There are concerns about the slow pace of change in the country, with a promised election still months away, a struggling economy and familiar problems persisting.

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Learning to budget and knowing what awaits you with tuition fees are key skills to learn

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North Korean leader’s firebrand sister says Pyongyang has no intention of halting broadcasts or courting better ties with the South

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Better than expected GDP figure comes as chancellor Rachel Reeves prepares for Autumn Budget

A Rhode Island man accused of faking his death and fleeing the United States to evade rape charges was found guilty Wednesday of sexually assaulting a former girlfriend in his first of two Utah trials.

The figure was stronger than the 0.1 per cent level widely expected by economists

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ICE said an illegal migrant was detained in Washington, D.C., after he was stopped by agents and subsequently motioned that he would harm himself with a butcher knife.

The lawsuit in a New York state court in Manhattan followed the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's decision in March to drop a similar case.

GDP figure slower than previous quarter but beats expectations thanks to 0.4% expansion in June

The UK economy grew at a faster rate than expected in the second quarter, official figures show, despite a slowdown from a strong start to the year amid pressure from tax increases and Donald Trump’s global trade war.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed growth in gross domestic product (GDP) slowed to 0.3% in the three months to the end of June, down from a rate of 0.7% in the first quarter.

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© Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

© Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Airline warns ‘other carriers are already very full due to summer travel peak’, limiting travellers’ options for alternative flights

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Our tipster, sports journalist and betting content producer Chris Wilson reviews UK betting sites and picks out his favourites

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In an open letter, writers denounced abrupt scrapping of a Harvard Educational Review issue dedicated to Palestine

More than 115 education scholars have condemned the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal dedicated to Palestine by a Harvard University publisher as “censorship”.

In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an “attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies.”

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Actor has been nominated for 10 Oscars and won two in a nearly five-decade career

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For visitors to France overwhelmed by the crowds at Versailles, the Chateau of Vincennes offers a quieter alternative

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A four-minute train ride from Amsterdam Centraal is an easygoing world of floating homes, art galleries and inexpensive waterside bars

The evening sun glints across the quiet marina, and the wooden gable ends of the houses lean gently into a street whose silence is broken only by the trundle of an occasional bicycle. I’m having a glass of inexpensive, decent wine in a waterside bar: and even on this picture-perfect night it’s quiet, with every customer around me speaking Dutch.

This can’t be Amsterdam, can it? A city that’s overpriced, heaves with tourists, and is awash with busy canals and traffic. It feels a million miles away. In fact, the city centre is just 20 minutes up the road, because this is Nieuwendam, whose houses date from as long ago as the 16th century, built atop the dyke that kept the sea at bay from the pasture land that grew the crops to feed the city. I’m drinking in Cafe ’t Sluisje, which for the last decade has been run by local residents. This is the most scenic quarter of Noord, the Amsterdam on the other side of the water from Centraal station.

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© Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy

© Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy

The bestselling author’s sixth novel is far from perfect, but this journey into the underworld is delivered with heretical glee

The more academia has broken your heart, the more you’ll love RF Kuang’s new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can’t be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasising, cannon fodder in a departmental forever war. Katabasis knows how it feels to spend your best thinking years doing grunt work to further someone else’s ideas, clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder you will never be allowed to climb: less an ivory tower than a pyramid scheme.

Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author’s sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons. Kuang’s previous book, 2023’s Yellowface, satirised the publishing industrial complex with an irresistible mix of gallows humour and gossip. A tale of toxic allies, commodified identity and hollow moralising, it was lapped up – with predictable irony – by the very people it skewered, like a real-life version of the stunt novel in Percival Everett’s Erasure. The year before Yellowface, in the cult hit Babel, she invented an elaborate, counter-historical version of Oxford University – and then blew it up. A literary Rhodes Must Fall.

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© Photograph: M Scott Brauer/The Guardian

© Photograph: M Scott Brauer/The Guardian

© Photograph: M Scott Brauer/The Guardian

Ten years ago, 1 million people fled into Europe, escaping conflict and poverty. Many had travelled for years in search of peace, prosperity or stability, and found it in countries such as Italy, Germany and Belgium. But the journey to truly belong continues.

A decade on, after finding work and learning a new language, four asylum seekers feel torn. They recall the woodlands of northern Nigeria, a river that flows through a Syrian town – or the nightmare of child abuse in Afghanistan. They are still homesick and wrestle with the possibility – or impossibility – of return. They are part of a new, transformed Europe

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© Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

© Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

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Human Rights Watch also finds that Iran abused survivors of June attack, which killed 80 people

Israeli airstrikes on Tehran’s Evin prison in June killed scores of detainees, visitors and staff in what Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called an “apparent war crime”. Iranian authorities have since subjected survivors to abuse, enforced disappearances and inhumane detention conditions, the rights group said.

HRW’s investigation, based on satellite imagery, videos and witness accounts, found the 23 June Israeli airstrikes destroyed visitation halls, prison wards, the central kitchen, the medical clinic and administrative offices. No evident military targets were identified in the facility, which held more than 1,500 prisoners at the time, many of whom had been jailed for peaceful activism.

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© Photograph: Mostafa Roudaki/mizanonline/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Mostafa Roudaki/mizanonline/AFP/Getty Images

Bobby Seagull is baffling the internet with a math problem from a 7-year-old that even he can’t solve

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The Las Vegas school district, where a group of brutes fatally beat a 17-year-old classmate, rehired its former principal and promoted her to a higher administrative position after her abrupt retirement following backlash over the deadly attack.

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