Jonsson has come a long way from east London’s Docklands, winning accolades on stage and screen

Few characters carry the cultural weight of Black Panther. Since 2018, the Wakandan king has become a global symbol of Black excellence, credited with reshaping expectations of representation on screen.

The first film grossed more than $1.3bn (£1bn) worldwide, won three Oscars and became the first superhero movie nominated for best picture.

The Paramount-Warner Bros merger is being fought in the US and UK. Britain’s culture secretary knows the risks and can intervene. She should

Though it has yet to become front-page news in the UK, you should know about the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros merger. It threatens to inflict immense harm on the British public. As actors and public figures who have spent our careers in the arts in Britain – working with British crews, on British stages and sets – we have a responsibility to the public who support, enjoy and consume the art we make.

The UK is being threatened by a media merger that would harm our workers, our culture and the public – but we can stop it. We are encouraged by Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, who recently sent letters to Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, as well as a statement to parliament, indicating that she is “minded to intervene” in Paramount’s $110bn takeover of Warner Bros.

Alan Cumming, Benedict Cumberbatch and Benedict Wong are actors working in the UK and Hollywood

The beloved star of The Goodies went on to become TV’s most famous birdwatcher. But behind these triumphs were pain, frustration and mental health issues that led him to leave the show he loved

• Bill Oddie, naturalist and broadcaster, dies aged 85
• Bill Oddie – a life in pictures

Bill Oddie, who has died aged 85, had two separate, substantial TV presences – as a comedy actor and an ornithologist. Both roles brought him fame but also pain. The peak of the former career was 76 episodes from 1970-82 of The Goodies, which he co-wrote and co-starred in with Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor. They played an eccentric trio of investigators and fixers who rode into action on a three-seater bicycle called a “trandem”.

As a birdwatcher, his onscreen zenith was Springwatch, which he initially co-hosted with Kate Humble, from 2005. It began a BBC Two natural history franchise marking the change of seasons, its success leading to wintry, autumnal and summery spin-offs. Binoculars lowered to show eyes awed or enthused, and Oddie became TV’s signature birdwatcher.

With large areas still burning, damage from national park’s worst blaze could take decades, if not longer, to put right

It is the jewel in the crown of the Highlands, one of Scotland’s most impressive natural landscapes, but 12 days on from the start of an enormous wildfire that is tearing through moorland and forest, the Cairngorms national park is unrecognisable.

Hectares of blackened land were visible as low cloud cleared on Sunday, with smoke billowing into the air from large areas still ablaze. In the evening, the sky glowed an eerie orange.

Suing his record label and sick of being a sex symbol, the singer spent 1992 working on the Trojan Souls for stars including Aretha Franklin and Bryan Ferry. Now, newly released studio footage shows him in his creative prime

• Wham! special: read Andrew Ridgeley on their bizarre 1985 trip to China

The George Michael album that never was began in defiance and ended in grief. It was 1992. Mired in a toxic dispute with Sony Records, Michael chose to keep busy and declare his independence by making an album of songs to be sung by several of his musical heroes, including Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson and Sade Adu, under the alias the Trojan Souls. Michael worked on the album for months until his Brazilian boyfriend Anselmo Feleppa died of Aids in March 1993 and he lost interest in music. It was never revived.

Tracks from the sessions have since leaked, along with some of the fly-on-the-wall footage filmed by Michael’s close friend and informal adviser Andros Georgiou, who has spent years trying to get unauthorised clips removed from YouTube and TikTok. Now, months before the 10th anniversary of Michael’s death, he is releasing 90 minutes of unedited video as Trojan Souls – not exactly a film but an unfiltered view of Michael in his creative prime. “I thought these fans were making money from my rights so I decided to stop fighting and get it out there,” Georgiou says. He hopes it will open a door on what he calls, with characteristic hyperbole, “the greatest album never made”.

After masked agents fired on his truck, Francisco Longoria was ambushed, charged and jailed – only for the case against him to fall apart. Now he and his family are seeking justice, and says the harrowing experience is part of a troubling pattern

It was just after 8am on 16 August and Francisco Longoria, who runs a party supply business, was driving his truck down a suburban southern California street to deliver a jumper for a water slide. But this ordinary Saturday morning turned into a nightmare when, suddenly, three unmarked vehicles stopped his truck and four masked men jumped out.

Longoria, who had brought his son Jonathan Longoria and son-in-law Daniel Rascon with him, wondered if they were being abducted.

PM wants curriculums for students aged 14 and above to be more responsive to local jobs market

Andy Burnham will tell schools across England to adapt their curriculums to the needs of local businesses as part of a devolution drive aimed at tackling the jobs crisis for young people.

By moving decision-making to local areas, the PM hopes the plan will make technical and vocational skills as valued as academic qualifications – and help cut the benefits bill.

Coming days are ‘absolutely critical’ for firefighters before temperatures rise again this week, officials say

Firefighters in France and Spain are racing to bring huge wildfires under control before another heatwave this week that will complicate efforts to tame the flames.

Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said Monday and Tuesday were “absolutely crucial days” before temperatures rise again from Wednesday.

Social media influencers fighting against extradition to UK where they face rape, sexual assault and other allegations

Social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate will remain in jail at least two more weeks until their next hearing as they fight extradition to the United Kingdom, where the brothers are accused of rape and sex trafficking, a federal judge said on Monday.

US magistrate Lauren Louis set a detention hearing for 13 August to determine whether the Tates should stay in jail or be released during what could be a months-long extradition process.

Green party leader shared picture of man wearing T-shirt with words ‘we’re only making plans for Nigel’ alongside a guillotine

Police are “conducting inquiries” into an image shared by Green party leader Zack Polanski on Instagram after Reform UK reported it for “inciting murder”.

The image showed a man wearing a black T-shirt with the words “we’re only making plans for Nigel”, alongside a photograph of a guillotine.

Exclusive: Two children taken to hospital during heatwaves after residents told units in glass-fronted block ‘not offered as amenity’

Homeless families placed in temporary accommodation in London were told they could not use the in-built air conditioning as it had “not been offered as an amenity” for them, leading to two children being hospitalised during recent heatwaves.

Other families placed in Britannia Point in Colliers Wood, south-west London, also experienced such stifling conditions that young children became ill. The company managing some of the tenancies involved told the Guardian households in temporary accommodation had now been told they could use the air conditioning.

Culture Club singer sings ‘I stand with the Jews / I don’t feel brave, I just need to behave like a human’, in song defending Israel’s response to Hamas attack

Boy George has released a new song entitled We Will Dance Again, which voices support for Israel’s military action in Palestine.

Posted on X and Instagram with the Hebrew title עוד נרקוד alongside its English translation, the song features a pop-reggae backing. The opening lyrics are: “You say genocide, I say war / When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for / Does it get ugly? You bet it does / When I know you wanna kill every last one of us.”

Intensive nature of modern chicken farming creates ideal conditions for campylobacter, allowing bacteria to evolve

Industrial chicken farming is accelerating the spread of the world’s most common bacterial cause of diarrhoea, scientists have found.

The study found a dramatic increase in the exchange of campylobacter strains between wild birds and chickens as farming has intensified, creating the ideal conditions for the bacteria to mix, spread and acquire new traits. There has also been a rise in antimicrobial resistance traits in circulating strains, raising concerns that serious illness in people will be more difficult to treat.

Democrat Jamie Raskin pushes Fifa to release records of contact with Trump, administration and family business

Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, has launched an investigation into Fifa president Gianni Infantino, seeking documents that would detail the ties between soccer’s governing body and Donald Trump and his administration.

In a Sunday letter, Raskin wrote to Infantino and called for Fifa to provide any documents and communications related to gifts, payments or benefits provided to Trump and his associates, as well as the visitor logs for Fifa’s office space in Trump Tower, which it acquired last year. The committee also requested that Infantino sit for a transcribed interview.

Wilson, whose work on Homer’s epic was praised by Nolan, said his film was grandiose and superficial with ‘nothing convincing to say’

• Peter Bradshaw reviews The Odyssey
• ‘At times I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew’: Christopher Nolan interviewed
• What Nolan’s Odyssey changed, invented – and left out

Emily Wilson, the classicist whose 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey was cited by Christopher Nolan in early publicity for his hugely successful adaptation of the poem, has roundly criticised the film, saying “it has nothing convincing to say” and that it “lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth”.

In a scathing essay for the London Review of Books, Wilson writes: “I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality … the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants.”

Residents describe their fear as they were forced to leave their homes because of the ‘extremely intense’ blaze

Sitting in their suburban apartment in Mérignac on the outskirts of Bordeaux, Krishma, an interpreter, and her husband, Nassir, first felt a sense of dread when a strange black cloud turned the sky dark in the middle of the day. Then a bitter burning smell filled the air outside.

“The sky changed colour. It seemed like a cloud but it was smoke covering the sun – it wasn’t a natural phenomenon. It didn’t seem real,” said Nassir, an English literature graduate from Kabul who has been living in France for seven years. “We couldn’t breathe easily, you could feel it in your lungs.”

New prime minister wants to focus at home, but his first week already suggests the world has other plans

It took just seven days in office for Andy Burnham to meet his first world leader. As he welcomed Volodymyr Zelenskyy to a naval base in Portsmouth on Monday, the new prime minister told the Ukrainian president it was “no accident” he was his first international visitor since entering No 10.

“It is intended to send a very clear message,” Burnham told him. “We are with Ukraine 100%, I am personally with you 100%, and I will honour every commitment this country has made to Ukraine in full.” In short, the UK’s support for Kyiv would continue despite the change in leadership.

Too many outfits and not enough suitcase space? Whether it’s sightseeing or sundowners, our fashion writer shares her secrets for packing smarter

• The travel essentials that made your holiday better
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When you hear the words capsule wardrobe, you probably picture beige knits and minimalist tailoring. A capsule isn’t just about dressing neutrally, though: it’s about choosing a handful of pieces that work together in countless combinations.

There is no time that skill is more important than when you’re packing for a holiday. I have streamlined my approach by sticking to a simple rule of thumb: instead of packing for every possible scenario, I focus on versatile staples that can be dressed up or down and worn more than once.

Women and men exhibit different heart attack symptoms. Knowing these lesser-known factors can help save your life

A few months ago at work, when I rose from my seat and walked a few steps, something felt off. There was a strange pressure in my chest and rib cage, but I ignored it, took my water bottle from the kitchen and returned to my desk.

The next day it happened again. There was no pain and my breathing was fine. But whenever I stood up and took a few steps, the odd squeezing would return. I work at a hospital as a neurosurgery coordinator, and the wall was lined with posters about stroke and heart distress signs. I barely glanced at the pictures, having memorized them years ago.

Elevated high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, or hs-CRP, score: the level of these proteins increases with inflammation, and a high level can indicate blood vessels in the heart are narrowing (cardiovascular disease).

Lipoprotein(a) elevation: a genetic test for inherited LDL (“bad”) cholesterol; high levels significantly increase risk of heart attack via plaque buildup in arteries.

Apolipoprotein B elevation: measures the amount of Apo B, which carries substances in your blood that make the plaque.

Coronary artery calcium score (high CAC): a high score probably means a large amount of plaque is present in arteries and the risk of a future heart attack is high.

Ask your primary care doctor what kinds of cardiac testing are available to you. If bloodwork is suggested first, do it. If you have a family history of heart attacks and want to check your arteries now, discuss proteins and inflammation markers. You may need to consult a specialist for these steps.

Provide as much information as possible, even if you don’t think it’s related to your current problem. It could make a difference in someone deciding on a scan or sending you to the ER. The more details you provide, the better someone can assist. For instance, if you have a stomach ache that hasn’t gone away in three days, disclose it.

Keep asking about next steps. You are entitled to an answer and it’s the doctor’s job to help you find it. If your inquiries are not being taken seriously, book an appointment elsewhere. Do not give up or wait it out. Persistence can help you identify serious risks.

Julie Charnet is a healthcare worker and writer in Philadelphia

As the show takes its final bow, Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer reflect on ‘having a ball’ playing exes while being married with kids, ignoring notes from US TV executives and having ‘big old cries’ at the end

It began, as all great romances do, with a nipple flash. When Colin from Accounts, the little comedy that could, started airing back in 2022, the world fell in love – hard and fast. It was a surprisingly prickly Australian show about Ashley, a student doctor (Harriet Dyer), and Gordon, an older brewery owner (Patrick Brammall), who fall in love after she pops a boob at him, he hits a dog with his car, and they jointly land an astronomical vet bill and a new pet.

The show shared its name with its furriest star – full name: “Colin from accounts payable, who is working on the big merger” – and it was as charming as the title suggested, winning fans across Hollywood and the world. That Brammall and Dyer were actually a couple, now married with two kids and a dog (no wheels), just made everyone love the show even more.

Team to return for euphoric homecoming after winning all-Ireland men’s final against Kerry, ending decades of defeats

The hex is broken, dispelled, banished, and a story that bewitched Ireland for decades has ended in fairytale: Mayo are all-Ireland champions.

Seventy-five years after a supposed curse condemned its Gaelic men’s football team to endless defeat, the county prevailed and uncorked a wave of emotion that engulfed even its rivals.

It used be called playing the field, but now young people are claiming dating multiple people at once is intentional and growth-enhancing

Name: Roster dating.

Age: The term seems to be about a decade old; the practice is much older.

From BBC drama The Rapture on the climate crisis to Apple’s Criminal Record on the rise of the far right, culture often sees what politics fails to

In the BBC’s new apocalypse drama, The Rapture, the UK is engulfed in a terrifying heatwave. I watched a preview of the programme in May, while preparing to interview the lead actor Ruth Madeley. I thought at the time: “This will be much more frightening when it chimes with the real life weather, bad luck for them that it’s not coming out for a couple of months.” But, by the time of meeting Madeley the following month, we were already in the middle of a heatwave that would lead to the highest ever recorded June temperature in the UK. The whole encounter made the show feel even more prophetic. She was in a central London hotel, air-conditioned inside, but all the door handles and surrounding street furniture – benches segmented by metal arm rests, to make life just that little bit harder for homeless people – had got way too hot. It was like playing The Floor is Lava, except instead of “floor”, “everything”. It surely can’t hit the screens at a more apposite time than this, I thought, failing to predict that by late July we’d be in heatwave number three, and France would be on fire.

The Daily Mail’s reviewer was upset that Christianity was portrayed “as a bastion of anti-science nutjobs and fundamentalists” in the show, wondering rhetorically whether the BBC would ever create such a drama about a “Muslim imam”. Peculiar thing to get upset about, I thought, since the religion is really more of a symptom of, or even a garnish to, the central atmosphere of engulfing heat. It’s like complaining that cats get a bad rap in the 1974 film The Towering Inferno (yes, there is a cat in it).

Offer for DCC Energy leaves total of completed or agreed deals within FTSE 100 this year at five, but has Westminster noticed?

• DCC, one of FTSE 100’s biggest energy firms, agrees £5.75bn takeover

And another one goes. Dublin-based DCC Energy is a lower-profile member of the FTSE 100, but they all count. We’re now at five completed or agreed takeovers within London’s leading index this year – and it’s still only July.

The subplot at DCC was vocal opposition from a few shareholders who thought the private equity groups KKR and Energy Capital Partners, a unit of Bridgepoint, should be paying more than the £5.75bn, or £65.25 a share, at which the board has rolled over. Fidelity International and Aviva Investors were to the fore, as well as DCC’s founder.

New research reveals deep anxieties. Medals and cash bonuses have been mooted as incentives, but the priority is for policy that addresses women’s real concerns

It seems as though every week brings another news story on declining global birthrates. A number of political leaders have been panicking for a while, of course, instructing citizens to reproduce in tones so beguiling, who could possibly resist? JD Vance: “I want more babies”; Jacob Rees-Mogg: “We need more babies”. While in France this year, a government direct-mailing campaign urged 29-year-olds to have a baby before it’s too late.

People are busily scratching their heads and trying to work out why this is happening. The trend is described as a catastrophe for civilisation, with leaders drumming up incentives and policies in response, from medals (Russia) and a €1,000 birth bonus (Italy) to expanding access to IVF (the US, with Donald Trump crowing – and if you’re eating you may want to skip the rest of this sentence – he’ll be known as the “fertilisation president”).

Lucy Jones is a journalist and the author of Matresence and Losing Eden

The president is using forced labor as a pretext to slap tariffs on countries around the world

With the midterm elections less than four months away, it’s a precarious time for Donald Trump and Republicans: Trump’s war against Iran is going badly, his approval ratings are in the toilet, gas prices are soaring and pushing up inflation, and nation after nation is furious about Trump’s insults, bullying and ugly American unilateralism.

So amid all this mess, what does Trump do? He turns to his favorite economic plaything: tariffs. On Monday, Trump signed orders to slap a 50% tariff on many Canadian goods, and four days later, he imposed across-the-board 10% or 12.5% tariffs on goods from more than 80 countries. Trump was no doubt thumping his chest, while millions of people overseas were dumping on him for yet another unnecessary, hostile act.

The young leaders are eloquent and organised – and now they know what victory looks like. That could be a huge headache for Narendra Modi

The rebellion in India of the young, led by the Cockroach Janta party (CJP), unfolded against a backdrop of large, abstract, geometrical structures – arcs, planes, hemispheres – that together make up an observatory called Jantar Mantar, built in the early 18th century to refine almanacs and tell time. Jantar Mantar has been a byword for political protest for decades: it marks the space that the Delhi police assigns to the politically disgruntled so they can vent in a contained way. But it had never before hosted a political insurgency that started from scratch and forced the Indian state to back down in less than eight weeks.

When its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, brought the CJP to Jantar Mantar, it was a social media hashtag with 20 million followers. While he was studying in Boston, Dipke took the remarks of chief justice Surya Kant, who is accused of referring to the swathes of unemployed young people and activists as “parasites” and “cockroaches”, and turned them into a here-we-come meme. When he brought the CJP home to Delhi on 6 June to make it real, people were intrigued. Given the mostly dismal fate of civil society movements during prime minister Narendra Modi’s time in office, no one anticipated the David and Goliath contest that came to a head last Saturday.

Leaving your blue ticks on used to be a sign that you were trustworthy. These days it conveys a certain ‘pick me’ energy

Genuine question: am I the last person in the world who still has my blue ticks on? In the early days of WhatsApp, if someone had gone into their privacy settings and turned them off, so you could never be sure when or even if this person had read your message, that told you all you needed to know. No blue ticks = red flag. Here was a slippery, sneaky individual, not to be trusted under any circumstances. As opposed to those of us who left them on – honest, noble, open books with nothing to hide. No blue ticks was an indicator that you were probably messaging a serial killer.

But recently the tide has turned. Now everyone seems to have gone all mysterious and switched them off, to leave you guessing. I’m starting to feel like a desperate blue-tick loser, over-keen and needy, falling over myself to volunteer the unnecessary information that I’ve read your message, when you are far too cool to care. Blue ticks on has real “pick me” energy. It’s attention-seeking, the coloured symbol equivalent of sending a selfie of you reading the message in question, while grinning and doing a thumbs up.

The party’s silence shows how broadly male supremacist thinking has seeped into the conventional wisdom of political strategists

It’s not exactly strange that elements of the Magaverse have embraced Andrew Tate. What’s strange is that the Democrats do not seem interested in holding the Trump movement to account for it.

Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer who is accused by numerous women around the world and now by British prosecutors of rape and strangulation, as well as assault, sex trafficking, possession of child abuse images and extreme pornography, and various other forms of gender violence and exploitation, was arrested in Miami last week, along with Tristan, his brother and sidekick. Or I should say, they were rearrested: the men were previously charged in Romania, where they were under house arrest until, following some conveniently timed diplomatic moves from the Trump administration, they were allowed to leave the country and resettled in the US. When asked if the Trump administration had secured their release from Romania back then, the Tates’ lawyer said: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.” Now, finally, they are awaiting extradition to the UK, where they are dual citizens.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

At a time when the quickening pace of global heating has never been clearer, climate policies are being deprioritised

A new and ominous word has entered the vocabulary of firefighters struggling to cope with the vast wildfire sweeping through south-west France. A pyrocumulonimbus is a fire-generated thunderstorm that can whip up winds in unpredictable ways, making the containment of a blaze and assessment of its likely course far more difficult. A known phenomenon in North America and Australia, firefighters believe France is suffering its first in the Bordeaux region, as the country endures the consequences of the third major heatwave of the summer and prepares for a fourth.

The dire statistics of the ongoing fires in France and Spain tell a story of deepening devastation and human misery. A far greater expanse of French land has already been burnt this year, compared with the 30,000 hectares during the whole of 2025, while 220,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in the Gironde. In Spain, the environment ministry has calculated that over 170,000 hectares have been affected, compared with 29,000 last year. Over 100,000 people have been forced to flee.

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.

Thanks to new technology we are are acquiring insights into earlier times, and realising how little we truly know

Archaeologists believe the Upton Lovell Shaman, who lived in what is now Wiltshire 4,000 years ago, was an important religious leader and metalworker because of the artefacts and tools buried with the body. Until very recently it was also believed, on considerably slimmer evidence, that this shaman was a man: it was simply assumed that someone of such status must be male, and the view was barely questioned over the years. Now ancient DNA analysis performed at the Francis Crick Institute has revealed that the body, held by the Wiltshire Museum, is in fact a woman.

That should cause a stir in bronze-age studies. But it is also yet another example of how many of our assumptions about human history have been upended by the rise of ancient DNA analysis over the past two decades. Others include the revelation that there were (frequent) liaisons between humans and Neanderthals just 50,000 years ago, a reconstruction suggesting that the first modern Britons had “dark to black” skin, and the closing of longstanding mysteries such as what really killed two members of Italy’s powerful Medici family in the 16th century (probably malaria, not murder as was often believed). Every time we widen our keyhole view of the past even slightly, we are confronted by how many of our seemingly grounded assumptions are, in fact, wrong.

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.

Rabbi Jeff Newman, David Williams and Tom Carr respond to an editorial on the new prime minister’s plans to decentralise power

Your editorial (22 July) rightly identifies the structural paradox at the heart of Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda – that it takes a confident assertion of central power to give real power away. But one institutional mechanism that goes some way to resolving this paradox operationally deserves mention: the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (Nista), which has sat jointly between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office since April 2025.

Inherited from Keir Starmer’s government, Nista (with about 250 civil servants) merges what were the National Infrastructure Commission and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority into a single body reporting simultaneously to both departments. Under Starmer, the Cabinet Office side of that dual accountability was relatively weak. Under Louise Haigh’s new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet – explicitly endorsed by the Institute for Government as implementing long-called-for structural reforms – that balance may shift.

Dr Stephen Battersby on the lessons this Labour government can learn from the 1970s

Your editorial quoting Sam Johnson-Schlee saying that our ability to trust that our homes will keep us safe is under threat is not news to environmental health officers working in housing (The Guardian view on Britain’s uninhabitable homes: as temperatures rise, a new approach is needed, 23 July). Every day they are faced with homes that contain threats to the health and safety of occupiers – from excess heat or cold, or damp and mould. For many years there has been a lack of resources, including environmental health staff to inspect homes or the political will to tackle the problems on the scale needed.

You are right to suggest that a new approach is required, but we can also learn from the 1970s, when local authorities would take the lead on collective action to improve housing. So councils should be the place to look to get things moving. This will require funding, not only to help homeowners but also to ensure that councils have sufficient staff with the right skills.

Simon Armitage’s Odyssey | Preventing lobbying | Surviving obituaries | Cream cracker lunch | DIY decision

Re Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, Charlotte Higgins urges us to watch the film, but also read the poem – “you won’t regret it” (25 July). I bypassed the verse and went straight to Simon Armitage’s stunning four-hour radio adaptation of Homer from 2004, now on BBC Sounds, which helped, thrillingly, to clarify much of what remained a bit murky in the movie.
Quentin Falk
Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire

• Re your article on lobbying the government (Besieged by lobbyists, will UK ministers protect our ecosystems? No, they’ll chicken out, 23 July), the NHS trust I worked for had a policy that prevented doctors from meeting drug representatives without a pharmacist present. This ensured doctors’ prescriptions were based on good evidence rather than drug firms’ promotions. Perhaps it’s time for a similar system to be put in place when MPs meet lobbyists.
Stephen Carter
Cullompton, Devon

Charles MacKinnon disagrees with the British Gas owner’s justification for cutting 1,300 jobs

According to Centrica’s boss, Chris O’Shea, most people using British Gas prefer to talk to a chatbot rather than a person (Customers prefer AI chatbots, says British Gas owner as 1,300 call centre and back office jobs axed, 23 July).

He says that 90% of his customers prefer to use digital channels than speak to a person in the first instance, and that the number of customer calls has fallen by 20%. Well, this is hardly surprising, given the difficulty of getting through to a real person. Finding a telephone number to do so is a challenge in itself, and then there are all the layers of numbers and deflections to encourage use of the digital channels while you are kept on hold at your own cost before you can get to an employee.

• ‘It’s human first, then athlete, which is a fair price to pay’

• Scotland’s Archie Goodburn racing despite brain cancer

Shortly after Adam Ramsay-Peaty had battled desperately to snatch another bronze medal at these Commonwealth Games, it was put to him that he was no longer a winning machine.

Once upon a time, Britain’s greatest swimmer might have bristled. Instead he nodded – before pointing out that, at 31, he was now winning in an altogether different way.

• Elliot Jones grabs golden ticket offered by withdrawals

• Welsh sprinter Azu: ‘I would never disrespect the flag’

It took Elliot Jones, an unheralded English 100m sprinter making his major international debut at the grand age of 28, to cut through the noise. Asked about all the no-shows at these Commonwealth Games, he began to shake his head, almost in disbelief.

“The national pride I have is so, so high,” Jones said. “I personally don’t understand why athletes wouldn’t want to come and represent their country, regardless of timetables. I’m going to take every international call I can get.”

• Northern Irish boxer one victory away from winning a medal

• Tryagain Morning Ndevelo inspired by name in quarter-final run

Before these Commonwealth Games, Jon McConnell made headlines for turning down the 13th season of Love Island. Now the Northern Irishman is one win away from a medal after defeating India’s Sumit Sumit to reach the 70kg quarter-finals in Glasgow.

“I didn’t expect [the attention] at all,” he said. “Someone sent me the interview [about Love Island auditions] and I was a wee bit shocked. I didn’t even know I said half of it. It was after a sparring session and with the adrenaline I was just saying different stuff.

English clubs have spent more on players this summer than the other four major European leagues combined

The financial power of the Premier League is unmatched. The teams in England’s top division have collectively invested more than £1.4bn in new players already this summer (through disclosed fees alone), around £303m more than the 76 clubs from the Bundesliga, La Liga, Ligue 1 and Serie A combined.

These figures are the gross spend, so take no account of players sold to help balance the books. Factoring this in only increases the divide. The clubs of Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga are £203.4m and £72.2m in credit from their transfer dealings respectively. While La Liga (£163.1m) and Serie A (£124.1m) have spent more than they have earned, they are an ocean adrift of the Premier League’s net spend of £523.6m.

• Real Madrid interested after World Cup performance

• Midfielder’s contract at City expires in June 2027

Manchester City are hopeful that Rodri will sign a new contract, but the club are braced for a bid from Real Madrid for the midfielder as well as moves from other suitors.

Rodri’s terms expire next June and he has failed to sign City’s new deal, which has been on the table for a while. The club are in talks with the 30-year-old and are optimistic these will prove successful.

• Slovene has quickly drawn level with the greats

• Paul Seixas acknowledges Pogacar’s dominance

Tadej Pogacar woke up in Paris on Monday as the fastest and the youngest cyclist to win five Tours de France. The 27-year-old Slovene took his fifth overall victory on the Champs Élysées on Sunday evening in a thrilling final stage won by Mathieu van der Poel.

Pogacar is level with Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin and he is expected to continue racing in pursuit of a record-breaking sixth win.

• ‘He’s more in control of his emotions,’ says Andrea Stella

• World champion won his first race of season in Hungary

Lando Norris is at the peak of his powers after his win at the Hungarian Grand Prix demonstrated the world champion has a stronger psychological approach to driving, according to the McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella.

Norris took his team’s first win of the season on Sunday with a commanding drive at the Hungaroring after Mercedes dominance for much of the campaign. The Briton has always maintained his team would come back into contention and duly did so, beating the Red Bull of Max Verstappen into second and the Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli into third.

Jim Allen’s drive, enthusiasm and focus will be a big loss to the five-year Epsom project to revive the Classic

The King George card at Ascot on Saturday was an day that showcased Flat racing at its best and the sense of optimism at the end of the afternoon was only enhanced by the prospect of five days at Glorious Goodwood this week.

Scandinavia and Trawlerman will reprise their Ascot Gold Cup rivalry in Tuesday’s Goodwood Cup. The big three of Bow Echo, Gstaad and Opera Ballo have been declared for Wednesday’s £1.5m Sussex Stakes. Diamond Necklace, the French Oaks winner, is lined up for the Nassau Stakes on Thursday while on the final day the fierce punting challenge of the Stewards’ Cup, one of the biggest betting races of the summer, lurks on the Saturday card.

Washington and Tehran issue conflicting messages over the status of talks to end Middle East crisis

Donald Trump has once again warned that the US will return to “strong military action” against Iran if diplomatic efforts do not bring a rapid resolution to the crisis in the Middle East.

“We are in very deep talks with Iran. If they don’t work out, we will go back to very strong military action,” the US president told Axios on Monday. Asked for how long he would allow the talks to proceed, he answered: “Not much time. Either it goes fast or not at all.”

Gibraltar-based Ros Astengo inspired four men to report sexual assaults carried out by Allan Grimson in 1990s

Ros Astengo, a journalist based in Gibraltar who usually focuses on politics and social issues, had qualms when she began investigating the case of the suspected serial killer Allan Grimson as he neared release from prison after serving more than 20 years.

She worried that she might reopen the scars of survivors of Grimson – but also that she could be putting herself in the “crosshairs” of a dangerous man who had sexually assaulted and battered two young men to death in the late 1990s when he was a Royal Navy petty officer.

Canadian-born British operator, president of the British Puppet Guild, died after a ‘short illness’

Ronnie Le Drew, best known for operating the puppet Zippy on the classic children’s television programme Rainbow, has died aged 78 after a short illness. The news was confirmed by the British Puppet Guild, of which Le Drew was president.

The Canadian-born British puppeteer was also known for working on 1986’s Labyrinth alongside David Bowie as well as 1986’s Little Shop of Horrors and various Muppet movies including in 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol. He worked on various iterations of Sooty, alongside Harry and Matthew Corbett, usually as Sweep, Sooty’s sidekick.

Scientists say decision is blow to UK astronomy as deep space observatory is home to world-leading facilities

Jodrell Bank Observatory, the hub of a world-leading network of radio telescopes, is facing closure after government funding for the facility was slashed.

The deep space observatory includes the Grade I-listed Lovell telescope and is prized by astronomers who study galaxies, black holes, star formation, planets beyond the solar system and the afterglow of the big bang.

Robert Bush, owner of Legacy Independent Funeral Directors, left bodies ‘rotting away’, family members say

A fraudulent funeral director broke the trust of families on an “almost industrial scale” as their loved ones’ bodies were left “rotting away”, a court has heard.

Robert Bush, owner of Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull, appeared at Hull crown court on Monday for a five-day sentencing hearing. He previously pleaded guilty to 67 offences, including 30 counts of preventing lawful and decent burial.

Experts who helped Burnham draw up Manchester carbon neutral pledge say backtracking would send wrong message amid wildfires and heatwaves

Leading climate scientists who created Greater Manchester’s carbon neutral by 2038 commitment are urging Andy Burnham to unequivocally reject new drilling in the North Sea.

In a letter to the prime minister they said he, as mayor of Greater Manchester, had unveiled one of the UK’s most ambitious local climate programmes that tackled housing, green growth and public transport.

Exclusive: Foreign secretary to take up World Bank seat and play active role in shaping changes to global lender

Britain’s foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, is to indicate he will put the climate crisis and overseas development at the heart of UK international relations by taking up the country’s seat on the board at the World Bank.

The position, which is usually delegated to a junior minister, means Miliband will play an active role in shaping the changes to the World Bank that developing countries have called for, and ensuring the climate remains a core focus for overseas aid.

Exclusive: Party says housing stock ‘woefully unprepared’ for extreme heat and new rules for builders must be set

All new UK homes should be built with air conditioning to cope with the effects of the climate crisis, according to the Liberal Democrats.

The party says British homes are dangerously unsuited to rising temperatures, meaning passive cooling measures such as planting more trees in residential areas are necessary.

Exclusive: Blunder at Rosebank, UK’s biggest undeveloped oilfield, comes as government considers granting licence

Production at Britain’s biggest undeveloped oil and gasfield could be delayed for months after equipment from a rig was accidentally dropped in the North Sea, the Guardian can reveal.

Andy Burnham’s new government is under pressure from the fossil fuel industry to allow oil to be retrieved from the Rosebank site despite opposition from climate campaigners and some Labour MPs.

Coming to fame in The Goodies, Oddie was later known for his wildlife expertise and presented BBC Springwatch

• Bill Oddie: the comedy legend tragically undervalued by the BBC

• Bill Oddie – a life in pictures

The writer, comedian and conservationist Bill Oddie has died aged 85. Having come to prominence with the comedy group The Goodies, Oddie later established himself as an authority on wildlife, presenting television series including the BBC’s Springwatch and Autumnwatch.

Oddie’s agent paid tribute to his “intelligence and wit”. In a statement, David Foster said: “It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of Bill Oddie, the country’s best-loved birder. Bill was a multitalented celebrity – wildlife presenter, broadcaster, comedian, writer, songwriter, musician and conservationist. Yet it was never fame that he valued.

Police appeal for help to find handbag woman was carrying when she entered the water at Fistral beach in Newquay

A father and daughter have died after being pulled from the sea at a popular surfing beach in the Cornish resort of Newquay.

The man, in his 60s, and the woman, in her 30s, were pronounced dead at Fistral beach on Sunday after a large emergency response involving coastguards, a rescue helicopter, an RNLI lifeboat, paramedics and police. The pair were from Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

Torbitt admits to two counts of fraud by false representation in relation to his parliamentary expenses

A GB News pundit has admitted fraud in relation to his parliamentary expenses when he was a Labour aide.

Matthew Torbitt, a prominent political commentator who once described himself as “Britain’s favourite lefty”, pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud by false representation at a hearing at Thames magistrates court on Monday.

Ukrainian president will be first overseas visitor for new British prime minister

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will become Andy Burnham’s first overseas visitor as prime minister, in a visit that Burnham said underlined Britain’s “unwavering” backing for Ukraine.

Less than two weeks after Keir Starmer travelled to Kyiv for the final foreign visit of his prime ministership, the Ukrainian president will on Monday join Burnham at a naval base where Ukrainian forces have been receiving training.

Kentucky senator has been absent and not seen in public since mid-June after he was hospitalized due to a fall

• US politics live – latest updates

US senator Mitch McConnell is still not cleared to return to work, his office confirmed on Monday, six weeks after he was hospitalized after a fall at his home.

An update released alongside a new photograph of the Republican lawmaker – one of the highest-profile figures in Congress, as a former Senate majority leader – said he was undergoing “intense physical therapy” and is “working hard” to get back to his duties.

Nelson Haase Mazzei was sentenced for murdering Jara in 2023, but fled from authorities in Chile

More than 50 years after the murder of the Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara, the last man wanted in connection with his death has been tracked down and brought to justice.

Nelson Haase Mazzei, a retired colonel, fled from authorities in 2023 after he and six other retired soldiers were sentenced in absentia for murdering Jara and another man.

Two women severely wounded before bystanders intervened in incident near Porte de Clichy

A man attacked three women with knives in Paris before bystanders pinned him to the ground and an off-duty police officer detained him, the French interior ⁠minister, Laurent Nuñez, has said.

The man attacked the three women, aged 19, 24 and 36, with ⁠two kitchen knives, severely wounding two of them, near Porte de Clichy on Monday, Nuñez said.

Former top US health official wrote about challenging interactions with publicity-fixated Trump during Covid

Diary entries released by a Republican senator in an attempt to damage Anthony Fauci also show the former top US government science adviser’s growing disillusionment with Donald Trump in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, branding the president “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.

From the earliest days of the crisis six years ago, Fauci noted in his journal challenging interactions with the publicity-fixated Trump. On 27 February 2020, amid the first stirrings of public alarm, he wrote of a surprise late-night call, in which the US president “wanted to chat about the coronavirus situation in general”.

Artificial intelligence firm should provide $100m for cyber defences, says Hugging Face CEO

The boss of the startup hacked by an OpenAI agent has called for the investigation into the incident to show “radical transparency”.

Clément Delangue, the chief executive of Hugging Face, said the “unprecedented” attack on his business required a similar response.

Europe and US risk being outpaced on innovation, as happened in the car industry, warns Pascal Soriot

AstraZeneca must operate at “Chinese speed” to ensure it does not suffer the fate of the western automotive industry by losing out to more innovative rivals, the drug company’s boss has said.

The FTSE 100 company is watching the rise of China’s pharmaceutical industry closely and collaborating to take drugs to global markets, but its chief executive, Pascal Soriot, said the US and European pharmaceutical sectors must focus on increasing the speed of innovation.

KKR and Energy Capital Partners poised to buy firm despite misgivings from founder and biggest shareholders

• Nils Pratley: Private equity finds soft takeover targets in London – yet again

One of the biggest energy businesses listed on the London Stock Exchange has agreed a controversial £5.7bn takeover by private equity, adding to the growing exodus of companies from the UK market.

The US private equity groups KKR and Energy Capital Partners are poised to buy DCC Energy after the company’s board recommended the offer despite misgivings from its founder and biggest shareholders.

Research shows AI accounts are gaining millions of views on TikTok by spreading dubious health advice

Misleading health claims online pose a “huge danger to public safety”, experts have warned, after research has shown that AI-generated doctors are gaining millions of views on TikTok by spreading dubious health advice.

The British Medical Association council deputy chair, Dr Emma Runswick, flagged the risks posed by AI accounts that “peddle medical myths and promote so-called miracle cures”.

The Odyssey is the summer’s biggest film: an adaptation of an almost 3,000 year old poem that everyone is talking about. So what was our readers’ verdict?

As expected from Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey is an immense technical achievement: vast in scale, beautifully shot and carried by an absorbing soundscape, particularly impressive on the Imax screen. I did enjoy it, but it did not resonate with me emotionally as some of Nolan’s other films have. For a film reaching for something deep and mythic, I’m not sure it felt quite as profound as it wanted to be. I also wasn’t wholly convinced by the casting. There were so many big names that at times I found myself seeing the actors more than the characters. Matt Damon, especially in the island scenes, reminded me of his early Bourne performances when the character had lost his memory. Charlize Theron felt underused, Jon Bernthal seemed to bring his familiar swagger, and Tom Holland did not fully convince me in the more conflicted moments. Samantha Morton, however, was excellent, as she always is. Samiul Kamal-Uddin, 49, London, UK

‘The ripple of energy and anticipation from the audience was almost visual. It was like opening a new Star Wars film – I didn’t hear a phone go off once’

My initial response when I was asked if I was interested in the role was confusion – I felt a bit long in the tooth to play a teenager. I had read the first Harry Potter book and seen a few of the movies, but was just past the right age when it was all kicking off. I didn’t know that there was the coda in the final book that places the action 19 years later, and that’s where the play would be picking up from.

The latest in our series of writers’ most pleasurable comfort films is a journey through US airports with George Clooney

Airports have always been my happy place. From shiny citadels jutting out of the desert to shoddier European hubs located 120 miles outside the city they’re designated to serve; I love them all. With so many stories to be told, all those connections and people colliding, it’s a first-class seat to life itself. Which should go some way to explaining why I hold such a deep admiration for 2009’s comedy-drama Up in the Air.

Directed by Jason Reitman and based on the book of the same name by Walter Kirn, it stars an Oscar-nominated George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a US corporate downsizer who spends 322 days a year flying state to state doing the job cowardly employers prefer to outsource, leaving him with “43 miserable days at home”. That is until graduate Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) enters the firm with a cost-saving idea of firing people by video call, and hits the road with her older colleague, who is suddenly forced to grapple with the future of his own industry while re-evaluating his nomadic lifestyle.

Maryam Ebrahimi’s documentary about a home for survivors of the war in northern Syria is tender, gentle and incredibly moving

Speaking over footage filmed at the funeral of a female army commander, documentary-maker Maryam Ebrahimi notes that it’s the first time she has seen women carrying a coffin in the Middle East. As they move through crowd of mourners, she adds: “Their sisterhood amazes me.” Ebrahimi is talking about the women of Rojava, the Kurdish-led autonomous socialist region in northern Syria. At the cemetery, the women dig the soil with their bare hands; it is a tradition in Rojava, a final act of solidarity with their fallen sister.

Ebrahimi’s tender, gentle film is about a home for injured army veterans in Rojava; most are survivors of the war against Islamic State (IS). The house is mixed genders; one of the men living there is Fadakhar, who has had both his legs amputated and is haunted at night by phantom itches and pains. Mostly, though, Ebrahimi’s gaze is drawn to the female veterans, who made headlines a decade ago for their courage on the battlefield. We learn that women started leaving their villages to fight IS in 2011 – though in truth a little more background about the history of Kurdish all-female battalions might have been helpful.

Chris Packham gets to the bottom of things in the fantastic Evolution. Plus, has reality TV found its next big star? Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
Which animal was the first to poo? Chris Packham’s belting biology lesson continues with the story of the bat – and the origins of its insatiable hunger are in the urbilaterian, an animal that floated about in the waters of the Ediacaran period, about 570m years ago. Food entered and exited through one hole … until a vital mutation: “The anus was a breakthrough!” Hollie Richardson

Filled with shots of emerald pastures and gambolling animals, this documentary shows that challenging accepted practices can benefit animals and the environment

A new addition to the ranks of neo-rural cinema that is getting its hands dirty with the realities of the modern countryside, this mellow Scottish documentary lauds the emerging practice of cow-and-calf farming. It focuses on Rainton Farm in Dumfries and Galloway where, instead of the dairy-industry norm of separating calves from their mothers a few hours after birth, owners David and Wilma Finlay allow them to stay together until the youngsters are five or six months old. Having run a fully fledged organic operation since the 1990s, the Finlays have progressive form; Rainton is thought to be the first European site where cow-and-calf has been attempted at commercial scale.

This shakeup breaks dairy-farming orthodoxy, which refuses to waste lucrative milk on calves. Not only are neighbouring farmers sceptical, the cows initially are too: in the 2012 pilot, the animals were stressed out by the sudden change of routine when they were confronted with needy offspring that they had expected to disappear. Milk yields dropped, but rebounded to a 25% increase in subsequent trials, as the mums settled down and extra suckling stimulated production. An even greater revelation are the damaging routines imposed on dairy farmers by old-style methods: a stressed-out factory milking schedule that, ringfenced by intensive veterinary and crop fertilisation, has ecological repercussions in the fields.

Author Alexander McCall Smith’s new series is an attempt to use short fiction to make listeners feel better about the world. Plus, what happened when two London gangsters decided to make a film?

While he is best known for his No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels, Alexander McCall Smith has something of a soft spot for short stories, which can “cover a whole sweep of history in a couple of paragraphs”. His new series features a selection of short original works that he hopes will make listeners feel better about the state of the world, beginning with a pleasingly twee tale inspired by a friend’s miniature helicopter landing pad. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

The country-pop superstar loves Abba and secretly listens to Lloyd Webber, but which British heartthrob’s single gets her out of bed in the morning?

The song that changed my life
There’s many critical songs on The Mission soundtrack, but Gabriel’s Oboe [by Ennio Morricone] hit me hard. I had to pull off the road, I cried like a baby. I didn’t realise how powerful music could be until that moment. I was 22.

The first single I bought
At Seventeen by Janis Ian. I reference it in my album Little Miss Twain and it says so much about the emotions of a teenage misfit. I felt like her, I related – but I was also thinking: “Wow, I have to some day write this well.” It gave me a goal; I was so in awe. I made very little money, babysitting, taking care of my neighbour’s horse, singing in bars. I would get like 20 bucks, that I would mostly give to my family, but I got that record for myself.

The singer-songwriter and Water from Your Eyes guitarist was unstoppably prolific, despite a growing dependence on substances. Now sober, he reflects on his new album and the songs that helped him turn his life round

For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to get through the day. There was plenty of it: dozens of self-produced albums and EPs uploaded – since his This Is Lorelei project launched in 2012 – to what was then a plucky, independent platform called Bandcamp. Now 35, he is perhaps the quintessential Bandcamp artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His peers treat him like a lost folk hero from a bygone era.

Amos is sitting in the basement of a cafe in Camden Town, north London, cradling an iced matcha; coffee makes him “feel like shit”, he says, and he no longer indulges such foibles. The title of one of those Bandcamp albums, OK N8, is tattooed on his knuckles. A friend inked it a few years ago, soon after Amos got sober. “Exactly when you’re not supposed to be making decisions like getting a tattoo on your hand,” he jokes. His active blue eyes dance around behind a golden-brown fringe and an unruly, woodchip beard. In a tough spot he will swing back in his chair and search for answers that always seem to be hiding beneath the table. But each time he stumbles upon the truth, he looks up with a hungry smile.

(Atlantic)
How do you follow up the album that made you a star – and a caricature? In classic Charli style: with a pivot to guitar and a meta masterpiece about the instability of identity

After a decade spent trailblazing a unique kind of pop freedom from the genre’s fringes, A-list success seemed like the thing that might finally trap Charli xcx. Her 2024 club-rat opus Brat spawned memes, embarrassing political bandwagoning, Collins’ word of the year and possibly terminal damage to the bra industry. Its ludicrous cultural impact looked set to pickle her as a caricature of a Parliament-toting bad girl; the question of whether “Brat summer” could last – whether Charli could sustain the interest – was so rife she turned it into a mockumentary, The Moment. It made success look miserable: your creation turned cringe by execs wanting to milk their prize cow dry of every last acid-green drop.

Even for a pop star renowned for reinvention, it put a higher price on her next move. Pivot and risk losing new fans and looking wilfully contrarian. When Charli released the sub-two-minute single Rock Music, many heard it as a middle finger. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she drawls over guitars that buzzed like speakers weathering interference from a Nokia 5110, “so now we’re making rock music.” There were boring thinkpieces about the dancefloor being very much alive, actually (as if Charli had ever ridden culture for clout then binned it off), and about whether she was trying to eject fair-weather new fans. But the key to this cheeky song is surprisingly earnest: “Jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don’t it’s OK,” she sings naively, an affirmation to take creative leaps, and to come with Charli – or not, as you like – as she takes this one.

A sad, heartbroken woman becomes obsessed with a famous writer in a continuously humorous and touching story from the Sorrow and Bliss author

The protagonist of Meg Mason’s new book, the follow-up to the 2020 tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, is an invisible woman. She might well be standing there but you won’t notice her. She’s a techie at literary festivals – the person who shuffles up to a famous writer a few minutes before their event and apologetically slides a microphone cable down their shirt while they’re making small talk with the chair or accepting a bottle of room-temperature mineral water from an anxious publicist.

No man is a hero to his valet, and no writer is a hero to the technical staff lurking in the wings of a venue. Mason’s opening pages present a teasing but not quite libellous series of cameos of real writers: George Saunders deciding at an inconsiderately late stage to insist on swapping his headset for a lapel mic; Ann Patchett being frosty with a fan; Mick Herron accidentally stepping on someone’s foot and not apologising.

Half a century on, this tale of a woman who abandons her children in search of her self remains thrillingly original

There is a growing literature of maternal flight: novels about women who leave not just their husbands but also the children they have made. In the real world, men are the more frequent deserters; the connection of the father to family life is seen as contingent, while motherhood is revered as an intrinsic state. This means that women who “un-mother” themselves are doing something impossible: the connection between a woman and her child is not just emotional, but also creational. Joan Barfoot understands the inside-out nature of the logic involved in maternal obligation: “she created these other people and their need for her,” says Abra, the abandoning mother of Gaining Ground, “and now she must fulfil them.”

Abra neglects to fulfil her children or their needs. The novel is rigorously and meditatively about the business of separation, which is also the business of becoming a single and undivided self.

The academic’s ambitious guide to the ethics of tech falls short of its promise to provide meaningful answers

The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some mystical, formless thing, it is the product of hours of human labour, in silicon and quartz mines, microchip factories and data labelling centres. If citizens want to wrest power from the tech companies that are building AI, it helps to understand clearly what they are selling us. This also means seeing through the marketing and hype: “the cloud”, that nebulous, distant place where your photos are stored, is just someone else’s computer; an AI “hallucination” is a system error or data labelling mistake; intelligence is a very broad – and potentially misleading – term.

The story in Silicon Valley is that AI will either save us, ushering in a new era of prosperity and human longevity, or it will wipe us all out. Drage argues, convincingly, that big tech cannot possibly deliver on its utopian promises while it continues to chase profit and power above all else, and while it serves the interests of a narrow few. Meanwhile, the cultural obsession with the AI-induced apocalypse conveniently redirects attention from the practical conversations we could be having about how to make AI safer – by ensuring citizens have more power over how their information is used, and how AI models are trained and regulated, for example. Tech titans’ apocalyptic visions also create the false impression that AI safety is more important than climate change, geopolitical tensions and inequality, three problems that are already causing a huge amount of suffering and that, if addressed, would reduce many AI-linked risks too.

More than seven decades after they were first released, the dark novels of Osamu Dazai have become a publishing sensation, as a new generation of readers engage with his bleakness, humour and brilliance

There’s no question that Japanese literature has been one of the outstanding successes for British bookshops in recent years: in 2024 close to half of the bestselling translated fiction titles were from Japan. Much of the Japanese fiction translated into English fits into broad categories – cats, crime, coffee shops – but one surprise bestseller stands alone.

Sales of books by Osamu Dazai, who killed himself in 1948 aged 38, have rocketed in the last few years. His best-known novel, No Longer Human (1948), has sold more than 75,000 copies in the UK alone. An intense semi-autobiographical account of one man’s alienation, it was the last work of fiction completed before Dazai’s death.

The debut from Scandinavian outfit Dead Astronauts promises shooting, survival, and, in a shake-up to the genre, seeds that terraform its pristine world right before your eyes

The wilds of the sub-Arctic north: towering pine trees, flashes of psychedelic-yellow lichen, and a sun that never wholly sets during the summer months. This land is gorgeous, yes, but also unforgiving, yet in Haex (pronounced “hex”) you have an unusual tool at your disposal to make it a little more hospitable: a cube that fits snugly in the palm of your hand out of which grows a plant. You plant this so-called Seed in the earth and – voilà – the world around you transforms: new vegetation and topography but also narrative threads to follow, and, naturally, enemies. Wield these small-but-mighty kernels of change at your own peril.

“Your adventure and your world is player-shaped,” says Haex’s creative director Tobias Nyman. He explains that everyone starts a campaign with a unique, procedurally generated world. Each Seed then contains further procedural data that causes it to terraform before your eyes. “You change the world as you go,” he says. “It becomes even more unique.”

The horror movie sensation of 2026 has its roots in gaming’s discovery of ‘noclip’ – and the hidden virtual realms that could be opened up inside games. Developers explain how everyone got lost in these liminal spaces

It starts on 4chan, in a May 2019 thread entitled “unsettling images”. The first post was a photo showing an empty room with the now iconic yellow wallpaper, no natural lighting and a kind of inexplicable jutting half-wall. Shortly afterwards, another user (there are no usernames on 4chan, just identifying numbers) responded with 78 words of text that would essentially lay out the blueprint for a future $262m A24 movie sensation.

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms,” the post begins. For the uninitiated, “noclip” refers to a game mode in which collision with solid objects is disabled, allowing players to move freely through walls and floors. Think of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in the film, finding a permeable wall in the basement of his furniture store and passing through to the world on the other side.

Going by the mantra, if you want to make someone laugh, make them cry first, the game’s developers have created a lonely magpie who fills the void by wreaking havoc

Amid the gleeful anarchy of Bad Magpie’s debut trailer, there’s a striking note of melancholy. The game’s protagonist – a wounded corvid that creates havoc wherever she goes – calls out forlornly as a flock of her kind passes above, with a conspicuous gap in their formation.

Milktooth games designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this particular image in her head for years. Lying in the grass one afternoon during the 2020 lockdowns, she looked up and saw a V-shaped pattern in the sky, poignantly incomplete. “It really stuck with me,” she says. “I posted about it online and someone told me about a ‘missing man’ formation, which is an aerial salute to a fallen pilot.”

These days, I ‘collect’ birdsong and wild flowers, but it all started when my sons and I first set out to find Pikachu and pals

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Believe it or not, Pokémon Go is 10 years old this month. The wildly successful smartphone game, which allows you to track down lovable creatures in the real world using GPS and augmented-reality technologies, has reportedly been downloaded 800m times across 150 countries and regions. A trillion Pokémon have been caught so far – and I have been responsible for a modest percentage of that figure.

When the game was first released, my sons and I spent many happy hours wandering the streets and parks of Frome searching for Jigglypuffs and Charizards, and the game’s social element, which lets you take on gym battles with other players in your vicinity, offered my autistic son a route to communicate with other children in a way he’d never been able to before.

Neston Park, Wiltshire
​In a new home after a year off, there’s a thread of fierce political anger running alongside the spirited musical performances – including standout sets from Barrington Levy and Daniela Mercury

At Womad, opening at new home Neston Park after a year off in 2025, the boundary between spectator and performer dissolves entirely: you bump into headliners in the loo queue, spot them wandering the site with their kids, or sit in on an intimate panel discussion with them hours after their main-stage set. Phone signal is practically nonexistent at the new site, forcing a crowd reliant on group chats into analogue meet-ups; the new arboretum layout holds a cosier, village-like setup than before, complete with a mercifully shorter trek from all camping areas. You can start the morning at your own speed: pounding through a west African djembe workshop, joining “laughing yoga”, or relaxing in a wood-fired tub while distant basslines echo through the trees.

Musical highlights often happen when artists go off-script. Reggae legend Barrington Levy provides Friday’s standout moment by rejecting strict act times, turning to the side of the stage to deliver a blunt ultimatum: “Mr Promoter, don’t invite me to your festival and tell me to get off the stage. I’m fucking playing as long as I like.” The crowd back him and he stays, launching back into Black Roses and Here I Come, his star power locking in a crowd of nodding, fist-pumping seniors, families, and kids getting a proper musical education.

Bayreuth festival theatre, Bayreuth
Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka’s production swaps 14th-century Rome for an abstract near future in an over-busy staging . Jennifer Holloway’s Adriano is a standout in a strong cast

It was Adolf Hitler’s favourite opera – and thus vital to a historical chapter that Germany’s Bayreuth festival long preferred to avoid. But Rienzi has finally arrived at Wagner’s symbolic HQ, opening the 150th anniversary season as an exception to the festival’s rigid canon of his 10 “mature” works.

Rienzi’s problems are unavoidable. Since the complete handwritten score was given to Hitler and subsequently disappeared, no authentic version of Wagner’s longest opera exists. Aesthetically, Rienzi shares the vast scale of French grand opera but sounds broadly Italian. Flashes of chromatic ambition hint at a Wagnerian language to come. Yet there are endless repetitions and the sense of an epic both overcompressed and underpowered.

Royal Albert Hall, London
Lucas and Arthur Jussen brought fun and energy to Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and John Adams’ Harmonium was monumental and moving in the City of Birmingham Orchestra and Chorus’ Prom under their chief conductor Kazuki Yamada

American minimalism can punch and thrill, hypnotise and slow your pulse, but how often does it make you laugh? What a brilliant idea, then, from Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to pair John Adams’ formative 1980 epic Harmonium – a sonic wrestle with love and death and desire – with music by the wittiest, slipperiest, most self-puncturing composer in the business, an artist who will break your heart with the cheekiest of grins: Francis Poulenc.

It’s entirely typical that Poulenc can’t even bring himself to call a symphony a symphony. Any delusions of grandeur are seen off at the pass by diminutising his 1948 “Sinfonietta”, which duly unfolds in a series of impeccably shaded and textured dances, marches and melodies that thumb their nose at anything so dutiful as development.

Gloucester Cathedral
A packed crowd greeted this year’s curtain raiser for a delightfully Tiggerish premiere of Gavin Higgins’ Fanfare Americana, an exhilarating Elgar’s First and a joyful rendition of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast

So shocked were the worthies of the venerable Three Choirs festival by the eunuchs and concubines littering William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast that they banned the work for 26 years (the powers that be finally unpursed their lips sufficiently to allow it to be performed in 1957). These days it’s a hot ticket judging by the enthusiastic crowd packing out Gloucester Cathedral for this opening concert. It’s also a significant test of any group of singers, and one that this year’s Festival Chorus passed with flying colours.

The UK premiere of Gavin Higgins’ Fanfare Americana opened proceedings, a likable work celebrating the can do attitude prevalent in the US. Whooping brass and tubular bells propelled vast wodges of sound into the resonant cathedral acoustic that exploded like exuberant fireworks. Adrian Partington led the Philharmonia Orchestra in a delightfully Tiggerish account.

Singer-songwriter also had surgery to treat carcinoma on her face, leading her to ‘withdraw from public view’

The musician Carly Simon has revealed that she has Parkinson’s disease in a statement shared on Monday.

“So many people have written to me, kindly wondering about my relative silence, asking how I am and what I have been doing,” Simon said. “The truth is, I’ve been learning how to live with Parkinson’s disease.”

Pop star is celebrated as ‘one of the defining cultural figures of her generation’ by gallery, which acquires Brat-era portrait by Harley Weir

A portrait of Charli xcx has been added to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, in the week that she hopes for a No 1 chart position for her new album Music, Fashion, Film.

The photograph by Harley Weir was taken in 2023 and became one of the key images associated with Charli’s Brat era: the 2024 album that became a pop cultural phenomenon for its candour and debauchery.

Ghost Ranch exhibition at Courtauld in London will look at how artist’s New Mexico home shaped her life and work

As soon as Georgia O’Keeffe was shown Ghost Ranch, she knew it was her place.

The remote property in the shadow of the mountains north of Santa Fe in New Mexico would become the artist’s summer residence for decades – a setting that fascinated her, inspired several paintings and is where her ashes were scattered. “I knew the minute I got up here that this was where I would live,” she once said.

Celebrated saxophonist in demand for session work and film soundtracks who was famous for his stylistic and technical versatility

As a first-call session musician in the Hollywood studios, the saxophonist Plas Johnson needed to be able to cope with anything the occasion might require. One day in 1963, during a session to record Henry Mancini’s music for the detective comedy The Pink Panther, directed by Blake Edwards and starring David Niven and Peter Sellers, Johnson was asked to apply his distinctive tone on the tenor saxophone to a stealthy melody suggestive of some sort of nocturnal prowling. Released as a single after the film had become a hit, the tune reached the US Top 10.

“I had a specific saxophone player in mind,” Mancini wrote in his autobiography. “I nearly always pre-cast my players and write for them and around them, and Plas had the sound and the style I wanted.”

Abandoned at the age of two, he pinched everything from birthday cake to raw potatoes. Beneath the comic greed was a much-loved companion who kept us laughing for 12 years

We adopted Morris after he’d been abandoned in a park at the age of two. The shelter named him Kai but it didn’t suit him. An old soul (read: curmudgeon) who tried to pull us into old-school boozers, and who demanded routine and treated walks as a favour to us, Morris was perfect.

Incorrigibly lazy and happiest on the sofa, preferably on top of us, his only real motivation was food. Perhaps he knew hunger in that park, and vowed never to meet it again. Among the countless petty thefts from unattended plates were some truly audacious schemes. There was the sandwich stolen right out of a stranger’s hand. The birthday cake polished off, tinfoil and all, before its intended recipient tasted a single bite. The multiple raw baking potatoes eaten, this last crime caught on video or we’d never have believed it.

Chicagoans come together for cathartic and communal screaming experience as activity gains traction across US

People strolling along North Avenue Beach, a sandy strip on Lake Michigan, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, are apt to see something unusual on Sunday evenings.

That’s because Chicago’s “Scream Club” meets there every week during the city’s warmer months, bringing together a community of up to 300 people who like to scream out over the water – and it’s an activity that seems to be spreading across the US.

Who makes the smoothest, creamiest, chocolatiest tub? We have the inside scoop for you

• The best supermarket dark chocolate

There’s been a marked shift towards less-processed ice-cream since I tested vanilla ice-cream for this column last summer. Most ice-cream on the market used to be a cocktail of gums and emulsifiers, but now they’re of much higher quality and with fewer additives.

All today’s chocolate ice-creams are sophisticated, rich and complex, with deep, dark flavours, and I scored them on taste and texture first (I favour denser, French-style, custard-based ice-creams). I also prioritised smoothness and mouthfeel.

Whether you’re on PC or a console, level up your setup with our gaming expert’s pick of the best chairs

• The best games of 2026 so far

Comfort is crucial to the gaming experience. It’s hard to focus on blasting aliens or taking Stoke to the Champions League final if your bum has gone to sleep because you’ve been sitting on an old chair for three hours. We’re spending more time playing games than ever before, so good posture matters. If you have set up a dedicated gaming space, then a rickety seat just won’t cut it.

From luxurious ergonomic thrones to cheap-and-cheerful bucket seats, the options available are bewildering. So I set out on an epic quest: to find the most comfortable, durable and stylish gaming chairs. Here’s what I discovered.

Best gaming chair overall:
Secretlab Titan Evo

Best budget gaming chair:
ThunderX3 Solo 360

Supportive and surprisingly cool for memory foam, Panda’s flagship topper gave our reviewer some of the best sleep she’s had all summer

• The best mattress toppers – tested

When I was struggling to sleep in a heatwave, diving into a 6ft slab of memory foam didn’t exactly sound like the answer. Memory foam is renowned for trapping heat, and the more “sinky” the foam, the more heat you’d expect it to trap. Less comfort layer, more boiled marshmallow.

However, the foam used by Panda in its flagship mattress topper genuinely seems to break the mould. It has the cosy feel of conventional memory foam, but it eased my night sweats so well when I tested the best mattress toppers in summer 2025 that I named it the “best cooling topper”, beating rivals filled with airy wool and microfibre.

They’re the foundation of a good routine, but which face wash does our beauty expert rate for oily, dry, or normal skin?

• How to build the perfect skincare routine

Choosing a cleanser can feel like Goldilocks’ task of searching for the perfect bowl of porridge – finding one that’s just right is rarely straightforward. Add in that our skin is constantly changing, due to hormones, the seasons and environmental stressors, and it’s easy to see why finding the ideal formula can be challenging.

Cleansers are often overlooked, but the right one is the basis of a good skincare routine. To understand what we should be looking for, I spoke with Dr Ahmed El Muntasar, GP and founder of the Aesthetics Doctor, who explained that the ideal formula depends entirely on skin type. “If someone is acne-prone or oily, I would usually recommend something more gel-based, because it helps break through excess oil more effectively,” he says. “Ingredients such as salicylic acid and niacinamide can also be helpful for those skin types.”

Best overall and best budget cleanser:
Cetaphil gentle exfoliating salicylic acid cleanser

Best cleanser if you can afford it:
Sarah Chapman Skinesis Ultimate Cleanse

Sweetness and spice abound in this refreshing summer salad

When the weather is glorious, I have very little desire to do any “proper cooking”. Turning the grill on for about 15 minutes is the maximum amount of heat I want to subject my home to, which is why, in the summer months, I eat this sort of salad on repeat: stone fruit with golden slices of halloumi is my favourite pairing. Add a little freshness with some sweetness and spice, and it is a glorious thing. You could even spoon it on to slices of toasted ciabatta for an open sandwich or elegant crostini.

Fragrant, punchy vegan dishes that can be kept in the kept in the fridge or freezer for an easy midweek dinner

Whether you love it or loathe it, tofu is one of the most versatile ingredients in any kitchen. For me, it’s the saviour of stressful dinner times, because it cooks in minutes, absorbs flavour like no other and packs a real nutritional punch. Here, it plays two very different roles: crisped until golden in a fragrant, spice-infused Vietnamese-style pho, and mashed to give body and bite to bold, punchy Thai-ish fishless cakes.

You’ll leave fed, challenged and gastronomically punch-drunk

Nico Simeone is the Scottish-Italian chef behind the Six by Nico restaurant empire, and Lennox, in Spring Gardens, Manchester, is his new baby. If you are unfamiliar with Six by Nico, it’s a fever-dream version of fine dining: Simeone conjured up themes such as “The Chippie”, “Italian Road Trip” and “Ancient Rome”, then served six courses in homage to them. Tokyo! Mad Hatters! Childhood! At one point, the Six empire was growing like knotweed, and by 2025 there were 17 restaurants. You had more chance of eating at a Six by Nico than finding an NHS dentist.

Suffice to say, many adore the concept – overlooking its middling cooking skills – because it’s pocket-friendly, and the six-course format gives a night out with friends a sense of occasion not available at Pizza Express. Lennox, Simeone says, will be very different: à la carte, focused on dry-aged meat, but with the same playfulness and invention. There would be a fish finger with katsu curry and celeriac remoulade; a tempura oyster shell filled with dry-aged beef tartare and oyster emulsion; and gnocchi with deboned chicken wings and parmesan. Lennox would be personal, bespoke and absolutely unscalable. No rollout planned, no siree. But by August 2026, there will be three of them. Hang on, what? Yes, shortly after Manchester came Glasgow, and then Edinburgh. Simeone sleeps with one eye open; I salute his indefatigability.

They make grand claims about beauty benefits or extra energy – and even actor Gillian Anderson has her own brand. We investigate what they’re really doing – and put them to a taste test

Show yourself some love. Fuel your focus. Life’s too good for bad energy. Find your calm in the everyday chaos. Live fit. No, not new-age slogans or something you’d find scribbled in neon on the wall of a cocktail bar, but marketing taglines slapped across cans of functional soft drinks. Walk into any supermarket or newsagent and there they are, bright and cheerful, right next to the Tango, promising everything from improved mental clarity and zen-like calm, to a blast of highly caffeinated energy as part of your sandwich-and-a-snack lunchtime meal deal. Influencers love them. Your favourite podcasters are sponsored by them. Even Gillian Anderson has a functional drinks brand (brilliantly, she’s called it G Spot).

If you have not yet swigged an electrolyte-loaded lemonade or opened a can of probiotic fizzy pop, you might be wondering what functional drinks even are. Because they are marketed as having one or more of many possible physiological and cognitive benefits, it’s a big category. There are functional drinks for focus, productivity, relaxation, calm, protein, energy, gut health and perhaps most confusingly, for hydration – which is, after all, the core function of most potable liquids.

I was just 10 at the time but my siblings and I will never forget the sense of safety, comfort and warmth they offered

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

We were doing the groceries when a blood vessel burst in my mother’s brain. I was 10 years old and on a family holiday to France that very suddenly changed its tenor. In the following weeks Mum went through brain surgery, suffered a stroke and was placed in intensive care.

We had been staying in a gîte but moved to a small hotel closer to the hospital. It was a terrifying and stressful time, even as a young kid who knew things were serious – but didn’t understand quite how serious.

Will’s lack of self-worth is creating a barrier between him and Fi, but talking more could help them adjust to their mismatched libidos

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

I worry that Will sees me more as a mother figure than a sexual being

You are stepping into a family system with its own history and loyalties; try to consider how you might set boundaries without rejecting his mum

I’m in my 30s and have been living in Spain for a decade. My partner is Spanish and we have lived together for a year.

The bond he has with his mum sometimes makes me feel angry, jealous and helpless. I’m aware that, culturally, Spanish people often have closer bonds with their families and I try to accept that. He is an only child and his father left his family when he was a teenager and started another. I feel my partner has developed an unhealthy and codependent relationship with his mum.

In the 1960s, 19-year-old Anne Ring was set up with Ian and felt an immediate attraction

• Find more stories from the moment I knew series

It was June 1961, I was 19, and innocently dating in the ways of that time – I’d had several boyfriends, had my heart broken once and had broken two.

A platonic friend decided I should meet Ian, as we both liked to talk. So he invited Ian – who was 20 – and me to dinner. It was at our friend’s family’s home with Beethoven’s violin concerto playing in the background, and he was right. From the outset Ian and I were totally immersed in our conversation, and I felt an immediate connection and attraction to him. Driving me home, he asked me out the following Saturday.

I’m a self-employed driving instructor and I’m running out of cash to hire a replacement dual-control vehicle

My livelihood as a self-employed driving instructor is under threat owing to Nissan’s failure to repair my leased dual-control car.

It has been off the road awaiting a spare part for three months, and I’ve now been told it will take at least a further month to arrive.

Criminals send victims to a cloned site that collects login, personal and payment details

You have had a Spotify account for years and your credit card is linked for the monthly payments. When an email arrives telling you that your payment couldn’t be processed you are not surprised as the expiry date on the card is soon.

“We encountered an issue while processing your recent payment,” it says. “To keep your access active and avoid interruption, please review and update your information.”

Unclear terms and expensive extras can turn what seemed like a cheap rental into a costly one

It is not too late to get a good deal on your holiday car rental, even if you have booked already and are travelling soon. But there are many pitfalls to avoid so that you do not end up paying over the odds.

A survey from Which? found that one in eight people who had hired a car in the past two years had ended up paying more than they were first quoted.

Don’t delay in taking advantage of the competition that is pushing up interest rates and increasing choice, experts say

It is shaping up to be a decent summer for savers as fierce competition among providers pushes up interest rates and increases choice.

You can currently get instant- and easy-access accounts that pay up to 5% interest, and fixed-rate savings bonds that pay almost that much. Meanwhile, those looking for a regular savings account can now get up to 8%.

The classic gym routine doesn’t isolate your stomach muscles as much as you might think, but here are five that will

If someone in a film or TV show wants a six-pack, chances are they’ll drop to the floor and start doing sit-ups. According to Dr Lee Brown, senior lecturer in strength and conditioning at the University of East London, that’s more Hollywood than science.

“It’s embedded in the archaic practices of boxing coaches and therefore everyone seems to follow it,” he says. “But they’re far from the best exercise for training your core.”

Stress, the cost of living, long working hours and even excessive exercise have all been touted as reasons the illness is rising among women in their 30s and 40s. What can be done to help them?

The “lightning strike” pain was like nothing Francine Jones had experienced before. “That is the only way I can describe it,” she says, of the stabbing in her torso that would occur every 10 minutes or so. “It was a really sharp, intense pain, as if someone was giving me an electric shock … it took my breath away.”

It had started in May with a strange pricking sensation under her bra. Then 10 large blisters, plus a host of smaller ones, formed in a band from her stomach to her back. They burned, “like someone was putting an iron on me. I don’t think I wore underwear for five or six weeks.” Showering, or even a cold flannel, would make her skin burn. Then came “the itch”, which lasted for five weeks and was so intense that she was lucky if she slept for four hours a night. “It was like something was crawling all over me all the time.” I can hear her wincing.

Feel lethargic even after a full night’s sleep? From not enough fibre to too much sitting, experts explain why your get up and go has got up and gone

The very air you breathe could be an issue. “Close the door, shut the window, add a partner and a heater, and by 3am a typical bedroom sits at 1,500 to 2,500 parts per million of carbon dioxide,” says Dr Jemma King, author of Sleep First: Sleep Smarter, Think Sharper, Feel Better. “Research shows that above 1,000 ppm sleep efficiency drops, deep sleep reduces and salivary cortisol rises on waking. You’re sleeping, but your nervous system is mildly activated all night.” Luckily, it’s an easy fix: open a window – even 2cm will do the job, according to King.

‘Bulking’, or gaining weight on purpose to get stronger, challenged everything I was once taught to do with my body

• Tell us: what impact have GLP-1s had on your relationships?

I had been casually lifting weights for a few years when several things changed in quick succession.

First, my boyfriend proposed.

Are you stuck in a makeup rut? Or maybe just beginning to wear cosmetics? Here, experts reveal how to to find the right products for you

Makeup trends change over time – and so does our skin. How can you enhance what you have and refresh your look? Here, makeup artists share the fundamentals of applying cosmetics, at every age.

Around town, on the pitch and even in the pool, the New York mayor keeps his suit on – what do his sartorial choices tell us?

Playing football. Playing in the sand. Dancing on a stage with Alicia Keys and the entire New York Knicks roster. Swimming in a swimming pool. Swimming in the ocean.

Traditionally, a suit and tie would be considered inappropriate attire for each of these activities. Yet over the past year Zohran Mamdani has seemingly been on a one-man crusade to prove otherwise: to convince people that a formal suit is, actually, suitable for all activities.

Latest edition of one of world’s most influential fashion photography publications is also shot entirely in India

Against the ancient, weathered walls of Jaigarh fort, high on the hills above Jaipur, Bhavitha Mandava stood barefoot and draped in gold.

Just a few months earlier, the Indian model had been catapulted from a life of obscurity as a student at New York University to become one of the most recognisable and celebrated new faces of fashion. This year, she became the first Indian woman to open the Chanel catwalk at their Métiers d’Art show and her divisive Chanel outfit for the Met Gala, fashion’s most exclusive event, became an international talking point.

A physio, a tailor and a historian on the style trends that can put women in hospital and how to avoid the dangers

“Buyer beware” is one of the oldest principles in English law. Now, a pair of wide legged trousers from Zara is bringing the phrase back to the forefront of shoppers’ minds.

On social media the £25.99 wide-legged trousers from the high-street retailer have earned the moniker “Zara death pants” thanks to a slew of videos showing wearers tripping over the leg of the trousers and injuring themselves.

Horchata, the revered creamy drink made from tiger nuts, is still served in grand Valencian parlours – always accompanied by sugar-glazed pastries

It was a glimpse of an old couple sharing a tender moment in the bustling horchatería that drew me into one of Valencia’s most storied culinary traditions. As he sipped his milky horchata de chufa and a white crescent moon appeared on his coiffed moustache, they shared a soft laugh and she dabbed it away from his upper lip.

“There’s no fixed time to drink horchata,” the lady said. “As long we have at least one every day.”

Sagre – the historic local events that pop up in villages across the country in summer – are the perfect way to get a taste of regional cuisine and culture

I cannot remember a summer when at least one evening hasn’t been spent following signs to a local sagra. Not quite a food market and not quite a village fete, a sagra is like a village moving its kitchen outdoors for a few nights.

When I think back to those nights from childhood, the first image that comes to mind is of a woman’s hand closed into a fist above a pan of hot oil. Through a tight circle formed between her thumb and forefinger, she would squeeze soft lumps of batter, one small ball at a time, into the oil. In a few seconds, each soft mass would become a pittula, a small Salento fritter: swollen, uneven, golden, too hot to eat straight away but too good to wait for.

On a coastline brimming with seafood shacks, crab sandwiches and hyperlocal flavour, our food writer is happy to be distracted from the stunning scenery

If we take it as read that the better the view, the worse the cooking, then by rights south Wales’s Gower peninsula should be a culinary desert. The first time I visited almost 15 years ago, I was unprepared for its loveliness – back in 1956, Gower (never the Gower, as locals were quick to correct me) was the first place in the UK to be designated an area of outstanding natural beauty, and though the peninsula abuts the country’s second city, Swansea, it still feels profoundly rural. Crisscrossed by narrow lanes flanked by towering hedges and ancient churches, it’s a great place to cycle, to drive, and above all to walk up an appetite.

Indeed, it’s been a long-held ambition of mine to hike the 43 miles of the Welsh Coast Path from Mumbles to Loughor. Sadly, it remains just that because on this latest trip I spent considerably more time chomping than yomping … though in fairness I was on a research mission for a walking trip with a friend here later in the summer, because as a food writer and semi-professional glutton, I never like to head anywhere unprepared.

From being abused by staff and other travellers to being denied access to toilets, flying is an increasingly distressing and frustrating experience for many wheelchair users. Here, they share their stories

When Hannah Babalola boarded KLM flight 598 on 26 May, she was tired. A Paralympic athlete, she had been competing at an event in South Africa’s Cape Town, and was hoping there would be no hold ups on her journey back home to Chicago.

Babalola, 37, is well-travelled. A former wheelchair racer, she now competes in marathons and has flown to dozens of countries over the years without big problems.

The work was simple: deliver letters, notices of assessment and other important legal documents, by bicycle. The locations, I came to realise, were varied and inconvenient

• Read more in this series here

A gopher is a small, solitary rodent with large front teeth native to North and Central America. It’s also the name of the job some workplaces give to errand runners (though it’s more usually spelled gofer).

When I was a 21-year-old law student in Canberra, I was in desperate need of casual work. I came across an ad pinned to one of the corkboards outside the library. Bleary-eyed after another all-nighter to finish an assignment, I took down the number of the law firm.

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Stephen Walsh was such a workaholic that none of his colleagues would believe he’d ever leave. But then he learned to dance and he’s now part of a dazzling tap troupe

When he was 57, Stephen Walsh found himself in hospital with a stomach bleed from an ulcer. As he lay in bed recovering, he thought about his future. “‘You always had this vague idea that you’d retire early,’” he told himself at the time. “‘Well, I’m going to do it.’”

Discharged from hospital, he gave his business partners three years’ notice. They had worked together at the General Electric Company, and after it was broken up in 1999, they launched their own training and consultancy business specialising in how to improve companies’ efficiency and outcomes.

Super-premium Android has top performance, long battery life and good cameras, but is let down by software

Honor’s svelte Android phone-tablet has been given a glow-up for its sixth version, offering a great alternative to Samsung for a fancy foldable with a red suede-like back framed in gold.

The Magic V6 continues the Chinese challenger brand’s strategy of taking a razor-thin device and slapping a giant circular lump on the back to fit in top-class cameras, something others often forgo. It costs a not inconsiderable £1,500 (€1,700/A$2,999) but only until August when the price jumps to a cool £2,000 (€2,300) – a solid £300 more than last year’s model as the cost of RAMageddon continues to bite, even at the very top end of the market.

Main screen: 7.95in (403ppi) 120Hz OLED flexible display

Cover screen: 6.52in (406ppi) 120Hz OLED

Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

RAM: 16GB

Storage: 512GB

Operating system: MagicOS 10 (Android 16)

Camera: 50MP + 50MP ultrawide + 64MP 3x tele; 2x 20MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, dual sim + esim, USB-C, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6, GNSS

Water resistance: IP68/69 (1.5 metres for 30 minutes)

Dimensions folded: 156.7 x 74.5 x 8.75-9mm

Dimensions unfolded: 156.7 x 145.6 x 4.0-4.1mm

Weight: 219-224g

The Game of Thrones actor on her feral youth, not playing the fame game, and being protective of her daughter

Born in Hamilton, Bermuda, in 1973 and raised in West Yorkshire and Somerset, Lena Headey is an actor, writer and director. She made her film debut in Waterland in 1992. Her career spans 300, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Game of Thrones, in which she played Cersei Lannister from 2011 to 2019, earning five Emmy nominations. Intimacy, which she writes, directs and stars in, is an eight-part comedy audio drama for BBC Sounds and Radio 4.

I was an OG onesie wearer. This was taken on Christmas Day in our house in Bermuda. My parents were in the police force, and for some reason one day the Yorkshire branch decided: “We’re all going to go to Bermuda for some training.” I don’t remember much from that time, but I know that it was hot, everyone had scooters, and that it was fun.

International law states only military sites can be targeted during conflicts, but this is routinely being ignored

Twice every day, Liubov Martynenko leaves the underground maternity ward where she works in Kherson and travels by ambulance to collect meals from another hospital in the Ukrainian city’s “red zone”, close to the Dnipro River and the Russian forces on the other side.

On 4 June , just before midday, the vehicle entered the grounds of Luchansky city clinical hospital as usual, but Martynenko, who also works as a midwife, heard a strange sound in the air. “It’s flying!” the driver screamed, as she realised there was a drone nearby.

His mother was an Oscar-winning actor who had been exploited from a young age; Astin appeared in The Goonies at just 13. Now, he has followed in his mother’s footsteps again as a union leader. He talks Stranger Things, AI and why playing Samwise Gamgee cost him his house

Sean Astin is showing me around his new office. There’s framed movie prints on the walls, piles of paperwork and a stack of boxes of Stranger Things Funko Pops. “If you were here, you could look out this window and see a 10-storey building with our iconic Sag-Aftra logo on it,” he says proudly on video call, gesturing out of the window to the Los Angeles skyline. “But you just have to trust me that it’s there.” He shows me a framed photo of his mother, Patty Duke, aged 16, with the best supporting actress Oscar she won in 1963 (for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker), and even more proudly, a framed copy of Duke’s business card from when she was president of the Screen Actors Guild in the mid-80s – the role he now occupies (Sag merged with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 2012). The 10 months of his presidency “has been a whirlwind”, he says.

It’s still slightly jarring to see Astin in a suit and tie, lanyard around his neck. We’re more accustomed to seeing him in the handwoven cloak and hairy feet of Samwise Gamgee, loyally accompanying mister Frodo into Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. Or as Winona Ryder’s short-lived partner in Stranger Things (before a Demodog got to him). Or as never-say-die college football underdog “Rudy” Ruettiger in the 1993 biopic. Or, for viewers of his own vintage, as plucky leader Mikey in The Goonies. Astin has been a member of the union he now represents for 45 of his 55 years, but he seems to have survived the perils of child stardom and a Hollywood upbringing remarkably unscathed. In fact, you could see it all as preparation for the role.

From TikTok appearances to ‘sugar rush’ policies, new prime minister is taking different approach to predecessor

Six weeks ago Andy Burnham was not even an MP; now the former mayor of Greater Manchester is the most important political figure in Britain. After orchestrating a bloodless coup against Keir Starmer, in which he was crowned as Labour leader unopposed, the new prime minister has started his tenure in Downing Street with some eye-catching policies and a radically different approach to communication. A week into the job, how do their leadership styles compare?

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

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

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

Wildfires are burning in parts of the UK and Europe, forcing people to leave their homes, disrupting travel and affecting communities. We would like to hear how the fires have impacted you

Wildfires are affecting communities in the UK and other parts of Europe, with people forced to evacuate their homes, travel disrupted and smoke affecting air quality in many areas.

In France, around 10,000 people have been evacuated from camping sites and other holiday accommodation near Bordeaux in the south-west on Thursday, as a wildfire ravaged a seaside pine forest, AFP news agency reported. The blaze in Le Porge had ripped through 2,400 hectares (5,900 acres) since Wednesday, officials said

We would love to hear about your workhorse appliances, why they’re so impressive and how long you’ve had them

An elderly couple in Gloucestershire are reportedly still using what is believed to be Britain’s oldest working fridge.

The Electrolux appliance was built in the 1930s and bought second-hand by their family in 1949, with the owners telling SWNS that it is “still going strong”.

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

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

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

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