Environment secretary backs Cunliffe review’s plan to end sewage scandals and financial mismanagement and ‘change the whole system’ in England and Wales

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A new, “powerful” water regulator should replace Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Environment Agency to “reset” a sector tarnished by scandals over sewage spills and financial mismanagement, a major review has recommended.

The government is expected to adopt the recommendation for England and Wales made in the review it commissioned from Sir Jon Cunliffe, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, which was released on Monday.

Jeopardy’s Jennings is the king of ken

Jeopardy! is the long-running US quiz show where contestants are given an answer and must respond with a question for that answer.

“Ken Jennings”, for example, is the correct answer to the following question:

Austria’s upgraded sleeper proves an exciting way to travel between two absorbing, family-friendly cities for our writer and her young daughters

Toasted ham baguettes in hand, we cheered as the new-generation Nightjet drew into Vienna Hauptbahnhof. It was a little before 7pm, and as the carriages hummed past I felt a rush of joy, like celebrity trainspotter Francis Bourgeois, but without the GoPro on my forehead. For more than three years I’ve been documenting the renaissance of sleeper trains, and I’d wondered if I might one day tire of them. But the thrill seems only to intensify each time I embark on another nocturnal adventure, this time with my two daughters – aged eight and five – who were already arguing over the top berth. The first four carriages were designated for travellers to the Italian port city of La Spezia, the other seven carrying on to Roma Tiburtina, where we would alight at 10am. Once in Rome we had 24 hours to eat classic carbonara, dark chocolate gelato, and bike around the Villa Borghese before taking a train to Florence.

Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) has played the lead role in resuscitating Europe’s night trains. Towards the end of 2016, ÖBB launched its Nightjet network on 14 routes, using old rolling stock it bought from Deutsche Bahn. Then, to the delight of train nerds like me, it launched a brand-new fleet at the end of 2023, and now operates 20 routes across Europe. We were now on board this high-spec service, which smelled of freshly unpacked furniture, the carpets soft underfoot, the lighting adjustable to disco hues of neon blue and punk pink.

Listeners get to ask the the broadcasting duo almost everything – just don’t mention sex in the 90s. Plus, Garry Kasparov asks if the US is sliding into a pseudo dictatorship

BBC broadcasting besties Zoe Ball and Jo Whiley follow those who have enjoyed new freedom in the podcast world. In a breezy series, which was nearly called “Jo and Zo’s Big Bushes”, they invite listeners to ask them questions on subjects from kids to gardening, interiors, music and the menopause. What they won’t be talking about, Zoe confirms, is band members they slept with in the 90s. Sorry! Hollie Richardson
Widely available, episodes weekly

Andy Kalli discovered cocaine at the age of 29, and was soon blowing almost everything he earned on drugs. Twenty-four years later he finally hit rock bottom

For 24 years, Andy Kalli was addicted to crack cocaine. He lost contact with his family and sold his possessions – even his dad’s sovereign ring – to fund his addiction. But three years ago, at 61, he started working for a rehab centre. Now, he says, “I save lives. I make a difference.” The cork board full of thank you cards in his office agrees.

Kalli works as service manager at the Perry Clayman Project in Luton, Bedfordshire, and likes to advise clients not to apologise. “Because how many times have I apologised?” he says. “Don’t say sorry. Your families have heard it a thousand times.” It’s by making change that “you’ll be making amends,” he says.

Carrier says Horizon Air flights also suspended while not specifying reasons for outage causing fleet’s second grounding in a year

US carrier Alaska Airlines grounded its flights after an IT outage on Sunday that affected its systems, the company said, without specifying the nature of the outage, marking the second time it has grounded its fleet in just over a year.

“At approximately 8pm Pacific on Sunday (0300 GMT on Monday), Alaska Airlines experienced an IT outage that’s impacting our operations,” the carrier said in a statement. “We requested a temporary, system-wide ground stop for Alaska and Horizon Air flights.”

‘It’s an incredibly varied donation. He clearly held on to his books, some of them are quite old,’ says bookshop worker

Nick Cave fans have descended on a charity bookshop in Hove, in southern England, after the musician donated 2,000 books from his personal collection.

The Australian singer made the donation to Hove’s Oxfam Bookshop on Blatchington Road. The books were once part of his personal library, which was recreated for an art installation that went to Denmark and Canada.

• Australia 88-79 Japan in Women’s Asia Cup final played in China

• Alex Fowler hits 15 points in decider and named tournament MVP

Australia’s Opals survived a late comeback by Japan to win the Women’s Asia Cup for the first time on Sunday.

With a breakthrough Asia Cup title now under their belt, the Opals can turn their attention to next year’s Women’s Basketball World Cup in Germany full of confidence.

A ninefold increase is the result of huge advances in our understanding – and brings the hope of fulfilling lives to many more people

• Gina Rippon is an emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging and author of The Lost Girls of Autism

Soaring rates of diagnoses in various illnesses such as cancer and diabetes have stimulated a debate about whether medicine has an “overdiagnosis” problem. The claim is that individuals may be prematurely diagnosed with conditions that, although meeting criteria for a disease, will never cause symptoms or death during a patient’s lifetime.

Discussions of this problem in the world of physical medicine have mainly been described as compassionate, arising from concerns that many so-called diagnoses might be unnecessary (does being pre-diabetic really mean you are ill?) or even harmful (the worried well being driven to seek needless and possibly damaging surgical interventions). Now that there are ever-more sensitive screening tests, and access to predictive genetic information, are doctors handing out too many unnecessary sicknotes?

Prof Gina Rippon is emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Institute of Health and Neurodevelopment, Aston University, and the author of The Lost Girls of Autism and The Gendered Brain

Transformed from a second world war bunker into Germany’s buzziest dance venue, the acoustics at Open Ground in Wuppertal are raved about by DJs such as Floating Points – and may even be good for your health

It’s 8pm when DJ Lag steps up to the booth for his sound check at Open Ground, a dance venue in western Germany. It has been described as the “best-sounding new club in the world”, and when the first track plays you can hear why.

Rotund bass lines roll across the acoustically treated room, propelled by an extraordinarily powerful, horn-loaded bass enclosure named the Funktion-One F132. High-pitched melodies and intricate textures develop with startling clarity. And as for the call-and-response ad-libs – they sound as if the vocalists are standing only metres away.

• First T20I: WI 189-8, Aus 190-7; Australia win by 3 wkts

• Debutant blasts six sixes in match-turning half-century

Mitch Owen has dazzled on his international debut with a power-hitting masterclass that helped rescue Australia on the way to a three-wicket victory over the West Indies. With Australia using the five-match series in the Caribbean as an opportunity to test the next generation and build depth for the longer term, Owen wasted no time in showing that he could be part of the future with a gamechanging half-century.

Australia still had to call on the more experienced Ben Dwarshuis and Sean Abbott to guide them home at the death, as the tourists reached 190 to win with seven balls to spare in the first T20I at Sabina Park.

Driving through Manchester one Sunday, at the wheel of a Nissan Micra, Foot suddenly woke from decades of anxiety, anger and misery. He talks about the friends who tried to help him, and the forgiveness he struggled to find

For three years and four months, Paul Foot has been living in a state of joy. He is in it now, he says, sitting across a table, overlooking London’s Regent’s canal. He’s wearing one of his trademark blue LF Markey boilersuits, and seems serene rather than ecstatic, half smiling. But that’s because the joy doesn’t spike or yo-yo. It’s a “constant”, so reliable that even when someone he knows dies, “there’s still a peace beneath it and a joy in it as well”.

Life was not always like this, and the story of how Foot, 51, overturned 28 years of “crushing, all-encompassing depression and anxiety” is told in his critically acclaimed 2023 show Dissolve, the filmed special of which is released this week.

Corporation aims to build ‘lifestyle brand’ for all ages around smash-hit cartoon character

Each episode may only last seven minutes, but the bite-size length of Bluey’s adventures has not held back the world’s most popular blue dog from creating endless money-spinning opportunities for the BBC.

Grateful executives are open about Bluey’s status as the golden goose driving a record £2.16bn in sales from commercial operations last year, spawning branding deals for everything from headphones to baked beans.

Jude Dibia’s Walking With Shadows has a gay character at its heart – a radical act that continues to influence the region’s literary scene

When Jude Dibia first tried to sell the manuscript of his groundbreaking novel Walking With Shadows 20 years ago, he was aware of the silence around queerness in West African literature. While there had been books with gay themes, his is widely recognised as the first novel in the region to put a gay character at the heart of the story.

“The absence wasn’t just literary; it was societal,” Dibia says. “Queer people were living, loving, suffering, surviving – but largely rendered invisible or spoken of in hushed tones, if at all. That silence felt violent. It felt like erasure.

This small cutback is hardly a draconian austerity purge for a country that is broke. But the howls of outrage show a rational debate is unlikely

France is skint, but the French are in denial. To judge by the howls of outrage from the left and the hard right of the French political spectrum, you would think the prime minister, François Bayrou, had just taken a Javier Milei-style chainsaw to public services, announced Doge-style mass layoffs or imposed swingeing pay cuts.

But it was Bayrou’s suggestion that the French should give up two of their 11 cherished public holidays – Easter Monday and 8 May, the anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe – and work instead to increase economic output and hence government revenue that provoked the anger.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

In this first episode of our special Politics Weekly America series, author Gwenda Blair, and reporters Rosie Gray and Ashley Parker introduce us to the family members who helped Donald Trump succeed on his road to the White House and his time in office

The United States has had its fair share of political dynasties – the Bushes, the Clintons, the Kennedys … but has Donald Trump been quietly moulding his own family to become a political force long after he leaves office? Who from within the family fold could be a successor to the president? Or does Trump simply see the presidency as an opportunity to enrich himself and promote the Trump family brand?

In this first episode, the author Gwenda Blair takes us back through Donald Trump’s family history and how the decisions made by his dad and grandfather led him to where he is today. The reporter Rosie Gray talks us through the role the first lady, Melania Trump, played in supporting her husband. And Ashley Parker profiles the roles of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, as they served as senior advisers to the president during his first term.

It started in a strip joint and ended up bringing alternative comedy to our TV screens. Ahead of a new Edinburgh show, Peter Richardson tells us why his riotous creation still makes audiences laugh 40 years on

It was the moment comedy broke with sexism – yet it happened in a strip club. It was a fervour of free creative expression – yet it retained a commercial, careerist edge. It was one of the longest-running and most successful brands in UK comedy history – which few people could now recognise.

At the Edinburgh fringe this summer, The Comic Strip Presents … will be memorialised in a series of film screenings and Q&As with its creator and prime mover Peter Richardson. Richardson was the impresario behind the legendary comedy club The Comic Strip, which opened in 1980. When he and his star performers – Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, French and Saunders among them – created Channel 4’s The Comic Strip Presents … a couple of years later, he could legitimately claim to be the man who brought alternative comedy to television.

US comedian and Portia de Rossi have stayed in the UK since Trump’s re-election, and are considering getting married again in case the US overturns same-sex marriage

Ellen DeGeneres has confirmed that she moved to the UK because of Donald Trump, saying, “Everything here is just better”.

At a conversation event on Sunday at Cheltenham’s Everyman theatre – the comedian’s first public appearance since leaving the US – broadcaster Richard Bacon asked DeGeneres if it was true Trump had spurred her decision to relocate.

City officials say a subway station in central Kyiv, commercial property, shops, houses and a kindergarten were all damaged in the attacks

Russia launched a barrage of drones and missiles at Ukraine in an overnight attack on Monday, killing at least one person and causing multiple fires in the capital Kyiv, city officials said.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said rescuers and medics were working on sites across four districts of the capital. A subway station in central Kyiv, commercial property, shops, houses and a kindergarten were damaged, city officials said.

Rightmove blames the 1.2% fall in new sellers’ prices on the end of stamp duty discounts and more homes coming on to the market

The average price of homes coming up for sale dropped by the largest monthly amount in more than 20 years in July, according to a property website, after the end of temporary cuts to stamp duty, and recent increases in council tax on second homes.

The average price being asked by new sellers fell by 1.2%, or £4,531, in July compared with a month earlier, to £373,709.

Larson, who survived Normandy landings, gained 1.2 million followers on social media platform by sharing second world war stories

D-day veteran ″Papa Jake″ Larson, who survived German gunfire on Normandy’s beaches in 1944 and then garnered 1.2 million followers on TikTok late in life by sharing stories to commemorate the second world war and his fallen comrades, has died aged 102.

An animated speaker who charmed strangers young and old with his quick smile and generous hugs, the self-described country boy from Minnesota was “cracking jokes til the end,’’ his granddaughter wrote in announcing his death.

The 18-year-old is in a serious but stable condition at Royal Darwin hospital

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A woman with a spear embedded in her head has been airlifted to hospital from a remote Northern Territory community, with police searching for her alleged attacker.

On Sunday police received a report alleging that an 18-year-old woman had been stabbed in the head by a male known to her at Angurugu on the west coast of Groote Eylandt, an island in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

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Donald Trump calls on Commanders and Guardians to revert to names that were abandoned due to being racially insensitive – key US politics stories from Sunday 20 July at a glance

Donald Trump has weighed into a new fight – this time with two sports teams. The president wants Washington’s football franchise the Commanders and Cleveland baseball team the Guardians to revert to their former names, which were abandoned in recent years due to being racially insensitive to Native Americans.

Trump said on Sunday on Truth Social that: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team …. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past.”