Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Andrew Bailey insists: “I think the path [for interest rates] is down.

Trade data released this morning shows that China’s exports regained some momentum in June.

China’s exports rose 5.8% in June from a year earlier to $325bn, while imports rose 1.1% to grow, according to data from the General Administration of Customs.

Its gains have been driven by strong inflows into ETFs, including BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF IBIT, which, after receiving $1.7bn in inflows last week, now manages $84bn in FUM (funds under management).

Still, the rally is underpinned by a crypto-friendly US policy shift and growing emerging market adoption — both remain intact.

Three decades on from the author’s breakthrough debut, why are we still trapped in the Trainspotting moment?

It has been more than 30 years since Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting. To put that in perspective, it’s as distant to readers today as Catch-22 or To Kill a Mockingbird would have been in 1993. If you are anything like me, that doesn’t feel quite right. Because even at such a historical remove, there remains something undeniably resonant, something curiously current, about Welsh’s wiry, demotic, scabrous debut.

In part, this is explained by the sheer scale of Trainspotting’s success. It was one of those genuinely rare literary events, wherein a critically acclaimed, stylistically adventurous book catches the cultural zeitgeist to such a degree that it also becomes a commercial sensation, going on to sell over a million copies. Its cultural salience was further compounded by Danny Boyle’s cinematic adaptation, one of the highest-grossing UK films of all time, a visual intervention that seemed to crystallise the aesthetics of Britpop – high velocity, high audacity, high nostalgia.

Where his family once farmed on a wild fringe of the Lycian shoreline, one man has built his dream retreat

Aged seven or eight, planting onions on his father’s land above Kabak Bay, Fatih Canözü saw his first foreigner. Before the road came in 1980, his village on the jagged coast of south-west Turkey’s Lycia region was extremely remote, isolated by steep valleys and mountains plunging into the sea. It took his family two days to get to the city of Fethiye on winding donkey tracks, to sell their apricots, vegetables and honey at the market. Despite his shock at seeing the outside world intrude for the first time, Canözü remembers thinking even then that tourism was the future.

Four decades on and having trained as a chef, Canözü has not only built a restaurant and 14 tourist cabins in Kabak, he has married a foreigner too: a former Middle East correspondent from England, who came here to research a novel and ended up falling in love. Now they are raising their family on this wild fringe of Anatolia’s Turquoise Coast, a region that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founding father of the Republic of Turkey, is said to have called the most beautiful in the country.

Winner of the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award, the South African documentary photographer and filmmaker focuses her photo essay on daily life inside a former public hospital that has been occupied since 2017 by more than 1,500 people resisting displacement

Brace yourself for the staggering tale of Travis, who has both real and bot wives. Plus, the wickedly gossipy duo of Graham Norton and Maria McErlane are back

This staggering tale of people falling in love with AI chatbots is baffling, tragic and terrifying. It’s full of jaw-dropping moments, as hosts Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala speak to Travis who “married” a bot despite already having a real-life spouse. There’s also the vulnerable teenager whose “companion” spurs him on to an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II (which ends with him being charged with treason). Alexi Duggins
Wondery+, episodes weekly

A new architectural guidebook was written as a love letter to the Ukrainian city – then Russia started bombing it. How will this home to Tetris-like offices and daring curved cinemas be rebuilt?

When the Derzhprom building erupted on to the Kharkiv skyline in the 1920s, it must have seemed like an impossibly futuristic vision. Standing like a gleaming white concrete castle, it curves around the circular plaza of Freedom Square in the city’s centre.

Built as the state industry headquarters of what was then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, it looks like a three-dimensional game of Tetris, a mighty nest of chunky oblong forms stacked, rotated and interlocked to form a colossal administrative pile. Striding across three city blocks, and towering almost 60m high, it was the tallest office building in Europe for several years, its humungous floor plates connected high up in the air by thrilling sci-fi skybridges. It was far ahead of its time, prefiguring the brawny brutalist complexes that emerged in western Europe and the US half a century later.

Researchers in Europe found everyday plastics, especially farmers’ baler twine, being used by the birds as a building material and entangling their young. It is a problem that affects other species too, say experts in the US, UK and Argentina

On a late spring morning in the farmlands of southern Portugal, Dr Marta Acácio set her ladder against a tree and began to climb. Four metres up, she reached the giant white stork nest that was her goal. She knew from telescopic camera shots there was a healthy looking chick inside – and now she wanted to ring it.

But when Acácio, an ecologist from University of Montpellier in France, tried to scoop up the chick, it would not come away: it was tethered to the nest by a piece of plastic baler twine. She turned the chick over and recoiled: its belly was a mass of maggots.

Labour set to point to repercussions of Tory Northern Ireland legislation as justification for repealing it

Investigations into the deaths of more than 200 British soldiers were halted by the Conservatives’ Northern Ireland Legacy Act, Labour will announce, as a justification for its intention to repeal the legislation.

Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland secretary, is expected to tell MPs on Monday afternoon that 202 live inquiries into the Troubles-related killings of members of the armed forces were brought to a stop in May 2024 and a further 23 involving veterans.

Increasing frequency of heatwaves and flooding raises fears over health, infrastructure and how society functions

• Ed Miliband to tell MPs who reject net zero policies they are betraying future generations

Record-breaking extreme weather is the new norm in the UK, scientists have said, showing that the country is firmly in the grip of the climate crisis.

The hottest days people endure have dramatically increased in frequency and severity, and periods of intense rain have also ramped up, data from hundreds of weather stations shows. Heatwaves and floods leading to deaths and costly damage are of “profound concern” for health, infrastructure and the functioning of society, the scientists said.

A tomato, olive and anchovy pastry pie, and grilled sardines with a funky fermented green tomato sauce

Along the Adriatic coast, sardines are usually grilled over an open fire (na gradele) and served with lemon, excellent local olive oil and blitva, a side dish of young swiss chard, potato and garlic. Fresh sardines are key (they should smell of the sea) and do cook them whole (the heads add wonderful flavour and the small bones soften during cooking). On the Croatian island of Vis, two beloved pogačas (bread)– viška and komiška – tell a tale of friendly rivalry. Both are savoury bread pies (pogača being the word for bread and similar in both composition and etymology to Italian focaccia) filled with onions and salted fish (typically anchovies or sardines), a nod to the island’s ancient fishing and seafaring heritage. The key difference? Tomatoes. In Vis town (one side of the island), they’re absent; in Komiža (the other side of the island), they’re essential and cooked down into a rich sauce. The tomato version is a perfect celebration of summer.

Of course the climate crisis must be confronted, but history, tranquility and beauty must also count for something

Nowhere does landscape marry passion quite so much as in Yorkshire’s Wuthering Heights. The tempestuous Pennine contours and tumbling streams perfectly frame Emily Brontë’s turbulent romance. Wild storms and dark gullies echo the cries of Heathcliff, Cathy and sexual jealousy. From moorland peaks to the historic Brontë village of Haworth below, the scene is unspoilt.

I cannot think of any British government for half a century that would have dreamed of destroying this place. Yet the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, apparently wants to do so, with the largest onshore windfarm in England, the Calderdale Energy Park. He clearly regards this unique landscape as the perfect spot for 41 giant wind turbines, each no less than 200m tall. Their height would top Blackpool Tower by 40m.

• Scotland’s Sutherland, Ashman and Graham receive call ups

• British & Irish Lions now have 44 players on tour of Australia

The British & Irish Lions squad in Australia continues to grow in number with three extra Scotland players set to join the party. Rory Sutherland, Ewan Ashman and Darcy Graham have been called up to provide cover for next week’s First Nations & Pasifika XV fixture which will be played between the first and second Tests against the Wallabies.

All three players are currently in New Zealand where they had been preparing to face Samoa but will now become the latest members of the Lions ever-expanding squad. The Lions management have already had to summon four injury replacements in Owen Farrell, Ben White, Jamie Osborne and Jamie George with prop Thomas Clarkson also added as cover over the weekend.

The anonymous writer has seen horror after horror in the 21 months since he was driven from his home in Gaza City. How has he kept going? And does he have any hope left?

On the morning of 7 October 2023, the author of the Guardian’s Gaza diary woke up planning to play tennis. “This year I decided to take care of my mental and physical health,” he wrote in his first entry, published six days later. “This means no stress, no negative energy and definitely more tennis.”

Instead, with the news full of how Hamas had broken out of the territory, killing 1,200 people, he found himself scrambling desperately for the documents showing he owned his apartment in Gaza City, in the north of the strip. “If our building gets bombed, I need evidence that this apartment belongs to me,” he wrote.

Archaeologists, anthropologists and forensic experts aim to identify infants buried at former mother and baby home in Tuam

A century after Irish nuns first began to bury hundreds of infants in what would become a mass, unmarked grave, archaeologists and other specialists will start excavating the site in Tuam, County Galway.

A mechanical digger is to slowly start scraping earth on Monday at the 5,000-sq-metre (53,820 sq ft) site where the Bon Secours order is believed have interred 796 infants who died at the St Mary’s mother and baby home between 1925 and 1961.

Site had to be saved from closure after visitor slump in 00s but is now a thriving biodiversity success story

Amid the gentle hills of Carmarthenshire’s Tywi valley, the domed glasshouse of the National Botanic Garden of Wales sparkles from miles away. Designed by Sir Norman Foster, when the garden opened in 2000 it was the largest single-span glasshouse in the world, set among 230 hectares (570 acres) of themed gardens and a nature reserve – but today, the most special part of the site is actually a modest hillside where Welsh black cattle graze.

At this time of year, there is little to see in the organically managed pasture other than the cows. But in the autumn, this field boasts an astonishing 23 different species of colourful waxcap mushrooms – some of which are considered as endangered as the Siberian tiger or mountain gorilla.

Coffee or no coffee? Almond croissant or exercise snack? Early night or bedtime as usual? You’ll be grateful you made the right choices

Ah, sleep – “nature’s soft nurse” to Shakespeare, “the foundation of our mental and physical health” to the less poetically minded neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman. By now, you hopefully know that getting a consistent seven to eight hours of shuteye is crucial for everything from your short-term decision-making to your long-term health, and you’re familiar with all the usual advice on getting it (have a consistent bedtime, make your bedroom really dark, no double espressos at 9pm). But one question that’s considered less is: what if you have one restless night? How do you best get through the day – and what can you do to avoid a single interrupted slumber snowballing into several? Let’s take it one hour at a time.

When you first drag yourself out of bed, it’s tempting to click the kettle straight on – but should you hold off your first hot drink of the day until you’re a bit less bleary-eyed? Increasingly, influencers advise delaying your first hit of tea or coffee for anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes after you wake up – the rationale being that caffeine mostly works by blocking the brain’s receptors for a molecule called adenosine, which ordinarily promotes relaxation by slowing down neural activity. Adenosine levels are at their lowest when you wake up, and so in theory, you might be “wasting” your first brew of the day by glugging it when there’s nothing for the caffeine to block. This seems plausible, but it’s also worth noting that caffeine’s effects take about 10 minutes to kick in, and it’s about 45 minutes before levels peak in the bloodstream. Caffeine’s also not just good for getting you going: if you’re planning a workout or a morning walk, it can help things along by producing feelgood endorphins and increasing the amount of fat you’re able to burn. Some people suggest that waiting a while before your first cup helps to avoid afternoon drowsiness, but according to an evaluation of the scientific literature published last year, “There is no evidence that caffeine ingestion upon waking is somehow responsible for an afternoon ‘crash’.”

MP calls for region where Battle of Hastings took place to be included in events surrounding return of artwork

The MP for Hastings and Rye has called on the British Museum to let the Bayeux tapestry spend time in “1066 country” when it comes to the UK, and to ensure the region reaps the benefits of the “once-in-a-generation exhibition”.

The tapestry will return to the UK for the first time in more than 900 years as part of a landmark loan agreement announced by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

Housed in an unremarkable office block in the captial, the country’s national museum is home to the most extensive collection of the remains of modern humans’ ancestors – and a team of world-leading scholars

When Berhane Asfaw was in California beginning his graduate studies into the origins of humanity, he realised all the fossils he was examining had come, like himself, from Ethiopia. They had been shipped to the US to be researched and pieced together.

Back then, in the early 1980s, the only Ethiopians working on archaeological digs in their own country were labourers, employed by foreigners.

Research papers found carrying hidden white text giving instructions not to highlight negatives as concern grows over use of large language models for peer review

Academics are reportedly hiding prompts in preprint papers for artificial intelligence tools, encouraging them to give positive reviews.

Nikkei reported on 1 July it had reviewed research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries, including Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore and two in the United States.

Witnesses describe the aircraft leaning to the left shortly after takeoff before crashing

London Southend airport has been closed and flights cancelled after a small plane crashed into a fireball shortly after takeoff.

The Beechcraft B200 aircraft crashed about 4pm on Sunday, soon after taking off from the airport, which is in Essex. The plane was seen in flames with dark smoke billowing from it, according to witnesses and photos circulating on social media.

After the Pacific nation struck deals with Beijing, New Zealand abruptly cut off millions of dollars in critical aid and funding

On a remote stretch of land in the Cook Islands lies a second world war airstrip. Once used as a wartime supply route by American forces, the narrow runway is in dire need of resealing to allow larger tourist jets to land. Leaders on the northern island of Penrhyn have asked New Zealand, Australia and the US to help, but none have come through. Now, they hope China will step in and fund it.

“That is the dream,” says Penrhyn’s executive director, Puna John Vano. “We want to maintain our traditional partners, but if not, we’re going to get assistance from elsewhere.”

On the Cook Islands’ main island of Rarotonga, many people are angry over the damage caused to relations with New Zealand.

SBU intelligence agency claims to have ‘liquidated’ members of Russia’s FSB who were suspected of killing Colonel Ivan Voronych last week

Ukrainian intelligence agents killed members of a Russian secret service cell wanted on suspicion of having shot dead a colonel last week, the SBU said.

The SBU intelligence agency said in a statement that the operation had sought the arrest of the agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), who it believes were behind the killing of Colonel Ivan Voronych – also a member of the SBU security service – in Kyiv on Thursday.

Migrants want more than just celebration of their cultures; they want to be part of decision-making

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

The first thing that hit me when I landed in Melbourne from Kabul wasn’t the city’s famously unpredictable weather but the incredible diversity on the streets and in the food. It was nothing like the Australia I had imagined growing up: a cricket-mad nation led by white politicians in suits, in the headlines occasionally for either good or controversial reasons.

This vibrant reality surprised me in the best way.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email