Kyren Wilson v Jak Jones: World Snooker Championship 2024 final – live

• Updates from the final day at the Crucible, starts 1pm BST
• Get in touch! You can email David with your thoughts here

Wilson 11-6 Jones (32-65) Jones has the white under control and just needs the final red fairly close to the left-side cushion to leave Wilson leading snookers. With full concentration, he rather wobbles it in although forgets about position and a missed length-of-the-table pink leaves his advantage at 33 with just 27 left. Memories of last night maybe when Wilson won the closing frame from this kind of position. Jones’ 64 break is certainly a settler and he’s in prime position to cut the gap to four.

Wilson 11-6 Jones (32-43) One obvious difference between these two is scoring when in the balls. Wilson has knocked in four centuries in the final so far but Jones hasn’t managed a single ton. The Welshman has only reached triple figures twice all tournament which backs up the idea that a century looks good, elicits much applause but only wins you a single frame. Jones isn’t exactly in full control but he’s ahead in this opener and still going with his break now on 42.

Paris authority slated for doubling cost of Métro and bus trips during Olympics

Union says rise unwelcome for tourists and residents – but officials say holders of regular transport passes will not be affected

Paris’s public transport authority has been accused of initiating ‘a bit of a racket’ after almost doubling the price of Métro and doubling bus tickets during the Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer.

A single journey ticket in the Métro will rise from €2.15 to €4, while a ticket for a city bus will double from €2.50 to €5 from 20 July – six days before the Games begin – and remain until 8 September, the transport authority RATP has announced.

Naoya Inoue knocks out Luis Nery to retain undisputed junior featherweight championship – live

• Japanese star defends WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO titles at 122lbs
• Inoue out to bolster claim as world’s top pound-for-pound boxer
• Sellout crowd of about 55,000 spectators on hand at Tokyo Dome
• Send Bryan a tweet at @BryanAGraham or email him

Jason Moloney is in big trouble against Yoshiki Takei in the final undercard bout ahead of the main event. Six rounds into their scheduled 12-round fight and it’s unclear if the Australian has managed to win a single round. Takei, a former K-1 kickboxing champion, appears within touching distance of winning a world title in only his ninth professional fight.

Here’s a look at how Inoue and Nery measure up ahead of tonight’s main event. Both men stand 5ft 5in, while Inoue brings a two-and-a-half-inch reach advantage into the ring. Each came in comfortably below the junior featherweight division limit of 122lbs at yesterday’s official weigh-in.

John Swinney becomes new SNP leader as Scottish Tories condemn ‘stitch-up’ – UK politics live

Swinney succeeds Humza Yousaf after no other candidates put their name forward

Labour has marked the anniversary of the Conservatives re-entering government at the 2010 election by launching a what the opposition have called “Conflix” website [geddit?] that mockingly tells the story of “14 years of Tory chaos”

The party’s chair, Anneliese Dodds, was challenged about the site on Sky News this morning and whether the party was relying on “stunts” rather than policy proposals. She insisted that the “detail of policy” was there, in the form of initiatives like GB Energy.

Hush-money trial to resume after Hope Hicks’ testimony on mood inside Trump’s 2016 campaign – live

Hope Hicks said last week Donald Trump told her Michael Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels to protect him from a false allegation

• Trump trial to resume after teary testimony from key aide Hope Hicks

Here is a look at some images from the Manhattan courthouse that came through the newswires last week:

With the trial entering its fourth week, here is a reminder of the key players by the Guardian’s Sam Levine:

Donald Trump, defendant: The Republican nominee for president is the defendant in the case. Prosecutors allege that he orchestrated a $130,000 payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels when she threatened to go public with allegations of an affair on the eve of the 2016 election, and then conspired with others to cover up the payment.

David Pecker, key witness: Pecker was a key Trump ally who served as the CEO of American Media Inc (AMI), the publisher of the National Enquirer. Pecker helped Trump by purchasing the rights to potentially damaging stories and then never publishing them, a practice known as “catch and kill.”

Stormy Daniels, key witness: Daniels, an adult film star, says she met Trump in 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament. Daniels was 27 at the time and Trump was 60 and Daniels has always said the sex was consensual. Just before the 2016 election, Daniels said she was approached by Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer at the time, and offered $130,000 not to disclose the alleged affair.

Michael Cohen, key witness: Cohen was once a lawyer for Trump and one of the former president’s most loyal lieutenants and enforcers. He facilitated the payment to Daniels, funnelling the $130,000 to her through a shell company called Essential Consultants LLC. Trump later arranged to pay him back in monthly payment installments of $35,000.

CoppaFeel! breast cancer charity founder Kris Hallenga dies aged 38

Campaigner resolved to set up awareness charity after being told she had stage 4 cancer when she was 23

Kris Hallenga, the founder of the charity CoppaFeel!, which raises awareness of the importance of young women checking their breasts for early signs of cancer, has died aged 38 after being diagnosed with the disease 15 years ago.

The campaigner, from Cornwall, was 23 when she was given the news she had stage 4 cancer that had spread to her spine.

Middle East crisis live: Hamas condemns Israeli order to evacuate Rafah as a ‘dangerous escalation’

Israel’s military has called for people evacuate eastern neighbourhoods of Rafah and head to what it claimed was an ‘expanded humanitarian zone’ in southern Gaza

• Follow all our coverage of the Israel-Gaza war

An anonymous Israeli official with knowledge of the ceasefire negotiations has told the New York Times that the two sides were close to a deal a couple of days ago but that comments by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Rafah pushed Hamas to harden its demands in a bid to protect the city from an Israeli ground invasion.

On Tuesday Netanyahu vowed that Israel would proceed with an offensive on the southern city even if renewed efforts at internationally brokered talks with Hamas result in the release of hostages and a ceasefire.

The idea that we will halt the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question. We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate the Hamas battalions there – with or without a deal, in order to achieve total victory.

Haaland destroys Wolves as City and Arsenal keep winning – Football Weekly

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Barney Ronay and Lucy Ward as both Arsenal and Manchester City refuse to blink in the Premier League title race

Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

On the podcast today; Arsenal comfortably beat Bournemouth before Manchester City comfortably beat Wolves, will this be the story until the end of the season?

Russia-Ukraine war live: Ukraine accuses Russia of ‘nuclear blackmail’ after Putin orders nuclear weapons drills

Kremlin says tactical drills are a response to statements from the West about possibly sending troops to Ukraine

The British ambassador to Moscow, Nigel Casey, was summoned to the Russian foreign ministry, Russian state agency RIA reported on Monday. Reuters said the ministry did not give the reason but there is speculation that it is linked to statements made last week by the foreign secretary, David Cameron, saying he had no issue with British-supplied weapons being used by Ukraine to strike inside Russia.

It comes as Russia has cited statements by the west as justification for upcoming nuclear weapons drills.

Poorer nations must be transparent over climate spending, says Cop29 leader

Exclusive: Mukhtar Babayev says clear accounting crucial to build trust as developing world seeks trillions in support

Poor countries must demonstrate clearer accounting and transparency to back up their calls for trillions of dollars of climate finance, the president of global climate negotiations has said.

Mukhtar Babayev, the ecology minister of Azerbaijan, who will lead the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, urged governments in developing countries to draw up reports showing their progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and their spending on the climate crisis.

Call for port extension to be halted as genocide remains are found on Namibia’s Shark Island

Researchers say more bodies of Herero and Nama people from early 20th century concentration camp could be in waters around port

The Namibian authorities are being urged to halt plans to extend a port on the Shark Island peninsula after the discovery of unmarked graves and artefacts relating to the Herero and Nama genocide.

Forensic Architecture, a non-profit research agency, said it had located sites of executions, forced labour, imprisonment and sexual violence that occurred when the island was used by the German empire as a concentration camp between 1905 and 1907.

Jokes about massages, OJ and Gisele divorce fly in Tom Brady comedy roast

• Former teammates and comedians round on quarterback
• Brady appears to object to joke after Robert Kraft

Tom Brady took his share of barbs from comedians, former teammates and his longtime coach on Sunday night during a comedy roast on Netflix.

“It’s like a football game. You run with a game plan, and then you get to see kind of how the strategy goes, and then you adjust on the fly,” Brady said before the three-hour event. “This is what a locker room has been like for me for all these years. So it’s not like I’m used to people not making fun of me.”

An impressive lineup of comedians, former teammates and opponents took the stage. Host Kevin Hart said before the event that no topic was off limits, and Hart went on the offensive early with jokes about Brady’s ex-wife, Gisele Bündchen.

“Gisele gave you an ultimatum. She said you retire or we’re done. When you got a chance to go 8-9 and all it will cost you is your wife and your kids, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” Hart said, referring to Brady coming out of a brief retirement in 2022 for one more season.

The only time Brady objected to a joke was when Jeff Ross made a reference to Patriots owner Robert Kraft and massages. In 2019, Kraft originally received a misdemeanor charge that he paid for sex at a Florida massage parlor. Prosecutors later dropped the charge after courts blocked the use of video from cameras installed by police inside the massage parlors.

In the sketch, Ross joked about Kraft offering Brady a massage when he first joined the Patriots. On Sunday, Brady walked up to Ross and said in his ear “don’t say that shit again”, but it was clearly caught on the microphone and heard by those watching the roast at home. It was not heard by those in attendance.

Later, Kraft and former Patriots coach Bill Belichick did a shot together on stage after some coaxing from Hart.

Belichick was fired in January after 24 seasons with the Patriots, and a lot has been written about friction between the six-time winning Super Bowl coach and owner over the past couple years.

After joking about this being like a reunion and “unlike many family reunions there are some people I am desperately trying to avoid”, Kraft praised Belichick for what the two accomplished.

“I want to say this is the greatest coach in the history of the game that did what no one else has done. And having Tom Brady and him was the greatest honor the good Lord gave me,” Kraft said.

The big idea: why we need human rights now more than ever

In an age of climate crisis and AI, equal treatment is nothing less than essential

In the three decades since I became a lawyer, human rights – once understood as an uncomplicated good, a tool for securing dignity for the vulnerable against abuses by the powerful – have increasingly come under assault. Perhaps never more so than in the current moment: we are constantly talking about human rights, but often in a highly sceptical way. When Liz Truss loudly proclaims “We’ve got to leave the ECHR, abolish the supreme court and abolish the Human Rights Act,” she’s not the fringe voice she might have been in the 1990s. She represents a dangerous current of opinion, as prevalent on parts of the radical left as on the populist right of politics. It seems to be gaining momentum.

As an idealistic youngster, I would have been shocked to know that in 2024 it would be necessary to return to the back-to-basics case, to justify the need for fundamental rights and freedoms. But in a world where facts are made fluid, what were once thought of as core values have become hard to distill and defend. In an atmosphere of intense polarisation, human rights are trashed along all parts of the political spectrum – either as a framework to protect markets, or as a form of undercover socialism. What stands out for me is that the most trenchant critics share a profound nationalism. Nationalists believe that universal human rights – the clue’s in the name – undermine the ability of states to agitate for their narrower interests.

Vampire facials, under-eye fillers, ‘prejuvenation’: how did cosmetic tweakments get so extreme? | Georgina Lawton

Cosmetic procedures are on the rise among younger people; I’m barely 30. Still this is about more than just clinging to youth

Everyone goes through it: a reckoning with one’s own mortality in the mirror, poking at eye bags and tugging at folds of loose skin. Am I looking a bit rough? It’s part of the human condition to fear ageing, but among millennials and gen Z there seems to be a heightened anxiety around growing older, coupled with an increasingly casual attitude towards getting fillers and Botox compared with previous generations.

Almost half of millennial women polled by the BBC in 2019 said they believed that having a cosmetic procedure was akin to having a haircut. I can say from experience that it is not. Like many, I have fallen victim to negative anti-ageing rhetoric. After months of staring at my tired face on Zoom calls during lockdown, I felt as if my hot years were slipping through my fingers. When the world opened up, I found a doctor to “restore” my hollowed out under-eyes with 1ml of filler. I was barely 28.

Georgina Lawton is the author of Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity and the Truth About Where I Belong

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‘We deserve more’: US workers’ share of the pie dwindles

Bureau of Labor Statistics releases latest estimate of how much labor receives of national income, showing bleak decline

When Jesse Motte began working at a Starbucks inside a Target store in Columbia, South Carolina, more than two years ago, $15 an hour sounded great. He was excited to start because it was the most he had ever made after working for years in the service industry.

The excitement has dissipated due to his inconsistent and erratic work schedule, the rising costs of necessities and the minuscule raises he and his co-workers receive annually. His most recent annual wage increase was $0.37 an hour.

Boeing hopes to polish its reputation with Starliner crew capsule launch

Company, which has been plagued by safety issues in its avionics wing, will send two astronauts to the ISS in its new spacecraft

Boeing has an opportunity on Monday night to restore some luster to its tarnished name, with the scheduled first crewed launch from Florida of Starliner, a pioneering new capsule designed to transform human exploration of space.

Although the company’s space operations are entirely independent of its aviation wing, which has been plagued by a recent series of safety and quality issues, the spacecraft’s pathway to the Cape Canaveral launchpad, and planned 10.34pm ET liftoff, has been similarly bumpy.

‘I am ready to return whenever they say’: Nasrin Sotoudeh on prison, the hijab, and violence in Iran

Exclusive: the human rights lawyer, temporarily released from jail on medical grounds, describes her love for her family, and why she keeps going despite brutal treatment at the hands of the regime

Iran’s Qarchak jail has been called many things: a torture chamber; the worst women’s prison in the world; unfit for humans. Nasrin Sotoudeh uses just one word to describe the nine months she spent there: “Hell.”

Sotoudeh does not speak of the appalling conditions or stench of sewage, the undrinkable water or lack of food, the disease or cruelty of solitary confinement. She simply says: “I am ready to return whenever they say.”

The pet I’ll never forget: Babyleaf, the feral kitten who tamed me

She came into my life just when I needed her, and together we worked on our traumas. But it could not last …

I’d been feeding the stray cat for months before she brought them to our door: a gang of feral and frail-looking kittens. I’d never had a pet before, and, like many people who do not grow up with animals, I perhaps lacked a certain emotional dimension. The arrival of this bunch of spitters and shakers cracked me wide open, and right when I needed it.

It was 2016, and I was living as a property guardian in a disused care home in east London. I was 23, and I was broke, ambitious and ill. Back then I could be found having routine panic attacks in a PPE-blue ex-NHS bathroom. These days, I know all this to be the ripples of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. At the time, however, I just assumed this was what happened to unemployed writers. Enter Kitten Babyleaf and her fluffy kin – seemingly as traumatised, adrift and desperate for security as me.

Our Mothers review – moving drama about aftermath of unspeakable war violence

Cezar Diaz’s sensitive and humane film looks back at one of the bloodiest periods of the Guatemalan civil war from the perspective of one damaged family

Here is a thoughtful, restrained drama about one of the bloodiest periods during the long civil war in Guatemala, fought between US-backed rightwing generals and leftwing insurgents. In the 1980s, thousands of men, women and children were killed, mostly by soldiers. Our Mothers starts as a straightforward drama about families, decades later, still looking for relatives who disappeared in the massacres. But what emerges is a sensitive and moving portrait of female survivors – the clue is in the title.

In 2018, Ernesto (Armando Espitia) is a hard-working young government forensic investigator. Director Cesar Diaz follows Ernesto with a low-key documentary-like style as the young man goes about his job locating mass graves and exhuming bodies. One day, an indigenous woman, Nicolasa (Aurelia Caal), walks into his office with a familiar story: more than 30 years ago, soldiers tortured and killed the men in her farming village, then raped the women. Diaz handles the accounts of sexual violence with tremendous sensitivity, giving no more information than needed.

Scientists create vaccine with potential to protect against future coronaviruses

Researchers say experimental shot is step towards goal of creating vaccines before a pandemic has started

Scientists have created a vaccine that has the potential to protect against a broad range of coronaviruses, including varieties that are not yet even known about.

The experimental shot, which has been tested in mice, marks a change in strategy towards “proactive vaccinology”, where vaccines are designed and readied for manufacture before a potentially pandemic virus emerges.

‘A wild cocktail of emotion, politics and desire’: the history of breasts in art

From lactating Madonnas to disembodied orbs, a new exhibition surveys the depictions of breasts and asks – what about the women who own them?

Breasts have been a focus in the culture wars of the last 50-odd years. Second-wave feminists casting off their bras in the 1970s come to mind, and then ongoing judgment-filled debates around breastfeeding, and the even more fraught, and recent, hostilities around trans healthcare. Recent celebrations of female sensuality manifested in things like #freethenip, hot girl summer, widening conversations around sexual pleasure, and the body positivity movement all take breasts as a key motif, too.

But for all the girlies freeing their nips on Instagram, it’s much rarer to see them free on the street. We keep them under wraps and rarely articulate why they seem to be so contentious. The potency of breasts as symbols of things as disparate but overlapping as gender, eroticism and motherhood makes them the nexus of a wild cocktail of emotions, politics and desires.

Italian government accused of using defamation law to silence intellectuals

Philosopher being sued by Giorgia Meloni’s brother-in-law says such trials are part of a political strategy

The government of Giorgia Meloni is making strategic use of defamation suits to silence public intellectuals, a philosopher who is being sued by the Italian prime minister’s brother-in-law has claimed.

In the latest of a series of lawsuits drawing on Italy’s comparatively harsh defamation laws, Donatella Di Cesare of Sapienza University in Rome will appear at a criminal court in the Italian capital on 15 May, after a complaint by the agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, over comments she made comparing one of his speeches to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Drake denies allegations by Kendrick Lamar of underage sex and harbouring secret child

Drake says ‘I feel disgusted’ by allegations, as enmity between rap superstars deepens following weekend flurry of diss tracks

Drake has denied allegations of child sex offences and of him harbouring a secret child, both levelled at him by Kendrick Lamar in recent days.

The enmity between the rap superstars has escalated over a series of diss tracks in the past few weeks, culminating in a flurry of activity during the weekend with three tracks by Lamar and two by Drake.

‘It’s not that I’m against story. I like films with stories’: Pat Collins on directing a tale without a plot

That They May Face the Rising Sun, about a small rural community in Ireland, has little obvious drama. The director explains how that is exactly what’s winning it awards

For most directors it would be an agonising predicament: how do you translate a novel with no discernible plot, in which nothing really happens, to the screen? John McGahern called his experimental masterpiece That They May Face the Rising Sun, about a small rural Irish community, an “anti-novel” for its rejection of conventional narrative.

“I thought that the act of taking drama out of it, if it was consciously done, could be dramatic in itself,” he told the Observer in 2005. “My whole idea was to take plot and everything else out of the novel and see what was left.”

I stopped lying to please people – and I’ve never felt more free | Radhika Sanghani

Radical honesty isn’t for the faint-hearted, but it’s one of the greatest joys I’ve ever discovered

I never used to think of myself as a liar. I always saw myself as an honest person. The only time I’d ever veer from the truth was to protect someone’s feelings. But that wasn’t really lying, I would tell myself, it was an act of kindness!

And then I had a therapy session, where I realised that all of this was actually people-pleasing behaviour and it turned out I was a prolific liar. Not only that, but according to my therapist, by constantly hiding my true feelings to protect those I loved, I was blocking them from ever getting to know the real me and creating true intimacy.

Radhika Sanghani is a writer and author. Her children’s book The Girl Who Couldn’t Lie is published on 9 May

We all want to cut out the bad parts of ourselves. It won’t work, and it won’t make us happier

Trauma, vulnerability, dependency … like it or not, we can’t just wish them away

When I was a little girl, I cried a lot. I used to wish ferociously that I was not such a crybaby. I remember the shame so well. Sitting on my bed on a Sunday evening, hot-cheeked and furious with my tears, holding on to the thought that when I was a grownup, I would never cry. I would be a strong, confident and capable woman, and I would never again feel like a sobbing little girl who doesn’t want to go to school tomorrow and just wants to stay with her mum. I hated that part of myself and I desperately wanted to get rid of it. That is what a better life meant to me back then.

Since becoming a psychotherapist, I have seen this kind of wish at play in patient after patient – and I’ve continued to see it in myself as a patient in therapy, too. It seems to be a pretty ubiquitous desire, although we are not always aware of it: this wish and even belief that if we just try hard enough, if we can find the magic self-help book or therapist or personal trainer or Instagram filter, we will truly be able to get rid of the parts of ourselves we feel ashamed of, or hate, or don’t want to acknowledge.

Double fault: Challengers is as bad in the bedroom as it is on the tennis court

Critics might have fallen for Luca Guadagnino’s erotic tennis romp but it’s a vapid string of disappointing choices

I have spent the week and a half since seeing Challengers on the brink of throwing a racquet-trashing, expletive-scattering, McEnroe-style tantrum. Is Hawkeye working? Did they not see it? How, for an exhausting Mahut-Isner length of huffing and puffing, practically every single one of the wild swings taken by Luca Guadagnino’s film missed its target and landed out by a country mile? Four-star reviews? Five-star reviews? C’mon, fellow critics. You cannot be serious.

Some points I will concede as inarguable. The film is a box-office champion. And it’s pure fire on the internet, a movie more memeable than even the sainted Saltburn. There are clear generational issues in play: I can see why excitable younger viewers, raised on a largely sexless cinema, have fallen so hard for the film’s sprayed-on sweat and forceful faux sophistication. It’s my senior-tour colleagues I’m staring at with hands on hips, wearing an expression of disbelief. The film they’ve been politely applauding looks to me less a modern classic than another marker of American cinema’s ongoing infantilisation: a Muppet Babies redo of Jules and Jim.

Possibly some spectators were swayed by the spirit of indulgence fostered by the film’s on-screen umpire, handing out code violations as if they were candy. (In actual tennis, those breaches of court decorum have consequences: loss of whole games and matches. Not so in Luca-land.) Swallow those, and maybe you’ll also overlook how neither of the film’s male leads persuade as the whey-bulked jocks observed swaggering around America’s secondary tennis circuits. Even at their most drained, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) resemble the gauche nerds of a thousand other teen comedies, sniggering at their own witless masturbation stories.

Confronting the audience and breaking the fourth wall: why Black drama is getting meta

On stage and screen, self-referential works such as A Strange Loop and American Fiction are on the rise, with playful postmodernism a potent weapon in the fight against inequality

Officers storm a ballroom, releasing a flurry of bullets that pierce through a Black man as he collapses in a pool of his own blood. Monk, American Fiction’s neurotic protagonist, is unarmed, clutching nothing more than an ill-gotten literary award. It could end here. Yet – spoiler alert! – in the final act of the recent Oscar-winning film its writers take us along for the ride as they toy with reaching for a romantic reconciliation with Monk’s disgruntled ex-girlfriend or even fading to black with no resolution.

American Fiction, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, sees Monk, a middle-class Black academic, struggle to get his highly intellectual books published because they aren’t “Black enough”. In order to make some money for his family he writes Fuck, a Black working-class struggle narrative laden with violence, crime and pain. He instantly finds fame and fortune and is embraced by the cultural elite, who think he’s brave for being so authentic.

Drylongso review – charming 90s indie is a genre-resistant film that keeps its DIY dazzle

Cauleen Smith’s 1998 debut about a California girl who takes Polaroids of young black men as an endangered-species record, is captivating

The title is an African American term from the US south meaning “ordinary” or “ordinariness” – but there’s nothing ordinary about this 1998 indie from artist and film-maker Cauleen Smith, rereleased for its 25th anniversary. Smith shot it in her 20s while still in grad school at UCLA, and maybe the film does have a distinctive film-school project feel with its DIY aesthetic. But there is a captivating kind of innocence in its walking-pace narrative, its indifference to the irony and self-awareness that was fashionable in independent cinema at the time, and in the unaffected charm and guilelessness of its performances.

Toby Smith plays Pica, a girl who lives with her mother and grandmother in a chaotic house near Oakland, California, where she is enrolled in a photography class; instead of creating artistically refined studies on 35mm film cameras as demanded by her professor, Pica is taking Polaroids of young black men because she believes this is a kind of endangered-species record, as so many of these men will wind up in prison or dead. It’s a radically simple street-art reportage, which of course makes the professorial sophisticated compositions look dull and bloodless; the film itself arguably endorses the Polaroid aesthetic.

How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money

From baby clothes to popcorn makers, borrowing items rather than buying them is a growing trend

A year into motherhood and I can confirm two things: babies grow too fast and clothing them is an expensive business.

My solution has been to rent my daughter Stella’s wardrobe. Warm coats, swimming costumes, sleepsuits, sandals – all can be borrowed for a monthly subscription from any number of services such as Bundlee, Lullaloop and thelittleloop, amongst others.

Weather tracker: torrential rainstorms cause death and destruction in Brazil

This part of South America is no stranger to major rainfall, but last week’s storms were particularly devastating

Torrential rainstorms in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul have caused the worst flooding the country has seen in 80 years, many deaths and the displacement of thousands of families. Central parts of the state were hit the hardest after the storms began last Monday, with unofficial weather stations in the area recording 50-100cm (20-40in) of rain over the past week.

Widespread floods and landslides have caused major damage to homes and infrastructure, most alarmingly triggering the partial collapse of a small hydroelectric dam on Thursday, which sent a 2-metre-high wave through the surrounding area. At least 57 deaths have been reported and 24,000 people have been displaced, alongside an estimated 500,000 being without power and clean water.

Premier League: 10 talking points from the weekend’s football action

Mikel Arteta keeps cool, Jacob Murphy proves his worth and Elijah Adebayo states his case for a top-flight stay

From touchline handbags in London with his manager a week ago to this: an individual performance of verve and efficiency to go with collective success, Mohamed Salah smiling once again. Much has been written and said about the Egyptian forward, of his recent struggles, future and behaviour. But a career as storied as his requires him to put aside the noise and go again, an internal wiring that is present among only the best. Salah was electric against Tottenham, striking the bar with a cross-turned-shot and forcing a strong save from Guglielmo Vicario inside the first 10 minutes. The post was struck not long after, though the offside flag went up too, and then came the goal just 16 minutes in, masterful movement at the far post preceding a clinical header. He was present in the build-up to Liverpool’s other three goals, allowing Jürgen Klopp a gorgeous afternoon of Anfield sunshine and fist pumps as that final goodbye inches closer. Taha Hashim

Match report: Liverpool 4-2 Tottenham

Match report: Manchester City 5-1 Wolves

Match report: Brighton 1-0 Aston Villa

Match report: Arsenal 3-0 Bournemouth

‘You struggled with my film? Fantastic!’ Alice Rohrwacher and her riotous new tomb-raiding tale

La Chimera looks like a crime caper about looters in 1980s Italy. But it’s about way more than that. The great director, loved by everyone from Scorsese to Gerwig, talks about the dark secrets of the heart – and her debt to bees

Alice Rohrwacher could be the European arthouse made flesh, or its distilled essence, bottled and preserved for the ages. She’s quoting Italian poets one minute and German poets the next. She’s discussing nature, civilisation and the power of collective memory. She says she makes films to shake us from our lethargy and invite us to reflect on the state of the world. It doesn’t matter whether we even like her films. Like or dislike: that’s beside the point.

Certain criticisms she takes as compliments. “For example, people will tell me, ‘I always knew that I was watching a film.’ Well, good, that’s great. I am trying to break your hypnosis. Or people will say, ‘I struggled to get into this film.’ Which is fantastic, I’m pleased. We don’t need to get inside everything, break down every door, storm in like conquistadors. There are other ways to approach a film. We can gently knock. We can walk around it in circles.”

‘People think it’s just for emo or gothic kids’: the Kenyan metalhead leading a new wave of African rock

Martin Kanja, AKA Lord Spikeheart, covers everything from colonialism to his grandmother in music that mixes African culture with metal. He hopes to help more artists like him break through

As a teenager, Martin Kanja spent countless late nights listening to heavy metal on a local radio show. The furious riffs, shrieks, growls and distorted sounds drowned out his angst. “What drew me to the music was how it was so ‘physical’ – very present, very now – there was no space for negative thoughts or feelings,” says Kanja, who soon decided he too wanted to be a metal artist.

In 2010, when he was 19, he left his home town in Kenya’s midwestern city Nakuru for the capital, Nairobi, figuring it was his best bet for a foothold in the underground scene.

Sport and the climate emergency: collating injustice with an action plan

‘I’m very alarmed by everybody’s lack of alarm, that’s the scariest thing for me,’ says Warming Up author Madeleine Orr

If Madeleine Orr had been searching for a launch pad for her book, Warming up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport, last week provided the perfect rocket boosters. Only two years after the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, brandished a “green card for the planet” in a video message, football’s world governing body signed a four-year sponsorship deal with the Saudi oil and gas conglomerate Aramco, the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter, the third biggest carbon emitter since the industrial revolution (behind China’s state coal company and the former Soviet Union) and one with plans, alongside other fossil fuel companies, to expand production in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

“A comedian couldn’t write that,” says Orr over the phone from North Carolina. “It is textbook greenwashing. I’m kind of sad that I didn’t put it in the book as case study No 1. But it is a practice that has been going on for 100 years.”

Snake catchers festival in Italy – in pictures

Each 1 May, the village of Cocullo in the Abruzzo region honours Saint Dominic of Sora with a procession of his statue draped with live snakes. The snakes’ catchers also take part in the monitoring of snake species in the region. After the procession, the snakes are released back into nature

Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words by Michael Peppiatt review – glimpses of a demon-driven genius

Despite the painter’s lack of ‘epistolary fluency’, this collection of his writings – from drunken interviews to begging letters – offers some insight into his working methods and private life

Francis Bacon composed his autobiography in paint, not words. His portraiture laid bare the skull beneath the skin, the beast pregnantly housed inside the human form, and all of the figures he painted – copulating men, hybrid monsters, bystanders at a crucifixion, many of them trapped in chrome cages or sadomasochistic cellars – were fractured images of himself. The verbal self-portrait that Michael Peppiatt has assembled could never match that lacerating self-scrutiny; in his correspondence, his scrappy memos for paintings and his repetitive interviews, Bacon hid behind evasive banality or wilful obscurity.

Descended from Irish gentry, he took a snobbish pride in his lack of education, and his writing is clumsy, unpunctuated and whimsically misspelled. His greatest works were triptychs, profane versions of religious altarpieces; he habitually referred to them as “tryptichs”. In an exchange that lasted for decades, he always addressed his close friend Denis Wirth-Miller as “Dennis”. In addition, as Peppiatt admits, Bacon lacked “epistolary fluency”. The volume contains dozens of postcards from Monaco or Morocco in which the laconic messages consist of weather reports, while another terse and entirely insignificant note asks his London cleaning lady to come on Monday.

Mambar Pierrette review – subtle and big-hearted parable of women’s resilience in Cameroon

Pierrette is beset with troubles, from a robbery to a house flood and more, but the neorealist drama comes with solidarity and surprising humour

The simple image of pushing a seam through a sewing machine becomes a profound life statement in Rosine Mbakam’s debut feature, which is focused on talented clothier Pierrette (played by the director’s cousin Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat) in the Cameroonian city Douala. It’s emblematic of the need to keep moving forward in daily life – and to come out the other side smiling, with stoicism and resilience. As one customer puts it: “I’m getting by. That’s life. When you fall down, you get up again.”

Pierrette is having, it has to be said, an especially rough day. A single mother also caring for an elderly parent (Marguerite Mbakop), she is already scraping for cash. Regularly bartered into submission by her clientele, she always holds her gaze bashfully downwards – either out of anger, or embarrassment at having to assert herself. When she takes a motorcycle taxi after work, robbers relieve her of all her savings, disastrously just as the new school year is beginning. Meanwhile her home is flooded, endangering the clothes she is preparing and leaving her wondering how she will escape this soggy calvary.

Unloved, but unchallenged, Sunak appears safe – because only a fool would want his job now | Henry Hill

After the local elections, the PM has a broken party and an unenviable destiny. He is now the fall guy for the Tory wipeout to come

How to react to unfolding calamity? Tory MPs took different approaches. “Disastrous. Worse than I expected and pointing to a total wipeout.” That’s how one Conservative MP – and not one of the disaffected usual suspects – summed up the local election results to me as the gloom deepened on Saturday. Others preferred to focus on how football teams were doing.

Then there were some game attempts at spin – “Labour are tracking Cameron in 2009, ended up not getting a majority,” said one – but they were few and far between. After Andy Street’s defeat in the West Midlands, the last filigree traces of a silver lining vanished.

Don’t let the sound and fury over Gaza protests drown out what the students are saying | Nesrine Malik

At Columbia University I saw young people who feel they have no choice but to risk their futures

On a hot day last week, the pavements outside Columbia University were heaving. About 200 protesters were gathered, making a noise that was bigger than their numbers, raising pro-Palestine chants and signs. It was a disparate crowd, diverse across ethnicities and generations. “I’ve lived in this neighbourhood all my life,” said one of them when I asked him why he was there. One smiling elderly lady walked through the crowd offering small bottles of water. A helicopter circled overhead. The police who encircled the crowd were jittery, yelling at passersby to keep moving, and raising the temperature of what was a loud but perfectly orderly and amiable crowd.

Once inside the campus, I made my way to the reason for protesters, the police and the high security at the university gates: an encampment of students on a patch of lawn at the heart of campus. It had been up for about two weeks at this point, after a series of demands to university administrators, including divestment from “companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid”, were not met.

Fix Europe’s housing crisis or risk fuelling the far-right, UN expert warns

Unaffordable rents and property prices risk becoming a key political battleground across the continent

• Higher costs and cramped conditions: the impact of Europe’s housing crisis
• ‘Everything’s just … on hold’: the Netherlands’ next-level housing crisis

Spiralling rents and sky-high property prices risk becoming a key battleground of European politics as far-right and populist parties start to exploit growing public anger over the continent’s housing crisis, experts have said.

Weeks before European parliament elections in which far-right parties are forecast to finish first in nine EU member states and second or third in another nine, housing has the potential to become as potent a driver of far-right support as immigration.

Conflict of interest concerns raised over MEPs’ second jobs

Seven out of 10 have outside work with six earning more with work than as parliamentary representatives, analysis shows

Half a dozen members of the European parliament earn more from second jobs than as EU lawmakers, according to analysis that raises questions about potential conflicts of interest.

The campaign group Transparency International EU found that 70% of the European parliament’s 705 members have side jobs. Just over a quarter (26%) of side jobs were paid, with six lawmakers earning more than their €120,900 (£103,000) annual gross MEP salary.

‘I’ve had massive highs and deep lows’: Edward Timpson on winning for the Tories and being sacked by Liz Truss

Sixteen years after he entered parliament, the former minister has had enough. He talks about fighting for children, backing austerity, and his least favourite Conservative PM

“I do question whether I’m actually a politician,” Edward Timpson says. “It’s a bit late now, isn’t it?” I say. He laughs. “Yes, it’s a question I should have asked at the start.” Why does he question it? “Because … maybe I didn’t feel I was ruthless enough, not sharp-elbowed enough.”

However much he is in denial, the Conservative MP is definitely a politician, though not for much longer. He joined parliament in 2008 as member for Crewe and Nantwich after the death of Labour’s Gwyneth Dunwoody, who had represented the area for 34 years, lost his seat by 48 votes after three recounts in 2017, and returned to parliament in 2019 representing the neighbouring seat of Eddisbury. Now a boyish 50, he’s had enough, and is standing down at the next election.

How child labour in India makes the paving stones beneath our feet – podcast

Despite promises of reform, exploitation remains endemic in India’s sandstone industry, with children doing dangerous work for low pay – often to decorate driveways and gardens thousands of miles away. By Romita Saluja

The Bauhaus Nazis: the collaborators – and worse – among the design icons

They were seen as heroes and martyrs who defied the Nazis. But a new show in Weimar reveals horrifying details about some Bauhauslers, one of whom designed the crematoriums at Auschwitz

If the day of Otti Berger’s death is not known, its place and cause are. In April 1944, Berger – part deaf, Jewish, a communist – was arrested in her home town of Zmajevac, in German-occupied Yugoslavia. On 29 May, she was put on a transport to Auschwitz. After that, nothing.

Of the eight Bauhaus students to die at Auschwitz – half the number murdered in other camps and ghettoes – Berger was the best known. With Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, she had revolutionised weaving, turning it from a craft into an art. She had come to Dessau – the iteration of the school most of us think of as the Bauhaus – in 1927, when she was 28. That same year, belatedly, the school had opened a department of architecture. A few months later, a young Austrian called Fritz Ertl signed up to study at it.

Qantas to pay $120m for allegedly selling tickets to flights that had already been cancelled

The airline agrees to a $100m fine and to repay $20m to customers in settlement with the ACCC

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Qantas will fork out $100m as a civil penalty and pay $20m to customers in compensation, after striking a deal with the consumer watchdog over landmark legal action for allegedly selling tens of thousands of tickets to flights that had already been cancelled in its system.

On Monday, Qantas announced it had come to an agreement with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to resolve the court proceedings lodged in August last year, alleging it had advertised and sold tickets for more than 8,000 flights that it had already cancelled in its internal system, revelations which precipitated the early retirement of the former CEO Alan Joyce.

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‘I freaking love it’: Lando Norris proud to silence the critics with first F1 win at Miami Grand Prix

• McLaren driver beat Max Verstappen to take out Miami GP
• Briton used doubters and family as motivation for victory

Lando Norris has hailed his maiden Formula One win at the Miami Grand Prix as a moment of immense pride and one that he insisted would finally silence the critics and doubters who have called his talent into question.

The McLaren driver claimed his debut victory in a thrilling finale at the Miami International Autodrome. Norris comprehensively beat the triple world champion Max Verstappen into second place to take the flag for the first time after 110 race starts since making his debut in Australia in 2019.

How do we protect teenagers from sextortion scams? - podcast

Murray Dowey, a 16-year-old from Dunblane, was targeted by a sextortion scammer in the hours before he took his own life. Now his parents are raising awareness of this increasingly prevalent crime. Libby Brooks reports

On the evening of 29 December, 16-year-old Murray Dowey was with his family in their home in Dunblane, Scotland. As they sat together watching TV, Murray talked about saving up money for a summer holiday with his friends.

At about 9.30pm, he went up to his bedroom.

Missing surfers died from gunshots after attempted robbery, Mexican officials say

Families of two Australians and American who went missing in Baja California have identified the bodies, officials say

Mexican authorities have identified the three dead bodies found in a well in Mexico as Australian brothers Callum and Jake Robinson and their travelling companion, Jack Carter Rhoad.

The trio, who went missing in the Pacific coast state of Baja California, were killed with gunshots to the head, Mexican authorities said on Sunday.

Ukraine war briefing: Russian attacks kill three during Orthodox Easter

Volodymyr Zelenskiy urges prayers for soldiers on frontline amid attacks in Kharkiv and Sumy regions; Xi Jinping arrives in Paris under pressure to harden stance on Russia. What we know on day 803

• See all our Ukraine war coverage

Russian attacks on Orthodox Easter Sunday killed a woman, burying her under rubble, and injured 24 in Ukraine’s north-eastern city of Kharkiv and surrounds, regional officials said. Public broadcaster Suspilne reported power cuts in parts of Kharkiv region and in the adjacent Sumy region after reports of drone attacks and explosions. Vadim Filashkin, head of the military administration in Donetsk region, said two people were killed by shelling in the town of Pokrovsk and two injured in Chasiv Yar, west of the Russian-held town of Bakhmut.

In his Easter address, Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on Ukrainians to be “united in one common prayer”. Standing in front of Kyiv’s Saint Sophia cathedral, Zelenskiy called on Ukrainians to pray for each other and the soldiers on the frontline. “And we believe: God has a chevron with the Ukrainian flag on his shoulder,” said the president, dressed in a traditional embroidered Ukrainian vyshyvanka shirt and khaki trousers. “So with such an ally, life will definitely win over death.” A majority of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians, though the church is divided. Many belong to the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church was loyal to the patriarch in Moscow until it split from Russia after the 2022 invasion and is viewed with suspicion by many Ukrainians.

In his Easter message, Vladimir Putin did not explicitly mention the war as he attended a Moscow Easter service led by the head of the country’s Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. Instead he thanked Kirill for “fruitful cooperation in the current difficult period, when it is so important for us to unite our efforts for the steady development and strengthening of the fatherland”.

Russian forces have taken control of the ruined village of Ocheretyne in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the Russian defence ministry has said. It is north-west of Avdiivka, which Russia captured in February only after huge losses of personnel and equipment. There was no comment from Ukrainian officials or the military, but unofficial Ukrainian war bloggers indicated Russia was in control of Ocheretyne, said the Reuters news agency.

In Sumy, Russian drone attacks left critical infrastructure including water supply and hospitals running on backup power, officials said on Sunday. On Monday morning, Ukraine’s air force said 13 more drones were launched by Russia over the Sumy region and air defence systems destroyed 12 of them.

Officials in Kyiv urged residents to follow Orthodox Easter services online due to safety concerns. Serhiy Popko, head of the Kyiv city administration, warned that “even on such bright days of celebration, we can expect evil deeds from the aggressor”.

Ukraine’s Eurovision 2016 winner, Jamala, has said her country cannot afford to boycott the song contest because it needs the opportunity to remind Europe of Russia’s invasion. There have been calls for artists to refuse to participate over Israel’s inclusion while the war in Gaza continues. The opening round begins on Tuesday in Malmö, Sweden.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has arrived in Paris, where his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, will urge Xi to use his influence with Russia over the war in Ukraine. Xi has done little apart from call Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, for the first time shortly after Macron visited Beijing in 2023. “If the Chinese seek to deepen the relationship with European partners, it is really important that they hear our point of view and start taking it seriously,” a French diplomatic source said. Xi is due on Monday to meet Macron and the European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen.

In an article for Le Figaro, Xi said he wanted to work with the international community to find ways to solve the conflict sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while claiming that China was “neither a party nor a participant” in the conflict. “We hope that peace and stability will return quickly to Europe and intend to work with France and the entire international community to find good paths to resolve the crisis.”

Eurovision winner Jamala says Ukraine ‘cannot afford’ to boycott contest

Singer says her country needs the opportunity to remind Europe of Russia’s invasion

Ukraine’s former Eurovision winner Jamala has said her country “cannot afford” to boycott the song contest because it needs the opportunity to remind Europe of Russia’s invasion.

There have been calls for artists to refuse to participate over Israel’s inclusion in the music competition while the war in Gaza continues.

‘I’m not worried’: Arne Slot bids farewell to Feyenoord fans as Liverpool beckon

• Manager waves to supporters in apparent goodbye
• Dutchman says he will seek Jürgen Klopp’s advice on new role

Arne Slot has all but confirmed he will leave Feyenoord to join Liverpool at the end of the season after saying his goodbyes to the Dutch club’s fans at the end of Sunday night’s 5-0 thrashing of PEC Zwolle, saying: “I’m not worried at all about whether it will go ahead – the question is when it will be communicated.”

Though Feyenoord have one home game still to play, against Excelsior in two weeks, much of the main home end will be empty for that match as punishment for their use of fireworks during the KNVB Cup semi-final against Groningen. At the end of the game against Zwolle fans in those sections stayed behind as Slot approached and waved in what appeared to be a farewell, while his name and photograph appeared on the scoreboards behind the goal.

World Cup winning Argentina coach César Luis Menotti dies aged 85

• Menotti led Argentina to success in home World Cup in 1978
• He also coached Barcelona and Atlético Madrid

The World Cup winning coach César Luis Menotti, who led Argentina to the title in 1978, has died at the age of 85, the Argentine Football Association (AFA) said on Sunday.

Menotti, who played for Rosario Central, Boca Juniors and Santos, began his coaching career at Newell’s Old Boys and won the Argentinian championship with Huracán in 1973, before taking over as head coach of the Argentinian national team in 1974.

Police dismantle Palestinian solidarity encampment at USC

Officers in riot gear raid encampment at dawn as university warns demonstrators that failure to leave could lead to arrest

Police have dismantled the student-led Palestinian solidarity encampment at the University of Southern California.

About 4am on Saturday, as many as 100 Los Angeles police officers in riot gear raided the encampment at dawn as anti-war student demonstrators slept in the tents. In a series of tweets during the raid, the university warned demonstrators to leave the area, adding that “people who don’t leave could be arrested”.

Bolster the Cornish giant stars in clifftop pageant – in pictures

The annual event near St Agnes tells the story of how the picturesque village was supposedly saved from a tyrannical giant

Rwanda admits it can’t guarantee how many asylum seekers it will take in from UK

About 52,000 people are eligible under the scheme, but a government spokesperson said Kigali would accept ‘thousands’

Rwanda has admitted it cannot guarantee how many people it will take from the UK under Rishi Sunak’s deportation scheme.

The east African country did not give assurances that the estimated 52,000 asylum seekers in the UK who are eligible to be sent to Kigali would be accepted, instead saying it would be “thousands”.

‘I’m a blue whale, I’m here’: researchers listen with delight to songs that hint at Antarctic resurgence

Audio collected with underwater microphones suggests numbers at least stable after centuries of industrial whaling left only a few hundred alive

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Centuries of industrial whaling left only a few hundred Antarctic blue whales alive, making it almost impossible to find them in the wild.

New research suggests the population may be recovering. Australian scientists and international colleagues spent two decades listening for their distinctive songs and calls, and have found the whales – the largest animals ever to have lived – swimming across the Southern Ocean with growing regularity.

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Politics Weekly Westminster: local elections special

In the first of our Politics Weekly Westminster episodes, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar and political correspondent Kiran Stacey go over the big wins and losses from the local and mayoral elections

Politics Weekly Westminster: Election special – podcast

In the first of our Politics Weekly Westminster episodes, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar and political correspondent Kiran Stacey go over the big wins and losses from the local and mayoral elections

Being diagnosed with dyslexia has made me happier

Throughout her life, Danyah Miller developed coping mechanisms to help deal with certain challenges. Would she have thrived if she had known about dyslexia, or would a label have limited her?

Discovering that I have dyslexia, and most probably dyscalculia, later in my life has raised many questions for me, not least whether a childhood diagnosis would have changed the trajectory of my life, both personally and professionally.

Over the years I’d suspected that I might be dyslexic. I also thought that I was making excuses for myself when met with certain challenges. It wasn’t until last year that I decided to seek an assessment to confirm either way. I was relieved to read, in the first paragraph of my diagnostic report, that my literacy difficulties are consistent with the specific learning difficulty dyslexia.

Madonna in Rio and a battle between Greek churches: photos of the weekend

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

‘Ghostly’: Taiwan park dotted with hundreds of statues of late dictator as row rages over their fate

Tributes that were removed from public spaces after the end of Chiang Kai-shek’s brutal rule in 1975 now crowd a site west of Taipei

The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek, known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling the island under brutal martial law.

“There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.”

He’s 93, he’s run 52 marathons and he’s in the gym six days a week: can this man teach us how to age well?

Known to his friends as the Legend, John Starbrook is living, breathing proof of the power of exercise and enthusiasm. I tried to keep up with him – and barely survived

I like to think of myself as a strong swimmer. I’m not fast, I can’t dive or tumble turn, but when I get a lane to myself I’ll happily bash out 50 or 60 lengths. Give me a nice big lake, and my idea of heaven is to backstroke into the middle and watch the swallows overhead. I don’t worry that I’ll cramp up or suddenly forget how to float.

But I’ve never fancied water polo. If you’ve not watched it, it’s a sort of cross between swimming, basketball and wrestling, usually played in a pool that’s so deep you have to tread water or drown. There are two teams, two goals, a large ball and an ungodly amount of throwing, catching and flat-out sprinting. Aquatics GB, the governing body, says players can swim two miles in a single game, and need “remarkable stamina” to cope with all the holding and pushing.

‘It’s just not hitting like it used to’: TikTok was in its flop era before it got banned in the US

I used to be an avid user of TikTok, but the algorithm serves much less delight and serendipity than it used to

TikTok is facing its most credible existential threat yet. Last week, the US Congress passed a bill that bans the short-form video app if it does not sell to an American company by this time next year. But as a former avid user whose time on the app has dropped sharply in recent months, I am left wondering – will I even be using the app a year from now?

Like many Americans of my demographic (aging millennial), I first started using TikTok regularly when the Covid-19 pandemic began and lockdowns gave many of us more time than we knew how to fill.

With six months to go, the US election is more unpredictable than ever

Depending on the expert, either Biden or Trump is likely to pull ahead, but this election race is playing out in an unstable landscape

“You know what I hate?” Donald Trump asked in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday night. “When these guys get on television, they say – pundits, you know, the great pundits that never did a thing in their whole lives – ‘You know, we have two very unpopular candidates. We have Biden or we have Trump. These are very unpopular.’”

Watched by a crowd of adoring fans in Make America Great Again (Maga) regalia, against the backdrop of a plane marked “Trump” in giant gold letters, the former US president protested a little too much: “I’m not unpopular!”

10 UK stays that take tranquillity to the next level

From a hideaway with star-gazing spectacular enough to keep you off your phone to a ‘burnout’ retreat and a reimagined coastguard lookout

Bordering the Consall Nature Park, a nature reserve featuring 740 acres of woodland, heath and moor, is The Tawny, a “deconstructed hotel”. This means that instead of a single house with rooms there are a collection of boathouses, huts and treehouses scattered around the woodlands and lakes. At the top of the hill is a modern glass building, the Plumicorn restaurant, and a heated outdoor pool looking out over the gardens. Stargazing sessions and night-time meditation are on offer, while spa treatments can be booked in the thatched cottage onsite.
Huts from £240 B&B; thetawny.co.uk

Cop29 summit to call for peace between warring states, says host Azerbaijan

Organisers of this year’s environmental conference hope cooperation on green issues could help ease global tensions

This year’s Cop29 UN climate summit will be the first “Cop of peace”, focusing on the prevention of future climate-fuelled conflicts and using international cooperation on green issues to help heal existing tensions, according to plans being drawn up by organisers.

Nations may be asked to observe a “Cop truce”, suspending hostilities for the fortnight-long duration of the conference, modelled on the Olympic truce, which is observed by most governments during the summer and winter Olympic Games.

The big picture: author Paul Auster in his element

The celebrated ​writer, who died last week, is captured​ by Arnold Newman in his study ​in 1993​ with his trusty Olympia manual typewriter​

Few novelists ever inhabited their vocation with more conviction than Paul Auster, who died last week of lung cancer at the age of 77. This picture, taken in 1993 by Arnold Newman, captured the writer in his element and among the objects that defined him.

The author of The New York Trilogy is pictured in his basement study in the Brooklyn brownstone house that he shared with his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt (she wrote in a room in the attic). The white walls and bare lightbulbs cast the 19th-century workspace in 20th-century light; you are reminded that his contemporary and friend Don DeLillo had, the previous year, described Auster’s fictional method as “building a traditional storytelling architecture with sharply modern interiors”. There is the ever-present authorial cigarette – Auster’s 1995 film Smoke was set in a Brooklyn tobacconist (he belatedly switched to a vape in 2018) – and, centre stage, the Olympia manual typewriter on which he produced every word of his novels and which was itself the subject of a short 2002 book.

I have no children and have started to fear for my legacy. What can I do? | Ask Philippa

Legacy can be found in the lives you touch and your impact on others

The question I am a 54-year-old woman with a good career and a stable marriage. I live across the globe from my parents, my siblings and their kids and I am child-free. I have reduced contact with them to brief and polite birthday and Christmas messages, which they respond to, but we have no relationship or ongoing contact as such. It is close to estrangement, and I have no desire to try to repair this. I am child-free because I always feared repeating my family’s parenting style and had no sense of my childhood as a positive experience.

I have become preoccupied with the idea of a legacy of a life well lived. I have always placed high value on social contribution and working hard. But, as I increasingly ponder the likelihood of dying alone and without children, I have started to become quite critical about the point of striving in my career, and how and what I should be doing with my time. I feel “being forgotten” is a realistic proposition – and it leads me to wonder whether this is liberating, and I can stop striving, do as I please, or should I strive harder and find a way of leaving my mark, ensuring I have a life that will mean something? Is this just an indulgent existential crisis? Do I need to just get over myself?

‘Inside an oven’: sweltering heat ravages crops and takes lives in south-east Asia

Governments issue health warnings as schools shut and crops fail, with fears that worse is to come as heatwave tightens grip

Extreme heat has gripped much of south and south-east Asia over recent weeks, killing dozens of people, forcing millions of students to miss school and destroying crops.

Both the Philippines and Bangladesh shut schools due to the unbearable heat last month, while governments across the region have issued health warnings. In Thailand, at least 30 people have died from heatstroke since the start of the year.

Faux Native American costumes and clothing reconsidered – in pictures

Artist Selena Kearney was raised on the Chehalis reservation in Washington state and began photographing fake native regalia after a chance encounter with a young woman in a grocery store on Halloween. “She was wearing a skimpy faux-Native American costume,” she says. “I couldn’t begin to understand how that cheap outfit had anything to do with me, or my heritage.” Curious about the power of these objects, she started to collect and consider them, sourcing sports paraphernalia, traditional headdresses and vintage and new costumes from eBay and Amazon. Over the course of five years, Kearney photographed them and the resulting series is now featured in a book, Every Object Has a Ritual (published by Minor Matters), and an exhibition at the Suquamish Museum in Washington state (Object/Ritual, 18 May-January 2025). “Collecting masks felt the hardest of all,” she says. One featuring a woman with two braids was particularly unsettling. “A parody of me, looking back at me.”

‘Is this an image of a sculpture or an invitation to a sexual encounter?’: Esteban Kuriel’s best phone picture

The photographer on an ambiguous image inspired by Greek, Roman and Egyptian art

“A former mentor, Elinor Carucci, recommends taking pictures daily as a sort of gym for the photographic mind,” Esteban Kuriel says.

On this day, Kuriel was staying at St Ermin’s hotel in London and had visited the Sir John Soane’s Museum, which houses a collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian figurative sculptures. “The fragmented, contorted bodies inspired me, and I returned to my room to make this image. Photographing daily trains my eye, just as one trains their body at the gym, so I must play with what is available. In this case, it was this space and its furniture.”

‘You’re going to call me a Holocaust denier now, are you?’: George Monbiot comes face to face with his local conspiracy theorist

Covid vaccines, chemtrails, the Great Reset … Why do people invent false conspiracies when there are so many real ones to worry about? There’s only one way to find out: ask a believer

I am a conspiracy theorist. I believe that groups of people conspire secretly against our interests to line their pockets, cover their backs or achieve political goals. By this definition I suspect you are, too. We see evidence of these conspiracies every day. We see them in the Horizon scandal, in which the Post Office kept prosecuting innocent operators. We see them in the government’s use of a “VIP” lane for procuring PPE from friends and donors at extortionate prices. We see them in the Windrush scandal, in which people were denied their legal rights and unlawfully deported by the UK government. In the Cambridge Analytica scandal: a secretive micro-targeting campaign likely to have influenced the Brexit vote. In the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers, showing how the ultra-rich hide their money from taxes and legal scrutiny.

All these are conspiracies in the true sense: hidden machinations that advance particular interests while causing harm to others. A theory is a rational explanation, subject to disproof. If you accept these scandals are the result of hidden machinations, which they evidently are, you are a conspiracy theorist.

‘I can say things other people are afraid to’: Margaret Atwood on censorship, literary feuds and Trump

At 84, The Handmaid’s Tale author is as outspoken as ever. She talks about aging, culture wars - and why “the orange guy” can’t be allowed back into the White House

“I’m the great sage on top of the mountain,” Margaret Atwood says with a smile, on a video call from her home in Toronto. “If you’ve lived to a certain age people think you know something because they haven’t got there yet.”

At 84, most writers could be forgiven for taking it easy, but especially Atwood, after a tumultuous few years that have seen The Handmaid’s Tale become a hit TV series; the publication of its long-awaited sequel The Testaments, joint winner of the Booker prize in 2019; and the death of her partner of nearly 50 years, novelist Graeme Gibson. He died of a stroke two days after the UK launch of the novel, and Atwood, with typical grit, carried on with the tour.

Weekend Podcast: comedian Sofie Hagen on eight years of celibacy, the £5 coffee is coming, and Philippa Perry offers advice on reconnecting with a sibling

Sofie Hagen loves sex – so why has it been 3,089 days since she’s had any? (1m27s); A flat white can now set you back up to £5.19 – but should we swallow it? (25m13s); and psychotherapist and Observer columnist Philippa Perry addresses a reader’s personal problem (43m51s).

The not-so-secret cost of being superhuman: elite sport’s problem with disordered eating

Athletes are breaking their silence about their experience of eating disorders and disordered eating. Why is this happening in an arena celebrated as the epitome of health?

Elite sport has long been consumed with the idea of the superhuman. Pushing the capabilities of the human body to its extremes in the hopes of uncovering the blueprint to engineer bodies that can jump higher, run faster and endure longer. And, as professionalism has increased, so too has the optimisation of athletes’ bodies in the quest for peak human condition.

But recent revelations that former Australian women’s cricket captain Meg Lanning cut her international career short due to struggles with disordered eating have exposed some of the cracks that have long been forming in the elite sport system.

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Solar storms, ice cores and nuns’ teeth: the new science of history – podcast

Advances in fields such as spectrometry and gene sequencing are unleashing torrents of new data about the ancient world – and could offer answers to questions we never even knew to ask. By Jacob Mikanowski

King Charles visits hospital as he returns to public duties after cancer diagnosis – video

On his first public-facing engagement since his cancer diagnosis, King Charles visited patients at University College hospital’s Macmillan Cancer Centre in London, aiming to highlight the importance of early diagnosis. In February it was announced that the king had been diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer, for which he is still receiving treatment. Doctors said they saw encouraging signs in his treatment and he could resume public duties

• King Charles speaks to cancer patients on first public engagement since diagnosis

Aerial footage shows scene of Hainault stabbing attack – video report

Footage taken by Sky News showed a police cordon and blood on the ground at the scene of a stabbing in London on Tuesday. A man carrying a sword attacked members of the public and two police officers in Hainault before being arrested, police said. The London ambulance service said emergency workers treated five people and took them to hospital. Police confirmed a 14-year-old boy had died from his injuries

• Boy, 14, dies after ‘horrific’ sword attack in north-east London

Pro-Palestine protesters barricade Columbia University building – video

Dozens of protesters have taken over a building at Columbia University in New York, barricading the entrances and unfurling a Palestine flag out of a window, as the UN human rights chief said he was “troubled” by how law enforcement has dealt with the recent wave of campus demonstrations. In the latest escalation of uprest on US campuses, video footage showed protesters on Columbia’s Manhattan campus locking arms in front of Hamilton Hall early on Tuesday and carrying furniture and metal barricades to the building. Protesters ignored the Monday ultimatum to abandon their encampment or risk suspension

• Pro-Palestinian protesters take over Columbia University building

• Columbia begins suspending pro-Palestine protesters after ultimatum ignored

‘The Greens are our enemy’: What is fuelling the far right in Germany?

The far right are on the march in Germany and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany has become the most popular party in several states. Immigration and a sense of being economically left behind have been driving factors in the rise in popularity but the Green party and the federal government’s climate policies have also borne the brunt of public anger. The Guardian travelled to Görlitz, on the German border with Poland, to find out to what extent Germany’s green policies are fuelling the far right

• How climate policies are becoming focus for far-right attacks in Germany

Tell us your experiences of making a living from music

We would like to hear from professional musicians about how they make a living from their work and the obstacles they face

Musicians playing smaller venues are facing low fees, high costs, and frequent losses. We would like to hear from professional musicians of all levels about how they make a living from their work and the obstacles they face.

Have you experienced issues with the costs of playing live or recording? Have you found a way to get around it? Tell us all about it below.

Drone footage shows Ukraine's 'Harry Potter castle’ in flames after Russian missile attack - video

Firefighters in the Ukrainian southern port city of Odesa battled a blaze in a private law academy after a Russian attack. The missile strike killed at least four people and injured 32 others after residential buildings and 'civil infrastructure' were hit. The law academy was in a Gothic-style building on the seafront and was known as the Harry Potter castle. Drone footage released by the Ukrainian armed forces show the building in flames.

On the frontline, Ukrainian officials say Russia is assembling forces for a huge summer offensive, despite its troops making only incremental gains in recent months. The Nato chief, Jens Stoltenberg, says countries have failed to deliver military aid to Ukraine in time, benefiting Russia on the frontline

• Ukraine war briefing: Russia making gains from slow western aid, says Nato chief

• Debris from North Korean missile found in Kharkiv, say UN sanctions monitors

'We are losing people': hostage families make appeal for 'immediate release' of relatives – video

The relatives of Keith Siegel and Omri Miran, who were taken as hostage to Gaza and had videos recently released of them, have made an appeal to the international community for help obtaining their 'immediate release'. Elan Siegel, the daughter of Keith Siegel, told reporters at a press conference in Tel Aviv that now was the time to 'stop the talking and start the action'.

Lishay Lavi Miran, the wife of Omri Miran, said: 'This is your responsibility to bring them back. And I know it a really hard decision to do it'

• ICC urged to delay possible war crimes charges against Israel and Hamas

• David Cameron urges Hamas to agree to 40-day Gaza ceasefire deal

At least 30 dead as strikes across Gaza continue amid renewed momentum in ceasefire talks – video

Israeli strikes hit three houses in Rafah, which currently hosts a large population of displaced Palestinians, killing at least 30 and injuring many more. The strikes come amid renewed momentum in ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas. Nearly 85% of Gaza's population remains displaced, as humanitarian organisations warn of the risk of famine spreading across the besieged strip

• Blinken urges Hamas to accept ‘extraordinarily generous’ Israeli ceasefire deal

• ICC urged to delay possible war crimes charges against Israel and Hamas

Who is Arne Slot, Klopp's expected successor at Liverpool? – video report

Arne Slot caught the eye of Liverpool’s recruitment team with his track record of improving young talent, success on a relatively modest budget, European experience and a style of play that is not a dramatic departure from Jürgen Klopp’s. The Feyenoord coach has earned a reputation for high intensity on the pitch and has led his team to success multiple times.

Since joining the Rotterdam club from AZ Alkmaar in 2021, Slot has won the Eredivisie in 2022-23 and the KNVB Cup this season. He also led Feyenoord to the Europa Conference League final in 2022, where they lost to José Mourinho's Roma.

• Arne Slot: the overachiever and ‘good guy’ who can spark a revolution

Parts of Kenya hit by torrential rain and deadly floods – video

In Kenya's southern town of Mai Mahiu, a dam burst its banks, killing at least 42 people, authorities said. There has been heavy rain across east Africa driven by El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern usually associated with increased heat worldwide. Kenya's government has said almost 200,000 people have been displaced and at least 100 people killed since March. Neighbouring Tanzania has also been affected

• Dozens of people killed as dam bursts in Kenya

Tell us: are you splurging on luxury goods you can ill afford?

We’d like to hear from people who have been purchasing luxury goods and experiences in recent years, and how they feel about their spending habits

We’re interested to hear about people’s spending habits in the area of upmarket or luxury goods, services and experiences, and whether they are generally happy with their spending on non-essentials.

We’d like to know whether you have spent money on expensive non-essential items such as designer clothing, high end housewares, luxury holidays, expensive beauty or wellness treatments, or exclusive dining, for instance, in the past year, and if so, whether you have struggled to afford this.

Young Europeans: do you live with your parents?

We want to hear from people aged 18 to 35 – what is housing like in your area and do you live in your parental home?

We would like to learn more about the housing situation for young people (aged 18-35) in mainland Europe.

What is your situation and who is in your household? Do you live with your family, your partner, housemates, or alone? How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with this arrangement? How does this affect you in your daily life?

People in India: share your thoughts on the election

The Guardian would like to hear from people in India on their thoughts on the 2024 general election, in particular young people who are voting for the first time

The world’s largest election has begun, with nearly a billion people eligible to vote in India’s marathon poll taking place over the next few weeks.

The elections have been described by analysts as the most predictable polls India has held in decades, with prime minister Narendra Modi and his BJP widely expected to win a third term in power. Amid a crackdown on the opposition, analysts and opponents have warned this could be the most one-sided election in India’s history