After a relationship breakup, rambling 700 miles from the Highlands to Dorset with Martin helped restore my faith in people

I’ve always had a keen sense of adventure. During the summer holidays, my parents would push me and my sister out of the front door and tell us only to come home to eat. I went from roaming the streets of Hackney in east London as a child, to trekking, wild camping and hitchhiking the length of the Americas in my late 20s.

After returning to my home in Liverpool, I worked as a photographer and got into a relationship. When we broke up years later, I was distraught – but it led me back to the life of exploration that I’d put on the back‑burner. In the summer of 2016, I embarked on a solo 1,000-mile (1,600km) route through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Not wanting to feel sealed off from the wondrous environments around me, I did the majority of it on foot.

The US president’s plan for Hollywood is full of plot holes. But when it comes to the hidden propaganda baked into movies, he may have a point

As always with pronouncements by President Trump, once you had peeled away the xenophobia, removed the stew of resentment, ignored the sheer idiocy and asterisked the possible illegality, there was a small kernel of truth to his posting on Truth Social last Sunday. “The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, pointing to the nefarious tax breaks other countries gave film-makers as “a National Security threat” and proposing an 100% tariff on films made oversees. “It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda! WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA AGAIN!”

How would a 100% tariff on films made oversees work? Just movies shot overseas? What about movies set overseas? And who would pay? How do you impose tariffs on goods without a port of entry? “Commerce is figuring it out,” said a White House official. In fact, movies are listed as an exception to presidential authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president authority to address national security threats, so it is likely the lawyers would end up figuring it out, if Trump’s plan went ahead. But, many executives in Hollywood are quietly nodding agreement. It is true that Los Angeles has seen feature movie shoot days plummet from 3,901 in 2017 to just 2,403 in 2024, a 38% drop. Many major franchises such as Avatar and Mission: Impossible are shot mostly overseas, where the lure of lucrative tax breaks offset such minor inconveniences as the incursion of some Derbyshire sheep into one of Tom Cruise’s paragliding set-pieces.

Jonathan Freedland and the senior Washington editor of Semafor, Elana Schor, discuss what the US president is choosing to make a priority, and what he’s neglecting in return

On Thursday, the White House announced a framework for a US-UK trade deal. Earlier in the week, when asked for his take on India’s missile attack on Pakistan, Donald Trump replied: “I get along with both.” But before all of that, on an otherwise quiet Sunday, the US president announced tariffs on foreign films and the reopening of Alcatraz. Throw in the White House posting another AI-generated image of Trump – this time featuring a lightsabre, muscly arms and two bald eagles – and you have one chaotic week.

Archive: BBC News, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News, Sky News, Sky News Australia

As psycho-thriller The Surfer is released, the actor answers your questions about eating rats, loving pickled eggs and scaring Terry Wogan

What do you remember of that appearance on Wogan? What was Terry like in real life? Have you still got that leather jacket, and the snakeskin jacket from Wild at Heart? johnnysmooth, EddieChorepost and BigAl65
I remember Terry Wogan was a very nice man and I enjoyed the interview with him, although I thought I was both obnoxious and somewhat wild. I guess it’s no secret that I was promoting a movie called Wild at Heart, so I was sort of play acting to that. I remember, as a child, I was in a car, a guy was walking down the street, and he had a leather jacket on and no shirt on underneath. I thought: “Well, that’s an interesting look.” I don’t know why that came back to me when I went on Terry’s show, but I thought: “I’m going to create that look again.” It was incredibly absurd and irreverent. I don’t have that leather jacket any more.

I found the snakeskin jacket in a secondhand store on Melrose in Los Angeles called Aaardvark’s – it reminded me of the jacket Brando wears in The Fugitive Kind – and I knew at some point I was gonna put it in a movie. I ended up giving it to Laura Dern because she was such a terrific actor, I enjoyed our time together on that movie with David Lynch, so I wanted her to have it.

It can happen when doing ‘just about anything’ – experts share how to get ‘in the zone’, and what can pull you out

What is the secret to happiness? In a 2004 Ted Talk, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi boldly claimed to have the answer: flow.

Flow is the experience of being completely absorbed in a particular task. Sometimes we call it being “in the zone”. Csikszentmihalyi described it in his Ted Talk as an “effortless, spontaneous feeling” and an “ecstatic state”.

An intense focus that “leads to a sense of ecstasy”

Knowing exactly what you want from one moment to the next

Getting immediate feedback on what you are doing

Knowing your goal is achievable, even if it is difficult

Losing track of time

Forgetting yourself – you are so focused on your task that any self-consciousness disappears

Feeling part of something bigger than yourself

His role in This City Is Ours has had the Liverpool FC squad perform line dances with him, he’s wowed in Black Mirror and he’s bringing Bez’s life to screen. It’s all down to meeting his hero in a chicken restaurant

James Nelson-Joyce is still buzzing. Two days ago, he not only watched his beloved Liverpool FC clinch the Premier League title but led a celebratory dance with his heroes. “I ended up in the Anfield boardroom after the match, then partied with the team,” he grins. “The DJ clocked that I was there, played Andy Williams’ House of Bamboo and it all went right off.”

The 36-year-old Merseysider is now starring in BBC gangland thriller This City Is Ours, in which a local crime family perform a choreographed line-dance to the loungecore classic. “Harvey Elliott and a few other players dragged me on to the dancefloor and made me do it with them,” he chuckles in disbelief. “They all love the show, which is a huge compliment.”

Colleagues recall a calm and grounded leader capable of moderating between factions, with a strong connection to his predecessor

• New pope chosen: latest updates
• Share your views on Pope Leo XIV

Robert Francis Prevost – who has chosen the papal name Leo XIV – may not be the Latin American Jesuit wildcard that his predecessor, Pope Francis, was, but his election is similarly historic.

In the figure of the 69-year-old former head of the Augustinian order, the Roman Catholic church has its very first US leader. Until Thursday evening, the idea of the fisherman’s ring being slipped on to a North American hand was seen as a fairly distant possibility. The Vatican’s longstanding opposition to a US pope stemmed largely from the optics of having a pontiff from a political superpower and a country with such a hegemonic cultural and secular global influence.

Successor to Pope Francis becomes first US pontiff, although he is also a Peruvian citizen

• Robert Francis Prevost: the moderate, good humoured first US pope
• Americans on first US pope: ‘Everything dope, including the pope’
• Share your views on Pope Leo XIV

Historically, some of the conclaves were really drawn out: in 13th century, they needed three years, over 1,000 days, to choose Gregory X.

There was also one that ended on the first day, when Julius II in 1503 was elected after just 10 hours.

Residents – Catholic and non-Catholic – celebrate a ‘moment of joy’ as native son Robert Prevost becomes new pontiff

As white smoke billowed from the Vatican in Rome, yellow papal flags whipped in the crisp Lake Michigan breeze in front of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy on Chicago’s North Side.

Screams of “Habemus Papam!” echoed throughout the cafeteria at the Catholic school on Thursday afternoon, when news broke that Chicago’s Robert Prevost had become Pope Leo XIV.

Leo XIV celebrated as second Latin American pope having spent many years in Peru’s church

• Pope Leo XIV – live updates

The election of Pope Leo XIV has been celebrated across Latin America, where many hailed him as the second pontiff from the region, after his Argentinian predecessor, Francis.

The news prompted particular elation in Peru, where he lived and worked for more than 20 years and was granted citizenship in 2015. In the capital, Lima, the bells of the cathedral rang in celebration.

In his first appearance from the Vatican balcony, Leo XIV briefly switched from Italian to Spanish to address the faithful “from my beloved diocese of Chiclayo, in Peru”, where he served as bishop for more than a decade.

Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson hails hometown cardinal as Donald Trump and others offer congratulations

• New pope chosen: latest updates
• Share your views on Pope Leo XIV

Americans are celebrating and speaking out after the US cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who will be known as Pope Leo XIV, was announced as the next pope.

“Congratulations to Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was just named Pope. It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope. What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social shortly after the pope, who was born in Chicago, appeared on the Vatican balcony in Rome on Thursday.

Vice-president says US will seek to de-escalate but cannot force either nuclear power to ‘lay down their arms’

JD Vance has said that the US will not intervene in the conflict between Pakistan and India, calling fighting between the two nuclear powers “fundamentally none of our business”.

The remarks came during an interview with Fox News, where the US vice-president said that the US would seek to de-escalate the conflict but could force neither side to “lay down their arms”.

Announcement makes UK the first country to agree deal with US since Trump imposed sweeping tariffs in April

• Aston Martin and Rolls-Royce share prices soar as manufacturers welcome US tariff cuts
• Analysis: new UK/US trade deal is a relief for Starmer but doubts, and tariffs, remain
• US politics live – latest updates

The UK and US have agreed a “breakthrough” trade deal slashing some of Donald Trump’s tariffs on cars, aluminium and steel and that the prime minister said would save thousands of British jobs.

Keir Starmer said it was a “fantastic, historic day” as he announced the agreement, the first by the White House since Trump announced sweeping global tariffs last month.

Ukrainians record 734 attacks despite Putin’s claim of three-day halt to fighting; Britain further targets Russian oil ‘shadow fleet’. What we know on day 1,171

Donald Trump after a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for “ideally, a 30-day unconditional ceasefire”. “If the ceasefire is not respected, the US and its partners will impose further sanctions,” Trump posted. Zelenskyy said after the call on Thursday that he told Trump that Ukraine was ready for talks on the war with Russia “in any format” but first “Russia must show that it is serious about ending the war, starting with a full and unconditional ceasefire”.

The call between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday went “very well”, said a senior Ukrainian official. The conversation lasted about 20 minutes and focused on diplomacy and the genuine ceasefire that the US and Ukraine are trying to establish, while the presidents also discussed the Ukraine-US minerals deal, ratified on Thursday by the Ukrainian parliament.

Ukraine has accused Russia of violating Vladimir Putin’s self-declared ceasefire 734 times within its first 12 hours. Kyiv’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, called it a “farce”. The Russian president’s unagreed ceasefire aims to protect parades and other proceedings on Russia’s biggest secular holiday, the 80th anniversary of victory over Germany in the second world war.

In its opening hours, Russian bombs struck north-east Ukraine, killing at least one civilian, said Ukrainian officials who added that artillery assaults took place across the 1,000km (620 mile) frontline, although with less intensity than in the previous 24 hours. Russia carried out 63 assaults along the frontline. Attacks took place near Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region. Large-scale missile and drone attacks abated for a short time, the Ukrainian air force said. But Russian forces fired a missile in central Ukraine’s Poltava region, a top regional official said, damaging roofs of houses when air defences brought it down.

The Russian defence Ministry accused Ukrainian forces of attacking its positions and said Russian forces would continue to “mirror” Ukraine’s actions during the Kremlin’s ceasefire. The Russian regions of Belgorod, Lipetsk, Orenburg, Ryazan and Tambov issued drone alerts, but there were no reports of any drones being shot down or intercepted. Russia’s civil aviation authority Rosaviatsia briefly imposed restrictions on flights to and from the airport in Nizhny Novgorod.

Reuters journalists with a Ukrainian drone unit near the front in eastern Ukraine said a Russian infantry raiding party tried to advance on Thursday, but was stopped by drones. “The infantry are still coming,” said one of the soldiers in the unit, a 33-year-old who identified himself by his callsign Mikha. A second person who identified himself as Nazar said in the six hours since the Russian ceasefire started there had been three strikes on his section of the front: “The facts speak for themselves.”

Germany said Trump voiced support for European efforts to end the Ukraine war in a first phone call with the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz. A German statement said: “Trump said he would strongly support Germany’s efforts, together with France, Great Britain, Poland and other European partners, to achieve lasting peace.” Merz assured Zelenskyy of his support and remained open to arming Ukraine with Germany’s Taurus cruise missiles, which the previous chancellor, Olaf Scholz, refused to do.

Britain has announced further sanctions targeting Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said his government was sanctioning up to 100 tankers responsible for carrying more than $24bn worth of cargo since the start of 2024. The UK also said the ships are damaging critical subsea cables in Europe.

Starmer is due to attend a meeting of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) in Oslo on Friday where Ukraine and Arctic security are on the agenda. The British-led military alliance is expected to announce further support for Ukraine’s armed forces including intensive training exercises and efforts to counter disinformation. The JEF consists of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the UK.

Microsoft co-founder accuses Trump ally of involvement in ‘killing the world’s poorest children’ by slashing US aid funding

Bill Gates announced plans on Thursday to shutter the Gates Foundation in 2045 and also strongly criticized Elon Musk for slashing funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), accusing the Tesla CEO of involvement in “killing the world’s poorest children” in new interviews.

In an interview with the Financial Times published on Thursday, Gates condemned the sudden funding cuts to USAID by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), saying the cuts had led to life-saving food and medicines expiring in warehouses, and could result in the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV and polio.

Buoyed by supreme court ruling, Pentagon will remove as many as 1,000 service members. Key US politics stories from Thursday 8 May at a glance

“No More Trans @ DoD,” Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, posted after the supreme court allowed the Trump administration’s ousting of transgender troops to go forward. As of Thursday, the orders have been issued to identify and involuntarily force trans people out of service.

Department officials have said it is difficult to determine exactly how many transgender service members there are, but medical records will show those who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, show symptoms or are being treated. Those troops would then be forced out.

Mayor to make major policy shift and say scale of housing crisis requires breaking taboo

Sadiq Khan is announcing plans to build on parts of London’s green belt, in a dramatic shift in housing policy aimed at tackling “the most profound housing crisis in the capital’s history”.

In a major speech on Friday, the mayor of London is expected to say the scale of the challenge, which could need about 1m new homes built in the next decade, requires a break from longstanding taboos.

In Who Killed Shireen?, IDF soldier Alon Scagio is named as shooter of the Palestinian-American in Jenin in 2022

A new US-made documentary has produced evidence pointing to the identity of an Israeli soldier who shot dead the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022.

The documentary, Who Killed Shireen?, concludes that a member of the Duvdevan Israeli special forces unit shot Abu Akleh while she was reporting for Al Jazeera in Jenin, on the West Bank.

Lawyers say they’re ‘still in dark’ about government’s efforts to free the man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador

The Trump administration is invoking the “state secrets privilege ” in an apparent attempt to avoid answering a judge’s questions about its erroneous deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador.

US district judge Paula Xinis disclosed the government’s position in a two-page order on Wednesday. She set a Monday deadline for attorneys to file briefs on the issue and how it could affect Ábrego García’s case. Xinis also scheduled a 16 May hearing in Greenbelt, Maryland, to address the matter.

Researchers link suspected cases in New Brunswick to known diseases, suggesting ‘misdiagnosis and misinformation’

A new peer-reviewed scientific study has found no evidence of a mystery brain disease in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, suggesting instead a troubling combination of “misdiagnosis and misinformation”.

The research comes as the Maritime province prepares its own assessment of more than 220 suspected cases in the hope of giving families some answers to a medical mystery that has gripped the region for years.

Evo Morales is charged with statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl but still hopes to oust former ally Luis Arce as president

If it were not taking place in a small village deep within the Bolivian jungle, the scene could easily have been mistaken for a film set or live-action role-playing game: hundreds of people brandish wooden spears and improvised shields made from iron or plastic drums, some of which still bear the pictogram of the toxic products they once contained.

Behind them a wooden fort – with an elevated observation post where a man holds a bow and arrow – blocks the main path leading to a radio station, where Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales, 65, has been entrenched for seven months, seeking to avoid arrest.

Surge of departures – mostly fleeing a weak economy - fuels concern over the longer-term impact on the country as some small towns scramble for survival

She considers herself a diehard South Island girl, but Harriet Baker, 33, won’t be raising her children in the city where she’s spent most of her life.

“When we bought our house I said, ‘You’ll be taking me out of here in a casket,” she says, of the Dunedin home she and husband Cameron Baker, 33, sold last month.

Prince Harry and King Charles will need to put past grievances to one side if they are to move on from their estrangement, experts say

For most families, fallouts and squabbles are a regular occurrence. But what happens when those rifts deepen to an estrangement, such as appears to have beset the royal family and the Beckhams, and how can relationships be rebuilt?

According to the following psychologists and psychotherapists, family reconciliation requires both sides taking accountability for their behaviour and not letting past grievances and trauma block efforts to meaningfully re-engage with estranged relatives.

Jerce Barrios told his family he might be transferred from a California detention center – no one’s heard from him since

The last time Joregelis Barrios heard from her brother Jerce, the call had lasted just one minute.

Immigration officials had moved Jerce from the detention center in southern California where he had been for six months to another one in Texas. He sounded worried, as if he had been crying. He told his sister he might be transferred somewhere else soon.

From rocks being thrown at cars to spectators being given the red cards, readers share their experiences of the most shocking scenes at children’s soccer games

The first manager my son had, when he was seven, got the parents together and told us how shouting could affect our sons’ development and behaviour, not only as players but as human beings. Usually, I don’t behave so badly. The worst I’ve done is to complain to the referee and I’ve sworn once or twice. But mostly I’ve been civil. There was one time, though, when a game was interrupted because the other team had fielded ineligible nine-year-old players. There was a lot of swearing and shouting from managers and dads. My wife decided enough was enough and took our son from the field to go home. He was the team’s only keeper so without him there was no game and several of the other team’s dads taunted us, shouting: “Are you running?”, “Are you scared?”. My wife ignored them and headed for the exit but one of the dads pushed her. Another guy punched me from behind and I completely lost it and punched back. Both teams were expelled from the tournament.
André Pereira Leme Lopes, 53, Brazil

On a summer morning in 1990, the body of a young woman appeared in a small town close to the frontier. For those who saw her, finding her identity became an obsession that would last 30 years

By Giles Tremlett. Read by Luis Soto

There’s a gap between what you want to do and what you do, advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith writes. Thinking about how it affects others might help

I recognise myself to be very contrarian, to the point of reacting in this fashion in every situation, regardless of what it is. How can I change this?

Eleanor says: It sounds as though there’s a gap between what you want to do and what you do. You can see you’re being contrarian, you want to change that, but that’s not enough to mean things actually change.

The actor’s new travelogue with Charley Boorman is far from action-packed – and could do with fewer episodes. But watching them ride eventually becomes entrancing

They’ve gone Round, Down and Up, and now, for their fourth season, Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman are attempting to ride the Long Way Home. In 2020, the long-running blokes-on-bikes travel series was revived by Apple after a 15-year gap, and it set its stars the task of travelling from the southernmost tip of South America to Los Angeles on electric motorbikes. Not all fans of the previous seasons were enamoured with it, not least because it lacked the everyman appeal of their earlier runs. Having a big team at Harley-Davidson design and custom-build vehicles for the job, and getting a company to install charging points along the route for them, wasn’t quite the same as two old mates jumping on their bikes and camping wherever the mood dictated.

It makes sense, then, for Long Way Home to take it back to basics. It certainly seems as if a concerted effort has been made for McGregor and Boorman to be more relatable. We see more of them with their families and children, and it appears to be a more intimate operation. Instead of the fancy central London office and massive logistics team, there’s a big map pinned to the wall of McGregor’s garage, a small gathering of the original crew, and that should do it. Or at least, it’s made to look that way.

Brooklyn Steel, New York

Stranger Things actor’s musical project has now gone from bedroom to the big stage and, while not all of it works, there’s energy to spare

By now, Djo is not a secret. The psychedelic electro-pop project led by Joe Keery, once an IYKYK solo bedroom-production artist, has reached the mainstream, making the festival circuit at Laneway, Coachella and Glastonbury. And Keery, an actor best known for playing foppish, helplessly winsome Steve Harrington on Stranger Things, has stepped out from the shadows of a persona initially meant to disguise his famous name; gone are the Scooby-Doo Shaggy-style wigs and costumes from Djo’s early performances, meant to dissociate any notion of the Upside Down from Keery’s longstanding interest in making music.

It worked, though in a manner befitting a preternaturally charming and thoughtful celebrity who seemingly courts good fortune: by accident. Djo, pronounced like his first name, blew up not because he was “the guy from Stranger Things”, but because he inadvertently caught a rogue wave of virality. End of Beginning, a synth-y, nostalgic ode to a past version of oneself, became a TikTok track, a million videos soundtracked to Keery’s wistful “and when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it”, largely without knowledge of the name. The song racked up more than 1.4bn streams in 2024, two years after its release on Djo’s second album, Decide.

Popes who take that name tend to be progressive reformers. If Trump and JD Vance think they have an ally in the Vatican, I think not

• Catherine Pepinster is a former editor of The Tablet
• Share your views on Pope Leo XIV

What’s in a name? When it comes to a pope – everything. The white smoke from the Sistine Chapel earlier this evening told the world that a new pope to succeed Francis had been elected – and for the first time the pontiff is from the US.

But if Donald Trump and his Catholic convert Veep, JD Vance, are ready to cheer, then they should think again. Cardinal Robert Prevost has chosen the name Leo XIV – and if you’re a papal Leo, you tend to be a reformer at the progressive end of Catholicism. That Prevost has decided to become Leo XIV will make Catholics think immediately of the last Leo – Leo XIII – and his 1891 encyclical or teaching document, Rerum Novarum, which outlined workers’ rights to a fair wage, safe working conditions and the rights of workers to belong to trade unions. If Pope Francis was the People’s Pope, then Leo XIV is all set to be the Workers’ Pope.

A new pact could be the first step towards extending France’s nuclear shield over central Europe

In the city where a dethroned Polish king once governed a French province and built enduring landmarks, the leaders of France and Poland will sign a treaty on Friday that could be the first formal step towards extending French nuclear deterrence over central Europe in this new era of US unreliability.

The treaty of Nancy will be signed on Europe Day, in the town hall on the 18th-century Place Stanislas, by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk. It will cement a reconciliation between two countries that have been estranged within the EU for most of the last three decades.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

There will be relief for carmakers but not much else to celebrate: Trump’s whims still hang over the UK – and the world – economy

Hang out the bunting and let the church bells ring. A VE Day trade deal with Donald Trump is done, and in the car plants of the West Midlands as much as in the backrooms of No 10, there will be understandable relief that, for now at least, America’s phoney war on them is over.

It’s true that the easing of arbitrary tariffs on cars, steel and aluminium that didn’t even exist until eight weeks ago falls far short of being an actual trade deal, not least because the president could rip it up again tomorrow if he felt like it. But the terms agreed between London and Washington could save thousands of jobs, which isn’t to be sniffed at, even if they’re jobs that need never have been at risk in the first place had Trump not suddenly chosen to threaten them. More surprisingly, Rachel Reeves seems to have managed to hang on to her digital services tax on (mostly US) tech companies, while for all the president’s bluster about “dramatic” new access for cattle ranchers to British markets it could have been infinitely worse for British farming: no chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-injected beef or flooding of the market with heavily subsidised US meat at prices British farmers just couldn’t afford to match.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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

The company is sending more packages every year – but with fewer fulfillment center workers

Stefano La Rovere, director of global robotics, mechatronics and sustainable packaging at Amazon, has the unfortunate task of trying to convince the public that Amazon is not in fact automating away human labor with its robotics deployments.

“It is a myth that technology and robots take out jobs,” La Rovere told CNBC last year. He said robots assisted workers “by reducing walking distance between assignments, by taking away repetitive motions, or by helping them to lift heavy weights. In turn, our employees can learn new skills.”

Benjamin Y Fong is associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University and keeps a newsletter on labor & logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.

Sycophancy stops Trump from dozing off as PM and co hail victory – or at least getting what they could get

Three days ago, Donald Trump promised an announcement that would be very possibly the greatest announcement in the whole history of announcements. Come Thursday morning, he said the US and the UK had reached a full and comprehensive trade deal.

I guess a lot depends on what you mean by the words “greatest announcement” and “full and comprehensive”. As details of the deal began to emerge, it rather looked as if the UK had managed to negotiate a worse deal with the US than we had even two months ago. One that was hardly transformative. Just reversing some of the damage that had been done to the UK by the US starting a global trade war. Tariffs as a protection racket.

The heroism of soldiers from India, Africa and the Caribbean is too often airbrushed, as is the struggle of those who resisted colonial powers

On 8 May 1945, as the allies rejoiced at Germany’s unconditional surrender, some local people in the market town of Sétif in Algeria gathered not to celebrate their freedom but to demand it, carrying Algerian flags and placards calling for independence from France. The French police opened fire, unleashing a spiral of violence resulting in a notorious massacre. Algerian independence militants retaliated by killing about 100 settlers and wounding hundreds more over the next five days. Similar disturbances erupted in the nearby village of Guelma. The colonisers responded with brutal disproportionality – bombing small villages, shelling the area from the coast and running amok, inflicting collective punishment. Official estimates for the number of Algerians killed vary widely, ranging from about 8,000 from some French historians to 45,000 from the Algerian government.

This was no isolated incident. There were similar protests that month against French colonial rule in Syria and Lebanon; six weeks later came a general strike in British-ruled Nigeria; six weeks after that, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesia’s independence from the Dutch, sparking a vicious four-year war; two weeks later, Ho Chi Minh announced Vietnam’s independence, which would not be fully achieved for another three decades. VE Day might have marked the cessation of fighting and atrocities in Europe, but it did not signal the end of Europe fighting or committing atrocities.

Both sides believe they are treading carefully, but without intercession the military clash following the murder of Hindu tourists in Kashmir could escalate

The familiarity of military confrontation between India and Pakistan is no cause for reassurance: this is the worst violence in years. Though neither wants full-blown conflict, the dispute over Kashmir has produced three wars and multiple crises over eight decades. When two nuclear-armed neighbours clash, we should worry.

One reason is that errors and misjudgments are always possible. Following its overnight strikes on Pakistan, which it accuses of involvement in the massacre of Hindu tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir last month, India said that it hit only terrorist infrastructure and that its actions were “not escalatory”. This is not a judgment that can be made unilaterally. Pakistan said India was “igniting an inferno” and that its military is authorised to take corresponding actions.

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

It is shocking that while illnesses specific to men are studied, those affecting women are ignored

Six years after Caroline Criado Perez’s bestselling book Invisible Women drew a mass readership’s attention to the long history of sexist bias in medical research, it is shocking that women and their illnesses are still underrepresented in clinical trials. Analysis by the Guardian of data gathered for a new study showed that from 2019 to 2023, 282 trials involving only male subjects were submitted for regulatory approval in the UK – compared with 169 focused on women.

Health inequality is a complex and multifaceted problem. There are massive socioeconomic differences in life expectancy and infant mortality, as well as race inequalities – for example, in maternity and mental illnesses. These and other disparities, along with those relating to disability, can also be mapped geographically.

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

President Trump’s tariffs have plunged the world economy into chaos. But history counsels against despair – and the left should seize on capitalism’s crisis of legitimacy

Since Donald Trump launched his chaotic trade war earlier this year, it has become a truism to say he has plunged the world economy into crisis. At last month’s spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, where policymakers and finance ministers from all over congregated, the attenders were “shellshocked”, the economist Eswar Prasad, a former senior IMF official who now teaches at Cornell, told me. “The sense is that the world has changed fundamentally in ways that cannot easily be put back together. Every country has to figure out its own place in this new world order and how to protect its own interests.”

Trump’s assault on the old global order is real. But in taking its measure, it’s necessary to look beyond the daily headlines and acknowledge that being in a state of crisis is nothing new to capitalism. It’s also important to note that, as Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” Even would-be authoritarians who occupy the Oval Office have to operate in the social, economic and political environment that is bequeathed to them. In Trump’s case, the inheritance was one in which global capitalism was already suffering from a crisis of legitimacy.

The Mason Mount strike that sealed Manchester United’s Europa League final berth was as sublime as Ruben Amorim’s team were slipshod until the substitute took charge.

With 72 minutes gone, Leny Yoro prodded the ball to Mount who, with the sweetest touch of his right instep, swivelled, then bent the equaliser past the helpless Julen Agirrezabala.

Who are you and what have you done with Ange Postecoglou? There was a messy goal from a set piece, another from a mishit cross, a plan with pragmatism at its core and a team able to find beauty in the kind of ugly performance that has so often left Postecoglou cold.

All the cool came from Tottenham Hotspur in the Arctic Circle. They were robust rather than flimsy on the infamous plastic pitch at the Aspmyra Stadium, serious rather than spectacular, and they did not mind turning this Europa League semi-final against punchy, determined Bodo/Glimt into a grind. Postecoglou, the manager with supposedly no clue how to kill a game, came up trumps. Spurs were dogged, streetwise and smart in unpleasant conditions in northern Norway and, after a season of such strife in the Premier League, their reward is an all-English final against Manchester United later this month.

• Andy Farrell installs Itoje as captain for Australia tour
• Henry Pollock backed to star, Leinster provide 12 players

Andy Farrell has left the door open for his son Owen to join the ­British & Irish Lions tour of ­Australia and called on Henry Pollock to showcase his “cocky” streak after Northampton’s rising star was the standout ­selection in his squad.

Farrell Jr was among the headline omissions from the 38-man group that will be captained by Maro Itoje, with Finn Russell, Fin Smith and ­Marcus Smith preferred as the fly-half options. ­Pollock’s selection caps a stunning rise for the 20-year-old who made his Test debut against Wales in March as part of a remarkable breakthrough season with Northampton. Marcus Smith benefits from his ability to play full-back despite falling down the England pecking order.

Chelsea’s status as London’s prime European trophy hunters remains inarguable. Winning this season’s Conference League would add to a set of two European Cups, two Europa Leagues and having twice been ­winners of the old Cup Winners’ Cup.

If Uefa’s minor competition is not meant for global super-clubs, more clubs such as Djurgården, swept aside easily over two legs, Blues fans can look forward to an eighth European final, having won six of seven. It is a haul Arsenal fans licking painful wounds from Paris can only dream of.

Dominance of last year’s champion can become predictable and this event could be volatile with more opportunities for the peloton

The 2025 Giro d’Italia may lack the star power of the Tour de France, but it is likely to make up for it with dynamic and unpredictable racing when it gets under way in Tirana on Friday.

Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel, the top three riders in last year’s Tour de France, are not racing, but the Giro will, as ever, throw up plentiful drama.

There are high stakes at St James’ Park, City could yet nab second and will Forest cope with playing on the front foot?

Antonee Robinson has been one of the best full-backs in the league this season. He flies up and down the left flank, defends well and whips in crosses. However, the Fulham defender was not at his sharpest during his side’s defeat to Aston Villa last weekend. He found it difficult to contain Morgan Rogers and his crossing was not up to its usual high standards. The concern is whether Robinson, who had missed Fulham’s previous game, is in peak physical condition. It has been a long campaign but Marco Silva needs the USA international to be ready to go when Everton visit Craven Cottage on Saturday. Robinson’s raids are a key part of Fulham’s attacking set-up. Jacob Steinberg

Fulham v Everton, Saturday 3pm (all times BST)

Ipswich v Brentford, Saturday 3pm

Southampton v Manchester City, Saturday 3pm

Wolves v Brighton, Saturday 3pm

Bournemouth v Aston Villa, Saturday 5.30pm

Newcastle v Chelsea, Sunday 12pm

• Midfielder says season is ‘a huge learning curve’
• Arsenal need seven points to finish second in league

Mikel Merino has vowed Arsenal’s young squad will learn from being eliminated in the Champions League semi-finals and is convinced they will “be back stronger” next season.

Paris Saint-Germain booked their place in the final against Inter with a 2-1 win in the second leg, meaning Arsenal will end another campaign without a trophy. They saw off PSV and Real Madrid to reach the last four in the Champions League for the first time since 2009, having been knocked out by Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals last year.

• Home favourite wins 6-5 to book place in playoffs
• United fan Littler goaded by Leeds fans all night

The home favourite Luke Humphries continued the feelgood factor in Leeds by winning night 14 of the Premier League, beating Luke Littler in the final. Littler, a Manchester United fan, had earlier mocked Leeds fans in his opening match

The city has been celebrating the football club’s promotion from the Championship this week and the buoyant supporters got to watch their adopted favourite book his place in the playoffs later this month.

The Copa do Brasil is back after a nine-year break but there are concerns about Brazil’s top flight before a first World Cup in South America

After a nine-year hiatus, fans of Brazilian women’s football will once again be able to support their clubs in the Copa do Brasil. The cup will bring together 65 clubs from the three divisions of the national women’s football league, starting with a preliminary round on 21 May and concluding with the final in November. It is a return that has long been requested by the women’s football community in Brazil in order to expand the calendar for lower-division clubs and gives high-profile teams such as Flamengo, Corinthians and Santos another opportunity to compete for silverware.

However, all is not rosy on the Brazilian club scene only two years before Brazil are to host the Women’s World Cup for the first time. There have been a few years of growing sponsorship and visibility in the top tier, the Brasileirão A1, but this season has exposed the challenges facing the game.

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Exclusive: Prosecutors impanel federal grand jury in Virginia to hear evidence after Trump official’s referral against Letitia James

• US politics live – latest updates

Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, after the Trump administration alleged last month in a referral that she may have falsified paperwork for properties she owns in Virginia and New York, according to people familiar with the matter.

The investigation marks a swift and notable escalation against James, a major political enemy of Donald Trump, who was ordered to pay more than $450m in penalties as a result of a lawsuit brought by James’s office that accused him of inflating his net worth to secure financial benefits.

The film-maker, whose credits also included many Madonna music videos, died of brain cancer

Director James Foley, whose credits included Glengarry Glen Ross and the Fifty Shades sequels, has died aged 71.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, his death was confirmed by his representative who said he died “peacefully in his sleep earlier this week following a years-long struggle with brain cancer”.

Calls for law change after ‘cruel and unnecessary investigation’ into Nicola Packer that CPS brought to trial

When Nicola Packer took a pregnancy test in November 2020, as the country was in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, she did not even believe she was pregnant.

Aged 41 at the time, she thought it more likely that she was perimenopausal, but had been feeling under the weather and when her friend – with whom the pregnancy had been conceived – suggested she took a test, she only did so to “prove him wrong”.

Vermont senator’s joint initiative aims to recruit and train those seeking public office, especially young people

Bernie Sanders is partnering with the group Run for Something to help support a new generation of progressive candidates interested in seeking public office.

Questions about the future of Sanders’ leftwing movement have followed his cross-country Fighting Oligarchy tour, where at each stop the Vermont senator encourages supporters to get involved and run for office. The initiative builds on those calls, Politico first reported, by teaming up with organizations that recruit and train candidates running for office, with an emphasis on young people.

Cliona Ward, who has lived legally in US for decades, was returning from trip to Ireland when held over criminal record from 20 years ago

An Irish woman who was detained by US immigration authorities because of a criminal record dating back almost 20 years has been released after 17 days in custody.

Cliona Ward, 54, who has lived legally in the US for decades, emerged on Wednesday from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility at Tacomain Washington.

The University of Queensland system is intended to give policymakers idea of how species traverse the oceans and what it will take to save them

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Off the east coast of Florida, female loggerhead turtles swim more than 1,000km north, hugging the edge of the continental shelf to get to feeding grounds.

Humpback whales move through Moreton Bay off the Brisbane coast in Australia, on their way to feed around the Balleny Islands more than 4,000km away off the Antarctic coastline, where wandering albatross circle above, travelling 1,000km a day.

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US agency will no longer update major weather database in latest showing of Trump’s influence on climate resources

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer track the cost of climate crisis-fueled weather disasters, including floods, heatwaves, wildfires and more. It is the latest example of changes to the agency and the Trump administration limiting federal government resources on climate change.

Noaa falls under the US Department of Commerce and is tasked with daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate monitoring. It is also parent to the National Weather Service.

Study finds human-caused climate change made four-day rainfall across central Mississippi valley 40% more likely

The four-day historic storm that caused death and destruction across the central Mississippi valley in early April was made significantly more likely and more severe by burning fossil fuels, rapid analysis by a coalition of leading climate scientists has found.

Record quantities of rain were dumped across eight southern and midwestern states between 3 and 6 April, causing widespread catastrophic flooding that killed at least 15 people, inundated crops, wrecked homes, swept away vehicles and caused power outages for hundreds of thousands of households.

Sacred site of the Arabana people could get its most significant top-up in a generation as floods spread across the outback

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A pulse of flood water has surged into Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre in what could be the most significant top-up in a generation.

The sacred site of the Arabana people is home to rivers and creeks that drain towards the second largest salt lake in the world. Its surrounding basin sprawls across 1.2m sq km, or just under one-sixth of Australia’s landmass.

Car exports will face 10% tariffs while levies on steel and aluminium are cut to zero

• Trump and Starmer confirm ‘breakthrough’ UK-US trade deal

The Liberal Democrats treasury spokesperson Daisy Cooper has reiterated the party’s position that any trade deal with the US should be put to parliament for approval before being ratified, saying Labour “should not be afraid” of a vote if they are confident a deal is in the country’s best interests.

Cooper, the MP for St Albans, said in a statement:

Parliament must be given a vote on this US trade deal so it can be properly scrutinised.

A good trade deal with the US could bring huge benefits, but Liberal Democrats are deeply concerned that it may include measures that threaten our NHS, undermine our farmers or give tax cuts to US tech billionaires.

If it’s correct, and you know, whilst we haven’t been named publicly, it does sound like something’s happening, nevertheless, it would be wholly speculative [to comment].

As you appreciate and know full well, with any deal like that, the devil is in the detail. What is the nitty gritty? What does it mean for individual sectors and so on.

I think if we don’t know at all what’s in it, or even if it’ll definitely happen, I think to try and sort of pre-judge what might or might not be in is not something I’m going to get into respectfully. I totally understand why you’re asking that. I think it’s an incredibly important issue, particularly with the wider challenge of tariffs and so on. I’m a big free trader. Our party wants us to see the UK growing by striking trade deals. But I just think you’ve got to wait and see, because who knows, quite frankly.

Charles says sacrifice of second world war heroes must not be in vain

King Charles called for a renewal of “global commitments to restoring a just peace where there is war, to diplomacy and to the prevention of conflict”, as the UK marked the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day.

Westminster Abbey was the focal point for national commemorations with a service of thanksgiving weaving poignant reminders of wartime deprivation and loss with the hopes for the future that historic day had promised.

Nicola Packer, 45, was prescribed medication but was accused of believing she was more than 10 weeks pregnant

A woman has been cleared of illegally terminating a pregnancy, after taking abortion pills during lockdown.

Nicola Packer took the pills at home in November 2020. She had been prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol after a remote consultation.

Likes of Lyse Doucet and Jonathan Dimbleby say they have at times turned away from current affairs

She is perhaps the UK’s most prominent war correspondent, broadcasting from the world’s toughest regions, interpreting its most intractable and bloody conflicts. Yet, like many others when the news agenda is so tough, even Lyse Doucet has said she finds herself tempted to turn off.

“I just want to say as a broadcaster that even though I’m on one side of the microphone and you’re on the other, that I too have been turning away from news and listening to Radio 3 instead of Radio 4, because the news is difficult,” said Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, as she picked up an award last week. “We all think: ‘Oh, it’s so depressing. It’s so gloomy.’”

Chinese leader describes talks as ‘friendly and fruitful’ during visit for Victory Day commemorations

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin exchanged warm words in the Kremlin on Thursday during a grand ceremony welcoming the Chinese leader for his 11th visit to Russia, ahead of a military parade to mark 80 years since the end of the second world war.

After nearly four hours of talks, Xi described his meeting with his Russian counterpart as “in-depth, friendly and fruitful”.

Records obtained by the Guardian indicate shooters did not hit Mikal Mahdi according to protocol, which lawyers say caused prolonged suffering

A South Carolina firing squad botched the execution of Mikal Mahdi last month, with shooters missing the target area on the man’s heart, causing him to suffer a prolonged death, according to autopsy records and his attorneys.

Mahdi, 42, was shot dead by corrections employees last month in the second firing squad execution this year in South Carolina. The state has aggressively revived capital punishment over the last seven months and brought back the controversial firearm method that has rarely been used in the modern death penalty era.

Small genetic changes in enzyme that prevents bad breath in humans lead to sulphurous scent in some asarum

With a smell of rotting flesh the flowers of certain species of wild ginger are unlikely to be used in a wedding bouquet – although they are irresistible to carrion-loving flies. Now researchers say they have worked out how the sulphurous scent is produced.

Scientists say the odour is down to small changes in an enzyme that prevents bad breath in humans.

New-York based asset management company about to issue new guidance, according to FT

• Business live – latest updates

BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset management company, is reportedly preparing to order its senior managers to work from the office five days a week.

The New-York based company is expected to tell its staff as early as Thursday that about 1,000 managing directors around the world should work in the office full-time, the Financial Times has reported.

Ahead of her 50th birthday this month, we rate the best tracks of the multi-hyphenate talent who, with Fugees and as a solo artist, blended soul, hip-hop and reggae with raw emotion and charisma

The closest their debut album Blunted on Reality came to a crossover hit, Nappy Heads is almost unrecognisable as the work of Fugees, who went on to sell millions of records. But it’s an of-its-era joy nonetheless, with a boom-bap rhythm and horns sampled from jazzy 70s funk.

Director Joe Carnahan’s limply made thriller about an estranged couple of elite operatives is a lazy grab bag of exhaustingly familiar cliches

Maybe the new action movie Shadow Force is just deserts for film fans who complain when seemingly surefire big-screen hits such as Another Simple Favor debut as streaming-only releases. Shadow Force has a premise almost comically adherent to the fixations of so many big-budget streaming movies: elite operatives Kyrah (Kerry Washington) and Isaac (Omar Sy) must fight for their lives and their family when they defy the rules of their, yes, shadowy employers by falling in love and having a child. It shares familiar components including charismatic stars, spy action, domestic strife and semi-slapstick violence with projects such as Back in Action (Netflix), Role Play (Prime Video) and Ghosted (Apple TV+), among others. With director Joe Carnahan, it even has a once edgy stylist who used to deal in gritty grain, blown-out color and quick-cut aesthetics, now following in the footsteps of fellow 2000s-era action directors such as McG and Antoine Fuqua by eliminating all traces of color from his work – another streaming trademark. Somehow, it is nonetheless premiering in movie theaters.

This change of venue should be doing Shadow Force a great service. No action picture worth its salt will play better on a smaller screen. But blown up to theater size, Shadow Force doesn’t look any more epic or exciting. It’s working from such a greyish and muted color palette that when enemy combatants throw smoke bombs in order to conceal their attacks, you might find yourself thinking: what’s the difference, really? The whole movie looks like it’s waiting for smoke to clear.

The Canadian director set out to make a 90-minute snapshot of the trans experience before it ballooned in length and scope. Nevertheless, the film’s writer, director and star is confident of reaching the mainstream

When Louise Weard began shooting her debut film in 2023, she envisaged it as a snappy, 90-minute portrait of a group of queer and transgender friends in Vancouver. Now, Castration Movie, a crowdfunded camcorder epic made for less than C$60,000 (£33,000), runs four-and-a-half hours. And that’s just part one. When the entire magnum opus is finished later this year, Weard estimates it will clock in at more than 12 hours. Take that, Béla Tarr. Watch your back, Rivette.

Not that anyone could mistake Castration Movie for slow cinema. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to watch farmers in a field for 20 minutes,” says the 31-year-old director over coffee in an east London cafe. Indeed not: the first hour-and-a-half follows a budding “incel” as he sinks deeper into the manosphere. The narrative focus then switches abruptly to a trans sex worker, Michaela “Traps” Sinclair, played by Weard. Michaela’s abrasive exterior conceals a yearning for motherhood and intimacy; she may have the tongue of Joan Rivers and the decorum of Divine, but she’s as fragile as Edith Piaf. “People are always relieved when they find out I’m nothing like Michaela,” says Weard, whose background is in Canadian underground horror. “She’s the nightmare version of me.”

The zoologist, now aged 97, is about to unveil Time Flower, his fantasy-fuelled film in which he pursues a woman called Ramona – who gave such a brave performance leaping off the bonnet of a car that he proposed to her

In the opening scene of Time Flower, a surrealist film by the zoologist Desmond Morris, a woman is lying facedown on the ground, clutching the grass with manicured hands and shaking her head. She is about to start running across a Wiltshire moor in elegant black heels, chased by Morris in a shirt and tie, her eyes wide, her lipstick dark, the angle of the shot emphasising her perfect, parted, panting mouth. Just before she trips and falls, a wild rabbit will stare straight at the camera – and flee.

This 10-minute black-and-white film, which Morris made in 1950 while he was a 22-year-old student at Birmingham University, has lain untouched in his archive for nearly 75 years. Created in response to Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, it is a testament to Morris’s early work as a surrealist artist. He exhibited alongside Joan Miró before he became a zoology broadcaster and the author of The Naked Ape.

An adaptation of the 2020 YA horror sees an evil clown pick off local youths and while there are a handful of interesting ideas, this is pretty standard late night fodder

One would be forgiven for assuming there was a lot more to early summer slasher Clown in a Cornfield other than, well, a clown in a cornfield. Because ever since an inevitable premiere at SXSW in March, an impressively maintained buzz has followed – special drive-in screenings, an ambitiously wide release, the bullish positioning of a New Horror Icon – giving us enough naive hope that in an overcrowded genre (there’s estimated to be double the amount of wide release horrors this year compared to 2024), this one might be worthy of the hype.

But the film, which was picked up by ever-growing horror streamer Shudder at the end of last year, would have been a wiser choice for a small screen premiere, a late-night weekend couch watch that feels a little too modest for the multiplex. The expansive rollout will likely have been triggered by the surprise success of last year’s Art the Clown sequel Terrifier 3, which made a staggering $90m worldwide from a $2m budget (it was released the month before Clown in a Cornfield was purchased). As small and junky as those films might be, they’re distinguished by a throughline of ghoulishly inventive ultra-gore, a throwback to the kind of video nasty violence that would worry and repulse parents, the act of seeing the films then carrying with it an air of juvenile rebellion.

From Gene Simmons discussing lowgrade meatballs to Shaun Ryder comparing himself to Uncle Fester, Kate Mossman has spent her life interviewing rock stars of a certain age. What has she learned?

Young musicians have so little to say. Give me a rocker in his later years any day. Ask him about his childhood, his relationship with his mum, his painful lifelong love affair with his lead guitarist. Many belong to a specific anthropological group: born after the war, they got their first guitars on hire purchase and went on to date the aristocracy. They became my specialist subject as a journalist: it was impossible to resist the combination of vulnerability, extreme oddness and sharp business nous I found in so many, while others were living in strangely compromised circumstances despite years of deathless hits. I was particularly drawn to those who had continued a career under the radar, or who had slipped under it but hadn’t quite noticed.

It was a strange subject to pursue, but always a labour of love – because on some level, I felt a strange identification with these “cosmic dads” of rock’n’roll. The obsession has culminated in a book, Men of a Certain Age. Here are 10 things I learned in the course of writing it.

‘It was great to get a song that’s entirely in Sanskrit on Radio 1. It has a power that’s beyond us. We’re just the vessels’

It’s not our song; it’s as old as the hills. The first time I heard it was in a Krishna temple as a kid. George Harrison was the first person I know of who recorded it – it’s the last track on 1971’s The Radha Krsna Temple album. We were all living together as a band in Swiss Cottage, London, and that record got played all the time. So I had it absorbed.

SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, California

The singer delivers a rousing, seven-act spectacle as she performs many of her country songs on stage for the first time while also harking back to her previous dance-leaning era

Beyoncé doesn’t just take the stage – she takes the narrative back. On opening night of her Cowboy Carter world tour at the four-year-old SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, she brings forth a sweeping, theatrical spectacle that reclaims country music, reframes American identity and reminds everyone who’s still driving pop’s evolution after all these years. Her nearly three-hour, seven-act performance draws heavily from Cowboy Carter – her Grammy-winning country epic – and threads in nods to Renaissance, the ballroom-infused predecessor that lit up stadiums barely two years ago. Rather than stake a claim in country, Beyoncé goes deeper: celebrating the Black roots of the genre and exploding its boundaries with precision, power and polish.

Outside SoFi, vendors hawk more cowboy hats than you’d see at a Los Tigres del Norte show. Inside, anticipation sizzles. Projected across the massive stage-length screen: CHITLIN’ CIRCUIT – a nod to the historic Black music venues where blues, country and rock took shape. The show begins with American Requiem – the Sign o’ the Times-drizzled opener from Cowboy Carter – followed by a haunting Blackbiird. Then comes a defining moment: a Hendrix-inspired Star-Spangled Banner, laced with the thunder of Freedom, flashing red, white and blue. The screen reads: “Never ask permission for something that already belongs to you.”

An excellent dig into the life – and sex scandal – of the controversial chatshow king. Plus, a new podcast on the Titanic … made by the nephew of a survivor

Long before he was a chatshow titan, Jerry Springer was a plucky young politician who held the post of mayor of Cincinnati before setting his sights on the state of Ohio at large. Slow Burn’s Leon Neyfakh goes all the way back to those beginnings for this nine-part series, marrying excellent journalism with some unbelievable source material – not least when it comes to Springer’s 70s sex scandal. Hannah J Davies
Audible, all episodes out now

Can you tell the American story via ginseng? Thompson’s funny, moving and exquisitely drawn work has a go

Genre is a slippery beast at the best of times, but Craig Thompson’s new book is particularly hard to categorise. It’s a memoir, graphic novel, and piece of social commentary, all based around ginseng. Living in the dirt poor (literally) midwest in the 1980s, his family farmed the plant, with its weird humanoid roots, and Thompson and his brother spent their youths caked in mud and chemicals plucking them from the ground for a dollar an hour. Ginseng is an essential ingredient in many Chinese medicines, as well as a range of health gimmicks, and for various reasons, Wisconsin has been an unlikely centre of global production for several centuries.

Originally published in 12 issues from 2019 to 2024, Ginseng Roots is epic in length and breadth, but simultaneously pleasingly narrow in scope. It plays out in multiple strands that examine both the minutiae of a man’s life and the cultural history of a difficult-to-grow crop (once harvested, it cannot be grown in the same field again).

Actor January LaVoy narrates the visceral story of a girl on the run in a winter wilderness, in early 17th-century Virginia

At the start of The Vaster Wilds, we meet a servant girl, “bony and childish small”, on the run from a disease-ridden English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. The reason for her flight is not immediately disclosed, though her fingernails are tellingly bloody. Armed with a knife, a thick cloak stolen from her mistress and leather boots taken from a dead child, she heads out into the winter wilderness. There, in the face of ice storms, potentially hostile Powhatan villages and a soldier charged with task of capturing her “living or dead”, she must be fearless and resourceful to stay alive.

Lauren Groff’s vivid and visceral story of survival – think Man vs Wild meets The Revenant – is set in the early 17th century when smallpox and starvation pose the greatest threat to life. Our protagonist, formerly the child of a prostitute living in a London poorhouse, was given the name Lamentation as an infant but has spent most of her life known as “girl” – “Think not of it, girl,” she murmurs while contemplating the bleakness of her situation. We follow her as she builds fires, skins squirrels, forages for grubs and berries and sprints across frozen rivers, her plight set against the deprivation and patriarchal violence of the so-called new world.

An eye-opening account of the old Soviet tactic of embedding secret agents where you’d least expect them

One of the best series of the golden age of TV drama, The Americans (2013-2018), centred on a pair of Russian sleeper agents operating in suburban Washington DC during the height of the cold war. By day they seemed to be a boring married American couple; by night they set honey traps, sabotaged facilities, recruited traitors and assassinated enemies.

That story was based in part on the real-life pair of “illegals” – as spies living under deep cover in civil society are called – Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov, who pretended to be Canadians living in Cambridge, Massachussetts, until their arrest and deportation in 2010. In reality, they weren’t so successful: owing to the turning of another Soviet agent, they were closely monitored by the FBI for years and never managed anything nefarious enough to make it worth charging them with espionage.

High-concept fiction is having a moment. Funny, inventive and crackling with big ideas, these ambitious stories will have you instantly hooked

Florence Knapp’s first novel The Names, publishing this month, tells not one story but three. As it opens, a mother is preparing to take her newborn boy to formally register his name. Will it be Bear, as his older sister would like, her own choice of Julian, or Gordon, named after his controlling father? The universe pivots on the decision she makes. Knapp plaits together the three stories that follow to trace the three different worlds in which the boy grows to manhood. Think of it as Sliding Doors for nominative determinism.

In this universe, at least, it is going like gangbusters. Described as “the book of the fair” at Frankfurt two years ago, Knapp’s publisher secured the rights in a 13-way auction and it’s already due to appear in 20 languages. It is a prime example of a renewed interest in what might be called “high-concept fiction”.

The newest trailer indicates Grand Theft Auto VI may have a soft centre, with its focus on outlaw lovers Lucia and Jason

Something new is coming to the Grand Theft Auto universe next year. I don’t mean super-high-definition visuals, or previously unexplored areas of Rockstar’s take on the US. This time it’s something much more profound. If you’ve seen the newly released second trailer from GTA6 – somewhat cruelly released just days after we discovered the game won’t be out until next May – then you might know what I mean. The brand new thing is romance.

It’s now clear that the key protagonists of the latest gangland adventure are Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, two twentysomething lovers from the wrong side of the tracks. He’s ex-army, now working for drug runners; she’s fresh out of jail, looking to make a better life for herself and her beloved mom. They fall for each other, hatch a plan to get out of Vice City, and then when their simple heist goes wrong, they find themselves at the sharp end of a state-wide conspiracy. You always knew that if Rockstar were going to tell a love story, it would involve a formidable cast of underworld kingpins, gang members, conspiracy nuts and corrupt politicians, and you were right.

As industry giants trade beloved brands like commodities and AI offers easy content, independent games outlets are ​rising up. Here’s why they’re sorely needed

Last week was a bad one for video games journalism. Two key contributors to the veteran site Giant Bomb, Jeff Grubb and Mike Minotti, have announced their departure after a recent podcast was taken down. The 888th episode of the Giant Bombcast reportedly featured a section lampooning new brand guidelines issued to staff and is no longer available online. Later this week, it was announced that major US site Polygon was being sold to Valnet, owner of the ScreenRant and GameRant brands, resulting in a swathe of job losses. This follows ReedPop’s sale, in 2024, of four high-profile UK-based sites – Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Rock Paper Shotgun and VG247 – to IGN Entertainment, owned by Ziff Davis, which also resulted in redundancies.

It’s sad how these long-standing sites, each with vast audiences and sturdy reputations, have been traded and chopped up like commodities. On selling Polygon, Vox CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement: “This transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio.” It felt gross, to be honest, to see this decade-old bastion of progressive video games writing being reduced to an asset ripe for off-loading. Of its purchase Valnet said: “Polygon is poised to reach new editorial heights through focused investment and innovation.” Quite how it will do that with a significantly reduced staff is anyone’s guess.

When Bethesda surprise-released a remake last week, I revisited its world with my son to see if the magic was still there

For a 10-day period the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in black-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me.

I bet a lot of you will have had a similar experience with a Bethesda game – if not Oblivion, then Skyrim or perhaps Fallout 3. There’s something intoxicating about these role-playing games, the way they lay out their worlds for you like a buffet, inviting you to gorge. Go where you like! Learn some weird spells and try them out on bandits! Nip into a cave to fight a necromancer and end up getting ambushed by vampires! Open-world games such as this are exhaustingly common now but Oblivion was the first one I ever played. Lately I’ve been devouring it all again, after Bethesda surprise-released a remake last Friday.

Blendo Games/Annapurna Interactive, PC
This attempt to cosy-fi an immersive sim game is full of ‘zany’ gags as you rescue cats from a spaceship, but it gets a bit too saccharine

When it comes to gamer-gatekeeping, there are few genres as snootily guarded as the immersive sim. From PC classic System Shock to the Dickensian Dishonored 2, these system-heavy sandboxes are video gaming’s equivalent to avant garde electronica or the films of Darren Aronofsky, adored by critics and genreheads but largely baffling to everyone else. Much like those elitist fandoms, the im-sim’s loudest cheerleaders often look down on linear blockbusters with similar sneer. No, Assassin’s Creed player, you cannot sit with us.

While massive games such as Tears of the Kingdom have recently flirted with elements of the genre, there’s still a surprising lack of breezier, beginner-friendly immersive sims. Enter Blendo Games’ Skin Deep – an attempt to cosy-fi the genre. Doing away with the sour-faced sci-fi of Deus Ex, Skin Deep sends you hurtling into space with a premise ripped straight out of a noughties web comic. You play Nina Pasadena, an insurance commando sworn to rescue feline fleets from raiding pirates. As you answer each well-insured tabby’s urgent distress call, Nina quietly sneaks across the raided ship, using whatever tools she can cobble together to rescue her kitty clientele.

Here We Are, a satirical mashup of two surrealist movie masterpieces, was finished after musicals maestro Stephen Sondheim died – outraging some fans. As the show hits Britain, its stars and creators reveal their thrills and fears

There’s an edge of febrile hilarity in the National Theatre rehearsal room. The company of Here We Are, Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, are off-book and getting the first act on its feet. But hitting your cues in a show as intricate as this is tough, whoever you are.

Jane Krakowski fluffs an entrance and tries not to corpse. Martha Plimpton raises a glass a second after everyone else, and a cast-mate blows a raspberry from the sidelines. Jesse Tyler Ferguson is convinced it’s not him who is a beat off. “Do it exactly like Rory does,” suggests director Joe Mantello, and Rory Kinnear responds mock-haughtily: “That’s just a general note.”

When Tania Franco Klein began feeling unmoored and depressed, she realised many of her friends were in the same boat. Her photographs explore the peculiar unease of modern life

I created the hijabi mom character in #1 Happy Family USA. How she wears it is part of her personality – so I knew I had to get it right

If you’ve seen a hijab on a screen – animated or otherwise – it’s likely that this Islamic head covering was one specific style.

Think Princess Jasmine in the 1992 movie Aladdin, Claire Danes in the series Homeland, or the Zamins in the animated show The Proud Family:

Forget modern edicts and prepare for the return of power dressing, big hair, short skirts and movie-star-in-a-convertible sunglasses

Boom boom is this year’s new vibe. It’s a vibe, not just a trend, meaning it takes tectonic rumblings in culture and gives them expression in what we wear and say and drink and watch on TV.

Boom boom is a new weather system that is sweeping away pretty much everything we thought we knew about modern fashion (gender fluidity, quiet luxury, elevated basics, ethical brands) and replacing it with ambitious power dressing for day, and traditional tropes of feminine and masculine sexual allure for evening. It is fur (real or fake), gold watches, big hair, wearing ties, sexy dancing. It is a silhouette that has inflection points at the shoulders (big), the breasts (important) and the waist (tiny) instead of worshipping a peachy bum or flat abs.

Much modern cider is mass-produced with the bare minimum fruit content of questionable provenance, but the UK used to be the world leader in fine ciders. Luckily, a new generation of terroir-focussed makers is finally emerging …

“When I started out 10 years ago, only three of the makers here were even in business,” says Felix Nash, gesturing to the reams of golden bottles that line the shelves of his shop. I’m at the Fine Cider Company in London Fields, east London, with its founder, having arrived with the hope of lapping up all that fine cider has to offer inside a neat hour. (Spoiler alert: I leave thirsty and inspired.)

Although much of recent cider-making history is defined by mergers and mass-market production, there’s also an exciting re-emergence of terroir-focused production, though that is something Nash claims has always been a part of the UK’s agricultural DNA: “One of the first things the Royal Society ever published was on perry and cider, when John Beale, an early fellow, recognised that an apple variety called redstreak grew particularly well in certain parts of Herefordshire, a concept we now understand as terroir.”

Asparagus is an annual springtime ritual, and this soup is a thrifty and wholesome way to celebrate it

According to the Guinness World Record’s official website, 351.7cm was the length of the asparagus presented by Harry and Carson Willemse at the Port Elgin Pumpkinfest in Ontario, Canada, on 2 October 2004. Sadly, however, the Pumpkinfest’s own archives hold only the records of master growers and weigh-offs dating back to 2017, and are almost entirely pumpkin-related. Gardening websites and Pinterest, however, offer more insight into how asparagus, left unpicked, quite quickly reaches 6ft and develops branches and soft, feathery foliage. I assume Harry and Carson must have pulled away the ferns in order for their spears to grow to 3½m, which is a metre more than the average UK ceiling and almost the same length as a Mini Cooper, and the equivalent of 16-20 average-length spears laid across the kitchen floor.

Those average-length spears, however, are as much a sign of spring as blossom and barometric pressure-change lethargy (my tortoise and I are diametrically opposed for about 10 days every spring: him coming out of hibernation, me wishing I could enter it). Despite myself, we have been enjoying asparagus: boiled and covered with melted butter; rolled in salt and pepper, roasted on the griddle, then dressed with bitter orange; and turned into soup.

They like ice-cream – but only homemade. Carrots – but only served whole. And don’t even think of cooking with any herb or spice livelier than parsley ...

Name: The Aristocrat Diet.

Age: As old as the aristocracy.

Cheese odds and ends, potatoes (and/or celeriac or beetroot), onions and cream, all crammed into a pastry case

Today’s comforting pie is super-adaptable and brilliant for using up any leftover bits of cheese. The classic homity pie filling of potatoes, onions and cream works beautifully with a jumble of cheese ends – cheddar, stilton, taleggio or whatever pungent blocks and rinds are lurking in your fridge drawer; it’s also a fantastic base for using up other root vegetables besides potatoes – celeriac, for example, bring earthiness, beetroot turns the entire filling a vibrant purple, while salsify adds a nutty note. Use whatever you have to hand, and waste nothing.

Are the Crawford-Gerbers the new Kardashians – or a family selling a modern take on the American dream?

First came the Kardashians. Then the Beckham clan. Now the Crawford-Gerbers are positioning themselves as the next family superpower in fashion.

Last week, Cindy Crawford, her husband, Rande Gerber, and their two children, Kaia and Presley, announced a “first-of-its-kind partnership” with the Californian sportswear and lifestyle brand Vuori. Kicking things off with a campaign, it sees the menage frolicking in front of a Malibu beach house, all long limbs, glowing skin and gleaming Hollywood smiles.

Dressing to this year’s theme of ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’, Anna Wintour and her co-hosts Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky and Pharrell Williams button up and pull out the umbrellas for the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art exhibition

• Met Gala 2025 live updates: all the stars and red carpet looks from fashion’s biggest night

They work for HRT and nicotine, but can skin patches really improve mental wellbeing, skin, nails and more?

At the end of last year, I noticed many of my beauty industry colleagues were wearing brightly coloured patches – a bit like children’s novelty sticking plasters – on their wrists. Soon they started popping up on my Instagram feed via wellness and lifestyle accounts. These transdermal supplement patches, claiming to improve mental wellbeing, skin, nails, energy levels and more, are expected by industry figures to replace vitamin tablets and gummies in the next five years.

Whether or not they do much is hard to call. As patches (and indeed oral supplements) aren’t generally classed as medication, they’re a low priority for clinical testing, while many studies that do exist were undertaken by supplement companies. The anecdotal evidence in favour seems significant, and while this may well be a placebo effect – a friend told me that just seeing the patch there makes her feel calmer; another describes his physiological response to the What Supp Co’s Dip Out Chill Patch as “surprisingly dramatic” – if the effects are beneficial to a user’s sense of wellness, there is arguably nothing wrong with that. I wish I felt the same – or indeed any – effect from the many patches I’ve tried so far.

What could possibly go wrong with taking a razor to your lashes? Apart from irritation, infections and ‘eye boogers’, that is

Name: Stubby lashes.

Age: Genetically? Ancient. Done deliberately? New.

Focus on yourself and your own self-worth, and you never know what may follow.
• Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a relationship problem sent in by a reader

I’m a 40-year-old man who has used dating apps for eight years and met about 100 different women, not counting the ones with whom I just chatted. That’s a lot of first dates, quite a few second dates and a few short relationships. Nothing stuck.

No one seems to want a relationship. Everyone is broken, including me. Some women turn me down, allegedly, because I ask to split the bill on the second date, having paid on the first. Some turn me down because I want kids and they don’t. Some tell me I’m a nice man, after which I don’t hear from them again. I’ve never ghosted anyone, but I’ve turned down some good people too. I was trying to do the right thing by my head and my heart. It appears everyone is looking for chemistry and not finding it.

Denise, 62, meets Federico, 64. Both are actors

What were you hoping for?
Someone drop-dead gorgeous – Matthew McConaughey.

It’s easy to go through life mirroring what others want and how they see you. But don’t you deserve more?

Many of us tend to diminish ourselves and others with some snappy, reductive phrase rather than dig more deeply in search of understanding. Enter the idea of the “people pleaser”. The term has a ring to it; it rolls off the tongue and its meaning seems self-evident. It feels comfortable and anodyne. We know where we are with a people pleaser.

But do we really? I hadn’t taken the time to think about it until recently. And the more I did, the more I found the phrase, and the possible unconscious dynamics reduced by it, discomfiting and disturbing. It took several years of psychoanalysis for me to be able to see more clearly what my tendency for people pleasing was hiding, and what I saw did not please me at all. What I saw was not anodyne. I saw that at the core of me, where something real and solid should be, sat a mirror, reflecting whatever I thought others wanted to see.

Lucy and Kyra have accepted that their libidos differ – and their sex life ebbs, flows and evolves accordingly
How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

As it takes Kyra a long time to climax, we usually have sex on the weekend – it takes up a Saturday morning

Direct to consumer tests that claim to tell us our biological – as opposed to chronological – age are getting a lot of attention, but what can they really tell us about our health? Science editor Ian Sample talks to Dr Brian H Chen, an epidemiologist at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, who has conducted research into a variety of these tests called epigenetic clocks. He explains what exactly they are measuring and whether, once we have the results, there are any evidence-based strategies we can adopt to lower our biological age

Real age versus biological age: the startups revealing how old we really are

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My father’s death from cancer showed me you need to look after your lungs. But apart from not smoking, what should you be doing? I headed to a laboratory, strapped on a mask and heart monitor and started pedalling …

Lungs are amazing. There they sit, inflating and deflating from dawn to dusk, dusk to dawn, sucking in air, stripping out oxygen and exchanging it for carbon dioxide. They do this 20,000 times a day, 7.5m times a year, 600m times in the average lifetime, keeping our trillions of cells ticking over and saving them from choking on their own exhaust fumes. And we ignore them until something goes wrong and we’re gasping, wheezing, panicking – or worse.

When I think about lungs, it’s often in the same breath as cancer, which killed my dad 39 years ago. He only realised his lungs were knackered after a heart attack, which was probably also down to smoking. Sixty Senior Service a day, cigarette number two often lit as soon as number one was stubbed out. He stopped overnight, but it was too late.

The ‘worst allergy season ever’ in the US. A ‘pollen bomb’ in the UK. I asked experts how to tell if a runny nose is the result of allergies or a virus

Ah, spring. A time of thawing and rebirth, of blooms bursting forth from frost. Days become longer, warmer and – oh no, what’s this? A tickle in your throat. Pressure building in your sinuses. A runny nose. A sneeze. Another sneeze. Was there ever a time before sneezing?

But is it allergies or a cold? Beautiful as springtime may be, the emerging greenery can also expel waves of allergens. So how can you tell if your runny nose is the result of unruly pollen or a virus? Are you infectious or is your immune system overreacting to an outside stimulus?

When it comes to workouts, how much pain – specifically, how much post-workout soreness – is actually a good thing? The answer: it depends

Humans have long glamorized suffering, hailing it as an essential ingredient of growth. In the ancient Greek tragedy Elektra, Sophocles wrote: “Nothing truly succeeds without pain.” In the 1980s, the actor and aerobics instructor Jane Fonda told people: “No pain, no gain.”

But when it comes to workouts, how much pain – specifically, how much post-workout soreness – is actually a good thing? The answer: it depends.

Temu’s deals feel like a game but behind the scenes the Chinese shopping app uses underhand psychological tactics known as ‘dark patterns’ to keep us spending. Temu was the most downloaded app in the UK, US, Australia and Canada at the beginning of last year. Neelam Tailor uncovers the tactics the shopping app borrows from casinos and gaming apps to manipulate shoppers, and explores the environmental, ethical and data privacy risks that come with those bargain hauls

Martha says Dad doesn’t need to know her every move. Neil says following her on an app helps him feel connected. Who’s lost the plot? You decide

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

I like to keep Dad updated, but only for important things – and on my terms. I am 27!

Martha isn’t great at keeping in touch, so it’s nice to know she’s alive. It’s not stalking, it’s love

Parenthood has opened the door to a new kind of love – one not necessarily more sacred or pure than the love for my friends, parents and husband

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Two years ago I fell pregnant and within five weeks I was diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum, a medical condition that causes extreme nausea and vomiting. It lasted my entire pregnancy and that year was (almost) the worst of my life. Now, I keep being told the relief of no longer being sick is the main reason I enjoyed the first year of my child’s life so much.

Shortly after my baby was born, I started seeing social media content about Charli xcx’s song I Think About It All the Time and its articulation of the apprehension many women have about becoming mothers. I have recently started back at work and miss my child terribly. It’s the unhappiest I have been since she was born, around the same time Chappell Roan said none of her friends with children were happy.

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Who was behind the anonymous account sending nasty messages at 4am? The answer made me paranoid, then defiant

When I first saw the message, I froze with shock. I had just woken up and, as usual, was spending the first half hour of my day in bed, clearing notifications from social media apps. That day, hidden in my Instagram message requests, was a troll. Their message, which read, “Your actually disgusting and you shouldn’t be promoting morbid obesity”, was sent from an anonymous account, at 4am. The message continued: “Stop pretending you love your body because your too lazy to diet or exercise.”

I felt upset but, more than anything, I felt surveilled. Who could have sent me this attack? The more I read, the worse it got. I knew I should ignore the message – simply delete it and carry on with my day – but curiosity got the better of me. I started to look for clues.

There is surprising nostalgia and humour in Gerad Argeros’s story of healing after child abuse by a Catholic priest. He was an altar boy at St Cecilia Catholic church in north-east Philadelphia when, at age 11, he became one of the victims of paedophile James Brzyski. Decades later, the actor and father developed the one-man stage show Fox Chase Boy. Performing it to his close-knit parish he speaks directly about a crime cloaked in silence, and brings welcome insight into their collective trauma

Small-scale schemes are replacing dirty diesel with clean electricity in remote areas – and ensuring a just transition

When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, Roxana Borda Mamani had to leave Mexico, where she was studying for her degree in rural development and food security, and return to her remote village in the Peruvian Amazon.

At the time, the Indigenous community in Alto Mishagua had neither an internet connection nor a reliable energy source. “How am I going to study?” Borda asked. “With energy from the sun,” replied her friend, a fellow member of the Latin American Observatory for Energy Geopolitics at the Brazil-based Federal University of Latin American Integration (Unila).

During the decade-long conflicts, the major powers dithered as Serb militias carried out their brutal campaigns of ethnic cleansing. Guardian reporters became more passionate and more outspoken in their condemnation, attracting praise and criticism

Among many courageous correspondents covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, the reporting of Ed Vulliamy and Maggie O’Kane received plaudits and numerous awards. Both were inexorably drawn to where the action was, and wrote unblinking, vivid accounts. But what made their work controversial was their refusal to be neutral. For many journalists, including some of their colleagues at the Guardian, it was vital to maintain the distinction between being a witness – a “neutral” observer – and becoming actively caught up in the conflict. Some felt they crossed a line that should not have been crossed.

The war – a series of ethnic conflicts that started in 1991 and lasted for nearly a decade – left an estimated 140,000 dead and as many as 4 million displaced. During the course of their reporting, Vulliamy and O’Kane became involved partisans, in the cause of the Bosnian Muslims, in particular. For O’Kane, “There really was no parity of guilt in this”. Vulliamy, too, saw the Muslims, more than any others, as the “victim people” of the war, and his reporting became a passionate indictment of their oppressors.

We’d like to hear your thoughts about the first clergyman from the US to lead the Roman Catholic church

Robert Francis Prevost, from Chicago, has become the first American pope to lead the Roman Catholic church.

The 69-year-old has taken the papal name Pope Leo XIV, a senior cardinal announced from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica on Thursday evening. The announcement, which followed white smoke billowing from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel, prompted raucous celebration among the 50,000 pilgrims and tourists in St Peter’s Square.

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As she marks her 90th birthday with a UK tour and new album, the singer and activist will answer your questions

After a long career which has established her as one of the most significant folk singers on both sides of the Atlantic, Peggy Seeger is about to celebrate her 90th birthday with a final tour and album – and will answer your questions.

Born in New York to a musicologist father and a modernist composer, and with siblings including future folk legend Pete Seeger, she started out on piano at seven years old, eventually adding guitar, banjo, autoharp, dulcimer and concertina to her skillset.

We want to hear about the big moves you made following a romantic split - for the better or for the worse

Have you made a drastic decision following break up? Did you move countries or have a massive career change because a relationship ended? Or did heartbreak lead you to undergo a body transformation or maybe even getting a tattoo ... that you now regret?

We want to hear about the big moves you made following a romantic split - for the better or for the worse.

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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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