She had a zest for life that propelled her to the heights of stage and screen – but behind all this lay a shocking story of violence, grooming and abuse. From her bed, flanked by pills and cigarettes, Ireland’s grande dame looks back

Brenda Fricker is sitting up in a bed plumped with pillows, wearing a sapphire blue blouse and a head of grey-golden ringlets. One bedside table has her medication, 25 pills a day. Another has a cup of water, an ashtray and her cigarettes. Above and on either side of her are shelves jammed with an eclectic hoard of books: Salman Rushdie, Edna O’Brien, Brian Aldiss, Alex Ferguson. Meanwhile, gazing out from framed black and white photographs on the walls, are writers, producers and actors from another era, plus a young, luminous Fricker herself.

The current version of Fricker is 80 and not so well, happy to be interviewed but only from the bed of her Dublin home – not exactly a common setup with stars, but then she is no ordinary star. “I’m out of breath just talking,” she says. “I’ve never known tiredness ever in my life. Weary. Will I ever get up again?” She will, but the question is not entirely rhetorical. “I’m having a dreadful death,” she says. “I’m just dying, every day in pain.” This is said in a matter of fact tone, only to be undercut by a rueful prediction: “I’ll probably live to be 100.”

Powerful Buddhist monks who have previously escaped punishment are the latest target of the government’s crackdown on excess wealth and alleged corruption

For a religious leader, the allegations were scandalous. Mistresses, illegitimate children, embezzlement. But in 2015, the head abbott of Shaolin monastery, the cradle of Zen Buddhism and kung-fu in China, was untouchable. Shi Yongxin, the so-called “CEO monk” who turned the 1,500-year-old monastery into a commercial empire worth hundreds of millions of yuan, held firm. Soon he was cleared of all charges.

But 10 years later, the 60-year-old monk was not so lucky. In July, not long after Shi returned from a trip to the Vatican to meet the late Pope Francis, the Shaolin Temple released a statement saying that he was being investigated for allegedly misappropriating funds and for fathering illegitimate children with multiple mistresses. Less than a fortnight later he was dismissed and stripped of his monkhood. He has not been heard from since.

An American football fan called in sick so he could attend a game – and was rumbled after being caught on camera, his face projected up on the stadium’s giant screens

Name: Getting Coldplayed.

Age: The original incident happened on 16 July this year.

The UN commission of inquiry’s report makes it almost impossible for Israel – and its allies – to maintain the narrative that criticism of it is part of an antisemitic plot

The conclusion of a UN commission of inquiry that Israel has committed genocide in the war in Gaza, and that its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and other Israeli leaders are responsible for inciting that genocide, changes little in legal terms. The international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague has yet to issue its final ruling in the genocide case that South Africa brought against Israel last year.

Politically, however, this latest report (officially a “conference room paper”, intended to aid discussion of the themes) may prove to be one of the final nails in the coffin of the shameless but still-continuing narrative from Netanyahu and his allies that any talk of Israeli crimes is part of an antisemitic plot – or, to use Netanyahu’s favourite phrase, “a blood libel”.

Steve Crawshaw is the author of Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crimes and the Battle for Justice. He is a former chief foreign correspondent at the Independent and former UK director at Human Rights Watch

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Thousands of dodos could return within a decade according to Colossal Biosciences, a ‘de-extinction’ company – but experts warn of ‘moral hazard’

Since its demise in the 17th century, the dodo has long been synonymous with extinction. But thousands of dodos could soon again populate Mauritius, the species’ former home, according to a “de-extinction” company that has announced a major breakthrough in its quest to resurrect the flightless bird.

Colossal Biosciences said on Wednesday it has succeeded in growing pigeon primordial germ cells, precursor cells to sperm and eggs, for the first time. This is a “pivotal step” in bringing back the dodo, which was a type of pigeon, for the first time in more than 300 years, according to Colossal.

As the US president comes to the UK, let’s give credit where it’s due: he wasn’t lying when he said smart people don’t like him

Channel 4 will be marking Donald Trump’s visit to the UK with what it describes as “the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television”. It will play more than 100 of Trump’s lies or misleading statements in a segment called Trump v The Truth. All his greatest hits, from false claims about the price of eggs to disgusting lies about the US spending millions on condoms for Hamas, packaged together.

Obviously we’ve got to be fair and balanced here, though, haven’t we? Gotta show both sides. So I think it’s only right that Channel 4 also broadcast a 10-second segment covering all of the truthful and astute things the president has said. It’s not just lies, lies, lies: occasionally the man can be surprisingly wise. Only this week, for example, a video circulated online of Trump telling attendees of a gala at one of his golf clubs: “Smart people don’t like me, you know?” He added: “And they don’t like what we talk about.” No lies detected there.

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ABC says show will be off-air ‘indefinitely’ following complaints about host’s comments on the killing of rightwing activist Kirk

Donald Trump has claimed his administration has reached a deal with China to keep TikTok operating in the US, amid uncertainty over what shape the final agreement will take, with suggestions from the Chinese side that Beijing would retain control of the algorithm that powers the site’s video feed.

“We have a deal on TikTok ... We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it,” Trump said on Tuesday, without providing further details.

Two army divisions work their way towards centre of Gaza City as further Israeli airstrikes destroy buildings

Israeli troops pressed ahead with a ground offensive into Gaza City on Wednesday, making further efforts to force more people to flee their homes and travel to overcrowded and unsafe areas in the south of the devastated territory.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Wednesday they had carried out 150 air and artillery strikes ahead of the ground operation that began early on Tuesday morning.

Prime minister seeks to make best of difficult state visit by US president with package of commitments by US firms

Keir Starmer has sought to navigate a politically treacherous state visit by Donald Trump with an announcement of £150bn of US investment in the UK, as the president was kept safely within the confines of Windsor Castle.

As thousands of protesters voiced their anger in London at a Stop Trump Coalition protest, the US president was escorted by the king and queen through a first day that ended in a state banquet but kept him out of reach of his critics.

About 800,000 people to demonstrate against budget plans, putting pressure on new prime minister

France is braced for one of its biggest strike days in recent years, as trade unions make a rare show of unity to put pressure on the new prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, to rethink budget cuts and act on wages, pensions and public services.

About 800,000 people are expected to take to the streets in marches across the country on Thursday, according to police, while schools, rail and air transport will all be affected. A total of 80,000 police will be deployed.

Version of company’s Gemini 2.5 AI model solved complex real-world problem that stumped human programmers

Google DeepMind claims it has made a “historic” artificial intelligence breakthrough akin to the Deep Blue computer defeating Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and an AI beating a human Go champion in 2016.

A version of the company’s Gemini 2.5 AI model solved a complex real-world problem that stumped human computer programmers to become the first AI model to win a gold medal at an international programming competition held earlier this month in Azerbaijan.

Armed forces say ‘special naval militia’ involved in Caribbean deployment as defence minister cites ‘threatening, vulgar voice’ of Washington

Venezuela says it has begun three days of military exercises on its Caribbean island of La Orchila as tensions soar amid US military activity in the region.

Forces deployed for what Washington called an anti-drug operation have blown up at least two Venezuelan boats and a combined 14 people allegedly transporting drugs across the Caribbean this month – a move slammed by UN experts as “extrajudicial execution”.

Zelenskyy says Patriot and Himars included in Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List; drones threaten Volgograd oil refineries. What we know on day 1,303

The first weapons supplied to Ukraine under a programme funded by its European allies will include missiles for Patriot air defence systems and Himars rocket launchers, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday. The two initial batches are worth US$500m each. Ukraine has secured over $2bn in financing via what is called the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List, or Purl. Ukraine’s president said he expected the total committed funds to reach $3.5bn in October. Patrick Turner, Nato’s senior representative in Ukraine, said: “Four packages [under Purl] have already been funded and equipment is already flowing.”

Russia closed its Volgograd airport and put oil refineries on alert for a Ukrainian drone attack early on Thursday morning. Between 10 and 15 explosions were heard and flashes were seen in the sky as air defence systems opened fire, said the Russian Telegram channel Shot.

It was likely a missile fired at Russian drones from a Polish plane that hit a house, a government minister said on Wednesday, when UAVs swarmed into Poland in an unprecedented violation of Nato airspace. Authorities initially said one of the 21 Russian drones hit the house on the night of 9-10 September. The minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, said on Wednesday: “Everything indicates that it was a missile fired by our plane, defending Poland, defending the fatherland, defending our citizens.” Poland’s PM, Donald Tusk, promised an investigation of how it happened but all responsibility for the damage still lay with Russia, which he said was responsible for orchestrating a provocation using drones.

Denmark said on Wednesday that it would for the first time acquire “long-range precision weapons” for its defence, citing the need to deter Russia. The prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, called it “a paradigm shift in Danish defence policy” adding that Russia would constitute a threat to Denmark and Europe “for years to come”, requiring “credible deterrence”. “With these weapons, the defence forces will be able to hit targets at long range and, for example, neutralise enemy missile threats.”

The announcement sparked a back-and-forth with Russia’s ambassador to Denmark who called it “pure madness” and equated it to “threatening a nuclear power publicly”. Frederiksen said the ambassador’s comments should be interpreted as a threat. “Russia is trying to threaten Europe and Nato into not defending our people and borders. Of course, we will not be intimidated.” Denmark’s defence ministry said it was looking into which long-range weapons to buy.

Russia attacked Ukraine with 172 drones as well as missiles on Tuesday night into Wednesday, Ukraine’s air force said. Air defences shot down or jammed 136 drones in the north, south and east of Ukraine. Missile hits and 36 strikes by UAVs were recorded at 13 locations, the air force said.

Lithuania has charged 15 people with terrorism offences over an alleged Russia-backed plot to detonate parcels last year in Germany, Poland and Britain. Prosecutors said that the suspects used delivery companies DHL and DPD to send four packages of explosives hidden in cosmetics containers from the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, to various European countries. The devices caused three explosions: at Leipzig airport, in a truck in Poland and a warehouse in Britain. The fourth malfunctioned, the Lithuania prosecutor’s office said, adding that it was an international inquiry. Those charged are Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian and Ukrainian citizens.

Ukraine and the US International Development Finance Corporation announced they would each commit $75 million to a joint investment fund that is part of Kyiv’s minerals deal with Washington, the Ukrainian prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, said on Wednesday. The US corporation said the investment would support Ukraine’s reconstruction and long-term economic recovery and strengthen US natural resources supply chains.

Former 2GB and Sky News Australia broadcaster was not in court on Thursday when it heard 17 of previous 44 charges had been dropped

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Alan Jones faces 25 charges of indecent assault and two of sexual touching relating to nine complainants after prosecutors revealed two alleged victims would no longer be part of the case against the veteran broadcaster.

Jones was on Thursday expected to make his first appearance in court this year to be committed to stand trial on 44 charges of indecent assault against 11 victims aged 17 and older.

Swedish researchers find low daily dose can halve risk in post-surgery patients with specific gene mutations

A daily dose of aspirin can substantially reduce the risk of some colorectal cancers returning after surgery, according to a major trial into the protective effects of the everyday painkiller.

Swedish researchers found that people who took a low daily dose of aspirin after having their tumour removed were half as likely to have their cancer return over the next three years than patients who took a placebo.

With US president hidden from public view, media focuses instead on peripheral sideshow of clowns drawn by state visit

Never in its long and august history has the No 10 bus from Windsor to Staines (via Datchet and Wraysbury) received a welcome like this. Its passage secured by police escort, its progress followed by the world’s media, the orange single-decker trundles regally up Windsor’s high street, while onlookers crane to get a glimpse of the single pensioner conveyed within. “It’s not him,” one man mutters, a little superfluously.

It was that kind of a day on the banks of the Thames: lots of excitement over very little, a sideshow that felt largely peripheral to the pageantry unfolding within the sealed castle grounds. “I’m afraid nothing’s going to happen, madam,” a police officer informed a woman filming a Facebook Live video from the kerb as he shooed her a safe distance back towards the pavement.

Mariam, Nasser and Ahmed were evacuated from the warzone but are now stranded in an Egyptian hospital that cannot treat their life-threatening injuries after Trump’s sudden ban on Palestinians entering the US

Mariam Sabbah had been fast asleep, huddled under a blanket with her siblings, when an Israeli missile tore through her home in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in the early hours of 1 March.

The missile narrowly missed the sleeping children but as the terrified nine-year-old ran to her parents, a second one hit. “I saw her coming towards me but suddenly there was another explosion and she vanished into the smoke,” says her mother, Fatma Salman.

For 25 years, Justin and Nichola were an essential part of each other’s lives. Then, one random Wednesday, came a terrible, wrenching phone call

Many lifelong alliances begin with a period of mild intimidation, and so it was with my friendship with Nichola. We were 18, in the first year at university, and shared a few French classes. I didn’t know her name, had never heard her speak in English but, with her voluminous curls and friendly, curious stare, she stood out. I assumed she would be too cool to hang around with someone like me.

One weekend, at a student social in the grotty union bar, booze acted as an icebreaker and the guardrails dropped. Nods of recognition in the corridor became cheery hellos, then toasties in the cafe, followed by nights out and nursing hangovers in front of the TV in our dilapidated student houses.

Scores of artists, speakers and activists appear at four-hour fundraiser curated by Brian Eno – but it’s Palestinian voices who make the biggest impression

The sheer scale of it was boggling. A total of 69 artists, speakers and activists were to appear at Ovo Arena Wembley.

There were stars of music: Damon Albarn, Bastille, PinkPantheress, Hot Chip and a festival’s worth of others. There were stars of stage and screen: Benedict Cumberbatch, Florence Pugh, Guy Pearce, Ramy Youssef and a huge supporting cast. There were the firebrands, the podcasters, the people you’re sure are important but you have no idea why. And there were the people who, well, you don’t really know what they’re bringing: the former footballer Eric Cantona, the Love Island host Laura Whitmore, the Chicken Shop Dates YouTuber Amelia Dimoldenberg.

Anderson updates Thomas Pynchon for the era of Ice roundups, pitting shaggy revolutionary Leonardo DiCaprio against cartoonish forces of reaction

One of the great creative bromances has flowered again: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon. Having adapted Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for the screen in 2015, Anderson has now taken a freer rein with his 1990 novel Vineland, creating a bizarre action thriller driven by pulpy comic-book energy and transformed political indignation, keeping his pedal at all times welded to the metal.

It’s a riff on the now recognisable Anderson-Pynchonian idea of counterculture and counter-revolution, absorbing the paranoid style of American politics into a screwball farcical resistance, with a jolting, jangling, nerve-shredding score by Jonny Greenwood. It’s partly a freaky-Freudian diagnosis of father-daughter dysfunction – juxtaposed with the separation of migrant children and parents at the US-Mexico border – and a very serious, relevant response to the US’s secretive ruling class and its insidiously normalised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) roundups: the toxic new Vichyite Trump enthusiasm.

Meta Ray-Ban Display have screen on inside of lens that can translate conversations, display information on landmarks and give directions

Meta has announced three new pairs of AI smart glasses, including the first Ray-Bans with a built-in screen for augmented reality.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display will be the first smart glasses with a heads-up display from a mainstream brand since the ill-fated Google Glass. They use a classic Wayfarer-like styling to avoid looking too obviously like wearable technology, while still having a camera, speakers and microphone.

The two actors play brothers dragged into danger by gangsters, but are too stupid or poorly sketched for you to sympathise with them. It’s a relentlessly cheerless watch

Hard on the heels of the airless misery of Mark Ruffalo’s new venture, Task, comes Jude Law and Jason Bateman’s Black Rabbit, which has a bit more action but the same relentless, cheerless tone and even less forgiving lighting. One more entry and it’s officially a trend! We’ll all have to schedule recovery viewings of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, like winter vitamin D shots, to make it through unbowed.

Law and Bateman are working-class brothers Jake (Law) and Vince (Bateman) Friedkin from Coney Island. They grew up in what we assume from relatively early on was a violent home, dominated by an alcoholic father. They became a Nirvana-lite rock group – Jake the handsome lead, Vince the drummer and creative force – until the latter’s taste for drugs and mayhem put paid to their success. Jake pivoted into management, primarily of multihyphenate talent Wes (Sope Dirisu), and when Vince regained his sobriety and vision and found a building that seized his imagination they all went into business together as restaurateurs, creating the Black Rabbit – a three-storey clubhouse that soon became the toast of bohemian New York.

Preteens are parroting influencer speak and demanding anti-ageing products as the pressure to fit in intensifies

Jessica, 25, was working a shift at Sephora when a little girl who looked about 10 ran up to one of her colleagues, crying. “Her skin was burning,” Jessica said, “it was tomato red. She had been running around, putting every acid you can think of on the palm of her hand, then all over her face. One of our estheticians had to tend to her skin. Her parents were nowhere to be seen.”

Former Sephora employee KM, 25, has her war stories too. Like the day a woman was caught shoplifting and told the security guard “she was trying to steal because her kid was getting bullied because she didn’t have a Dior lip gloss. [The mom] couldn’t afford it but her daughter told her she is going to get made fun of at school.”

In the 1970s, the radical leftwing German terrorist organisation may have spread fear through public acts of violence – but its inner workings were characterised by vanity and incompetence

In the summer of 1970, a group of aspirant revolutionaries arrived in Jordan from West Germany. They sought military training though they had barely handled weapons before. They sought a guerrilla war in the streets of Europe, but had never done anything more than light a fire in a deserted department store. They sought the spurious glamour that spending time with a Palestinian armed group could confer. Above all, they sought a safe place where they could hide and plan.

Some of the group had flown to Beirut on a direct flight from communist-run East Berlin. The better known members – Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent leftwing journalist, and two convicted arsonists called Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader – had faced a more complicated journey. First, they’d had to cross into East Germany, then they took a train to Prague, where they boarded a plane to Lebanon. From Beirut, a taxi took them east across the mountains into Syria. Finally, they drove south from Damascus into Jordan.

Weakened domestically, Emmanuel Macron wants an international legacy. Yet still, he does nothing to sanction Israel

When Emmanuel Macron announced that France intended to recognise Palestinian statehood, he drew a furious rebuke from Israel – and caused a diplomatic storm with the US. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote a letter accusing the French government of failing to “confront the alarming rise of antisemitism” in France, adding the harsh and unequivocal assessment: “Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on this antisemitic fire.”

In the same letter, he praised Donald Trump’s action to “protect the civil rights of American Jews”.

Rokhaya Diallo is a Guardian Europe columnist

The choice for governments around the world is clear: engage, or fall beneath the US president’s wheel. For now, Britain must do the former

Has any visiting leader ever seen so little of Britain or the British as Donald Trump is doing this week? The absurdly unrepresentative version of the country offered up to the US president on his second state visit on Wednesday was a Windsor parody, a Potemkin version of this country, glistening with protocol and polish, amid a lavish reenactment of the British monarchy’s invented traditions. Just about the only thing that was authentic was the rain.

But here’s the unalterable and underlying thing. None of that really matters. What matters is that Trump is the most powerful leader in the world. Despite all the Trumpian shocks, the US and Britain remain allies. Business can and should be done between them. So the opportunity for face-time with Trump, in circumstances designed to soften him up with flattery and engage him over this country’s own priorities, is to be seized. Not to do this would be perverse.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Let’s not be too cynical about the US-UK agreement to build new power plants – but costs must fall if nuclear is to make headway

Presidential visits, like investment summits, involve a blizzard of claims about companies set to spend squillions in the UK. Some “commitments” are merely extrapolations of current trends. Some can be filed under “believe it when you see it”. Some involve throwing everything into the mix and producing an implausibly precise number for the “economic value” to the UK. A few pledges are genuinely new, but scepticism should be the default setting.

How to view this week’s “landmark commitments” by UK and US firms to build new nuclear power plants in the UK? Actually, this may be one of those rare occasions when one shouldn’t be too cynical.

A research paper says people are more likely to believe you if you use long words when asking for forgiveness. I prefer to keep it simple

A bloke in a service station once said something really horrible to me. But he swiftly followed it up with one of the most sincere apologies I’ve ever been on the end of. This was at Hopwood Park services on the M42, years ago. I’d just pulled up at the pump. Clocking me, he knocked on the passenger window, and when I opened it he stuck his head in and said something vile. It could have been classed as banter, I suppose, but it was still vile. My two young children were in the back, all wide-eyed in bafflement. Upset more than angry, I got out, filled up and went to pay, only to find him waiting by the car when I returned. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry mate. I didn’t know you had your kids in the car. I apologise for that.” There was something about the last four words which made the difference, somehow adding just the right amount of emphasis.

I wasn’t particularly pleased to have such a memory stirred this week when I read about a research paper, published by the British Psychological Society, on how the length of the words you use when you make an apology are important in conveying your sincerity. Apologies always fascinate me because, as far as I can see, without contrition on one side and forgiveness on the other, we’re all doomed.

It should have been a lot easier than this for Liverpool but the 92nd‑minute roar to celebrate Virgil van Dijk’s winner against Atlético Madrid made the hardship worthwhile. This is what everyone expects of Liverpool this season; the captain’s header was only their third latest decisive goal in five straight victories.

Arne Slot’s side have won every Premier League game so far with goals scored after the 80th minute. Liverpool looked as if they wanted to do things differently in the Champions League and were two goals ahead within six minutes thanks to Andy Robertson and Mohamed Salah. If they thought they had done the business before anyone had broken a sweat, they were very much mistaken. Atlético’s goals came from an unlikely source in the full-back-cum-midfielder Marcos Llorente, who now has four Champions League goals at Anfield to his name.

The Allianz Arena will always hold cherished memories for Chelsea but when they pick through the wreckage of their first night back in the Champions League there will be plenty of moments that they would rather not have to think about again.

Back at the ground where they became European champions for the first time, there was the brief prospect of the team in blue pulling off another unlikely heist in Bavaria. Yet while there was defiance after Bayern Munich went 2-0 up inside 27 minutes, Cole Palmer halving the deficit with typical nonchalance, the problems at the other end were too great for Chelsea to overcome.

• World champion from 2022 is first American man to join

• Kerley provisionally banned by Athletics Integrity Unit

The Olympic 100m silver and bronze medallist Fred Kerley will compete in the inaugural Enhanced Games, the event’s organisers revealed on Wednesday, weeks after the Athletics Integrity Unit handed the American a provisional suspension for whereabouts failures.

The 2022 100m world champion is the first track athlete and American man to join the event that permits athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs that are banned in official competition.

• First T20: England, 197-6, beat Ireland, 196-3, by four wkts

• Salt has rollicking opening stand with Buttler and hits 89

Jacob Bethell’s big day began awkwardly and ended with England dominant. After Ireland put up 196, some serious work was required as the 21-year-old became his country’s youngest men’s captain.

Enter Phil Salt, ready to make headlines once again. The opener followed his 141 not out against South Africa last Friday with 89 off 46 balls as England secured victory in the first of three Twenty20 internationals with 14 balls to spare.

• Silver medal for Briton in Tokyo as injury thwarts Kerr

• Just 0.02sec separates first from second in 1500m final

When Jake Wightman sat on the bus to the 1500m heats at the World Athletics Championships on Sunday, he told himself that if he failed to make it through he was done. He was 31. His body was breaking down so often that he felt he had post‑traumatic stress disorder. And he feared his best days were behind him. Yet, just three days later, what had seemed like a final hurrah became a glorious resurrection.

What a fighter. What an athlete. What a 1500m final. Most expected this to be a shootout between Britain’s defending champion, Josh Kerr, and the young Dutch star Niels Laros. Instead the script was flipped on its head and ripped into pieces. Twice.

Faustino Asprilla will be in attendance as Eddie Howe aims to prove his side are Champions League contenders

It is only two years since Eddie Howe attended his first Champions League match but now Newcastle’s manager is on a mission to disrupt Europe’s elite.

As Barcelona arrived on Tyneside on Wednesday Hansi Flick’s La Liga champions certainly displayed no sign of complacency. Indeed Flick warned of the “intensity” his players must be braced for at St James’ Park on Thursday night.

• Eubank Jr makes allegations against Matchroom at press conference

• Hearn rejects claims and threatens legal action unless boxer apologises

Eddie Hearn has threatened to sue Chris Eubank Jr, after the boxer fired the first shots during a press conference ahead of his rematch with Conor Benn by accusing his opponent’s team of dirty tricks and “sabotage”.

Eubank Jr, who won their first bout by unanimous decision in April, claimed an ambulance taking him to hospital afterwards was stopped – and appeared to point the finger at Benn’s promoters, Matchroom Boxing.

• Alyssa Healy admits side was outplayed in New Chandigarh

• Australia fall well short of 292 target as World Cup looms

Australia’s all-conquering cricket women have been given a wake-up call with their World Cup defence approaching as India handed Alyssa Healy’s side their biggest ever one-day international defeat in Punjab.

Healy admitted the champions had been “outplayed” in New Chandigarh on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) as they suffered a 102-run loss, a thumping so heavy that it even surpassed the Australians’ previous record 92-run defeat to England in Birmingham 52 years ago.

The Javier Mascherano-led side has an outside chance of repeating as Supporters’ Shield winners, but MLS Cup remains the ultimate goal

Much about Tuesday night in Fort Lauderdale was typical. The weather was sticky and humid. The crowd at Chase Stadium was lively. And on the field, Lionel Messi assisted Jordi Alba, and vice-versa, in a 3-1 win for Inter Miami. That the victory came against the Seattle Sounders, the side that beat Miami in a contentious Leagues Cup final two weeks ago, gave the squad a measure of revenge. But there are bigger factors at play.

“It was important to regain positive feelings,” Miami head coach Javier Mascherano told reporters afterward.

Yulia Navalnaya says tests by two laboratories on samples smuggled out of Russia show her husband was killed by poison

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said that two foreign laboratories had confirmed her husband was poisoned, after tests on biological samples secretly smuggled out of Russia.

Navalny, 47, died suddenly on 16 February 2024, while being held in a jail about 40 miles (64km) north of the Arctic Circle, where he had been sentenced to decades in prison to be served in a “special regime”.

Central bank moves to set rates at range between 4 and 4.25% but decision unlikely to satisfy Donald Trump

The US Federal Reserve cut interest rates on Wednesday, its first rate cut since December, as the central bank moved to stabilize a wobbling labor market even as Donald Trump’s tariffs continue to push up prices.

Rates are now at a range of 4% to 4.25% – the lowest since November 2022. But the decision is unlikely to satisfy Trump, who has lambasted the Fed for acting “too late” and called for a far bigger cut.

Detectives arrested and charged 64-year-old man over murder of Susan Goodwin, reported missing in July 2002

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Police have charged a man with murder, hours after bones were found during a search for the remains of a woman who vanished more than 20 years ago.

The breakthrough in the cold case was made late on Wednesday after the discovery of human remains, believed to be those of Susan Goodwin, 39, buried in the back yard of a house in Port Lincoln, South Australia.

Eoin Hayes TD apologised for ‘huge mistake’ of dressing up as Barack Obama at 2009 Halloween party

A member of Ireland’s parliament who was pictured in blackface at a 2009 Halloween party will stay on as a member of the Social Democrats, the party leader has said, citing his “unreserved” apology and the fact that the incident took place 16 years ago.

Eoin Hayes, a deputy (TD) for Dublin Bay South, came under fire this week after media published pictures of him dressed up as the then US president, Barack Obama, at a party. At the time, Hayes was the president of the students’ union at University College Cork.

Governor says ‘we grieve the loss of life of three precious souls’ as two injured in critical condition in hospital

Three police officers were killed and two were injured in a shooting on Wednesday in the southern part of Pennsylvania, state police said.

“We grieve for the loss of life of three precious souls who served this county, served this commonwealth, served this country,” governor Josh Shapiro said.

Exclusive: Firm that runs Aberdeenshire resort says it is ‘categorically wrong’ to suggest it has caused environmental damage

Donald Trump’s Aberdeenshire golf course has breached sewage contamination limits 14 times since 2019, documents reveal.

The 36-hole golf course, one of two that Trump owns in Scotland, also has a five-star hotel, a whisky bar and two restaurants. Trump International Golf Links, Scotland has a private sewage system that treats wastewater before releasing it into the ground by soaking it through gravel beds in raised filter mounds.

With a ‘one-sided’ deal handing vast profits to the world’s top oil firms, many Guyanese ask when the energy bonanza will benefit them

On 18 July, the International Chamber of Commerce approved the attempt by the US energy multinational Chevron to replace Hess Oil as a stakeholder in one of the world’s largest offshore oilfields, Guyana’s Stabroek, as part of its $55bn (£41bn) acquisition of the smaller company.

Yet, as Chevron executives celebrated joining Exxon and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) as in producing Guyana’s daily oil output of 650,000 barrels, the response from the Guyanese government, opposition leaders and environmentalists was muted.

Since our 2024 climate pledge, there has been a global pushback against green progress. This update reflects the urgent and growing challenges facing our planet – and how the Guardian is more focused than ever on exposing the causes of the climate crisis

• In the past three weeks, more than 50,000 Guardian readers have supported our annual environment support campaign. If you believe in the power of independent journalism, please consider joining them today

The Guardian has long been at the forefront of agenda-setting climate journalism, and in a news cycle dominated by autocrats and war, we refuse to let the health of the planet slip out of sight.

2024 was the hottest year on record, driving the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time

Winter temperatures at the north pole reached more than 20C above the 1991-2020 average in early 2025, crossing the threshold for ice to melt

The planet’s remaining carbon budget to meet the international target of 1.5C has just two years left at the current rate of emissions

Humans are driving biodiversity loss among all species across the planet, according to the largest syntheses of the human impacts on biodiversity ever conducted worldwide

Tipping points – in the Amazon, Antarctic, coral reefs and more – could cause fundamental parts of the Earth’s system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with devastating effects. We asked the experts about the latest science – and how it makes them feel

Published our annual company emissions data, explaining what drives our emissions and where they have risen and fallen

Created a digital course, as part of an initiative by the Sustainable Journalism Partnership, sharing examples from experts across the Guardian of how to embed sustainability into journalism and media commercial operations

Contributed our time and knowledge to working groups in the advertising industry that are working on better ways to measure the emissions impact of advertising

Researchers from Imperial College London say 16,500 deaths caused by hot weather brought on by greenhouse gases

Human-made global heating caused two in every three heat deaths in Europe during this year’s scorching summer, an early analysis of mortality in 854 big cities has found.

Epidemiologists and climate scientists attributed 16,500 out of 24,400 heat deaths from June to August to the extra hot weather brought on by greenhouse gases.

‘Sometimes, less really is more,’ says chef as Michelin-starred restaurant offers Mindful Experience option

When gazing at the bill after a Michelin-starred meal, the average diner’s first thought is not usually: “I wish I’d got less food for that.”

But Heston Blumenthal has come up with a new menu catering to just that sentiment, tailored to reflect a growing demand for smaller portions, driven by weight-loss drugs.

Video from ‘unite the kingdom’ rally captured man saying ‘someone needs to shoot Keir Starmer’

A man allegedly captured on video at the far-right rally in London on Saturday threatening to kill Keir Starmer has been arrested by police.

An investigation was launched on Sunday in connection with the video, which was filmed at the event organised by the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as Tommy Robinson.

Third option for juries – blamed for country’s lower conviction rates for rape and sexual assault – abolished

The Scottish verdict of “not proven” – a global legal anomaly thought to be a key factor in the country’s significantly lower convictions rate for rape and sexual assault – has been abolished.

MSPs agreed to scrap the unique Scottish verdict as they voted through a series of major changes that Angela Constance, the justice secretary, said “put victims and witnesses at the heart of a modern and fair justice system”.

Meta’s former president of global affairs says agreement will leave UK more reliant on US tech firms

A multibillion-dollar transatlantic tech agreement announced to coincide with Donald Trump’s state visit represents “sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley”, Nick Clegg, Meta’s former president of global affairs, has said.

The former deputy prime minister said the deals, heralded with great fanfare by the government as it tries to foster growth in the UK, were “mutton dressed as lamb” and would make the country ever more reliant on US tech firms.

Gardaí believe body is that of Daniel Aruebose, whose 2022 disappearance was not noticed by authorities until last month

Irish police investigating the fate of a boy who disappeared four years ago but was only registered by authorities as missing last month have found the remains of a child on Dublin wasteland.

Gardaí named the missing boy as Daniel Aruebose, who is thought to have vanished in 2022 aged three, after they discovered the remains on Wednesday in the Donabate area of north Dublin.

David Pittman, 63, convicted in 1991 of killing three people, executed after final appeal rejected by US supreme court

A Florida man convicted of killing his estranged wife’s sister and parents and setting their house on fire was put to death on Wednesday evening, a record 12th execution in the state in 2025.

David Pittman, 63, was pronounced dead at 6.12pm local time following a lethal injection at Florida state prison near Starke, under a death warrant signed by Governor Ron DeSantis. Florida’s Republican governor has signed more death warrants this year than any of his predecessors.

Museum says specimens taken are worth €600,000 based on price of gold but have ‘immeasurable heritage value’

Historic gold samples with a street value of €600,000 but priceless to scientists and researchers have been stolen from the French national natural history museum in the latest of a series of museum robberies in France.

“This has happened in a critical context for cultural establishments in France, particularly museums,” the Paris museum said. “Several public collections have been the victims of robberies in the past months.”

Study finds chimpanzees’ enthusiasm for guzzling ripe fruit puts their ethanol intake at about 14g per day

Someone have a word with the chimps? Observations of the apes in the wild show them imbibing the alcoholic equivalent of a half pint of beer a day through the vast amount of fermented fruit in their diet.

Researchers arrived at the first estimates of wild chimp daily alcohol intake after measuring ethanol levels in fallen fruit that the apes gather from the forest floor in Kibale national park in Uganda and in Taï national park in Ivory Coast.

The artist and curator of photography talks about her relationship to the work of Black pioneers of photography and the influence of her 2000 book

When Dr Deborah Willis was an undergrad student at the Philadelphia College of Art, she asked the question that informed her work for years to follow: “Where are all the Black photographers?”

From photos by Gordon Parks in Time magazine to Black image-makers capturing daily life in Ebony and Jet magazines – she knew that Black photographers, like her father, were making their impact on the world. Growing up, her father was an amateur photographer, and her father’s cousin owned a photo studio, and seeing them photograph people as a child created a desire in her to become an image-maker.

Speaking to Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch on her Good Hang podcast, the star criticised the lack of credit given to comedy acting

Amy Poehler, the Saturday Night Live veteran and star of multiple films as well as Parks and Recreation, has spoken out about what she perceives as an anti-comedy bias at the Oscars.

Speaking to Olivia Colman on her Good Hang podcast, Poehler first canvassed Colman’s The Roses co-star Benedict Cumberbatch for questions.

He marched against the Vietnam war, supported the Black Panthers, has protested over animal rights, ended up in prison after a climate sit-in – and starred in Babe, LA Confidential and Succession. He explains how he became the ultimate activist-actor

Amid the hustle of midtown Manhattan on Wednesday 11 May 2022, James Cromwell walked into Starbucks, glued his hand to a counter and complained about the surcharges on vegan milks. “When will you stop raking in huge profits while customers, animals and the environment suffer?” Cromwell boomed as fellow activists streamed the protest online.

But the insouciant patrons of Starbucks paid little heed. Perhaps they didn’t realise they were in the company of the tallest person ever nominated for an acting Oscar, deliverer of one of the best speeches in Succession, and the only actor to utter the words “star trek” in a Star Trek production. Police arrived to shut down the store.

When Jade Ang Jackman met Ayesha Hussain it was to make a film about the latter’s training as a stunt performer. With that in the bag along with Sag award nominations, they are going after bigger ambitions together

Ayesha Hussain says her mum was relieved when she became a professional stuntwoman because there were a lot more safety precautions on film sets than at the nightclubs where she had been fire-breathing and throwing knives since her early 20s. Now a twice Sag-award nominated stunt performer, with credits on Doctor Who, Gladiator II and Deadpool and Wolverine, 35-year-old Hussain has her heart set on becoming “the female Keanu Reeves slash Jason Statham”.

As part of Hussain’s aim to tackle the lack of representation of south Asian women in the action arena, she joined with Malaysian-British director Jade Ang Jackman to co-found the film collective Babes With Blades. In January, they took over the Rio cinema in London’s Dalston during the London short film festival to showcase a series of action shorts; these included FKA Twigs’ swordsmanship in Sad Day, and Nida Manzoor’s teen action-comedy 7.2. Babes With Blades has also started a print magazine; and taught classes to children from low income households the basics of boxing.

Pointless and witless, this atrociously acted ripoff of The Hills Have Eyes should be cast back into the water

There are horror movies that walk the viewer through their deepest fears, others that use the genre to explore broader social issues and anxieties, and others that are just about thrill rides and LOLs. And then there is silly, sadistic trash like this: a micro-budget ripoff of cannibal-killer franchise The Hills Have Eyes, its lousy sequels and suchlike. It even features an actor from the original 1977 Hills’ cast: Susan Lanier here plays Martha, a blowsy barmaid with a taste for human flesh. But Hills at least attempted to craft some sort of backstory for its mayhem; Martha and her skeezy friends’ tastes are just a given, as if encountering cannibals is just one of the hazards of the boating life, like sharks or equipment failure.

The lambs to this slaughter are a quintet of mostly stupid young people in their 20s, who get together for partying purposes on the yacht of rich boy Chad (Zachary Roosa). Passengers include Chad’s permanently bikini-clad girlfriend Dana (Meghan Carrasquillo), stag buddy Franklin (Jamal R Averett), and lesbian couple Brandy (Amy Byrd) and Jess (Caitlin Rose). Yards of cocaine are snorted, gallons of booze consumed and makeouts embarked on as teasers for the film’s real idea of fun: putting the young’uns at the mercy of the tattooed boatyard body-eaters, who bring them ashore when the yacht runs out of gas at sea.

Teen romance and paranoid surveillance collide to dysfunctional effect in Neo Sora’s beguiling debut future set in an oppressive near-future

Neo Sora is a Japanese film-maker who directed Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, a documentary about his father, the renowned composer. Now he has made his feature debut with this complex, beguiling and often brilliant movie, co-produced by Anthony Chen; it manages to be part futurist satire, part coming-of-age dramedy, part high school dystopia. It combines the spirit of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club with Lindsay Anderson’s If.… and there might even be a trace memory of Paul Schrader’s Mishima, only without the seppuku.

In a high school in Kobe in the future, students are oppressed by the reactionary xenophobia of their elders; periodic earthquake warnings, and actual earthquakes themselves, create a widespread air of suppressed panic which the authorities believe justifies a perpetual clampdown. The prime minister has taken to claiming that undesirable elements are taking advantage of the earthquakes to indulge in lawlessness. In the school, there is an almost unconcealed racist disdain for students who are not fully ethnic Japanese as well as those who have unorthodox or rebellious views.

The electroacoustic pioneer scored dozens of pictures – and communist propaganda. Too successful to be persecuted by the politburo but largely forgotten when he died, his music is being revived by a new archival series

Zdeněk Liška became one of the eastern bloc’s pioneers of electroacoustic music by accident. After breaking through making music for ads and animations, the revolutionary film-makers of the 1960s Czechoslovak new wave asked him to soundtrack their movies, which he took as his greatest inspirations. With the help of radio engineering enthusiasts at Czechoslovakia’s film powerhouse, Barrandov Studios, he could imitate the whoosh of a spaceship or birds chirping. He composed underwater electroacoustic symphonies and music to be played on typewriters. Despite his innovations, he famously proclaimed: “I only write music under the pictures.”

Liška was as productive as he was innovative: from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, he would score eight feature films a year, as well as numerous shorts and TV series. He could go camp or avant garde, channel Disney-like beauty and loved a waltz. His peers recall him composing on the night train or sketching the next cue while the orchestra was still recording the last one. Czechs from across the generations can whistle some of his melodies, such as the carnival-style theme from crime series The Sinful People of Prague.

The all-girl trio gave punk a playful spin and drew admirers in Paul Weller and Captain Sensible – but, singer Debsey Wykes recalls, faced confusion for being out of step with era’s noise and anger

At 19 years old, Debsey Wykes stood in front of a sold-out crowd at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, her knees “literally knocking with fear”, as she puts it. It was the end of 1980 and Dolly Mixture were supporting the Jam for a second time, having piqued the interest of Paul Weller. Despite the shaky start, the teen trio made it through the set to appreciative applause. “Everyone is your friend when you support the Jam,” Wykes recalls in her new memoir, Teenage Daydream: We Are the Girls Who Play in a Band.

Dolly Mixture paired girl-group harmonies and pop sensibilities with scuffed-up combat boots and charity shop dresses. Their intricate arrangements remained playfully punk, displaying a songwriting craft well beyond their years. Although beloved by the Undertones and John Peel, as well as becoming the first group to release a single on Weller’s label, Respond, the band never found the success of many of their peers. “I think people were confused,” says Wykes. “One: we were girls, and girls often didn’t play in bands. And if you’re not dressed in jeans and leather, you must be crap and cute. There was no subtlety allowed.”

Witty, foul-mouthed, camp and punky, it was the 00s answer to slick superclubs and the rock patriarchy. As its rough, raw sound returns, the scene’s eyeliner-ed heroes, from Peaches to Jonny Slut, relive its excesses

Jonny Melton knew that his club night Nag Nag Nag had reached some kind of tipping point when he peered out of the DJ booth and spotted Cilla Black on the dancefloor. “I think that’s the only time I got really excited,” he laughs. “I was playing the Tobi Neumann remix of Khia’s My Neck, My Back, too – ‘my neck, my back, lick my pussy and my crack’ – and there was Cilla, grooving on down. You know, it’s not Bobby Gillespie or Gwen Stefani, it’s fucking Cilla Black. I’ve got no idea how she ended up there, but I’ve heard since that she was apparently a bit of a party animal.”

It seems fair to say that a visit from Our Cilla was not what Melton expected when he started Nag Nag Nag in London in 2002. A former member of 80s goth band Specimen who DJed under the name Jonny Slut, he’d been inspired by a fresh wave of electronic music synchronously appearing in different locations around the world. Germany had feminist collective Chicks on Speed and DJ Hell with his groundbreaking label International DeeJay Gigolos. France produced Miss Kittin and The Hacker, Vitalic and Electrosexual. Britain spawned icy electro-pop quartet Ladytron and noisy, sex-obsessed trio Add N To (X). Canada spawned Tiga and Merrill Nisker, who abandoned the alt-rock sound of her debut album Fancypants Hoodlum and, with the aid of a Roland MC-505 “groovebox”, reinvented herself as Peaches. New York had performance art inspired duo Fischerspooner and a collection of artists centred around DJ and producer Larry Tee, who gave the sound a name: electroclash.

The long-awaited return of the series about finding closure is a warm look at parental clutter. Plus, the incredible tale of Taj, who traces his roots from being kidnapped in India to being adopted in Utah

Jonathan Goldstein’s narrative pod about regrets, mistakes and the pursuit of closure – cancelled by Spotify in 2023 – makes its return this week under the Pushkin banner, and it’s been worth the wait. Heavyweight does up-close-and-personal like few other shows, and this first episode – about a son’s fears around his parents’ cluttered house, and a plot to relocate their trinkets to a barn – is both warm and spiked with melancholy. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly from Thu

What if Descartes had melted his brain on acid? Find out in this mind-expanding exploration of thought and consciousness

This book is a trip. Among other things, it copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité has ingested. They include psilocybin, LSD, cannabis; quetiapine and Xanax (for anxiety); venlafaxine, Prozac, Lexapro and tricyclics (antidepressants); caffeine (“I have drunk coffee every single day without fail since September 13, 1990”); and, at least for him, the always disappointing alcohol.

The really trippy thing, though, is not so much Justin Smith-Ruiu’s descriptions of his drug experiences, but the fact that they’re written by a tough-minded analytic philosopher, one as familiar with AJ Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge as Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-inspired The Doors of Perception. Moreover, they’re presented with the aim of melting the minds of his philosophical peers and the rest of us by suggesting that psychedelics dissolve our selves and make us part of cosmic consciousness, thereby rendering us free in the way the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined it (paraphrased by Smith-Ruiu as “an agreeable acquiescence in the way one’s own body is moving in the necessary order of things”).

This deeply comforting tale of record collecting, magical creatures and a lovingly knitted cardigan rambles across England

Ursula K Le Guin had her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction; I have my comfy cardigan theory. What Le Guin proposed is that human culture, novels included, didn’t begin with technologies of harm, such as flints and spears, but with items of collection and care, such as the wicker basket or, nowadays, the carrier bag. And so, if we make them that way, novels can be gatherings rather than battles.

Tom Cox’s third novel fashions an escape from the dangerous outside world into something soft, comforting and unfashionable. It might once have been a Neanderthal’s armpit, but now it’s more likely to be a cosy cardigan. Or a deeply comforting story.

A century from now, a literature scholar pieces together a picture of our times in a novel that quietly compels us to consider the moral consequences of global catastrophe

The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just McEwan’s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes – to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England’s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.

These thoughts were provoked by a brief passage in McEwan’s future-set new novel that describes the “Inundation” of Britain after a Russian warhead goes off accidentally in the middle of the Atlantic, causing a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, wipes out everything but a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks. In these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the fate of that other major chunk of the British Isles is not mentioned. Presumably Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. But from McEwan’s future history, you’d never know it. I began to think of What We Can Know as another of McEwan’s deeply English stories. It has, I thought, the familiar partialities of vision. Has Brexit, endlessly backstopped by those pesky six counties, taught English liberals nothing?

Artificial intelligence will replace creativity with something closer to magical wishing. The challenge for future generations will be dealing with the feeling of emptiness that leaves us with

In the German fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife, an old man one day catches a strange fish: a talking flounder. It turns out that an enchanted prince is trapped inside this fish and that it can therefore grant any wish. The man’s wife, Ilsebill, is delighted and wishes for increasingly excessive things. She turns their miserable hut into a castle, but that is not enough; eventually she wants to become the pope and, finally, God. This enrages the elements; the sea turns dark and she is transformed back into her original impoverished state. The moral of the story: don’t wish for anything you’re not entitled to.

Several variations of this classic fairytale motif are known. Sometimes, the wishes are not so much excessive or offensive to the divine order of the world, but simply clumsy or contradictory, such as in Charles Perrault’s The Ridiculous Wishes. Or, as in WW Jacobs’ 1902 horror story The Monkey’s Paw, their wishes unintentionally harm someone who is actually much closer to them than the object of their desire.

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch 2; Gearbox Software/2K Games
Familiar and predictable, but also well-honed and significantly less juvenile, the fourth Borderlands game is a blast

Once a games franchise hits its fourth outing, it is certainly mature – yet maturity is not a word generally associated with Borderlands, the colourful and performatively edgy looter-shooter from Texas. This series is characterised by a pervasive and polarising streak of distinctly adolescent humour. But in Borderlands 4, developer Gearbox has addressed that issue: it features plenty of returning characters in its storyline, but this time around they are more world-weary and less annoyingly manic. Borderlands has finally matured, to an extent. And not before time.

Borderlands 4 still flings jokes at you thick and fast, and they are still hit-or-miss, but at least its general humour is a bit more sophisticated than before. It retains the distinctive cel-shaded graphical style and gun and ordnance-heavy gameplay that people have always loved. Indeed, it throws even more guns at you than any of its predecessors, and with a little work at filtering out the best ones, you will find plenty of absolute gems with which to take on hordes of straightforward enemies and more interesting bosses. A decent storyline emerges after the formulaic first few hours, eventually sending you off on some unexpected, fun and sometimes gratifyingly surreal tangents.

From famous Street Fighter lines to quips from 90s classics, these are the quotes we hear again and again – and even incorporate into our own lives

Some snippets of video game dialogue, like classic movie quotes, are immediately recognisable to a swathe of fans. From Street Fighter’s “hadouken!” to Call of Duty’s “remember, no Russian” to BioShock’s “would you kindly?”, there are phrases so creepy, clever or cool they have slipped imperceptibly into the gaming lexicon, ensuring that whenever they’re memed on social media, almost everyone gets the reference.

But there are also odd little phrases, sometimes from obscure games, that stick with us for seemingly no reason. I recall most of the vocal barks from the second world war strategy game Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, even though I haven’t played it for 20 years. Why is it that I’ll lose my headphones, wallet and phone on a daily basis, but I have absolute recall when it comes to the utterances of burly soldier Samuel Brooklyn? Why am I doomed to “Finally, some action”, “Consider it done, boss” and the immortal “okey dokey” echoing through my head? What is wrong with me?

After a lacklustre response to the 2025 edition, the game has gone all out to engage players and respond to user feedback

In an open office space somewhere inside the vast Electronic Arts campus in Vancouver, dozens of people are gathered around multiple monitors playing EA Sports FC 26. Around them, as well as rows of football shirts from leagues all over the world, are PCs and monitors with staff watching feeds of the matches. The people playing are from EA’s Design Council, a group of pro players, influencers and fans who regularly come in to play new builds, ask questions and make suggestions. These councils have been running for years, but for this third addition to the EA Sports FC series, the successor to EA’s Fifa games, their input is apparently being treated more seriously than ever.

The message to journalists, invited here to get a sneak look at the game, is that a lacklustre response to EA Sports FC 25 has meant that addressing user feedback is the main focus. EA has set up a new Player Feedback Portal, as well as a dedicated Discord channel, for fans to put forward their concerns. The developer has also introduced AI-powered social listening tools to monitor EA Sports FC chatter across various platforms including X, Instagram and YouTube.

PC, PS5, Xbox, Switch 2; Bloober Team
An intriguing setup sees an unnamed protagonist time-travel to discover the origins of a devastating outbreak, but a stingy inventory and one-sided battles lead to frustration

Bloober Team, the Polish developer behind 2021’s hugely underrated psycho-thriller The Medium and last year’s excellent Silent Hill 2 remake, clearly understands that there is an established, almost comforting rhythm to survival horror games. It’s baffling, then, to see this latest game excel in so many areas while failing spectacularly on several of the genre’s most basic tenets.

You play an unnamed traveller, the latest of many, sent to gather information about a devastating outbreak that transformed the citizens of a town called New Dawn into the sort of misshapen monsters that have become the staple of sci-fi-adjacent survival horror: contorted of limb, long of fang, and ample of slobber. As you explore the stark, often beautifully devastated aftermath of the outbreak, you search for places where you can travel back through time to when all hell was breaking loose, extracting persons of interest who may shed light on the disaster. A slow-burn story is revealed through the usual assortment of voice notes, missives and grim environmental clues (often, as is de rigueur, daubed in blood on walls).

Late-night hosts discuss Maga’s baseless claims about ‘violence’ from the ‘far left’ and Trump’s new $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times

• Jimmy Kimmel Live! suspended indefinitely after host’s Charlie Kirk comments

Late-show hosts recap Donald Trump’s chilly reception in the UK, his corrupt business deals with the UAE and Maga’s fearmongering around the “radical left”.

‘When I stopped to let him out, he was looking down. I didn’t know what he was doing. Turned out he was writing a poem about me. I still have it’

I drove a cab in New York for three decades. Riding around, I would meet poets, drag queens and other people who were inspiring. It made me feel good. I started taking their portraits, sometimes with me in the picture. I had several cameras and would often have my strobe hooked on to my visor with a rubber band.

This particular evening, in 1990, I had been informed by a friend that there was a book event going on so I went to take a look. It was jam-packed inside. I spotted Allen Ginsberg, so I went over and talked to him a little. He was pretty intense, kind of stressed, so I had to lay back a little but I asked him if he could write an introduction to my book In My Taxi. But he had too much going on.

The late frontman refused to adhere to the lyrical conventions of the genre, surveying suffering in a peerless wailing screech that will echo across the history of heavy music

Tomas Lindberg was not the voice of death metal – he was so much better than that. During his 35-year career fronting Swedish band At the Gates, he never toed the line, never grunted about loving violence and hating Christianity because the genre dictated that you do so. Rather, he ripped up the rulebook with both his messaging and his delivery, setting a new standard for distinctiveness in extreme music.

Lindberg – who has passed away aged 52 after being diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare oral cancer – was fascinated with suffering. Yet, unlike his peers, he was seldom concerned with the suffering caused by a chainsaw or organised religion. It was the suffering inside of us, rooted in our own expectations, trauma and follies. “Twenty-two years of pain and I can feel it closing in,” goes the bridge of 1995’s semi-autobiographical fan-favourite track Cold. “The will to rise above, tearing my insides out.” And Lindberg delivered each line not with a typical, guttural rumble, but with a wailing screech that made all that anguish feel even more real.

Veteran journalist played by Redford in 1976 film version of the Watergate exposé that brought down the Nixon presidency pays tribute to a ‘fiery’ friend

• Robert Redford: the incandescently handsome star who changed Hollywood forever

Bob Woodward, the journalist played by Robert Redford in the 1976 corruption exposé All the President’s Men, has paid tribute to the actor who died on Tuesday, saying he was “a noble and principled force for good”.

In a statement posted on social media, Woodward said that Redford and he had been friends for 50 years and that he “admired him – for his friendship, his fiery independence, and the way he used any platform he had to help make the world better, fairer, brighter for others”.

This is a powerful month for fashion, and an ideal time to try a waistcoat, wider trousers, a shorter skirt or a splash of saturated colour

‘Every day is all there is”, as Joan Didion put it, rather elegantly. The words are so smoothly balanced you can turn them over in your mind like a pebble, and the phrase popped into my head the other day when I was thinking about why September is such a powerful month for fashion. September, the saying goes, is January for fashion people. This is sunrise for new trends, high noon for shopping, peak season for glossy magazines packed with breathless style instruction. It is the point in the calendar when an update of what you wear suddenly feels urgent.

This seems, on the surface, like odd timing. After all, once you get to be an adult, nothing much happens in September. It’s not much of a season for parties, or for family holidays. Just the muscle memory of school days makes this the moment to lock back into the routine, the nine-to-five, the tea-bath-bed. But that’s the point. September is all about the everyday.

The latest craze for the kidult market is small stuffed toys you attach to your clothes. But can you look cool – or even just socially acceptable – while wearing them?

There was a time when adults who owned collections of stuffed toys were relatively uncommon, weird even. All that has changed recently: the rise in popularity of toys such as Squishmallows and Jellycat Amuseables has been linked to the growing “kidult” market (adults buying toys for themselves) which accounted for almost 30% of toy sales last year. On the whole, cuddly toys are something people keep at home, on their beds or on display shelves. But that’s changing too – plush toy keyrings such as Labubus are now everywhere. And some “Disney adults” (self-professed grown up Disney fans who might, for example, go to the theme parks without taking children with them) have gone one step further: attaching toys not just to their bags, but to themselves.

“Shoulder pals” (variously known as “shoulder plushies”, “shoulder toys” and “shoulder sitters”) are small toys made in the likeness of Disney characters. They have magnetic bases and come with a flat metal plate designed to be placed under your shirt, so the toy perches on your shoulder. Since the first one, baby Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, was brought out in 2018, these toys have become a common accessory at the Disney theme parks. There are multiple Reddit threads and TikTok videos about how to track down the latest ones (some are sold at the Disney store, but others are only available at specific locations within the parks). There will apparently be 45 official Disney shoulder pals on offer by the end of next year, with characters ranging from Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell to Anxiety from Inside Out 2. That’s not to mention the many, many knockoffs available online, as well as those sold by Primark, or the DIY pals that some creative TikTok users have been making.

The freezer is one of the best tools for saving waste. Here it makes an unexpected but inspired burrata topper

While most Instagram food trends prioritise spectacle over substance, the viral frozen tomato idea that I’m employing today delivers genuine culinary value, and solves a common kitchen problem into the bargain. I’m a bit late to the party, admittedly, but it’s a versatile waste-saving technique.

Its origin clearly derives from either Hawaiian shaved ice or granita, that classic Italian frozen dessert made by stirring and scraping or grating a sorbet-like base into shavings, and the approach essentially applies granita principles to fresh produce, while at the same time cutting out all of the hassle: simply pop any surplus or past-its-best fruit or vegetables in the freezer until they’re rock solid, then grate!

Field-to-fork farmers on the Scottish island are restoring abandoned crofts and serving home-grown produce and freshly caught seafood in their homesteads

‘Edible means it won’t kill you – it doesn’t mean it tastes good. This, however, does taste good,” says chef Carla Lamont as she snips off a piece of orpine, a native sedum, in her herb garden. It’s crisp and juicy like a granny smith but tastes more like cucumber. “It’s said to ward off strange people and lightning strikes; but I like strange people.”

We’re on a three-hectare (seven-acre) coastal croft on the Hebridean island of Mull. Armed with scissors, Carla is giving me a kitchen garden tour and culinary masterclass – she was a quarter-finalist in Masterchef: The Professionals a few years back. Sweet cicely can be swapped for star anise, she tells me. Lemon verbena she uses in scallop ceviche.

A rich and savoury meat main served over steamed rice, and a crunchy and satisfying side or snack

Our restaurant Bao turns 10 this year, and today’s two dishes capture what’s driven us from the start: heritage and innovation. As the season shifts towards autumn, we crave deeper, more grounding flavours, and lu rou fan is just that: rich, savoury and nostalgic. The daikon tots, meanwhile, are a happy kitchen accident from even before we even had a restaurant – they’re crunchy on the outside, soft within and oddly satisfying. Both dishes reflect what we have always been about: balancing the familiar and the unexpected. Honest, humble and a little indulgent, and perfect for that in-between time as summer fades.

Give cakes and cookies a fruity boost, lend breakfast a sweet lift – and save the rest to jar up as Christmas gifts

I have a lot of jam made with all kinds of berries – are there any bakes that would use some of it up?
Anne-Lies, Gouda, the Netherlands
“Jam is at the heart of many great British puddings and cakes, so there are never too many jars in my house!” says Emily Cuddeford, co-founder of Edinburgh’s Twelve Triangles bakery. Her first thought, though, would be to tip a jar of the sweet stuff into a buttered ceramic baking dish and top it with sponge: “Make a classic, equal-parts mix scaled to your dish by creaming, say, 180g butter and 180g sugar, slowly beating in an egg and a dash of vanilla or lemon zest, and finishing with 180g self-raising flour.” Spoon that on top of the jam and bake at 190C (170C fan)/375F/gas 5 until the sponge “bounces back” and a skewer comes out clean. Serve warm with cream or custard, and job’s a good ’un.

You’ll also want jam to fill or top cakes. “Obvious things are a Victoria sponge, but that doesn’t use much jam,” says the Guardian’s own Benjamina Ebuehi, so she’d be more inclined to spoon buttercream over the top of a coconut cake, for example, make a dip in the middle with the back of a spoon and pop some jam in there: “That’s a nice way to decorate a cake and it also uses up a decent amount of jam.” It wouldn’t hurt, either, to use berry jams to finish a classic school dinner traybake sponge: “Once it’s out of the oven, top with jam then scatter with desiccated coconut.” Otherwise, Ebuehi says, joy can be found in a nostalgic jam tart or Italian crostata (look out for Ebuehi’s blackberry version next week).

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

The high street brand moves beyond fast fashion with a brutalist collection, while Paltrow loses the gimmicks

The headline act on day four of New York fashion week had all the hallmarks of a typical designer catwalk, including a pulsating soundtrack and a front row peppered with Hollywood stars. However, there was a twist. Instead of a luxury brand staging the show on Sunday, it was the high street label Cos.

The Swedish label, founded in 2007 by the H&M group, welcomed guests including the British actors Jodie Turner-Smith and Naomi Watts as well as the singer Lauryn Hill to a former 1890s rope factory in Brooklyn.

The white shirt speaks of formality without trying too hard and is making a comeback on the catwalk and on screen

Victoria Beckham has positioned herself as a pop star, mother, perfumier, TikToker and fashion designer. But whatever job next month’s Netflix documentary focuses on – details are scant, but it’s thought the early October series will end at her Paris catwalk show – she will always be scrutinised over how she looks. How to temper that? Wear a plain white shirt.

The documentary poster released this week shows Beckham wearing a diamond tennis bracelet, open-collar white shirt – and nothing else. Last week, the Princess of Wales appeared in public at the Natural History Museum, also in a plain white shirt. Earlier this month, the Duchess of Sussex launched her Netflix series in a white shirt (one of seven in fact), and when Taylor Swift recently announced her new album she did so wearing a white shirt. Laura Dern wore hers twice at the Venice film festival, and the woman with the most enviable wardrobe in fashion – Sarah Jessica Parker – chose a billowing version to promote her role as Booker prize judge.

The American dream has never looked more seductive, with long and loose summer wardrobes and beachy jewellery

With the death of Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren became the world’s oldest major working fashion designer. The spotlight arrives with great timing for an 85-year-old on a hot streak. His brand is in better health than it has been for decades, with shares up 35% in 2025 and annual sales figures showing an 8% growth to $7.1bn (£1.25bn).

On the first night of New York fashion week, Lauren hosted the curtain-raiser for a month of catwalks with a show in his Madison Avenue design studio. Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King chatted to Lauren’s family; Usher smiled broadly behind sunglasses, lounging on a plushly cushioned front row. Champagne was served on silver trays under twinkling chandeliers. In the fractious climate, with the US reeling from the shooting of the far-right activist Charlie Kirk, Ralph Lauren’s affable, charming vision of the American dream has never looked more seductive.

As I reached my late-40s, I’d become anxious and risk-averse. A solo trip made me realise who I was again – and taught me to embrace the thrill of trying something new

I used to pride myself on being a gung-ho kind of person, embracing change and thrills in life, whether that was travelling alone to South America or doing standup comedy. But, as my 40s progressed, I found myself becoming more cautious. I started to choose the safer option, such as booking a package holiday instead of a DIY adventure, or hesitating before sending a work email, worried it didn’t sound “right”.

I felt anxiety, low mood and brain fog – all symptoms of perimenopause – creeping in. I was in what I would call a menopausal funk: weighed down by my feelings and my slightly aching body. I began experiencing this two years ago. I’m 47 now. Taking HRT (hormone replacement therapy) helped, but I felt as if I had reached a point in my life where I had to accept that I was just going to be a bit less “me” and not so brave.

After Jessica and I received expert counselling from the hit show Couples Therapy, I became public enemy number one. Here’s what didn’t make it to the screen

“You are the reason women hate men,” a woman commented on one of my Instagram posts. “You don’t deserve Jessica, you schmuck,” another said in a direct message on Facebook. “I hope you’ve gotten the help you need and set your poor wife free,” wrote a third.

I am a novelist who relishes connecting with his audience. That disposition has suffered. The reason: three months ago, the US network Showtime aired the latest season of the documentary series Couples Therapy, on which my wife Jessica and I appeared as one of the pairs.

Grace and Theo’s long-distance relationship – and mismatched libidos – puts pressure on their sex life, but they are learning to build intimacy

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

“We’ve been getting to know each other and building intimacy in bursts of a few weeks at a time

Martha, 30, an analyst, meets Jack, 26, a primary school teacher

What were you hoping for?
A fun evening, a free meal, a story and the fun of appearing in the Guardian. But deep down, to meet someone that I really want to be with.

My husband and I still have sex – but something’s missing. Is stress the culprit?

I’m a woman in my 50s and have been with my husband for decades. We have always had a wonderful sex life and I used to be able to climax vaginally very easily, often without clitoral stimulation. During an eventful time for the family a couple of years ago, my libido and ability to climax disappeared, though they did eventually return. A few months ago, I had a health crisis, which has slightly impaired my coordination on one side. Although I have recovered very well, I am again experiencing a loss of libido and sexual sensation.

We continue to have sex regularly and I enjoy the intimacy. I can climax with clitoral stimulation but it takes a long time and can be almost physically painful. I really miss vaginal orgasms and the release they brought. Although I am of perimenopausal age, I have no obvious symptoms and a hormone test came back normal.

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.

For decades, lung cancer has been viewed as a disease of older men who smoked. Now, cases among young women are on the rise and doctors are baffled. Could air pollution be behind it?

Towards the end of 2019, Becca Smith’s life was full and hectic. At 28, she had taken on a unit in Chester to convert into a yoga studio, poured in all her savings and hired teachers, while at the same time working as a personal trainer. Her days started at 5am; she was driven, stressed, excited, and had no time for the back pain that just would not subside.

“It kept moving around,” she says. “Every day it would be in a different part of my back. I was strapping on heat packs and ice packs just to get to work.” Smith saw her GP, her physiotherapist and a chiropractor, all of whom suspected a torn muscle. “What really worried me,” she says, “the worst-case scenario, was a slipped disc.” One day in March 2020, the pain was so intense that Smith took to her bed, fell asleep and woke with a crashing migraine and blurred vision. Her mum took her to the optician who shone a light behind Smith’s eyes, saw haemorrhaging and sent her straight to the hospital. Once there, Smith was admitted, and over the course of a week, had an MRI, a CT scan, and a biopsy taken from the cells in her back.

The JadeYoga Harmony helped me unlock a new form of fitness, and stuck with me for the long haul

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The original yogis didn’t have rubber mats, or foam ones, for that matter. They had bare ground, grass mats and animal skins, if they were lucky. So when my wife suggested I spend $90 on a natural rubber yoga mat like the one she had, I balked. Is that really necessary?

It turns out the answer was yes. Ten years later, I’m still using the JadeYoga Harmony mat I sprang for, and I’m no longer a skeptic, I’m an evangelist. Natural rubber provides enough cushion for comfort, enough grip to safely push my limits, and the durability of a truck tire.

Neil Gilson is undertaking a huge mental and physical task to raise awareness of a neuropsychiatric condition that affected his son Jack

The physical effort as he battles currents, coldness and wind is massive, but the mental challenge of ploughing on alone for hours on end is even more testing.

Neil Gilson, a father of three from Devon, is about to set off on the next leg of his attempt to become the first person to swim the 10 largest lakes in Switzerland, a total of about 230 miles.

DIY expert Jaharn Quinn has spent 20 years upcycling homewares. She shares where to look and what to bring when hunting for pre-loved pieces

I have always loved thrifting and upcycling. There’s no greater feeling than discovering a hidden gem at a thrift shop and upcycling it into something new, especially when you save hundreds – sometimes thousands – of dollars.

I love flipping through interior magazines, poring over gorgeous images on Pinterest and scrolling through home tours on social media.

Compile your thrifting inventory. This should include the items you are especially looking for, such as a bedside table or a chest of drawers. It’s inevitable that you’ll get sidetracked – which is half the fun – but a list helps you focus when you start to feel overwhelmed, which sometimes happens.

Always carry cash. It makes it easier to bargain.

Pack plenty of blankets or towels in your car. These will protect the pieces you find and keep them cushioned from moving around in your vehicle too much.

Pack a toolkit including antibacterial wipes to wipe down secondhand furniture, removing the dust and dirt to see what’s underneath; measuring tape to see what will fit in your car and home; a notebook filled with ideas, house plans and measurements plus a pencil to jot more down; paint swatches to check for colours that can easily be integrated into your home; and a screwdriver set in case you need to take furniture apart to fit it into your car.

From telling the insurers to accepting you may need to get the experts in, tips on dealing with the deceased’s property

When someone close to you dies, be it a relative or a friend, practical considerations may be far from your mind. But you could quickly find that you have the responsibility of looking after, then clearing out, their home.

I should have been devastated when I came third in a public speaking competition. But the joy that came out of nowhere has shaped the rest of my life

“I am a teenager, living in an age with war, corruption, discrimination, racism, sexism. But no one seems angry about it. People see the slight advances towards equal society as having solved our issues entirely and it just isn’t enough.”

It’s March 2015, and I’ve done it: I’ve solved inequality. Standing in the basement room of Modern Art Oxford for my regional heat of the Articulation prize public speaking competition, I truly believe that I may have just introduced this room full of parents and teachers to the concept of feminism. I’m very pleased with myself.

It doesn’t have to be miserable. We asked experts how best to start training your new (or old) best friend

My family has never been closer to the brink of collapse than when we got a puppy. We spent hours reading articles and watching videos about puppy training, and were constantly arguing about the right way to potty train him or get him to stop barking.

Every new piece of information seemed to contradict what we’d already learned – never scold him! Scold him! – but one thing was certain: make one wrong move and you will ruin your dog and your life forever.

How to start meditating

How to start weightlifting

How to start budgeting

How to start running

Sea levels are rising in New England at some of the fastest rates in the world. On a quiet ribbon of saltmarsh in Rhode Island, septuagenarian Deirdre isn’t prepared to accept the loss of her beloved saltmarsh sparrow - the species is facing extinction before 2050 due to elevated high tides inundating nests and drowning fledgling birds. Leading a team of citizen scientists, Deirdre unravels the secret to finding delicate nests amid thick marsh grass, while they design and deploy a low-cost ‘ark’ to try to raise the sparrow nests to safety.

More women are entering the US ranching and agriculture field. Their struggles – and aspirations – defy the traditional Marlboro cowboy stereotype

Savanah McCarty was not riding across the wide-open prairie when a horse accident nearly killed her.

She was in the driveway of her leased farm outside Bozeman, Montana, waiting for a student’s mother to arrive, when her horse seized and flipped over backwards, landing on top of her.

In 2020, after spending half his life in the US, Song-Chun Zhu took a one-way ticket to China. Now he might hold the key to who wins the global AI race

By the time Song-Chun Zhu was six years old, he had encountered death more times than he could count. Or so it felt. This was the early 1970s, the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, and his father ran a village supply store in rural China. There was little to do beyond till the fields and study Mao Zedong at home, and so the shop became a refuge where people could rest, recharge and share tales. Zhu grew up in that shop, absorbing a lifetime’s worth of tragedies: a family friend lost in a car crash, a relative from an untreated illness, stories of suicide or starvation. “That was really tough,” Zhu recalled recently. “People were so poor.”

The young Zhu became obsessed with what people left behind after they died. One day, he came across a book that contained his family genealogy. When he asked the bookkeeper why it included his ancestors’ dates of birth and death but nothing about their lives, the man told him matter of factly that they were peasants, so there was nothing worth recording. The answer terrified Zhu. He resolved that his fate would be different.

We would like to speak to people who are sticking to their jobs, a trend which has been termed job-hugging

Workers in the UK are embracing job-hugging and prioritising security in their careers as they face a competitive job market, according to new figures.

Instead of looking for new roles, employees are sticking to their jobs, a trend which has been termed job-hugging. We would like to speak to people about how they have revitalised their love for their job. How do you bring back the spark when you’ve been in a job for a long time? Do you have any tips you’d like to share about how to make your job more exciting?

We want to hear which Australian birds you think should be shortlisted for the Guardian/Birdlife Australia bird of the year poll next month

• Create your own bird art with colouring sheets from Pete Cromer

Which of the 830 bird species that call Australia home (or at least one of their homes) should make it into the 2025 Australian bird of the year poll?

Australia has the greatest diversity of avian life in the world, home to nearly one in 10 of the world’s 10,000 living bird species. And we love to celebrate it. Australians are renowned for admiring our beautiful, bountiful and boisterous birds. And nothing highlights that more than the Guardian/Birdlife Australia bird of the year poll, held every two years, when birdlovers around the country battle it out to see their favourite feathered friend take the crown as best bird.

We would like to hear from people about their culinary disasters and what they think went wrong

From an overambitious birthday cake to an adventurous would-be feast that ended up in the dustbin, we would like to hear about the worst meal you’ve ever cooked.

We will feature a selection in an article of humorous (and non-lethal) anecdotes of culinary disaster for G2.

We want to hear from people in their 60s, 70s, 80s or even 90s who are actively dating other people over the age of 60

We’d like to hear from both single people and members of couples who very recently met the love of their life on a date. What is the best and worst date you’ve been on? Any funny or shocking anecdotes to share?

How do relationships compare to the ones you had at a younger age? How much does companionship or sex factor? What about exes – your’s and your partners’ children and grandchildren? Are you using apps and websites or relying on word of mouth? Have you been on a lot of dates? What about ghosting?

Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean

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Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi, Nigel Slater, Meera Sodha and all our star cooks, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent and Jay Rayner.

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