PM faces questions in Commons after No 10 spokesperson said on Tuesday he does not believe transgender women are women

Rosie Duffield, the independent MP who left Labour after the election in part because she felt her gender critical views made her unwelcome in the party (although her resignation letter focused on welfare issues), has claimed that Keir Starmer no longer arguing a trans woman is a woman shows he is a “manager rather than a leader”.

Speaking on LBC, Duffield said:

It’s just another sign of the prime minister’s lack of leadership skills. I’m bound to say that, he’s a manager rather than a leader. He responds and reacts rather than leads from the front, and this is what we’re seeing again from him.

Nigel Farage is peddling a dangerous fantasy by claiming the UK can be self-sufficient in gas.

After sixty years of drilling, the truth is the UK has already burned most of its gas. That’s down to geology, not politics, and no amount of hot air from Farage will change that.

Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami, Rene Matić and Zadie Xa have been nominated for £25,000 prize

An artist who creates swirling sculptures out of fabric and old videocassette tape, and another who installed huge paintings evoking wartime trauma in the genteel rooms of Blenheim Palace, have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.

Nnena Kalu, a Scottish-born, London-based artist, and Mohammed Sami, who fled his native Iraq as a refugee, have been chosen alongside Rene Matić and Zadie Xa to compete for the contemporary art prize.

• Forward will not make decision on future before June
• Rashford does not want to join a team in London

Marcus Rashford will decide his future no earlier than mid-June, with his preference being to leave Manchester United for Champions League club, though the forward does not wish to join a London team.

His camp have also ruled out an exchange with any player who may be of interest to United, such as Aston Villa’s Ollie Watkins, owing to the complexities of those deals.

• Fund manager joining club’s ownership group
• Idea is to give access to broader sources of funding

Everton are set to announce a new investor, with the American billionaire Christopher Sarofim joining their ownership group. The 62-year-old fund manager is also a minority shareholder of the Houston Texans NFL franchise.

Sarofim is understood to have agreed to join Everton’s ownership group, Roundhouse Capital, and will be given an observer position on the football club’s board. Everton will remain under the day-to-day control of The Friedkin Group (TFG), who bought the club from Farhad Moshiri last December.

Stretch of major highway shut as 3,000 people moved to safety and homes left without power

A fast-moving wildfire burning in New Jersey has forced thousands of people to evacuate, closed a stretch of a main highway and reached a shuttered nuclear power plant.

Flames from the Jones Road wildfire in Ocean County had reached buildings on the campus of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, according to the local Lakewood Scoop newspaper.

Julie Keeps Quiet casts real-life tennis ace Tessa Van den Broeck as a teenage player facing peril ignored by adults. The director explains how telling the story well required a care the sport itself neglects

Leonardo Van Dijl smiles: “If you told me a year ago that I’d be speaking to the Guardian, I’d have asked: ‘What about?’” Last May, the 34-year-old from Belgium took his debut film Julie Keeps Quiet to Cannes. (Where, he says, everyone was much friendlier after a four-star review in the Guardian.) Ever since, he has been living out of a suitcase, grabbing five or six hours’ sleep. It’s not just media interviews and Q&As keeping him busy: “We are a small movie. I’m the in-house graphic designer. I do the social media …” He stops, looks down at my phone, recording. “But I don’t really want to talk about that. I’m grateful, and it’s not that interesting.”

What Van Dijl really does want to talk about is the urgent issue his film raises about safe spaces for children. Julie Keeps Quiet is a tense psychological drama about a talented 15-year-old tennis player called Julie, played by real-life tennis ace Tessa Van den Broeck in her first acting role. When Julie’s male coach at her tennis academy is suspended after the suicide of a teenage girl he trained, pressure falls on Julie to speak up. After all, she’s his new favourite.

A bracingly hopeful call for high-flyers to ditch corporate drudgery in favour of something far more ambitious

This is not a self-help book,” the author tells us, firmly. Appearances might suggest otherwise: it is written and presented almost entirely in the familiar style of that genre, with largish print, short sentences, snappy maxims in italics and lots of lists and charts (“six signs you may be on the wrong side of history”). Its proposals are delivered with all the annoyingly hectic bounciness of the genre.

But it is worth taking Bregman (a thirtysomething historian and author labelled “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers” by the Ted network) at his word. He begins from the deep and corrosive anomie experienced by so many gifted young professionals who find themselves making substantial sums of money in exhausting and (at best) morally compromising jobs. The “moral ambition” of the title is about recognising that serious financial, organisational, technological and analytical skills – the kind that in the US will get you through, say, law school with a secure ticket to prosperity – can be used to make tangible improvements in the lives of human and nonhuman neighbours.

Sex Education star calls on women to send in their anonymous submissions for a second volume of her 2024 title Want

Gillian Anderson has announced a follow-up to her bestselling anthology of female sexual fantasies, Want, with the hope that it will be “more international, and even more daring”.

The original book “gave thousands of women the freedom to talk about sex without shame or judgment; to see themselves in the words of strangers, and reflect on their own desires – some for the very first time,” Anderson said. “But Want unlocked so much more for so many and felt like just the beginning of a deeper conversation.”

Conservative commentators can’t stand the idea that people they loathe can live fulfilling lives

An estate on Martha’s Vineyard. A nine-bedroom house in DC. A family home in Chicago. Barack and Michelle Obama own about a gazillion dollars’ worth of property. Turns out they don’t need any of their fancy mansions, however, because they live rent-free in rightwing commentators’ heads. While the right has always been fixated on trying to find fault with former president Obama, they have now become unhealthily obsessed with the idea that Barack and Michelle’s marriage is failing. There’s no evidence to support this, mind you. Just vibes.

Picking up on these mysterious vibes is conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, who recently proclaimed on her podcast that she thinks Michelle and Barack “married the wrong people”. Many straws were grasped at to come to this conclusion – including the fact that Michelle once said that she likes going to bed early (wise woman) and her husband doesn’t.

Francis was as outspoken as could be without naming names, when he criticized Vance in his February letter to US bishops

We might never quite know what Pope Francis said to the US vice-president during their very brief meeting on Sunday. In the widely shared video clip, it was hardly audible. The morning after, Francis died, and Vance jetted to visit India, finding time to tweet that his heart went out to the millions of Christians who loved Francis (implying, I suppose, that not all Catholics loved him) and patronizing the dead pontiff by calling one of his homilies “really quite beautiful”).

Francis had been as outspoken as could be without naming names, when he criticized Vance in his February letter to US bishops; but he was not just registering his rebuke of Trump and Vance’s cruel treatment of refugees and migrants; he was reacting to a broader trend of instrumentalizing religion for nationalist and authoritarian populism.

American Lung Association’s study says almost 156 million people live in areas with unhealthy levels of soot or smog

Almost half of Americans are breathing in dangerous levels of air pollutants, a new report shows, a rise compared with a year ago and likely to further increase in coming years thanks to the climate crisis and the Trump administration’s sweeping environmental rollbacks.

Just over 156 million people live in neighborhoods with unhealthy levels of soot or smog – a 16% rise compared with last year and the highest number in a decade, according to the American Lung Association (ALA) annual state of the air report.

Incident apparently involving four gunmen is worst attack on civilians in India since Mumbai shootings in 2008

Indian security forces fanned out across the Himalayan region of Kashmir as the army and police launched a massive manhunt for the perpetrators of a militant attack on Tuesday that killed at least 26 tourists.

Tens of thousands of armed police and troops headed to the region, setting up checkpoints and searching vehicles, while many businesses remained closed after a call by religious and political figures.

A lack of pitches, kit and coaching has held the sport back for far too long but Major League Cricket may be the answer

If you look south from the Manhattan end of Brooklyn Bridge, you can just about imagine the cricket field that used to be beneath what is now the South Seaport – and, if you squint, pretend that the people making their way around the bars and clubs and restaurants are the descendants of the same New York crowd who attended a match here between a local team and a London XI in 1751. Modern-day Manhattan is built on cricket pitches, among other things. They are there under the streets, among the farms and tenements cleared to make way for skyscrapers. There’s another under Central Park, a third below the NYU Langone medical centre, where – in 1844 – Canada beat the USA by 23 runs in what is considered the first international fixture in all sport.

People have been dreaming of reviving American cricket ever since it died during the civil war, more than 160 years ago. It was killed by a shortage of pitches, kit and coaching, and by the rise of baseball, the great American pastime. Baseball had two advantages. It was easier to play – all you needed was a bat, a ball, four bases and a field – and if you were good at it, you could make a lot more money. Plenty of professional cricketers made the switch. The brothers George and Harry Wright, who had both played for St George’s Cricket Club in New York, where their father was groundsman, were founding members of the first pro baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Both are in the Hall of Fame, and Harry is still known as the “father of the game”. Early proprietors such as AG Spalding, another ex-cricketer, sold baseball as the indigenous American sport. It was the patriotic choice. Cricket was inescapably English.

A new exhibition at the Los Angeles Gagosian showcases previously unseen pictures taken by the musician during the rise of Beatlemania

He is not drowning but waving. John Lennon’s arms stretch at angles like the sails of a windmill. His face wears a toothy, incandescent smile. Beads of water dance around him like an upside-down waterfall as he swims off Miami Beach.

“He’s so carefree,” says Joshua Chuang, director of photography at the Gagosian art gallery. “It’s almost like you’ve never seen him like that; he’s always kind of joking around or brooding or being sarcastic. He’s so happy. It’s his best friend at the time capturing that and, when you know about what happened, it’s so moving.”

Hadi Matar was convicted over 2022 attack in western New York that left author partially blinded

Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed and partially blinded the novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a New York arts institute in 2022, is scheduled for sentencing on Wednesday, four months after he was found guilty of attempted murder in the second degree.

He could receive up to 25 years in prison.

He was no liberal, but Francis embodied a spirit of international solidarity that is in alarmingly short supply

Pope Francis died hours after meeting the US vice-president, JD Vance. If that wasn’t a bad enough omen, the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump’s acolyte and self-styled “Christian nationalist”, appeared to welcome the pope’s death as a sign of “evil” being “defeated”.

In fact, despite a series of clashes with the Trump White House, Francis was no liberal. While refraining from judging homosexuality, he explicitly disapproved of the liberalising synodal path embarked on by the Catholic church in Germany, which ruled in 2023 that church employees could not be sacked for entering same-sex relationships or remarrying after divorce. On abortion, euthanasia, women and LGBTQ+ rights, Francis betrayed the high hopes that liberals and progressives had bestowed upon him.

Is it possible to make a country healthier one slice of rye bread at a time? If the rocketing wholegrain consumption of the Danes is anything to go by, absolutely

Lunchtime in Copenhagen, Denmark. The place is packed and staff are talking customers through the menu. Would we like the slow-roasted pork with pearl barley and mushrooms? How about the rye pancakes with salmon, cream cheese and avocado? I decide on the beetroot tartare with horseradish and rye toasts, and a spelt side salad.

This isn’t a fancy new Nordic restaurant – it’s a work canteen. These chefs feed 900 workers from DSB (Danish State Railways) every weekday. As well as looking and tasting great, each dish served here contains fuldkorn (wholegrains), from breakfast smoothies with oats to afternoon treats such as today’s wholemeal scones. There’s a good reason for this: DSB recently signed up to a national programme that aims to get more wholegrains into employees.

The Colorado star is brilliant on offense and defense but the burdens of professional football make it very difficult for two-way players to succeed

Every once in a while, a player comes along who breaks our understanding of a sport. Basketball has Victor Wembanyama. Baseball has Shohei Ohtani. For professional football, enter Travis Hunter.

There are good prospects, there are great prospects, and then there is whatever Hunter is. The Heisman Trophy winner and soon-to-be top-five draft pick is looking to do the improbable: play both sides of the ball in the NFL, offense and defense, full-time.

Wines produced after 2010 showed steep rise in contamination of trifluoroacetic acid, analysis finds

Levels of a little-known forever chemical known as TFA in European wines have risen “alarmingly” in recent decades, according to analysis, prompting fears that contamination will breach a planetary boundary.

Researchers from Pesticide Action Network Europe tested 49 bottles of commercial wine to see how TFA contamination in food and drink had progressed. They found levels of trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), a breakdown product of long-lasting Pfas chemicals that carries possible fertility risks, far above those previously measured in water.

Despite the ongoing Netflix era, Brooklyn’s Night Owl Video hopes formats such as VHS, DVD and Blu-ray will see a vinyl-like revival

They trickle in by twos and threes, spiritual seekers to a temple long thought gone: the video store. Some of these acolytes are sentimental for the days of Blockbuster and famed New York institutions like Kim’s Video. Others are so young that Blu-ray Discs, DVDs and VHS tapes represent novelty, not nostalgia.

Either way they’re here, at a small, freshly painted storefront in Brooklyn, to buy movies that you hold in your hand, store on a shelf and watch whenever you’d like – the powerful but fickle newer gods of Netflix, Hulu and Prime be damned.

From humans with robotic body parts to robots with human emotions, a vibrant debut set in a unified Korea examines what it means to be a person

Silvia Park’s debut novel is about people, robots and cyborgs: that is, humans enhanced or augmented with robotic technology. Ruijie is a schoolgirl afflicted with a degenerative disease: “affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customised circuitry to aid her ability to walk”. As the novel opens, Ruijie is in a robot junkyard, scavenging for spare parts and better legs. Here she meets a robot boy, Yoyo, discarded despite being a highly sophisticated model. Ruijie takes the quirky Yoyo to school with her, and a group of friends assemble to protect him from scavengers and exploitation in the robot-fighting ring.

This element of the novel reads like a YA adventure, though the rest is more adult-focused: cyberpunk, violent and sexualised. In an author’s note, Park says that they began writing Luminous as children’s fiction, until a bereavement took the work in a different direction, making the novel “a shape-shifter, no longer so appropriate for children”. There’s an awkwardness to this mix of tone, although we could say it reproduces, on the level of form, the book’s central topic of hybridisation, cyborgification, different elements worked together, as the novel’s setting – a future unified Korea – does on the level of geography.

I traveled from Mozambique to Finland to learn parenting hacks, and came away with the same lesson: parenting is hard everywhere, but nowhere is it as lonely as it is in the US

Four years ago, scarred by the pandemic experience of trying to care for two toddlers in isolation, my husband and I decided we wanted a built-in community. We were tired of being the ones solely in charge of organizing, feeding, disciplining and playing with our kids.

On a whim, we moved halfway across the world to Singapore to live next door to our best friends, Jeremy and Melissa. We aren’t polyamorous, hippies or reckless. Just another set of tired parents, exhausted by trying to do it all with little support.

Highlights from the 2025 edition presented by AIPAD, which will run from April 23 to 27

As the UK Pandemic Sciences Network conference kicks off in Glasgow, virus expert Prof Emma Thomson says new technologies are boosting science’s ability to fight novel strains of infectious diseases

Prof Emma Thomson is someone who knows a thing or two about pandemics. As the recently appointed director of the Medical Research Council, University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research (CVR) and a World Heath Organization consultant, Thomson is one of the country’s leading virus experts.

“We used to think that pandemics would occur maybe once in our lifetimes. Now, it’s definitely within the next few years. It could even be tomorrow,” she says.

We’d like to hear from people with autism, and their families, on the impact of RFK’s comments

In his first press conference, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, said that the recent rise in autism diagnoses was evidence of an “epidemic” caused by an “environmental toxin”.

Health experts and autism advocates have repeatedly said the rise in diagnoses is related to better recognition of the condition, changing diagnostic criteria and better access to screening.

If you’ve ever had – or still have – a nickname, we want to hear from you

Nicknames are dying out, according to the Wall Street Journal. Giving someone a catchy or amusing moniker often used to be “a sign of affection” – but nicknames are thought to be becoming less common, thanks to a fear of causing offence or sounding unprofessional.

If you’ve ever had – or still have – a nickname, we want to hear from you. How did your nickname originate? Did you like it – or hate it? Tell us about it below.

To mark 20 years since the first ever YouTube video, we’d like to hear your favourite YouTube TV shows

The first YouTube video, a 19-second clip posted entitled “Me at the zoo” posted by co-founder Jawed Karim, was uploaded on 23 April 2005. Now the most popular video-sharing platform in the world, YouTube has expanded far beyond short clips and into TV streaming.

To mark the anniversary, we’d like to hear your favourite YouTube TV shows of the moment. You can tell us your favourite and why below.

We would like to hear about the books you’ve particularly enjoyed this month

As part of The Guardian’s “what we’re reading” series, we would like to hear about the books you’ve particularly enjoyed this month.

Have you read a book in recent weeks – fiction or non-fiction – that you’d recommend? Tell us all about it below.

Economists say chancellor could be forced to raise taxes or announce deeper spending cuts later this year; investors cheered by hopes of US-China trade deal

• UK annual borrowing exceeds forecasts by almost £15bn

Here’s our full story on the rise in UK government borrowing, which means the chancellor could be forced to raise taxes or announce deeper spending cuts later this year.

Britain entered the economic shock from Donald Trump’s trade wars with government borrowing having overshot official forecasts by almost £15bn in the most recent financial year.

Move follows news that US secretary of state Marco Rubio would not attend

Suspilne, Ukraine's state broadcaster, citing the Ukrainian air force, reports that overnight Ukraine claimed to have shot down 67 out of 134 drones used in Russian attacks.

Additionally the air force reported that 47 drones did not reach their target. Attacks, it said, happened in the Kharkiv, Poltava, Donetsk, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhia regions.

Francis will lie in state for three days at St Peter’s Basilica before funeral is held on Saturday

The coffin makes it way through the Vatican towards St Peter’s Basilica, accompanied by the choir’s singing, starting with Psalm 22.

You can follow the ceremony live watching the stream at the top of the blog.

No music, no script, no narration, no editing – slow TV like this is exactly the balm we need these days

Do you reach for your phone first thing in the morning as soon as you wake up? Me too. Only, for the past week, it’s not my WhatsApp, email or social media I’ve been desperate to check, but how many moose have managed to swim across the Ångerman river overnight.

I know. I need more going on in my life, right? How else to explain my fascination with watching dozens of Swedish moose (yes, moose is the plural of moose, sadly not “meese”) undertake their annual spring migration to summer pastures?

Chris Davies’s dominant side have secured League One promotion but the club hope that is just the start

On day one in the job, as Chris Davies surveyed St Andrew’s for the first time last summer, the Birmingham City manager was struck by a damning statistic courtesy of the club historian, Malcolm McHenry: no league side had lost more matches across the previous five seasons. Birmingham were relegated to League One a month earlier after circling the drain for a while. “When you hear something like that, it’s powerful because you think: ‘Wow, there are 92 teams,’” Davies says. “Everyone has suffered so much … I suppose I saw an opportunity to change that and this season we’ve won more games than any other team in the country.”

Talk about a turnaround. Birmingham, runaway champions, have returned to the Championship at the first attempt and it is now 30 league wins and counting. Only Leeds have scored more goals than Birmingham this season across the top four tiers and only Arsenal, Leeds and Burnley have conceded fewer goals. “I walked into a club that was feeling down,” Davies says. “People were depressed and everybody was looking out for themselves. There was a real concern around the place but underlying that there was an optimism that there could be a reset.”

Plus: footballers who put parenting first, title playoffs in Italy, and relegated Golden Boot winners

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“Arne Slot is going to win the Premier League in his first season after taking over from Jürgen Klopp,” writes Hannah Mitchell. “What examples are there of managers who have had instant success after succeeding a legendary manager?”

It’s not unusual for a new Liverpool manager to win the league in their first season. Matt McQueen (1922-23), Joe Fagan (1983-84) and Kenny Dalglish (1985-86) all did so, – but they were established figures at the club, whether in the boardroom, the boot room or the dressing-room. Arne Slot was new to English football, never mind Liverpool, and was succeeding one of the most charismatic figures in the club’s history. In that context, winning the Premier League with (potentially) four or five games remaining is a remarkable achievement.

Spring into action with new season asparagus in a punchy hazelnut dressing, and a quickfire cheesy gratin with white beans and vegetables

Coming as I do from a family with a colourful array of dietary requirements, I can verify that these veg-forward dishes seriously perform on both the texture and flavour fronts, as well as being achievable crowdpleasers. British asparagus swoops in around now, offering bright green relief from winter’s hardier vegetables, while the jarred and frozen veg in the gratin save on prep time and keep everything light.

Philadelphia’s Speling Reform Asoshiashun wasn’t the only group to demand a simpler way of putting things in print

You may be familiar with the ghoti, the shiny animal with fins that lives in the water; perhaps you even have your own ghoti tank. Ghotis evolved long ago, but they didn’t get their name until the 19th century, when jokesters noted that, thanks to the weirdness of English spelling, the word “fish” might be written with a “gh”, as in “rough”, an “o”, as in “women”, and a “ti”, as in “lotion”.

The idea of the ghoti is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it. He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries. From “through” to “though” and “trough”, whether you’re a child or learning English as a second language, getting the spelling right is a nightmare. Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways.

Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s timely documentary tells the story of the courageous women whose cases of sexual assault and rape have gone unheard by the US judicial system

In 2018, a historic lawsuit was brought against the US city of Austin, Travis County, the Austin Police Department, and the Travis County District Attorney’s Office. The plaintiffs were survivors of sexual assault, whose cases had gone unheard by the judicial system. Gripping and timely, Julie Lunde Lillesæter’s riveting documentary follows these courageous women as they fight for justice.

The film lays bare the shocking details concerning how sex crimes were treated in the county. In one year, between July 2016 and June 2017, of more than 220 cases presented for prosecution, only one went to trial – and the victim in this instance was male. Testimony from the survivors reveal the harrowing extent to which officials turned a blind eye; even with scientific evidence such as DNA matches, the majority of criminal filings were dismissed, denying these women due process in front of a jury.

Experts call for redesign of financial services and improved Centrelink processes to protect older Australians from fraud

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The fraud began when Ray Baird, then 65, asked his son Peter for help dealing with the bank. In the years that followed, Peter gained access to his dad’s bank accounts, diverted Ray’s aged pension to his own bank account and ran up debts in his father’s name that led to two caveats being put on Ray’s home.

By the time the fraud was uncovered and Ray, then 74, began to untangle the lies his son had spun, Peter had taken more than $230,000 from him, including seven years of pension totalling $152,423.33.

Idyllic scenery is just part of the appeal of a break that is also about sustainability, meeting locals and maintaining paths

Armed with gloves and pruners, my friend and I are near Pythara waterfall above Chora – the capital of the Greek island of Andros – and we are cutting back thorny and overhanging vegetation. We’re helping out the local volunteer association, Andros Routes, which has been restoring a network of ancient mule tracks, from the coast to the interior and its low mountains. The tracks form part of a new walking holiday that allows us to explore the pretty island on foot – and give something back, too.

The eight-day trip with Ramble Worldwide takes you from the south-east to the north-west, from Ormos Korthiou to Gavrio, via Chora on the east coast, with accommodation in low-key hotels and luggage transfer between them. Daily routes are only suggested: guests can choose full-on trekking days or easy circular walks, customising the holiday to suit energy levels and using buses or taxis to skip sections if desired. Along the way you can choose to help with the maintenance of the paths (secateurs and gloves are delivered to your hotel).

The theme of this year’s celebrated photo bonanza is ‘humanity’ – and Kyoto is bursting with images – from family albums with a twist, to naked men in a frenzied battle for fortune

Towering above commuters and passersby at Kyoto station is a monumental mural featuring more than 500 portraits of local residents. This striking installation by acclaimed French photographer JR heralds the opening of Kyotographie 2025, the city’s celebrated month-long international photography festival.

The theme for this year’s event is “humanity”. Last autumn, JR and his team transformed Kyoto into a living studio, setting up mobile portrait stations across the city to capture the rich diversity of Kyōto-jin society. Monks, artisans, politicians, schoolchildren and drag queens – all life is here.

Shooting the Chronicles of Kyoto – each person is photographed against a greenscreen backdrop