist.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

A young activist thought her father’s disapproval of her leftwing views was purely political. Then one evening, a kiss goodbye sent her on a remarkable journey that continues today

• Last chance to buy the summer issue of The Long Read magazine, now with 15% off. Click here to order

As a child, Analía Azic used to pretend she was secretly a princess, the heiress to a magical distant kingdom. In real life, she was the daughter of a greengrocer named Juan Antonio Azic and a demure housewife named Esther Abrego. The family lived in the province of Buenos Aires, which, as anyone from the area will tell you with a dash of pride, is not the city of Buenos Aires but its rougher neighbour. Analía was not royalty, but she had an iron will and audacity out of proportion to her small stature.

Analía cared little for grades at the Ladies Institute of the Sacred Heart, where she rolled with the dominantes, girls who hiked their school skirts up so high they served as little more than belts, and dreamed of the weekend when they could finally trade in their school uniforms for designer jeans and tight tank tops and sashay into Electric Circus, the one local club that allowed in minors. There, Analía would climb atop the speakers and dance, then leap back down to toy with the boys from the Argentine air force’s technical trade school.

Clary’s back with Fully Dilated, a burlesque star called Entendre Entendre is doing lewd singalongs and there’s an A-Z of very dirty words. Our writer investigates Edinburgh’s smut outbreak – and ends up getting his own fantasies turned into erotica

On a street in Edinburgh, a woman I’ve only just met is quizzing me on my sexual fantasies. “Do you want softcore or hardcore? What positions do you prefer?” asks Cameryn Moore, a former phone sex operator turned playwright from the US, along with other, less printable, questions.

Her business plan is simple: for £20, punters can tell Moore what turns them on. She will then bash out a piece of bespoke erotic fiction for them on her typewriter. “I listen to their content then spit it out on paper – no punctuation, very stream of consciousness,” she says. “I also offer to read it out loud to them – and they walk away grinning from ear to ear because nobody’s ever asked them what they like when it comes to sex. So that’s what I do every day at the fringe: sit down for four or five hours a day and crank out dirty shit.” She calls the service Sidewalk Smut.

Prof Gustaf Hugelius warns wildfires could accelerate release of methane and carbon as vast regions approach irreversible thresholds

Heatwaves and wildfires are not just scorching forests, they are adding to the tipping point risks in the world’s vast permafrost regions, which contain three times more carbon than all the living vegetation on Earth.

This is a major concern for Gustaf Hugelius, a professor at the Bolin Centre of Climate Research at Stockholm University, Sweden, and a leading authority on the risks from thawing tundra and peatlands. In this Q&A, he explains why the world should pay attention.

Pádraig has a favourite side, whereas Dave likes to sleep farthest from the door. Help us put this argument to bed
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

I sleep better on the left side of the bed. I shouldn’t have to swap just because we’ve moved to a new flat

Former chief of staff tells of fears her conversations were being recorded and leaked to media by colleagues

Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff has lifted the lid on how “unbearable” it was working in No 10, revealing she feared her conversations were being recorded by colleagues seeking to leak her remarks to the media.

Sue Gray, who was the most powerful adviser in Downing Street before her resignation in 2024, was highly critical of the working environment under Starmer, saying she was “disappointed” that he did not act on her concerns about staff briefing journalists against her.

Overall results slightly better than last year, with share receiving grades 7, 8 and 9 rising by 0.1 of a percentage point to 23.1%

• GCSE results – latest updates

Almost one in four boys in England received top grades in maths while results in English improved across the board, helping to propel improved GCSE results for this year’s cohort of 16-year-olds.

The stronger performances in maths helped pupils taking GCSEs in year 11 reach a record level for higher grades in England outside the Covid pandemic years, when exams were replaced by teacher assessments.

Duke and Duchess of Sussex intend to relocate from US, with children to start British school in September

• Harry and Meghan: the key moments, conflicts and controversies since their US move

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are planning to return to live in Britain, six years after leaving for the US, it is understood.

The couple and their two children, Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five, are expected to relocate later in August to a non-royal residence.

Joanna Boydell steps down after widespread criticism over company’s handling of guest safety issues

The boss of Travelodge has resigned after widespread criticism of her handling of security failings at the hotel chain, including a shocking case where a domestic abuser was given a key to a woman’s room before assaulting her.

In a brief company statement on Thursday, Travelodge said Joanna Boydell had stepped down and been temporarily replaced by its finance chief, Ray Reidy. The company has launched a formal search for a permanent substitute.

Improvements in fire management however could mitigate increases by more than 70%, study shows

Wildfires are projected to burn 39% more of Europe by the end of the century even in the best-case scenario for stopping the planet from heating, a study has found, unless action is taken to manage them better.

The increase in hot, dry and windy weather that leads to small fires turning into raging infernos is to engulf more of Europe as carbon pollution pushes temperatures higher. In the worst-case scenario the researchers modelled, which would see global heating reach 3.6C above preindustrial levels, the burnt area would almost triple.

Former archbishop of Canterbury also has ‘awkward questions’ for activist Tommy Robinson on his claimed faith

A former archbishop of Canterbury has accused Nigel Farage of misusing the UK’s Christianity “to channel anti-Muslim feeling” and said he also had “some awkward questions” for the far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

Dr Rowan Williams, who was the archbishop of Canterbury for 10 years until 2012, said there was an “inevitable scepticism these days about some claims to religious conviction”.

Children’s hospital and residential areas hit in latest bombardment of capital and surrounding region

• Europe live – latest updates

A heavy Russian bombardment has killed at least 13 people in Ukraine’s capital and its surrounding region overnight, authorities have said.

A missile attack on Kyiv struck residential areas and warehouses, said the mayor, Vitali Klitschko. The attack damaged residential buildings, a medical facility and an educational institution. Thirteen people were killed and 33 injured, he said.

The prime minister has promised a crackdown on criminal gangs making money from dumping waste

A former archbishop of Canterbury has accused Nigel Farage of misusing the UK’s Christianity “to channel anti-Muslim feeling” and said he also had “some awkward questions” for the far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

Dr Rowan Williams, who was the archbishop of Canterbury for 10 years until 2012, said there was an “inevitable scepticism these days about some claims to religious conviction”.

There are lots of possible causes. Anxiety about migration, anti-Islamism. In France, that anxiety has a secular aspect, but the St George’s Cross still means something in the English imagination, which still has a Christian aspect.

The second thing is the globalising of all political discourse. The message given at international Christian conservative gatherings is that self-respecting nationalist movements need a bit of theology injected into them.

Healthwatch Rotherham says Emma AI system’s failure to grasp local ‘twangs’ is leaving people frustrated

Patients in a South Yorkshire town are frustrated by AI GP receptionists not understanding their “broad accents”, a health watchdog has said.

Healthwatch Rotherham, a local health and social care watchdog, said a number of practices in the area had introduced a new AI receptionist called Emma.

The cyber-fraud industry has flourished in Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar, with thousands of people trafficked into the industry. But even those who have managed to find a way out often cannot return home

Artillery fire thundered. Windows shattered. Roofs caved in. And thousands of foreign workers – many who had been tricked and trafficked into the vast cyber-fraud industry that has flourished in south-east Asia – fled.

For a brief moment, the regional crackdown appeared to mark a turning point in one of the world’s fastest-growing criminal industries, which has defrauded millions of people globally and generated billions of dollars for organised crime networks. Police and troops across Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar conducted mass raids to empty and demolish some of the region’s massive scam centres. But for many of those who escaped, freedom was only the beginning of another ordeal.

Five hundred people turn up to adopt plants from conservatory that will reopen in 2030 after renovation project

Above the waxy monstera leaves and bright pink hibiscus flowers in the Barbican conservatory hangs a giant net to catch the panes of glass that are at risk of falling from the ceiling on the unwitting plant lovers below.

This precarious situation has caused the estate to shutter its greenhouse on the third and fourth floors for three years so a full refurbishment can take place. But the hiatus has a silver lining for many of those who visited on Wednesday to give the plants from the conservatory a new home.

After 10 years and more than 17bn YouTube views, Geonroung Park, aka Baby Shark Boy, speaks about his life as a child star and his new K-Pop career

“I just remember having fun dancing and playing on what felt like a huge set,” Geonroung Park says, recalling the day 10 years ago when he was filmed, aged seven, doing the hand movements to a children’s song about a family of sharks.

That footage became Baby Shark Dance, now the most-watched video in YouTube’s history. It has racked up more than 17.2bn views and has held the platform’s global no 1 spot for 69 consecutive months.

On its anniversary, the author of a new book about the album explains the complex legacy and masterful musicianship of the 1986 classic

It was the summer of 1984 and things weren’t going well for Paul Simon. The year prior, a blockbuster Simon and Garfunkel tour ended in bickering. Meanwhile, even though the 1980 single Late in the Evening reached the US Top 10, Simon’s last two albums had not sold very well, and his marriage to Carrie Fisher was starting to unravel. In the midst of all that the 43-year-old folk icon was steadily working on building a beach home out on the far end of Long Island.

Many of Simon’s pilgrimages from Manhattan out to Montauk were soundtracked by a bootleg tape of accordion-heavy mbaqanga, a South African music style with jazz rhythms and bright guitar chords, he had received from a friend. It was on those drives that the seeds of Graceland, the crown jewel of Simon’s discography, were planted. “Many of us, in that day and age, found a moment of self-reflection – of being able to go deep inside ourselves – when we were in the car on these road trips,” said Ashley Kahn, whose new book, Days of Miracle and Wonder, follows the gestation process of Graceland. “If it wasn’t the radio, it was cassettes.”

Every year, hundreds of standups from across the world descend on the venerable festival. Here are some of their finest one-liners

10 of the funniest jokes from the 2025 fringe

Olaf Falafel: I remember thinking, as I taped a piranha to my boomerang, this could come back to bite me.

Richard Stott: To the person who stole my bank card and spent all my money on ancestry.com – you know who you are.

Before he was an irascible TV pundit, the Irish midfielder was equally feared on the pitch. Irish painter Seánie Harte has documented all the times Keane was sent off playing for Manchester United. ‘It’s a bit of fun,’ he says

Across his career in the 1990s and early 2000s, Roy Keane, the Ireland and Manchester United footballer, was a widely decorated midfielder with a relentless will to win. He also had his share of controversies, which included being famously sent off on several occasions.

These have now been documented in Irish painter Seánie Harte’s Red Card series, which marks the 11 times Keane received his marching orders while playing for Manchester United.

The comedian charts his life in demos from 1960s Liverpool to 2020s London in this fiery and addictive book

At 74, the comedian Alexei Sayle is approaching a dangerous phase for veteran British leftists: becoming a national treasure. Once described by special branch, in a surveillance file gleefully quoted in this memoir, as an “intellectual thug” who made “foul-mouthed comments about the royal family”, Sayle now appears regularly on Radio 4. His jolly, self-deprecating, man of the people side – one of his radio series is called Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar – has made him almost cosy.

But not quite. One fascination of his meandering career, which has included villainous Hollywood cameos, subversive podcasts and successful novelty pop songs, is the persistent fierceness of his politics – the underlying subject of this short, sharp book. “My decision to become … a professional funny man,” he writes, “wasn’t a choice made simply out of monstrous vanity … I was also … taking part in [Antonio] Gramsci’s war of position: attempting to get examples of communist thought on to Top of the Pops, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Doctor Who.”

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Nicky Bandini and Jordan Jarrett-Bryan for the second of our Premier League preview podcasts.

On one side, you face the domination of the Islamic Republic; on the other, the imperialist forces that Republic claims to stand against

August marks the anniversary of the 1988 mass executions in Iran, a horror that echoes in the country’s current surge in death sentences. It also marks the 19 August anniversary of the UK- and US-orchestrated coup against the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Amid the current, indiscriminate waves of US-Israeli military assaults against Iran, this letter of solidarity denounces the repression of the Iranian people and their political prisoners by forces both at home and abroad.

***

It’s simple, says the SpaceX boss – according to something called the ‘Kardashev scale’, we just have to move energy production ‘off-planet’

Next time the weather gives the UK 61 days without rain and we wonder idly if this is the end, there is a term we may whistle up to soothe us. Like murmuring the rosary, or putting our fingers in our ears and humming, this phrase is to be mumbled on repeat – “the Kardashev scale, the Kardashev scale” – a buzzy concept in tech, much favoured by Elon Musk, and precisely the thing we’ve been waiting for. The Kardashev scale is the answer both to our impending doom and our anxiety around it – and if we decide to believe in it, we won’t have to give the climate crisis a single thought until the last drip falls from the tap.

This is the idea and it’s a familiar one to anyone who has watched tech billionaires take intractable, commonplace crises and decide that, among the measures and proposals in play, the vital missing ingredient so far has been them. Do you remember when Jeff Bezos, rather than doing something quotidian and loserish like funding public education by ensuring Amazon pays the same tax rate as regular Americans, decided instead to reinvent preschools?

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

For most of modern history, technology sought to imitate humans. Humans increasingly seek to imitate technology

Two faces that appeared on my Instagram feed in recent months gave me pause. One belonged to John Travolta at Cannes. The other to Carla Bruni on a date night with her husband, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Both looked recognisably themselves, yet, they both also looked oddly unfamiliar. Their looks have provoked speculation about cosmetic enhancement, though never acknowledged by them. Bruni has previously denied having had work done.

In any case the feeling lasted only a second: a flicker of unease, as though I were looking at people who had become approximations of themselves.

Joseph de Weck is an associate fellow with the German Council on Foreign Relations and writes for Guardian Europe from Zürich and Paris

Reverse decluttering is here, prompting a shudder from me and my fellow neat freaks. Why would you want to be surrounded by mementos when you could be perfectly tidy?

Older doesn’t always mean wiser. Jo Whiley has spoken about a home hack she picked up from – clang! – Dame Judi Dench, and I’m afraid I’m opposed to it with every fibre of my being. Whiley is in a new phase – her four children are grownup – so she recently began the most satisfying project of all: a decluttering spree. Hard even to type those words without a shiver of anticipation. Trigger warning for fellow neat freaks, though: this anecdote does not end well.

Whiley went to interview Dench for her RHS Roots podcast and found the actor’s house “packed with family photographs, children’s drawings and memories everywhere”. Mind-blowingly, she means this as a positive. “Seeing Judi’s reminded me that lived-in spaces are often the most beautiful because they reflect a lifetime of love, family and shared experiences,” she says. “I suddenly thought: ‘Why am I putting all these things away?’” As soon as I got home, I immediately put all the family photographs back out.” TLDR: I cleaned up and then I made it all messy again. Shudder.

LBC’s Nick Ferrari can’t see what is stopping people buying a cheap toothbrush, but the grinding reality of living in poverty creates its own priorities

I don’t listen to Nick Ferrari on LBC very often. His antagonistic way of dealing with complex problems gets me screaming at the radio far too easily. Last month was a perfect example. Someone from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was on discussing research showing that about 7 million people are struggling to afford basic essentials, including toothpaste and toothbrushes, because of the cost of living crisis.

This did not strike me as a controversial finding. The cost of fuel, heating, food, school, clothes – everything – has gone up, while wages and benefits have not risen enough to keep pace. Ferrari, however, latched on to the toothbrushes. I found myself listening to him talk about the price of cheap toothbrushes in pound shops and at Asda. At times, it sounded like a price-comparison advert. At other times, it sounded like lazy journalism: take a complicated issue, strip it of all context and turn it into something that will generate outrage, clicks and applause.

Dr Katriona O’Sullivan is a psychologist, author and professor at Maynooth University. She is the author of the bestselling memoirs Poor and Hungry, and is a weekly columnist for the Irish Independent

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Competition and Markets Authority on message with PM’s planned purge of hidden fees and add-on charges

• Trainline, Virgin Atlantic and Red Driving School face investigation

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is on-message with Andy Burnham’s declaration of war on the small – and sometimes not-so-small – hassles and expenses of everyday consumer life created by companies’ underhand and misleading pricing tactics. Trainline, Virgin Atlantic and Red Driving School found themselves under investigation on Wednesday for various forms of alleged “drip pricing” – not being upfront about mandatory add-on charges, in other words.

The prime minister had nothing to do with the CMA’s pursuit, it should be said. The watchdog’s “consumer protection drive” pre-dates his arrival and was encouraged by legislation under the last Tory government – the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act of 2024, which gave the regulator “direct enforcement” powers, meaning it no longer had to go to court under consumer protection laws. And it is using those powers: eight cases were opened last November and driving schools AA and BSM plus the ticketing site StubHub UK have already been fined.

Nige’s gift, Dicky’s love of global heating and so much more – what fun it is watching the party implode

You would need to have a heart of stone not to fall about laughing. There was a time not so long ago when Reform could give a passable impression of a vaguely functional political party. One that knew its audience and had learned how to get its message across through the media. Admittedly this was largely because the party was a one-man band with all its MPs accepting that they owed their entire existence to Nige. They were satellites to his sun. Nigel Farage was Reform, and Reform was Nige.

In recent months, though, things have been falling apart and Reform now resembles an anarchic end-of-the-pier clown show. And chaos has seldom been this entertaining. The fun started when Nige had an uncharacteristic fit of humility and tried to pretend he was only a first among equals with the grandiose announcement of a “shadow cabinet” of four people. Largely because that’s about as many serious politicians as he had at his disposal.

Victims received less compensation than shareholders in the company behind its flammable cladding. Parliament must make corporations pay for harm caused

There is something profoundly wrong when the company behind Grenfell Tower’s flammable cladding paid more compensation to its shareholders than to victims of the disaster. Of Arconic’s £86m in Grenfell-related settlements, all but £1.5m was covered by insurers. Hardly enough to make a multinational think again. The company whose product the inquiry found was the “primary cause” of the fire’s rapid spread has ended up paying only a fraction of the wider social cost, while the multibillion-pound bill for making hundreds of buildings safe falls largely on the state. In June 2017, 72 people – including 18 children – died in London’s Grenfell Tower fire. Almost a decade later, nobody has been criminally charged over its causes. It’s hard to conclude anything but that Britain’s system of corporate accountability is rotten.

A new report by the thinktank Common Wealth and the financial investigations group FIND suggests putting right this state of affairs in England and Wales by adopting two changes that parliament could enact quickly. The first is a “failure to prevent” law that would make companies responsible for having adequate systems to prevent foreseeable serious harm. The second is to adopt a “punitive damages” approach. Rather than compensating victims for their loss, punitive damages ask what a company should pay for its conduct. Such an award against Arconic could have been used to meet the costs of remediation, the report says, “at no public cost”.

The Trump administration’s ‘America first’ approach has contributed to the scale of the crisis now unfolding in one of the world’s poorest countries

For months health experts have warned that the scale of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) could surpass the one that swept west Africa in 2014-16. This week, the authorities in the DRC announced that a grim milestone has already been passed: at least 2,325 people have died from the virus, making it the deadliest of the country’s 17 outbreaks and the fastest-growing in history.

There is no effective vaccine against Bundibugyo – a rare strain of the virus that spread fatally undetected during the spring, often being misdiagnosed as malaria or typhoid. In contrast to neighbouring Uganda, which succeeded in eliminating an outbreak, multiple factors are combining to let the disease rip through the DRC. The worst-affected region is contested by armed groups, and a context of population displacement and chronic insecurity has made monitoring and surveillance more difficult. Ebola treatment centres have been attacked as a result of misinformation and community distrust.

Local community food-growing could be best line of defence, writes Dan Farag, while David E Alexander says the government must be more open about its emergency planning, and Antony So says we need to look beyond stockpiling food

George Monbiot is right that Britain has become dangerously complacent about food security (Britain’s scorched fields mean a food crisis – and the government is ignoring the one measure that would help, 13 August). A country facing climate shocks, disrupted trade routes and increasingly volatile harvests – all of which contribute to not only the availability of food but its increased cost – cannot rely indefinitely on just-in-time supply chains and supermarket logistics.

But strategic food reserves are only part of the answer. The other underused resource is our communities themselves. Research has shown that during floods, infrastructure failures and other emergencies, local groups, charities and neighbours are often the real first responders, stepping in long before formal systems can fully mobilise. Resilience is not just about what sits in a warehouse; it is about the strength of local networks, trusted relationships and the capacity of people to act together.

Dismissing screen use entirely fails to recognise the crucial role modern technology plays in equity, accessibility and basic school operations, says Charlotte Bleakley

Your article buries the real story beneath the headline (‘Our children are less cognitively capable,’ says neuroscientist who wants to cut screen use in schools, 16 August). Even Jared Cooney Horvath’s own data, cited mid-article, shows that moderate school device use is associated with better outcomes than no device use at all – it is only the heaviest use daily that drags results down. That is a case for sensible integration, not blanket alarm.

The article’s most significant omission is what technology means for students with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), and for those learning English as an additional language.

The medical system is biased against women, says Carole Kendall, pointing to the very different way men who have colonoscopies are treated

I fully endorse everything Anna Moore writes in her excellent article on the lack of pain relief for hysteroscopies (‘It was barbaric. I was crying my eyes out’: why are so many women left in agony by routine womb examinations?, 16 August).

I have had three of these barbaric procedures, two of them being associated with being on hormone replacement therapy (HRT). All three were administered with very basic pain relief, ie a small amount of local anaesthetic, which I would compare to numbing a gum with a piece of ice and then proceeding with root canal treatment. I was offered a general anaesthetic on the third occasion, but this is way too much. At no point was anything else offered, like it is for colonoscopies.

Online ratings | School holiday scam | Back-row kisses | Barking | Champagne populism

To Stuart Heritage’s excellent list of words to describe our tech dystopia (18 August), can I add “iRate”? This is when you make an online purchase and, even before you’ve had time to remove the packaging, receive an email asking “How was it for you?”, followed by another a few days later if you fail to review every detail of the transaction, and then another, and another, until you’re left wanting to throw your purchase and/or your laptop across the room.
Elli Woollard
London

• Rather than criminalising parents who take their children on holiday during term time because it’s much cheaper (‘Cheap travel is not a defence’: the parents facing court for school absences in England, 15 August), why not address the blatant profiteering by travel firms charging inflated prices during school holidays?
Max Fishel
Bromley, London

Another left-back has been a priority all summer, but there seems to be no sign of one coming to Old Trafford

After signing Aaron Wan-Bissaka in 2019, Manchester United’s PR machine boasted they had scouted 804 right-backs before landing on the Crystal Palace player. At the time it felt like an unnecessary brag, designed to convince fans and journalists the club were doing their due diligence when it came to scouting and data.

Now, as the search for a left-back to challenge Luke Shaw drags on with less than two weeks of the summer transfer window remaining, there seems to be a lack of credible targets.

• Robinson and Tongue take five wickets each in first Test

• Ball cut in half so duo could share honour against Pakistan

A ball cut in half was the solution to Ollie Robinson and Josh Tongue’s novel problem. Courtesy of a helpful member of the Headingley ground staff, the two quicks shared the souvenir after each took five wickets on the opening day of England’s first Test against Pakistan, with the visitors bowled out for 171.

“You don’t really have too many halves of cricket balls, so it’ll be something that we never forget,” said Robinson, showing off his share in his post-match press conference as he reflected on his haul of five for 51, including a wicket with the first ball of the series.

Updates as County Championship returns
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Over in Leeds, England and Pakistan wade into day two of the Test. Ali Martin was watching yesterday.

Last night I heard a radio programme about an amazing young man called Ben West who, after his beloved younger brother Sam took his own life aged 15, started a suicide prevention website called Reasons to Stay. Strangers submit letters for people struggling with their mental health, which are then checked by clinical professionals. Anyone visiting the website gets a new letter, a new message of hope, each time they refresh. It is there for you if you need a helping hand.

Newcastle, Arsenal, Brentford, Everton, Leeds, Coventry, Aston Villa, Hull and Ipswich have all brought in exciting players

By Opta Analyst

Anthony Gordon will be a difficult act to follow at Newcastle, but Touré could be a shrewd replacement. Blessed with electric pace, the 20-year-old is a bit more of an old-fashioned winger in that he predominantly plays from the left and is left-footed. As a result, he was more of a creator than a goalscorer for Hoffenheim last season.

• Dutch driver had been linked with Mercedes and McLaren

• Verstappen: ‘The team is like a second family for me’

Max Verstappen has ended speculation about his future in Formula One by signing a new contract with Red Bull that will extend to the end of 2030.

The four-time champion had been linked with potential moves to Mercedes and McLaren and had also intimated that he might call time on his F1 career because he was so unhappy with the new regulations imposed this season and they way they have effected his enjoyment of racing.

• Coach had not been heard from in two months

• Baptiste serving a custodial sentence in Morocco

Leon Baptiste, the British Athletics coach who had not been heard from since visiting Morocco around two months ago, is being held in prison in Marrakech, it has emerged.

Baptiste, 41, who coaches a number of elite athletes, is believed to have gone to Morocco for the weekend with friends. As of last weekend he had not been heard from since by his athletes or the UK Athletics officials who pay him as a Loughborough-based consultant, with messages to his phone not returned.

Spaniard loses narrowly in fourth round of the Cincinnati Open yet the buzz around him will only get louder

As Rafael Jódar slowly trudged from the court, he could only bring himself to wave at his adoring crowd for no more than a millisecond. The 19-year-old was appropriately devastated after he had come within two points of victory on numerous occasions before losing 4-6, 7-6 (3), 6-3 in the fourth round of the Cincinnati Open to an excellent Flavio Cobolli.

No matter, Jódar departs Ohio having further solidified himself as the subject of so much conversation on the ATP Tour. This has been a turbulent and unpredictable year in men’s tennis, largely thanks to Carlos Alcaraz’s extended injury layoff. The one certainty through it all has been the imperious rise of Jódar. After a short period competing at the University of Virginia, Jódar started to play regularly on the tour only in May last year. In August 2025, he was ranked No 540. He began the 2026 season at No 165.

US president pivots towards ‘crushing’ economic operation against Iran and its trading partners as military strikes fail to bring Tehran to the table

Donald Trump has announced a new campaign to isolate Iran’s economy, threatening “tremendous economic consequences” on any country that helps or does business with Tehran, a move that could set up a fresh confrontation with China if implemented.

“Today, I am announcing the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Any country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face tremendous economic consequences.”

Penny Wong calls in Israeli ambassador as PM expresses ‘outrage’ over IDF decision

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The family of the slain Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom has described a decision by the Israel Defense Forces not to open a criminal investigation into her death as deeply disappointing, and called on the government to push for the release of evidence, including audio from the drone strike.

Israel’s decision prompted outrage from Australia on Thursday. The country’s ambassador to Australia, Hillel Newman, was called in by the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, while the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, expressed “outrage” and insisted he would press for justice for Frankcom and her colleagues.

Inflation deterring shoppers from spending, especially in the US, says sportswear fashion chain

Sports fashion retailer JD has slashed its profit forecasts as cost-of-living pressures, fuelled by the US war on Iran, weighed on sales of trainers.

JD Sports, which sells a range of sports brands including Nike and Adidas, said widespread inflation had hit shoppers’ wallets, resulting in falling sales across important markets such as the US, where it struggled to quickly shift trainers and other footwear.

Exhibition at Charles Dickens Museum in London looks at writer’s holiday pursuits, from Kent to the Isle of Wight

It’s summer in the city, the pubs are crowded, and the coast beckons. In a year that has so far brought five significant heatwaves, it is a fair description of the current holiday season.

But the same was true, too, of the much les frequent hot, dry summers of the past, including 186 years ago when Charles Dickens put pen to paper in anticipation of escaping London for the sea breeze in Broadstairs, Kent.

Former real estate developer leads press corps on tour of grounds and says ‘one thing I know how to do is build’

As the US national debt climbed past $40tn for the first time on Wednesday, and the war with Iran he started nearly six months ago dragged on, forcing Americans already struggling to pay the bills to spend more on fuel, Donald Trump led the press corps on a tour of the extensive remodeling of the White House grounds he is personally overseeing in his role as the self-styled “builder-in-chief”.

The tour, during which Trump showed off upgrades such as a new granite driveway and refurbished columns, and expounded at length on newly laid grass, culminated in Trump autographing the back of a stone, inscribed with his name, to go in the center of the ornate new helipad he insists he needs.

Newton Flotman, Norfolk: It looks like a toilet brush yet predates the dinosaurs. I can’t help but give it a stroke by the roadside, even if I get strange looks

The rural road is flanked with a bank of green fuzz. It’s jungly and verdant – lush in a landscape that has turned brown and yellow from drought. I run my hand over the green bristles erupting from a bamboo-like stem.

Equisetum arvense, or field horsetail, looks fluffy, but it is wiry and rough. One could serve effectively as a toilet brush. The bristles are rich in abrasive silicon, which gives the texture of sandpaper. This explains another of equisetum’s common names, scouring rush, from when it was used to clean wood and polish metal. If you are careful, a hollow jointed stem can be separated at its junction and then rejoined like children’s tubular pipes for building, slotting back in a satisfying way.

Andy Burnham promises drive to tackle toxic waste, raise fines and use AI-powered drones to detect illegal activity

Illegal dumps in West Yorkshire, Surrey and Kent will be cleared up using taxpayer money, Andy Burnham has announced, as the prime minister promises a new drive to tackle toxic waste.

Ministers have identified dumps in Bradford, Runnymede and the Isle of Sheppey, which collectively contain about 22,000 tonnes of illegal waste, to be cleared in the next phase of the government’s national clear-up effort.

Recycling system in Cambridgeshire that could save thousands of litres a day is deemed not in line with rules

The largest water reuse system in the UK, which could save thousands of litres of water a day for people living in one of the driest regions of the country, is not allowed to be switched on because of drinking water regulations.

As water supplies in England reach critical levels, the Guardian can reveal that a model water recycling system within an urban housing development in Cambridgeshire has not been switched on since it was made ready in 2021.

People told they and their pets should keep out of river at Ham amid anger over Thames Water’s treated sewage plan

Swimmers are being warned not to enter the water at the first official bathing site on the River Thames, in south-west London, because of toxic blue-green algae in the water.

The blue-green algal blooms are rare in moving water but are likely to be caused by the extreme heat, low river flow, and nutrient pollution from sewage waste.

On drive to end rough sleeping, homeless people and charities say they have heard similar declarations before

• Andy Burnham calls on wider society to help end rough sleeping by Christmas

As Andy Burnham set out his plan to end rough sleeping on Tuesday night, volunteers from homelessness charity Under One Sky were offering hot drinks, sandwiches, socks, underwear and soap to dozens of rough sleepers around Tottenham Court Road in central London.

Among those sleeping on the streets, the prime minister’s plan was met with widespread scepticism born from long familiarity with similar political declarations.

Officers still investigating deaths of Zeina Alayn, Hassan El-Khawas and daughter Sara El-Khawas at Shoreham-by-Sea

A father, mother and their teenage daughter who died off the Sussex coast on Tuesday have been identified.

Sussex police named the victims as Hassan El-Khawas, 55, his partner, Zeina Alayn, 37, and their 14-year-old daughter, Sara El-Khawas. A younger girl who was also part of the family is in hospital in a critical condition. She has not been named.

Review by paediatricians links child vaping with poor respiratory health such as coughing, wheezing and asthma

Young people who start vaping risk developing breathing problems and going on to smoke cigarettes, children’s doctors have warned.

Child vaping is consistently linked with poor respiratory health, such as coughing, wheezing, bronchitis symptoms and asthma exacerbations, while vapes have been shown to act as a gateway to smoking cigarettes, according to one of the most comprehensive reviews of the available evidence so far undertaken by the Royal College of Child and Paediatrics Health.

Researchers laud return of giant tuna to North Sea after being fished almost to point of extinction

Researchers have lauded two giant bluefin tunas being caught off the coast of Yorkshire for the first time in more than six decades as a “success story” for marine conservation.

The tunas, which were caught a day apart off the coast of Whitby earlier this week, have mostly been absent along the north-east coast of Britain since the 1960s.

Crown prosecutor tells Victorian court that all seven of Patterson’s grounds for appeal should fail while arguing for tougher sentence

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Triple murderer Erin Patterson should have been given no possibility of ever being released from prison, or a non-parole period so lengthy that she was likely to die behind bars, Victoria’s highest court has heard.

Patterson, 51, is appealing against her convictions in the court of appeal, with the director of public prosecutions is also appealing against the sentence handed down to her, arguing it is “manifestly inadequate”.

The collapse was caused by a landslide, while local officials say the death toll is likely to rise as recovery efforts continue

More than 100 people have died after an artisanal goldmine at a small village in western Central African Republic (CAR) caved in due to a landslide, local officials and aid workers said on Wednesday.

The landslide happened on Tuesday afternoon in the village of Zamboye, about 50km (31 miles) from the town of Baboua and close to the border of Cameroon. Footage on social media appeared to show an avalanche of sand descend on a group of people, likely the miners, and cover them.

A landslide triggered by the quake had blocked access to the village where Paulina Pobi had lived, leaving her buried under the collapsed remains

An 84-year-old woman has been discovered alive in the flattened remains of her home three days after a powerful earthquake hit eastern Indonesia, authorities have confirmed.

The 7.7-magnitude quake struck off Indonesia’s Flores island on Saturday morning, killing at least 73 people, injuring more than 900 people and displacing nearly 60,000 others.

Arturo Béjar, former Meta safety engineer, tells jury tech company was aware of products’ potential harm to children

Meta has taken a “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy when it comes to the safety of children on its social media platforms, according to a whistleblower who testified during a landmark trial against the company on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta safety engineer, told the jury that the company was aware of the harm its products caused children, which included its recommendations pushing content from sexual predators and violent and graphic images. He said he repeatedly raised the issue to various Facebook and Instagram executives but that they did little to resolve it.

PM wants to reduce department’s stranglehold on public purse and bring long-term thinking to economic policy

Andy Burnham is far from the first prime minister to dream of taming the power of the mighty Treasury.

Boris Johnson all but forced the resignation of Sajid Javid by handpicking his team; Margaret Thatcher favoured her economic adviser Alan Walters over Nigel Lawson, prompting the latter’s furious resignation; and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s power struggle was the stuff of Whitehall legend.

UK competition watchdog investigation is part of broader clampdown on illegal ‘drip pricing’

• Nils Pratley: all power to UK watchdog’s war on ‘drip pricing’

The UK’s competition watchdog has launched investigations into Trainline, Virgin Atlantic and Red Driving School over concerns that all three companies displayed misleadingly low prices to their customers.

The Competition and Markets Authority’s investigations are part of a broader clampdown on “drip pricing”, an illegal practice that makes a product appear cheaper by not including all mandatory fees.

Owner of firm behind ‘Temu Range Rover’ will open facility in Bedfordshire in autumn

The Chinese carmaker behind the irreverently nicknamed “Temu Range Rover” is plotting further UK expansion with a major research and development centre in England.

Chery, which makes the Jaecoo and Omoda car brands, said the launch of a new R&D site was “the next step in our long-term plan” for Britain as it also moves towards manufacturing its cars in the UK.

Company’s robots have gained global fame via videos of them performing martial arts and as dancers for pop stars

Unitree, the world’s biggest humanoid robot maker, has made a spectacular entry on to China’s stock market, with its shares surging by more than 600%.

The Chinese company’s robots have gained global fame via viral videos of them performing martial arts, running at Olympic speeds and serving as backup dancers for pop stars.

A ‘capacity for despair’ forged by political oppression has long been considered a Magyar national trait. But after Orbán, writers in the country remind us that melancholy must not always be bleak

A lone visitor looks for a garden outside an empty monastery. A morose housekeeper won’t let anyone behind the door of her own home. A retired general living alone on a crumbling estate waits 40 years to confront the only friend he ever had. Melancholy, an affinity with oblivion without a concrete cause, suffuses the Hungarian fiction translated for foreign audiences over the past 30 years, from the tortured tales of Sándor Márai to the taut novels of Magda Szabó.

In his book In Praise of Melancholy, essayist László F Földényi tells the story of an Englishman who monomanically decides to teach himself Hungarian. For Földényi, the commitment to studying a language with 26 cases and with no connection to any other language, from a culture besieged by centuries of invasion, is to embrace melancholy, a seductive “capacity for despair”. To read Hungarian literature as an outsider, the poet János Pilinszky claimed in 1972, is to acquire unique spiritual insights that come from centuries of rootlessness, alienation and strife.

Sayuri Ichida and her sister used to be distant – until their mother died. This exhibition traces their close relationship through sun, wind and snow

The popular cosy-crime drama is back – with a couple of changes. Plus: some late-starters get into the dating game. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One

Lisa Hayden-Johnson was convicted of child cruelty, but she still insists that she didn’t do anything wrong – and barely gets a grilling about it. Her children, who speak for the first time in this documentary, deserve much more

There’s an increasingly common pattern emerging whereby documentary makers take a story that was run through the Outrage-A-Tron by the tabloids to produce headlines that warped public understanding (“Britain’s Worst/Most Evil/Most Deadly” and so on), then proceed to put back some of the lost nuance and present the more complicated original picture. Lucy Letby (“Britain’s Worst Child Killer”) has been the subject of at least two such films redressing the lost balance. Last week, the story of Rhianan Rudd (“Britain’s Youngest Terrorist”) was unpacked and its many sadder parts laid out for inspection in The Schoolgirl Terrorist?

In Love You to Death, it is the turn of Lisa Hayden-Johnson, who became known as “Britain’s Most Evil Mum” during her trial and conviction for child cruelty after years spent fabricating her son Matthew’s apparent illnesses. He was put through more than 300 medical encounters, nine general anaesthetics, four operations by the age of nine, and endured many unnecessary constraints on his life, including using a wheelchair, feeding tube and oxygen tank, until Lisa was arrested when he was nine.

The hard-working action hero gives us exactly what we expect, and often want, in this sturdy cargo ship-set caper

The dog days of August have already seen the trotting out of some usual suspects from a junky Eli Roth horror to a belated nostalgia comedy sequel to a Mike Pence-approved Ronald Reagan drama. This weekend, yet more howls will be heard in cinemas with a lower-tier horror instalment and an even lower-tier girlies on tour comedy being shuffled out. It’s all amounting to a rather rubbishy end to what’s been a pretty remarkable summer (easily the biggest since the pandemic), allowing for Spider-Man supremacy until September slowly returns the industry from the D-list closer to the A.

There can still be low-level popcorn pleasures to be had in August. Last weekend’s throwback dino caper The End of Oak Street was a B-movie made with just the right balance of serious to silly while last year Zach Cregger gifted us Weapons, the rare genre film to end up winning an Oscar. Trophies are unlikely for this weekend’s other medium-sized release Mutiny (if only the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards hadn’t died off at the turn of the 2000s) but if the words “Jason Statham vehicle” possess a safe, soothing quality then there are far worse ways to spend a Saturday night.

Uninteresting mythology and junky effects push a once-promising horror franchise further from what it once was

When the Insidious franchise started in 2010, it felt like a liberating moment for director James Wan and writer (and later director) Leigh Whannell, the Australian duo who captured the zeitgeist with the original Saw movie, which imported the gonzo energy of low-budget Ozploitation flicks. As the partners quietly ceded control to other film-makers, the Saw sequels sunk into gross, dreary exercises in mechanized murder, and they moved on to other projects. When they emerged with Insidious, another shoestring horror movie, it was a confident and wildly entertaining return to form, like a down-and-dirty fusion of 80s staples such as Poltergeist and Ghostbusters.

Now the pattern has repeated itself. Though Whannell stuck around longer than Wan – Wan directed the sequel, but Whannell directed the third film and has writing or story credits through the most recent sequel, Insidious: The Red Door – the creative returns have diminished over time, even if the cheap productions are still like a license to print money. Insidious: Out of the Further arrives as the sixth entry in the series, and the fun has almost completely evaporated, replaced by a dull mythology that would be hard to piece together even if the sequels hadn’t come out in scrambled chronology.

Alongside Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer created a feminist punk vernacular that’s still inspiring the likes of Olivia Rodrigo. They recall the clarity and conviction of their historic teenage exploits

Back in June, a cut-and-paste photocopied flyer began appearing on telegraph poles around Portland, Oregon, promoting a DIY show by an apparently defunct band at an intimate community space. The band hadn’t mentioned it online, but hopeful fans bought every ticket anyway. Their bet paid off: the gig really was the first in 32 years for Heavens to Betsy, the pioneering feminist punk duo of drummer Tracy Sawyer and singer-guitarist Corin Tucker – the latter’s band before Sleater-Kinney unleashed her visceral vibrato unto the world. Tucker proudly made the flyer herself.

Heavens to Betsy were barely out of high school when they played their very first show, 35 years ago this week, in Olympia, Washington, a two-song set as part of a now-mythical indie fest dubbed the International Pop Underground Convention. The festival also featured the likes of Fugazi, Bikini Kill and Melvins; meanwhile Heavens to Betsy had practised only a couple times. Before an audience of about 100, Sawyer was so terrified that all she could think was, “This has to be over soon.”

The maverick former Public Image Ltd bassist takes us on a typically picaresque journey through his ‘Kafka-esque’ days at Transport for London, being named by Sid Vicious and his spiritual learnings

Sometimes, on the top deck of a London bus, pension-age punks will politely disturb the concentration of a man on his iPad. “They’ll say: ‘Are you Jah Wobble?’” recounts the musician born John Wardle, his upbeat cockney accent ringing with delight. They will ask if he’s working on anything. “And I like to say: ‘Yes, I’m recording an album. I’m doing it right now.’”

In the 2020s, the 68-year-old bassist and bandleader has been revisiting the city of his birth and youth, composing and producing albums including the cosmic dub of The Bus Routes of South London, or the celestial electronica of Thames Symphony, while traversing London on public transport.

Scotland’s Thea Musgrave is still writing radical music with perambulatory soloists and a message of hopefulness. Her latest work, for bassoonist Amy Harman, comes to the Proms this weekend

Thea Musgrave is a phenomenon. Born in Scotland in 1928, the composer has lived in the US since the early 70s, but has lost none of her accent, her infectious optimism, and her drive to keep writing. As she told me from her home in California, with a joyfully rolling laugh, “I’ve got to this age, and from now on I’m going to do what the fuck I want to do”. That includes her latest opera, on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando – Orlando: An Escapade – which will premiere at the Buxton festival next year, and a new bassoon concerto for Amy Harman, Out of the Darkness, which you can hear at the Proms this weekend, on 23 August.

The bassoon concerto develops one of the central innovations of Musgrave’s life and career, which she’s still intensifying and exploring in her 99th year: what she calls her “dramatic-abstract” approach to her orchestral compositions, in which the players aren’t a single collective told what to do by a conductor’s gestures, but instead are released as individual characters and identities.

Four years since their last album, the anthemic Australian band are back with a fresh sound and new music about finally being ‘overwhelmingly OK’

When tickets for the first Gang of Youths shows in Australia in four years went on sale last month, a one-off show in Thirroul sold out in 45 seconds; two shows at Sydney Opera House went in minutes. Though I have loved the band for years, I was surprised by how emotional it was to see them play on home soil again in Sydney. Dave Le’aupepe, who has a claim to being the country’s most charismatic frontman, seemed to sense the mood. “Thank you for loving me,” he told the audience. “I know it’s very difficult.”

As I left the show, bewildered and tearful, I locked eyes with a stranger in the foyer who was also crying. Without saying a word, we both burst out laughing; feeling a bit silly, perhaps, but also a sense of wonder at our shared reaction. I later heard there were two marriage proposals in that audience; I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more.

A teenage boy navigates adolescence and the traumatic loss of his mother in this poignant coming-of-age novel set in rural Ireland

Something is happening to literary time. In the last fortnight I’ve read new or forthcoming novels about a mirror universe where history runs backwards (The Understory, Chloe Benjamin), an agency that offers appointments with the past (Time Travel for Beginners, Jaclyn Moriarty), and a young woman who’s genetically untethered from linear life (Audrey Niffenegger’s long-awaited sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife, out in October). And these are just the latest books to meddle with the fourth dimension. There are dozens: from Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series and Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, to Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time. Time is losing the plot – or perhaps it’s the other way around.

I have an armchair theory about all this counterfactual longing: the lure of the do-over. The present feels like a corrupted timeline. If only we could find the glitch.

A vivid and hopeful study of how culture endures in the midst of extreme violence

Towards the end of her subtly piercing book about art in wartime, Charlotte Higgins recounts an autumn visit to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, in the north-east of the country, a short drive from the Russian border. In a tranquil park, she sees a man standing in a stream, making stones balance on top of each other in a teetering tower – “a metaphor of life in that city,” she writes, “that would have seemed too obvious for a novel”.

Still, as a good novelist would, Higgins doesn’t seem to beg telling details from a place so much as have them leap to her open eye and ear. The cartoons a boy is watching that fall silent in a power cut, allowing the distant boom of explosions on the frontline to be heard. A cityscape tattooed on a young poet’s arm that cuts off suddenly where skin from his leg was grafted after he was torn up by shrapnel. Cataracts of larkspur, as Higgins describes them, in a field in the frontline Donbas region, “pouring down the hill, pooling at the bottom into a great lake of blooms … Larkspur thrives on ground where there has been recent disturbance.”

A historian charts the emergence of a democracy-crushing dystopia that is – in some ways – already with us

Pulitzer prize-winning US historian Jill Lepore’s new book addresses the threat posed to liberal democracy by artificial intelligence. According to Lepore, the extraordinary power of private tech companies led by men whose priorities may not align with the wellbeing of the Earth or its inhabitants is set to destroy civilisation as we know it.

Lepore’s concept of the Artificial State is capacious. It includes both a fantasy desired by a select few and a reality that is already with us. The fantasy is of an atomised society in which an elite can transcend biological and planetary restrictions, “abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state, and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence”. The reality is that of public discourse having shifted to privately owned platforms on which monetised attention is valued above all else.

This fictional memoir by Octavius’s right-hand man shows us bloodshed, betrayal and hectic jockeying for power

If you’re one of those people who thinks about the Roman empire several times a week, Robert Harris has you covered. He follows his trilogy of novels about the life of Cicero and his one-off about the unpleasantness in Pompeii with a narrative that takes us from civil war through the assassination of Julius Caesar, with all the bickering and bloodshed that follows, on to the decisive battle of Actium and Octavius’s apotheosis as Caesar Augustus. We meet Cicero, Fulvia, Lepidus, two Caesars and a burly Antony (“Imagine, if you will, a statue of Hercules with a club in one hand, a wineskin in the other”).

Here’s the clever bit: he narrates it all from the point of view of Octavius’s right-hand man, Agrippa, a much less well-remembered figure. Harris tells us he “left behind no speeches, few letters and only a couple of sentences of direct quotation”. Yet Agrippa was “effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years” and “the greatest general of the period”. Octavius couldn’t have risen without him, but he seems to have done his best to write him out of the story afterwards, according him only two passing mentions in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti.

After their hit Untitled Goose Game, Australian studio House House is back with a new game where your only goal is to go exploring with friends – so we took them on a big walk inside Big Walk

When I arrive to meet with the tiny team at Melbourne game developer House House, they’re sitting in a circle under a eucalyptus tree. After introductions, the five of us set off into the scrub. Over the course of our hike we take a train to the beach, huddle on deck chairs in the sand dunes and climb a mountain as the sun rises. All without ever leaving our desks.

Welcome to the world of Big Walk: House House’s new game after the runaway global success Untitled Goose Game, which saw millions fall in love with being a naughty goose rampaging through a bucolic village. After Untitled Goose Game’s overwhelming success, House House wanted their next game to be very different and “unusual”. Despite this, Big Walk has been an immediate success, with more than 1m downloads in the first week of release.

As gaming’s biggest publishers retreat into safer bets, a new generation of independents are building an alternative from the ground up

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During the 1990s, a new strata of independent film studios and distributors revitalised the Hollywood movie machine. The likes of Miramax, New Line Cinema and October Films challenged the ageing behemoths of the industry and pushed forward offbeat directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky and Jane Campion. The decade is widely considered an artistic high point for western cinema after the bloated mainstream excesses of the 1980s. Could something similar now be happening in games?

Certainly, we have a comparable setup. The big players of the games business are in various states of creative disarray: Electronic Arts (EA) has been bought out by a Saudi-led consortium, which is likely to lead to more cautious, hit-driven decisions; Microsoft bought Activision and Bethesda and then ordered waves of redundancies; Ubisoft has cancelled several titles and is posting big losses. Those companies are also facing rising development costs, so they’re circling the wagons, focusing on legacy brands and freezing recruitment. It’s hard to imagine any left-field works of genius emerging from this imaginative quagmire.

Human by day, vampire by night, Coen has difficult choices to make – beginning here in the 1300s, his adventure could span centuries in upcoming sequels

The Blood of Dawnwalker could be the start of an epic saga. Created by some of the talent behind The Witcher 3, this dark fantasy role-playing game takes place in the 14th century in the fictional land of Vale Sangora, a Carpathian valley of wetlands, mountains and forests cut off from the rest of the world and under the rule of a vicious vampire clan.

The developers envisage Dawnwalker as a trilogy. And because protagonist Coen is half vampire himself, that trilogy can skip across time, culminating in the modern day.

Sonic’s creators explain how the speedy scamp has kept on running through generations as an enduring avatar of ‘attitude in the face of adversity’

One day in the early 1990s, I came home from university for the weekend and discovered that my dad had bought himself a Sega Mega Drive, bundled with a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I knew about Sega’s mascot of course. The launch of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game in 1991 was a landmark moment for the company, massively boosting the sales of its 16bit console in the west, ripping market share from the dominant Super Nintendo. While Mario was the family favourite, Sonic with his speed, attitude and brash visual energy encapsulated the edgy spirit of the early 1990s MTV culture. That weekend, Dad and I did little else but team up for daylong Sonic sessions, the game’s two-player mode letting us play cooperatively as we zoomed through those dense, beautiful play zones.

Thirty-five years later, I am still a Sonic fan. There have been plenty of rough times (Sonic 06, Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sonic Free Riders – sorry, I can’t go on), but there have been plenty of good ones too. (Rush, Mania and Colors, and I have a soft spot for Sonic R, a racer developed by Traveller’s Tales, which went on to make the Lego games). Few people know this rollercoaster better than Takashi Iizuka, who worked on Sonic 3 as a designer and has been series producer for almost 20 years. When he joined Sega in 1992 he wanted to work for the company’s arcade division, but after playing the original Sonic – especially Sonic 2 – he was seduced.

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
An unlikely relationship blossoms in Abigail Weinstock’s compelling and touching solo drama

It takes a brave writer/performer to make her character a sociopath. How to keep the audience on board with someone who is callous and indifferent?

In Abigail Weinstock’s sparkling one-woman show, 30-year-old Eliana has been caught making clandestine recordings in her neighbour’s bedroom and cannot deny it. A court summons follows. Even then, her first thought is how to game the system.

At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 31 August

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

St Paul’s Cathedral, London
Elemental roars and full-frontal vocal expressivity as the UFO focuses on a mission bigger than a good performance

There were climaxes in Verdi’s Requiem that would surely have registered on a seismometer as they gathered into a thrillingly elemental roar before dissipating as a series of echoed convulsions into the vast dome above. There were choral susurrations that swept over the orchestra, exhortations delivered in crisp consonants. There were sinuous woodwind lines that took a few seconds to wend their way out of the orchestral clamour, and vocal soloists – Natalya Romaniw, Natalie Lewis, René Barbera and Jongmin Park – who cut instantly through it in a shock of full-frontal expressivity from the very front of the stage.

Four years after making their UK debut with their second ever performance, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra is now on its fifth international summer tour. Founded by Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson in response to the Russian invasion in February 2022, this orchestra has always had a mission bigger than producing a good performance. And what counts as “good” is always shaped by circumstance, after all. As the numerous speeches that preceded the music stressed, the UFO tour as “cultural ambassadors”, their work centred on hope and resilience, solidarity and justice at what one Ukrainian diplomat called “probably the most difficult moment in our modern history”. One of the orchestra’s percussionists is away at the frontline – so too is the son of composer Bohdana Frolyak, whose Gloria opened the concert, its smudgy chromaticism weighted with sadness.

Battersea Arts Centre, London
The staging is awkward and balance is an issue at points, but the singers of British Youth Opera are consistently impressive

Clapham – home to hundreds of young Londoners crammed into sticky-floored house-shares of a weeknight and the sweaty dancefloors of Infernos at the weekend. Where better to stage The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky and WH Auden’s 1951 fairytale-cum-morality-play about a country innocent swallowed whole by the temptations and corruptions of the capital? Add a cast and creative team in their 20s, and you’ve got immersive theatre before you even open the doors.

We’ve seen Rakes before from British Youth Opera (2009’s starred a certain Nicky Spence, star attraction of this year’s Last Night of the Proms – this finishing-school for students and young professionals clearly works) but never one conceived, directed, designed and stage-managed entirely by the participants themselves. In terms of professional development it’s a gift, but it made for a bit of a bumpy show on opening night.

Festival theatre, Edinburgh
The choreographer combines a homophobic killing from 2012 with a remembrance for his father in an often rapturous show about healing

In 2019 at the Edinburgh international festival, the Swiss director Milo Rau staged an intense theatrical investigation, La Reprise: Histoire(s) du Theatre (I), recreating a homophobic killing in Belgium. The murder of Ihsane Jarfi, seven years earlier, had made headlines and the news disturbed choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui who was just a little older, also gay and had a Belgian mother and Moroccan father like Jarfi.

Cherkaoui now arrives at the same festival with his own act of remembrance, every bit as engrossing as Rau’s, yet more expansive. It pays tribute, too, to the choreographer’s father who died 30 years ago and whose past is interwoven with Jarfi’s death. If that raises any qualms, Cherkaoui’s larger point is about the interconnectedness of all lives and his characters morph into each other. He takes his cue from the victim’s first name, which essentially means “benevolence”, and counters the production’s disturbing flashes of violence with a floating lightness, whether in breakdance or traditional forms, and by presenting ideals of harmonious joy and kindness.

A selection of winning images from DarkSky International’s 2026 Capture the Dark photography contest. It is the sixth edition of the annual night-time photography competition, which drew 2,288 submissions from 30 countries

The maker of indie classics Kids, Swoon and Poison on daring to have a temper in the 90s, what some producer credits mean – and what happened between her and Joaquin Phoenix

Trailblazing producer Christine Vachon bestrides the world of US independent film-making like a colossus. She has championed idiosyncratic American cinema for more than 35 years, scoring hits such as the romcom Materialists, which starred three superhero actors (Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, Chris Evans) and grossed $108m, alongside curiosities such as Zola, a strippers’ road-trip comedy based on a string of viral tweets.

Vachon got her start in the early 1990s. Her often scandalous movies – from Poison (gay prison sex) and Swoon (gay child killers) to Happiness (paedophile dad) and Kids (delinquent teens) – dominated the cultural conversation decades before boutique studio A24 had sold its first tote bag. Her production outfit Killer Films, which she founded in 1995 with Pamela Koffler, has as its logo a cartoon bunny with a target for a body, mischievously evoking the company’s blend of irreverence and danger. “I don’t think we’ve ever made a movie that somebody hasn’t been offended by,” Vachon said in 2000.

As her supergroup with Neko Case and Laura Veirs celebrates the 10th anniversary of its sublime album, the Ingénue herself will answer your questions

A decade ago, three of the finest voices in Americana got together to make a sublime supergroup record. Case/Lang/Veirs, in case the title didn’t make it plain, brought together Neko Case of the New Pornographers, stalwart Portland songwriter Laura Veirs and kd lang, the Grammy-winning Canadian country icon. Sadly, that glorious album has remained a one-off – though a new anniversary release includes a gorgeous never-before-heard song, Accidental Tattoo – but happily, lang is joining the Guardian for a very rare interview to answer your questions.

Maybe you’d like to know secrets from behind the scenes of making this record in lang’s loft and Veirs’ dining room, or about lang’s relationship with the late, great Tony Bennett, her animal rights advocacy, what the Edmonton country-swing scene was like in the mid-80s before lang became a country star and later mainstream icon, or what she and Cindy Crawford talked about when they posed for quite possibly the greatest magazine photoshoot of all time. What was Roy Orbison like to work with, is new music on the horizon, or what her contemporary constant cravings are? Or anything else indeed.

In a year that’s seen the British actor star in the season’s two biggest blockbusters – and marry his co-star from both – he is reportedly earning a huge pay packet thanks to box-office bonuses

The British actor Tom Holland is expected to “make at least $100m” for starring in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, according to the Wrap.

Unnamed sources “with knowledge of Holland’s deal” say he was paid $20m (£15m) upfront, about double what he reportedly received for his previous Spider-Man film No Way Home in 2021. But the extraordinary success of Brand New Day at the global box office means the 30-year-old is expected to earn another $80m or more in backend bonuses.

Quick to fire up and compact enough to take camping, Ooni’s gas-powered model sets a high bar for outdoor dining

• The best pizza ovens – tested
• Gozney Dome Gen 2 pizza oven review

If you’re looking for a gas-powered, compact, portable pizza oven that’s easy to set up, yet still offers generous cooking space, the Ooni Koda 2 may be the pick for you.

The second generation of the company’s award-winning Koda 12 oven has space for a 14in pizza compared with the original’s 12in one. There is also more room to manoeuvre inside, a wider temperature range (so you can cook seafood and steaks, too), and a flame designed for better heat distribution. Unlike the Koda 12, the Ooni Koda 2 is available with optional accessories, including the rotating stone bundle tested here (a pricey upgrade of £229) and a smart temperature hub (the Connect, £89), which means you don’t have to constantly reach for an infrared (IR) thermometer.

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

Tim Martin may have spent the better part of a decade trying to convince people that leaving the EU was the only way to secure cheap pub grub, but credit where credit is due: JD Wetherspoon is banning people from blasting out TikToks, videos and music on speakerphone in its pubs. The pub chain has not, however, banned you from asking Thursday quiz questions out loud and then showing off that you know your feral hogs from your escaped macaques. So get to it. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 261

Low-cal, crisp and fruity, these are our expert’s favourite non-alcoholic and hard seltzer cans to pop in your bag this summer

• I tried 75 low- and no-alcohol drinks: here are my favourites

Since White Claw disrupted the drinks-in-tins category with its UK arrival in 2020, hard seltzers have continued to grow in popularity. Loved by celebrities, festival-goers and commuters alike, these alcoholic sparkling waters are known for being low in calories, sugar and with minimal ingredients, while containing roughly the same amount of alcohol as a standard lager (up to about 5% ABV).

Hovering at about 100 calories a can and with a few carefully chosen (usually) natural flavourings plus spirit, it’s easy to see why seltzers have gained a reputation for being a relatively light choice when picking up a couple of cans. But what makes a good seltzer?

Ninja’s assisted machine will make every coffee you crave at hundreds of pounds cheaper than some of its rivals, although you’ll have to put up with a few quirks

• The best espresso machines, tested

If you’re not a morning person, decision-making is best avoided before 8am. Or, at the very least, until you’ve had a cup of coffee. That is why assisted espresso machines, such as the Ninja Luxe Cafe Premier ES601UK, are so welcome in my kitchen. They require more effort than a fully automatic bean-to-cup machine, but the reward is a glimmer of manual espresso perfection – without all the faff.

The Ninja Luxe Cafe Premier ES601UK has been gracing my kitchen worktop on and off for over a year, and – despite some mild to moderately serious irritations – it’s a capable alternative to the similarly priced, fully automatic bean-to-cup machines found in my roundup of the best coffee machines. The big question is whether you’re willing to put in a little more effort for your morning coffee in exchange for a tastier cup – and, in doing so, put up with some of the Luxe Cafe’s quirks.

Whether you’re trying to squeeze more into a carry-on or simply want a tidier suitcase, our expert rounds up the top cubes, from compression to lightweight

• The best suitcases for your next holiday

Nightmarish scenes reminiscent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting used to erupt whenever I travelled with a case. Skirts and shirt sleeves slithered out from under compression straps, worn clothes frolicked with unworn clothes in the lid compartment, and even the best suitcases would sometimes leave my clothing creased and jumbled.

Packing cubes have changed all that. Boxy, zippable and small to varying degrees, these organisation accessories are designed to keep items neat and separate inside a suitcase or bag.

From handheld to corded, self-emptying to stick models, these are our resident cleaner’s favourite vacuums for a spotless home

• The best cordless vacuum cleaners, tested
• How to make your vacuum cleaner last longer

Buying a vacuum cleaner isn’t as easy as you might think. With so many brands and models to choose from, it can be bewildering. Sticking with established brands isn’t necessarily a safe bet, with past performance being no guarantee that the latest models will be as good. Meanwhile, prices can be deceptive, with some affordable models now closing the gap on top-of-the-range brands when it comes to cleaning performance.

You can’t know all this by browsing through a department store or online. The ideal thing to do would be to take a few models home to try them out – but good luck persuading anyone to let you do that. Thankfully, you won’t have to try because I’ve tested an array of models for you. I’ve measured each one’s ability to perform a range of real-world cleaning jobs, so you can discover the best vacuum cleaner for you.

Sun-drying tomatoes until they’re leathery on the outside and soft within is something of an art, but it’s more than worth it for this moreish pasta dish

One set of guidelines I received in Sicily for sun-drying tomatoes was two to seven days, depending on temperature, humidity, wind and the size of the fruit. I might as well have been given a surfboard and told “go”, because that advice felt far too broad and general to be helpful to a complete beginner. So I asked someone else.

For them, with an ideal temperatures of 35C and low humidity, trays of egg-sized tomato halves arranged on wire racks on wooden boards, sprinkled with salt and left in full sun during the day, and taken in at night, generally took three days to reach the desirable point: dry enough to store, but still with a flexibility and sweet chew. From broad to specific, this advice also felt overwhelming: What if the temperature changes or turns humid? What are the signs of humidity? What if my tomatoes are bigger than eggs? What happens if it rains? In the end, though, between these two extremes of advice and temperatures swinging between being in the pleasant 20Cs and burning 40Cs, too much humidity, rain (bring them inside) and not being particularly organised, I have managed to – relatively successfully – dry batches of tomatoes of all shapes and sizes.

The English language can seem designed to trip us up, whether we’re greeting a colonel or travelling to Worcestershire. Here are some of the biggest stumbling blocks

Name: Açaí.

Age: First imported to western countries from South America as freeze-dried pulp in the 1990s.

A gazpacho is not only a great way to use up odds and ends in the crisper drawer, it will also surprise you with its flavour and versatility

Since reading How Not to Die, by Michael Greger, I’m always looking for ways to include greens in every meal. He regularly pops into my mind when I’m cooking, whispering in my ear: “Add some spinach to that risotto,” say, or “Moringa powder will make your porridge much more nutritious.” So I’m sure today’s green gazpacho would make him proud. It’s a great way to clear out your crisper drawer and pack a meal with all sorts of greens. Anything goes, but if any of your chosen ingredients (eg, basil or mint) has a particularly potent flavour, just add it in moderation or to taste. Incidentally, the key to a great gazpacho is the quality of the olive oil, as is a nice, bold-but-balanced acidity, which is easily achieved with a squeeze of lemon or your best vinegar.

Make the most of the season’s freshest produce with a light but richly flavoured tomato-dosed dinner and a booze-laced, New York-inspired dessert

At Toklas, ingredients such as datterini tomatoes and ripe peaches are taking centre stage. These recipes celebrate the simplicity of summer cooking, allowing produce to shine with minimal intervention. From a risotto layered with sweet tomatoes, pecorino and mint to roast peaches finished with amaretto and mascarpone, they capture the character of the season – fresh, generous and full of flavour.

I was living on my own for the first time in 35 years, walking every day. Nature reminded me how much there still is to be found in emptiness

After my husband died, the birds started behaving strangely towards me. This was not my imagination; it really happened. On my daily walks, I was startled by how close they came to me – approaching, hopping alongside me and chirping. If there were a lot of them – and if there was no one else around – it felt as if they were accompanying me, maybe trying to convey something.

I had walked on the heath near our home with my husband for years. But his illness meant that, during his final months, he could not walk with me any more. When he died – in January 2023 – I had been walking on my own for six months and the birds, I am sure of this, had paid no attention to me.

Because I’d visited so often to print things, she made me feel that someone had witnessed the journey I was on, all the way through to its difficult conclusion

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

Mum’s disease progressed slowly at first, and then in a really big rush. After years of battling early onset Parkinson’s, in 2015 we were suddenly told she only had six months left.

I was living in Brisbane, Australia, and Mum was in a care home 600km away in Taree, so I began flying down every second weekend to visit. At the time, it was still common to print out your boarding pass – or at least, it was for me; I was a bit late to the tech game.

A trainee accountant and a company director had differing views on opportunities for young people, but could they find common ground on the new prime minister?

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

Margaret, 22, London

Occupation Trainee accountant and part-time arts producer

Pam and Mike couldn’t keep their hands off each other when they met. But as aging and biology have taken their toll, their sex life has suffered

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

We haven’t had sex in two years. Mike says it’s because his dick is dead

Sign-up perks may capture the attention but should the focus be on the interest-free overdraft?

• Students on their biggest financial shocks

• The best student deals and discounts

• An insider’s tips on student money

In the scramble to sort out university accommodation, join freshers group chats and work out how a student loan payment is meant to stretch across a whole term, there is one big decision that is easy to put off but worth getting right: which student bank account to open.

Student accounts work like any other current account but come with two extras that don’t apply to the general public: an interest-free overdraft, and a lot of perks designed to hook you in as a customer for life.

It said that was what I was due after I submitted a claim for £300 for energy exported through my solar panels

British Gas paid me more than £38,000 by mistake, then had no idea how to reclaim it. I receive quarterly feed-in tariff (Fit) payments for energy exported by my solar panels.

In May, I submitted a claim for £300, based on my meter reading, and I received an email stating that I was due £38,611.59.

Fraudsters use pictures posted on Instagram or Facebook to create emails seeking bank account details

You are on a short break in Porto and post some pictures of your family on Instagram or Facebook. With a small section of the Douro river in the background, you think it could have been taken anywhere.

A few days later, you get a text saying that your card was compromised. “We detected unusual activity while you were travelling in Porto – please verify immediately,” says the message.

You can save money at university, especially using schemes such as UNiDAYS, Student Beans or TOTUM

• ‘Watch your spending, use free perks’: an insider’s tips on student money

With rents on the up and food costing more, maintenance loans are stretched thinner than ever. Knowing how, and where, to get a discount can make a real difference.

A golden rule is to register with the big discount websites and apps – UNiDAYS, Student Beans and TOTUM – using your university email address as soon as you have one. Each has a slightly different roster of retailers, so it is worth signing up to all three.

Here’s what professionals have to say about good workout etiquette, from using equipment to being on your phone

I like to think of myself as a fairly laid-back person. Other people’s behavior is not my business. There is one notable exception: my gym nemesis.

He brings his computer to the gym and takes work conference calls at full volume. He has four to six pairs of dumbbells around him at all times – then doesn’t put them away. Intellectually I understand he is a fragile, flawed human like the rest of us, but in my gut I sometimes wonder if he arrived here from another galaxy.

Findings highlight importance of sleep health during middle age, particularly for those with lower socioeconomic status

Sleep that is extremely disrupted or that goes on too long could mean a loss of nine months from working life after the age of 50, a study has found.

It also found that women with no sleep disturbances had a longer working life from 50 to 68 than their male equivalents.

Premixed drinks are ultra-processed products but their marketing claims create a ‘health halo’ that takes the focus away from the harms of alcohol, researchers say

Premixed alcoholic drinks are not known for their health benefits. But that hasn’t stopped a boom in products being marketed with “better for you” claims designed to appeal to younger, more health-conscious drinkers.

Labels such as “low sugar”, “gluten-free” and “low carb” are being used in advertising to promote the products, and social media influencers spruik the products under the hashtag #healthydrinking.

Melissa Davey is Guardian Australia’s medical editor

Antiviral is a fortnightly column that interrogates the evidence behind the health headlines and factchecks popular wellness claims

In an era of transparency, people are detailing their financial struggles on the internet, breaking one of the last social taboos

Discussions regarding personal finances have traditionally been taboo. But gen Z and millennials in the US are finally normalizing conversations about money, openly sharing about salaries, rent and investment strategies, but also their (sometimes substantial) debt.

In recent years, financial influencers (finfluencers) – some licensed professionals, others not – have gained visibility, sharing advice on once-covert, perhaps unsexy topics such as Roth IRA contributions, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and maxing out 401(k)s. The most popular have a big audience: for instance, Humphrey Yang, a former financial adviser, has more than 2 million YouTube subscribers, and Erika Kullberg, an attorney and financial expert, has more than 20 million followers across social media.

The Traitors star gives his tips on how to shine at a wedding – from mismatching jacket and trousers to rocking a man bag

For a long time, I didn’t enjoy going to weddings. It wasn’t the celebration or the party that put me off – it was the clothes. I felt I had to conform and wear a suit, and yet the shape and style of what was on offer were the antithesis of what I would normally wear.

Wedding guest attire for women is a whole micro-industry these days. But men are still stuck in the dark ages. It’s all grey, navy and black suits. I often see men wearing the same sort of suit they might wear to a funeral. What kind of message is that sending? It’s high time we got to experiment because a wedding is a celebration of love. You don’t want to look like you’re in mourning.

Soon it will be harder for the beauty industry to aggressively market at children, hopefully spelling the end of gimmicky, ineffective kiddie makeup

This summer’s announcement that under-16s will soon be banned from some social media platforms and, more recently, that 16- and 17-year-olds will face a digital curfew, strikes me as a good and sensible decision. It also has unignorable benefits for beauty consumers who are old enough to vote, as opposed to those receiving pocket money – with whom brands are inexplicably obsessed.

A social media ban makes it harder – though not impossible – for the beauty industry to market aggressively and cynically at children, which might mean gimmicky, ineffectual kiddie makeup and skincare will stop occupying a disproportionate share of marketing spend and retail space. Will it be the end for “lip oils” in 36 shades of pink?

Lululemon’s absurdly capacious 80-litre bag will set you back a small fortune – and it’s one of the cheapest giant holdalls on the market

Name: Big-Ass Bags.

Age: The titular “Big-Ass Bag” launched this month (but large carrying receptacles have been available for centuries).

How does a rabbi choose her shoes? Why does a psychoanalyst like slogan tees? And why does a doctor avoid wearing scrubs at work? Seven striking dressers share their surprising style stories

Andrew Geldart, 65, retired engineer, Cornwall

The Mjølkevegen was once used to bring milk from high pastures to the towns below. Now cyclists are discovering the road’s breathtaking panoramas of peaks and lakes, dotted with cosy inns

‘Norway is a hilly country,” shrugs Glenn Roar Berge. He’s not wrong, though he is fond of an understatement. I’m in Valdres in southern Norway to explore the cycle routes that skirt the edges of Jotunheimen national park. Glenn from Jotunheimen Travel is our guide, a born-and-bred local of these mountains.

For most of our three-day ride, we’ll be following the Mjølkevegen, or Milky Way, a 155-mile (250km) route from Vinstra in the north to Gol in the south. It was developed after the second world war, when increased demand for fresh milk meant connecting the mountain farms with the towns below. While farming continues, the road has been embraced in recent years by gravel cyclists, (typically riders on drop-bar bikes favouring unpaved roads and trails), looking for a multi-day adventure far from towns and cities.

Anyone who has frequently landed in New Zealand’s capital has a hair-raising story to tell, and this year’s ‘super’ El Niño could only intensify the winds

It had been a smooth late-July flight from Auckland, until the plane started its descent into Wellington. Then the bumps and swaying began.

“The more we went down, the rockier it got,” says Laura, a Wellington resident who wished to give her first name only. “There was one point where we must have got a horrible cross-wind and it felt like the plane was about to flip over. At that point, the entire flight screamed.”

I found two days of hard graft – repairing hiking paths with a conservation trust in stunningly remote Wester Ross – a surprisingly rewarding experience

I hadn’t planned to enjoy any of this. As summer light fell on Stac Pollaidh – the summit’s teeth bared, the views stretching across the surreal emptiness of Assynt – I found myself ankle-deep in blanket bog next to a hiking path, back bent, hacking at the tough terrain with a heavy-duty mattock. Farther up the hillside, another hunched figure was cutting a deep brown scar into the moor grass and, while he worked, I stood back to look at my efforts. At my feet was a cross drain that I’d unblocked and repacked with new stonework to prevent storm damage and aid runoff from the path. A burble began to trickle, slow yet clear across the sparkling bedrock. It felt a little like appreciating a masterwork in a museum.

I’d come to Wester Ross with a bucket and spade, not for a beach break at particularly gorgeous Achmelvich or Clachtoll nearby, but with the notion of giving something back to the hills. The Outdoor Access Trust for Scotland (Oats) is a steward of many of the Highlands’ most famous mountains – developing, building and repairing paths and habitats – and I’d joined a group of volunteers for a two-day stint on the north-west Highlands’ most visited peak. Factoring in a free stay at Ullapool youth hostel and the promise of a home-cooked communal meal in return, plus an acceptable midge-free forecast, I’d driven north from Edinburgh the night before in a buoyant mood.

Forget the vampire tales – the Eastern Carpathians deliver dramatic peaks, roaming bears and deep solitude

As the sun disappears behind the high tree line, our campfire spits and crackles. Four plump trout are sizzling on a flame-heated slab of rock, a cooking technique used by people in the Gurghiu mountains, part of Transylvania’s Eastern Carpathians, for centuries. Apart from gentle birdsong, it’s the only sound up here, 1,550 metres above sea level and far from any town or village.

“This area is very wild,” says Samir Teslovan, who drove us up through the densely forested peaks from his guesthouse in Toplița. “When I come here to the mountains, I charge my battery, charge my soul. I feel free, like the wind.”

From bank accounts to rent and food, students and recent graduates offer advice to those beginning to study

• Student bank accounts: don’t be swayed by freebies

• The best student deals and discounts

• An insider’s tips on student money

We asked students, and recent graduates, to tell us about the biggest financial shock they had when they started university, and what advice they had for freshers.

Many of my clients expected to find fulfillment from their career, marriage and home. Instead, they feel grief

“I have the career I wanted, but at this point I just don’t care.”

“I don’t know why I’m so angry.”

Madley, Herefordshire: The cool of our churches has been welcome to many, but my polyester robes are not made for the heat

Every summer, while roasting in my robes, I say to myself: “I must get a lighter set.” If I had a cotton cassock instead of a polyester cassock and alb, swaying to the singing of hymns might not raise my core temperature as much. In that regard, this year hasn’t been without its challenges.

Even so, our churches have become “cool spaces”. In Madley towards the end of term I received a call from Mr Batstone, headteacher of the primary school, wondering if classes could be held in church. Madley parish church is huge, with room in the nave for each class and a cool, subterranean crypt. I headed over later that week to find the church buzzing with children.

Any new addition to your collection can contain stowaways, so you’d be wise to deploy a little patience – but how long is long enough?

The problem
There is nothing quite like the joy of bringing home a new plant. You find the perfect spot, nestle it in among your others, and stand back to admire the new arrival. What you cannot see are its passengers: a few spider mites tucked under a leaf, mealybug eggs in a joint, or fungus gnat larvae in the compost. A fortnight later, plants that were perfectly healthy are speckled, sticky or swarming, and you have no idea how it happened.

The hack
Quarantining means keeping any new plant separated from the rest of your collection for a few weeks before letting it join the others. The logic is simple: if something is going to emerge, you want it to do so in isolation, where it can be dealt with before it spreads to the whole crew.

Speculation about US president’s executive assistant sparks furious backlash from White House

Wearing shoulder-length blond hair, gold earrings and a red dress, cancer survivor Natalie Harp introduced herself to the 2020 Republican national convention as “a formerly forgotten American from California” and compared Donald Trump to George Bailey, the everyman hero played by James Stewart in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life.

“George Bailey’s father was right,” smiled Harp, her voice echoing in the Andrew W Mellon auditorium in pandemic-hit Washington. “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away. Mr President, that makes you the richest man in the world.”

Whether it’s paying for dinner, going on holiday or sharing a taxi, friendships can be fraught with financial frustrations, which are very rarely aired. Here’s how to break the taboo

Summer is the season of socialising, from alfresco drinks to weddings to group holidays. It can get expensive – and suddenly you start noticing those friends who don’t pay their way. Or the ones who splash the cash and make you feel cheap. In fact, there are a host of annoying money-related habits that can cause tension among friends. Here are 20 common sources of financial frustration – and how to resolve them.

People say they’ve been secretly filmed in their own homes, at concerts and at work. Are the wildly popular smartglasses the final nail in the coffin of personal privacy?

“I’ve had one person who told me that their intentions were creepy,” a man tells me over a video call, on condition of anonymity. He’s based in Los Angeles, and while we speak, he eats what appears to be tuna directly out of the can. “He said: ‘I go to strip clubs, and I want to record the strippers … Normally I put my phone in my chest pocket, but the glasses are more convenient.’”

The man I’m talking to runs a business called Ghost Metas. He’s one of hundreds of vendors, easily discoverable online, who specialise in disabling the flashing LED light embedded in Meta’s smartglasses that blinks when wearers capture photos, videos and audio. After Ghost Metas disables the LED, it’s impossible for someone to know they’re being filmed.

The government has announced plans to create thousands more apprenticeships. We want to hear from employers about their experiences of recruiting apprentices

The government has announced plans to create thousands more apprenticeships in England as part of wider reforms to technical and vocational education.

We’d like to hear from employers who have taken on apprentices. What has your experience been like? Have apprentices benefited your organisation? What have been the biggest challenges? What changes or government support would encourage you to offer more apprenticeship opportunities?

What are some of the weirdest or priciest things parents and carers have to buy

From September 2026 a new law comes into force, which will mean parents and carers in England should not have to buy more than three items of branded school uniform. Secondary and middle schools may ask for four items if a tie is one of them.

The government says it hopes the new law will “ensure the cost of school uniforms is reasonable and provides the best value for money”.

We would also like to speak to florists, groundskeepers, and professional gardeners about how they are planning for the future

The heatwaves and drought conditions across parts of Britain this summer have brought a series of challenges for food producers and those working on the land.

According to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, hot and dry weather has resulted in the earliest UK cereals harvest in at least 20 years.

We’re interested in hearing from people who have found themselves unexpectedly out of work in midlife and have struggled to get another job despite years of professional experience

For many people in their 50s and 60s, losing a job can be the start of a long and unexpected struggle to get back into work. Despite years – or even decades – of professional experience, some say they are applying for hundreds of roles without success, while others have had to take lower-paid work or claim benefits to make ends meet.

The number of people aged 50 to 64 receiving out-of-work benefits has reached 2.15 million, according to recent analysis by the Centre for Social Justice. We’d like to hear from people across the UK who have found it difficult to find work later in their careers.

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