For years, her husband was adding sedatives to her evening cup of tea. Now, with fellow survivor Amanda Stanhope, she is lifting the lid on a hidden and diabolical crime

In September 2024, Amanda Stanhope watched, transfixed, from her home in Manchester, as the Gisèle Pelicot case made headlines around the world.

“Gisèle’s case was the first time I knew of somebody else who had been raped while they were drugged,” says Stanhope. “I remember feeling: ‘Thank God I’m not alone. There’s one other person in the world that this has happened to.’” Stanhope’s former partner, David Rogerson, was under investigation at the time for raping her while she slept, and filming the abuse. Pelicot’s husband, Dominique, would end up being convicted for drug-facilitated rape and sexual assault (DFSA), along with 50 strangers he had recruited online to abuse his wife.

Anger, guilt, shame: the deepest unseen wound of this war is the rift between those who left and those who stayed behind

“Can we reschedule?”

Over the years of working with western colleagues, I had learned to accept that they don’t fully understand what war feels like from the inside. They would ask me to find someone in occupied Mariupol for an interview, or seem genuinely puzzled that I couldn’t just log on at a time that suited them. I made my peace with this long ago – they don’t have to understand. But this time, it was a Ukrainian who asked.

Diana Berg is a Ukrainian artist, writer and cultural manager from Mariupol, and the founder of Platform TU, an independent cultural initiative now operating in exile after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

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

Ray Exworth spent his life filling Cornish sheds with breathtaking sculptures – but wouldn’t let anyone in to view them. Now, after his death, his secret body of work has been revealed

Ray Exworth spent six decades creating one of Britain’s most extraordinary bodies of sculpture – and almost nobody has seen it. Hidden inside a labyrinth of sheds on a remote Cornish smallholding, his vast, obsessive constructions have remained locked away from the world, visited only by a fortunate few. Even his wife Susie, 92, was largely kept out. “I could not visit without an invitation!” she recalls.

Exworth, who died in 2015 aged 84, had just one major exhibition in his lifetime, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1975. Since then, the man who might belong among Britain’s most notable artists has disappeared almost entirely. His works – sprawling, intricate and wildly ambitious, assembled from an array of salvaged materials – have remained exactly where he left them: filling seven studio sheds and a scattering of shipping containers, unseen.

It is hard to make the case for a 10-year plan in our political culture of constant campaigning frenzy – but the new PM will try

It all sounded feasible but improbable. A few days after Labour’s disastrous performance in local and devolved elections in May, one of Andy Burnham’s allies confidently forecast for me the sequence of events that would convey the then mayor of Greater Manchester to No 10. A friendly MP would surrender a parliamentary seat. Keir Starmer would be persuaded to resign. Other leadership contenders would see the futility of resistance to the Burnham bandwagon. It would roll, unchallenged, up Downing Street. It was a plan with many moving parts, and a lot that could go wrong.

That it all worked as predicted took more than luck. The Makerfield byelection was winnable for Labour only with the right candidate and a strong campaign. The scale of Burnham’s victory generated momentum sufficient to push other obstacles aside. The “Andy” brand was stronger than his party’s logo.

Rafael Behr is an Guardian columnist

Hackney council will close Keith Miller sports pitch at end of year to build urgently needed social homes

Campaigners say the loss of a much-loved football pitch in east London to a housebuilding programme will be a huge blow to the local community.

Hackney’s Keith Miller sports pitch is known locally as the “San Siro of east London” – for non-football fans, that’s the famous Milan stadium that is one of the biggest in Europe. The Hackney version, however, is due to be demolished at the end of the year so that urgently needed social homes can be built.

These visualisations from exclusive polling modelling show how the UK parliament could change under different voting systems

New analysis produced exclusively for the Guardian reveals how different voting systems would return wildly different seat totals in the UK parliament based on current polling.

While the current first past the post (FPTP) system could leave Reform UK just 30 seats short of a majority based on recent polls, the modelling shows how proportional systems would be likely to give the UK a more finely balanced parliament that better represents the votes people cast.

Measure to cost more than £500m, with money allocated to allow devolved nations to do the same

Single bus fares across England will be capped at £2 from January, Andy Burnham has announced, as he continues a cost of living blitz in his first week as prime minister.

The nationwide cap is currently set at £3 until the end of March 2027, although some areas – including London and Greater Manchester, where Burnham set a £2 limit as mayor – have lower top rates for single tickets.

Annual June figure comes after new PM pledges to reduce cost of living and improve economy

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UK inflation dropped by more than expected in June to 2.6%, in a boost for Andy Burnham’s plans to reduce the cost of living.

The new prime minister has pledged to bring down the cost of living to give households more disposable income and improve the outlook for the economy, announcing a winter VAT cut on electricity bills and lowering the cap on bus fares in England.

After nationwide protests Oleksandr Syrskyi is to be replaced in reshuffle and popular defence minister returns to government

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and offered a “prominent position” to the defence minister he sacked last week in a move that sparked nationwide protests.

In a late-night TV address, Zelenskyy said he was appointing Mykhailo Drapatyi, a popular and innovative general, as the new head of Ukraine’s armed forces. Drapatyi would oversee a reorganisation of the army’s command structure, Ukraine’s president said.

US military completes 11th night of strikes as attacks overshadow diplomatic efforts in Pakistan to salvage interim ceasefire deal

• Houthis threaten attacks on shipping tankers if they use Saudi ports on Red Sea

• What is Pickaxe Mountain, Iran’s underground nuclear facility?

The Jordanian army said it intercepted four Iranian missiles on Wednesday with two additional missile falling in an open area, AFP reports.

The two missiles that the army did not intercept fell in “two remote, uninhabited areas, without causing any human casualties or material damage” the army said in a statement.

Firm behind ChatGPT reveals agent powered by its models chose to attack Hugging Face database by itself

OpenAI has revealed an autonomous AI agent powered by its technology went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a prominent startup by itself in an “unprecedented incident”.

The company behind ChatGPT said the startup Hugging Face had detected and contained the agent – an AI tool designed to carry out tasks without human assistance – which had entered its systems.

Pub chain blames worse-than-expected sales on rising costs for workers, food, energy and property taxes

• Business live – latest updates

JD Wetherspoon has issued its fourth profit warning in seven months, with the pub chain blaming worse-than-expected sales, despite the World Cup, as it struggled with rising costs for food, workers, energy and property taxes.

Shares in the pub chain tumbled 10% on Wednesday morning as its chair, Tim Martin, warned that profits would fall short of forecasts when it reports full-year earnings in October.

Judge finds Wilson did not defame Charlotte MacInnes, lead actor in Pitch Perfect star’s directorial debut The Deb

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After a blistering dispute that spanned continents and years, Hollywood A-lister Rebel Wilson has been found not to have defamed her co-star in a series of social media posts.

The Pitch Perfect star was sued by Australian actor Charlotte MacInnes, who played the lead role in Wilson’s directorial debut film The Deb.

Fine of 20m won (£10,108) could also be imposed for serving insect not approved for consumption under local law

Prosecutors in South Korea have asked a court to sentence the owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant to one year in prison for serving a dessert topped with ants, an insect not approved for consumption under local food safety law.

The request, made on Monday, also sought a 20m won (£10,108) fine for the company that runs the restaurant, Yonhap news agency reported.

Puffling excites volunteers trying to save the last known regular nesting site on mainland of southern England

For years, volunteers have craned their necks and tested their patience to peer into the crevices of the cliffs hoping for a glimpse of fluffy joy.

Finally it all paid off as a puffling – baby puffin – poked its way into the sunshine, becoming the first to be spotted on the coast of Dorset in southern England for three decades.

The new PM is already under pressure to explain how he will pay for his ambitious plans to remake Britain

Andy Burnham has made lowering the cost of living his first major policy announcement in government, with an immediate tax cut to remove VAT on energy bills.

As he begins to flesh out his agenda for government, the prime minister said the measure would provide “breathing space” for households. But Burnham is under close scrutiny over how his plans will be funded.

Diligent, popular, unexpected pick for the Treasury has been given a straitjacket – and the job of funding PM’s policy promises

On the frequent occasions that John Healey would travel abroad as defence secretary, he was so determined to keep working he would get the crew to tether a desk to the inside of his military aircraft so he could read his papers.

His diligence is one reason why Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, made Healey his unexpected pick for chancellor on Monday. Allies say others include their shared commitment to re-industrialisation and devolution.

European leaders have made positive noises about the new UK PM, but he is likely to face the same restrictions as Starmer

• UK politics live – latest updates

Andy Burnham is unknown in Brussels, but that will soon change. In his schedule for the autumn is an EU-UK summit that may underscore the same dilemmas that have confronted previous British prime ministers in the relationship with Europe.

EU leaders were quick to offer congratulations to Britain’s prime minister, the seventh since the 2016 Brexit referendum. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said she looked forward to strengthening the EU-UK partnership “for the security of our shared continent” and “the prosperity of people on both sides of the Channel”. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, invited Burnham to visit Berlin “very soon”, noting that the UK and Germany’s “deep connection is particularly evident in these times”.

New prime minister is implementing immediate tax cut to help ease cost of living pressures for British households

• Andy Burnham to cut VAT on electricity bills as first cost of living move

Household electricity bills for people in Great Britain will not attract VAT for six months, under the first of a series of cost of living measures announced by the new prime minister, Andy Burnham.

Iranians describe how daily life is becoming ever harder as conflict continues and human rights crisis worsens

As US airstrikes hit port and inland cities in Iran, and Tehran strikes at the US’s Middle East allies, the escalating conflict has left many Iranians fearing that, amid war and a worsening human rights crisis, they remain trapped in a cycle of violence and repression with no way out.

Bandar Abbas, on the strait of Hormuz and the headquarters of the Iranian navy, has been hit by strikes every night since the latest escalation began nearly two weeks ago. Soroush*, a writer based in the city who secretly publishes a newsletter documenting human rights violations in Iran, described a “new normal” for its residents.

Neso denies allegations aired by Tory MP that staff took part in cover-up over decision-making in heatwave

In a control room in Wokingham, Berkshire, staff work around the clock, minute by minute, to align Great Britain’s fluctuating power supplies with its ever-changing demand.

However, as households struggle to adapt to soaring summer temperatures, staff at the government-owned National Energy System Operator (Neso), tasked with keeping the lights on, have faced the kind of challenge usually reserved for the country’s coldest winter nights in recent weeks.

The Carr family took in Steven Judy, hoping to ‘save’ a troubled teen. They didn’t know he would become one of the most hated men in America

Childhood returns to Traci Carr in fragments.

Night-time. She is five. She wakes to shadows on the wall, her room strange in the dark. Her footie pyjamas slip against the wood as she pads downstairs and climbs into bed next to her foster brother, Steven Judy.

Olivia Rodrigo, Noah Kahan and Morgan Wallen have all dealt with audience effluence in recent weeks – but that’s only one part of a fearsome subculture that has built up around fandom, endurance and ‘getting barrier’

The front row of a gig is a sacred space. When you love an artist, you want to be as close to them as possible, without a view obscured by someone else’s hairdo. You want the possibility that the artist will pluck you from the crowd, form a deep and enduring connection and end up marrying you. Or at least notice you.

Last month, Olivia Rodrigo revealed how acutely she had noticed some of the fans lining the barriers at her shows. “People wear diapers so that they can be front row,” she said, adding, to everyone’s absolute horror: “That’s been an experience as a performer that I have smelled.”

This is no aberration, and while genuine medical needs should be taken into account, situations down the front have clearly got out of control. Also last month, video of a very stoic stadium worker cleaning up human excrement at a Noah Kahan gig went viral and prompted Kahan himself to post on X: “If you have to poop at a show please dear god just go to the bathroom lmao.” This week, a fan of US country star Morgan Wallen complained that he, his brother and his niece were urinated on by another concertgoer, and police are investigating. Must we be subjected to headlines such as “Someone Also Shit Their Pants at a 5 Seconds of Summer Concert”? And in 2024, someone urinated on the floor of the standing section of a Sabrina Carpenter concert, causing a run on a fairly horrifying item called a “pit diaper”, whose mere existence speaks to a wider problem.

Difficult new Hulu documentary follows a 26-year-old woman’s startling discovery that she’s related to the notorious, murderous cult leader

Sophia Maddox spent her life hearing from her father about how he had never met his father. He would tuck her into bed as a child, she said, and tell her about how much he wanted to know him.

Four years ago, following a match on a genealogy website, they finally learned the shocking truth: her father’s father – her grandfather – was Charles Manson, the notorious cult leader and criminal.

The best games, goals and personal highlights – from a magical Azteca to Erling Haaland breaking America

Paraguay 1-1 Germany. There were plenty more games with more goals but none could match the drama of the penalty shootout in this last-32 tie. Germany aren’t supposed to lose in them but they did this time in spectacular fashion. Ed Aarons

I thought this commission would be straightforward. But my sitter’s response made me question my own attitude to my looks and body image

In September 2024, I was asked to paint the portrait of an 86-year-old man. He had apparently always wanted a formal portrait of himself, and a binge watch of Portrait Artist of the Year had finally spurred him to action. I had been receiving painting commissions for about three years, so I knew the drill: take receipt of a photo, render a painting that wouldn’t look out of place on a county cricket clubhouse wall, and pocket my semi-hard-earned money.

On this occasion, there were two immediate sticking points: first, the sitter wanted me to paint him in person, which would involve commuting to Reading from London and making small talk – to my mind the very worst of obligations. And second, to quote his WhatsApp message, he wanted me to “capture him”. How hard could that be, I thought?

Utilising empty homes, capping rents and fixing the benefits system would all help, but they’d require a serious fight

In January 2017, the then mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, promised to end rough sleeping in the region by 2020 – a bold, frankly absurd promise that inevitably didn’t materialise. Nearly a decade later, shortly after becoming prime minister, Burnham promised to end rough sleeping again, only this time for the whole of England. So why should we believe him this time around?

I have interviewed Burnham several times over the past decade. At the end of 2019, when it was clear he had not lived up to his promise, I asked him if he regretted making it in the first place. “I wasn’t making what you would call a traditional target,” the mayor said. “I issued my commitment to make it more of a wake-up call to the system. And I think it has had that effect.” Burnham’s advisers had told him to tone down the pledge, but he resisted. “The team here said I should have said: ‘End the need for rough sleeping,’ because you can’t force people into a shelter … In retrospect, if I had said ‘end the need for’, that probably would have been a wiser thing to have done. But I wasn’t in the space of wanting to play semantics with it.”

Daniel Lavelle writes on mental health, homelessness and social care. He received the Guardian’s Hugo Young award in 2017, and is the author of Down and Out

The popular presenter is by no means the first to have come a cropper hosting a talkshow. But new formats provide new opportunities

You might think the TV chatshow is an easy format to get right. Hire a well-liked host with comic chops and some successful shows under their belt. Build a cheerful set with a big sofa in the middle. Book some A-list celebs plus the obligatory comedian, invite a live audience et voilà! A prime-time hit is surely born.

Except that time and time again, it has proved not to be that simple. Just ask Claudia Winkleman, who revealed last week that she won’t be returning to do a second season of The Claudia Winkleman Show on the BBC. The series, which launched in March, filling the gap while The Graham Norton Show was on hiatus, was received with lukewarm reviews and so-so ratings. The decision to call time on it is reported to be Winkleman’s – “I was just too nervous to enjoy it,” she admitted – though, given the cuts rippling through the corporation, she may have opted to jump before being pushed.

Many Black Americans were not cheering Spain’s complicated history. They were rooting against the racism, politics and silence associated with Argentina

There are moments in sports when you realize people aren’t just watching the score any more. They’re watching values. They’re watching who speaks. They’re watching who stays silent. And they’re watching what those silences say.

I found myself thinking about that throughout this World Cup. On paper, Sunday’s final looked simple. Spain v Argentina. Two footballing giants and countries with glorious soccer histories. Two nations whose pasts are also stained by colonization, oppression and chapters of history that shouldn’t be whitewashed simply because someone can score a goal.

After his dubious intervention at the World Cup, the president is now an arbiter of high-level fairway disputes. There’s one word for that: SAD!

For so many of us around the world, the final scenes of the World Cup were a chance to switch off the TV with an eye-roll and observe mildly: “Well, I think that’s quite enough America for us all for a while now.” And yet: there can and must always be more. It is simply the way of things. If you thought the World Cup being carried on to the pitch ahead of Sunday’s final in some kind of Louis Vuitton sex trunk was the nadir of hysterical trashiness in sport, then simply recall the lesson of the past few years and expand your mind. It can always get trashier.

To the parched fairways of Royal Birkdale, then, the host of this year’s Open Championship, which – yesssssss! – was won by someone other than Bryson DeChambeau or Scottie Scheffler or any of the other radioactively ghastly US golfers you’d cheerfully head-flush in a Mar-a-Lago loo just as long as you could clear the classified documents out of it first. It has now been revealed that, during his heated row over a two-shot penalty he was handed for improving the area for his backswing, DeChambeau has been accused of threatening to call the US president unless it was all resolved in his favour. To repeat: threatening to call Donald Trump.

Bondholders are suddenly showing flexibility after 18 wasted months at ailing utility company

• Thames Water investors offer ‘golden share’ in bid to head off nationalisation

What a difference a credible political threat of special administration at Thames Water can make. Suddenly, the bondholders are volunteering all manner of new ideas in their attempt to take over the ailing utility. Would you like the state to have a “golden share”, Mr Burnham? Here is a menu of “supervisory structures” that may meet your definition of “greater public control”. And please note that other “material improvements” to our last offer are on the way. Tell us what you want.

The bondholders’ sudden flexibility demonstrates the weakness in the government’s approach under Keir Starmer. The Treasury never hid its preference for a “market-based solution”, in the jargon. The result was a series of weak proposals from the bondholders – starting a year ago with an inadequate 20% haircut for them – that didn’t match the depth of the financial crisis at failing Thames. Now, at last, we may be cutting to the chase. We should have arrived at this point at least 18 months ago.

Reform leader’s recycled moanathon included digs at Kemi, the media, immigrants and new PM. But no questions, of course

Is it safe? Is it safe? For the past couple of months, Nigel Farage has been like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, wondering if he can come out of hiding. Tucked away in one of his five homes, living on handouts from benefactors and hoping the coast is clear. Free from troublesome reporters who insist on asking awkward questions about where his money comes from and what it’s for.

It’s tough to be the Man of the People when some of your money is coming from a posh convicted fraudster. Then again, Nige is a man who seems quick to forgive criminal behaviour. But – slowly, slowly – he is beginning to show his face in public again. And on Tuesday he took the latest steps on his Long Walk to Freedom.

Ending the pattern of broken pledges and ditched proposals could help to rebuild trust in politics

Andy Burnham chose not to make social care the centrepiece of his first speech as prime minister. Instead, rough sleeping was named as his top priority upon entering 10 Downing Street. Given that earlier attempts at overhauling social care have flopped, he was wise not to over-promise on day one. Louise Casey, who is leading the independent commission on the issue, says that “an honest conversation with the nation” is needed. If Mr Burnham agrees, he will have to wait before making any big announcements. The public outreach phase of her work has not even begun.

Social care has personal significance for Mr Burnham. In recent days he revealed that his father’s Alzheimer’s means that he does not understand that his son is the prime minister. But he was right to name social care as an area on which “to expend quite a lot of political capital”. If public trust in politics is to be lifted from its current low base, and faith in the welfare state restored, politicians need to show that they are capable of gripping these seemingly intractable problems. For relatives of people with unmet needs, and others who see the system’s flaws closeup, feelings of helplessness and injustice can undermine confidence in society and the state overall.

The row over the sacking of the popular defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, highlights questions about the country’s military and political direction

Even as Ukraine’s civilians endure brutal strikes by Russia, thousands have taken to the streets to protest against Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s sacking of Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular young defence minister, last week after he clashed with the commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi. On Tuesday night, demonstrators’ calls were answered as the Ukrainian president fired the general and offered Mr Fedorov a “prominent” role and promised an overhaul of the army command.

Mr Fedorov, widely credited for significant improvements in the country’s military performance and reducing corruption, had made a scathing attack on Gen Syrskyi after his dismissal – accusing him of blocking reforms and refusing to cooperate. The general seems to have seen the minister as exceeding his remit and effectively taking control of units. The pair also butted heads over Mr Fedorov’s plans to improve recruitment and training to reduce the deep anger created by the conscription system. A Soviet-schooled military officer deeply embedded within institutions tussled with a young civilian disruptor taking a more agile, improvisational approach.

Readers respond to a warning from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health on a ‘national embarrassment’

We were pleased to see your report (UK children will be one of unhealthiest generations in decades, doctors say, 14 July) on the deteriorating health of UK children, based on a study by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. However, it was disappointing to see no mention of the shrinking health visitor workforce and the impact that this has on the health and wellbeing of young children and their families.

Health visitors are described by Unicef UK as the “backbone of the early years … the safety net around all families”. A long-established and trusted profession, health visitors are specialist public health nurses who work with families to improve health and reduce inequalities. They provide the only universal service that sees babies and children in their own homes.

Screening for spinal muscular atrophy is a step forward, says Dr Janet Hoskin, but what about other serious genetic conditions such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy?

The decision to introduce newborn screening for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a major breakthrough for families and campaigners (All newborns in England to be screened for spinal muscular atrophy from 2027, 16 July). Early diagnosis means children can access treatment sooner, improving outcomes and giving families clarity at a crucial time.

However, this success raises an important question: why are other serious genetic conditions, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), still excluded from newborn screening programmes? About 100 boys are born with DMD each year. It causes progressive muscle weakness and is often diagnosed only after years of uncertainty. Although new treatments such as Givinostat are beginning to offer hope for some young people, early diagnosis remains vital. It can help families access information, specialist care and support much sooner, and may allow more children to benefit from emerging treatments.

The former Labour MP David Hinchliffe recalls working with the former Conservative MP, saying their disagreements were always without rancour

Of all the many articles I have read following the death of Ann Widdecombe, I think Gaby Hinsliff’s piece got closest to portraying her unique character (Ann Widdecombe’s death should make Britain ask itself: what sort of political culture do we want?, 17 July). I entered the Commons in 1987, at the same time as Ann, and got to know her well as a formidable opponent through doing media interviews and committee work together. We fundamentally disagreed on most issues, but always without rancour.

Our most heated clash was over my amendment to adoption legislation to allow unmarried partners to apply to adopt. It was a strange situation where we had Ann, who as Hinsliff recalled, publicly professed to being “a middle-aged virgin”, passionately arguing the case for marriage, while I, married with children, put forward the numerous merits of single people.

I’ve worked to cope with the chronic pain through ashtanga yoga, says Louise Zamparutti. Plus letters from Kirie Pedersen and Alice Devon

Thank you for publishing Natasha Livingstone’s article (A moment that changed me: I started yoga – and saw my scoliosis in a surprising new light, 15 July). I have been ashamed of my scoliosis my entire life. It wasn’t diagnosed until my early 20s, and by that time I had begun a career as a dancer and choreographer. My dance teachers were always criticising my off-kilter posture and I constantly felt that I didn’t deserve to pursue a career in dance due to my disfigured spine. My curvature is both thoracic and lumbar, and runs both sideways and forward-backward. I, too, have an uneven waistline, a hip curve on one side and straight rib-to-hip line on the other. Pants fit unevenly on me, and for years I would never wear an open-backed top.

Reading this piece made me recognise how hard I’ve worked to cope with the chronic pain, through ashtanga yoga, which I taught for over 10 years, and now through lap swimming. But I haven’t come to terms with the shame. This piece gave me the sense that I am not alone – that there are others of us who have scoliosis and deal with it in a myriad of ways. As the author of this article shows, there should be no shame in having the strength to cope with it and do whatever we want to do in our lives.
Louise Zamparutti
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, US

Plus: the most World Cup assists, Ballon d’Or winners with fewest caps and what happens to World Cup balls?

• Mail us with your all of your questions and answers

“Adding the World Cup to his résumé means Rodri has now won the World Cup, the European Championship, the Champions League, and the Ballon d’Or,” writes Owen Bagnall. “Has anyone else ‘completed football’ like this?”

They have but it’s a small, elite list.

• Italian football federation confirm interest in Guardiola

• Mancini and Pirlo also linked with national team vacancy

Financial “exceptions” are in place to allow Pep Guardiola to become Italy’s next head coach, the president of the Italian Football Federation (FIGC), Giovanni Malago, has said.

Guardiola left Manchester City at the end of last season after winning six Premier League titles, three FA Cups, five League Cups and the Champions League during a hugely successful 10-year reign. He is free to take up another job, having also coached Barcelona and Bayern Munich, and has been linked with the Italy vacancy for some time, with it reported earlier this week that he has held talks with the FIGC. Gennaro Gattuso resigned from the post in in April after the four-time World Cup champions failed to qualify for a third tournament in a row.

• 27-year-old leaves Real Madrid after six years at club

• ‘Arsenal is one of the top clubs in the world,’ she says

Arsenal have continued their rebuild of the squad by signing the Spain goalkeeper Misa Rodríguez on a free transfer. The 27-year-old arrives after spending the last six years at Real Madrid.

The WSL side have already added Georgia Stanway (Bayern Munich), Selina Cerci (Hoffenheim), Ona Batlle (Barcelona) and Géraldine Reuteler (Eintracht Frankfurt) as they aim to challenge for the league title. Last season they finished second, four points behind champions Manchester City.

The outcome of this week’s hearings could determine the entire direction of the case – we explain the current state of play

It has been nearly six years since the Guardian first reported that a group of former rugby union players were bringing legal action against the game’s governing authorities because they were enduring brain injuries which they believe were caused by their playing careers. There are now two separate cases, one in rugby league and one in rugby union, involving hundreds of former amateur and professional players.

The two cases are being heard together because they have so many overlapping issues. They are both still in the pre-trial phase, as the legal teams try to agree on exactly what the size, shape and structure of the trials ought to be when they finally start.

• Belgian wins time trial, says chase of leader ‘not over yet’

• Florian Lipowitz, third last year, quits race after crashing

Remco Evenepoel took back-to-back stage wins in the Tour de France, and eroded some of Tadej Pogacar’s overall lead, with victory in the stage 16 time trial from Evian to Thonon-les-Bains.

The Olympic road and time trial champion, now second overall in the Tour, won on the Belgian national day from Pogacar by 28 seconds, to reduce the Slovenian’s advantage to just over four and a half minutes. It was the third Tour time trial win of his career.

As the Commonwealth Games return to Scotland’s biggest city, the mood is markedly different from the last time Glasgow hosted the event

The first person to stop on Glasgow’s streets does not recognise the Commonwealth Games mascot, Finnie the unicorn. “I genuinely didn’t realise that the unicorn was the mascot,” Karl, a 33-year-old Glaswegian native, says with a laugh. “I caught a glimpse of one of the posters from the bus and thought: ‘Are the bronies making a comeback?’”

It is a telling response. As the Commonwealth Games return to Scotland’s biggest city, the mood is markedly different from the last time Glasgow hosted the event in 2014, when anticipation built for months. This time, the Games have arrived with considerably less fanfare.

• Bhatia backed by father-in-law Lakshmi Mittal

• Minority stake deal values the club at £4.5bn

Liverpool’s owner is in talks over ­selling a minority stake to a consortium led by the former Queens Park Rangers co‑owner Amit ­Bhatia and backed by his father-in-law ­Lakshmi Mittal, the billionaire Indian steel magnate. The Guardian understands a sale of 30% of the club is being discussed, with an offer of around £1.35bn on the table.

Fenway Sports Group confirmed in a statement to the Financial Times that it had begun negotiations with a group led by Bhatia over a potential minority share sale that would value ­Liverpool at about £4.5bn.

Exclusive: Ljubisa Karović tells Guardian the fact that he lived to tell the tale is nothing short of a miracle

It is the explosion just before he was nearly sucked out of the aircraft that Ljubisa Karović remembers. The thunderous noise of the window shattering that roused him from slumber in 11F, his window seat on the early morning Ryanair flight from Greece to Germany.

Eleven days and 11 nights later, it remains the prelude “to the chaos, the catastrophe” that keeps him awake at night.

Greenpeace petitions Dutch courts to order JBS to disclose how its aims are compatible with responsibilities to climate and human rights

The world’s biggest meat company, JBS, faces a landmark legal challenge to disclose how its $6bn (£4.5bn) global expansion plan is compatible with responsibilities to the climate, nature and human rights.

Courts in the Netherlands, where JBS is headquartered, will assess the petition filed by Greenpeace for information on whether the company is compliant with Dutch laws on “duty of care” as well as its own publicly stated commitments.

Opposition leader taken away after accusing Narendra Modi of ‘destroying the future of India’s youth’

Indian police briefly detained the opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, during protests calling for the resignation of Narendra Modi in solidarity with the new youth-led “cockroach” movement.

Gandhi, the leader of India’s Congress party, was forcefully removed by police as he staged a sit-in outside the prime minister’s house in Delhi on Tuesday afternoon, accusing Modi of “destroying the future of India’s youth”.

Finding widens selection of rocky planets that may once have been habitable

Mars once had rivers of magma bubbling beneath its crust, new research suggests. The surprise find makes it more probable that Mars could have supported life and widens the selection of rocky planets that may once have been habitable.

Researchers at the University of Oxford studied data gathered by Nasa’s Insight Lander, which recorded seismic waves caused by meteorite impacts and Martian quakes. They used the seismic data to analyse a mysterious boundary 15 miles (24km) below the surface of Mars. Their findings, published in Nature Astronomy, showed that the most likely cause for this boundary was molten rock pooling deep underground and stretching sideways for hundreds or even thousands of miles.

New York mayor admits he does not have authority to arrest Netanyahu, adding Israeli PM is ‘architect of a horrific genocide’

Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, acknowledged on Tuesday he does not have the authority to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, but urged US federal authorities to do so if the Israeli prime minister visits the US later this year.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” Mamdani said in a video posted to social media.

In April Japan coined new term kokushobi for days above 40C as country advises workers to wear shorts to the office to cope with stifling heat

Japan logged its first official kokushobi or “cruelly hot day” on Tuesday since the new term for when temperatures top 40 degrees Celsius was introduced in April. The Japan Meteorological Agency coined the new designation to warn the public of the heat dangers of days that were once freak weather events but have now become more common.

The central Japan cities of Gujo and Tajimi in Gifu prefecture, along with Toyota in Aichi prefecture, all hit 40C. Gujo’s 40C and Toyota’s 40.1C were all-time highs recorded at their respective weather stations.

About 23 million people across country affected by water-saving measures with ‘prolonged dry weather’ in eight areas

• How can I water my garden in a hosepipe ban and will there be drought this summer?

• Thames Water investors offer ‘golden share’ in bid to head off nationalisation

About 23 million people will be banned from using hosepipes by this weekend, as England and Wales moves closer to drought status.

On Tuesday Thames Water became the latest water company to announce a hosepipe ban, covering the more than 10 million customers it supplies water to across London and the Thames valley.

Millions of people in southern England and parts of Wales face restrictions after prolonged periods of hot weather

Millions of people across southern England are subject to hosepipe bans after prolonged periods of extreme heat and reduced rainfall. On Tuesday, Thames Water, Britain’s biggest water company, announced a ban starting on Thursday. Here, the Guardian answers questions about what the restriction means for you.

Government urges visitors not to approach or feed wolves as it manages safety amid growing population

Danish authorities have advised tourists to stand still, make eye contact and put up “maximum resistance” in the event of attack if they encounter a wolf while on holiday.

After a 200-year absence, wolves started returning to Denmark in 2012. There are now estimated to be 49 wolves on the Danish peninsula of Jutland.

Joshua Kerry appears at Westminster magistrates court charged with murder of former MP earlier this month

A man has appeared in court charged with the murder of the former MP and Reform UK spokesperson Ann Widdecombe.

Joshua Kerry, 28, is accused of killing the 78-year-old former Conservative minister at her home in Haytor, Devon, earlier this month, by hitting her on the head with a hammer 21 times.

Exclusive: Research shows millions live more than a 1km round trip from 24/7 accessible device

More than 16 million people in England and Wales risk dying from a cardiac arrest because they live farther than a 1km round trip from the nearest 24/7 defibrillator, according to exclusive research.

Analysis of publicly available defibrillators by the Heart Restart campaign found that in England and Wales alone, 35 million people – more than half the population – do not live within the recommended three- to five-minute brisk walk of a defibrillator. Of these, about half live more than a 1km round trip from a 24/7 accessible defibrillator.

There are more than 40,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests each year in the UK, but fewer than one in 10 people survive. However, early cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillation can more than double the chance of survival.

Animal welfare charities say marmoset could be ‘first of many’ since new law on primate licenses and microchipping

A “stressed and dehydrated” monkey has been found in a laundry bag on a London bus in what animal welfare charities warn could be the “first of many” abandonments now owners must obtain primate licenses.

The female common marmoset was discovered on a 302 bus waiting in Kensal Rise, north-west London, on Friday by a passenger whose buggy was obstructed by the bag containing the monkey in a cage. The monkey has since been named Oyster after the London transport payment system.

UK resident was evacuated from Democratic Republic of the Congo where there is an outbreak of the disease

A humanitarian worker is being monitored at a specialist hospital in London after potential exposure to the Ebola virus.

The UK resident was medically evacuated from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where the worker had been treating patients with the disease, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said.

As fear and fighting ease in Mogadishu, coffee shops have become catalysts for change, bringing jobs for women and creating much-needed social spaces

Every morning at six, Saabiriin Hassan slips on her apron as she takes her place behind the counter at Cplus Cafe in the heart of Mogadishu. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee fills the air, but it is Hassan’s ever-present smile that draws the attention first.

It stays with her every move – from grinding beans and steaming milk to chatting with customers. Hassan is among the first female baristas in Somalia, serving coffee and helping a new cafe culture take root in a capital city once only known for conflict.

The ribbon-cutting celebration of the Gordie Howe International Bridge is no longer taking place after Trump announced a 50% tariff on Canadian goods

A planned joint US-Canada ceremony Friday celebrating the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, is no longer expected to take place after Donald Trump announced a 50% tariff on most Canadian goods.

In announcing the tariffs, the president accused Canada of unfairly discriminating against US automobiles, alcohol and dairy products, escalating tensions with one of the United States’ closest allies.

Parliament votes to stop children using apps such as TikTok in policy championed by Emmanuel Macron

France’s parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first EU country to bar children from apps such as TikTok.

The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September.

US judge’s ruling could open up window into first family’s multiple ventures, in drawback of lawsuit on media

Donald Trump must divulge detailed financial information from his many businesses as part of his $10bn defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation, a federal judge ruled during a discovery hearing on Tuesday, according to news reports.

The ruling by US magistrate judge Enjoliqué Lett could open a unique window into the hundreds of businesses owned by Trump’s family trust. It also highlights a potential drawback for Trump’s strategy of bludgeoning critical media with multibillion-dollar lawsuits.

Figure of £16bn from ONS comes after Andy Burnham revealed plans to cut VAT on electricity bills

• Business live – latest updates

The UK government borrowed less than expected in June, in a boost for Andy Burnham as he set out plans to cut VAT on household electricity bills and promised a new direction for the British economy.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said public sector net borrowing – the difference between government spending and income – was £16bn last month, £7.9bn less than in June 2025.

Danish pharma company says Eli Lilly using outdated trial data to make its weight-loss drugs appear more effective

Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk said on Tuesday it is suing arch US rival Eli Lilly over “false and materially misleading” adverts for its competing weight-loss and anti-diabetes treatments.

The Danish pharmaceuticals heavyweight complained that the US group – which makes rival weight-loss treatments Zepbound and Mounjaro – “intentionally selected outdated studies” that compared Lilly’s highest doses against lower doses of Novo Nordisk’s medicines.

Google’s AI struggles scream trouble as new Chinese models (again) throw US tech dominance into question

Hello, I’m Blake Montgomery, writing to you after a double-header feature of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and the World Cup final. What a great Sunday. Today in tech, we’re discussing how China is chipping away at the US’s lead in the AI race and how Silicon Valley’s workers are taking action to protect their jobs from AI.

New York becomes first state to impose one-year pause on new AI datacenters

Trump rails against New York’s statewide datacenter moratorium

Albanese’s AI blueprint sparks calls for datacentre moratorium until new regulations in place

‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?

IBM loses quarter of its value as tech giant’s shares plunge and profits falter

‘What’s the point?’ Teenagers give their verdict on Britain’s social media curfew

Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch

Trump made $1.4bn from crypto in one year. Is Justin Sun the man who helped him do it?

Babcock and BAE Systems benefit as markets hope former defence secretary will increase spending on sector

• Business live – latest updates

Shares in defence companies have risen sharply after Andy Burnham appointed John Healey as chancellor, prompting hope among investors of increased spending on suppliers to the military.

Defence stocks were among the biggest risers on the FTSE 100 on Tuesday morning after the former defence secretary was announced as chancellor after markets closed on Monday. Babcock International rose 7%, BAE Systems was up 3% and Rolls-Royce increased nearly 2% on the FTSE 100. On the FTSE 250, QinetiQ rose nearly 4%.

In a jaw-dropping return to true-crime form, Netflix’s new documentary delves into the Anaheim Craigslist case – and it’s a horrifying monster indeed

The sound of barrel-scraping during true-crime documentaries is becoming more and more frequent at Netflix these days (the dismal Worst Neighbor Ever being the most recent case in point). Such are the perils of being the pioneer of a form; you run out of material first but must keep trying to recapture past glories while you search desperately for another way to seize the fickle audience’s attention once again.

A Toxic Love Story is a welcome, if doubtless temporary, return to form. It is a rigorous, 88-minute recounting of an astonishing story that became notorious about 10 years ago in the US and was known as “the Anaheim Craigslist case” or “the Anaheim Craigslist rape fantasy case”, depending on just how many local Craigslist-based delinquencies were occurring at the exact time of reference. It has, after all, been the most criminally fertile of lists.

João Linneu’s raw and intimate photographs capture his partner and child as they navigate isolation, lumbar punctures and even a lightning storm

Ivy Meeropol’s engrossing film follows former star columnist E Jean Carroll, now in her 80s, battles through an unfinished series of legal disputes

Donald Trump has almost succeeded in an insidiously sneaky trick of auto-uncancelling on the #MeToo issue, implying that he is above and beyond and constitutionally exempt, despite being caught on tape boasting of sexual violence. Through a combination of bluster, bad faith, threats, abuse and the simple fact of being US president and flooding the zone on a grander international stage, and moreover with an aggressive army of online trolls at his disposal, he has got away with it. So far.

But among his accusers, the one who has so far been successful in two civil suits is the journalist and former advice columnist E Jean Carroll, showing remarkable courage and indomitable good humour. She is the subject of this engrossing documentary from film-maker Ivy Meeropol, co-produced by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who incidentally has perhaps a few hail marys of his own to offer for having at first ducked the Jeffrey Epstein story. Carroll had an uproarious career in New York media in the 80s and 90s, in which she was a wisecracking Rosalind Russell-slash-Joan Rivers figure, creating a tough broad persona; she was in fact sometimes less than sympathetic to Paula Jones and Anita Hill in the Bill Clinton and Clarence Thomas cases. Carroll had a TV advice show called Ask E Jean (given to her, as she points out without comment, by the notorious exec Roger Ailes, himself an abuser brought low by #MeToo).

The rebooted GCHQ digital warfare series has more zip than its predecessor – but people bashing away on computers in a bunker near Cheltenham is inherently unsexy

If the espionage battles of the future are going to be fought online, TV thrillers will have to reflect that fact, much as they might not want to. Cyber-attacks, cross-border malware and digital misinformation just aren’t especially televisual: whatever you do, you always end up with a speed-typing nerd muttering “Shit!” as gobbledegook scrolls across a monitor and red lights flash in the distance.

In 2022, Channel 4’s missable drama The Undeclared War tried to crack the problem by throwing heavyweight film-making pedigree at it. Peter Kosminsky, the esteemed director behind Wolf Hall and The Government Inspector, had evidently researched the back end out of the subject, presenting the details of an imagined campaign of Russian interference in Britain’s daily digital functionality – and, from there, the democratic process of an election – in a way that real-life sleepless nerds said was credible enough.

Away from the disapproval of their Welsh fishing community, two men embark on a passionate affair in Helen Walsh’s poignant drama

Barry Ward brings sincerity and force to this well-intended, well-acted Brokeback drama of forbidden love in a remote north Wales fishing community. It comes from writer-director Helen Walsh, who is that rare and valuable figure in the arts world: a novelist who is of equal status as an original film-maker. (Her debut feature The Violators came out 11 years ago.)

Ward plays Jack, a middle-aged man beset with cares. He is getting too old for the hard physical labour of raking mussel beds; he co-owns this business jointly with his quarrelsome, boorish brother Dyfan (Celyn Jones), who resents the time Jack has spent away from work receiving treatment for cancer which is now in remission. Jack has been with his wife Maggie (Liz White) since they were 16; they are both concerned about their son Tom (Henry Lawfull) getting into bad company and failing to help with the mussel business – although they both like Tom’s smart, level-headed girlfriend Lois (a small role for Leisa Gwenllian, the star of the recent Welsh-language drama Effi o Blaenau).

The model tells all in her highly entertaining, eyebrow-raising documentary. Plus, revisiting a classic Play for Today. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Documentaries
Twenty years before Taylor and Travis’s stadium wedding bonanza, there was Katie Price and Peter Andre’s fairytale ceremony – or, as Kerry Katona puts it, “like Cinderella on coke and speed on a seven-day bender”. The third episode of Price’s documentary focuses on the marriage she says provided the best years of her life … until it didn’t. “I’d love you to interview Pete,” she says. “The chances are zero.” And she’s right. Hollie Richardson

The late songwriter released around 50 records, writing gay love songs and effortless folk songs from folk’s fringes. Fans including Bill Callahan explain his singular brilliance

In a grainy television clip from 1986, a flame-haired and neckerchiefed troubadour plucks away at a lute-like instrument, harmonica under chin, the gentle ripples giving way to a voice full of longing. This performance, uploaded to YouTube in 2010, has generated only a handful of comments, but peruse any of them (“Ed the Great!”; “pure gold”) and you begin to understand the passion that Ed Askew – an under-the-radar US poet, artist and musician – has inspired over the years.

“He was living in a world that was for people who didn’t fit in,” Askew’s collaborator, Jerry David DeCicca, says on the free-spiritedness of his friend, whose musical life began with discovering the 10-stringed tiple as a teenager in the 1950s and ended with his death a year ago, aged 84, on the verge of him releasing his album The Final Painting, now being released posthumously this month.

The popular broadcaster investigates what happened after a large pile of murdered animals were dumped outside a primary school in Hampshire. Plus, Lena Headey tackles an idea from an ‘ethical pornographer’

Mangled pheasants, mutilated foxes, weeping kids: the third series of the multi-award-winning show about environmental crime opens with a huge pile of murdered animals outside a primary school. The investigation leads to revelations about the world of illegal bloodsports and rural organised crime. It even recruits Chris Packham. “It’s low-level terrorism, isn’t it?” he exclaims at one point – and it’s hard not to agree. An essential listen. Alexi Duggins
BBC Sounds, all episodes available

The soul-rockers achieved worldwide success before surprising everyone by deciding to quit while they were ahead. Now they’re back with a new album railing against the state of contemporary America

In the autumn of 2024, Alabama Shakes showed no sign of ending their indefinite hiatus – and nobody was asking them to. Seven years had passed since the blues-soul-rock band, who exploded out of Athens, Alabama in 2009, had last shared a stage. Their transatlantic Top 10 2012 debut Boys & Girls announced them; the million-selling 2015 follow-up Sound & Color went to No 1 in the US and won them four Grammys. Their fanbase included Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant and Barack Obama. But by 2017 they were physically and creatively spent, and they stopped. Then, in December 2024, with almost no warning, they played their first show in more than seven years.

“We had a friend in Tuscaloosa who had a brewery, but it wasn’t doing so well after Covid,” explains singer Brittany Howard. “He called me and said he was going to do a fundraiser and asked if I’d like to perform. I said, ‘For sure.’” But then she started reminiscing, remembering how that particular friend had been a huge help to the band, not just her personally. She felt the band owed him something, collectively. “So I called the fellas,” she smiles. “‘Do y’all wanna perform at this thing – like, all of us, together?’ And they instantly said yes.”

Wembley Stadium, London
Mars sings every line like it’s his big solo in a show that leans more on his stage presence than pyro and pageantry

Wembley Stadium is awash with crimson as the Bruno Mars operation rolls into town for the first of a six night run. The tour is named for the diminutive singer’s 2026 album The Romantic. Mars is feeling amorous and the Saturday night crowd is very happy to be romanced, clad in red and brandishing hand fans that read “Hot for Bruno”.

He starts with a prayer, a kitschy video in which he asks for a hand giving the audience a show we’ll never forget, before emerging in a puff of dry ice. Stained glass behind him and twinkling fairy lights all around, it’s half seedy club, half church service as he barrels into Risk It All. Is this show meant to be a spaghetti western or a 50s high school prom? The Romantic Tour bravely asks: why not both?

Moments of beauty and horror punctuate this account of an ill-timed sub-zero camping trip

In late February 2022, Charlie Walker set off on a hiking holiday in northern Siberia. In temperatures as low as -50C, he intended to trek a thousand miles north along the frozen surface of the river Lena, then out across the solid Laptev Sea to the port town of Tiksi, before finally flying home to London. “The plan,” he writes, “was simple in concept.” A sub-zero camping trip through a region populated by wolves and bears and scarred by centuries of historical trauma, in a country that was about to invade one of its neighbours: what could possibly go wrong?

On Thin Ice is Walker’s third travelogue. Previous excursions have included a 43,000-mile bicycle ride across three continents, a 1,000-mile solo walk through the Gobi desert, and a river trip down the Congo in a leaky canoe. When not performing incredible feats of forward motion, according to his website, he gives talks to business leaders on subjects such as “risk taking” and “the line between courage and recklessness”. Reading his latest, it’s clear he’s familiar with the terrain on both sides of that line.

This portrait of a Jewish painter in bohemian Berlin is filled with insightful observations

In the summer of 1937, two exhibitions sponsored by the Nazis opened in Munich. For the Degenerate Art exhibition, hundreds of confiscated works by banned modern artists – including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso – were gathered: a derisive demonstration of the supposedly anti-German spirit of contemporary culture. The show was also meant as a counterpoint to the first Great German Art Exhibition, essentially an art fair for state-sanctioned work, which ran annually until 1944. The official style of Aryan art was traditionalist neoclassicism; popular subjects included idealised female nudes, pastoral landscapes and heroic battle scenes. Hitler was among the main buyers. You probably haven’t heard of any of those artists.

What if one of them were secretly a Jew, working under a pseudonym? Rebecca Birrell’s debut novel imagines this scenario, telling the story of a fictional Jewish artist who comes of age in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar republic. Hannah Sherman is working as a seamstress for the family business when she learns that she is about to be married off. She runs away, finding lodgings using the “desirable Christian” name of Schmidt, and begins to realise her artistic ambitions. A free-thinking New Woman, she also takes two lovers: Saul, a museum curator, and Charlotte, a dancer at a lesbian bar where Hannah likes to sketch.

Historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s book Country of Lords looks back at the many men who have tried to fight against egalitarianism, from John Adams to Peter Thiel

The historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth “self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.

Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social and economic inequality, Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk “emerging as a trillionaire very much on people’s minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger about what this portends”.

A documentary-maker probes family history and the darker corners of the internet to solve an urgent political puzzle

When Sandra Forsyth began marching in support of the English Defence League, her daughter Nicola Wilding hoped it was a phase. The Cumbria-bred, Dover-dwelling Sandra was about to turn 60 and had been dealing with a lot of stress. Not only had her son been sentenced to two years in prison for armed robbery, but she was working at a home for adults with complex needs. She liked the job, but it could be gruelling – especially when clients hurled furniture at her or ripped sinks off walls.

Then, in May 2013, came the death of Lee Rigby, a drummer with the Second Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers who was murdered by two Islamist terrorists using machetes. Sandra didn’t know Rigby, Wilding notes, but his death nonetheless brought her pent-up rage to the surface. She began watching videos on Facebook by a man named Tommy Robinson, who wanted to know why the country’s brave soldiers were being murdered. By September of that year, she was protesting on the streets of London.

Nintendo Switch 2
The single-player offshoot of the quirky and colourful multiplayer series is disappointingly run-of-the-mill

Splatoon is among Nintendo’s most ingenious inventions of the last decade: a series of shooting games whose paint-splattered turf war nature means being bad at shooting is just as valuable as – if not more so than – being good. It is also blessed with an abundance of personality, with vibrant characters, a richly imagined world, and a hipness that the competition can only dream of achieving. Unfortunately, Splatoon Raiders makes it difficult to remember all of this.

The first spinoff in the ink-soaked franchise, Splatoon Raiders is advertised as a single player-focused entry in this primarily multiplayer series. While this is true enough – one can play through the entire game solo just fine – Raiders is clearly best enjoyed cooperatively with up to three others. Players start each session on a hideout ship where they can upgrade their equipment and tweak their play style before heading out on bite-sized repeatable missions, and this structure is tailor-made for teaming up with friends or helping out strangers (the game lets you do either), as each person works towards creating their ultimate squid-kid avatar of chaos.

Splatoon Raiders is out 23 July; £41.99

An autobiographical game about the devastating effects of chronic illness on an artist’s creative life gives players the chance to slow the pace right down

Bub does not look like a traditional video game. Artist and stop-motion animator Case Jernigan spends hours, days, months in his studio drawing, painting and delicately cutting out pieces of collected paper, while coder and gameplay designer Todd Anderson builds scripts and physics simulations to make them into a game.

In Bub, you play through the life of an artist in New York City, making art but also diving into his early memories and imaginative dreams. “You go from present day New York City into his childhood, or different sort of visions, which are all rendered in stop motion,” says Anderson. “His story is told in the present day, but also how he’s making sense of his past.”

The developer of Duck Detective reveals details of her ‘sad grandma game’ follow-up: a whodunnit – or who-plans-to-do-it? – with a darker edge

Someone wants to kill grandma. In this Knives Out-inspired mystery game, each of your family members is suspicious in their own way: your stressed mum, your “midlife crisis uncle” and especially that stranger in your bedroom. Yikes!

While Apple Crumble is still a mystery, it is mechanically different from Happy Broccoli Games’ previous game, Duck Detective, in which the player solves crimes in a small office. Here you are largely snooping through your family home. “I love the idea of having a walking sim where you can really open up every drawer, every door, and see what’s behind there,” says founder and creative director Annika Maar. As you learn more about the different grievances and troubles of your family members, the mystery slowly unwinds.

Evil Empire creatives explain how it is playing to today’s ‘metroidvanias’ and honouring the original’s legacy with much fresh slaying to be done

Since the last Castlevania game hit the shelves (2014’s Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2), Konami’s dormant series has unexpectedly spawned a hit genre. With an entire generation raised on “metroidvanias” – a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania – millions of players have only ever seen the games inspired by Konami’s seminal games. Now with Belmont’s Curse, launching in October, Castlevania is finally dashing back to console, where Konami hopes to reclaim its side-scroller throne.

Set 23 years after the events of 1989’s Castlevania 3 – the same setting as the hit Netflix show – Belmont’s Curse shakes off the series’ 3D ambitions and takes the Belmonts back to basics. Dispatching players to the demon-infested streets of 1499 Paris, you’re placed in the tattered boots of Trevor Belmont’s daughter, Rose. As a bishop pleads with the Belmonts to rid Paris of the ancient evil besetting the city, Rose heads into the sewers, longsword in hand, and her demon-slaying adventure begins.

Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon
Tamara Harvey’s production of Chekhov’s final play can seem woolly in meaning and soft-edged tone mutes its force

Laura Wade’s reworking of Anton Chekhov’s final, plaintive play brings a dazzle of big names. Helen Hunt is the aristocratic matriarch Madame Ranyevskaya, Bill Pullman her brother, and Kenneth Branagh (so soon after his lead role in the Royal Shakespeare’s production of The Tempest) their nemesis, Lopakhin, a shopkeeper’s son here who takes over the reins of the family estate and represents the rising forces against Russia’s old order of ossified elites.

But for such a starry cast Tamara Harvey’s production has a disappointing lack of sparkle. You do not feel the story’s charge, its complications around love and its stinging losses. The tone is too soft-edged, almost endearing, and the cast such an ensemble that there is no magnetic centre to hold you.

Royal Albert Hall, London
A programme – Bach, Beethoven and a Jessie Montgomery premiere – that looked odd on paper made perfect sense in the hall, with Abel Selaocoe a mesmerising soloist in Montgomery’s ‘These Righteous Paths’

‘Thy magic power reunites / All that custom has divided / All men become brothers / Under the sway of thy gentle wings.” The BBC can’t have known when they booked Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – culminating in Schiller’s ode to fellowship and unity – that it would mark Andy Burnham’s appointment as prime minister. Our new leader’s “gentle wings” will need the span of a 747 to embrace every warring faction beneath them, but what a welcome from a Proms concert that was everything the festival does best.

A strange programme on paper – Bach, Beethoven and a brand new cello concerto – made absolute sense in the hall, where musical past and future were held suspended together in a rapt continuous present. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor set the tone. Arranged for orchestra by Andrew Davis, it had a distinct twinkle in its eye. Dutiful, even dogmatic, string exegesis takes a sudden sideways turn as the wind bend and distort the theme. And is that a celesta doubling the flute – a shimmering ghost in the orchestral machine, a childish distortion of the original organ? It’s wittily done, and under former chief conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the orchestra relished this fusion of sonic worlds.

Menier Chocolate Factory, London
Platt excels as a crooner looking back on falling for his songwriter-lover – dazzlingly played by Gregor Milne – in a show of beguiling, bittersweet nostalgia and pristine songs

Ben Platt’s sky-gliding voice was made for decades gone by. The Tony, Emmy and Grammy award-winning actor (Dear Evan Hansen, The Last Five Years) is beautifully cast in Mark Sonnenblick’s (KPop Demon Hunters) out-of-time love story, a honey-hearted cabaret-musical of two gay musicians trying to make it in 1960s New York.

With the Menier Chocolate Factory set up as a lamplit cabaret (set by Scott Pask), Platt is Trevor Copeland, a crooning bar-singer reliving the years he spent with songwriter Arthur Brightman, played with plate-spinning brilliance by Gregor Milne. The history of their love is told through stories shaped around American Songbook-style music, only occasionally syrupy, as the pair slip in and out of Sonnenblick’s inventions: now a jaunty knee-bouncing number; now a big-band ballad.

Royal Academy, London
Dadd was already a remarkable artist – with fairies as his hit theme – before he was locked up for murder. Yet it was within the confines of Bedlam that he saw nature and art afresh

The young man in the garden must be one of Richard Dadd’s fellow patients in Bedlam, you think. His unkempt hair and ruffled clothes are sure indications of a distracted mind as he sits, half his face in shadow, hands nervously clasped, on a fabulously twisted wooden bench surrounded by greenery that’s almost too lush for comfort. Yet the subject of Dadd’s 1853 Portrait of a Young Man is probably the superintendent of Bethlem Hospital, Dr Charles Hood. The painter sees reflections of his own mental state in this frail-seeming young clinician. Patient and doctor are not so different, he suggests. There is the finest of lines between “sanity” and “madness”.

Dadd crossed that line when he murdered his father whom he thought was the devil, then tried to kill a stranger while fleeing to Paris. He was quickly caught and would spend the rest of his life in Bedlam and Broadmoor. But how much does his mental illness explain his arresting, bizarre, sometimes unforgettable images? Is he a kind of Victorian acid casualty whose visions of fairies are the peculiar fruit of his psychosis?

The deaf actor, who played a major role in Godzilla vs Kong and its 2024 sequel, was killed in a car crash in Maryland

Kaylee Hottle, who played a major role in Godzilla vs Kong and the sequel Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, has died at the age of 18.

Her death was confirmed by her father, Joshua, in a video shared on Facebook. The stream was in American Sign Language (ASL) as the Hottle family is all deaf. “I am taking a flight that I never would like to take,” is the name of the video.

Film star promotes Christopher Nolan film epic wearing gold artefacts dating back almost 3,000 years

The Odyssey is a story about a Greek king’s long journey home. But a pair of earrings worn on the new film adaptation’s press tour – and their long separation from their homeland – is sparking controversy.

At a photocall in London, Zendaya, who plays the goddess Athena in the Christopher Nolan film, wore a pair of earrings fashioned from Iranian artefacts dating back to 700BC.

As Nick in the blockbuster TV comedy, the actor was adored by millions. So will his new comedy The Dink, which he jokes is a ‘sexier Challengers’, make him even more popular?

You might assume that Jake Johnson would know a little something about pickleball. The actor is starring in The Dink, a sort of spiritual heir to Dodgeball – it has a Ben Stiller cameo – and he plays Dusty Boyd, a former tennis pro turned plucky pickleball upstart. Presumably Johnson took the gig because he has a deep love of the sport, a fondness for its pockmarked balls and weirdly smooth paddles? “No experience of it whatsoever,” says the actor, cheerfully, on a video call from Los Angeles.

Yet this underdog of a racket sport, loved by retirees, found him anyway. At the climax of the movie, Dusty must play against an old foe, which meant Johnson had to undertake months of real-life training in pickleball and tennis, so it looked as if he could play. “It was like WWE. They call it fake wrestling. The outcome is there, but you still have to wrestle. That was probably the most stressful part of the film to me.”

Inside all the blink-and-you-miss-it moments, subtle easter eggs and poignant takeaways from Christopher Nolan’s ancient epic

• This article contains spoilers for The Odyssey

The Odyssey looks set to be the blockbuster hit of the summer, with global opening weekend grosses of $264m, critical rave reviews including five stars from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, and reports of fans traversing continents to experience Christopher Nolan’s epic tale of gods and monsters in one of the few dozen screens worldwide with the capability to screen Imax in 70mm. It also has the potential to rule the box office for the coming weeks, with few other true blockbusters to be released this summer, with the exception of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (hence the cast’s humiliation ritual of a press tour). Read on for a spoiler-packed breakdown of the epic battles, narrative twists and out-of-nowhere cameos that bring richness to Nolan’s idiosyncratic vision of ancient life.

Ultra-light, quick to inflate, and surprisingly comfortable, Decathlon’s sleeping pad outperforms gear that’s twice the price

• The best camping mattresses, tested

Budget camping mattresses used to fall into two unsatisfying camps: thin foam roll mats that do little to cushion you from hard, uneven ground, and bulky flocked airbeds that are prone to punctures and require either a pump or superhuman lung capacity to inflate.

The self-inflating mat felt revolutionary when it first appeared. I remember my boyfriend giving me a Therm-a-Rest in the mid-2000s and promptly declaring myself a camping convert. But for ageing side-sleepers like me, these foam- and air-filled mats have their limits: unless you opt for one at least 8cm thick, rocky ground and aching hips can still detract from the magic of a night spent outdoors. And as mats get thicker, they also tend to get heavier, bulkier and more expensive.

Forget the underpowered, ready-made offerings of food chains: these vibrant mixes are bursting with fruit and notes of florals, citrus and spice

Most of our experiences with fruit salad are dull: straight out of a can in saccharine syrup or unripe, slippery, unidentifiable chunks hastily bought from a sandwich chain when you’re trying to be healthy. The best ones, however, are life-enhancing and made fresh at home. And, with summer offering up a bounty of ripeness, now is the best time to make them. Eat them sweet or savoury, heighten their flavour with floral waters, spices, aromats, herbs or citrus, and enjoy for breakfast, lunch or as a refreshing after-dinner treat.

From catnip to interactive, scented and all-natural teasers, here are the toys our reviewer’s panel of feline testers fell head over paws for

• The best gifts for cats and dogs

Watch a cat doing as they please in a garden, and you’ll witness a procession of behaviours passed down from their wild ancestors. They may crouch with ears pricked up at the sight or sound of birds in flight; rub against objects to leave their scent; chase buzzing, drowsing insects; or sniff a favourite plant with gusto. Regrettably, some will hunt and catch prey.

The best cat toys help any cat – indoor or outdoor – live out these behaviours safely, humanely, and often with their owner’s involvement. Having a few within paw’s reach is valuable to a pet cat’s fitness, mood and fundamental felinity.

Best cat toy overall:
Nature’s Goodies colourful long raffia tail teaser sticks

Best budget cat toy:
Pets at Home scrunchie ball

They claim to fix fine lines, blemishes, and redness – but which stand up to scrutiny? After consulting dermatologists and putting them to the test, we have crowned a brand new number one

• The best anti-ageing creams, serums and treatments

LED face masks are booming in popularity – despite being one of the most expensive at-home beauty products to hit the market. They claim to either reduce the appearance of fine lines, stop spots or calm redness, with some even combining different types of light to enhance the benefits.

However, it’s wise to be sceptical about new treatments that are costly and non-invasive, and to do your research before you buy. With this in mind, I interviewed doctors and dermatologists to find out whether these light therapy devices work.

Best LED mask overall:
CurrentBody Multi Light Therapy LED mask

Best budget LED face mask:
Silk’n LED face mask 100

You told us your tried-and-tested tricks for keeping children entertained. Plus, the best eye masks and natural deodorants, tested

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If there’s one thing worse than a long journey, it’s a long journey with bored, fractious children. So what helps smooth things along? We asked for your best, tried-and-tested hacks for travelling with kids, from “fidget bags” to lollipops.

On a long car trip from the UK to France with his kids, reader Tim Leadbeater attached small plastic baskets with string around the pillars of the front headrest: “They held everything from felt tips to half-eaten food, not only preventing stains on covers but also keeping everything reachable for kids in car seats.”

‘This is my bucket-list spot for wild camping’: Outdoors expert Sian Lewis answered your questions

‘It’s the first thing we set up’: parents on everything you need for camping with kids – and what you don’t

The best camping tents: 10 expert picks for every outdoor adventure

Do natural deodorants actually work? I put 18 to the test – here are my favourites

The best walking sandals for women: 10 comfy and supportive styles for summer

CurrentBody Multi Light Therapy LED mask review: hands down the best I’ve tested

The best air coolers to chill your home during heatwaves – tested

‘Proof that delicious tomatoes can be grown in the UK’: the best supermarket vine tomatoes, tasted and rated

How I Shop with Angela Hartnett: ‘The purchase I regret the most? Any fitness machine!’

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

Surprisingly easy to manoeuvre and skilled at cleaning carpet and hard floor, Shark’s upright bagless model is one of the best corded vacuums I’ve tested

• The best vacuum cleaners

Corded vacuum cleaners aren’t as glamorous as their cordless cousins, but swapping battery power for a plug socket has its advantages. The device will never be short of power, so it can keep cleaning for as long as you need it to. Prices also tend to be lower because there’s no expensive battery to factor into the cost.

On the downside, there’s a cable to manage while you clean, and even the longest cords usually need to be switched from one plug socket to another if your home is any larger than a small flat.

Those expensive pods will bring their heavenly aroma to syrups, compotes, baked goods, desserts – and even your underwear drawer

Can you do anything with vanilla pods once you’ve scraped out the seeds? They’re so expensive.
Jo, by email
“I put them in my knicker drawer,” says Sarah Lemanski, owner of Nova Bakehouse in Leeds. “They scent it nicely, that’s for sure.” But, culinarily speaking, and beyond custards and the like, Lemanski often uses them in vanilla syrup: “Chop the pod quite small, then dry-toast it with some of the sugar for the syrup – I use a 2:1 sugar-to-water ratio – to give it body.” The Guardian’s own Benjamina Ebuehi is very much in agreement, and keeps a stash of said vanilla syrup in the fridge to fuel her matcha habit: “I can’t be paying £6 for one every day.” (It would work well in iced coffee, too.)

“Even when you’ve scraped out as much as you can from a pod, there are always some seeds left inside,” Ebuehi says, so there’s still so much flavour to be had in there. Perhaps the easiest way to keep the love alive is by sticking a spent pod in a fruit compote: “Once that’s cooled, get it in the fridge, but leave the pod in there, so it continues to seep out that flavour.” You could apply a similar tactic to jam.

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Spanish white pickled anchovies top this full-flavoured dish that’s easy to make and made for sharing

In Spain, some of our most loved dishes come from making something special out of very little. This salad is exactly that kind of food: it’s about using what is already in the house and turning it into something generous and full-flavoured. I have always loved how these dishes bring people together, because they’re designed to be placed in the middle of the table for everyone to share. They remind me of long, relaxed lunches that slowly turn into the afternoon and evening, and where conversation matters as much as the food. Simple, honest and full of character, this is the kind of cooking that never goes out of style.

Rustic, authentic and utterly delicious – three dishes that bring the taste of the trattoria straight to your table

Pesto trapanese combines almonds, tomatoes, pecorino and a hint of garlic and basil to create a fresher version than the typical Genovese variety, and I especially love the way the richness of the almonds is lifted by the fresh tomatoes – when they’re pureed together, it creates a wonderful mouthfeel. For me, though, pasta pomodoro symbolises home. My mum’s was a cornerstone of our trattoria, as it is at Italian restaurants around the world, and every family has their own fiercely guarded recipe. I developed this particular method when I started Pasta Princess, which delivered hand-rolled pasta and pomodoro sauce all over London during lockdown. It kept me grounded when I was in between kitchens, and resurfaced at Tiella, where it features regularly on the menu. Finally, torta caprese is a wonderfully rich flourless chocolate cake made with ground almonds. Mum often made a similar cake called torta gianduia, which uses hazelnuts instead of almonds, a recipe that hails from Piedmont, the heart of Italy’s hazelnut production (the Tonda Gentile delle Langhe variety is particularly prized for its incredible quality and flavour, carrying the IGP label to denote regionality and strict production standards). I remember her once buying these special hazelnuts on a trip to Italy, and taking them back home to New Zealand so she could make gianduia. When the cake came out of the oven, the aroma was so incredible that she decided to bring it home rather than putting it on the menu, and shared it with us instead.

Perfect for an al fresco lunch spread, these bruschetta come together as quickly as they disappear …

Fresh, light but filling – these bruschetta are beautiful to bring outside as part of a lunch spread. They take minutes to whip together (sorry) and, for extra Marie Antoinette at Le Petit Trianon vibes, pick mint (or/and baby courgettes) from your own garden. You can get ahead by making the whipped feta and lemon dressing in advance, and keeping the courgette ribbons and radishes in cold water until needed. Drain and dress the courgettes just before serving – they’re lovely with the contrast of the toasted baguette and cool cheese.

A Harris’s hawk, she is capable of flying at more than 35mph, scouring the ground for prey, while also judging my footwear. The moments of connection with this wild creature are incredible

My children brought hawks into my life. My youngest son, especially, became fascinated by birds of prey at the age of six, drawing beautiful pictures and reciting endless facts to bird owners at various country shows.

Eventually I decided, why not? We live in the countryside, after all, on Anglesey (Ynys Môn). So, during Covid, Bird, the Harris’s hawk, came into our lives. We got her from a breeder after she hatched. It was perfect timing: I was home-schooling my three kids, and at 2pm every day, rain or shine, with a brilliant local falconer, we would set out on to the headland to watch her fly. It was beautiful to see. For years, my youngest never missed a day, no matter how cold.

Both Denzel and Sarita left sexless relationships before they met, but together they have discovered toys and Tantric sex

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

She’s brought a different side to my life I didn’t know existed

I went out into the car park to see if I could spot anyone nearby who might have just left the restaurant

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

I lost my wife in 2020 and my son in 2021. A few years later, I was living alone in a retirement complex when I decided to go out one night for dinner. There was a little Vietnamese restaurant nearby that my wife and I used to frequent, which had excellent food and held many happy memories. It just so happened to be Father’s Day.

I dined alone, ordering my usual rice paper rolls. When I went to settle the bill, the lass behind the counter told me my meal had already been paid for.

A social media manager and a​ transport psychology ​researcher disagreed over Palestine Action, but who ​changed their view on the triple-loc​k?

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

Hugo, 21, Birmingham

Occupation Social media manager for the Conservative party

When the problem was finally sorted out in our new-build home, it increased my tariff by 19%

Residents in our new housing development are being billed for each other’s energy after the meters were mixed up.

I realised British Gas was sending bills for my energy to the developer of the estate instead of to me. I informed British Gas of my details when I moved in seven months ago.

I bought a wheelchair for my daughter, but she later died in hospital and the company refuses a refund

I bought a £435 wheelchair for my disabled daughter from my local Lifestyle & Mobility store.

She had been admitted to hospital for tests and I planned to use the chair to take her on outings when she was discharged.

They are out to steal your password to commit further fraud such as crypto scams or phishing attacks

You have had an X account for years, since it was known as Twitter. When an email arrives about a new login from a location nowhere near where you live, alarm bells begin to ring.

“We noticed a login to your account from a new device. Was this you?” the email asks.

Vibrant areas for young workers who plan to rent while saving for a deposit and then get on the property ladder

• The new 100% mortgages for first-time buyers

• Homes to rent before buying in cities

The common property rite of passage for graduates and career-focused first jobbers has changed over the past decade. Many careers used to start in London, and an early house-share would be followed by a first flat purchase, then a move to somewhere bigger.

However, the heavy burden of housing costs in the capital is making would-be first-time buyers stop and evaluate whether – even with London weighting on some wages – it is possible to get on the ladder there.

For those who are burned out, perimenopausal, or both, dancing all night can be a panacea. It’s great exercise, lowers stress, boosts energy and provides connection. No wonder so many are doing it

It’s 4am and I’m in a club – the first time I’ve done this in years. I’m 51 and in my sandwich era, meaning I’ve got teenage and elderly loved ones on my mind – a situation that generally calls for early nights. But when you’re responsibilities-maxxing, sometimes you need the opposite. A blowout. A huge, transcendent, resetting release. A rave.

I don’t know what took me so long to get around to it. Misplaced parental guilt? Internalised ageism? Exhaustion? It’s not as though I didn’t know other gen-Xers who have been regularly getting blissfully – ceremonially, even – lost in house, techno or drum’n’bass, and they’re not alone. A 2025 study by the University of Leeds went viral: “Women aged 40-65 are turning to raves for real mental health,” said one of many Instagram posts and press headlines. “Why many women over 40 still go to raves,” read another. But surely the question should be: why the hell wouldn’t they?

Experts share tips to avoid the blood-sucking pests that can transmit Lyme disease and other illnesses on to humans

I won’t go into gory detail about the tick I found latched behind my ear approximately 35 hours after a hike in early June. Suffice it to say, the parasite was well fed, and I was horrified.

I am far from alone in making such a disgusting discovery. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), emergency room visits for tick bites have been unusually high in the US this year. Thirty-one million Americans are bitten by ticks annually – and the number has been trending up for over a decade. In the UK, ticks appear to be rising in number and species variety.

Over the last decade, the understanding of these devastating headaches has grown enormously, as has the understanding of what can be done to treat them

We’ve been trying to cure migraines – without much success, until relatively recently – for as long as we’ve been able to identify them as a distinct ailment. The Ebers Papyrus, a scroll dating back to 1550BC that mentions a “disease of one half of the head”, suggests anointing the scalp with fried catfish; Galen, the second-century Roman physician whose term “hemicrania” evolved into the modern word, recommended blood-letting (this, to be fair, was his answer to a lot of things). By the 20th century, doctors were suggesting repressed emotions might be at fault, leading to suggestions that women – who suffer from migraines far more than men – were simply too fragile and neurotic. As recently as a couple of decades ago, “vascular theory” – the idea that blood vessels in the brain expanding and contracting were to blame – was still the standard explanation in many medical schools.

Over the last decade, though, our understanding of what causes these neurological disorders, which are technically a sub-category of headache, has progressed enormously, alongside the options for treating them. One of the biggest problems, as in centuries past, is a lack of sympathy for sufferers. The biggest difference, these days, is that we actually understand what is happening, and why.

The England defender wears a tracker, the heptathlete is experimenting with kiwi fruits – and world champion swimmer Adam Peaty swears by hours and hours of history videos …

Katarina Johnson-Thompson

Surfboards, knee-length shorts, wetsuits, flip-flops: all have been seen on the catwalks this year. But what do actual surfers think of the trend? We went to Newquay to find out

Summer is here, and with it the annual scramble to decide what kind of season we’re supposed to be having. What will it be? On offer in 2026 are “freaky sandal summer”, which requires you to wear weird shoes, and “euromaxxing”, which is presumably about making the most of the easyJet sale without considering the environmental impact. Maybe “poet girl summer” is for you, whereby you listen to Gracie Abrams while wearing a silk camisole. Or simply “no mascara summer”, which I won’t spell out but sounds quite appealing.

The most plausible contender is “board short summer”, a phrase coined by Marie Claire, which broadly involves dressing like you surf even if you’ve never set foot on a board.

From Lily Collins at Wimbledon to the cast of Love Island, heels-averse cohort is stepping it up a notch

Gen Z, the flats-only generation, has finally succumbed to the heel – albeit a tiny one. Long vocally anti-heel, the cohort who were born between 1997 and 2012 have famously shunned millennials’ obsession with Jimmy Choos in favour of pancake-flat shoes, from the Adidas Samba “It-trainer” to the split-toe Margiela Tabi and so-called “French girl ballet flats”.

But they now appear to be embracing a potential gateway heel, typically measuring in the region of 1.5in (3.8cm) or the height of a triple-A battery.

From M&S to Miu Miu, 50s US school gym staple adopted by 70s rockers is having its moment in the sun again

If the T-shirt is a ubiquitous sight on summer streets, fashion loves nothing more than changing up something very familiar. Enter, this summer, the rise of the ringer T-shirt.

A T-shirt shape but with contrast colour on the collar and ends of the short sleeves, the garment has been spotted at brands ranging from Marks & Spencer to Ganni, Hush and Levi’s.

Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy

As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.

Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.

The seven inhabited isles off the North Sea coast, part of a Unesco world heritage site, are a sanctuary for wildlife – with great hotels and restaurants too

‘Can you hear that?” my guide Andrea Wellmeyer asks as I sink a little deeper into the wet ground, cold mud seeping between my toes. When the wind drops, I detect a faint but distinct crackling, similar to the rustle of a sweet wrapper or the bubbling of sparkling water. “That’s the Wattknistern,” she says, “a natural phenomenon caused by the tens of thousands of mud shrimp that live here.”

We’re standing in the Wadden Sea mudflats on Norderney, an island just off Germany’s North Sea coast. It’s Friday evening at low tide. In the town centre, bars are pumping with music, but here, just 15 minutes along the southern edge of the island, it’s a completely different story.

Almost all of the sandy stretches on the country’s 8,000km of coastline are run for profit. Now ‘free beach’ campaigners are fighting back against the mafia, the military and those profiteering from sun loungers and cocktails

Walking along Italian beaches is like strolling through a rainbow. The sand will be subdivided into colours: for 50 metres or so the perfectly spaced parasols and deck chairs will be all red, then they become orange, then yellow, green and so on.

These are the country’s famous bagni (lidos), formally known as concessioni balneari (bathing concessions). They’re simple but stylish. The sand is raked at dawn. The bar plays ambient music and serves negronis or fried squid. There will probably be a table-tennis table, or a beach volleyball area. Some have swimming pools.

With bus fares capped at £3 and free for kids in August, it’s the ideal time for wildlife watching, woodland walks, world-class art and more

Trips to waterfalls, gardens, galleries, medieval forests and prehistoric caves will make the long school holidays a lot more fun. To help families explore affordably, throughout August buses in England will be free for kids and adult fares will be capped at £3 single. Or, if you arrive somewhere by train, you could buy a PlusBus ticket, which include unlimited local bus travel. Here are six ideas for family outings by bus around England.

From 100,000 sunflowers in Gower and cosmic art in Galloway to a bat safari and messing about in boats, there’s enough here to keep you and the kids busy till September

At the westernmost tip of the Gower peninsula, Rhossili Bay is a gloriously wide sweep of sand, backed by dunes and licked with waves perfect for bodyboarding and surfing. Wild ponies graze on the southern headland, while walkers time their trip across to the serpent-like Worm’s Head promontory to not get cut off by the tide.

A woman ostentatiously making her own pasta in an eaterie in Florence or Rome might seem the height of authenticity. But travellers, beware ...

Name: Pasta windows.

Age: Pretty new.

Elon Musk is trying to own it, competing powers are trying to fight in it and nobody seems to be regulating it. So who does space really belong to?

The last time I saw Laura Grego was in a tent in a baking field on the Welsh borders in May. The conversation on stage ranged from the dangers of space debris to how the law of the sea might pertain to outer space; from our sense of the sacred to our interplanetary futures. At one point Grego, a physicist, said intently, “People have to be aware of what is happening in space. Public knowledge has to catch up.” Three weeks later, SpaceX launched on the stock exchange, temporarily making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

So, I ask her now, what is it that we should all know? Well, she says, the average person’s experience of space is about to change. If, so far, that has been “looking at the stars and being full of wonder, full of connection with the universe”, perhaps noticing the occasional streaking object that was not a shooting star, now “there are plans for tens of thousands more satellites, which would really change your relationship with what you see in the sky”. SpaceX, specifically, has just applied to a federal regulator for permission to launch up to 1m of them.

Seeds are packed into shop-bought pots, meaning they compete and wear themselves out. The best bet is to divide and conquer

The problem
We’ve all done it: picked up a lush, generous-looking pot of basil from the supermarket – full of promise and pesto plans, and within a fortnight it has collapsed into a dried-out, leggy mess. You assume you did something wrong. In reality, the plant was set up to fail before it even reached your kitchen.

The hack
That full, bushy pot is not actually one plant; it is dozens of basil seedlings crammed into a single container to look bushy on the shelf. Packed that tightly, they compete for light, water and root space, and exhaust themselves within days. The fix is to divide the overcrowded mass into smaller, separated clumps and give each one room to actually grow.

The answer to today’s puzzle

Earlier today I set you a puzzle about keeping homes cool in a heatwave. Here it is again with the solution.

Imagine a room with a set of curtains. When the Sun is shining, its energy comes through the windows where it is absorbed by the curtains. The curtains get hotter and hotter until they reach a temperature at which they are radiating as much heat as they absorb. The curtains radiate 50 per cent of this heat back towards the window, and 50 per cent of the heat into the room.

Aiden is an unforgettable young caregiver in Walthamstow, east London, who has been looking after his mum for over half his life. Every few weeks, Aiden and other young carers get a rare night off thanks to tenacious council worker Satvinder, who fights to improve the recognition of young carers in her borough. This film joins them as they reclaim a few hours of their teenage lives back.

Is Mum OK? is released during Carers Week in the UK, a campaign that celebrates unpaid carers across the country and calls for better recognition and support for them. There are more than one million young carers in the UK – with an average age of 12 – which is the equivalent of two kids in every school class.

After her son disappeared, Isabel Miranda de Wallace swore she would bring the culprits to justice. She became a national hero. But did she go too far?

When her son, Hugo, failed to answer his phone on the morning of 12 July 2005, Isabel Miranda de Wallace did not waste a moment. Everyone knew that kidnappings were rife in Mexico City, and Wallace immediately enlisted her brother and nephew to help with the search. They walked the streets near Hugo’s last known location until they came across his SUV. A passerby told them they’d seen someone being forced out of his car and into a nearby apartment, Wallace later said. She also described speaking to a boy who had heard gunshots and seen an injured man being led out of the apartment around 4am. “Within 24 hours, we found his car, then the building where they took my son. We had the case practically solved,” Wallace later said. “But the police didn’t believe us.”

At that time, many kidnapping cases went unreported, as families feared that the police couldn’t be trusted. Those who did go to the police often struggled to get them to take their complaints seriously. But Wallace was different. She was a successful businesswoman, who had set up an advertising agency that owned and operated billboards across Mexico City. “She didn’t beg or say please,” said Federico Döring, a politician and an early ally of Wallace. “She would point her finger at public officials not doing their job – and this was unheard of,” Döring told me. “In Mexico, a lot of people are often afraid to speak up because you don’t know if a politician is in bed with the cartels. That intimidates them, but it didn’t intimidate her.”

Since the start of the Iran war in February, there has been a 23% rise in fuel theft, with more than £1.2m stolen from British forecourts each week. Why aren’t the police doing more to apprehend the culprits?

A petrol station tucked away in the suburbs of Birmingham seems an unlikely place for a crime spree. But this garage has become a prime target for thieves. Some fuel runners are easy to spot, approaching the petrol pumps in face masks, but after a recent spate of fill-and-dashes by less conspicuous drivers, no motorist is beyond suspicion. “It could be anyone,” says Shailesh Parekh, who is on high alert, as always.

The 62-year-old owns six forecourts across Birmingham, and today I’m visiting his station in Erdington, a residential area about five miles from the city centre. Parekh remembers a time when a motorist speeding off with an unpaid-for tank was rare. So much so, it would be the talk of the station for months. Those days are long gone. Now, it’s a weekly and sometimes daily occurrence. “In the last three years, it’s been very bad,” Parekh tells me from the back office, where a monitor beams CCTV images from every inch of the forecourt.

Interviews with residents of Russian-held region point to frustration with Moscow as Ukrainian campaign to isolate it takes toll on daily life

First, the guests stopped coming. As Ukrainian drones and missiles pounded Crimea throughout the spring and into the summer, Russian tourists began cancelling their bookings at the small guesthouse Marina runs in Yevpatoria, a resort town on the peninsula’s Black Sea coast.

Then petrol became scarce, making it harder to stock the business with food and other essentials. Now, electricity and running water are cut off for much of the day, just as the summer heat sets in.

With the cost of holiday childcare rising and many parents juggling work with looking after children, we’d like to hear how you’re managing this summer

The summer holidays have begun, bringing the annual challenge many parents face in balancing work and looking after school-aged children. New research suggests arranging six weeks of holiday childcare can cost working parents up to £1,145 per child, while almost three-quarters of parents say the summer childcare juggle damages their career.

Are you paying for holiday clubs or childminders, relying on family and friends or working from home while caring for children? Are you taking annual leave, reducing your hours or working early mornings and late evenings to fit everything in?

We would like to hear your thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s adaption of Homer’s epic

The Odyssey has stormed the global box office, taking US$264m (£196m, A$378m) in its opening weekend, according to studio Universal Pictures.

Starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway and Zendaya, the blockbuster is an adaptation of Homer’s epic, which follows Odysseus as he makes his 10-year journey home after fighting in the Trojan war. It’s also the first feature movie to be filmed entirely with Imax cameras – a system of very heavy and loud cameras that capture a sharper, brighter and higher-resolution content.

If you’re wearing the new glasses, we want to know more about how you’re using them. We’d also like to hear from people about how they feel about others around them wearing the glasses

With over seven million pairs of glasses reported to have been sold by Meta in 2025, it is clear that their popularity is growing and we’d like to find out more about how people are using them.

There have been some concerns around nonconsensual filming and the data protection of users, however the glasses have proved life-changing for those with visual impairments and hearing loss.

We would like to hear from people living near AI datacentres about their experiences and any concerns they might have

There are around 450 large data centres across the UK. These warehouses contain computing infrastructure that power cloud services and, increasingly, AI.

There is much debate about how datacentres affect their local areas, with concerns raised by nearby residents about land use, pollution, noise, and the “heat island effect”.

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