Grilled over policies regarding children and young people, Johnson remains the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. Just not if you happened to be a schoolkid during the pandemic. Then you were being asked to make the biggest sacrifices to protect elderly people, even though you were the least at risk. Still, I suppose there was a lesson in there somewhere. Almost everyone who comes into contact – however indirectly – with Boris Johnson generally finds they have been done over at some point. So you might as well get your disappointment in early. Things can only improve after that.

The Covid inquiry has now moved on to its children and young people module and on Tuesday Johnson was back to give evidence. And, as ever, he looked as if he really did not give a shit. The hair was its trademark mess. His face unshaven. The smirk. Always the smirk. At times he looked almost bored. At others, irritated that people were asking him so many questions.

Experts say such dreams of dental distress may relate to the processing of various emotions and experiences

My teeth have fallen out at fancy dinners and in public restrooms. They’ve sprinkled from my mouth like enamel confetti before dates, important business meetings and major public speaking engagements. Each time, it’s troubling, stressful and deeply inconvenient. Fortunately, it’s only ever happened in my dreams.

“A lot of people have that dream,� says Dr Dylan Selterman, associate teaching professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. People often tell Selterman they think it’s weird that they have this kind of dream, or assume it says something about their personality. “I don’t think that’s the case,� he says.

Country mansion boasts 40 hectares of grounds yet discredited prince pays only ‘a peppercorn’ in rent each year

With its 30 rooms nestling in 40 hectares (98 acres) of secluded grounds in Windsor Great Park, Royal Lodge has been the home of Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson for two decades and been likened to a very grand country house.

Now it too is in the crosshairs of public outrage as pressure mounts to justify the discredited prince’s right to live in such grandeur in a crown estate property on “a peppercorn� rent.

This season has seen underwhelming results from stars such as Margot Robbie, Dwayne Johnson, Julia Roberts and Keanu Reeves

Movie stars have been on a journey this fall, and it hasn’t been especially big, bold or beautiful. Actually, on second thought, maybe there is something bold about the way audiences have rejected, in quick succession, new movies collectively starring Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Channing Tatum, Kristen Dunst, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Keanu Reeves, Seth Rogen and none other than Daniel Day-Lewis. This group of actors that would constitute an especially star-studded Oscars broadcast couldn’t muster a single hit among them. Even Leonardo DiCaprio must accept his status as the exception that proves the rule: his movie One Battle After Another is heading toward a respectable $200m worldwide – and all it took was one of the biggest stars in the world with support from familiar faces Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, a multiple-time Oscar nominee directing with an Imax-sized budget, and almost universally rapturous reviews. Put all that together in an adult-driven drama and maybe you can outgross, and lose somewhat less money than, Disney’s Snow White remake. (One Battle is unlikely to turn a profit on its theatrical release.)

Meanwhile, movies such as A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, The Smashing Machine, Roofman, After the Hunt, Good Fortune, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Anemone had no such constellation of exciting elements forming in their orbit alongside their stars. Some of them couldn’t even manage particularly great reviews. But that used to be what movie stars were there to provide: some kind of baseline level of interest in a movie, even if it wasn’t getting best-of-year reviews or boasting cutting-edge spectacle. None of the aforementioned stars are expected to perform with the superhuman consistency of Tom Cruise between 1986 and 2006 or Will Smith between 1996 and 2016. But there used to be a certain number of dramas and comedies that would make $50m or more in the US every year as a matter of course, the ones with stars tending to have an advantage in that respect.

Fed up with condensation, mould and musty smells? A dehumidifier could help – plus they’re a cheaper way to dry laundry compared with tumble dryers

• The best electric blankets and heated throws, tested by our expert

You don’t have to live in the American deep south to feel the effects of humidity. At home, just breathing makes the air more humid, let alone cooking or showering.

And when it gets too humid, it’s bad for our health as well as our homes. In fact, the two are connected: humidity lets mould and dust mites flourish – and they, in turn, can trigger asthma and allergies.

Best dehumidifier overall:
Ebac 4650e

Best budget dehumidifier:
VonHaus smart dehumidifier with laundry mode

Footage of Reform councillors fighting is further proof that uselessness abounds, but that’s almost moot. To voters they are very useful idiots

“I’m meant to be on bloody holiday this week, Paul! I don’t want to be having this meeting!� There is much to enjoy about the patriotic revolution in government promised by the leaked footage obtained by the Guardian of the Reform UK group of councillors running Kent county council. Take council leader Linden Kemkaran speaking for all free speech absolutists when she declares: “Paul! Paul! I’m going to mute you in a minute!� Or consider her repeatedly stated vision of the imperfections of representative democracy: “You’re just going to have to fucking suck it up, OK?�

Even so I think the standout bit is when Kemkaran, who acknowledged Kent’s “flagship� status for the party and its leader Nigel Farage, says: “If we can avoid putting up council tax by the full 5%, that is going to be the best thing that we can do to show that Reform can run something as big as Kent council.�

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 2 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back with special guests at another extraordinary year, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here

Chancellor, who is expected to announce tax rises and spending cuts, says effect of leaving bloc worse than predicted

Rachel Reeves has blamed a heavier than anticipated blow from Brexit and austerity for forcing her to take action to balance the books at next month’s budget.

In her clearest attempt to draw Brexit into the framing of her imminent tax and spending decisions, the chancellor said leaving the EU was turning out to have caused more damage than official forecasters had previously outlined.

White House says there are now no plans for summit ‘in the immediate future’ as latest efforts to end Ukraine war falter

• US politics live – latest updates

Plans to hold a summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Budapest have been put on hold as Ukraine and its European allies rallied in pushing for a ceasefire without territorial concessions from Kyiv.

The White House said there were now “no plans� for the US president to meet his Russian counterpart “in the immediate future� as a round of diplomacy at the end of last week failed to yield any significant progress towards ending the war.

Former Lambeth children’s services director Annie Hudson pulls out following intense media coverage

A national grooming gang inquiry ordered by Keir Starmer is facing further disruption after one of two candidates who had been shortlisted to lead it withdrew from the process.

Annie Hudson, a former director of children’s services for Lambeth, told survivors on Tuesday that she no longer wanted to be considered after intense media coverage.

Exclusive: West Midlands police were told supporters randomly attacked Muslims in Amsterdam last year

Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters were banned from watching their game against Aston Villa after police intelligence concluded the biggest risk of violence came from extremist fans of the Israeli club.

The ban ignited an intense controversy and was criticised by the prime minister, as well as others claiming it was a surrender to antisemitism.

Scores of extreme Maccabi fans with a past history of violence and shouting “racist taunts� were expected to travel to the Birmingham game.

Dutch police told their British counterparts that the Maccabi fans had instigated trouble in Amsterdam at a game last year.

They had randomly picked Muslims in Amsterdam to attack. That led to reprisal violence with some Dutch Jews attacked.

A huge Dutch police effort, involving 5,000 officers across three days, was needed to quell the trouble.

A community impact assessment by West Midlands police recorded that some Jewish people wanted the Maccabi fans banned because of the trouble that might ensue if they attended.

Any trouble started by Maccabi fans attending the Birmingham game could lead to reprisals from local people and further trouble.

The process did not consider whether the ban on fans of the Israeli club could be criticised as antisemitic itself or surrendering to antisemitism.

Andrew Bailey says a close look is needed at the private credit market after collapse of two big US firms

The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has warned recent events in US private credit markets have worrying echoes of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that kicked off the global financial crash of 2008.

Appearing before a House of Lords committee, the governor said it was important to have the “drains up� and analyse the collapse of two leveraged US firms, First Brands and Tricolor, in case they were not isolated events but “the canary in the coalmine�.

Exclusive: Intervention by deputy leadership contender could have saved company based in her Manchester constituency millions

Lucy Powell urged ministers to reconsider costly legal proceedings against a property development firm in her constituency founded by a Labour donor, in a move that could have saved his company millions, the Guardian can disclose.

Powell, who is the favourite to be elected Labour’s deputy leader this week, wrote to Angela Rayner on behalf of Urban Splash, a property developer in Manchester founded by party donor Tom Bloxham.

US vice-president to visit Netanyahu while Hamas joins talks in Cairo meant to iron out differences

The US vice-president, JD Vance, expressed “great optimism� over the Gaza truce plan which he described as “durable� and “going better than expected�, during a visit to Israel on Tuesday, two days after Israeli airstrikes killed 26 Palestinians.

Vance’s trip, as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to strengthen the ceasefire agreement, comes as Hamas officials joined talks in Cairo meant to bridge outstanding differences with Israel.

• Updates from the 8pm BST kick-off at the Emirates

• Newcastle v Benfica, Villarreal v Man City – live

• Get in touch! Share your thoughts with Scott

2 min: Arsenal start the evening as they presumably intend to go on, stroking the ball around patiently. Koke gets fed up and clips Zubimendi on the shin, and probably should go into the book, but it’s early and you know how referees roll. A couple of statements of intent there, perhaps.

Arsenal get the ball rolling. Noise bounces around the Emirates.

Company’s AI-powered browser built around marquee bot is designed to provide more personalized web experience

OpenAI on Tuesday launched an AI-powered web browser built around its marquee chatbot.

“Meet our new browser—ChatGPT Atlas,� a tweet from the company read.

The manosphere is known for misogyny, but that’s not the only thing that influencers in this space offer. Young men explain the allure and the problems of the manosphere in their own words

Cloud computing disruption highlights risk of deepening ties despite warnings from UK’s own regulators, including the Treasury

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy beamed as he met Keir Starmer in Downing Street’s garden to announce £40bn of UK investments in June. Starmer was equally effusive, gushing: “This deal shows that our plan for change is working –bringing in investment, driving growth, and putting more money in people’s pockets.�

Four months later, and the tech company was left scrambling to fix a devastating global outage on Monday that left thousands of businesses in limbo – and shed light on the UK government’s reliance on its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Impeachment and 25th amendment offer routes for removal – but experts say the system is set up to protect the president

Donald Trump looked out across the White House ballroom at his audience of wealthy donors and business figures – people who had given millions of dollars to his extravagant plan to build a vast ballroom attached to the building’s East Wing.

The president, 79, told the crowd he had enjoyed a “really historic trip� to the Middle East, and indulged in some of his familiar patter: saying his tariffs were successful, and claiming that under Joe Biden, countries were “literally emptying out insane asylums into our country�.

John-Bryan ‘JB’ Jarrett lives with devastating brain injuries after overdosing on fentanyl. Despite the uncertainty of his prognosis, his mom, Jessica, is by his side 24/7

• The hidden victims of the opioid crisis: the ones who lived

A couple of years ago, I began investigating non-fatal overdoses.

Coverage of the US’s opioid crisis has largely focused on lives lost. But through my cousin Mason, I saw another toll of the epidemic: the people who survive overdoses but are left with devastating disabilities.

An Italian restaurant shut up shop last week, with an angry and disappointed farewell note, blaming ‘neighbours’ for a lack of support ...

Name: Unappreciative customers.

Age: In the case of Don Ciccio, six years.

Click here to submit a picture for publication in these online galleries and/or on the Guardian letters page

The Oscar-winning costume designer Jenny Beavan has let slip that an alarming number of actors go commando to fittings. The profession has rarely felt more alien

Jenny Beavan is a living legend in the world of film. A three-time Oscar-winning costume designer, she gave Merchant Ivory films their distinctive look but was equally responsible for the visual onslaught of Mad Max: Fury Road.

In 2016, her decision to attend various awards shows wearing unconventional fashion captured the zeitgeist twice; first when Stephen Fry called her a “bag lady� and was forced off Twitter, and second when a clip of Alejandro González Iñárritu glowering as she passed him went viral. In other words, Jenny Beavan can do whatever the hell she likes.

Since 1985, the country’s toad population has almost halved, with hundreds of thousands killed on the roads each year. But many people are determined to protect them – including 274 dedicated patrol groups

It’s 7.30 on a Friday evening, but I’m not heading to the pub or putting on a film. Instead, I’ve caught the train to a market town in Wiltshire, where I’m meeting up with members of Warminster toad patrol. These are volunteers who – like similar groups up and down the country – give up their evenings to protect their local toad population.

For the common toad (scientific name Bufo bufo) is becoming increasingly uncommon. A recent study led by amphibian and reptile charity Froglife showed that the UK toad population has almost halved since 1985. To see a creature that has been a stalwart of the British countryside – not to mention a prominent feature of literature and folklore – in decline is “worrying�, says Dr Silviu Petrovan, senior researcher at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study. Toads “don’t require very specific conditions� and “should be able to live quite well in most of the habitats in Britain,� he says – so if even they are not managing to survive, “it kind of suggests that things are not as they should be�.

When a fishing boat left port in Alaska in December 2019 with an experienced crew, an icy storm was brewing. What happened to them shows why deep sea fishing is one of the most dangerous professions in the world

The Scandies Rose fishing boat set out to sea from Kodiak, Alaska on 30 December 2019 with a crew of seven, into weather as bad as anything December could throw. “It was enough of a shitty forecast,� said one of the crew in later testimony, “I didn’t think we were going to leave that night.� At 8.35pm, fierce, frigid winds were blowing. Some boats stayed in harbour but the Scandies Rose still set out. “We knew the weather was going to be bad,� said deckhand Dean Gribble, “but the boat’s a battleship, we go through the weather.�

The boat was carrying 7,000kg of bait and was headed north towards the Bering Sea. “She was trim, said Dean, and a good boat. Gary Cobban was a good captain.� One of the last jobs before departure was to stack the crab pots properly. There were 198 on board. That is a heavy load but not unusual. Each pot measured more than 2 metres by 2 metres. “Big, heavy fucking pots,� Gribble said.

Antibiotic use in farming is now rampant and you should care about that. How meat is produced in China may mean the drugs you need here won’t work

What we’re putting into our bodies can either nourish us, or make us ill. With that in mind, I wrote recently about the role of food consumption in terms of the risk of colon cancer. But what about food production?

Across the world, we are seeing the rise of cheap meat: largely driven by demand from a rising middle class who finally can afford beef, pork and chicken, which used to be out of reach, given their cost. Approximately 45% of global consumption growth is occurring in upper-middle-income countries including China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and the Philippines. Poultry is set to take an increasingly large share of that growth (projected to grow by 21% by 2034), because it is relatively cheap, widely acceptable and requires fewer resources per kilogram compared with beef or pork. By 2034, it is estimated that poultry will provide 45% of the protein consumed from all meat sources.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

The beauty industry has mastered selling us back an ersatz version of our own nature for enormous profit. Never has this been clearer than in the case of a sold-out modern-day merkin ...

Every writer has a “just in case� piece – the article they’ll write if their favourite artist dies, their beloved team wins, or the political moment they dreamed of arrives. I had mine all planned out. The piece: the bush is back! A 3,000-word essay about the quiet reclamation of pubic hair in all its unruly glory, replete with hair-raising puns befitting a story of such campy defiance.

But I must face the fact that I may never get to write this piece. Why? Because Kim Kardashian and her underwear brand Skims have ruined it, with the sale of a faux pubic hair thong called “the Ultimate Bush�. Launched last week with a video featuring models in a 70s-styled gameshow called “Does the carpet match the drapes?�, the £34 thong features a triangle of hair made of synthetic fibres to mimic pubic manes in 12 hair colour and texture combos. It sold out in under 24 hours, leaving the internet to wonder: who exactly is this product for? Those who regret lasering it all off? Or folks looking for some retro merkin fun?

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.

Tommy Robinson is said to be going to Villa Park as a Maccabi Tel Aviv fan. Do the politicians jumping on this bandwagon care what they are doing

If social media posts are anything to go by, Tommy Robinson is planning to visit Villa Park next month as a Maccabi Tel Aviv fan. What can possibly have attracted the Luton-born political activist to the Israeli Premier League’s second-placed club? The stylish all-action midfield play of Dor Peretz? The stirring run to the group stages of the 2004-05 Champions League? Perhaps, in the fashion of the club’s former manager Robbie Keane, Robinson’s embrace is simply the fulfilment of a cherished and multifaceted boyhood dream.

But of course there is a natural synergy there too, one we should probably have identified long before the Uefa computer pitted Aston Villa against the club long known in Israel as “the country’s team�, and inadvertently threw a hand grenade into British politics. Like Robinson, Maccabi attracts a fervid following of young men from the far right, who gather at weekends to chant racist and anti-Arab slogans. Like Robinson’s disciples, Maccabi’s fans have occasionally been known to indulge in a little light violence. A decade ago Maccabi fans unveiled a banner reading “refugees (not) welcome�, a refrain with which you can imagine the artist formerly known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon nodding heartily along.

Jonathan Liew 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 theft of the crown jewels is another blow to national prestige, but far greater is the threat of a monarchical president hoarding power against voters’ wishes

The world is now gripped by the spectacular (and literal daylight) robbery perpetrated on the world’s most famous art museum on Sunday morning. As visitors queued to get in to the Louvre, thieves were escaping out of another wing, after a raid on the crown jewels that took just seven minutes. The story could have been lifted straight from a Hollywood movie or an episode of the French mystery thriller series Lupin.

Yet, although this outrageous theft has stunned France, it was perhaps a fitting act of larceny for a country that has just been the victim of another incredible heist. From one Monday to the next the French people were swindled into thinking we were getting a new government. The political drama left many of us feeling like confused characters in Groundhog Day, but perhaps the closer symbolism is to be found in the surreal theft at the Louvre.

Rokhaya Diallo is a Guardian Europe 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.

Julia Roberts emerges unscathed but Luca Guadagnino’s tiring and muddled attempt to comment on trending topics doesn’t inspire the debates it so clearly wants

• Contains mild spoilers

In theory, After the Hunt, director Luca Guadagnino’s would-be psychological thriller tracing the fallout of a sexual-assault accusation at a cosseted Ivy League campus, hinges on a single early scene: Alma, the aloof and alluring philosophy professor made icily incandescent by Julia Roberts, arrives home to find Maggie, her doctoral student protege played by ascendant star Ayo Edebiri, waiting for her in the rain.

Crouched together in an apartment stairwell – Guadagnino, a slick and stylish film-maker, frames them facing each other as mirrored negatives in preppy neutrals, a generational yin-yang – Maggie tells Alma in clipped, digressive bits that something bad happened with Hank (Andrew Garfield), a fellow tenure-track professor who serves as Alma’s professional rival, friend and maybe lover. The two had left Alma’s the night before following an evening of drinking and tossing around airless provocations about how offending someone became “the pre-eminent cardinal sin�, or how “the common enemy has been chosen and it’s the straight, white, cis male�. After a nightcap at her apartment, Maggie says, Hank “crossed the line�.

By taking Jeremy Hunt’s NI cuts and ruling out other rises, Labour tried to out-Tory the Tories. And made a bad situation worse

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have only themselves to blame for the mess they are in over tax. The key moment was not the defenestration of their welfare bill or the uprising over pensioners’ winter fuel payments. The die was cast more than a year earlier.

In January 2024, the then chancellor Jeremy Hunt implemented a cut in employee national insurance contributions. Four months later he announced a further reduction from 10% to 8% and even hinted that he was considering abolishing employee contributions altogether. It was the mother of all election bribes, costing the exchequer about £10bn a year. It was also entirely cynical, offered in the absolute confidence that the Tories would not be in office long enough to grapple with the consequences. Had they by any chance won the election, he would have had to recoup the tax revenue forgone by either tax increases or by further swingeing cuts to the public sector.

Chris Mullin is a former Labour minister and the author of four volumes of widely acclaimed diaries

Attempts by the former French president and his supporters to discredit the legal process by which he was sentenced have been irresponsible and unjustified

As he was transported to La Santé prison in Paris on Tuesday, Nicolas Sarkozy posted a message brimming with defiance on X, writing “It’s not a former president of the republic who is being jailed this morning, it’s an innocent man�. A court of appeal will eventually give its view on the veracity of the second clause of that statement. But unfortunately for Mr Sarkozy, the drama and significance of his fall cannot simply be wished away.

President of France between 2007 and 2012, Mr Sarkozy was found guilty of criminal conspiracy to obtain illicit campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. Handed a five‑year sentence, he has become the first former leader of an EU country to go behind bars, and the first French leader since the disgraced head of Vichy France, Philippe Pétain. In a country in which the elected president enjoys a quasi-monarchical status, Tuesday’s extraordinary spectacle was a seminal moment.

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.

Another qualifications upheaval risks undermining the government’s good ideas

Further education is one of the public sector’s Cinderellas – chronically neglected by policymakers who care more about schools. The government’s latest white paper is a welcome attempt to rectify this. If the plan succeeds, it would go some way towards fulfilling Labour’s pledge to break down barriers that block opportunities for too many young people.

But there is no simple way to enhance the status of further education colleges while also raising the quality of job-linked training and adult education more widely. Previous attempts have not gone well. Overall, investment in non-academic training has dropped calamitously since 2010. The apprenticeship levy scheme introduced by the Conservatives in 2017 was a dismal failure, as employers spent the money on existing employees rather than entry-level opportunities. The take-up of new T-levels, which were meant to raise the status of technical learning to match A-levels, has been disappointing.

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.

Caitlin Boswell lays out measures that would make taxation fairer and improve lives. Plus letters from Rachel Sharp, Dr Tim Owen and Paul McGilchrist

Rachel Reeves has said that higher taxes on the wealthy will be a part of the story at the autumn budget (Report, 15 October). The government must use this moment to ensure that the super-rich contribute their fair share rather than cutting services that impact the poorest and most marginalised.

We all want the same things: thriving communities, good jobs and a future that we can look to with hope. But the rules have been rigged by the super-rich and powerful, allowing them to hoard wealth while the rest of us scrape by. This is fuelling division at a time when people desperately need meaningful change.

Hannah Essex and Robert Parkhill have opposing reactions to Daniel Day-Lewis’s claim that theatre is an elitist artform for privileged people

Daniel Day-Lewis contends that theatre is intrinsically elitist and dependent on privilege (‘Theatre is an elitist artform for privileged people’: Daniel Day-Lewis talks class, cinema and his crush on Mary Poppins, 15 October). He is wrong.

Far from standing still, the theatre sector has for many years placed inclusion at its heart, with free and subsidised tickets, relaxed, captioned or signed performances, community partnerships, touring to underserved areas, and outreach in schools.

Eugene O’Hare reflects on the increasingly ubiquitous use of microphones on stage

Royal Shakespeare Company actors and audiences will only stand to gain from the appointment of the great voice teacher Patsy Rodenburg to the role of emeritus director of voice Actors trained during pandemic lack vocal power and range says RSC leader, 14 October).

And Daniel Evans, the RSC’s co-artistic director, is right to point out that young actors trained over Zoom during the lockdowns are at a significant vocal disadvantage.

A hitchhiker’s guide to slang | Wassup | Royal formerly known as Prince | Trump tactics | Men practising pilates | Lowering blood pressure

I trust that the young people saying “six-seven� (Pass notes, 20 October) realise that the product of those two numbers is 42, which, according to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything�. It’s what we old people say.
Toby Wood
Peterborough

• My 13-year-old granddaughter, Sophia, confirms that randomly yelling “Six-sevvuhnn!� is trending at her school. This sort of thing is nothing new: when her mother was at school, the fashionable standard greeting between teenage boys was “Whassup?�.
Mark Newbury
Farndale, Yorkshire

⚽� Updates from 8pm BST kick-offs across Europe
⚽� Arsenal v Atlético Madrid – live
⚽� Live scoreboard | And share your thoughts with Yara

We are less than 15 minutes away from the 8pm BST kick-offs. You can follow Arsenal’s match against Atlético Madrid with Scott Murray below.

Full-time in the early games:

• Barça capitalise on dismissal of visitors’ Hezze

• Kairat Almaty held at home by Pafos of Cyprus

A Fermin López hat-trick and two goals from Marcus Rashford powered Barcelona to a commanding 6-1 Champions League victory over Olympiakos.

The match got off to a flying start when the 22-year-old López opened the scoring from a rebound in the seventh minute and he doubled his tally in the 39th, finishing off a lightning-quick counterattack.

This story will be updated

• Tandy names wing in squad after 21-month absence

• Rhys Carré also included after he requalifies for selection

Louis Rees-Zammit is in line for an international comeback for Wales next month, 21 months after ­abandoning the sport to try his luck in American football. Rees-Zammit, now 24, is among 39 players named in the first squad to be picked by the new national head coach, Steve Tandy.

The British & Irish Lions wing, who won the most recent of his 32 caps at the 2023 World Cup, made the switch to American football in January 2024 but ended up not featuring in a ­competitive NFL game. He returned to union in August when he joined the English Prem side Bristol.

Manager inherits a group of players that suits him and has a track record of creating camaraderie in his squads

Sean Dyche was often spotted at the City Ground while out of work. The Nottingham Forest job has been of interest to him for a long time, and not only because he lives close by. The circumstances in which the role has become available are not ideal for an incoming head coach but his appointment is the pragmatic choice in ludicrous circumstances.

Ange Postecoglou was never the right man, inheriting a squad that did not suit his style and did not adapt quickly enough, though it did not help that he told the players their previous achievements meant nothing. His tenure will go down in history for all the wrong reasons. Dyche, on the other hand, has plenty of respect for what Forest achieved under Nuno Espírito Santo and is far more aligned with that conservatism than with what was witnessed under Postecoglou.

Sides have reached Women’s Cricket World Cup semis but last winter’s whitewash gives Wednesday’s game an edge

Amy Jones has claimed that January’s Ashes whitewash “hasn’t been a topic of discussion� before Wednesday’s World Cup clash between England and Australia. If you believe that, you will believe anything.

Both teams have qualified for the semi-finals, so it could be argued that little will be at stake in Indore. That would be wrong. First, given the run of results in this World Cup, these sides are almost certain to finish first and second and therefore avoid a semi-final against each other – which means this game could well be a precursor to the final in Navi Mumbai on 2 November. Cricket is a game played partly in the mind: no one wants to be thumped by their opponents two weeks before they meet them in a global tournament final.

• Scarratt, 35, calls time on career after 119 England caps

• She will take up coaching and mentoring role with RFU

Emily Scarratt has announced her retirement from rugby after a 17-year international career. The two-time World Cup winner said in a statement that the “time feels right to step away�.

Scarratt made her England debut in 2008 and went on to win 119 caps and 11 Six Nations titles. The 35‑year‑old centre represented the Red Roses in five World Cups, the only England player to do so.

The duo face Germany and Sweden respectively in this week’s semi-finals and should each have enough to win

First leg: Friday, Düsseldorf, 4.45pm (all times BST). Second leg; Tuesday, Caen, 8.10pm

Leg-spinner has no thoughts of retirement as he plots series wins in New Zealand and glory at the 2026 T20 World Cup

Adil Rashid could be forgiven for tiring of the international cricket treadmill more than 16 years after his debut. Now in New Zealand for his 35th international T20 series or tournament, he summarises that hectic, monotonous life when talking about the team-bonding mini‑break in Queenstown with which England started their winter: “Sometimes you don’t get that opportunity when you’re always on tour,� he says. “You land, you train, you play and you travel.�

Yet his enthusiasm is clear, not just when he discusses the immediate future of a side that seems to be flourishing under Harry Brook and his own place in it, but also when watching Rashid train, play or bowl. But while he was able to stop New Zealand in their tracks as they attempted to chase down England’s record‑breaking 236 at Hagley Oval in Christchurch on Monday night, when his four‑wicket haul included all but one of their five highest scorers, there is nothing he can do to halt time.

• Jury rules Nicklaus defamed by former company

• False claims tied him to $750m LIV Golf offer

• 85-year-old legend awarded $50m in damages

Jack Nicklaus, the 18-time major champion, has won a $50m verdict in a defamation case against his former company, bringing an end to one of golf’s most bitter business feuds.

A jury in Palm Beach County, Florida, found that Nicklaus Companies – the firm he founded and later sold – defamed him by spreading false claims that he had considered a $750m offer to become a public face of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf League and that he was no longer mentally fit to manage his business affairs. The six-person jury ruled that the company’s actions damaged the 85-year-old’s reputation and exposed him to “ridicule, hatred, mistrust, distrust or contempt�.

David Lammy urged to consider 1955 case in light of evidence Ellis was abused by partner before she killed him

The grandchildren of the last woman to be hanged in the UK are asking ministers to posthumously pardon her in light of evidence that she was emotionally and physically abused by her partner before she killed him.

Ruth Ellis was executed in 1955 after killing David Blakely her partner, who she had met while working in the nightclub she managed two years earlier. At the time, she was portrayed as a “cold-blooded killer� but evidence has since emerged that Blakely, a racing-car driver, physically and emotionally abused her.

Former PM tells Covid inquiry that children were ‘paying a huge, huge price to protect the rest of society’

Boris Johnson rejected claims that his government failed to prepare for school closures at the outbreak of the pandemic, telling the Covid-19 inquiry that it would be “amazing� if the Department for Education (DfE) had not realised that plans were needed.

Gavin Williamson, the then education secretary, had told the inquiry that he hadn’t acted sooner because “there was no suggestion that the Department for Education should prepare a plan or a policy for mass school closures�.

Deng Chol Majek tells jury he had no reason to hurt Rhiannon Skye Whyte and was in hotel car park at time of attack

An asylum seeker accused of murdering a hotel worker told a jury in Wolverhampton he had no reason to want to harm or kill her and was not at the scene of the attack.

Deng Chol Majek, who said he was 19, denies attacking and murdering Rhiannon Skye Whyte with a screwdriver at Bescot Stadium railway station, West Midlands, last October.

Police continue to search for the criminal gang behind the brazen robbery targeting France’s crown jewels

The financial loss from France’s most dramatic heist in decades has been put at nearly €90m as the head of the Louvre prepared to face difficult questions over how thieves were able to steal priceless jewellery in broad daylight.

As police continued to search for the criminal gang behind the brazen robbery on Sunday, the Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau told the broadcaster RTL that the museum’s curator had estimated the losses at about €88m (£76m).

Adderley, said to have made false claims about time in Navy, to be prosecuted over allegations of fraud and misconduct

The former Northamptonshire police chief constable Nick Adderley has been charged with fraud and misconduct in public office over allegations he made false claims about his military service and educational achievements when applying to work for the police, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has said.

Adderley is accused of making false claims of being a decorated Navy officer while applying to work for the police, according to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

Once hunted to the brink of extinction, the most venerable of the leviathans now numbers 384, up eight from past year

One of the rarest whales on the planet has continued an encouraging trend of population growth in the wake of new efforts to protect the giant animals, according to scientists who study them.

The North Atlantic right whale now numbers an estimated 384 animals, up eight whales from the previous year, according to a report by the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium released on Tuesday. The whales have shown a trend of slow population growth over the past four years and have gained more than 7% of their 2020 population, the consortium said.

Iida Turpeinen’s novel has been a sensation in her native Finland. On the eve of its UK publication, she talks about her compulsion to tell of the sociable giant’s plight

Iida Turpeinen is the author of Beasts of the Sea, a Finnish novel tracing the fate of a now-extinct species: the sea cow. Similar to dugongs and manatees, the sea cow was only discovered in 1741 by the shipwrecked German-born naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller but by 1768 it had already become the first marine species to be eradicated by humans.

Translated into 28 languages and shortlisted for the country’s most prestigious literary award, the Finlandia Prize, Beasts of the Sea was described by the Helsinki Literacy Agency as the most internationally successful Finnish debut novel ever. Turpeinen, 38, a PhD student of comparative literature, is now a resident novelist at Finland’s Natural History Museum. Her book will be published in the UK on 23 October.

Climate crisis contributing to spread of diseases as hunting industry takes a hit from growing number of dead deer

When landowner and hunter James Barkhurst went scouting his property about a month ago to assess the local deer population ahead of the fall hunting season, he was left in shock.

“I’ve seen about 14 dead in less than a mile stretch. There’s a lot of does, big bucks and even fawns. You smell the dead everywhere,� he says. “And I haven’t really went deep into the woods.�

The Marches, Shropshire: The larvae of gall wasps burrowed into these acorns in summer. Now they’re gone, leaving behind the weird, hardened detritus

Under a woodsmoke sky, the lime trees smell yellow, their leaves defy gravity, hanging on to summer stains, a few stray into the cool, breathless air and vanish. Those leaves that have fallen lose their leafiness to decay, as John Clare says, in the poem Decay, “To be, – and to have been, – and then be not.� This is anticyclonic gloom. High pressure, low cloud, roofed by warm air, poor visibility, misty and grey. Gloom. It’s interesting that the sullen and despondent mood, Gloom, has left its evil twin Doom, and lumbered into meteorology to be the official poster-spirit of dim light.

I like a bit of autumnal gloom, and so do the crows, it seems. In dreamy mood and a gothic disdain for showiness, they make some cursory flaps around the field to settle in old oaks and caw six times as if that has some oracular significance. Maybe it has. In the scrunch of acorns under one oak, with a thinning crown and stag-headed, are lots of knopper galls. When they first formed in August, these flanged extrusions from pedunculate oak acorns were green, then red and sticky, created by the larvae of the tiny gall wasp Andricus quercuscalicis feeding on the seed within and producing weird crown-like growths.

Ricky Stubberfield, 31, guilty of 23 sexual offences including attacking some of his own customers

A man who ran a teeth-whitening and tanning salon in Plymouth has been jailed for 26 years for a series of rapes and sexual assaults against women, including customers of his business whom he lured with offers of free treatment.

Ricky Stubberfield, 31, attacked seven victims over a period of 11 years, between 2013 and 2024, with some of the assaults taking place at the Essex Smiles salon on Mutley Plain when he was the co-owner and manager.

Museum wants to confront history of ‘bishops of the colonies’ and their involvement in slavery

“Black History Month is a great thing,� said Siân Harrington, the chief executive at Fulham Palace Trust, “but I think it’s just not enough.�

The museum had always told the story of the bishop of London, who historically lived at Fulham Palace – now home to a historic house, museum and 13-acre garden. But when George Floyd was murdered in 2020, the museum concluded that more needed to be done.

Ministers face growing pressure to act amid fresh allegations over prince’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

MPs have moved to lodge a parliamentary motion to strip Prince Andrew of his dukedom, in a rarely permitted move in the Commons.

The government is facing mounting pressure over the prince’s residence in the 30-room Royal Lodge in Windsor, where it was revealed that he has not paid rent for more than two decades.

Exclusive: Poverty rapporteur says governments must rethink welfare state as essential to fabric of society

Decades of efforts by mainstream politicians to roll back welfare programmes have given rise to an “extremely dangerous� discourse that has helped fuel the rise of the far right and rightwing populists in countries around the world, a top UN expert has told the Guardian.

From London to Lisbon, politicians from centre-right and centre-left parties alike had steadily eroded social programmes, fostering a sense of scarcity and creating fertile ground for the stirring up of anti-migrant sentiment, said Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

John Thune suggests White House will have official comment on Paul Ingrassia after signaling Republicans won’t let confirmation pass in the Senate

• US shelves plans for Trump-Putin talks in Budapest

The Central Intelligence Agency is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal air strikes by the Trump administration against small, fast-going boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the operations.

Experts say the agency’s central role means much of the evidence used to select which alleged smugglers to kill on the open sea will almost certainly remain secret.

Legal teams are midway through a hearing over whether one vote truly swayed an election in a Montreal suburb

The case of a single vote which determined the outcome of a federal election in Canada risks sending the “disastrous message� to voters that “some votes count more than others�, says the lawyer of a former MP as a court considers whether to void the controversial election and hold a new vote.

Legal teams in Quebec are midway through a three-day hearing over whether a single vote – and an administrative error – truly swayed a recent election in a suburb north of Montreal.

Former president organised stage-managed departure from his Paris home before becoming first French postwar leader to be jailed

• What can Sarkozy expect in La Santé prison?

The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been jailed in Paris, after a court sentenced him to five years for criminal conspiracy over a scheme to obtain election campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

France’s rightwing president between 2007 and 2012 is the first former head of an EU country to serve time in prison, and the first French postwar leader to go behind bars.

Historic case over bribery and witness tampering has gripped nation and soured conservative strongman’s legacy

An appeals court has overturned the conviction of the former Colombian president �lvaro Uribe for bribery and witness tampering in a historic case that gripped the South American country and tarnished the conservative strongman’s legacy.

Uribe, 73, has denied any wrongdoing. He was sentenced to 12 years of house arrest in August following a nearly six-month trial in which prosecutors presented evidence that he attempted to influence witnesses who accused the law-and-order leader of having links to a paramilitary group in the 1990s.

In tech this week: The CEO of the city’s largest private employer apologizes, Amazon Web Services’ outage and OpenAI’s Sora makes waves

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host and editor, Blake Montgomery. What I’m watching this week: South Park’s caricature of Peter Thiel and his obsession with the antichrist. Read our reporting on the show’s inspiration: Thiel’s bizarre off-the-record lectures on the subject. And now, let’s get into things.

A glitch at Amazon’s cloud computing service brought down apps and websites around the world on Monday.

The affected platforms included Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.

Surprise shake-up follows row with majority shareholder, which seeks ‘extensive reconfiguration’

• Business live – latest updates

The chair of Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk, Helge Lund, and six other board members are stepping down in a surprise shake-up, after a row with the company’s majority shareholder.

The Danish manufacturer of the blockbuster anti-obesity jab, and the diabetes drug Ozempic, said Lund, the vice-chair, Henrik Poulsen, and five independent board members would quit at an extraordinary meeting on 14 November.

US company Yum! Brands appoints FTI as administrators to oversee deal that will preserve 1,276 jobs

• Business live – latest updates

The locations have been revealed of 68 Pizza Hut restaurants that will close after the company behind its UK venues fell into administration.

They are across the country, from Finchley Lido in London to Carlisle in Cumbria and Rhyl in north Wales.

Ashton, Lancashire

Beckton, London

Bolton, Lancashire

Bournemouth, Dorset

Bradford Vicar Lane, West Yorkshire

Brighton Marina, East Sussex

Aspects Leisure Park, Bristol

Cardiff, South Glamorgan

Carlisle, Cumbria

Chatham, Kent

Clacton, Essex

Cortonwood, South Yorkshire

Crawley, West Sussex

Cribbs Causeway, South Gloucestershire

Croydon, Surrey

Dudley, West Midlands

Dundee

Durham

Eastbourne, East Sussex

Hanover Street, Edinburgh

Fountain Park, Edinburgh

Kinnaird Park, Edinburgh

Enfield, Middlesex

Falkirk, Scotland

Feltham, Middlesex

Finchley Lido, London

Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Greenwich, London

Grimsby, Lincolnshire

Hartlepool, Cleveland

Hayes, Middlesex

Hereford, Herefordshire

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

Hull, East Yorkshire

Inverness, Scotland

Kettering, Northamptonshire

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

Lancaster, Lancashire

Leeds Colton Mill, West Yorkshire

Leeds Kirkstall Road, West Yorkshire

Leeds White Rose, West Yorkshire

Liverpool, Merseyside

Llanelli, Dyfed

Lowestoft, Suffolk

Manchester Fort, Lancashire

Middlesbrough, Cleveland

Norwich, Norfolk

Oldham, Lancashire

Portsmouth, Hampshire

Preston, Lancashire

Reading Gate, Berkshire

Rhyl, Clwyd

Rochdale, Lancashire

Romford, Essex

Russell Square, London

Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire

Shrewsbury, Shropshire

Silverlink, Tyne & Wear

Solihull, West Midlands

St Helens, Merseyside

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

Thanet, Kent

Tower Park, Dorset

Truro, Cornwall

Urmston, Lancashire

Wellingborough, Northamptonshire

Wigan, Lancashire

Yeovil, Somerset

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Bletchley, Milton Keynes

Coventry North, West Midlands

Coventry West, West Midlands

Dunstable, Bedfordshire

Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire

Luton, Bedfordshire

Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire

Rugby, Warwickshire

Uxbridge, Middlesex

Wolverton, Milton Keynes

Chancellor to tell business leaders at government’s first regional investment summit she plans to ‘cut pointless admin’

The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is poised to launch a renewed “blitz on business bureaucracy� ahead of next month’s budget to target savings for companies worth £6bn.

With Labour under pressure to reboot the economy, Reeves is expected to tell business leaders in Birmingham for the government’s first regional investment summit that she plans to “cut pointless admin�.

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
He has painted everything from a candle to 9/11, walked his naked wife through photographic mist, and turned Titian into a sacred jumble. This thrilling show, boasting 270 works, reveals the German in all his contradictory brilliance

Gerhard Richter recalls, as a child, drawing with his finger on his empty, slightly greasy dinner plate, tracing and retracing fanciful curves and spatial structures in endless alterations on the china. Decades later, he would place blobs of different colours on a canvas then intermingle them using slithery curving brushstrokes, lubricated by the oil and paint, until the entire surface was covered. More or less pure colour slid among the passages of impure, much-mixed pigment. Other paintings were made using large squeegees and spatulas, pushing and dragging paint over the surface, and just as often scraping it off again. The squeegee would often pick up previously applied, sometimes half-dried paint, excavating previous layers even as it applied new ones. Smearing paint on, dragging it off again, Richter would keep working until he could no longer think of anything else to do to a painting. One day in 2017, he stopped painting entirely. Since then, he has devoted himself mostly to drawing.

Richter’s art is filled with beginnings and endings, revelling in chance as often as he has used craftsmanship and exactitude to paint people and places and things, from flowers wilting in a vase to street corners, elegiac landscapes and the dead. Standing amid his retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, it strikes me that however one chooses to describe or compartmentalise the different strands of his work, his art remains irreducible. It’s contrarian, fickle, controlled yet intemperate, the contradictions make a mockery of fixed readings. His art is filled with fugues, with self-absorption and an objective stare.

From Carr mocking Imrie for her gas to them cracking each other up at the round table, the duo are an absolute hoot. But they’re not just going head to head for best contestant – they’re making terrestrial TV great again

She broke wind and broke the internet. Last week on The Celebrity Traitors, the gothic drama of the creepy cabin mission was interrupted by an audible parp. “What just happened?� asked host Claudia Winkleman, struggling to keep her composure. “I just farted,� said actor Celia Imrie sweetly. “I’m so sorry. It’s nerves – but I always own up.�

All around her, fellow famous types dissolved into fits of laughter. It was immediately hailed as a contender for TV moment of the year. Take note, Bafta, if you’re not too busy holding your nose. Deadline magazine reported that the viral scene “put some wind in the sails of the show’s ratings�.

Stupid, absurd and filled with depraved characters, this scrappy series might be TV’s greatest underdog

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The year was 2005 and comedy television was entering a shiny new era. Cultural giants like Friends and Sex and the City might have concluded a year earlier but glossy upstarts – The Office and How I Met Your Mother, heard of them? – were ready to fill their monolithic shoes. Into their midst came a scrappy new series: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The success of It’s Always Sunny was never guaranteed. It was born only a few months after YouTube, shot on a handheld camera, had a budget of practically nothing and featured a motley crew of out-of-work actors. The show was built on a simple premise; to highlight the exploits of an idiotic, narcissistic group of friends running an Irish dive bar in South Philly who scheme, betray and trick each other – or unfortunate strangers – at every turn.

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The ‘rough and ready’ genre’s current box office boom shouldn’t surprise us, say film-makers and experts

The biggest jump-scare the film industry has had in 2025? The return of horror as a main player at the UK box office. As a genre, it has impressively outperformed previous years (a 22% year-on-year increase for the UK and Irish box office: £83,766,086 in 2025, compared with £68,612,395 in 2024).

“Last year, no horror film reached £10m at the UK or Irish box office. This year, five films have,� says Charles Gant, box office editor of Screen International. The big hits of the year – Weapons (£11.4m), Sinners (£16.2m), The Conjuring Last Rites (£14.98m) and 28 Years Later (£15.54m) – have all hung about the multiplexes and in the public consciousness. Although much of the industry commentary focuses on the singular brilliance of Zac Cregger’s Weapons and Ryan Coogler’s postmodern epic Sinners, their successes indicate something is shifting between audiences and the genre.

In this emotionally smart adventure for older kids, a 10-year-old girl’s drawings magically come off the page and wreak havoc

The Goonies meets Godzilla in this brilliantly fun, imaginative and emotionally smart adventure for older kids. It’s about a 10-year-old girl named Amber (Bianca Belle) whose drawings of monsters magically come to life and wreak all kinds of havoc. Since they are the product of a 10-year-old brain, and drawn with felt-tip pens, the monsters are mostly a cute bunch of fuzzballs with googly eyes, burping up glitter. Though be warned, one or two near the end could spook even adult audiences.

Things start to go wrong for Amber after she is caught drawing a picture of herself stabbing a classmate – loudmouth, obnoxious Bowman (Kalon Cox). Amber lives with her big brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) and their lovely dad (Tony Hale); her mum has recently died, and there’s a funny scene around the dinner table as her brother Jack looks up on his phone if they are orphans, resulting in Amber coining the phrase “morphan� (as in maternal orphan).

Film-makers Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti play new owners of a haunted house in a DIY effort that is fun but fatally unscary

Scary found-footage movies can and do get better than this enthusiastic DIY horror from married-couple directors Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti. Their zero-budget feature is fun for a while, but in the end it’s just not scary enough. There is nothing to make jump out of your skin or frighten you out of your senses. Kempt and Toti also star in the film, playing fictional versions of themselves: Rachel and Nick, horror-obsessed film-makers living in Kirksville, Missouri. Things go wrong after they buy a house on the cheap to shoot a haunted house movie. (Which sounds unrealistic, but you can actually buy a fixer-upper in Kirksville for less than $30,000)

The idea is that we are watching behind the scenes documentary footage shot by Nick, who provides a forlorn voiceover: “I wish I never filmed any of it.� At first, the new house seems the perfect setting for a horror movie: there’s some satanic graffiti inside, a door that looks as though someone has taken an axe to it, even some creepy little portraits of stern-faced Victorians. The pair’s easygoing, self-satirising banter is good fun as Rachel considers the ways in which their haunted house might actually kill them: “We are literally inhaling rat faeces!�

Female collaborators, muses and ministers shaped D’Angelo’s voice, arrangements and emotional acuity

The first time D’Angelo reached me, he wasn’t alone. His voice was entwined with Erykah Badu’s on Your Precious Love, a duet that felt like an offering being passed between sweethearts. I was 14, the edge of adolescence, opening to my own life. Their voices sounded delicate, blooming – almost shy. A cover of a classic Motown record written by Ashford & Simpson and sung, most memorably, by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, D’Angelo and Erykah’s churchy call-and-response nodded to the past while low-pitched boom-baps reflected contemporary trends on the FM dial. It was a crossroads sound, working two ways at once, and the blend, the hybridity of it all, heralded the future.

Before long, D’Angelo’s 1995 debut Brown Sugar got shared and traded and analyzed among my girlfriends. Though we were deep in hip-hop’s high-flossing, shiny suit era, we noticed how he insisted on tenderness. It was the ’90s; crack and the crime bill had ravaged our neighborhoods and hurt our pride. His visuals seemed to seek to restore it. His music videos had a relaxed, smoky cool; clips such as Lady and Me and Those Dreaming Eyes of Mine showed women in every hue of brown whirling beneath warm lights and D’Angelo’s own devoted gaze. I had a dozen first loves, just as many fears, and a bouquet of dreams for the future – D’Angelo’s songs seemed to catch my currents.

As the 86-year-old music legend prepares to release a new album, she will take on your questions

At the age of 86, Mavis Staples is still pressing ahead with exciting new music – indeed, one of the most star-studded and resonant albums of her career is coming up. As she prepares to release it, she’ll be answering your questions.

That new album, Sad and Beautiful World – released on 7 November – includes a small galaxy of music legends orbiting around Staples at the centre. As well as covers of songs by Curtis Mayfield, Gillian Welch, Frank Ocean, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Porter Wagoner, plus US alt heroes Mark “Sparklehorse� Linkous and Kevin Morby, there are new songs, including one written for and about Staples by Hozier and Allison Russell.

The actor is a laconic delight as he dispenses surprising levels of wisdom in response to reader questions, while Obama, Paul McCartney and Ayo Edebiri pay homage to an African musical great

Bill Nighy is the agony uncle you never knew you needed as he answers the public’s questions in his new show. It’s a laconic delight, listening to his louche suggestions on topics from lipstick application to decluttering a record collection. Wisdom is being dispensed – despite his self-deprecating protestations. Alexi Duggins
Widely available, episodes weekly

Barbican, London
Thomas Adès curated and conducted a dazzling concert of contemporary works by Alex Paxton and Poul Ruders, plus his own Aquifer alongside a radiant Sibelius 3

By this point in October there is no escaping the shorter days, lower light and autumn drizzle, but this concert by London Symphony Orchestra – the first in a short series of LSO programmes this season and next curated by the composer and conductor Thomas Adès – seemed calculated to dispel any seasonal gloom, its intense burst of vivid orchestral colours and effervescent noisiness functioning as the musical equivalent of a Sad lamp.

The UK premiere of Alex Paxton’s World Builder, Creature set the tone from the glittering musical box of its opening, as upper woodwind flitted and skimmed the surface and lower brass ambled around the depths. The score’s intricate textures were almost miraculously lucid. Muted trumpets seemed to have escaped from a big band, a piano splashed around anarchically amid the strings and moreish rhythmic grooves emerged only to be abruptly halted. At one point an elephantine tuba blared into one of these sudden stoppages before a whole new cluster of ideas emerged, bright and delightfully bonkers, as Adès leapt around gamely on the podium.

Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir lays bare the life-wrecking impact of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes – but it is also the story of how a young woman becomes a hero

• Read an extract

There is a strand running through Nobody’s Girl – a memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April this year – in which the activist and survivor of Jeffrey Epstein grapples with something more insidious than abuse. “I know it is a lot to take in,� she writes after a gruelling early passage detailing how she was sexually abused as a child. “But please don’t stop reading.� After recounting the first time Epstein allegedly forced her to have sex with one of his billionaire friends, she writes, “I need a breather. I bet you do too.�

Throughout the book, Giuffre beguiles, apologises and cheerfully breaks the fourth wall in an effort to soften the distaste she assumes her story will trigger. Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sex abuse and the way in which institutions sided with the perpetrator over his victims. Epstein hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in 2019 and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, outcomes largely enabled by Giuffre’s testimony. But it is also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And yet here she is, having to charm us out of shrinking from her in horror.

The viral blog turned book details the exhausting life of a courier, but something may have been lost in translation

From the early 2000s until the Covid lockdowns, Hu Anyan was one of China’s vast army of internal migrants, moving between cities in pursuit of work. He did 19 jobs – shop assistant, hotel waiter, petrol attendant and security guard, among other things – in six cities. Although all these jobs were atrociously paid, they still earned him more than the one he tried for two years in the middle of this period: writer. (An 8,000-word story earned him less than 300 yuan – about £30.) Then, during Covid, he wrote a blog about his night shifts in a logistics warehouse, and it went viral. The blog expanded and became I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, which has sold nearly 2m copies in China since being published in 2023, and now appears in Jack Hargreaves’s English translation.

The low-paid Chinese worker is at the mercy of an entirely unrestrained market. The jobs Hu does demand unpaid trial periods and have no base pay, and he works mainly for commission or a handling fee, which his employers can reduce on a whim. Disgruntled employees pick on each other, because “going after the powerful will only cost us in the end�. Experienced hands refuse to help newbies, on the grounds that “teaching the disciple might starve the master�. The only power Hu has is to walk away. When his bosses learn that he has no children, that his parents have pensions and medical insurance and don’t need his support, they worry that he will leave at a moment’s notice (and are sometimes right).

If we regard this book as literature, it is an unqualified failure. But these juvenile stories and essays shed fascinating light on the repression of Lee’s early life

When a new book is published by a writer dead for a decade, there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. When the writer is Harper Lee, there is also the unpleasant aftertaste of the release of her second novel, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman, which was promoted as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, when in fact it was a formless early draft. The publication was also surrounded by controversy over whether the aged Lee, by then seriously disabled, had really consented to its publication.

This new book, The Land of Sweet Forever, is a much more conventional enterprise: a collection of Lee’s unpublished short stories and previously uncollected essays. No deception is being practised here, and if people want to read the lesser scribblings of a favourite author, it is surely a victimless crime. However, like most such books, it has little to offer to those who aren’t diehard fans.

From shadowing a cocaine-addled David Bowie to winning over Joni Mitchell, deliciously readable tales by the director of Almost Famous

Cameron Crowe spent his youth being in the right place at the right time. In 1964, aged seven, he was taken by his mother to see “a kid named Bob Dylan� play a local college gym. By the age of 14, living in San Diego, he was writing record reviews for a local underground magazine whose main aim was to bring down Richard Nixon. Shortly after that, he started interviewing the bands of the day as they came through California – first Humble Pie for Creem, and then the Eagles, the Allman Brothers Band and Led Zeppelin for Rolling Stone.

Crowe previously fictionalised his story in the 2000 film Almost Famous, which he wrote and directed. His lyrical and compulsively readable memoir The Uncool is bookended by the opening of a musical version, which coincides with the death of Crowe’s mother Alice whose aphorisms, including “Put some goodness in the world before it blows up�, are scattered throughout the book. Alice insisted that Crowe skip two school grades, driving his precocity; she was also dead against rock’n’roll on account of its unbridled hedonism. When Crowe asks her what Elvis did on The Ed Sullivan Show that was so subversive he had to be filmed from the waist up, she “clinically� replies: “He had an erection�.

PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox (version tested); The Chinese Room/Paradox Interactive
Arriving more than two decades after the original, this sequel was mired in development disaster – resulting in an interesting almost-failure

You are an ancient and powerful vampire, and you wake up in the basement of some decrepit Seattle building, with no recent memories and a strange sigil on your hand. The first thing you do is feed on the cop who finds you, before smacking his partner into a wall so hard that his blood spatters the brick. A violent fanged rampage ensues, where you beat up and tear apart rival undead and their ghouls while currying the favour of the local court of vampires, and trying to keep your existence hidden from the mortal populace of this sultry city.

But this is also a detective story: there’s a younger night-stalker sharing your brain, a voice in your head named Fabian, who talks like a 1920s gumshoe (presumably because he once was one). Fabian isn’t violent at all; he evidently works with the human police and the vampire underworld, snacking on consenting volunteers’ blood and using his mind-delving powers to solve murders. These two stories are two entirely different games in the same setting, but then everything about Bloodlines 2 feels stitched awkwardly together. It is unfortunate that I happen to be playing this right after bingeing AMC’s Interview with the Vampire TV series, because the contrast is stark. One is a masterful, frightening, sexually charged and deftly comic reimagining of vampire mythology. The other is OK.

Most games want you to save the world. This stop-motion adventure wants you to hold someone’s hand

Stop-motion adventure Out of Words was one of the most striking reveals at this year’s Summer Game Fest. While most games are built from code, Out of Words is made from clay, fabric, and glue: a love story literally crafted by hand that even caught the attention of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima (“The biggest praise we could imagine,� game director Johan Oettinger says.)

Oettinger dreamed of making a stop-motion video game since he was 12, when he first played 90s point-and-click claymation game The Neverhood. After years working across films, commercials and installation art, Out of Words became the project to merge these two lifelong passions.

Forty years ago today, the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in the US – and a generation of kids were sucked into video games for life

The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in the United States on 18 October 1985: about a year after I was born, and 40 years ago today. It’s as if the company sensed that a sucker who’d spend thousands of dollars on plastic toys and electronic games had just entered the world. Actually, it’s as if the company had sensed that an entire generation of fools like me was about to enter the world. Which is true. That was the time to strike. We were about to be drained of every dollar we received for birthdays, Christmases and all those times our dad didn’t want us to tell our mom about something. (Maybe that last one’s just me.)

Despite being slightly older than the NES, a horror I’m only now forced to face as I write this, it felt like that console had always existed in my life. I don’t have many memories from my baby years because I was too busy learning how to use my hands and eyes, but as far back as I can actually remember, “Nintendo� was a word synonymous with video games. Friends would ask if you had Nintendo (no “the�, no “a�) at your house the same way they might ask if you had Coca-Cola in the fridge.

This whimsical action-adventure game sees you stomping through nature as a life-giving lighthouse – and it only gets weirder from there

The world of Keeper looms from the screen like a dream coloured by psilocybin. Here is a gnarled landmass of bubblegum blues, powder pinks and strange, luminous beasts, where evolution seems to occur at light speed. This world’s considerable beauty is amplified by how it is rendered: like a 1980s fantasy movie filled with charmingly handmade practical effects. Keeper is the latest title from Double Fine, maker of trippy platformer Psychonauts 2, Kickstarter sensation Broken Age and many other idiosyncratic titles. It is an action-adventure resplendent with the lumps and bumps of life’s imperfections, as if its 3D modellers had sculpted the setting from papier-mache rather than using computer software.

Even stranger than the setting is the protagonist: you play as a lighthouse, coming to appreciate this gleaming ecological fantasia by shining its beacon about the environment. Long shadows stretch behind illuminated objects, making the outlines of spectacularly supersized plants and tiny critters all the more pronounced. The casting of light is how you interact with the world: it often causes vegetation to grow before your eyes, and sometimes unusual inhabitants will feast upon it. As you lumber through this environment – calm lagoons and sun-baked canyons filled with prickly cacti – there is joy to be found in simply looking, taking the weirdness in, and then bringing it to even greater life.

Elmet, a novel that was shortlisted for the Booker, is a lyrical, richly written tale of a woodland family on a collision course with an avaricious landowner. Can it work on stage in Bradford?

Novelist Fiona Mozley and theatre-maker Javaad Alipoor are not an obvious match. Elmet, Mozley’s Booker prize-shortlisted 2017 novel, is a lyrical and violent tale of land, family and revenge in semi-rural Yorkshire. Alipoor is best known for complex multimedia performances exploring digital technology, internet culture and geopolitics. But the contrast is what energises them about working on a stage adaptation for Bradford’s year as City of Culture. “I couldn’t see how it was going to come together,� says Mozley. “But that excited me.�

Alipoor read Elmet during the pandemic and was struck by its “gut-punch story�. As fans of his company’s work might expect, this is not what he calls a “route one� adaptation. Instead of focusing on plot and dialogue, he is maintaining the novel’s evocative narrative mode and underlining the show’s theatricality, with actors stepping in and out of character. Everything is refracted through the perspective of teenage Danny, who lives in the woods with his quietly seething sister Cathy and the hulking, almost superhuman Daddy, whose sense of right and hunger for violence sets them on a collision course with the avaricious local landowner.

Royal Court theatre, London
Marianne Elliott directs Nick Payne’s tonally uneven play about a missing son that comes with ill-fitting moments of comedy

Nick Payne is an exemplar of this theatre’s mission to nurture new writers. It was here he started out, on the young writers’ programme. Now a starry alumnus, he completes a career full circle by premiering a play on its main stage for the first time. Is it a triumphant return? Not exactly, although he has gathered a garlanded company around him, including director Marianne Elliott, another Royal Court returnee.

Nicola Walker plays Miriam, a mother grappling with the disappearance of her son, Oscar, who vanished when he was not yet 16. The play’s indirect inquiries into loss (When does disappearance turn into permanent loss? Is moving on the same as giving up?) feel very much in keeping with Payne’s oeuvre on stage and screen. So does its cut-up structure that shuttles non-chronologically through time, not unlike his 2012 play Constellations. Scenes flip from the hopeful beginnings of a police investigation to false leads followed ever more desperately by Miriam, to seven years later when her ex-husband David (Paul Higgins) suggests a memorial as some form of closure.

Sheffield Playhouse
Set against the backdrop of Tory rule and Section 28, this rousing musical is based on the real-life hub for feminist and queer protest set up by three pioneering women

There’s something knowing about Nicky Hallett and Val Regan’s new musical. It’s a show based on recent history that’s simultaneously uncomfortable with its status as, in the wry words of one character, “heritage�. In telling the story of the pioneering 1980s Sheffield garage run by three female mechanics, Gwenda’s Garage celebrates these women while refusing to turn them into calcified historical figures.

As the performers tell the audience, this is a half-remembered, incomplete version of the actual Gwenda’s Garage, with fictional characters in place of the real mechanics. The musical is as much about the female protagonists’ activism against the backdrop of Tory rule and the introduction of Section 28 as it is about the garage itself, with rousing songs such as We Had a Scam and Welcome to Sheffield creating an infectious atmosphere of collective feminist and queer protest.

The Place, London
This delightfully unique triple bill spans many worlds with Busby Berkeley-style sci-fi formations, a hazy summery waltz and a wild rampage of Welsh folk dance

The sequins are sensational; the dancers pretty special too. Clad in skin-tight black glittering bodysuits and masks – the full Leigh Bowery – it is a look: gorgeous with an undercurrent of unnerving. There’s a confidence on all fronts in the work of Marcos Morau, which befits a multi-award-winning choreographer who graces major stages with his own company La Veronal, but also has an ongoing relationship with the small National Dance Company Wales. In Waltz (2023) the ideas aren’t overcrowded. Morau’s dancer-creatures emerge like an alien chorus line, bodies entwined in geometric formations like a sci-fi Busby Berkeley. The highly ordered machine breaks down into separate parts, dancers in stop-start motion, their beguiling and peculiar appearance not dissimilar to the dislocated postures of Sharon Eyal or Wayne McGregor. Perhaps the novelty is exhausted before the time runs out, but there’s pleasing clarity, and it looks damn cool.

This triple bill actually begins with the short Infinity Duet by Faye Tan: two dancers and a swinging sculpture like a trapeze (by Cecile Johnson Soliz). Airy guitar music brings the warmth and ease of a hazy summer day, its breeze – and the pendulum-like sway of the sculpture – setting the dancers in motion. I was waiting for them to start swinging, but it wasn’t that kind of show.

The AI-generated host of Dispatches raises worrying questions about Channel 4’s environmental impact. She’s also a dead-eyed host who might leave Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Kevin McCloud fearing for their future

Last night’s Dispatches was called Will AI Take My Job? Usually when something like this employs a question mark in the title, it’s because the answer is no. Not this time, though, because the sheer overwhelming inevitability of AI taking our jobs is genuinely painful to think about.

According to the film, 8m jobs in the UK alone are at risk of being outsourced by AI. Call centre workers, translators, graphic designers – anyone who isn’t a masseur or a scaffolder, basically – will soon be made redundant by a technology that, despite its catastrophic effect on the environment, is growing more sophisticated by the hour. My days are almost certainly numbered; it stands to reason that I will soon be replaced by the ChatGPT prompt “Be performatively exasperated about whatever was just on the telly�. Grok could even whip up a byline photo of an unpleasantly smug egg to go with it. Nobody would be any the wiser.

Actor admired for the fearlessness she brought to her film roles in The Collector and The Brood who later appeared in popular US television shows such as Columbo and Murder, She Wrote

The most memorable performances by the flame-haired actor Samantha Eggar, who has died aged 86, occupied two distinct camps: either terrified or terrifying. In The Collector (1965), she was Miranda, an art-school student abducted by the shy but sinister lepidopterist Freddie (Terence Stamp), who imprisons her in the cellar of his country house in the hope that she will come around to loving him.

Eggar received an Oscar nomination for the film, and both she and Stamp won acting prizes at Cannes. Her role demanded that she ricochet between extreme states of distress, some feigned to gain the upper hand over her captor, others paralysingly real, and interludes of calm and even tenderness, during which Miranda tries to convince Freddie to release her. “If you let me go now, I shall begin to admire you,� she says softly. “I’ll think, ‘Well, he had me at his mercy but he was chivalrous. He behaved like a real gentleman.’�

The number of solo festivalgoers has jumped since the pandemic, and even safety concerns aren’t dissuading lone ravers. We speak to some to find out why

From solo travel to dining alone, people have increasingly been embracing social activities by themselves in the years since the pandemic – even in the ultra-social contexts of live music and club culture.

A recent survey by Ticketmaster found that the number of people who have attended either a weekend or day festival by themselves has risen from 8% in 2019 to 29% this year. Reading and Leeds festival introduced a campsite area for solo attendees this year, joining Download’s longstanding “lone wolf� area, and there are a growing number of social media pages such as London Solo Ravers, and WhatsApp groups such as Untitled Rave Community Project, for people venturing to nightclubs alone.

Products like Dekoda and Throne claim to offer health insights by tracking bowel movements – but who owns that data?

You can buy a smart ring to track your sleep activity or a smartwatch to monitor your heartbeat, so perhaps it makes sense that health tech’s next frontier has come for your toilet. Behold: Dekoda, Kohler’s new toilet cam. No, not that type of toilet cam: this one only shoots pictures down at what is inside the bowl, sending the snaps to an app that analyzes stool samples and rates your gut health. The Dekoda can be yours for $599, plus an annual subscription fee.

Kohler’s new product joins Throne, a $319 offering from an Austin-based startup. “Throne captures stool and hydration patterns, hands-free and automatically,� the camera’s description reads. “Notice shifts sooner, fine-tune daily choices, and feel more confident, every day.�

Gifts for prosperity and joy; women’s autumn style essentials; and the best leaf blowers, tested

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As a kid, Diwali was five days of sensory overload: flickering lamps, friends and relatives you hadn’t seen since last Diwali, and mithai served on repeat until joy curdled into sugar-induced despair.

Growing up in Wales in the 90s, I rejected almost all of it. Being Asian felt like a marker of otherness, and when your teenage mission is fitting in, a celebration of being Indian wasn’t all that appealing. So I joined in half-heartedly, but longed for the escape hatch of a sweaty metal gig with my friends where identity didn’t feel quite so loaded.

The best leaf blowers: 10 favourites to speed up raking – plus smart ways to reuse your fallen leaves

Season of the witch: 40 stylish, mystical treats, from crystal rings to pumpkin prints

‘Dreamy in a dirty martini’: the best vodkas, tested

The nine best electric blankets and heated throws, tried and tested to keep you toasty for less

‘It caramelised beautifully’: the best (and worst) supermarket chickens, tasted and rated

‘Just have fun. Smile. And keep putting on lipstick’: 10 ways to master Diane Keaton’s style

‘Once a fortnight would save people hundreds’: how to make your bike last longer, according to experts

From zero-waste spirits to hot honey twists, here are the nine tipples that came out on top from our taste test of 30

• The best gins for G&Ts, martinis and negronis

It’s the basis of countless cocktails, a party punch favourite and inexplicably added to creamy tomato penne pasta, yet vodka rarely seems to be given its due. While it may not have enjoyed a “ginaissance� like its juniper-based cousin – or seen the same trend-led uplift of rum and tequila – Wine and Spirit Trade Association data shows vodka is the UK’s biggest-selling spirit by volume.

“Too often people just buy the cheapest vodka as they believe it doesn’t have flavour,� says Dawn Davies, buying director at the Whisky Exchange. “Vodka has plenty of flavours, especially if you don’t choose one that has been distilled 100 times over. If you like a cream texture, then a potato-based one is good; for a bit more spice, try rye; and for fruitier notes, apple or grape.�

Blitz the autumn clean-up in record time (and turn your bounty into mulch and mould) with our tried-and-tested leaf blowers and garden vacuums

• How to get your garden ready for autumn: 17 expert tips

Trees are glorious things to have in your garden, providing shelter, shade and a habitat for wildlife. Right up until the moment when their leaves start to fall off, that is, and you’re left with the annoying autumnal job of clearing up.

Traditionally, we’d just use a rake for this job, and perhaps a good pair of leaf grabbers to help transfer them to the compost or a recycling bag (see below for our gardening expert Matt Collins’ advice on what to do with your leaves afterwards). If your leaf drop isn’t particularly heavy, these remain perfectly adequate tools for the job.

Best leaf blower overall:
Milwaukee M18 Fuel Blower FBLG3-802

Best garden vacuum overall:
Stihl SHA 56

Halloween is fast approaching – add a spooky vibe to your home and wardrobe with these glamorously ghoulish buys (they make great gifts, too)

• How to get cosy this autumn: 42 small, snuggly updates

Have you noticed a rise in all things mystical? Whether it’s retellings of tarot readings on TikTok, people rejecting dates due to incompatible star signs, or incense cleansings on Instagram, a fascination with the otherworldly is becoming ever more mainstream.

It makes sense – as the world feels increasingly turbulent, turning to spiritual practices for help is appealing. Crystals, astrology and divination may offer some reassurance, and a chance for self-discovery.

While slushie machines are going viral on social media, a blender, or elbow grease, can achieve similar results

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It promises icy, refreshing drinks, and for a cool $179, this slushie maker is yours – if you can find one.

Australian TikTok users have become fixated on a Kmart slushie machine, apparently a budget version of the equally viral Ninja slushie machine (RRP A$499), with users posting videos and reviews of their frosty, fruity extrusions. One Australian video has racked up 2.7m views, and the appliance has sold out online. But with Kmart supply chains under scrutiny and the knowledge that culinary trends and the very specific appliances needed to make them are passing fads, not everyone wants to – or has to – buy a machine to make slushies this summer.

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Little more than clean jars, salt water and time are needed to get you on the path to perfect pickles

I love ferments and want to start making my own to save money. Where should I start?
Ben, by email
“Maybe with some carrots, onions, cucumber or beetroot – anything Ben has an excess of,� says Connor Wilson, head chef at The Kirkstyle Inn in Slaggyford, Northumberland. “Fermentation is a great way of preserving produce, but it won’t give new life to things that are past their best.�

That said, tired-looking carrots would be perfect for Olia Hercules’ go-to for newbie fermenters: “If they look dehydrated but without any rotting, they’re amazing to ferment,� says the author of Strong Roots. “The sugars concentrate and you get this bright carrot flavour.� Start by slicing carrots (“the thinner or smaller the pieces, the quicker they’ll ferment�), then make a brine by mixing 35g rock or sea salt (“don’t use table salt�) with a litre of water (“tap is fine, filtered is better�), and making sure the salt dissolves. You can then go as fancy or simple as you like: “Drop in some peppercorns, allspice berries, coriander seeds, fennel seeds or anything else you think might go, bring the brine mix up to a simmer, then take off the heat and leave to infuse and cool to room temperature.� Pop the sliced carrots in a sterilised jar, then fill with the brine, making sure the veg are fully submerged: “You don’t want any sticking out and meeting the air, because that’s when bad bacteria can attach.� Hercules then leaves the sealed jar(s) for a few days until signs of fermentation emerge – “The brine will turn opaque, and you’ll see some bubbles� – then taste, taste, taste: “Once the carrots are nice and sour, stick the jar in the fridge.�

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com