Is chocolate better served chilled? Do bananas go mushy? And won’t someone think of the avocados? Here is the final word on the fridge or cupboard conflict

If every summer has a trending drink, then 2026 promises to be the season of the chilled red. In news that our European neighbours, who have long been doing this, will roll their eyes at, Britons have discovered the delights of a cold glass of red wine. No more serving at room temperature, or warming it by the fire (or radiator) as if you’re the host of a country house gathering: this year if your pinot noir isn’t in an ice bucket, consider it social death. The Times reports that gen Z drinkers are driving the trend, with Ocado finding that 56% had drunk chilled red wine, or wine served over ice, in summer compared with 35% of the wider population.

“We tend to serve wine way too warm in this country, and red wine particularly,” says the wine expert Tom Gilbey. “It accentuates the alcohol and makes it taste like soup. Actually almost every wine is better served slightly cooler than we normally drink it, and some red wines are beautiful when they’re really quite cool.” The optimum temperature is around 10C (50F). “So 20 minutes in the fridge, or 10 to 15 minutes in an ice bucket. You don’t want to serve any wine too, too cold, but it’s really refreshing.

The right is obsessed with ‘two-tier policing’. This is indeed a two-tier government – but the real victims are progressives

“If you are targeting people on the basis of the colour of their skin,” the Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, asked last week, “how else can you describe them? That is racist thuggery.” It is. But there is another way of describing the actions of the rioters burning people out of their homes in Belfast, though ministers somehow cannot bring themselves to say it. Terrorism.

The violence there clearly meets the government’s definition: “the use or threat” of actions designed to “intimidate the public” for the purpose of “advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”. Among these actions are “serious violence against a person” and “serious damage to property”. I happen to believe that the property clause blurs the issue. But either way, in what possible world do the Belfast attacks not fit the definition?

From Noël Coward to Martine McCutcheon, the famed institution has been hothousing talent for more than a century. Our writer finds there’s a softer approach these days – and a food bank

When I walk into renowned stage school Italia Conti, in the smart building in Woking that has been its home since 2022, the first thing that hits me is the quiet. Where are the students dancing on tables? Rehearsing scenes in the hallways? Some are offsite, it turns out, rehearsing for a show, but those I see are busy on their phones in the corridors, like any other young adults.

Life has changed at Italia Conti since its earliest days. The school celebrates its 115th anniversary this year. It was founded in London in 1911 by English actor Italia Conti to teach a group of children appearing in the play Where the Rainbow Ends at the Savoy theatre. Noël Coward was among the young performers. By the 1930s the school was advertising lessons in elocution, acting, singing, fencing and dance (ballroom, “operatic, Greek and stage dancing”).

Female activists are working in the shadows to find and support vulnerable women they fear are being failed by authorities

Last summer, Xiaocao, a softly spoken woman in her 40s, received a tip-off that in Lüliang, a small city in China’s Shanxi province, vulnerable women were being forced into marriages. Along with another volunteer, she wanted to investigate.

After leaving Beijing, the two volunteers travelled south for hours, on trains and in rental cars. A few villages turned out to be dead ends. But on the final day of their trip, the women stopped in a county where they’d heard about a woman with learning disabilities who was “married” to two brothers. Soon, they found her.

London Tree Ring project aims to create corridors of plant and animal life around the city to strengthen its biodiversity

Harry Ewing is heaping branches and foliage from the forest floor on to a dead hedge, reinforcing the protective circle around his newly planted trees in Hadley Wood, north London. He is in a glade created by a fallen oak that was previously overrun with thick bramble.

“I feel very happy – the trees are growing already. It’s really nice seeing it when it starts,” says Ewing.

Britain’s Camping and Caravanning Club started as a cycle camping club 125 years ago. I cycle from its birthplace to one of its oldest campsites to see if its free-wheeling spirit survives

Skylarks call out a cascading trill as I pedal between the pink and white hawthorn blossoms that make my path look like a May Day parade. I’m on the outskirts of Oxford, a city I thought I knew well, yet as I follow the National Cycle Route 57 on the e-bike I’d picked up in Jericho, it feels as though I’ve discovered a secret passageway.

This year the Camping and Caravanning Club (CCC) turns 125 – and I’m celebrating with a 60-mile cycling and camping trip, leaving from the city where the organisation was born and heading to Walton-on-Thames to stay at one of the oldest campsites in the CCC network.

Exclusive: Cain has been lauded by corporation for his appeal to young men despite history of abusive and misogynistic remarks

• Warning: this article contains sexually explicit, offensive language

A BBC presenter lauded by the corporation for his appeal to young male audiences has a history of making abusive and misogynistic remarks about women, whom he has variously called “slags”, “sluts”, “psychos” and “bitches”, the Guardian can reveal.

Ashley Cain is the presenter of the BBC Three documentary series Ashley Cain: Into the Danger Zone, which was filmed on location earlier this year after the BBC commissioned a second series.

Flatlining figure confounds forecasts of an increase to 3% as Bank of England prepares to set interest rates

UK inflation unexpectedly remained at 2.8% last month as higher transport and fuel costs were offset by slower food price rises, official figures have shown.

May’s annual price rise reading recorded by the Office for National Statistics came despite the feared impact of the Middle East conflict on energy prices and confounded economists’ forecasts of a rise to 3%.

Abbas Araghchi says war ‘not fully come to an end’ without Israeli forces leaving territories occupied during present conflict

Iran’s top diplomat has said a peace deal with the US would require Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, as concern grows that Israel could undermine diplomatic efforts to finally end the Middle East war, with Donald Trump even criticising his ally and war partner as irresponsible.

“Without the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories they occupied during this war, the war has not fully come to an end,” said the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi.

Exclusive: Ed Davey to make call ahead of 10th anniversary of Brexit vote, in strengthening of party’s position on EU

The Lib Dems will urge Andy Burnham to end Labour’s “torpor and timidity” towards the EU as they call for the UK to rejoin the single market, in a notable strengthening of their own position.

Ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote next week, Ed Davey will challenge Burnham to scrap Labour’s red lines on the customs union and single market if he becomes prime minister and immediately begin talks on a more ambitious deal with the EU.

Upgrade to Buchanan Galleries part of £50m spend this year and £800m by 2029 to revive appeal of department stores

John Lewis is to spend £20m on a revamp of its Glasgow store in the city centre’s Buchanan Galleries in a vote of confidence in the shopping mall not long ago scheduled for demolition.

It is the largest cash injection within a wider plan to spend £50m this financial year on refreshing its shops, with department stores in Reading, Cambridge, Leicester and Liverpool all earmarked for an upgrade.

Shots fired within 500 metres of vessel near Isle of Wight amid heightened tensions between London and Moscow

A Russian warship fired warning shots within a few hundred metres of a British pleasure yacht sailing across the Channel on Tuesday morning amid a period of heightened tensions between London and Moscow.

The rare incident took place at 11.40am more than 20 miles south of the Isle of Wight and less than 40 miles north of Normandy, France, when the yacht, identified as the private vessel Bright Future, sailed close to the Admiral Grigorovich and ignored at least one warning.

As bosses ridicule the chancellor’s scheme, one venue is offering a £25 ‘kids’ menu of snails and anchovy butter toast

Restaurants and pubs are expected to devise “enterprising” schemes to exploit a tax break on meals for under-18s, after one venue launched a menu for “kids” featuring wild burgundy snail salad and anchovy butter toast.

Rachel Reeves last month announced a temporary cut in VAT on children’s meals from 20% to 5% between 25 June and 1 September, part of a “Great British summer savings scheme” to support struggling venues and ease pressure on families.

Six companies are suspected of colluding to use food inflation to raise the prices of their product

Authorities in Japan have raided six of the country’s largest ice-cream firms for allegedly colluding to raise the price of their products, provoking anger from frozen snack aficionados as they face a cruel summer ahead.

Officials from the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) on Tuesday carried out searches of the corporate headquarters of Akagi Nyugyo, Ezaki Glico, Lotte, Meiji, Morinaga Milk Industry and Morinaga & Co due to suspicions they had violated antimonopoly laws.

Those in attendance at Argentina’s opening match against Algeria could be forgiven, for a moment, for thinking they were at one of the great Argentinian cathedrals of football – La Bombonera, or maybe the national stadium, El Monumental. Kansas City Stadium, awash in the colors of the Albiceleste, roared with the sound of nearly 70,000 Argentine supporters serenading their team, and their hero, in rapturous song on Tuesday night.

They had plenty to sing about.

A headteacher, a motorcycle taxi driver and a travel agent are among those who are counting the human and economic cost of the virus

Justin Keno watches more than 400 pupils stream through the Nelson Mandela school’s gate each morning, and wonders which of them might be carrying Ebola.

The institution’s principal has done everything he can to prevent the spread of the virus: installing hand-washing basins at the entrance, providing alcohol-based hand rub for parents, making pupils bring packed lunches instead of eating in the canteen, and banning food sellers from outside the gates.

The rules have changed and more taxpayers are being pulled into the net, not only the wealthy

Less generous rules have turned capital gains tax into a “cash machine” for the government, with income from the levy soaring by almost 80% to £24bn in the last tax year – equivalent to well over £800 a household.

A series of changes to the way the charge works means more people are being pulled into the capital gains tax (CGT) net, and not only the wealthy. And, given the scale of the change, this week experts were reminding consumers of legitimate ways to reduce a CGT bill.

From Quincy Jones to Sam Smith, Raye to Santana, Anoush Abrar has been taking mesmerising photographs of the festival’s stars for years

Is Japan really full of centenarians? And what about ‘blue zones’? A brilliant skewering of ageing secrets and lies

There is a special place in hell reserved for doctors who trade on their authority, status and medical training to monetise public fear and gullibility. Every time I scroll past a qualified physician touting elixirs that promise youthful vigour, cellulite-free thighs or gut microbiome makeovers, I want to poke their fraudulent eyes out. At best, these charlatans have chosen lining their pockets over helping others. At worst, as in the case of the Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers, they are actively dangerous – something I witnessed first-hand on hospital wards in 2021 as unvaccinated patients succumbed to the disease.

Nowhere is human hope monetised more ruthlessly by medical grifters than in the anti-ageing industry. Our inescapable fate – decrepitude and death – makes us ripe for exploitation. Who doesn’t want to pop a pill or hook themselves up to an IV infusion that, for only £99.99 a month, will magically stave off the moment you turn into your grandparents? In Morbid, debut author Saul Justin Newman, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Population Ageing, sets out to topple the whole, sordid house of cards. His central argument is that our fear of frailty and dying has “created an opening for all manner of skullduggery in the science of ageing”, an area of research which is rife, he argues, with “misleading claims, mistaken assumptions, and outright chicanery. The world’s oldest man is a fake, hundreds of thousands of the world’s oldest people are actually dead, and five decades of research on human longevity is moot.”

I’d always wanted to represent my country at something, so when I learned about Mölkky, I got a team together

It was December 2023 and I was searching in the attic for Christmas decorations when my phone pinged. I pulled it out of my pocket and found a WhatsApp message from my son who was backpacking in Australia. The message read, simply: “You might want to take a look at this” – it was accompanied by a short video clip.

The footage was grainy – it was night-time somewhere in Queensland and the streetlights weren’t the brightest – but I could make out Louis and his travel companion Asher throwing what looked like a rolling pin at a collection of numbered wooden skittles.

Detector teams in Wellington react to ‘intel’ from the public about pest sightings as part of the country’s push to eradicate all introduced predators

In many places around the world, discovering a rat in your garden would barely register a second thought.

But in parts of New Zealand, a single rat, possum or stoat can trigger an urgent response, as the country embarks on a world-leading project to eradicate introduced predators by 2050 to save its unique wildlife from further decimation.

A hat-trick against Algeria equalled Miroslav Klose’s World Cup scoring record, but Messi and his teammates insist the mark doesn’t matter to him

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Long after the dust had settled on Argentina’s 3-0 group-stage victory over Algeria on Tuesday night, Algeria and Bayern Munich midfielder Ibrahim Maza wearily emerged from behind a curtain and stepped up to the microphone.

Maza had played well, even assisting on Algeria’s disallowed first goal. He’d also had a front row seat to a Lionel Messi masterclass, just a few yards away from Argentina’s captain when he scored his third goal of the evening and tied Miroslav Klose as the World Cup’s all-time leading goalscorer. In short order, he was asked to expand on what made Messi unplayable on Tuesday evening.

Striker will lead England against Croatia at the home of the Dallas Cowboys, seeking to right the wrongs of Qatar 2022

There has long been something about the mentality of US sports stars that has appealed to Harry Kane. The England captain sees it as something specific to them: a unique brand of never-say-die spirit. It leans into a broader notion – that anyone can achieve success if they want it badly enough, if they pursue it with all their heart. It is known as the American dream.

Kane was introduced to it all in 2011 at the start of his professional career, when the path was anything but smooth at his boyhood club, Tottenham. He had started to become interested in the NFL and there was something about the New England Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady, that transfixed him.

The tournament favorites were far from their best in their first half against a strong Senegal side. Their star forward made sure things finished fine

• World Cup newsletter | Daily podcast | Download the app

After the whistle blew for half-time, Kylian Mbappé ran to the player tunnel at a good clip, followed by Ousmane Dembélé. Behind them, the rest of the French team were in no such hurry, sauntering off the pitch. The forward widely considered the best in the world – or at least the most famous in the Non-Ronaldo-and-Messi Division – and the reigning Ballon d’Or winner had much to discuss.

The scoreless first half Tuesday against a Senegal side who had organized and pressed cohesively and forged much the better chances, including a clipped post, was a disjointed mess for the 2018 World Cup champions and the 2022 runners-up. But having the world’s best corps of forwards means getting to comprehensively beat the (former) African champions 3-1 despite spending the first hour looking like your front four had never played together before. And possibly didn’t even know one another’s names.

Surely nobody expected anything different. Erling Haaland arrival on the biggest football stage of all involved a match-defining performance. Kylian Mbappé had laid down a marker with two goals in France’s win over Senegal. Haaland responded in kind, courtesy of a first-half double of his own. The Manchester City striker’s quest for the Golden Boot depends on Norway enjoying a decent run in the event. Their hopes for that extended stay are so hugely reliant on Haaland. Theirs is a powerful combination. The name on the back of the shirt is different for club versus country – Haaland becomes Braut Haaland – yet the output is identically ruthless. This is a 25-year-old you simply cannot take your eyes off. Iraq did that twice and suffered as a consequence.

Haaland used post-match media duties to contradict the sentiment of his international head coach. Ståle Solbakken had branded Haaland the finest goalscorer in the world on the eve of this game. Haaland pointed out his numbers had been bettered by Mbappé and Harry Kane during the 2025-26 season. He did, however, deliver a warning regards his level of intensity. “I think today you saw the same energy [as before],” Haaland said. “Of course we have to be happy but also stay calm.”

Carlos Queiroz has plenty to deal with as the Black Stars enter the fray against Panama looking to banish a long record of underachievement

That it took Ghana until 2006 to qualify for the World Cup, despite being African football’s dominant team of the 1960s, 70s and the early 80s, winning the Africa Cup of Nations four times during this period, reflects the topsy-turvy nature of their football odyssey.

“The journey of the Black Stars over the last four decades has been marked by long periods of disappointment,” says Gary Al-Smith, one of the country’s most respected football journalists. “We had a surge between 2006 and 2017, when we qualified for eight straight semi-finals at Afcon but never won anything. Yes, we had a quarter-final appearance at the 2010 World Cup, but our record overall has been pockmarked with great highlights but never a trophy. There has been nothing to celebrate.”

Just as the ‘poverty line’ determines what’s required for basic living, we need a ‘wealth line’ to show when extreme wealth becomes harmful

It was bound to happen eventually: Elon Musk has become the planet’s first trillionaire. Until recently, economists who spoke about “trillions” were describing the GDP of the largest economies or the accumulated value of bequests on their way to the heirs of today’s billionaires. The term is not often used in daily conversation, let alone to describe the wealth of an individual.

But now we have entered a new phase of the oligarchic era. Previously, when we described the wealth of the world’s richest billionaires, it was understood as a few hundred billions. Three years ago, the value of Musk’s total assets was estimated to be about $250bn. The pace at which it has increased is mind-boggling – and so is what it represents.

Brooklyn Peltz Beckham appears in a new ad for DoorDash, just months after attacking the family brand’s love of self-promotion. Where will it all end?

I see Brooklyn Beckham is on his DoorDash privacy tour. After Prince Harry and Meghan “stepped away” from royal family duties, they embarked on what South Park famously designated their worldwide privacy tour. When Brooklyn stepped away from Beckham family duties – which oddly appear to involve a regal level of shared mission, public appearances and emotional repression – he declared that he wished only for privacy.

And so to his DoorDash ad, which dropped on Monday. Brooklyn is becoming quite the Greta Garbo of food delivery service ads, having previously done a collaboration with Uber Eats. But this latest one for DoorDash, owner of Deliveroo, is an eyecatcher. “You’re probably wondering,” he begins – and honestly, he’d be amazed at what I’m actually wondering. “You’re probably wondering why I’m watching the Fifa World Cup 2026 at home,” smirks Brooklyn, throwing down several World Cup tickets on a table that also features items including some letters. “It’s a long story,” he chuckles, before viewers are … tantalised, I think it is? … with the caption slogan: “It’s complicated. More soon.”

‘I am going to fight on,’ said the PM. Perhaps his delusion was more deep-rooted than the others had feared

Shortly before he arrived in Évian at the beginning of the week, Emmanuel Macron set up a new WhatsApp group for world leaders. Keir Starmer wasn’t included. Call it the G6, if you like. The idea was to have a safe space to discuss how best to deal with the UK prime minister. Should they confront head-on that this was going to be his last G7? That next year’s outing would be an athleisure occasion with Andy Burnham (T-shirts just a tad on the small size)? Should they club together to buy him a leaving present? A French World Cup football shirt signed by all of them?

Or was it best not to mention it at all? Just proceed on the basis that this was a perfectly normal occasion and they would all soon be meeting again at another global get-together. Nothing to see here. A quick competition for a photo opportunity with President Zelenskyy, a few jokes, promises to make the world a better place and then everyone goes home without acknowledging that Keir is about to get booted out of their select club. At least Starmer was bringing his wife, Victoria. Maybe she would get to say a few goodbyes.

It is still not totally clear what the government wants but the political mood seems to be shifting towards a decision

• Thames Water nationalisation moves closer as government objects to rescue deal

At last, Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, has opined on the future of Thames Water. So what’s it to be? A takeover by the company’s creditors? Special administration, which would allow anyone to pitch up with an offer while the state temporarily funds the company? Or even a quick flush to full nationalisation?

Well, two years after Thames’s shareholders walked away, and 18 months after the creditors opened talks with regulator Ofwat on the terms on a potential recapitalisation, one still can’t say definitively what the government wants. But we do have a better idea: the political mood seems to be shifting firmly towards administration.

Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to block the Trump-Kushners’ plans to build on a nature reserve. But they’re not the only billionaires acting as if the whole world was for sale

Have the Albanians even said thank you once? It’s been moan, moan, moan for weeks now on the streets of Tirana just because Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner want to displace some flamingos and pave over a protected nature reserve to build a luxury resort. Judging by all the protests, the commoners simply do not understand what visionaries the Trump-Kushners are. Nor do they seem to understand Javanka were the ones who discovered Sazan island in the first place. It had just been sitting there, rotting in the sea, until our contemporary Christopher Columbuses spotted it from a yacht back in 2021 and swam to the island to explore. “We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated,” Ivanka recounted on the David Senra podcast in May.

She really put her barefoot in her mouth with that one. Kushner’s Albanian real estate adventures are not new; the country’s government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners, an LLC linked to Kushner, “strategic investor” status in 2025 shortly after Donald Trump won the election. But while anger has been brewing for a while, Ivanka’s tone-deaf comments were the final straw. Her podcast interview has been credited with drawing international attention to the project, and supercharging local rage. Turns out people don’t appreciate it when a foreign nepo baby waxes lyrical about “discovering” your land. Nor are they thrilled when billionaires want to take over your country’s largest island, which is public property, for private profit.

At a sold-out show in its home town, Swindon, all the bombast and conviction driving this Restore-linked outlet was there to see

If I asked you to name a popular politics podcast, what would you think of? Maybe The Rest Is Politics for centrist dads. Novara Media’s Downstream for young lefties, perhaps, or Triggernometry for conservatives.

While these podcasts have achieved mainstream success and recognition, the contemporary media landscape also allows fringe political shows to gain huge audiences and influence without the mainstream ever acknowledging them.

Oliver Haynes is a journalist and co-host of the Flep24 podcast

The regime has learned it must extract concessions rather than promises from the US, but any permanent deal still depends on ending the war in Lebanon

To understand why Iran agreed to the memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the United States to end the war, one must first understand how Iranian leaders believe they emerged from the war itself. For Iran’s leadership, this conflict did not begin with military strikes. It was the culmination of a years-long campaign of sanctions, covert operations, assassinations, economic pressure, and efforts to weaken and ultimately overthrow the Islamic Republic. Even episodes of domestic unrest, including the anti-government protests that culminated in the deadly January crackdown, are often understood in Tehran as part of this broader struggle. That worldview has profoundly shaped how Iranian decision-makers interpret both the war and its aftermath.

This perception is critical to understanding the confidence now evident in Tehran. The objectives of the war were hardly a mystery. A week into the war, Donald Trump demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender”. Both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu openly called for regime change. The destruction of Iran’s missile capabilities, the dismantling of its regional influence, and the capitulation or collapse of the Islamic Republic were repeatedly presented as desired outcomes. None of those objectives were achieved.

Sina Toossi is a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, where his work focuses on US-Iran relations, US policy toward the Middle East and nuclear issues

The recent abandonment of plans for a Franco-German fighter jet sent a disastrous signal. Strategic autonomy will be jointly achieved or not at all

It has become a truism to assert that Europe needs to fast-track its own strategic independence in a volatile world. A recent paper from the European Council on Foreign Relations describes the continent’s leaders as grappling with “a ‘Schrödinger’s NATO’ moment, in which America remains formally inside the alliance while behaving as though it were not, just as the Russian threat looms larger”. Donald Trump’s United States has become at best an unreliable and at times reluctant ally, as Vladimir Putin’s revanchist ambitions have exposed the need to strengthen Europe’s defences.

But if the goal of greater autonomy is to be achieved, far better coordination of resources and cooperation between national defence industries will be required. Neither has been much in evidence this month, with France and Germany abandoning a joint £100bn project to build a new fighter jet as part of an updated Future Combat Air System. Originally launched by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel in 2017, plans for the jet were pulled as a result of irresolvable disagreements between Dassault, the French aviation company involved, and Airbus, the European aerospace company whose defence unit is based in Germany.

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.

Indian fertility has fallen below the rate required for population stability, in further evidence of the unexpectedly rapid decline in births internationally

The global fall in fertility rates has arrived faster and spread further than anticipated. Two-thirds of people now live in countries that have slipped below the replacement rate – 2.1 births per woman – required for a stable population. Last month, India revealed that its fertility rate had fallen to just 1.9. The world’s two most populous nations, which pursued cruel and coercive policies to cut births, both face shrinking populations. China’s fertility rate is now around 1, and births last year fell below 8 million – just over half the number projected when the “one child” policy was axed 10 years ago, and comparable to the total in 1738, when its population was 150 million.

It’s further proof that what was seen as a phenomenon of rich nations has spread far beyond them. East Asia led the way. But Albania and Chile have far lower rates than the US or England and Wales (themselves experiencing record lows of 1.6 and 1.4).

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

Readers respond to an article about the obstacles young people face in the search for jobs

The issue of youth unemployment is not a new one (Young, ambitious and out of work: ‘I’ve gone from Oxford to zero jobs. It’s a bit of a fall’, 11 June). When my husband and I graduated from university in 1980, it took him 18 months to find employment, not in his field of microbiology but as a trainee IT programmer. We were lucky, and that led to a successful long-term career where I had the option of staying at home with the children.

This generation is stuck with fewer opportunities and the need for at least two incomes to create the chance to build a life and a future. I know that grinding sense of despair with each rejection or, worse, the ghosting of an application.

When I told an old friend about the horrific story of a Romanian family with two children being forced out of their home by last week’s violence, he showed a worrying lack of concern

Last Tuesday evening (Violence erupts in Belfast after protests over knife attack, 9 June), my wife received a phone call from the company that provides the care workers who help to look after her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. As the call was ending, a Romanian family of two children and two adults were being forced out of their home in the street where my mother-in-law lives, in a predominantly loyalist housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast.

The care workers were new arrivals in Northern Ireland and were afraid of being attacked if they entered the area, but eventually they did so, despite the threat. I heard from others who were in the area at the time that, as the Romanian family were being evacuated from the area by police, a group of women linked arms and cheered, and men and boys clapped. Events like these happened all over Belfast on Tuesday and Wednesday as people, including pregnant women, were in some instances taken to police stations for safety.

The former England manager sidestepped politics in a well-meaning but flawed television documentary, writes Dr Michael Richardson. Plus Lucy Kellaway on the importance of male teachers as role models for young men

In his TV review (Gareth Southgate: Changing the Game for Young Men review – boys are crying out for help like this, 8 June), Jack Seale astutely writes: “Every problem it identifies is the result of a big political choice, which Southgate ignores before offering a small-scale solution. It’s certainly well-meant, but its limitations are frustrating.”

Gareth Southgate’s commitment to the issue is admirable and entirely convincing. However, the fact that more boys own smartphones than live with their fathers – one of the statistics cited in Southgate’s documentary, which also featured in his Richard Dimbleby lecture last year – tell us remarkably little about either. Smartphones are close to ubiquitous among young people, while the reasons fathers may not reside with their children are complex and varied. Such comparisons reveal more about patterns of technology ownership than they do about the realities of fatherhood.

Readers offer sound advice on how to tackle faulty soap containers, in response to an article by Adrian Chiles

Having experienced similar frustrations to Adrian Chiles with soap dispensers , I have discovered that they are usually just tightened too much when they are manufactured (Pump-action soap dispensers are a disgrace – and I won’t put up with them any longer, 10 June). If you remove the pump and grip the part just inside the bottle with a suitable implement (in my case a nutcracker from the kitchen drawer), that is usually enough to dislodge it when you twist it as instructed. It is a bit of a messy job, but it does work.
Bridget Spencer
Sutton, London

• I would like to add to Adrian Chiles’ heartfelt cry. Even if I do manage to make the mechanism on a soap dispenser work, the tiny hole quickly becomes clogged so that, under desperate pumping pressure, an unpredictable jet of gunk ends up anywhere but on my hands.
Christopher Holker
London

It is rare to make five changes after winning by more than a hundred runs, but this has not been a normal week between Tests for England

These past 10 days must have been curious for New Zealand’s cricketers, as their restful mid-series downtime was occasionally interrupted by news of England’s latest convulsions. “I guess it probably wasn’t necessarily what we were expecting,” deadpanned their captain, Tom Latham.

At least most of his own side got a chance to relax. “A lot of guys have had some good family time, they’ve had a bit of time off to refresh the bodies, refresh the minds and get ready for what we’ve got coming up,” Latham said. “We’re not necessarily used to a big break like that, but guys did their own thing, some guys got away. So we’re ready to go.”

• Group B: England, 119-6, beat Ireland, 118-9, by 4 wkts

• Sciver-Brunt top scores with 48 but then retires hurt

England survived a wobble against Ireland on Tuesday at Southampton, recovering from 35 for three to chase down 119 with 15 balls remaining and four wickets to spare, and keep their World Cup campaign on track.

England, though, will be sweating on the fitness of their captain Nat Sciver-Brunt, who top-scored with 48 but was forced to retire hurt with nine runs still needed, after apparently suffering a recurrence of the calf injury she has struggled with all summer. She will be assessed by medics ahead of England’s next match against Scotland at Headingley on Saturday.

• Guineas winner fights hard for feature race success

• Moore and Soumillon given bans by stewards

Five races and two Group Ones into his career, Bow Echo remains unbeaten – just. He had only a short head to spare over Gstaad at the line in the St James’s Palace Stakes, having briefly looked likely to canter to victory passing the two-pole, but it was enough to secure a first Royal Ascot Group One for both George Boughey, Bow Echo’s trainer, and his 20-year-old rider, Billy Loughnane, whose best season yet just keeps getting better.

On the face of it, perhaps, this was a slightly scrambled success, given Bow Echo’s winning margin of nearly three lengths over Gstaad in the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket last month, and the apparent ease with which it was achieved. But Ascot is a very different track, with a sterner climb to the finish, and Bow Echo is hardly the first colt to find that it has different demands.

• Scrum-half could play in Saturday’s final against Exeter

• England preparing to name Nations Championship squad

The England scrum-half Alex Mitchell is in line for an unexpected return to Northampton’s matchday squad for this weekend’s Prem final against Exeter. A hamstring injury had threatened to rule Mitchell out of the rest of the domestic season but the Saints are now hopeful he will be available for Saturday’s finale at Allianz Stadium.

A fit Mitchell would be positive news for club and country after the 29-year-old tore a hamstring during an England training camp in Bagshot last month. At the time his club director of rugby, Phil Dowson, publicly expressed his frustration about Mitchell’s injury and suggested he would struggle to feature again this season.

• Williams sisters have won six doubles titles at SW19

• French Open finalist Chwalinksa awarded wildcard

Serena and Venus Williams will rekindle their doubles partnership at Wimbledon this month after receiving a wildcard into the doubles draw. The All England Club announced the recipients on Tuesday morning in one of the most highly anticipated wildcard announcements in recent memory, considering Serena’s return this month after four years of retirement.

Serena, a seven-time singles champion at SW19, did not request a singles wildcard and the 44-year-old has remained coy about whether she plans to return for singles. Venus, a five-time singles champion, has also not received a singles wildcard. Venus has competed on the tour since her debut in 1994, only stopping due to health-related issues. She turns 46 on Wednesday.

• McIlroy not a fan of planned two-tier system for events

• Fleetwood and Åberg drawn with world No 2 at US Open

Rory McIlroy believes the “false economy” created by the threat of LIV Golf may now be putting some well-established PGA Tour events at risk. The world No 2 and current Masters champion said he felt people had lost sight of how good the tour was before it too had a huge cash injection.

When the Saudi breakaway started luring away some of the top talent on multimillion-dollar contracts ­during the early years the PGA Tour’s response was to restructure, ­creating eight signature events each with smaller field and prize funds of $20m (£15m), plus generating a number of associated financial benefits.

• Boxer could face 20 years in jail if found guilty

• Mayweather’s attorney has not commented

Floyd Mayweather is facing two felony charges over allegations he used a bad check to buy a $200,000 watch in 2024.

The charges are for theft and intent to defraud. The theft charge carries a penalty of up to 20 years in jail if someone is found guilty, although sentences of that length for the offense are rare.

• Australian sprinter sets new national record of 14.96 in Ostrava

• Result an improvement on teenager’s Diamond League debut

Teenage sprint sensation Gout Gout has flown home to finish third behind his training mate and new 150m world record holder Noah Lyles at the Golden Spike track and field meet in Ostrava.

Paris Olympics gold medallist Lyles clocked 14.67 seconds in the rarely-contested distance, smashing the previous previous mark of 14.92 set by Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson earlier this year in Florida.

• Players deny their decision comes from place of hate

• MLB says writing on caps is a violation of league rules

Major League Baseball has issued a statement critical of players who wrote Bible verses on their Pride Night hats after an incident at a San Francisco Giants game last week.

MLB celebrates Pride month during June and most teams choose a home game to acknowledge the LGBTQ community and its baseball fans. The Giants, who are based in a city with a large LGBTQ population, often make an extra effort.

British prime minister was left making small talk unsure if a meeting with Trump and Zelenskyy was going ahead

The wait for Keir Starmer’s first session of the G7 gathering in Évian-les-Bains was undoubtedly awkward. A meeting about the future of Ukraine had been due to start at 9am but more than half an hour later, Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Emmanuel Macron were nowhere to be seen.

On a live Reuters feed, Starmer could be seen standing next to the leaders of Canada and Japan as they milled about making small talk. “Are they, are they having a meeting?” the British prime minister could be heard asking. If he was referring to the missing attenders, and they were indeed having a meeting, it was clear he hadn’t been invited.

National Audit Office says agency proposes closing operations in 11 countries as part of turnaround plan

The British Council faces cutting its workforce further and closing operations in 11 countries as it struggles to repay a crippling £197m Covid-era government loan that threatens its survival, the public spending watchdog has said.

The UK’s soft-power agency remains loss-making six years on from the pandemic and is not expected to make a profit until 2029-30, a report from the National Audit Office says.

Arnault’s addition of leading weekly to stable of publications raises concerns about media ownership in France

He is known as the “wolf in cashmere” – the owner of the world’s biggest luxury group whose brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior and Tiffany have made him one of the world’s richest people.

But Bernard Arnault, a close friend of Donald Trump, is under fire from journalists’ unions in France for buying up almost all the country’s business and economic press.

Exclusive: health professionals, survivors and politicians voice concerns in open letter over comments by Fatima Maadi Bio, who denies supporting the practice

The first lady of Sierra Leone has denied that she supports female genital mutilation amid rising anger around her perceived approval of the practice.

But in an exclusive response to the Guardian, Fatima Maada Bio, the wife of President Julius Maada Bio, also said she would not openly condemn FGM until she saw “reliable data” that the practice was harmful.

Minnie the Minx and Macbeth feature in National Library’s exploration of how rainfall has shaped Scottish science, literature, history and identity

It seems fitting that, 250 years ago, one of Scotland’s foremost scientists took a close interest in what is arguably the country’s most famous feature: rain

James Hutton, celebrated by Scots as the father of modern geology, went so far as to write a formula for “a theory of rain”. In 1784, he sketched out the key principles for the “condensation of aqueous vapour contained in the air”.

Sea ice is melting fast, worsening the climate crisis, but a bold attempt to rethicken it is showing early signs of success

‘This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.

“It’s incredibly different, the boundary – I mean, you can point to it,” he says. The difference is the result of a bold geoengineering experiment being conducted by Ceccolini’s company, Real Ice, funded by the UK government.

Frome, Somerset: This much-maligned midsummer menace has few friends among humans, but look closely and you might find an orgy of eating and mating

Eyes smarting, throat tickling, nostrils dog-wet, I pick my way along a thready footpath up the combe, only half-prepared for the next irritation. Nettles, I am watching you. But not well enough it seems, for a sneaky one hidden under the skirts of encroaching grasses and umbellifers grazes the back of my bare calf. It induces that tingling somewhere between pain and pleasure – one that quickly develops into a needling throb.

It is hard to love a nettle. This much-loathed plant may be one of the first that many children learn to identify, for their own protection. It has a secondhand look, with wrinkly, crinkly jagged hearts for leaves. It has no sheen; it does not shine. Near-invisible fine hairs on the upper surfaces give the dulled green a dusty, soiled appearance.

Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator, joins Democrats in bid to stop dismantling of Ocean Observatories Initiative

• US politics live – latest updates

A group of Democratic senators and one Republican, as well as two Democratic House committees, sent letters on Monday to the National Science Foundation asking it to reverse course on its plan to dismantle a sprawling ocean monitoring network, with House lawmakers going further and accusing the agency of acting illegally.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386m. Over the last decade it has tracked ocean circulation, marine ecosystems, climate change and extreme weather, producing data freely available to the public and informing more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run another 15 to 20 years.

Tech is helping to identify and save new specimens and could open ‘genomic goldmine’ of fungi data

The rise of AI and digitisation could be a turning point in the “race against extinction” faced by botanists trying to identify and save vital plants before they vanish, according to a major report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

New technology is enabling scientists to track how flowering times have shifted by weeks around the world, rapidly identify new specimens and even get crucial genetic data from 180-year-old fungus specimens, potentially opening a “genomic goldmine”. Digitisation and online access to millions of specimens that were until now only accessible in archives is also producing new insights, especially in the global south.

Exclusive: Royal College of Nursing says 1.5m vulnerable people not getting the right care, as specialism is ‘consistently undermined’

The specialist learning-disability nurse workforce is in “absolute crisis” with the number of specialist nurses falling by a third across the UK since 2009, leaving many vulnerable adults with inadequate care, according to a report by the largest nursing union.

The Royal College of Nursing review revealed that the number of learning-disability nurses employed by the NHS has fallen from 7,083 in 2009 to 4,768 in 2026. As a result of these falling numbers, 1.5 million people with learning disabilities were not being provided with their legal right to equitable access to health and care services.

Lauren Edwards dismisses party internal concerns and criticises ‘anti-democratic’ way bill was halted

The Labour MP Lauren Edwards who will bring the assisted dying bill back to the Commons has said she will not be dissuaded by concerns about Labour divisions, saying MPs should allow the House of Lords to finish its work on the bill after it was blocked from a vote by peers.

It also can be revealed that the Labour MP and disability rights campaigner Marie Tidball is to co-sponsor the bill, alongside the former minister Alex Davies- Jones.

Helen Cammock says her comments blaming wartime leader for Bengal famine were intended to create ‘dialogue’

A Turner prize-winning artist accused of telling a “barefaced lie” about Winston Churchill in a video piece installed at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) has defended her work, saying it was intended to create a “dialogue” about figures in the gallery’s collection.

Helen Cammock’s 40-minute moving image piece called Persistence has been at the centre of a row about the role Churchill played in the Bengal famine of 1943.

Exclusive: Sources say Defra’s policy on livestock fails to distinguish between ponies and sheep

Natural England and MPs are urging the government to change its livestock rules to stop ponies on Dartmoor from being culled.

Semi-wild ponies have roamed Dartmoor for more than 4,000 years and have become uniquely suited to the boggy landscape, providing a charming sight for those who visit the national park.

Former secretary of state says the winner of a genuine Democratic primary ‘would have beaten Donald Trump’

Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term was “a terrible mistake” that cost Democrats the presidency and may have permanently damaged his legacy, Hillary Clinton has declared.

Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Monday, the former US secretary of state and 2016 Democratic nominee said Biden had reneged on a prior commitment to step aside – and that the betrayal of that promise proved catastrophic. “He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy, and for the country,” she said.

Experiments show 29 animals moved towards a treat-filled bucket 60% of the time when guided by a researcher

When it comes to following human cues, it seems the greatest of all time might actually be the goat.

Researchers have discovered that, like young children, goats are able to follow the direction of a human voice to find an item.

Brazil supreme court finds that Eduardo Bolsonaro – who resides in the US - tried to get sanctions put on judges trying ex-president over coup plot

Brazil’s supreme court has sentenced Eduardo Bolsonaro to four years and two months in prison after finding him guilty of courting US ⁠interference in his father’s coup plot trial last year.

The office of Brazil’s ‌prosecutor general had ‌charged Eduardo Bolsonaro – who lives in the US - courting interference from the Trump administration to help Jair Bolsonaro’s case, by imposing sanctions on the court’s justices and tariffs on Brazilian goods.

Carnivorous animal taken to hospital in an unstable condition after escaping from quarantine facility in Paradise Country on 2 June

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After two weeks eluding thermal imaging drones and teams of zookeepers, a Tasmanian devil on the run in the Gold Coast has finally been found – and taken to hospital in an unstable condition.

The devil, Mary, escaped a quarantine facility in the Paradise Country theme park – more than 15,000km north of her native range – in the early morning dark of 2 June, with zookeepers believing an “abnormally large leap” saw her clear a fence.

Asda, Amazon and B&Q among retailers in talks to sell devices that feed into household sockets and can cut electricity bills by 30%

• Spanish homes save €10 a month via renewables expansion

Bosses of some of Britain’s biggest retailers are discussing plans with the government to start selling plug-in solar panels as part of a drive to encourage more UK homes to generate their own electricity.

Executives from brands including Currys, B&Q and Amazon met Martin McCluskey, the minister for energy consumers, on Tuesday to discuss guidelines for selling “balcony solar panels” to the British public.

Yum! Brands, parent company of KFC and Taco Bell, to sell Pizza Hut as it faces dated stores and growing competition

The struggling Pizza Hut restaurant chain will be sold for $2.7bn by parent company Yum! Brands.

Yum! Brands said in February that it was considering selling Pizza Hut and the chain looked to close 250 US restaurants. The pizza chain has struggled with outdated stores and growing competition.

Value of Elon Musk’s firm at one point rose to $2.97tn days after its IPO following purchase of AI coding startup Cursor

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has overtaken Amazon as the world’s fifth-most valuable company days after its stock market debut.

The milestone came as it agreed to buy the startup behind the AI-powered coding app Cursor for $60bn (£44bn), in an attempt to capitalise on the technology’s success as a coding tool.

Japanese technology company at centre of Post Office IT scandal is negotiating settlement with UK government over faulty software

• Business live – latest updates

The chair of Fujitsu, the Japanese technology firm at the centre of the Post Office IT scandal, has resigned after its board became aware of his “woman-related inappropriate conduct”.

The company said on Tuesday that Hidenori Furuta had stepped down after two years in the role.

Only four artist film-makers have been selected by the jury this year, for bringing their ‘deeply grounded lived experience’ to stories of migration, family and disaster

Whether taking inspiration from an 18th-century portrait or a radical 1960s radio documentary, the nominees for this year’s Film London Jarman awards have looked to the past in order to create visions of the future.

The shortlist for the £10,000 prize, which recognises British artists making groundbreaking work with moving images, has been streamlined to just four artists for the 2026 edition: Sadia Pineda Hameed, Ilona Sagar, Rhea Storr and Alia Syed. Yet the subjects tackled by these artist film-makers are as wide as ever, encompassing carnival ritual, asbestos poisoning and the traditional South Asian sport kabaddi.

A sinister new tablet threatens the honest-to-goodness toys’ existence, but Buzz, Woody and Jessie’s big tech moral battle feels compromised

The fifth episode of the Toy Story franchise is as slick and smooth as you like, as glitchless as Toy Story 6 or Toy Story 7 might be … or will be. As a piece of family-entertainment content it has the unblemished sheen of a brand new smartphone. But at heart, it has gone dead. For all the intensive, high-energy creative work that has clearly gone into this film’s every frame, the jeopardy, the novelty, the ideas and the passion are lacking; the crucial Toy Story theme of mortality feels underpowered, and the film even calamitously loses its nerve with its own big idea – those squeamish about spoilers had better look away now – the sinister way addictive tech devices are undermining the imaginative play that kids once had with honest-to-goodness toys.

Here a creepy tablet device called Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee) enters the children’s world, but ultimately proves to be capable of sentimental self-sacrificial heroism when it comes to their mental health. Really? At least Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, the villain from TS3, had the courage of his evil convictions.

The strictures of family and class stand between two young men and their humble dreams of happiness in an assured directorial debut from Rohan Kanawade

Here is a really impressive directorial debut from Mumbai film-maker Rohan Kanawade: tender, subtle, candid, scrupulously observed. It is a story of forbidden and unacknowledged love, or maybe semi-forbidden and semi-unacknowledged, and an emotional flowering that reveals the oppressive importance of family, status and class.

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) is a 30-year-old Mumbai call-centre worker who must return to his remote home village when his father dies, where he is expected to stay for the full 10-day mourning period, an absence for which he must grovellingly apologise to his boss over the phone. His dad’s final words, incidentally, were that he wanted his wife Suman (Jayshri Jagtap) to cook him a really nice meal, and the poignancy of that request is cleverly revealed by Kanawade in the later scene in which Anand’s elderly, blind grandfather reminisces about why he agreed to marry the lowly and uneducated Suman in the first place.

If you’re not going to be glued to the big match, Kirstie and Phil can provide some distraction. Plus: an utterly lovely Paul Mescal movie

8pm, Channel 4
With England playing Croatia on ITV1, it’s slim pickings across the rest of the channels, but anyone immune to football fever can always count on Kirstie and Phil. This week, they are in London to revisit two couples: in the east, Molly and Sam have finally bought in Walthamstow; down south, Alan and Rachel have spent three years doing up their Victorian terrace in Crystal Palace. Hollie Richardson

This documentary about a megachurch attendee who took donations for her alleged treatment – and experienced numerous ‘miracles’ that kept her alive – is a great story. What a shame this telling isn’t the most thrilling

Wouldn’t life be easier without a conscience? Imagine the freedom. No guilt. No anxiety. No responsibilities deeply felt, no investment in what society thinks of you, no constraints on your behaviour … My God, what a life. And above all, think of the money you could make. Frankly, I’m pretty envious of all the bastards out there scamming for a living. If I could, I’d become the next Elizabeth Holmes or Bernie Madoff in a (stony) heartbeat.

Now I have a new grifter to envy: Amanda Riley. Scamanda (it’s a gift, really) is a documentary about her, made by ABC News Studios and first shown on Hulu last year. During her years-long pretence of having terminal cancer, Riley cheated her friends, church community and others out of thousands and thousands of dollars (the true amount will never be known because so much was given in untraceable cash) to cover her fictitious medical bills.

Scamanda aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now. It is streaming in Australia on Disney+

When Rivers received a surprise letter from DeLillo, it encouraged him to set the author’s one-act play in an adult-free, postapocalyptic world

Nine-year-old girls reciting the gnomic prose of Don DeLillo – it sounds like an extreme English detention, but for film-maker Ben Rivers this was the foundation of his new movie, and the culmination of an unlikely friendship with the literary titan. DeLillo is an almost mythical figure of contemporary literature. His prose is precisely hewn, his narratives sophisticated and his preoccupations uncannily prophetic: conspiracy, terrorism, nuclear power, hypercapitalism – the 89-year-old New Yorker has been ahead of the curve for much of the late 20th and early 21st century. Rivers, a 53-year-old independent film-maker based in London, has been a lifelong fan, he says. So he was stunned to receive a letter from DeLillo himself one day in 2017.

A mutual friend had sent DeLillo a DVD of Rivers’ 2015 film The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, a hallucinatory parable set in a semi-abstract Morocco, and the writer responded with a hand-typed letter. “He thought that the film was really powerful and he was looking forward to watching it again,” says Rivers. “It was a beautiful thing to receive and very meaningful for me, being such a big admirer of his.” Rivers later sent DeLillo another of his films: 2019’s Krabi, 2562, co-directed with Anocha Suwichakornpong, “and he also wrote back about that, saying that he enjoyed it”.

The pianist and bandleader, who has died aged 91, had an inimitable style where bright, guileless melody met a fearless improvisational impulse

• South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim dies aged 91

Scullery Department (from Jazz Epistle Verse 1, 1960)

Born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town in 1934, Abdullah Ibrahim spent his six-decade career defining the heartfelt sound of South African jazz. Making his professional debut as a pianist at 15 under the name Dollar Brand, it was his co-founding of the group the Jazz Epistles in 1959 that laid the groundwork for his journeying career. South Africa’s first Black jazz group, featuring trumpeter Hugh Masekela who would go on to become a star bandleader in his own right, the Jazz Epistles’ first and only album Jazz Epistle Verse 1 is a sprightly document of the South African take on bebop. Although album opener Dollar’s Moods is named for Ibrahim, it’s the record’s closing number Scullery Department that highlights his nascent skills. Heavy-swinging over a bluesy motif, Ibrahim’s playing artfully skips through an opening polyrhythm before taking a solo that refigures Thelonious Monk’s wonky melodic motifs into an earthy sense of groove that would go on to feature throughout his hundreds of recordings to come.

Unpack the latest viral moments and the week’s celebrity whispers with Clara & Munroe. Plus, the grim story of a man cashing in on the rise in young suicides.

If the first episode is anything to go by, Clara Amfo (let loose from BBC broadcasting) and activist Munroe Bergdorf could well be your fun commute companions. The pair are passionate, incisive and just the right amount of gossipy as they unpack the latest pop culture moments – such as what the loud conversation around Olivia Rodrigo’s baby-doll dress says about women in music. Our one complaint? Half an hour isn’t long enough! Hollie Richardson
Widely available, episodes weekly

(Geffen)
Gossips have rushed to the lyrics for details about her personal life, but the rest of us can just get on with luxuriating in Rodrigo’s funny, Cure-infused craft

With a certain crushing inevitability, the arrival of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album has been accompanied by a lot of frenzied decoding of its lyrics for references to Louis Partridge, the British actor whose relationship with the singer ended late last year. One magazine ran a 1,200 word essay, complete with annotations, panning its songs for nuggets of gossip: the fourth piece they’ve published on the subject in recent months. A British broadsheet plumped for a news story about the fact that Rodrigo had apparently changed the lyrics of a track called Purple, formerly a “very sweet and saccharine” love song, to reflect the end of their relationship. Over in New Delhi, The Hindustan Times was pondering rumours that the couple had actually got back together: “Interest in Partridge has grown after Rodrigo released her new album since fans believe the track Stupid Song has references to the singer’s relationship with him.”

Well, of course it has: for better or for worse, that kind of speculation seems to have become a major part of modern pop, and Oliva Rodrigo in particular has long been a beneficiary of the clickbait publicity it brings. Her breakthrough single Drivers Licence gained traction thanks to the rumour that its lyrics were about her former boyfriend Joshua Bassett’s dalliance with Sabrina Carpenter; Vampire, the lead single from 2023’s Guts invited yet more speculation about whether its subject was another ex or Taylor Swift. Indeed, she actively seems to encourage it: “I never talk about my personal life in interviews or in any public forum, so I guess the music is where people go to deduce things,” she recently told an interviewer, a line that seems to have a distinct hint of “go ahead, fill your boots” about it.

Surreal genius from Harry Hill, trailblazing women and a passionate ode to an incredible New York rapper – these are the best listens from the last six months

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After ‘bottling everything up for a long time’ the faithful pet, who has remained silent for many years, will spill the beans on the pair’s ‘pet hates and fur-vent passions’

Gromit, the canine star of the Wallace and Gromit animations, is “breaking his silence” and writing a memoir.

After “bottling everything up for a long time”, the moment has come for him to “spill the beans”, according to publisher Ebury.

Parenting is represented in all its hilarious, moving and truthfully plodding detail, in the story of a mother and her two little boys

The last day of maternity leave, and an unnamed mother of two decides to stage a “yes day”, full of treats and good feelings. Of course it does not go according to plan: the treats are deficient, misjudged and underappreciated; the good feelings are fleeting, quickly upstaged by anxiety, guilt or humiliation. This familiar-sounding scenario is the simple yet bracing premise of Lisa Owens’s second novel, following her impressive first comic fiction of female-centred modernity, 2016’s Not Working.

The academic E Ann Kaplan once wrote that “motherhood is the major emotional experience of my adult life” – certainly a relatable observation, and reason enough why some writers may swerve going through the experience altogether. But when using it as narrative material, the aim is to render the cluttered yet lonely planet of motherhood in some new way, drawing on the energies of honesty and idiosyncrasy to frame a common, universal adventure as something singular and memorable.

This corrective to our habitual emphasis on competition had me writing ‘wow’ in the margins again and again

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the Industrial Revolution and British colonialism were in the ascendant. Charles Dickens had published Hard Times five years earlier; Queen Victoria nominally ruled a fifth of the world’s population. Darwin, writes science writer Rowan Hooper, crafted his evolutionary theory to deliver what he figured his audience wanted to hear: “an account of nature as a competitive struggle”. Natural selection was launched into a world that was “colonial, capitalist, patriarchal and ruled by the upper class” – and Darwin’s central message, crudely paraphrased by the philosopher Herbert Spencer as “survival of the fittest”, chimed with the times.

Hooper adores Darwin – his account of visiting Darwin’s Kent residence Down House radiates reverence (“it’s a pseudo-religious experience”). But he feels that Darwinism and its union with genetics in the so-called “modern synthesis” has placed undue emphasis on competition in the natural world and underplayed the roles of cooperation and collaboration. In redressing that imbalance, Togetherness is not an attempt to make evolution cuddlier and more palatable; rather, it is a corrective deeply informed by what we have learned since Darwin about how nature works. Written with immense charm and passion, and packed with eye-popping facts, it is also a paean to the wonders of nature and the value and urgency of preserving them.

The life of the Brooklyn Bridge’s chief engineer inspires this multifaceted novel

Washington Augustus Roebling, or “Wash”, was the chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge, which, when opened to the public on 24 May 1883, was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It was quite an achievement, but he didn’t do it alone. On the one hand there was his father, the austere and tyrannical John Roebling, who had designed and begun the bridge before his untimely death in 1869. On the other there was his wife, the accomplished and capable Emily, who, as well as providing moral and secretarial support, took on ever more responsibility for the project after Washington’s own health began to fail mysteriously.

Wash is something of a companion piece to Chief Engineer, Erica Wagner’s 2017 biography of Roebling. Spurning what she calls in her afterword “the clock’s time”, she has instead structured the narrative in accordance with “the soul’s time”; that is, by jumping backwards and forwards in time and place in a series of short chapters emphasising those individual moments, choices and encounters that together made this remarkable man who he was. It is a bold and engaging, if somewhat disorienting approach, giving this slender novel a vividness and intensity that might be smoothed over in a more traditional narrative arc.

Bart and co’s latest video game venture involved the show’s writers, animators and voice talent – plus a showdown between the two infamous tycoons. ‘It’s a true little Simpsons episode,’ say creators

Every generation gets its own Simpsons game. Them’s the rule-diddly-ules. For some, it was the arcade cabinets that swallowed pocket money throughout the 1990s. For others, it was The Simpsons: Cartoon Studio. For millennials like myself, it was The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Joe Zanetti, vice-president of operations at Monopoly Go! developer Scopely, traces his Simpsons gaming nostalgia back to Konami’s 1991 brawler, The Simpsons Arcade Game. “That’s the one that made such an impression on me,” he says.

It certainly did, because Springfield has just crash-landed in Monopoly Go! itself through a collaboration involving Simpsons writers, animators and voice talent alongside a new animated short starring Dan Castellaneta, Nancy Cartwright, Harry Shearer and Will Ferrell. While most licensed TV games have faded into obscurity, The Simpsons keeps finding new digital lives.

If you fancy roaring around Japan’s open roads, scaling impossible mountains and playing with post-apocalyptic Pokémon, this year’s highlights mean you can do so without leaving your chair

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch; Vertigo Games
This clever update captures the 1990s magic of the original… including some of the technical issues

The 90s were a gold rush for adventure games. LucasArts kicked off the decade with its legendarily irreverent Monkey Island games. Then, Cyan Worlds materialised to deliver a series of atmospheric and boundary-pushing odysseys with Myst and Riven. Nestled between these primary genre texts is The 7th Guest, a lesser-known but still notorious adventure that earned plaudits for its unique FMV visual style, blending live-action filmed footage with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds. It was remade originally for VR, and now has been reconfigured into something playable on PC and consoles, its digital cobwebs cleared and tricky puzzles tinkered with for a fresh (or nostalgic) audience.

We are dropped into the ectoplasmic shoes of an amnesiac apparition, arriving at the gloomy haunted home of a toy-maker. Armed with a time-bending lantern and a Ouija board-shaped map, your job is to solve a historical whodunnit by literally illuminating events from the past. It’s a melodramatic, surprisingly campy adventure that effectively evokes the overzealous CD-Rom horror of its original era.

From horror galore to Chinese action games, the key trends, trailers and surprises from Summer Game Fest’s many, many hours of streams and broadcasts

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Did you spend hours of your weekend watching a relentless series of video game adverts? No? I don’t blame you – Summer Game Fest, the collection of livestreams that has arisen in place of the giant annual E3 video game expo in Los Angeles, is extremely overwhelming. There are the bigger, longer shows: the PlayStation and Xbox streams, the main SGF show hosted by Geoff Keighley and Lucy James, Future’s duet of the Future Games Show and the PC Gaming Show. Each show is two hours long. Then there are all the indie showcases: cosy games, women-led games, Black voices in gaming, Day of the Devs. Between them, they show off hundreds of games that might pique your interest.

I picked out exactly 34 highlights here: the biggest news, the most interesting-looking smaller games. But from the barrage of trailers I was also able to discern some trends. Here’s what we can learn.

Marina Market, Cork
Michael Glenn Murphy is the accidental soldier and reluctant revolutionary reckoning with his past in Deirdre Kinahan’s touching drama of regret and return

A ferry terminal in steely morning light is the bare setting for Deirdre Kinahan’s poignant drama of return, as a man (Michael Glenn Murphy) in overcoat, suit and hat clutches a suitcase and considers his next move. In the 50 years since he left Ireland on a misguided impulse, Joseph Grace has never been back until now.

As a bus pulls up, he hesitates and turns away, assailed by memories. What follows in Louise Lowe’s atmospheric staging for Once Off Productions is a reckoning with Joseph’s past: a life swept up in 20th-century Europe’s upheavals, from the Western Front, to Roger Casement’s Irish Brigade of war prisoners in Germany in 1915, to the rise of Hitler.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Neons and videos mix with weaving and beadwork to address subjects as diverse as stolen land, ancestral traditions and queer identity. But the self-made nude steals the show

A breeze from the vast North American plains has blown across the rolling Yorkshire hills. The work of 38 Indigenous American artists has filled the galleries of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, transforming their underground space into a world of clay and earth, fabric and ceramics, painting and sculpture that talks of land, memory, oppression and freedom through art.

Everywhere, there’s a sense of ancestral identity, memory and tradition. It’s in the Navajo weavings of Tyrrell Tapaha and Melissa Cody, the patterned beadwork of Jeffrey Gibson, the dizzying geometricism of Dyani White Hawk’s towering column. They all use traditional aesthetics to explore new ideas: Gibson’s work is about how his queer identity meets his Indigenous culture, White Hawk pushes into pure abstraction, Cody mixes pixelated video game aesthetics into Navajo patterns, and on and on. Everyone here is taking the old ways and pushing them in new directions.

Hayward Gallery, London
Butcher bags, human sacrifice and cavernous black holes … in a world of dry art this stunning exhibition forces us to confront religion and mortality

It’s the clinging, transparent PVC that does it, a horribly surgical-looking, synthetic skin covering each of Anish Kapoor’s three paintings – can we call them that? – entitled Plastic Sacrifice I, II, III. They resemble a serial killer’s trophy art. Through the wrapping you gawp at three-dimensional purple and crimson entrails that slop off the wall, forming valleys and protuberances that, it seems, would collapse all over the floor if the carnage wasn’t contained by these butcher bags.

Sensationalist and macabre? Rembrandt’s painting Slaughtered Ox is just as visceral as it contemplates the flayed, hollowed body of a huge ox hanging upside down, its yellow fat and blood-dark meat a mirror of our own doomed flesh, not to mention the crucifixion. In the age of smartphones and minuscule attention spans, Kapoor gives artistic depth a go, addressing God and mortality, those themes of the old masters, in a metaphysical rollercoaster ride of a show, a divine bloodbath.

The Crypt at St Luke’s, Cork
Luke Casserly’s playful, participatory exploration of Ireland’s 10,000-year-old bogs involves touch, sound, taste – and an earthy perfume

Seated at a circular table covered in a mound of dried peat, writer and performer Luke Casserly might be presiding over an arcane ritual. When he holds a handful of peat in his hand and passes it to the small audience around the table, the initial air of solemnity dissolves into quizzical laughter.

A soundscape of birdsong and wind evokes the ancient landscape of bogs in the Irish midlands, where Casserly grew up. Part essay, part dialogue, this playful, participatory performance involves touch, sound, taste – and especially the smells of soil, moss and peat smoke, later presented as a perfume created by olfactory artist Joan Woods; a message in a bottle.

James Bond actor, who is only the second non-royal woman to be celebrated in this way, called the honour ‘truly overwhelming’

Dame Judi Dench is to have a West End theatre renamed after her, becoming only the second non-royal woman to be honoured in such a way.

The Shaftesbury theatre will be known as the Judi Dench theatre from February 2027 in celebration of the actor’s “unparalleled contribution to British theatre and the performing arts”.

Litter-picking creatures emerge from underground for global franchise targeting nostalgic adults and gen Alpha

Move over Paddington Bear. After almost 30 years off screen, the Wombles – the furry, litter-picking creatures who live beneath Wimbledon Common – are set for a comeback.

The characters, whose motto is “Make Good Use of Bad Rubbish”, are being revived after the consolidation of the brand’s intellectual property rights under The Blair Partnership, which will oversee its global development.

The actor told Esquire magazine the couple have ‘a relationship that will stand the test of time’ and his family ‘were all there’ for the wedding

Tom Holland, the British actor best known for playing Spider-Man, has offered confirmation that he and co-star Zendaya have already got married.

The wedding of the couple, who have been together for some years and got engaged in December 2024, has been the subject of intense speculation, further fuelled by a red carpet remark by Zendaya’s stylist, Law Roach, in March 2026, that the ceremony had already taken place.

Oscar-winning actor hails ‘electrifying opportunity’ to present lectures and seminars in contemporary theatre

The Oscar-winning actor Cate Blanchett has promised to cause a “creative rumpus” in her latest role, as visiting professor at the University of Oxford.

The Australian star is the latest in a long line of celebrated thespians to be appointed as the Cameron Mackintosh visiting professor of contemporary theatre at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Three ways with summer’s versatile vegetable: as a simple meal, a deliciously moist loaf and a South Asian achaar to spice up any cheese sandwich

Courgettes don’t have to be boring, thanks to their shapeshifting magic. Shave with a vegetable peeler, douse in olive oil and lemon juice and eat raw, or spiralise for noodles. Alternatively, grill until blackened, scoop out the creamy innards, and fold into tahini for a smoky dip. Courgettes are irresistible grated and turned into fritters, deep-fried or cut into thick rounds and roasted on a high heat so they caramelise, but don’t turn to mush. Finally, you can pickle them to enjoy their sunny flavour in the gloomier months.

It doesn’t matter if you drink less or use the restroom beforehand. Experts say it happens to all swimmers

I’m midway into my hour-long swim when it hits: I really have to pee. This always happens. It doesn’t help to curb my morning coffee or use the restroom beforehand. My bladder doesn’t care.

Why does this happen? “It’s a normal physiological response by the body to being immersed in water,” says Dr Stavros Kavouras, assistant dean, professor of nutrition and director of the Hydration Science Lab at Arizona State University. And it’s not just me: “It’s something that happens to all swimmers.”

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The model and entrepreneur talks pants, lawnmowers and restoring classic cars with the Filter

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David Gandy is one of the most recognisable faces in fashion, starring in hundreds of campaigns for brands including Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, Hugo Boss and many more. He was the first man nominated for model of the year by the British Fashion Council.

From 2014 to 2019 he designed a bestselling range for Marks & Spencer featuring underwear, sleepwear and more, and in 2021, he launched his own fashion and lifestyle brand, David Gandy Wellwear. A committed philanthropist, he has worked with several charities, from Save the Children to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, and backed the Centre for Social Justice’s Lost Boys report on the crisis facing boys and young men in the UK today. The David Gandy Wellwear summer collection is available now.

You told us the barbecue upgrades that make a big difference. Plus, we’ve got you covered for Father’s Day with 62 tried and tested gifts

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Lighter, drawn-out days, warmer nights, and World Cup watch parties can mean only one thing: alfresco dining. If you’re itching to get the barbecue out, we’ve rounded up reader tips and tricks – and some of our own – to help up your grill game.

If you need an upgrade to your setup, the Weber kettle barbecue “makes incredible food without any faff”, says Alex David, who gave it top spot in his test of the best barbecues. Or Argos’s affordable drum-shaped grill “has everything you need and a little more”, and was Alex’s budget favourite.

The very best double creams have a wildly complex taste, but which brands are a little scoop of sunshine and which are much of a muchness?

• The best supermarket natural yoghurts

This was a tricky taste test, not least because 70% of these creams tasted pretty much exactly the same, which is a clear reflection of how homogeneous our conventional food system has become (much of our cream is made from milk sourced from thousands of farms across the country and mixed together). Even the packaging is more or less identical, with a printed plastic tub and a peelable plastic lid.

British double cream is about 48% fat, which is higher than whipping cream (35%) and just below clotted (55% plus). This matters in practical terms because that’s why it whips more firmly, holds its shape longer and is less likely to split when added to a hot sauce. Conventional cream does the job well (it’s white, neutral in flavour and whips well), but really good cream is thick, gloopy and wildly fatty, with an unbelievably complex taste and remarkably nourishing effect; it’s also eminently whippable. Scooping a blob of cream like that straight from the tub can replenish energy and satiate in an almost alchemical way.

We’ve tried, tested and rounded up 62 thoughtful gifts – from gardening gloves to a cold brew coffee maker and a parkrun keyring – to make the father figure in your life feel special

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Whoever you’re celebrating this Father’s Day – your own dad or a father figure in your life – our bumper list of gift ideas should help you think beyond the norm (though we have included some sock options, because sometimes it’s OK to go classic).

Whatever their age or your budget, we’ve focused on sustainable products that stand the test of time. All of the products have either been tested by me or by our own brilliant testers on the Filter and should still be going strong on Father’s Day 2027 and beyond.

It’s all about ‘easy bowl food’, and grub you can shovel in on the sofa without having to cut anything up

What are the best summer TV dinners?
Mel, by email
Few are as committed to teas on knees as Ella Risbridger: “It appals my parents, but I eat on the sofa just about every day,” says the author of The Kitchen Book. The key, she says, is not having to cut anything up: “One-handed cooking is a good way of thinking about it,” which is to say that Mel should be looking for meals that require only a fork, a spoon or chopsticks. “That’s easier to do in winter, because then you’ve got the likes of casseroles, soups and stews, whereas a lot of summer food is based on big sharing platters, which are not ideal, because, while you can put them on the coffee table, there’s lunging involved.” Said movement not only upsets the balance, but often also results in spillages: “I’m currently looking at a lump of bicarb sopping up a turmeric stain on my sofa,” Risbridger adds by way of confirmation.

Other considerations of the sofa supper include getting as many textures and flavours as possible into every mouthful. “Wherever you dig, you want to be getting something good,” says Zena Kamgaing, author of Dinner Time. That’s why pasta is a regular go-to: “It’s easy bowl food. On a hot day, say, I’ll do a no-cook sauce by blitzing mascarpone with sun-dried tomatoes, a little harissa and fresh basil.” Risbridger, meanwhile, is partial to US-style chopped salads, although Vietnamese-inspired numbers also feature regularly: “Invest in a julienne peeler, because that can make salad feel fancy, and put any kind of protein in it: salmon, sliced steak.” Add rice – “Cold salad and warm rice is a delight” – or deploy twirlable cold noodles. “If you’re watching telly, curtains drawn, you’re not looking for a beautiful plate,” Risbridger says. “You want the focus to be on the deliciousness, and I cannot stress enough that a Vietnamese salad is the optimum, because it’s beautiful, but not in a way that means you have to concentrate on its beauty.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

Perfect for the football, these half-time snacks are quick to assemble and sure to score highly with friends

Both of these sausage-based delights are great for a gathering, can be prepared in advance and go really, really well with ice-cold beers. God bless the sausage. Whether your team is winning, losing, embarrassing or delighting, everyone will consider you the Cristiano Ronaldo of half-time snacks if you bang either of these out. The prawn and sausage toasts can be made in advance and kept in the fridge with greaseproof paper between the slices, then you just need to fry them when you want them. Similarly with the hotdogs: prep everything in advance, then, when the whistle goes, boil the sausages, steam the buns and get stuck in.

This crunchy, spicy wonder has made a fortune for its Chinese creator – and inspired hundreds of British-Asian versions. Time to get tasting …

Walk down the specialist aisle in most British supermarkets and you will find a red jar with the kindly face of a middle-aged Chinese woman staring back at you. Branded Lao Gan Ma, meaning “old godmother”, these jars contain chilli crisp – a spicy, crunchy and moreish umami condiment that has made made hundreds of millions for Tao Huabi, the woman on the label. Doused over steaming dumplings, fried eggs, noodles and even ice-cream, Lao Gan Ma’s chilli crisp has become a social media sensation in recent years and has spawned a thriving cottage industry of independent chilli crisp producers in the UK.

“It’s such a convenient shortcut to flavour when you use it as a condiment,” says Fuchsia Dunlop, an expert in Chinese cuisine. “Every Asian cuisine has a form of chilli oil, but China and Lao Gan Ma invented chilli crisp and now the western world is more interested in authentic flavours, thanks partly to social media.” People, she says, want to have their own taste of that authenticity. “It’s far more exciting than a bottle of ketchup!”

A crunchy, tangy antithesis to traditional soggy rice salads

There are not many foods I will pass on, but a traditional rice salad is something I have never been able to get on board with – soggy dressed grains just don’t do it for me texturally. However, the current trend of roasting or pan-frying the grains is a whole other story. I love the added flavour it brings, the crunchy texture, and the way the rice soaks up everything with which it is enrobed. This gochujang dressing is my new obsession, adding enough spice to elevate things, and finishing with chunks of creamy avocado and a punchy hit of tangy lime. Serve straight away, or leave the roast rice to cool before dressing, it’s up to you. Either way, I guarantee it won’t last long.

Edward thinks of sex as playtime and has a vivid imagination, which Jane is happy to go along with despite being quite ‘vanilla’ herself

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

When I dreamed about Jane in a latex catsuit, we had one made

Brendan Maclean had never spoken with drag queen Karen from Finance in person, nor laid eyes on the man behind the makeup. Then came a chance encounter in Melbourne

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

I’d had a big, sparkly pop career in my 20s but by 2024 I was beyond my twink era, and getting by hopping from one weird gig to the next. Covid had really done a number on the music industry and, while my friend Paul Mac had kept me making music, I found myself drifting through a strange, boozy few years in Sydney. I’d been single since 2020 and my best friend was my cat.

Throughout that hazy time, I was as terminally online as ever. At 38 I was posting like a 20-year-old. One day, for no particular reason, I posted a track from the Dissociatives’ self-titled album from the mid-noughties. Paul, who I call my gay uncle, and Daniel Johns of Silverchair fame, had made just one LP together, and the obscure track, Thinking in Reverse, was one of my favourites.

Yusuf, 25, who works in finance, meets Hannah, 26, a PhD student

What were you hoping for?
Someone interesting, good chat is more important than anything. And a fun story. I like a random side quest.

Jordan wants one catch-all digital resource for him and Charlene, so their social lives don’t clash, but she prefers to communicate in person. You decide whose time is up

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

I’m not trying to control her but having one shared calendar helps us plan our lives together

Katie Kendrick, Cath Williams and Jo Darbyshire were subject to tens of thousands of pounds of hidden costs as their new-build freeholds soared in value, making their homes unsellable. Their campaign could finally end the ‘feudal’ system in England and Wales

When a leaflet about leasehold injustice landed on Cath Williams’ doorstep in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, nearly a decade ago, she barely gave it a second thought, tossing it straight into the bin. Had she given it more than a cursory glance, she’d have read about how residents on her new-build estate had found out the leaseholds for their homes had been sold without their knowledge, which could cost them all thousands of pounds. “Sometimes you get things through the door and you go, ‘what are they on about?’” recalls the 69-year-old retired university lecturer. It was of no interest to her. Or so she thought.

Williams hadn’t realised her home was leasehold when she decided to buy it. It was never mentioned in any promotional material, she says, and the word “leasehold” was only later added to her paperwork in pencil by an estate agent four weeks before her move in date – by then she had already paid her deposit and it was too late to back out. Her unease about what this would mean built over time and it soon became clear it would be a huge headache for her: any alterations to her home would require paying the freeholder an ever-increasing permission fee, the property would decrease in value as the lease got shorter, and the ground rent could increase drastically over time. Ultimately, it could leave her trapped and unable to sell her home.

Wuva staff’s kindness and empathy means we are able to plan more trips away

My husband has motor neurone disease (MND). For us to continue going away, we decided to buy a refurbished mobile hoist, which helps to get out of a bed, from the online mobility equipment company, Wuva.

It arrived quickly, but had been damaged in transit and didn’t work. I contacted Wuva out of hours via WhatsApp, and within five minutes I received an extensive apology and advised an engineer would call me shortly.

After falling for a scam call, ‘The Tech Chap’ host Tom Honeyands realised he’d given away vital details in social media posts

When Tom Honeyands realised he had been defrauded out of £70,000 he was furious and embarrassed – and left wondering if he had given away too many details on his social media videos.

Honeyands was on a work trip to Tokyo when he got a call from someone claiming to be from Lloyds bank. The caller asked if he had made a recent transaction in Singapore and when he said no, the scammer said his account had been compromised and that security details needed to be reset.

We booked our hotel because of its swimming pool but a hefty hourly fee to use it wasn’t mentioned

My partner and I paid £2,150 for a week’s all-inclusive break in Marrakech with easyJet Holidays.

We chose the Jaal Riad Resort Hotel because of its pool and spa. When we arrived, we were told that use of the heated pool cost £24 a person an hour, the Jacuzzi £24 for 20 minutes, and the hammam was £16 for 20 minutes.

An increasing number of people are finding trail running relatively late in life – and they’re reaping the health benefits

Earlier this year, 62-year-old Karla Wagner placed second in the 100-mile division of the Grandmaster Ultras, an Arizona trail-running event designed for 50-and-over runners in the age group known as “grandmaster”.

For most of her adult life, Wagner, who is from Lander, Wyoming, avoided running because it triggered her asthma. But when asthma meds improved, she added trail running to her fitness mix and became completely hooked in her early fifties.

Many of us have reassured ourselves with the ‘five second rule’, but bacteria can transfer almost immediately – and sticks around for hours

You drop a piece of cucumber on the floor. Do you immediately throw it in the bin or reassure yourself of the age-old “five-second rule” and reckon it’s fine to pop it in your mouth after a quick rinse?

If you fall into the latter camp, John Tregoning, professor of vaccine immunology at Imperial College London, has some bad news. He refers to three studies into bacteria transfer that all point towards the rule being false.

Founded in 2004, the free weekly 5km event has grown into a global fixture of weekend life, taking place in parks, fields, seafronts and even prisons

An event to mark the millionth parkrun took place in west London on Saturday, acting as a celebration of the community cohesion and public health benefit that the charity has been aiming to achieve across the past two decades.

The former Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes joined thousands of locals and parkrun fanatics to mark the milestone in a west London park – the venue for the very first parkrun in 2004.

Footy Addicts helps amateur players find a game at short notice – and tackles the problem of loneliness

Cries of “Boss! Boss! Boss!” emerge from the pitch during a hard-fought game of football in a London park. There aren’t a lot of names used in this game, because most players only met just before kick-off. They were brought together by an app that’s injecting life into grassroots football.

Footy Addicts was invented to solve an infuriating problem for amateur players – the late dropout, which can lead to unbalanced teams and ruined games. The app brings together strangers who are desperate to play football, and who can step in after a cancellation to make up the numbers at short notice.

Fashion house pays tribute to Chinese style with its 75th anniversary catwalk show in Shanghai

“New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down.” For the British designer Ian Griffiths, who encountered this line in the New Yorker, it summed up why China’s biggest city was the right place to celebrate Max Mara’s 75th anniversary.

“Max Mara is a product for metropolitan women, and it would be patronising to assume that a metropolitan wardrobe should be western-centric,” Griffiths said.

Taylor Swift and Timothée Chalamet lead the charge in blue and orange, as courtside style hits a ‘memeable’ peak

The World Cup may have kicked off in the US this week, but America’s attention is focused on a different sport: basketball. The NBA finals could end this weekend, with the New York Knicks potentially becoming champions for the first time since 1973. And with Knicks fever comes fan style, especially courtside, where celebrities have been showing their support in different ways.

For Wednesday’s Game 4, won by the Knicks, Taylor Swift and Este and Alana Haim all wore T-shirts in the blue and orange of the Knicks with their own Knicks-related pop culture pun: Swift’s read “Stevie Knicks”, while Este’s said “Knickeback” and Alana’s read “Knickole Kidman”. This was not shop merch. Vogue reported that Alana had made the T-shirts herself.

‘Late life’ male celebrities are turning the need for spectacles into a style statement as they refuse to disappear into fashion invisibility

A heart-throb for more than 40 years, Brad Pitt is no doubt used to people looking at him. But this week, that gaze was distracted by an addition to his face – aviator-style glasses.

Worn to watch the tennis at Roland Garros and with a pink trenchcoat when out for dinner in Paris, these retro glassesare more typically worn by younger men. That’s changed recently – they’re now becoming central to a makeover for men entering their “late life” era, but who aren’t willing to submit to the fashion invisibility associated with ageing.

Dear Frances offers the latest take on ballet flats, offering ‘a glove-like fit wearability’ – which is fine if you have nice feet

When is a shoe not a shoe? On sale this month is a pair that seems to pose the question – the no shoe-shoe is the work of the cult brand Dear Frances and the latest in a steady march of shoes that are barely there; a take on naked dressing but for the foot.

The Balla shoe, which the brand calls a “sock shoe”, covers almost the entire foot, but also leaves it – encased but on display – in a kind of flimsy foot-cage. According to Jane Frances, the creative director and founder of the brand, it “offers a unique, glove-like fit wearability” and “takes inspiration from the delicate strength of a woman”.

The French cities of Marseille, Aix, Avignon and Arles boast a wealth of museums and festivals showing work by contemporary artists. Here’s how to make the most of a dazzling cultural summer

My wife and I moved from London to Marseille a little over five years ago when our British passports still conferred “right to reside” in France. That first winter on the beach, in short sleeves, as our daughters played in the topaz-coloured Mediterranean and the sun set across an ever-clear blue sky, I understood why this part of southern France has always been popular with artists.

I was recently speaking about this with the painter Fanny Nushka and her sailor husband, Benoît Bouchet, on the terrace of Café la Muse in Marseille’s “coolest” neighbourhood. She said: “It took a long time to go back to blue. It’s like being in Paris and painting the Eiffel Tower. It’s dangerous to paint the Calanques [limestone coves] as an artist from here.”

Can a long road trip work with children? I set out to relive a classic journey from Bilbao to Saint-Malo I did in my freewheeling 20s

The moment came on about day four. A cloud-like mist was drenching our faces, hair and clothes, despite the thick canopy of trees overhead. My six-year-old daughter silently trudged uphill pushing her bike, her mouth set in a grim line. I looked again at the blue blob on Google Maps, which seemed, unfeasibly, to indicate we were on the right path. I thought, again, about the diminishing supply of chocolate in my backpack.

“See! I told you! We’re having an adventure,” I said with forced jollity. She didn’t even look up.

A 1,600-mile journey to the wild peaks of Scotland, via Llandudno’s Victorian promenade and the bright lights of Blackpool proved an eye-opener in more ways than one

One of my favourite recent photographs is of me (unusually), perched on the bonnet of our car, about to set off on a solo, two-week road trip from our Sussex home to the wilds of Scotland, taking in Eryri (Snowdonia), Lancashire, the Lake District and Yorkshire. I had no idea that the research trip I was about to embark on – for my book, which traces the story of British holidays over 400 years – was going to reveal my homeland as somewhere I barely knew.

As a southerner, it was the northern half of Britain that I needed to discover. I’d stitched together my route with visits to museums, archives and classic seaside resorts that had once blazed so brightly. I’d visited Cumbria before, but the Conwy coast, the Lancashire countryside, Blackpool, Morecambe, Scarborough? All these were unknowns.

I found cinematic landscapes, wild freedom and thousands of miles of perfect solitude on my campervan adventure through the Nordic countries

It’s midnight, in June. Powder pink and dark grey clouds drift across a pallid sky, the palette reflecting in the motionless water of Lake Inari. Islets of pine and just-budding birch create pools of distorted shade close to the horizon of this 420 sq mile (1,080 sq km) lake in Lapland, northern Finland. There is not a sound. It’s so silent, I barely breathe to avoid disturbance. Only me, the lake and a moonbeam-coloured moth, whose wingbeat is inaudible.

I am sat beside my car-sized campervan, with mesmerised reverence for the rose-tinged panorama. I do not wish to go to bed and miss this moment. And I am loving the wild freedom and deliciousness of being entirely alone, with nobody in the world knowing my exact whereabouts. Ordinarily, I would be long asleep by midnight, exhausted after a day of work and family life. But I have left my husband and (adult) children at home in England for an eight-week solo camping adventure through Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, with the singular aim of reaching Nordkapp (North Cape) and Knivskjellodden, Europe’s northernmost point at the top of Norway, in time for midsummer.

Once a year, Dutch kids, parents and teachers take part in a walking festival, heading out for four nights in a single week to explore their neighbourhoods, exercise and make friends. It’s a tradition that seems to be genuinely transformative

I shouldn’t have been surprised that the rain didn’t stop the Dutch kids. All day it had been thunderstorming, and the forecast didn’t look so great for the evening. And yet at 5pm, hundreds of kids started arriving – many by bike – with their parents to Amsterdam’s Westerpark, a beloved city park that caters to a more residential area of the capital. Today, it functions as a starting point: volunteers coordinate registration, and groups of children gather, decked out in raincoats and eager to embark on either a 5km or a 10km excursion around the surrounding neighbourhoods.

It’s the second night of Avondvierdaagse (which literally means “four-day evening walk”) , organised by a group of neighbourhood volunteers. It’s not a race, but if children complete every night, they get medals, a bouquet of flowers and, if they’re lucky, a lot of sweets. It’s not just Amsterdam; across villages, towns and cities in the Netherlands, hundreds of thousands of Dutch people are doing the same: every year, kids spend four evenings in early summer exploring their neighbourhoods with their school friends and parents as part of the Week van de Avond4daagse. Some places had celebrated earlier; others were walking the following week. A variation of the tradition has even made its way to Suriname, one of the Dutch former colonies. There are also four-day cycling and swimming events. According to the Royal Dutch Walking Association (KWbN), which helps coordinate the events, half a million people take part every year, in 700 locations across the country, powered by tens of thousands of volunteers.

The World Naked Bike Ride is designed to draw attention to the vulnerability of cyclists in the city. But this year’s London event is in the news after half the riders used rental bikes

Name: World Naked Bike Ride.

Age: 22.

Wharfedale, Yorkshire: On the trail of a wood warbler, I find a suite of woodland plants rising up from a fascinating land formation – limestone pavement

Grass Wood is a magnificent fragment of ancient woodland owned and exceptionally well managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. It is home to some lovely plants, including lily of the valley and herb paris. What became my defining revelation about the place and, in truth, about this whole area was down to a wood warbler.

It is among my favourite birds, so getting to see the individual singing just off the trail required me to enter the trees, rise up a short bank, and then sit for a long time on a rocky ledge. Slowly it dawned on me that the platform on which I rested, while carpeted in moss, was also incised into a tessellated pattern. From these narrow cracks in the limestone arose a suite of woodland plants. It was dense with ash seedlings, ferns and sedges, as well as linear thickets of dog’s mercury, but there – unmistakably where my hand rested – were strips of flowering herb paris.

Rather than pouring away old aquarium water, you could use it as free plant feed

The problem
Houseplants need liquid fertiliser, but this can be expensive. Fish tank owners, meanwhile, produce litres of nutrient-rich water during water changes, which then gets poured away. Could it feed houseplants instead?

The hack
Water from a freshwater aquarium contains nitrogen, phosphorus and beneficial bacteria. Rather than discarding it during routine water changes, use it to water your houseplants, giving them a free feed.

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.

I’ve met many hardcore, violent fans, but the hostage-negotiating, cocaine-smuggling, Marxist-Leninist Alessandro Casolari still stood out

I had heard the name Alessandro Casolari on and off for years. From 2016 onwards, when I was researching my book on Italy’s ultras – a cross between English football hooligans and Hells Angels – the nickname “Caso” kept coming up. In the late 80s and early 90s, he had led the ultras in Ferrara, whose football club is known as Spal.

A red-brick city in northern Italy between Bologna and Venice, Ferrara has always felt sidelined, languishing in a marshy land of fog and floods. I used to go there quite often, drawn by its festivals and famous writers and film directors. A few years ago, when I started writing another book, about the Po River, I hung out there again, but I never bumped into Caso.

Six months ago, at least 12 people, including eight children, died during a US attack. The US has never admitted the civilian deaths. Here, the Guardian pieces together what happened that day

Explainer: Why is the US bombing Somalia – and who are the airstrikes killing?

They had just settled down for breakfast when the noise came. Some paused in the eating of their slow-cooked beans – cambuulo – spooked by the haunting high-pitched hum. Others pressed their faces against windows, scanning skywards. Farmers in nearby maize fields watched the objects circling above Jamaame, a town in southern Somalia.

Shortly after 9am on 15 November 2025, Jamaame shuddered from a series of explosions.

The late MP’s family, politicians and academics on the factors they believe have heightened division in the last 10 years

• How the murder of my sister changed Britain – podcast

Ten years on from Jo Cox’s murder, Kim Leadbeater fears that the consensus around “kinder, gentler politics” in the wake of her sister’s death was short-lived.

“Sadly and regrettably, over the last decade things are worse,” she says. Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen and mother of two young children, was murdered outside a library in West Yorkshire in June 2016 by an English nationalist.

What are your thoughts about the ban? Do you welcome it or do you have misgivings?

The UK government has confirmed a social media ban for under-16s.

We’d like to hear from 16 and 17-year-olds about their views on the social media ban. What are your thoughts on the ban coming in when 16-year-olds will soon be able to vote (at the next general election), and when they can pay taxes and join the army. Do you welcome it or do you have misgivings?

We would like to hear about the holidays reads you’d recommend

Summer is here, which means lazy days at the beach or the pool with a great book by your side.

We would love to hear from people about their favourite beach reads. What books have you loved reading on holiday? What are the page turners that you keep returning to every summer and always recommend to friends? We would love to hear what books these are and why they make a great beach read.

Tell us about your favourite trip to Greece – the best tip wins £200 towards a Coolstays break

The new Hollywood adaptation of Homer’s epic work The Odyssey, released next month, is expected to give a huge tourism boost to Greece this summer. We’d love to hear about your favourite travel experiences in Greece, whether it’s island hopping, exploring antiquities in Athens, trekking in the Peloponnese or watching the sun set into the Aegean from the perfect beachfront taverna.

The best tip of the week, chosen by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet, wins a £200 voucher to stay at a Coolstays property – the company has more than 3,000 worldwide. The best tips will appear in the Guardian Travel section and website.

We’d like to hear from UK adult adoptees about they navigated their reunion with a birth parent

Guardian journalist David Batty has described the complex family trauma many adult adoptees have to navigate during reunion with their birth parents, often without professional support.

We would like other UK adult adoptees to share their experiences of adoption reunion. How challenging was it to forge relationships with birth relatives and to maintain them? What, if any, support did you receive? How did it impact your relationship with your adoptive family?

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