Be it winter fuel, criminal justice, the EU or Chagos Islands, never miss a chance to try to rewrite Tory history

I fear for Kemi Badenoch’s sanity. She may need a little respite care. From herself. Little more than 24 hours after one of her by now customary car-crash outings at prime minister’s questions in which she didn’t appear to have noticed that Keir Starmer had U-turned on the winter fuel allowance, KemiKaze was emailing Tory party members to tell them the exciting news. She had had the prime minister on the rack and it was only down to her that Labour had done their reverse ferret.

Where do you even begin to start with this level of denial? Is it the assumption at Conservative party HQ that anyone left supporting the Tories must be technically brain dead so won’t have a clue what is going on? To be fair, that may not be a bad shout.

Modelling positive relationships can go a surprisingly long way, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. If you do say something, make your meaning clear

• Read more Leading questions

My dear friend has turned out to be an appalling father. He has unmanaged anxiety, admits to being an alcoholic, is in a relationship of convenience with the mother of his child after deciding, whether unilaterally or mutually, that they cannot resolve their differences, and seemingly only notices the bad about his four-year-old son. His expectations of his son’s behaviour are unreasonable and his comments, in front of his son, about him are almost completely negative.

I’ve tried to talk to him about getting treatment for his anxiety, which he has not done. He lives with his partner as he has constructed a narrative that he cannot afford not to do so, despite them now communicating through a shared calendar.

Following Wish You Were Here’s release, the actor answers your questions about Sunday roasts, being kept on her toes by Paul Greengrass and especially villainous villains

Hi Julia. What’s it like being directed by Paul Greengrass with his fast-cut, handheld camera, reportage style? Do you have to approach your acting in a different way? HighPriest1967
Paul is an extraordinary director, a visionary director, and I absorbed so much by watching him work. He comes from documentary, so even though he was filming these elaborate, very expensive, complicated action sequences, he was still able to see things happening spontaneously. I remember when we were shooting The Bourne Ultimatum in Tangier, running through those windy streets. Normally as an actor, you turn a corner and you think you’re off camera, so you’d stop. But you could never do that with Paul because there might be a camera around the corner. He always liked to keep us on our toes.

You stole the show as Heather Graham’s sister in Chosen Family. Is it easier to approach comedic, unpredictable roles as opposed to more intense, serious, Bourne-like performances? Bicuser
I absolutely love working on comedies. People don’t normally think of me as a comedic actress, but when they do, I really appreciate it. It’s such a different energy, trying to get other people to laugh. Working with Heather Graham was great. I’ve just finished shooting a Christmas comedy, Unbearable Christmas, with a lot of improv comedians, and had to keep up in terms of ad-libbing lines. It was the most fun I’ve ever had.

When future generations read about Gaza with horror and wonder how we allowed a livestreamed genocide to happen, what will you say?

Now, when Israel is executing a “final solution” in Gaza, when it is far too late for dissent to make any difference, the tide is slowly starting to turn. Now that Gaza is flattened, turned into mass graves and rubble, people who have kept quiet for the past 19 months are slowly starting to speak up. Now that Israel and the US are not even trying to pretend that they aren’t intent on emptying Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians, of “taking control” of all of the land, some criticism has started to trickle in.

Over in the UK, they’ve pulled out the “e” word. After 19 months of genocidal violence and almost three months of a starvation campaign the UK has decided to describe the situation as egregious. The UK, along with France and Canada, has threatened – and I’m sure Israel’s leaders are quaking in their boots over this – that there might be a “concrete” response if the mass killing and starvation continues.

Our cartoonist looks at the Tottenham coach fulfilling his prophecy by lifting a trophy in his second year with the club

Ritchie’s derivative yarn whisks John Krasinski off to picturesque spots on an uninspired search for treasure and excitement – neither of which arrive

Trying to make John Krasinski happen may be a misguided endeavour, but the campaign to mould him into a new Harrison Ford is bananas. After starring as Jack Ryan on TV, he now plays Luke Purdue, an Indiana Jones knock-off and son of an adventurer-archaeologist (named Harrison, no less) in Guy Ritchie’s soulless business-class yarn. Despite plucky work from Natalie Portman as Luke’s disapproving sister Charlotte, this hodgepodge of plundered elements adds up to nothing more than Indiana Bourne and the Thomas Crown Da Vinci Code.

Bankrolled by dying billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), Luke and his dad’s old team are on the trail of the mythical Fountain of Youth. He even has a PowerPoint presentation to show how he intends to find it: hidden on the backs of six paintings by artists such as Caravaggio and El Greco are clues which will lead to this fabled source of immortality. Charlotte cautions against the whole enterprise but is soon whisked along, apparently persuaded by her brother’s bumper-sticker slogans (“Life is about adventure!”). It’s almost as if she can’t see that he is an obnoxious bully, chiding her for her life choices, puckering up creepily for kisses from Esme (Eiza González) who is trying to prevent him from finding the fountain, and given to knocking women unconscious with a disabling spray. Nice.

Other NHS staff decry their award, while teachers are angered part of their pay rise will come from school budget

Ministers are bracing themselves for a potential wave of NHS strikes in England after doctors denounced pay rises of up to 5.4% this year as “derisory” and threatened to take action in protest.

Teaching unions, after teachers were awarded a 4% increase, also responded angrily at the government’s refusal to fully fund the deal and warned that it would damage the quality of education that pupils received. The largest union said it planned to take the first step towards possible industrial action.

US attorney general says Chicago-based suspect believed to have acted alone in killing of couple at Jewish museum

• US politics live – latest updates

The US justice department on Thursday charged the lone suspect in a brazen attack that killed two young Israeli embassy staff members outside the Jewish museum in downtown Washington DC with murder of foreign officials and other crimes.

Court documents released on Thursday charged Elias Rodriguez, 31, of Chicago, with the Wednesday night killings that left the US capital in shock and were condemned by world leaders as “horrible” and “antisemitic”. According to the filing, the suspect told police after his arrest: “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”

Speaking at book festival in East Sussex, former supreme court president says reaction to judgment ‘very binary’

The supreme court’s ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex “has been misinterpreted”, Brenda Hale has said.

Speaking at the Charleston literary festival in East Sussex, the first female president of the supreme court said the last thing she wanted now that she had retired was to “undermine the court and its authority by being critical of its decisions”.

Northern Irish group say charge is ‘political policing’ to stop them speaking out about ‘genocide in Gaza’

The Northern Irish rap trio Kneecap have claimed a campaign is being mounted to prevent their performance at Glastonbury this summer, at a surprise gig staged a day after one of its members was charged with a terror offence.

The group told the crowd at the 100 Club in central London on Thursday night that they were being used as a “scapegoat” because they “spoke about the genocide [in Gaza]” at Coachella in April.

Starmer says there’s ‘no alternative’ and defends cost, saying it is ‘part and parcel of using Britain’s reach to keep us safe at home’

The UK has signed a £3.4bn agreement to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius after an 11th-hour legal challenge failed.

Keir Starmer told a press conference on Thursday afternoon he had signed the deal and that it was “one of the most significant contributions that we make to our security relationship with the United States”.

G7 finance ministers and central bank governors pledge to address ‘economic imbalances’, without naming China

Top finance officials from the world’s seven wealthiest democracies set aside stark differences on US tariffs and agreed to counter global “economic imbalances”, a swipe at China’s trade practices.

In a communique issued on Thursday, the Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank governors, meeting in the Canadian Rockies, left out their traditional defense of free trade and toned down their references to Russia’s war in Ukraine compared with last year. But they did agree that further sanctions on Russia could be imposed if the two countries do not reach a ceasefire.

Leading figures say compulsory program is ‘ethically unsound’ and would be challenged in courts

• Explainer: What are the ‘radical’ proposed reforms to UK criminal sentencing?

Leading experts on the use of chemical castration for managing sexual offenders have said they would refuse to be part of any programme in the UK that makes the intervention compulsory.

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, confirmed in the Commons on Thursday that she was examining whether she could force offenders, including paedophiles, to take pills or injections to suppress “problematic sexual arousal”.

Committee says Karen Kneller’s position no longer tenable in damning report on miscarriage of justice watchdog

The miscarriage of justice watchdog for England, Wales and Northern Ireland has continually failed to learn from its mistakes and its chief executive should follow the organisation’s chair out the door, MPs have said.

In a damning report on the leadership of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the House of Commons justice committee said Karen Kneller had provided it with unpersuasive evidence and her position was no longer tenable.

Popular stop on M5 tops Which? survey with Tebay second, while Bridgwater is judged the worst with one-star rating

There are less than 80 miles between them, but the gulf in quality is massive, according to a Which? survey that ranked Gloucester services top of the stops, and Bridgwater bottom.

For many people motorway service stations are a place to take a break, grab a snack and use the toilet, but the rankings from the consumer recommendation group, which surveyed users of nearly 100 service stations across Great Britain, highlight the best and worst.

Exclusive: Neria Ben Pazi and Zohar Sabah witnessed visiting base set up to drive Palestinians from homes

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

Two violent Israeli settlers on whom sanctions were imposed by the UK government this week have joined a campaign to drive Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank village of Mughayyir al-Deir.

Neria Ben Pazi’s organisation, Neria’s Farm, had sanctions imposed by London on Tuesday, as the UK suspended negotiations on a new free-trade deal with Israel over its refusal to allow aid into Gaza and cabinet ministers’ calls to “purify Gaza” by expelling Palestinians.

Claims of a recent sighting of the animal in the vast Fiordland wilderness reignites public fascination in a story that has endured for decades

Over 100 years ago, a ship dropped anchor in the frigid fjords of New Zealand’s South Island and released 10 nervous moose on to the shore. The crew watched as the animals – the last survivors of a weeks-long voyage from Saskatchewan, Canada – skittered out of their crates and up into the dense, lonely, rainforest.

The moose had arrived on a flight of fancy, as part of the then premier’s grand vision to turn Fiordland national park into a hunters’ paradise. It was the second attempt to release moose into the region – in a country whose only native land-based mammals are bats – after nearly all of an earlier herd died crossing the seas. Red deer and wapiti, or elk, were also released around the same time for game-hunting.

More than a decade after China passed a groundbreaking mental health law, victims and activists say that involuntary hospitalisation remains common

Zhang Po was barely one year out of school when an out of control mine-cart barrelled into him deep in a pit in Anhui province, causing injuries that ended his brief career as a coalminer. Since the accident in 1999, he has been living off disability allowances provided by his former employer in Huainan, Anhui’s coal city. But in 2024 Zhang was sent to hospital once again – this time to a psychiatric ward.

Zhang was sectioned for 22 days in June after he protested outside the office of his former employer, demanding an increase in his disability allowance. “I endured more than 20 days of humiliation in there. There was no phone, and my belt and shoelaces were taken away,” Zhang said in a recent interview with Chinese media. Zhang said that he was forced to take medicines and tied to his bed for several hours a day. After the three weeks in hospital, he was sentenced to eight days of administrative detention for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.

Mayor of Bilopillya, where nine people were killed in strike on bus, says Russia has shown it does not care about talks

Even before the Russian strike on a shuttle bus travelling from his frontline town at the weekend, the mayor of Bilopillya, Yuri Zarko, was very sceptical that Vladimir Putin’s agreement to direct Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul would lead to peace.

The strike, which killed nine people including five over 60, only confirmed his conviction that talks to end the war were going nowhere and Ukraine had a challenging time ahead.

In Bi Gan’s ambitious alternate reality, where humans can live indefinitely, a reincarnating dissident dreamer travels through history in different guises

Bi Gan’s new movie in Cannes is bold and ambitious, visually amazing, trippy and woozy in its embrace of hallucination and the heightened meaning of the unreal and the dreamlike. His last film Long Day’s Journey Into Night from 2018 was an extraordinary and almost extraterrestrial experience in the cinema which challenged the audience to examine what they thought about time and memory; this doesn’t have quite that power, being effectively a portmanteau movie, some of whose sections are better than others – though it climaxes with some gasp-inducing images and tracking shots and all the constituent parts contribute to the film’s aggregate effect.

Resurrection is, perhaps, a long night’s journey to the enlightenment of daybreak; it finishes at a club called the Sunrise. It is also an episodic journey through Chinese history, finishing at that historic moment which continues to fascinate Chinese film-makers whose movies are a way of collectively processing their feelings about it: New Year’s Eve 1999, the new century in which China was to bullishly embrace the new capitalism while cleaving to the political conformism of the old ways.

Garrick theatre, London
Filial tangles, played with the actor’s real-life daughter Bessie Carter, bring George Bernard Shaw’s once-banned drama to life

This is not the first production of George Bernard Shaw’s once-banned 1893 play about a mother-daughter reckoning to cast a real-life mother and daughter. Caroline and Rose Quentin performed it together at Theatre Royal Bath in 2022. Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter here make a more compelling double act and bring an added frisson to the play’s intimacies and disputes.

Carter plays Vivie, a no-nonsense young woman with ambitions to take up the legal profession. Her mother, Kitty (Staunton), has a successful profession of her own – the world’s oldest – and a string of brothels to her name. When Kitty visits Vivie, who has just graduated from Cambridge, this secret is explosively revealed.

He was the first partner Kate Wilson ever moved in with; they were together for 16 months, and friends for years afterwards. Then she found out he had been spying on her all along

In February 2004, Kate Wilson – then 25 and known to her friends as Katja – decided to make a Valentine’s card for her partner, Mark. He was an affectionate person – he would write her poems, give her gifts, text her love messages – and she wanted to reciprocate in some way. “He was quite demonstrative and I was not. That was a little bit awkward for me,” she says. “The gesture of making a card for Valentine’s Day, which to my anarchist self was soppy and commercial, was a big deal.”

More than a decade later, Wilson read the incident back, as recorded in a police log:

Sunday 15th February. 19.37 Call from Source who has received a Valentines card from Katja. This has put Source’s mind at rest re the challenges about being an undercover/informant.

Revealed: an investigation shows how consumers buying fish in the UK are playing a role in food insecurity and unemployment in Senegal

Read more: Chris Packham calls sea bass labelling in UK supermarkets a ‘dereliction of duty’

At the entrance to the fish market in Joal-Fadiouth, a coastal town in central Senegal, a group of women have set up shop under the shade of a small pavilion. A few years ago, they say, the market would have been bustling with ice-cream sellers, salt vendors and horse-drawn carts delivering freshly caught fish to the women, who would set about sun-drying, salting and sorting the catch into affordable portions for local families to buy.

Today, trade is dead, says Aissatou Wade, one of the remaining small-scale fish processors left in the town. “Without fish [to sell], we have no money to send our children to school, buy food or get help if we fall ill,” she says.

As their album Grand Prix turns 30, we rate the standout moments from a group Kurt Cobain called ‘the best in the world’

In 2018, bassist Gerry Love departed Teenage Fanclub (TFC) after 29 years, much to fans’ despair. It’s perhaps a little romantic to see The First Sight as his parting gift, but it’s certainly an impressive closing statement of his songwriting talent: an intricate mesh of guitars, a buoyant horn section, and a typically stunning tune.

Want to make your rental property feel more like home? These practical and affordable tips will have you covered

• 12 space-saving tricks to make small rooms feel bigger

Renting often means living with someone else’s design choices, from magnolia walls and tired carpets to ugly furniture. And the worst part is, you usually can’t do much about it. While social media is full of dreamy interiors and home renovation projects, most renters don’t have the option to knock down walls, retile a bathroom, or even paint without permission.

As someone who’s rented a string of different flats – furnished, unfurnished, shoebox-sized, and occasionally some with questionable landlord DIY – I’ve learned to get creative. Making a place feel like home when you can’t even hang up artwork makes those smaller, temporary changes even more important.

Wigmore Hall, London
A programme of solo and duo works ranged from Schubert to Beethoven, but Kurtág was the main focus, his duets beautifully shaped and vivid

Until Márta Kurtág’s death in 2019, one of the most delightful musical experiences was to watch and listen to her and her composer husband György playing his piano duets – the playfulness, the quiet intimacy, the way in which the writing meant they crossed arms as if in a gentle game of Twister. But you don’t have to be married to play Kurtág’s duets – just generous with your personal space. Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou chose eight of them for this recital, performing them alongside Kurtág’s similarly miniature solos and framing them with four works by Schubert, the master piano duet writer of the 19th century.

The Kurtág pieces on the main programme were all from Játékok: translating as Games, this is a collection of mostly tiny piano solos and duets united by their concision and sense of mischief which Kurtág, now 99, has been adding to for half a century. Andsnes’s solo set began with an Evocation of Petrushka that indeed sounded like a sped-up tape of Stravinsky; immediately afterwards there was the contrast of Les Adieux, quietly throbbing into silence, then an about-turn into the frenzied klaxon of Sirens of the Deluge. Chamayou sent his hands cartwheeling repeatedly down the keyboard in The Little Squall, and painted spots of changing colour in Hommage Tardif à Karskaya. Their duets were even more vivid, with Harangok and Kyrie showcasing differing and equally convincing ways of making the piano sound like bells.

Football coverage no longer stops after the final whistle. And in this new era, the former Liverpool defender reigns supreme

Jamie Carragher’s legs were aching. He had been speaking to a Sky Sports cameraman for 25 minutes. Usually for a news interview it’s just 10, but today called for something more. Reports were coming out that Trent Alexander-Arnold, who inherited Carragher’s mantle as the local mainstay of Liverpool’s defence, was about to announce his long-expected departure from his boyhood club, and so, as sure as day follows night, a camera crew had been hastily dispatched to Carragher’s whereabouts to find a quiet spot, hit record and get his opinions out to viewers before they’d had a chance to fully form their own.

How much was there to say about a subject that had already been talked about all season long? Quite a lot, it turned out. Like a hunter-gatherer extracting a week’s worth of food from a seemingly arid wilderness, Carragher – occasionally prompted by a Sky Sports anchor in the studio – launched into nearly half an hour of pure, free-flowing, agenda-setting football opinionating. From this monologue, Sky would carve out a TV report, YouTube interview, news article and three short-form videos. When Carragher says something – about Alexander-Arnold’s future, Arsenal’s attack, Chelsea’s owners or Fifa’s executives – we tend to hear about it very shortly after.

Critics of Israel’s atrocious conduct in Gaza should be clear that their focus is the authors of that violence – not Israeli civilians

Israel’s campaign of bombing and starving Palestinian civilians in Gaza is inexcusable. It reflects a massive war crime, as the international criminal court has already charged, and arguably genocide. But it in no sense justifies the murder of two young Israeli embassy workers in Washington by a man who then chanted: “Free, free Palestine”. Nothing justifies violence against civilians.

The killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim occurred on Wednesday evening outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting a reception for young diplomats. The suspect, identified as Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, was detained shortly after the shooting. His social media accounts indicated that he had been involved in pro-Palestinian activism.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments was published by Knopf and Allen Lane in February.

The PM has little choice. Unless he brings the fractured nations together, none can move forward, and neither can he

A house divided against itself cannot stand, warned Abraham Lincoln. The United States’ later descent into civil war over slavery would prove Lincoln right. But is 21st-century Britain now also becoming, in its different way, an unsustainably divided house too? And have Britain’s economic divisions become so intractable that the UK state can no longer manage them? More than at any time in the postwar era, the answer to both questions looks increasingly like yes.

History shows that Britain’s capacity for pragmatic resilience in the face of internal and external threat is not to be underestimated. Wednesday’s partial climbdown on winter fuel payments was an example of that instinct for self-preservation at work. Yet the U-turn will not have restored the public’s lost trust in the ability of government to solve their problems.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Rather than trying to charm his US counterpart with golf, the South African president could have addressed the white supremacist attitudes holding our country back

• Zanele Mji is a writer, investigative journalist and podcaster based in Johannesburg, South Africa

The dust is still settling from Donald Trump’s latest “ambush” in the Oval Office. What started off as a series of pleasantries about golf between the US president and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa’s delegation quickly turned into a lecture – complete with a video screening and reams of printed-out news articles – about how a white genocide is supposedly under way in my home country.

The delegation was largely successful in correcting that narrative. It emphasised that crime affects South Africans of all races and that white citizens are not specifically targeted. Zingiswa Losi, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, rightly pointed out that in rural areas, it is Black women who bear the brunt of violent crime.

Our voters wanted change, not more austerity. Will the PM and his chancellor apologise for the anxiety and stress they’ve caused?

• Jon Trickett is the MP for Normanton and Hemsworth in West Yorkshire and former member of the shadow cabinet

On Wednesday, Keir Starmer indicated he may U-turn on last year’s winter fuel payments cuts. The prime minister announced in the Commons that he would look again at the £11,500 threshold over which pensioners are no longer eligible for the payment, meaning that more pensioners will again be eligible for the benefit. As a Labour MP who voted against the cut, I think the government should go further.

During the election, I promised I would defend the community I represent, fight for working-class people and stand by my principles. And so I could not in all conscience vote for the removal of the winter fuel payment from up to 10 million pensioners as one of the first actions of the new Labour government in September. Approximately 17,000 people in my constituency lost their winter fuel payment. Similar numbers can be seen in constituencies throughout the country.

Jon Trickett is the MP for Normanton and Hemsworth in West Yorkshire and former member of the shadow cabinet

How we deal with bereavement has changed enormously over the years. But not all the old traditions should be forgotten

Many years ago, as part of a school homework project, I asked my grandparents what the most significant social change had been during their lifetime. Two of them answered “child mortality”. I was surprised. Weren’t there other, more significant experiences in long lives that had stretched from the first and second world wars to the 1980s?

But now that I am older and have experienced bereavement, I understand their replies. Both grandparents had sisters who died of diphtheria. And my grandfather’s younger brother died of sepsis, meaning his parents had buried two of their four children before the age of three. Their childhoods had been profoundly shaped by loss. Child mortality was, at that time, horrifyingly common, and from their earliest years many people spent a great deal of their lives coping with the emotional fallout of grief, which shaped their lives into older age.

Molly Conisbee is a social historian, visiting research fellow at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, and author of No Ordinary Deaths

From DDG to Tory Lanez, a male celebrity is accused of abuse – and his supporters reverse the roles of victim and offender

There’s a new formula for punishing women who speak out about abuse by high-profile figures, and it usually goes like this: woman alleges abuse, woman seeks recourse through the justice system, woman’s accusation is made public – and then a tidal wave of fans of her abuser come together to help deny the abuse, attack her credibility and reverse the roles of victim and offender.

If this sounds familiar it’s because Darvo – the “deny, attack, reversevictim and offender” method of manipulating abuse victims – has existed for forever. But social media has given it a whole new dimension, and powerful people now have an army of rabid fans ready to do that work for them.

Labour’s pivot to welfare cuts and targeting of rightwing voters has backfired. If the party leadership won’t adapt, the public will move on

Sir Keir Starmer’s U-turn on winter fuel payments did not just represent a policy reversal. It was the moment when the prime minister, elected on promises of national renewal, was forced to confront the political reality that his strategy had refused to acknowledge. It may also prove to be the moment he lost control.

The original policy, hatched in the Treasury and defended for months, had cut winter fuel payments, worth up to £300 annually, to millions of pensioners. It was unpopular, and unnecessary. Local election losses and a looming backbench revolt over disability benefit cuts made it politically toxic. The result? On Wednesday, Sir Keir reversed course at the dispatch box – with his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, notably absent. Too little, too late: voters saw delay; activists cried betrayal.

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

The president’s cynical ambush of Cyril Ramaphosa was not about American interests but racial grievances

The most telling moment of Donald Trump’s meeting with Cyril Ramaphosa was not the cynical screening of footage promoting false claims of “white genocide” in South Africa. It was when a reporter asked the US president what he wanted his counterpart to do about it. Mr Trump replied: “I don’t know.”

Leaders enter the Oval Office uneasily, especially since the kicking administered to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The South African president came armed with gratitude, two golf stars, a billionaire and compliments on the decor – and kept a cool head and a straight face as he was ambushed. Mr Ramaphosa later described it as “robust engagement”. But, in truth, it was a clash of two worlds rather than an interaction.

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.

Not many at Old Trafford are suited to the manager’s trusty 3-4-2-1 but replacing them will cost hundreds of millions

Everything always seems clearer in the morning, and in the cold grey light of Thursday, the prognosis for Manchester United is bleak. While Tottenham face an awkward calculation – weighing up whether the delirium of a first European trophy in 41 years offsets their worst league season in terms of proportion of games lost – for Manchester United the equation is far starker.

Ruben Amorim will only play in one way. He is committed absolutely, uncompromisingly, irrevocably to the 3-4-2-1. Liverpool considered him, looked at their squad, realised the two things did not go together, appointed Arne Slot and won the league. Manchester United looked at their squad, flinched at the horror, and seem to have reasoned it was such a mess that it was impossible to find a manager whose philosophy would fit. There was a dissenting voice, Dan Ashworth, but at the court of Sir Jim Ratcliffe, reasoned doubts are as unwelcome as a free lunch.

Chelsea braced for City Ground cauldron, Rodri back on the scene and party vibes all round at Anfield

• Golden Boot: how the leading scorers stand

Bournemouth’s hopes of European football were vanquished after defeat to Manchester City on Tuesday but the Cherries, 11th on 53 points, could still achieve ninth spot and match their best finish in the Premier League (under Eddie Howe in 2016-17, although that was achieved with only 46 points). A home game against relegated Leicester looks to offer the perfect opportunity but the closing stretch has been tough for Andoni Iraola’s side, with the past 12 league games producing only two victories. Remarkably, a three-game league form table puts Leicester in fourth after home wins over Southampton and Ipswich either side of a 2-2 draw at Nottingham Forest. Perhaps this won’t be the walkover most are expecting, and there could be a wistful feeling in the air at the Vitality on Sunday afternoon. No one can deny it has been a strong season but what a party it might have been. With Dean Huijsen off to Real Madrid and Milos Kerkez linked heavily with the champions, Liverpool, how many of the goodbyes on the traditional end-of-season lap of honour will be permanent? David Tindall

Tourists are in England for the first time in 22 years and faced dual threats of hostile batting and cold weather

Of course the first morning of the summer was the worst morning of the summer. Test cricket, like a bank holiday picnic, is a reliable way to send the English sun running, and Zimbabwe’s first day of Test cricket in this country in 22 years started under thick ripples of ominous grey cloud, and in a freezing breeze. In the shop at the bottom of the Radcliffe Road Stand staff were sent running to the stock room to fetch up fresh boxes of beanie hats and hooded tops, as the crowd, caught short by the sudden dip in temperature after weeks of good weather, made an unexpected run on their supplies of winter clothing.

Zimbabwe won the toss, which was the last thing that went their way all day. “We’ll have a bowl,” said their captain, Craig Ervine, and it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Ben Stokes admitted he would have done the same thing himself given the conditions overhead.

• Briton’s production company working on ‘three concepts’

• Verstappen misses Monaco screening of F1: The Movie

Lewis Hamilton has revealed his film production company is working with screenwriters to produce three films in the future. The seven-time world champion was speaking after a private screening of the forthcoming film F1: The Movie, held on Wednesday night in Monte Carlo, on which he was a producer and an adviser.

“At the beginning you see all the different logos for the different production houses and my one comes out, which I worked on for so long, which is Dawn Apollo and it was just amazing to see that,” he said. “This has gone in very high. Couldn’t go any higher for my first movie but we will be producing more movies in the coming years. I’ve got three concepts that I’m writing. But I’m going to write with a writer.

• Leigh 12-26 Hull FC

• Hull score 26 unanswered points in the first half

John Cartwright has already enjoyed some wonderful moments as Hull FC coach and transformed the club’s fortunes in just three months in charge, but this win at Leigh could well turn out to be his finest victory yet.

There is no escaping the fact that after a wonderful start to 2025, Hull have endured a difficult few weeks. Injuries and a loss of form have resulted in them exiting the Challenge Cup at the hands of their biggest rivals and tumbling outside the playoff places as the midway point of the season approaches.

• Dutch dartist fails to make playoffs after 6-2 defeat

• Luke Littler sets points record by seeing off Humphries

Michael van Gerwen was knocked out of the Premier League after failing in his win-or-bust mission in Sheffield as a record-breaking Luke Littler won a sixth night. The seven-times Premier League champion has had a miserable campaign and came into the final weekly night having to win to stay in contention for the playoffs.

But Van Gerwen fell at the first hurdle, losing 6-2 to Nathan Aspinall, whose victory guaranteed him a top-four spot and completed the lineup for next week’s playoffs at the O2 in London.

Under Johann van Graan’s philosophy the West Country giants believe they are on the cusp of a return to the top

Trophies. They are like bloody buses. Or at least that is what Bath fans must be hoping. They wait 17 years for one, and along come …

We are about to find out how many. One has just been. The Premiership Cup pulled up in March to fairly inconsequential fanfare. But it looks as if another, the Challenge Cup, is waiting just a stop away, before we turn our attention to a third, the Premiership, timetabled for the middle of June – but you know what these bloody buses are like.

As she returns to the French Open, where she broke through in a run to the 2019 semis, the American explains why she stepped away from the sport

Professional tennis players are often led to believe that taking time off is fatal. In such an intense, competitive individual sport where greatness is determined though fine margins, the pressure to keep on moving is eternal. If you are not constantly training, competing and working on your craft, it is said, someone will always be there to take your place. Once you lose your spot, you may never get it back.

During the most difficult period of her career, Amanda Anisimova, a former teen prodigy, had to reckon with that myth. In the depths of her depression, when the intensity of the tennis circuit had become unbearable and her mind was screaming out for change, the 23-year-old opted for the solution of a complete break from the sport two years ago.

Suspect faces two counts of first-degree murder for shooting deaths of two Israeli embassy staffers

• Suspect charged with murder in shooting of Israeli embassy staffers

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, has accused unnamed European officials of “toxic antisemitic incitement” he blamed for a hostile climate in which the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington took place, Reuters reports.

Israel has faced a blizzard of criticism from Europe of late as it has intensified its military campaign in Gaza, where humanitarian groups have warned that an 11-week Israeli blockade on aid supplies has left the Palestinian territory on the brink of famine.

UN spokesperson says about 90 aid trucks have entered Gaza, but Palestinian Red Crescent says deliveries have not arrived

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Twenty-nine children and elderly people have died from starvation in Gaza in the last two days, the Palestinian Authority health minister has said , as Israeli strikes killed at least 52 people since dawn amid a renewed military offensive across the territory.

The warning came as food aid is expected to start reaching Palestinians in Gaza this week after Israel began allowing limited goods through after nearly three months after global pressure to lift the blockade and halt a newly expanded offensive.

Inland revenue targets eight outlets, union, 20 journalists and their families with supposed ‘random’ checks

Hong Kong authorities have targeted journalists and media outlets with what are supposed to be “random” tax audits, in a move the industry union says adds pressure to waning press freedoms.

The head of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, Selina Cheng, detailed what she said were “strange” and “unreasonable” accusations by Hong Kong’s inland revenue department. Requests or audits were made against the association, at least eight independent media outlets, and at least 20 journalists and their family members, including Cheng and her parents, she said at a press conference on Wednesday.

A 135-metre container vessel ran aground in Byneset, near Trondheim, narrowly missing a house

A Norwegian man has spoken of the “unreal” moment he woke up to discover that a 135-metre container ship had crashed into his front garden.

The cargo vessel, the NCL Salten, had run aground just before 5am on Thursday after entering the Trondheim fjord on its way to the western town of Orkanger.

Conservationists say part of bill allowing developers to avoid environmental laws by paying into nature fund should be ditched

Leading wildlife charities are calling on Labour to scrap a significant section of the planning bill that they say is a “licence to kill nature”, as new data reveals bats and newts are not the main reason planning is delayed in England.

The RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts, whose membership is more than 2 million, said Labour had broken its promises on nature. They called for part three of the bill, which allows developers to avoid environmental laws at a site by paying into a national nature recovery fund to pay for environmental improvements elsewhere, to be ditched.

Exclusive: expert raises concerns over quantities allowed to be discharged from nuclear fuel factory near Preston

The Environment Agency has allowed a firm to dump three tonnes of uranium into one of England’s most protected sites over the past nine years, it can be revealed, with experts sounding alarm over the potential environmental impact of these discharges.

Documents obtained by the Guardian and the Ends Report through freedom of information requests show that a nuclear fuel factory near Preston discharged large quantities of uranium – legally, under its environmental permit conditions – into the River Ribble between 2015 and 2024. The discharges peaked in 2015 when 703kg of uranium was discharged, according to the documents.

Scientists warn of profound impacts as sea temperatures rise by up to 4C above average for springtime

The sea off the coast of the UK and Ireland is experiencing an unprecedented marine heatwave with temperatures increasing by as much as 4C above average for the spring in some areas.

Marine biologists say the intensity and unprecedented nature of the rise in water temperatures off the coasts of Devon, Cornwall and the west coast of Ireland are very concerning. As human-induced climate breakdown continues to raise global temperatures, the frequency of marine heatwaves is increasing.

Until now, little was known about foraging flights of critically endangered southern bent-wing bats, which roost in caves

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A tiny, critically endangered bat – roughly the size of a matchbox – can fly about 150km in a single night, new research has found.

Southern bent-wing bats roost in caves in south-west Victoria and south-east South Australia. They fly out at night in search of food, eating about half their body weight in insects.

A cooperative in Pune, India, is diverting waste from the landfill while also alleviating poverty

Three decades ago, Rajabai Sawant used to pick and sort waste on the streets of Pune with a sack on her back. The plastic she collected from a public waste site would be sold for some money that saved her children from begging.

Today, dressed in a dark green jacket monogrammed with the acronym Swach (solid waste collection and handling) over a colourful sari, the 53-year-old is one among an organised group of waste collectors and climate educators who teach residents in urban Pune how to segregate and manage waste, based on a PPPP – a pro-poor private public partnership.

This is an abridged version of a piece originally published by Mongabay.

Whoever leaked deputy PM’s memo to the Telegraph, some believe it will have helped her leadership chances

What is Angela Rayner up to? To every Labour MP reading the leaked memo in the Daily Telegraph setting out the deputy prime minister’s alternative tax-raising measures, it felt like firing the starting gun on a race to succeed Keir Starmer as leader.

It has infuriated Starmer loyalists because of long memories of the breakdown in relations after Labour lost the Hartlepool byelection just a year into Starmer’s leadership, when he considered quitting and allies of Rayner encouraged her to stand against him. Starmer then attempted to demote her, leading to a fierce standoff and Rayner emerging with a clutch of new job titles.

Research also shows deprived areas have up to 25 times as many bookmakers and pawnbrokers as affluent high streets

The number of vape shops on high streets across England has increased by almost 1,200% over the past decade, while deprived areas have up to 25 times as many bookmakers and pawnbrokers as affluent ones, according to research.

In 2014, only 33.8% of 317 local authorities in England had a vape shop, rising to 97.2% in 2024. Similarly, in 2014 less than 1% of local authorities in England had 10 or more vape shops, rising to 28% in 2024.

Pop star recognised for sharp yet candid songcraft on Brat, but loses best album category to Berwyn at awards honouring songwriting excellence

Charli xcx continues her victory lap after the success of her zeitgeist-grabbing 2024 album Brat, winning songwriter of the year at the Ivor Novello awards, which honour the best in British and Irish songwriting and screen composition.

Brat marked a career high for the British pop artist, topping the UK charts and reaching No 3 in the US, and earning huge praise for Charli’s sardonic yet soul-baring lyrics. She won five Brit awards earlier this year, the second-highest number of wins in one night in the awards’ history, as well as three Grammys.

St Michael’s hospital was reopened at 7pm after the fire was extinguished and its cause will be investigated

Firefighters have been called to a maternity hospital in Bristol after a blaze broke out.

Emergency services were called to the scene at St Michael’s hospital at about 4.30pm on Thursday.

Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem posts copy of department’s letter to university on X

• US politics live – latest updates

The Trump administration has said it is halting Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students and has ordered existing international students at the university to transfer or lose their legal status.

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration notified Harvard about its decision following ongoing correspondence regarding the “legality of a sprawling records request”, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Sam Altman and Jony Ive say mystery product created by their partnership will be the coolest thing ever

Everything over the last 30 years, according to Sir Jony Ive, has led to this moment: a partnership between the iPhone designer and the developer of ChatGPT.

Ive has sold his hardware startup, io, to OpenAI and will take on creative and design leadership across the merged businesses. “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place, to this moment,” he says in a video announcing the $6.4bn (£4.8bn) deal.

Media Matters faces government inquiry into whether it helped advertisers coordinate to pull ad dollars from X

The US Federal Trade Commission has demanded documents from Media Matters about possible coordination with other media watchdogs accused by Elon Musk of helping orchestrate advertiser boycotts of X, according to a document seen by Reuters on Thursday.

The civil investigative demand seen by Reuters seeks information about Media Matters’ communications with other groups that evaluate misinformation and hate speech in news and social media, including a World Federation of Advertisers initiative called Global Alliance for Responsible Media. X has ongoing lawsuits against both organizations.

Heavy combat unit of 4,800 soldiers and 200 civilian staff inaugurated in Lithuania on Nato’s eastern flank

The German chancellor has visited Lithuania to mark Berlin’s first permanent foreign troop deployment since the second world war, as he called on allies to dramatically expand their efforts to bolster European defences against a hostile Russia.

As a crowd waved Lithuanian, German and Ukrainian flags, Friedrich Merz and his defence minister, Boris Pistorius, attended a ceremony launching the official formation of an armoured brigade aimed at protecting Nato’s eastern flank.

It might look like a platform for the films ‘produced in foreign lands’ that Donald Trump despises. But a surprising number of pictures at this year’s festival side with the locally rooted over cosmopolitan elites

If Donald Trump really wants to save Hollywood, maybe he needs to venture outside his comfort zone and watch more European art house cinema.

The Cannes film festival, which closes on Saturday, is in many ways the very definition of the “globalism” that the American president’s Maga movement despises. Walk past the queues snaking alongside the Palais des Festivals and you hear languages and accents from every corner of the globe. The Marché du Film, where industry professionals strike their deals, is brimming with smart people from all over the world beckoning US producers with irresistible tax incentives – resulting in the kind of movies “produced in foreign lands” that the US president earlier this month proposed punishing with 100% tariffs. At the opening gala, Cannes gave Trump arch-enemy Robert De Niro a platform to rally the world of cinema against the US president, “without violence, but with great passion and determination”.

As The Final Reckoning hits cinemas, Guardian writers pick their favourites of the action-packed series

Mission: Impossible’s slick and sensuous surface bears no trace of the drama behind the scenes making it. During production, the screenwriters of Jurassic Park (David Koepp) and Chinatown (Robert Towne) sent in duelling script pages for director Brian De Palma and producer Tom Cruise to wrestle over. The magnificent outcome is an intense tango between the modern blockbuster and a classic film noir, circling each other warily, and beautifully, like no Mission: Impossible that would follow. De Palma’s original is a sexy wrong-man thriller, a Hitchcockian affair that comes disguised as an action-heavy corporate product (or maybe the mask is worn the other way around?). In it, Cruise’s coiled IMF agent, framed for the murder of his entire team and surrounded by slippery allies, is constantly trying to play it cool through the plot’s knotty parlor games, all while feeling the noose tightening around him. If Cruise’s career up to this point was all about often leaving his relaxed boyish middle-American charm on the surface, Mission: Impossible pushed him to try on layers – not just the latex ones – while also pulling off those incredible high-wire stunts, which would only escalate but never improve on the hair-raising tension the first time out. Radheyan Simonpillai

Cannes film festival
Saeed Roustaee’s new film takes aim at a slippery, entitled male who thinks he can lord it over a widow he plans to marry

A strange, sad, sombre movie from Iranian director Saeed Roustaee whose last entry at Cannes was the family drama Leila’s Brothers in 2022. This is a story about the randomness of life in the big city, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV soap feel to its succession of escalating crises. Like Leila’s Brothers, it is about the entitlement of Iran’s menfolk, and how a man – however shiftless, casual and low-status – can somehow pull rank on a woman in the marriage market.

Payman Maadi (from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) plays Hamid, an ambulance driver in his late 40s with a certain roguish ladies-man charm whose unmarried status raises eyebrows among some of his acquaintances, but who is now engaged to Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar). She is a smart, hardworking hospital nurse who is widowed and lives with her sister Mehri (Soha Niasti) and mum (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaee), and her two kids. Teen son Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) is always in trouble at school and has a breezy way of sweet-talking his mother into forgiving him and younger sister Neda (Arshida Dorostkar).

Cannes film festival
Nadav Lapid’s brilliant, showy set-pieces present a caricature of decadence and heartlessness in a society haunted by 7 October

Nadav Lapid’s Yes is a fierce, stylised, confrontational caricature-satire that invites a comparison with George Grosz, dialled up to 11 in its sexualised choreography and almost radioactive with political pain. With icy provocation, Israel’s ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of 7 October.

It is inspired by the activist group Civic Front, which after 7 October released a new version of Haim Gouri’s classic song Hareut, or Fellowship, with jarring new lyrics calling for wholesale extermination in Gaza. A fictional version of this song features here, with lyrics about attacking the bearers of the swastika (as in the original) but also presents its audience with slick equivalence: the “Nazi” gotcha-comparison is levelled at Israel in a way that it isn’t at other countries. There is an odious Russian fintech bro here, commissioning jingoistic, nationalistic music; the suggested equivalence between Putin and Israel is presented without subtlety, although subtlety is maybe beside the point. One fourth-wall breaking scene has one man list the people who are supposedly anti-Israel: the BBC, CNN, the New York Times – and then turn furiously and directly to the camera: “… and you too are anti-Israel!”

This endlessly entertaining study in class and family is a witty, star-packed treat that zips through five tight episodes. Here’s hoping for a second season

Are you ready for some fun? Don’t you deserve it? I think we all do – life’s awful – so I gladly present to you Sirens, which is The White Lotus meets all the good series that Nicole Kidman has been in, with just a dash of Ryan Murphy-esque camp to make it all go with an especially zingy swing! Welcome!

It is a tale of two sisters and a superrich villain whose cult-like lifestyle threatens to come between them. Older sister Devon (Meghann Fahy – yes, of White Lotus fame, taking a much meatier part this time and running with it) is a semi-functioning alcoholic who is caring for their increasingly difficult father while working a minimum wage job at the local falafel joint and banging her married boss on the side. When she sends little sister Simone (House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcock and astonishing child actor in Tim Minchin’s heartbreaking comedy Upright) a plea for help when their father is diagnosed with dementia, Simone responds by sending an edible arrangement (or fancy fruit basket, if you’re British). Devon duly sets off on the long journey to her sister’s new place of employ with the clear aim of ramming said fruit arrangement up her arse and asking questions later.

(Duophonic UHF Disks/Warp)
Motorik grooves, Marxist critique and vintage synths – in their first album since 2010, Lætitia Sadier et al pick up where they left off yet sound more timely than ever

The first sound you hear on Stereolab’s first new studio album in 15 years is a burst of arpeggiated synth tones. It sounds not unlike the once futuristic ident of a long-defunct TV channel. The first words you hear Lætita Sadier and backing vocalist Marie Merlet sing – their voices winding around each other in a sweet-but-sad melody, over the tight, mid-tempo rhythm of Aerial Troubles – are “the numbing is not working any more / An unfillable hole, an insatiable state of consumption (systemic) / assigned trajectory (extortion).”

To which, of course, the seasoned Stereolab fan might break into a contented smile of recognition and sigh “mais naturellement”. A retro-futurist aesthetic; tight, hypnotic grooves derived from the motorik krautrock of Neu!; vintage synthesiser tones and vocals that entwine around each other; lyrics that take a dim Marxist/situationist-influenced view of modern life: this is very much what Stereolab spent the 90s and early 00s dealing in, during a career in which they occupied their own space slightly apart from everything else.

Facing homelessness and incurable illness, a couple sets out on a 630-mile hike in this lyrical memoir read by the author

A few days after Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, had their Welsh farm repossessed owing to a failed investment, Moth learned he had a rare and incurable neurodegenerative condition. With their world upended and nowhere to live, the couple decided there was only one course of action: to walk.

Their plan was to follow the South West Coast Path, a hiking trail taking them from Minehead in Somerset, along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, around Land’s End and Lizard Point, then back along Cornwall’s south coast, south Devon and ending in Poole in Dorset. The 630-mile walk, taking in secluded beaches and coves, wild moorland and quiet hamlets and coastal towns, is equivalent to climbing Mount Everest four times over. Armed with the essentials – clothes, a tent, sleeping bags, endless packets of dried noodles – they would be “sleeping wild, living wild, working our way through every painful action that had brought us here, to this moment”.

Collegium Novum Zürich/Ensemble Contrechamps/Michael Wendeberg
(Bastille Musique)
In the composer’s centenary year, this disc showcases two of his most substantial works

Almost all the major works from the second half of Pierre Boulez’s composing career developed in the same way: their starting point is a small-scale ensemble or solo piece that served as the kernel for the much expanded and elaborated later score. That was the process that led to the final versions of works such as Mémoriale, Anthèmes and …explosante-fixe…, and to the pair of substantial pieces that are played with fabulous precision and incisiveness on this disc.

Éclat/Multiples, completed in 1981, began life in 1965 as Éclat, a kit-like eight-minute exploration of the sound world Boulez had first created for the central movements of his masterpiece Pli selon Pli, and which he then expanded to a work for 25 instruments. For Sur Incises, which grew by stages through the mid 1990s, the starting point was a solo-piano piece, Incises, while the final work uses trios of pianos, harps and percussionists to create a seductive world of mysterious trills and decaying resonances and sudden outbursts of frantic activity. It’s clear from the sketches for Éclat/Multiples that Boulez intended to extend it beyond the 28-minute version that is played today, and this disc includes an extra four minutes of music never recorded before; there may be yet more to come in the future, but in the meantime these are fine accounts of two of Boulez’s most significant works.

Yunchan Lim/Fort Worth SO/Alsop
(Decca)
The prodigious South Korean talent won 2022’s Van Cliburn piano competition with this performance; his version deserves a place alongside Argerich and Rachmaninov himself

As soon as the 2022 Van Cliburn piano competition in Fort Worth, Texas, was over, news travelled across the Atlantic that the latest winner was very special indeed. Over the following year or so, Yunchan Lim’s recitals in Europe and a first disc for Decca (of the Chopin Études), together with recordings that documented his performances in the competition, of Liszt’s Transcendental Études in his semi-final recital, and Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto in the final, confirmed that the reports had been no exaggeration: he is the real thing, a once-in-a-generation talent. Now Decca has reissued the Fort Worth concerto performance, but with the sound significantly cleaned up and rebalanced, and the wonder of Lim’s playing if anything enhanced. What is immediately striking is the sheer confidence and poise of everything he does, and the overriding sense that there is never any doubt about the direction in which this majestic concerto should be taken; it’s hard to believe that this is the performance of an 18-year-old.

Needless to say, every technical challenge in the keyboard writing seems to be effortlessly negotiated, yet the brilliance is never an end in itself; it is always part of a bigger picture, without ever diminishing the thrill of such astonishing command, so that the way the unadorned melodic lines of the slow movement are phrased becomes just as telling as the way in which the densest flurries of notes are negotiated. Just perhaps in the finale, when Lim can seem too headstrong for his own good, does his performance betray his age; otherwise it deserves a place alongside the finest versions of this concerto on disc, from those by Rachmaninov himself and Vladimir Horowitz to Martha Argerich and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Despite Decca’s remastering, though, the sound is by no means perfect; some orchestral detail remains too distant, and the string sound is sometimes scrawny and undernourished. Normally such shortcomings might preclude a five-star recommendation, but Lim’s playing is so astonishing it’s almost irrelevant.

Hope is no casual platitude in this inspiring collection of essays; it’s the realistic mindset with which to approach existential challenges

According to Rebecca Solnit, a lot of us are suffering from something called moral injury. She describes this as the “deep sense of wrongness” that can infiltrate our lives when we realise we are complicit in something seriously bad.

The first time I experienced this in relation to climate change, I was changing my baby’s nappy soon after one of the worst Australian wildfire seasons on record in 2020. The nappy featured a smiling cartoon koala on the front. I immediately recalled the scene of a singed, parched koala being fed water from a plastic bottle by a human as it fled the inferno. A disposable nappy takes up to 500 years to decompose. I felt disgust and despair at the degree of consumption, waste and exploitation that even a modest lifestyle in a high-income country seems to entail.

The novelist’s meditation on grief, memory and radical acceptance contains both horror and comfort

In this quietly devastating account of life after the death by suicide of both of her sons, Yiyun Li refuses to use “mourning” or “grieving” because they cannot adequately contain the magnitude of her experience. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” she writes, and words can only “fall short”.

She begins by laying out the facts. And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering: Vincent died in 2017, aged 16. James died in 2024, aged 19. Vincent, we learn, loved baking and knitting, and did not live long enough to graduate high school. James, a brilliant linguist studying at Princeton, where Li teaches creative writing, took his last Japanese class on a Friday. “Facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to,” she writes. Things in Nature Merely Grow is by necessity profoundly sad, but in the act of sharing details of the “abyss” she now inhabits, Li has created something both inclusive and humane.

Alternate political realities are compellingly explored in this sinister vision of a children’s home – but the echoes of Ishiguro are just too strong

In 2016 Catherine Chidgey published her fourth novel, The Wish Child, a child’s-eye view of Nazi Germany. Since then the much-garlanded New Zealander has contrived to be not only conspicuously prolific but also intriguingly unpredictable. Though she returned to wartime Germany in her Women’s prize-longlisted Holocaust novel, Remote Sympathy, her work has ranged from the coming-of-age psychological thriller Pet to The Beat of the Pendulum, a “found” novel that drew on everything from conversations and social media posts to news bulletins and even satnav instructions to create a picture of one woman’s life over a year. The Axeman’s Carnival, published in the UK last year, was partly narrated by a magpie. Like The Wish Child it won the Acorn prize for fiction, making Chidgey the only writer to win New Zealand’s most prestigious prize twice.

The Book of Guilt appears to mark another departure. Chidgey describes her ninth novel as her “first foray into dystopian fiction” and, while the book purports to be set in England in 1979 with a female prime minister newly ensconced in Downing Street, it is not the country we know. In Chidgey’s alternate universe, the second world war ended not in 1945 with allied victory, but in 1943 when the assassination of Hitler by German conspirators led to a swiftly negotiated peace treaty. Subsequent collaboration across Europe has ensured that progress in biological and medical science, already significantly advanced, has accelerated, fuelled by shared research that includes the grotesque experiments carried out on prisoners in Nazi death camps.

Translocating the Scottish play to Iran with help from the RSC, iNK Stories’ version focuses on a Lady Macbeth contending with an oppressive surveillance state

The Cannes film festival isn’t typically associated with video games, but this year it’s playing host to an unusual collaboration. Lili is a co-production between the New York-based game studio iNK Stories (creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, about a photojournalist in Iran) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it’s been turning heads with its eye-catching translocation of Macbeth to modern-day Iran.

“It’s been such an incredible coup to have it as the first video game experience at Cannes,” says iNK Stories co-founder Vassiliki Khonsari. “People have gone in saying, I’m not familiar playing games, so I may just try it out for five minutes. […] But then once they’re in, there is this growing sense of empowerment that people from the film world are feeling.”

For years, the Switch has been ​a companion through life’s changes​, gaming milestones​ and a lifeline to fun in chaotic times

The lifespan of a games console has extended a lot since I was a child. In the 1990s, this kind of technology would be out of date after just a couple of years. There would be some tantalising new machine out before you knew it, everybody competing to be on the cutting edge: the Game Boy and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1989 were followed by the Game Gear in 1990 and the Super NES in 1991. Five years was a long life for a gaming machine.

Now, it’s more like 10. The Nintendo Switch 2 will be released in a couple of weeks, more than eight years since I first picked an original Switch up off its dock and marvelled at the instant transition to portable play. Games consoles often feel like they mark off particular eras in my life: the Nintendo 64 was the defining console of my childhood, the PlayStation 2 of my adolescence, and the Xbox 360 of the first years of my career, the first console launch I ever covered as a (ridiculously young) journalist. The Nintendo Switch came along just a few months after my first child was born, and for me it has become the games machine of that era of harried early parenthood.

PC, Xbox, PS5 (version played); Studio Far Out Games/Konami Digital Entertainment
This 1950s-set game offers a gorgeous, fully destroyable map but makes baffling decisions on how to use it

Deliver at All Costs casts you as a delivery driver in the late 1950s, and it looks fantastic in motion. Almost everything on the map can be destroyed, and there is immediate fun to be had from causing merry mayhem with your truck, clattering through deckchairs on the beach or driving straight through the middle of a diner and watching it collapse spectacularly behind you. But there is a void at the heart of this game where the core hook should have been.

We get a glimpse of its potential during a mission that sees you racing to catch up with a rival’s delivery truck before it can reach its destination. The aim is to manoeuvre alongside, and hold down a button so the crane on the back of your own truck can sneakily lift the package off their vehicle and on to yours. All the while, rival trucks are attempting to ram you off the road, and after you grab the package, you then have to deliver it while fending off the attentions of these other drivers. It leads to some wonderfully comic scenes in which a hotel owner thanks you profusely for a consignment while standing in front of the ruins of his newly destroyed establishment: a casualty of the violent act of delivery.

Strictly Limited/Giants Software; Mega Drive
It may be seem horrendously old-fashioned, but the seemingly dull repetition of working your wheat fields has a nostalgic pull like a combine harvester

When I got my first job in games journalism 30 years ago, I arrived just too late to review games for my favourite ever console: the Sega Mega Drive. Although a few titles were still being released for the machine in 1995, the games magazine world had moved on and all anyone wanted to read about were the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. It was a bitter blow.

Fast-forward to 2025 and a resurgent interest in producing new games for vintage home computers and consoles has led to Farming Simulator: 16bit Edition – a Mega Drive instalment in the hugely successful agricultural sim series. The passion project of Renzo Thönen, lead level designer and co-owner of Farming Simulation studio Giants Software, the game has been written using an open-source Mega Drive development kit, and manufactured in a limited run of genuine Mega Drive cartridges. Slotting this brand new release into the cart of my dad’s ancient Mega Drive II console felt ridiculously moving and I thought the game could only be a letdown after that. But I was wrong.

Shakespeare’s Globe, London
Director Ola Ince brings absurdist comedy to Arthur Miller’s classic drama of Salem witch-hunting

There is never a time when Arthur Miller’s play about a world turned upside down by collective hysteria and scapegoating does not bear some resonance. But the present moment – of dangerously disputed truths and lies – is an especially pertinent moment to revisit Miller’s analogy between accusations of witchcraft and McCarthyist terror.

This production is faithful to the original 17th-century setting, amid the heat and panic of the Salem witch trials. There is period dress: bonnets for women, pointed hats for men and ribbons for the judges, along with a range of broad British accents for these original American pilgrims. But director Ola Ince brings a quietly radical touch in the form of humour – more absurdist than comic, with accusations of flying girls and demon possession taking on preposterous tones. The men, mostly the judges of the last two acts, appear bumbling, like yokels arguing over the fate of their chattel at a country fair. Deputy Governor Danforth (Gareth Snook) is particularly clownish, though no less awful for it.

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London
Before he made a bigger splash, David Hockney was an angry, tempestuous student mashing together the styles of the big artists of his time

Years before he was a modern art megastar, long before the cool pop perfection that would make him one of the most popular painters of the past century, David Hockney was a student. Some of his early works from this period have been brought together at a small but perfectly formed exhibition, curated by Louis Kasmin, grandson of John Kasmin, the dealer who first spotted Hockney.

After leaving the Bradford School of Art, Hockney showed up at the RCA in 1959 ready to kick the art world’s doors in. But this is not the Hockney the world knows now. There is no simplicity, no calm. There are no cool, flat planes of bright colour. Rather, young Hockney was a frantic, angry, tempestuous thing.

From vibrating stages and a car park dance floor to metal pipes tuned to the frequency of ‘love’, the artists behind a new exhibition say their work may even change your body on a cellular level

‘You know, 528Hz is supposed to be the love frequency,” says artist Evan Ifekoya, striking a metal wah-wah pipe tuned to exactly that pitch, a fraction above the C, one octave higher than middle C. “It’s supposed to be able to transform the body on a cellular level. And, OK, how can you really prove that?” they smile. “But I can say, at least for myself, it has opened up a new level of awareness and self-compassion over the years.”

We know music is powerful: we turn to songs to feel comforted, to boost our energy, to appreciate beauty and so much more. But what about the frequencies; the actual soundwaves vibrating the air, our eardrums and our bodies – how do they affect us? From promoting deep relaxation to the use of noise as a weapon, there is a wide range of claims, and evidence, for the impact of sound. It moves us emotionally and literally, a theme that’s explored in a new exhibition at the Barbican in London called Feel the Sound. “The idea that the world is made up of vibrations and frequencies is something we don’t necessarily think about a lot of the time,” says Luke Kemp, head of creative programming at Barbican Immersive. “The big idea is how sound is more than an audio experience. We can think of our whole body as a listening device,” he says.

Take Jan St Werner’s Vibraceptional Plate installation, which visitors can stand on and then explore the resonance of their own body, and a film by deaf percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie discussing the rhythms inside us and how she experiences sound. There’s a holographic choral experience, a playground of multisensory musical instruments, and for the finale, an installation in the Barbican’s car park featuring souped-up cars with big sound systems; part sculpture, part dancefloor.

Jermyn Street theatre, London
Ibrahima Balde’s desperate journey to find his brother should make for essential theatre, but this production lacks the emotional intensity of the book

Ibrahima Balde’s life story is just extraordinary on the page. Brought to life in a bestselling memoir written with Basque poet Amets Arzallus Antia, it follows his trek from Guinea, west Africa, as a teenager, across the Sahara and Mediterranean to Europe as he goes in desperate search of his runaway younger brother.

A story about the horrors of migration, it has so many gut-punch moments alongside flashes of levity that it should make for dramatic viewing on stage. Balde undergoes hunger, human trafficking, torture and ransom as well as a terrifying ocean crossing. His voice is clear, distinctive and full of natural poetry. So why does this production, adapted by Timberlake Wertenbaker, who translated the book from its original Basque, feel so lifeless?

Cannes film festival
A love story of two folk song aficionados in the early days of recorded music is told with tiresomely mournful awe at its own sadness

Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound has admirers in Cannes; but I couldn’t help finding it an anaemic, laborious, achingly tasteful film, originally a short story by Ben Shattuck which has become a quasi-Brokeback Mountain film whose tone is one of persistent mournful awe at its own sadness.

Hermanus has made great movies in the past including Beauty and Living but this is a film that is almost petrified by its own upmarket values, paralysed under the varnish of classiness.

Before Blur became superstars, drummer Dave Rowntree was busy photographing them – on the tube, in Japanese taxis … and even on a big dipper

The actor reads a poem in memory of his father: "I like to think of the younger, happier man." The film is part of a series to mark Celebration Day 2025 – a new annual moment, held on the last bank holiday Monday of May, to honour and celebrate those who have shaped our lives but are no longer with us. Directed by Oliver Parker at Abbey Road Studios, curated by Allie Esiri and published exclusively by the Guardian. On Celebration Day, join in by sharing your memories using #ShareYourStar

• ‘He lived inside poetry’: Toby Jones and Helena Bonham Carter perform poems in memory of lost loved ones

• Helena Bonham Carter performs Don’t Let That Horse by Lawrence Ferlinghetti – video

She hid in the toilets during the Trainspotting shoot – yet became a screen sensation. As the star plays a police therapist in new Netflix thriller Dept Q, she explains why today’s young female actors leave her in awe

One of the good things about playing a therapist, says Kelly Macdonald with a laugh, is that you get to sit down a lot. There’s a fun scene in the new Netflix thriller Dept. Q in which her character, Dr Rachel Irving, weary of her client DCI Carl Morck, plants herself down behind her desk to eat her packed lunch in front of him. Morck may be the kind of troubled detective we’re used to seeing in police dramas, but Irving isn’t a typical therapist. She’s blunt, antagonistic even. It’s a “shitty” job working with police officers, she tells him. Another time she describes him as “doolally”, which in my experience is not something a typical therapist would say; Macdonald, who has had therapy, “but not regularly”, may agree.

In the show – adapted from novels by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen and brought to the screen by Scott Frank, who was also behind the Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit – Morck is made to see Irving after he survives a shooting. Brilliant but sidelined, Morck is tasked with reviewing cold cases, and moved to a shabby basement office that becomes known as Department Q. The first case for his small crew of misfit detectives is the disappearance of a lawyer four years earlier, who everyone thinks is probably dead. The truth, it soon emerges, is absolutely terrifying.

Marnie has the tattoos all planned out, but Kady is having second thoughts. You decide who’s needling whom

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

We’ve been speaking about it for ages. She’s just getting cold feet, but I know she won’t regret it

What if I grow to hate it or want it removed? We don’t need matching tattoos to show we’re best friends

Smooth, brighten and rejuvenate your undereyes with these hard-working buys for every budget

• The best mascaras for longer, fuller and fluttery lashes

‘The eyes are the window to the soul,” as the saying goes. Yet as well as communicating what we’re thinking and feeling, they can also reveal clues about our age, lifestyle and health – presented as some of the most common eye concerns, including puffiness, dark circles, fine lines and wrinkles.

The good news is that today’s eye cream and serum formulations can go a long way to address those issues when used as part of a daily skincare routine. Many products do more than simply hydrate the area around the eyes; next-generation formulas work harder and smarter, combining science-backed ingredients with skincare tech.

Best eye cream overall:
Medik8 Crystal Retinal Ceramide Eye
_{£42 at Cult Beauty}

Best budget eye cream:
The Inkey List Caffeine eye cream
_{£7.95 at Sephora}

Best eye serum for puffiness:
Charlotte Tilbury Cryo-Recovery eye serum
_{£47 at Sephora}

Best eye cream for dark circles:
Tatcha The Brightening eye cream
_{£64 at Space NK}

Best eye cream for fine lines:
SkinCeuticals AGE Advanced Eye
_{£105 at Look Fantastic}

Getting little ones outside can be an uphill struggle – here are the gadgets, gear and games real parents rely on to make it easier

• 55 screen-free activities, from birdwatching to colouring books

Marathons? Pfft, easy. If you really want to test your mental and physical endurance, try taking a reluctant toddler up a hill. I was ready to yield to circumstance after our first few attempts at a family walk. Prepared to accept that my active, outdoorsy days were behind me and go full cartoon-dad mode, sprawled across the sofa, surrounded by fried potato snacks. Thankfully, I’ve since learned that there are various tools, gadgets, gizmos and tricks designed to help me avoid this fate.

Getting a proper backpack-style carrier changed everything for us (see below). And having spoken to lots of parents of young children, I’ve heard plenty of similar tales involving other miracle buys. Below are a few of the best.

This week: everything I learned testing dating apps; garden furniture for sunny days; and the best suitcases, tested

• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

When the Filter asked me to test and rate six dating apps, it was a challenge I undertook without flinching. I’m something of an expert in this field: for close to a decade now, I’ve written and talked about my love life on public platforms. The reactions have always been mixed: friends roll their eyes, family members express quiet concern, and the men I date are either afraid of being written about or desperate to make it into my copy – one proudly tells people at parties that an article I wrote was about him (it wasn’t).

It was familiar territory, yes, but one I hoped might also drive me out of my Hinge-shaped comfort zone and force me to try something different. Maybe I’d discover a new favourite app. Or become overwhelmed by attractive, kind and emotionally available men capable of ameliorating my raging hetero-pessimism. At the very least, I’d get some entertaining anecdotes.

Online dating advice: five ways to stay safe, according to the experts

The best hot brushes for a salon finish at home, tried and tested by our expert

Ikea Valevåg mattress review: a brilliant budget buy or too cheap for comfort?

The best men’s walking boots for every type of hiking adventure, tested

Warm weather essentials: 42 ways to make the most of the sunshine

The best suitcases for your next holiday: eight expert picks, rigorously tested

‘The flavour, the texture, everything is perfect’: José Pizarro tests supermarket tinned sardines

Most suitcases look hardwearing, but which ones actually are? We dropped bestselling luggage brands from a ladder to find out …

• 13 travel packing hacks to save you space and money

A suitcase is like the portrait in the traveller’s attic, accumulating more than its fair share of knocks and scrapes while we refresh ourselves on the road. We trundle them over cobbles, see them tumble from luggage racks on the train – and if we choose to fly, there’s a fair chance they’ll be mishandled before we reunite at the carousel.

For our testing, we pushed eight suitcases to the limit by dropping them on to a hard surface, as if they’d been fumbled by a baggage handler. Air travel is especially tough on suitcases, so you might get away with choosing a less resilient case if you make the climate-conscious choice to travel by rail or sea.

Best suitcase overall:
Away The Large
_{£300 at Away}

Best budget suitcase:
Tripp Holiday 8
_{£60 at Amazon}

Best suitcase for shorter breaks:
July Checked
_{From £220 at July}

Best small suitcase:
Horizn Studios H6 Pro
_{£470 at Horizn Studios}

Best for a luxurious look:
Carl Friedrik The Trunk
_{£595 at Carl Fredrik}

Best wheeled backpack:
Eagle Creek Cargo Hauler duffel
_{£210 at Rohan}

Thinking about moderating your drinking? Sip smarter with our pick of the best mid-strength drinks, from crisp wines to award-winning pilsners (and even vodka)

• I tried 60 low- and no-alcohol drinks: here are my favourite beers, wines and spirits

These days, there are plenty of brilliant low- and no-alcohol options for when you want to stay off the sauce. But what if you’re wanting to enjoy a “real” drink – just minus the negative effects? Step up to the stage, mid-strength drinks.

For the uninitiated, mid-strength beers, wines and spirits occupy the space between the (very) low and no sector – which covers 0-1.2% alcohol by volume (ABV) drinks, whatever the beverage – and your standard alcoholic options. Expect to see beers and ciders around the 2-3% mark, wines at 6-9% and spirits at 15-20%, but there are variations on this, particularly with wine.

Ten years of hard graft have come to this triumphant moment: the puff pastry cream cake per eccellenza

Every now and then, a local restaurant called La Torricella has millefoglie among its regular offerings of lemon sorbet, tiramisu, pineapple-cut-into-a-fan, and pine nut or vanilla gelato with strawberries. Customers are very likely to have spotted the millefoglie long before seeing it typed up on the paper menu, though, because it will be sitting near the front door, either on the dessert trolley or zinc bar.

Named because the concertina puff of the pastry looks like a thousand (mille) leaves (foglie), La Torricella prepares a millefoglie that is more or less the size of a vinyl LP, its three rings of pastry sandwiched with a mixture of custard and whipped cream, otherwise known as diplomat cream. The layers of preparation make it a special-occasion dessert – in fact, La Torricella makes millefoglie only when a large enough group requests one. The rest of the room, however, then benefits from someone else’s celebration, because the kitchen might as well make two while they’re at it. Or at least I think that’s how it works.

Use up those final scrapings to make goma dare, a versatile sesame dipping sauce that adds a kick of flavour to salads and soups

A jar of goma dare is a new favourite fixture in my fridge door. This Japanese-style condiment, dipping sauce and dressing made from ground sesame seeds is powerful in flavour, sweet, sour and creamy all at the same time, while the addition of grated ginger and/or garlic makes it wonderfully piquant, too. It’s also very moreish and hugely versatile, meaning you can serve it with everything from a traditional shabu shabu hot pot to cold noodles, tofu, aubergine and slaw; in fact, it’s so tasty I have to stop myself from eating it straight from the jar. My recipe uses the leftover tahini in the bottom of a jar and comes together in the jar itself, so minimising both waste and washing-up. Simply add all the ingredients, scrape down the sides and shake (you can apply a similar method to the ends of a peanut butter jar, too, for a nutty, satay-style twist).

Ki Soon-do’s soy sauce has been served to Donald Trump and gained Unesco heritage protection. It is recognition that is 370 years in the making

In the lush foothills of Damyang county, South Jeolla province, rows of earthenware jars stand under the Korean sky. Inside each clay vessel, a quiet transformation is taking place, one that has been occurring on this land for centuries.

This is the domain of Ki Soon-do, South Korea’s sole grand master of traditional aged soy sauce, where patience isn’t just a virtue but the essential ingredient in her craft.

The medication he’s on reduces his libido and means he can’t take erectile dysfunction products. But I’m a very sensual person – what can I do?

I started dating someone I really like about two months ago. We click on all levels and he adores me, but he has some complicated circumstances, which means we have no sex life. He has anxiety and takes SSRIs, which reduce his libido. He also takes blood thinners for a coronary issue, which I know precludes the use of erectile dysfunction products. He has also said that he never really felt a lot of lovingness from his previous partners. He says he’s attracted to me and likes my body. He kisses me to show his interest and attraction but not in a heavy making-out way.

I am a very sensual person. My former partner and I had the best sex I’ve ever had in my life – however, he could be very distant at times and had poor emotional intelligence and communication with me (unlike my current partner). I have never had this issue with anyone else, so although I understand his vulnerability, I’m unsure what else to do other than wait. For now, I am willing to be patient.

Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.

Iris likes to have sex often, but Eva found that the pressures of work had put her off. Now, they’re both in a good place and having more and better sex
How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

Things came to a point when I was considering whether I wanted our relationship to continue if it was sexless

We assumed we’d be able to find accommodation during Vancouver’s 1986 World Expo, and we were wrong

• Read more in the Kindness of strangers series

I was visiting the US as a 23-year-old with my mother and her sister. On a whim, the three of us decided to road trip across the border to Vancouver to catch the tail end of the city’s 1986 World Expo. We assumed we’d be able to find accommodation when we got there – and we were wrong.

With no mobile phones or Google to guide us, we traipsed from one hotel to the next, before the inefficiency of such a tactic dawned on us and we headed for Vancouver’s visitor centre. I remember the centre being busy, packed with other panicked accommodation hunters, and close to shutting up shop for the day. But there was a lovely woman who made it her mission to help us, tirelessly telephoning every accommodation provider she could think of – motel, hotel, bed and breakfast, caravan park – all without success.

There are genuine concerns about young people using social media, but the main thing is that you talk to your parents about it
• Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a problem sent in by a reader

My mum has always been protective, and I fear it is destroying my social life because I haven’t grown up with much access to social media. I don’t mean to say it’s OK to be exposed to social media at a young age, but it needs to be controlled in a certain way.

Because I had a flip phone until the middle of secondary school, I haven’t had a TikTok or Snapchat streak with anyone because I never learned how it works. I know this might sound like me complaining over nothing, but it sometimes feels like my mum is purposely doing this to damage me.

National Parking Platform, where motorists can pay for all parking on single app, to launch ‘as soon as possible’

For motorists fed up with having to wrestle with a phone full of apps to pay for parking their car, relief could finally be in sight with a unified app.

Lengthy delays have dogged a government-funded initiative, the National Parking Platform (NPP), designed to let people use one app to pay for all their parking instead of having to sign up to a plethora of services.

Reader is willing to pay original sum but says no one should be fined for stopping for just over 2 minutes

In February, I parked briefly outside a clothing store to visit a nearby shop. As soon as I entered, the shopkeeper informed me that parking was not allowed in that area.

I immediately returned to my vehicle and left. The total duration of my stop, according to the parking charge notices (PCNs) I received the following week from Euro Parking Services (EPS), was just two minutes and 24 seconds.

Ofgem price cap on gas and electricity likely to drop by £129 to £1,720 a year, says consultancy Cornwall Insight

• Business live – latest updates

Household energy bills could drop this summer but experts have warned that “the crisis is not over” for households and manufacturers struggling to afford gas and electricity costs.

The industry regulator’s quarterly price cap is expected to fall in July by an average of £129, or 7%, according to forecasts from Cornwall Insight, a leading energy consultancy. It has predicted that the cap will fall to £1,720 a year for a typical dual-fuel household this summer, from £1,849 under the current limits.

From planning ahead to knowing what looks (and smells) good, a carnivore’s guide

It is estimated that UK households throw away 10 % of beef, pork and poultry they buy each year. That’s about 250,000 tonnes in total, so it is important to plan what you are going to buy to avoid waste and save money.

If everything feels broken but strangely normal, the Soviet-era concept of hypernormalization can help

In January, the comedian Ashley Bez posted an Instagram video of herself, trying to describe a heavy mood in the air. “How come everything feels all …?” she says, trailing off and grimacing exaggeratedly into the camera.

Digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush saw the video, and got it immediately.

It’s all too easy to say something crass or insensitive to someone who is going through IVF – as I discovered when I was. Here’s how to open your mouth without putting your foot in it

It is estimated that one in seven couples in the UK will experience difficulties conceiving, and many will go on to have fertility treatment. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) reports that more than 1.3m IVF cycles have been performed in the UK since 1991. I was 32 when I first underwent treatment, and I didn’t know anyone else who had been through it. Six years on, a quick headcount of IVF-enduring friends almost reaches double figures; we can no longer consider it rare. If you have friends, family or colleagues in their 30s and 40s, it is highly likely that some will be having IVF (that is not to say that no one younger will be – it is just statistically less likely: the average age is now 36).

It can be difficult to know what to say to someone who has shared that this is their path to potential parenthood – the outcome possibly exciting, possibly heartbreaking. From my experience of that challenging time, there are comments that can boost and others that, however well intentioned, can sting.

What you need to know about the essential yet misunderstood body part, including common issues and helpful exercises

• Tell us: how has your sex life changed after 60?

The pelvic floor is an essential but often overlooked and misunderstood part of the human body. Some people don’t even know they have one.

“We’re never really taught about it,” says Dr Sara Reardon, a board-certified pelvic floor therapist and author of Floored: A Woman’s Guide to Pelvic Floor Health at Every Age and Stage. “We don’t really get any education about how these muscles work and what’s normal.”

Dreading the thought of giving a speech, or stressed about a big work event? Your GP may prescribe beta blockers to reduce the effects of adrenaline on your heart. Here’s what happened when I took them

I first took beta blockers two years ago, when I was asked to give a eulogy. Terrible at public speaking on a good day, let alone at a funeral, my first instinct was to refuse to do it. I had made a speech at a friend’s wedding 15 years before and my legs shook so violently throughout that I thought I would collapse. This isn’t a case of being overcritical or dramatic: I find it almost impossible to stand up in front of a crowd and talk. It is an ordeal, for all involved – or it was before I took beta blockers.

Beta blockers are a prescription medication that blocks adrenaline and therefore temporarily reduces the body’s reaction to stress. Routinely given to patients with heart and circulatory conditions, including angina, atrial fibrillation and high blood pressure, as well as to prevent migraines, they are also prescribed for some kinds of anxiety. Some doctors will suggest taking them regularly, at certain times of the day. Others will suggest taking a specified dose when you feel you need it. “They work by reducing the effects of adrenaline on the heart, so you don’t get that heart-racing feeling, you may not get short of breath or sweaty, and they can reduce the symptoms of a full-blown panic attack,” says doctor and broadcaster Amir Khan, who has been a GP in Bradford for 16 years.

With all the noisy marketing, how do we know what skin actually needs? It’s less than you may think

• Tell us: how has your sex life changed after 60?

To hear many social media influencers tell it, a proper skincare routine requires dozens of expensive lotions and potions applied in complex, multistep sequences multiple times a day, and an understanding of advanced chemistry that would put Marie Curie to shame.

As customers stock up on all the creams, toners, masks and acids the epidermis supposedly requires, companies are cashing in. According to a 2024 report from the business consulting firm McKinsey & Company, global beauty-market sales reached $446bn in 2023. By 2028, sales are expected to reach $590bn.

How to start meditating

How to start weightlifting

How to start budgeting

How to start running

The trick is to remember they have more in common than they have differences – and you’ll be seeing a lot of both this summer

Are you team spot, or team stripe? They resonate on different frequencies, in a subtle sort of a way. They are not exactly opposites, but they are not interchangeable either. Not chalk and cheese, but perhaps a bit like salt-and-vinegar and cheese-and-onion. Just different flavours.

A stripe is brisker, while a spot is giving whimsy. I guess there’s some old-fashioned gender stereotyping mixed up in that, because stripes are worn by everyone, whereas spots are almost exclusively found in women’s fashion. Stripes feel robust and functional, while spots are daintier, more playful.

Thanks to excellent new tints, sticks and sprays, rising temperatures do not have to mean melting makeup

At the time of writing, my life and mood have been shifted dramatically by spring sunshine. And so too would my makeup if I hadn’t spent weeks testing new long-wear products designed to stop one’s face melting in the heat. Those of us with oily skin, an active lifestyle or a hormonal propensity for sweating or flushing, can also struggle to hold on to foundation, eyeshadow and more. But until recently, the term “long-wear” often meant dry, dragging, somewhat joyless textures and shades.

My best new discovery is Milk’s superlative Hydro Grip Gel Tint (£34), available in 15 shades; I wear number five and it’s perfect. Its light and comfortable texture and sheer, natural-looking, summery coverage betray what is extraordinarily dogged staying power. Used in place of foundation or tinted moisturiser, this has remained perfectly intact through tears, 16-hour days and a common cold – its glow never dimming. It has a flexible, stretchy gel texture that prevents cracking or caking as skin tires and dries. Concealer, blush, powders and anything else you care to throw on top layer over happily and smoothly (it has a similar texture to a primer). It’s an unequivocal 10/10 and I already know it’ll be among my best products of 2025. For a smidge more coverage with a comparable lifespan, try Maybelline’s impressive Super Stay 24h Skin Tint (£13.99).

The TV sewing judge is also a designer and clothing manufacturer who is fiercely anti-consumerism. He discusses how he balances his beliefs with his business

Patrick Grant is on his feet, giving the full tour of his outfit. He tugs down the waistband of his jeans to show off his white underpants elastic. His undies were made in south Wales, he says. His shoes in Bolton, the socks in Sussex. More than a man who got dressed this morning, he is a walking compendium of clothing.

The provenance of his garments is important to Grant. In fact, the provenance of his everything is important. We are meeting in the office of Cookson & Clegg, the Blackburn clothing factory he bought in 2015. Within a few minutes, I’ve learned that the table we’re sitting at came from Freecycle in Crystal Palace, the bookcase from a skip. I suspect these details have always mattered to Grant, 53, who is best known as a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee, but they’re especially pertinent since his book, Less, argues that we should all buy fewer things. Grant is very exercised about this idea, and the book’s affably bossy subtitle is a much better clue to his personal energy than its minimalist title: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier.

I’m partially sighted so birding has always felt out of reach for me. But a stay at Slimbridge wetlands centre learning to identify bird song helped me connect with nature

Silhouettes dart across a lake and the pale morning sky. Avocets screech high-pitched cries, defending their eggs from a squawking crow that circles above, while a barnacle goose with a barking call flies overhead.

There are 12 of us watching and listening on a dawn chorus workshop at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) Slimbridge centre in Gloucestershire. Being partially sighted, birding has felt out of reach for me. But this morning is about identifying birdsong, and I’m curious as to whether this will help me feel a deeper connection with nature.

Rising from the Po valley to the green Apennines, this little-visited region has good living down to a tee, with its fine wines, great food and historic villages

‘Look at the colour,” says tasting expert Carlo Veronese, sitting at a restaurant table in the village of Bosmenso. “Check how flexible it is, then give it a sniff and think about what you smell.” Only after we have given proper attention to appearance, structure and aroma do we taste the speciality before us.

We are not trying fine wines, however, but what many say is the world’s best salami: salame di Varzi, made in 15 villages around the town of the same name in south-east Lombardy.

A boat trip to Denmark’s South Funen archipelago takes in the North Sea coast, the historic Kiel canal and the Baltic before delivering its crew to an idyllic island rich in maritime culture

A south-westerly wind blew us to Ærø. This little Baltic island (pronounced Air-rue) in Denmark’s South Funen archipelago is home to some 6,000 fortunate residents who enjoy free bus services, shallow swimming beaches and picture-perfect villages. The 54 sq mile island has a history of building sailing ships and there is an excellent maritime museum, so it seemed appropriate to arrive on a historic wooden sailing boat, Peggy, a Bristol pilot cutter built in 1903.

“We’re going to Ærø without a plane,” quipped one crew member as we set the sails on leaving the German Baltic port of Kiel. Our overland journey from the UK had started with a 12-hour train trip from London to Cuxhaven, a German port on the North Sea; a short taxi ride to Cuxhaven marina; an overnight stay on Peggy in the marina; and then a two-day transit of the Kiel canal, the busiest in the world by number of vessels, with some 35,000 ships transiting annually.

With a stunning coastline, brilliant surfing and a B&B in the forest, this quiet corner north of the Algarve makes for an idyllic break

‘I declare this the best beach in the world,” my youngest son shouts, leaping from a three-metre-high dune on to the soft, golden sand. We’ve come to Praia de Monte Clérigo to watch the sun sink into the sea, and stumble upon a bay ripe for play with a babbling brook, rock pools, gentle swell, towering cliffs and rolling dunes. As I gaze across to colourful fishers’ cottages circling a simple beach bar, I can’t help but agree; this could indeed be the world’s best beach.

“Why’s it so empty?” my son asks. It’s a good question, given the beauty of our surroundings, but we soon realise that having the place to ourselves is a common occurance on our slow adventure exploring Portugal’s least-populated coastline.

Each year, Chelsea sets garden trends – will this year’s ‘robust lawn’ made for canine companions pass the sniff test?

Can you hear it? That sound of the horticultural industry exhaling? We are at the end of the Chelsea flower show, AKA Gardening Christmas. Designers, contractors, nurseries, growers and gardeners have been beetling away building things, attending things, observing things from a distance and generally finding the whole event a delicious, exhausting, engaging, controversial affair.

Perhaps you pore over it on the telly, perhaps you brave the queues and the floral-dressed crowds, perhaps you ignore it entirely, but Chelsea does set the metronome and the bellwether for gardening trends that, like Anne Hathaway’s infamous cerulean sweater in The Devil Wears Prada, filter down to what we do in our own gardens several seasons later. Corten steel, Mediterranean planting, the rise of the wildflower, outdoor kitchens: all were spotted first at Chelsea.

Questions on general knowledge and topical trivia, plus a few jokes, every Thursday. How will you fare?

The Thursday quiz was listening to Hello by The Beloved the other day, in the hope of asking a question such as “how many people mentioned in the song are still alive” and getting the in-joke answer 30-50. But it soon realised it was going to be quibbles all the way down. Leslie Crowther? Died in 1996. Kym Mazelle? Still very much with us. But Zippy? Well, Roy Skelton, who voiced him (and the Daleks) died in 2011. But is Zippy dead? Or was Zippy ever alive? What about the LSO? Presumably some of the people playing in the LSO at the time the single came out in 1990 have subsequently passed. But does that count? Anyway, one thing we can all agree on, that was certainly some words to bulk out this article page so it gets indexed by search engines. On with the quiz … 15 questions, no prizes, have fun!

The Thursday quiz, No 211

I’d spent 10 years trying to be more like my goat-farming neighbours. What if I stressed my ‘Britishness’ instead?

I was standing in the long queue of a rural French boulangerie when it happened. The sun was just coming up and the glorious smell of freshly baked baguette filled the dawn air. I drank it in and shuffled forward, awaiting my turn, aware I was getting “looks” – and it wasn’t difficult to see why. I had driven all night from performing at a comedy gig in London to get to my home in the Loire valley, and I was still in my work clothes. My stage wear included a check tweed Edwardian frock coat with matching weskit, navy blue dress trousers, brogue monk shoes, a smart Oxford-collared shirt and a knitted blue tie, slightly loosened. Under normal circumstances, I would not invade my local boulangerie dressed as a cross between a late 60s dandy and a roaring 20s duellist, but it had been a long drive, and I was too tired to tone it down.

Plus, I had never really fit in locally anyway. We had moved there about 10 years earlier, in 2005 – a catastrophic decision, according to my agent, but a happy one for me, my wife and our then four-year-old son; the pace of life was less frenetic and we felt less hemmed in. And, as I often said only half-jokingly, it was the closest place to London we could afford to buy a house. Things had gone pretty well: my wife, being half-French and fluent, was working locally as a teacher, and my son had picked up the language more quickly than I can change a car tyre. We had two more children and I was … well, I was doing OK.

How to prove your identity after your account gets hacked and how to improve security for the future

• Phone lost or stolen? Practical steps to restore peace of mind
• UK passport lost or stolen? Here are the steps you need to take

Your Facebook or Instagram account can be your link to friends, a profile for your work or a key to other services, so losing access can be very worrying. Here’s what to do if the worst happens.

If you have access to the phone number or email account associated with your Facebook or Instagram account, try to reset your password by clicking on the “Forgot password?” link on the main Facebook or Instagram login screen. Follow the instructions in the email or text message you receive.

If you no longer have access to the email account linked to your Facebook account, use a device with which you have previously logged into Facebook and go to facebook.com/login/identify. Enter any email address or phone number you might have associated with your account, or find your username which is the string of characters after Facebook.com/ on your page. Click on “No longer have access to these?”, “Forgotten account?” or “Recover” and follow the instructions to prove your identity and reset your password.

If your account was hacked, visit facebook.com/hacked or instagram.com/hacked/ on a device you have previously used to log in and follow the instructions. Visit the help with a hacked account page for Facebook or Instagram.

Change the password to something strong, long and unique, such as a combination of random words or a memorable lyric or quote. Avoid simple or guessable combinations. Use a password manager to help you remember it and other important details.

Turn on two-step verification in the “password and security” section of the Accounts Centre. Use an authentication app or security key for this, not SMS codes. Save your recovery codes somewhere safe in case you lose access to your two-step authentication method.

Turn on “unrecognised login” alerts in the “password and security” section of the Accounts Centre, which will alert you to any suspicious login activity.

Remove any suspicious “friends” from your account – these could be fake accounts or scammers.

If you are eligible, turn on “advanced protection for Facebook” in the “password and security” section of the Accounts Centre.

Johnathan Buma, who was arrested in March and is out on bail, claims in new interview that efforts to target Musk were ‘intense’

A former FBI counterintelligence agent turned whistleblower has claimed he tried to gain access to Elon Musk in 2022 to warn the billionaire that he was the target of a covert Russian campaign seeking to infiltrate his inner circle, possibly to gain access to sensitive information.

Johnathan Buma, who was arrested by the FBI earlier this year on a misdemeanor charge of disclosing confidential information, said in an interview that he tried – but ultimately failed – to gain access to Musk to personally brief and “inoculate” him against “outreach from the Kremlin”.

When Katherine Hubbard’s mother started suffering from profound memory loss she used her camera to help transform the pain of loss into an act of love

We’d like to hear from UK employers how tightened visa rules may affect their business, and why they have been recruiting from abroad instead of from the UK

The government’s immigration white paper aims to reduce the number of people arriving in the UK “significantly” by introducing restrictions across various forms of visas.

Changes include the requirement of degree-level qualifications rather than those that are roughly equivalent to A-levels for skilled work visa applicants.

We’d like to hear from carers in the UK who have been investigated for alleged benefit fraud by the DWP

Tens of thousands of unpaid carers looking after disabled, frail or ill relatives are being forced to repay huge sums to the government and threatened with criminal prosecution after unwittingly breaching earnings rules by just a few pounds a week.

People who claim the £81.90-a-week carer’s allowance for looking after loved ones while working part-time are being forced by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to pay back money that has been erroneously overpaid to them, in some cases running to more than £20,000, or risk going to prison.

In a new video series on our It’s Complicated YouTube channel, we’re on a mission to untangle confusing everyday topics by speaking directly with experts

Whether you’re frying an egg or dressing a salad, cooking oils are a staple in most kitchens, but figuring out which one to use can feel strangely complicated. With conflicting advice all over social media, it’s easy to get lost in the swirl of hot takes: some say seed oils are toxic, others swear by extra virgin olive oil for everything. Coconut oil, butter, avocado oil – everyone seems to have a different theory.

In a new video series on our It’s Complicated YouTube channel, we’re on a mission to untangle confusing everyday topics by speaking directly with experts and asking the questions people actually have. In an upcoming episode, we’re turning our attention to cooking oils.

We would like to hear about the poem that invokes memories of someone you loved and lost

• ‘He lived inside poetry’: Toby Jones and Helena Bonham Carter perform poems in memory of lost loved ones

In the Guardian’s new video series “Poems to remember” (published in collaboration with “Celebration Day”, an initiative that honours people who have died), actors including Helena Bonham Carter, Toby Jones, Stephen Mangan have read poems in memory of people they’ve lost. Now we would like to hear from you.

You can tell us about a poem that reminds you of someone you’ve lost – and why – below and we’ll include a selection in our Bookmarks newsletter.

Readers call on the British government to take firm steps to bring about an immediate end to the war and stop the starving of Palestinians

It would be churlish not to welcome the Damascene conversion of the Labour leadership on Israel’s unconscionable actions in Gaza but, as your editorial says, this must be translated into action (The Guardian view on the calls to save Gaza: Palestinians need deeds, not words, 20 May). As well as sanctions and an arms embargo, that should include an announcement on the recognition of a Palestinian state – which has already been endorsed in a symbolic Commons motion in 2014 by 11 members of the current cabinet – to revive the moribund peace process.

A key element must be to put pressure on the Americans, who alone have the power to persuade the Israeli government to stop the carnage. While Benjamin Netanyahu has hitherto had Donald Trump’s backing, he will no doubt be aware that the capricious US president, fixated on the bottom line and now distracted by projecting his gold obsession into outer space with his Golden Dome missile defence system, could turn on a dime.

Jenni Daiches says the party now feels alien, Yvonne Bearne ponders surcharge earnings and Anne Webb says British emigrants will brush up on their language skills

An “island of strangers” (Report, 19 May)? “If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world,” wrote Francis Bacon. Of course, there are those who consider citizens of the world to be citizens of nowhere, but shared humanity and threats to our planet that affect everyone suggest otherwise.

I am the granddaughter of immigrants and would not exist if they had not found refuge in this country. The words of our prime minister sent a chill through my veins. It seems that it is the Labour party, which I have supported all my life (though sometimes reluctantly), that has become alien.
Jenni Daiches
South Queensferry, Edinburgh

A sharp rise in preventable accidents in the UK over the past decade must be addressed by the government, say Steve Cole and Dr James Broun

Denis Campbell’s article rightly highlights the UK’s worsening health outcomes (UK ‘the sick person of the wealthy world’ amid increase in deaths from drugs and violence, 20 May), but it overlooks a key driver: the sharp rise in preventable accidents.

Research by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA)  shows that the rate of accidental deaths has surged by 42% in the past decade and has risen fastest in the middle-aged. Accidents are now the second leading cause of death for under‑40s. These are not random tragedies; they are systemic failures.

Many happy tax returns | Saving the welfare state | Defeat’s silver lining | Champion pundits | AI and copyright

Re your article (UK’s 50 richest families hold more wealth than 50% of population, analysis finds, 19 May), we would all see how little the super‑rich pay in taxes if we adopted the Scandinavian system of putting all tax returns in the public domain. Nosy neighbours would soon flush out tax dodgers.
Anthony Stoll
London

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