This brilliantly over-the-top comedy about an unworldly heckler explores art and authenticity – being tripped up by it is part of the fun

As TonyInterruptor begins, musician Sasha Keyes is in the middle of an improvised trumpet solo. A man stands up in the audience and says, “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” He points at Sasha and adds, “You especially.” Soon a video of the episode appears online, with a companion clip of Sasha’s vitriolic reaction: “Some random fucking nobody … some dick-weed, small-town TonyInterruptor.”

Given the times we live in, this naturally leads to Sasha’s trial by social media for artistic fraudulence and abusive conduct. But the shockwaves soon extend to everyone adjacent to the event: Fi Kinebuchi, the self-styled “Queen of Strings”, who was playing with Sasha at the time; India Shore, the teenager who posted the first video; India’s father, Lambert, an architecture professor with a secret crush on Fi Kinebuchi; his wife Mallory, who divides her time between parenting her daughter, Gunn, who has special needs, and venting intellectual spleen; and even to TonyInterruptor himself, real name John Lincoln Braithwaite, an otherworldly outsider whose “main occupation – his duty, even – is to observe and assess the falling and the catching of light”.

Azita Gandjei’s mesmerising black and white photos capture the point at which the boundaries between people and nature dissolve

Bloomberg journalist Olivia Carville follows a small legal outfit as it takes Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies to task for endangering young users

“Tweens are herd animals” and have “an addicts’ narrative”, according to internal documents revealed by a Facebook whistleblower to congress, making clear the levels of cynicism and obfuscation the company operates with in its quest to hook young people to its platform. Bad though that is, it’s not the worst example in this lucidly laid out and often harrowing indictment of social media’s ruthlessness; that would be the proliferation of drug dealers on Snapchat, which the company seems to have to some extent turned a blind eye to in the scramble to expand its user base.

Based on the investigative work of Bloomberg journalist Olivia Carville, this film covers the attempts of minnow legal outfit Social Media Victims Law Center to net the sharks of Silicon Valley. It represents a host of families who have suffered heartbreaking losses due to unpoliced extreme online content: children and teenagers who fatally copied auto-asphyxiation or pro-suicide videos, ones who killed themselves after falling victim to sextortionists, or who overdosed after buying off-prescription meds from predatory dealers. The battle here is to overcome section 230, a get-out clause in the 1996 Telecommunication Act that gives social media companies immunity for third-party-generated content. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg was still slurping Slush Puppies back then.

A commercial instinct created her brand, a market sustains it and mainstream businesses profit. It’s a tale of very capitalist times

Bonnie Blue has sex with men on camera for money. Lots of men one after the other, to be precise, for lots and lots of money: the commercial niche she invented to distinguish herself from countless other amateur porn stars jostling desperately for attention on OnlyFans was inviting “barely legal” ordinary teenage boys (which in porn means 18-plus) to have sex with her on film, and flogging the results to paying subscribers for a fortune. Unusually, her model involves a woman making millions out of men generating content for free, which makes it slightly harder than usual to work out exactly who is exploiting whom if she turns up (as she did in Nottingham) at a university freshers’ week with a sign saying “bonk me and let me film it”.

But debating whether getting rich this way makes Bonnie personally “empowered” seems tired and pointless. It was with this old pseudo-feminist chestnut that Channel 4 justified last week’s ratings-chasing documentary on her attempt to sleep with 1,000 men in 12 hours, a film that finally brought her into the cultural mainstream. There’s more to this story than sex, gender politics or Bonnie herself, and whatever is driving her (which she swears isn’t past trauma, “daddy issues” over a biological father she never knew, or anything else you’re thinking: though she does say maybe her brain works differently from other people’s, given her curious ability to switch off her emotions). It’s at heart a story about money, the merging of the oldest trade in the world with a newer attention economy inexorably geared towards rewarding extremes, and what that does to the society that unwittingly produced it.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

A Turkish feast of grilled lamb koftas with spices and dill in a rich tomato sauce, and a must-have yoghurty cucumber dip

Several years ago, I was stranded in Istanbul because of the Icelandic eruptions. I wandered through the ancient city and was astounded by the beauty of the place – and just as much by its food. I tasted grilled meats cooked over open fires on the streets, and had a kofta dish served with cacik, a classic cucumber and mint sauce, that was so intensely delicious that the moment has been distilled in my memory. Mince, with good provenance and the right amount of fat to carry flavour and lend moisture, is a kitchen hero. Here, it delivers an astoundingly good dinner inspired by that meal, and which shouldn’t break the bank.

Chinese fast fashion retailer penalised month after €40m fine from French regulator in July

The Italian authorities have fined Shein €1m (£870,000) for making “misleading or omissive” environmental claims about its products, the second time in as many months the Chinese fashion retailer has been targeted by European regulators.

Environmental sustainability and social responsibility messages on Shein’s website were in some cases “vague, generic, and/or overly emphatic” and in others were “misleading or omissive”, said Italy’s competition authority, AGCM.

Scotland says there have been 119 incidents on the rail network caused by Storm Floris, including 75 tree-related ones

The Scottish government has held emergency meetings in response to the “significant disruption” caused by Storm Floris across the country, with warnings of further travel chaos on Tuesday as poor weather continues.

On Monday night, the Scottish government’s Resilience Room held a meeting to help decide an appropriate response to the storm, which has included power outages and almost 120 rail incidents. Representatives from the Met Office, Police Scotland, Transport Scotland and transport and utilities companies were in attendance.

Lindsay and Craig Foreman were detained seven months ago on espionage charges while on global motorbike trip

A British couple detained in Iran for seven months on espionage charges have been moved to separate prisons in and near Tehran, heightening fears for their welfare, their son said on Monday.

Lindsay and Craig Foreman, both 52 and who previously split their time between south-east England and Spain, were seized in Kerman, in central Iran, in early January while on a round-the-world motorbike trip.

Pro-Israel posts point to a handful of cafes to claim 2 million people are not suffering hunger – despite Israel’s own data

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his supporters have variously argued that there is no starvation in Gaza, or that if there is hunger it is the fault of Hamas – who they accuse of stealing aid – or the United Nations.

In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Amit Segal, the chief political correspondent for Israel’s Channel 12, said he did not believe there was hunger in Gaza. Israel’s consul general in New York said that there was “no deliberate starvation in Gaza, only a deliberate disinformation campaign orchestrated by Hamas”.

Donald Tusk has failed to offer a positive vision for the future. Without one, liberals will just be an interval between populist acts

We were travelling across Poland by train the day after the country’s sensational parliamentary elections in autumn 2023. When news of the results came through, passengers in our compartment fell into each other’s arms, rejoicing as though a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders. Hard as it was to believe after eight years, the national populists of the Law and Justice party had been ousted from power on a record turnout of 75% of voters. We felt the potential of democracy to change things for the better as a physical sensation.

Less than two years have passed but this enthusiasm has disappeared without trace. The Law and Justice-backed candidate Karol Nawrocki won the presidential election run off in June with 50.89% of the vote, securing the admiration of Donald Trump in the process. Days before Nawrocki’s swearing in on Wednesday [6 August] a new poll suggested that almost half of voters would like the prime minister, Donald Tusk out. The ruling coalition is wobbling. Tusk’s liberal democratic government may turn out to be nothing more than an intermezzo, a pause between rightwing populist governments.

Karolina Wigura is a Polish historian and co-author of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty: An Essay (Why the Eastern European Mentality is Different). Jarosław Kuisz is editor-in-chief of the Polish weekly Kultura Liberalna and the author of The New Politics of Poland: A Case of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty

Ilulissat’s mayor has called for protests as local operators are frozen out of a booming visitor trade

It is known as the “iceberg capital of the world” but to the mayor of Ilulissat in northern Greenland, it is also a town divided where friends and neighbours have stopped talking to each other in a dispute over the cruise ships that bring tourists to see its frozen wonders.

Its Unesco-listed icefjord draws thousands of visitors in the summer months, each potentially bringing lucrative business to the town. But frustrated local tour operators say they are being shut out by larger companies from elsewhere in Greenland and Denmark, who are undercutting local businesses or excluding them entirely – while local boats sit unused in the harbour.

Professor Richard Thompson, a marine litter expert, says delegates must act decisively to ‘look next generation in the eye’

Delegates at the UN plastic pollution treaty talks in Geneva must secure an ambitious global agreement so they can look future generations in the eye, one of the world’s leading marine litter experts has said.

Prof Richard Thompson, who was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people this year for his groundbreaking work on plastic pollution, said decisive action was needed to protect human health and the planet.

Wular Lake once supported 5,000 people who harvested the plant’s edible roots, until the lake silted up after floods. Now the lotuses are back

“We threw seeds into the lake hundreds of times, but nothing grew. It’s only now, after the silt was cleared, that we see the flowers again after nearly 33 years,” says Bashir Ahmad, a 65-year-old who fishes in Kashmir’s Wular Lake for his livelihood.

Wular was once among Asia’s largest freshwater lakes. It lies in the Kashmir valley, about 18 miles (30km) north-west of Srinagar, at the foot of the Pir Panjal and Himalayan mountain ranges. It was renowned for its high-quality lotus plants, and sustained the livelihoods of more than 5,000 people who harvested and sold nadru – the edible lotus stem cherished as a delicacy in Kashmiri households and which features in wazwan, the region’s traditional multi-course celebratory meals.

On a small ledge in the Swiss mountains, 200 people were celebrating the end of a summer football tournament. As night fell, they had no idea what was coming

In the wake of a natural disaster, certain metrics are used to categorise the event: the buildings destroyed; the cost of repair to the nearest million; a single number for the loss of human life. Yet these figures obscure the truth of such events. They make the outcome seem fixed, somehow proportionate. But disasters are chaotic. Their extreme violence magnifies the consequences of every decision: to stay or to move; to run or to hide. Things could have turned out another way. And how would we talk about them then?

In Locarno, Switzerland, on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore, lies the mouth of the Maggia river. Follow it north-west and it winds past sandy, tree-shaded beaches, through rocky gorges and into a broad, glacial valley where, for much of the year, long waterfalls drop down forested mountainsides. Just over 20 kilometres upstream, at the foot of the Pizzo di Brünesc mountain, the river splits in two. This is the upper Maggia valley. To the west runs Val Bavona, with its historic villages of stone-roofed houses. To the east, equally steep and green, is Val Lavizzara. And in the upper reaches of Val Lavizzara, at an altitude of 1,000 metres, is Campo Draione.

Overcapacity and oversupply are causing ‘involution’ and putting growth at risk, manufacturers told

China is urging its electric vehicle industry to stop cutting prices and rein in production amid fears that persistent deflation is imperilling economic growth.

In recent months Chinese officials have talked repeatedly of the need to combat “involution” in sectors suffering from overcapacity, such as EVs, referring to the phenomenon of investing more effort and money for diminishing returns.

For many years, UK food had a terrible reputation. Then, in the 1990s, gastropubs brought new flavours, energy and ideas. When and why did it all start to go downhill again?

It was supposed to be a special occasion: an extended family get-together for Sunday lunch at a country pub. The setting was promising: a traditional establishment recently redecorated; outside terrace by the river; plenty of customers. The menu was also promising: a giant sheet of paper like a medieval charter, with glowing descriptions of how they aged their beef and sourced their produce locally.

The food, though, was awful. The starters were assorted deep-fried pellets of unidentifiable organic matter; the meat was cold and colourless, the gravy watery, the roast potatoes soggy and the yorkshire pudding chewy as a dishcloth. It was very difficult to believe all of this had been freshly prepared in the kitchen that day. It felt more like reheated leftovers – for £30 a head.

Merz walks fine line as ‘lazy Germans’ debate sparks protest and economy minister calls to raise retirement age to 70

The fact that ageing Germany’s generous pension system is unsustainable is political Berlin’s worst-kept secret, but a controversial call to save it by hiking the retirement age to 70 has sparked howls of protest and threatened to destabilise the fractious government.

The chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has largely sidestepped the ticking timebomb of the greying population since taking office in May, preferring instead to announce sweeteners such as tax breaks for older Germans to continue working past the retirement age.

Eighty years on from the destruction of the city, registered survivors of the blast - known as hibakusha – have fallen below 100,000

The fires were still burning, and the dead lay where they had fallen, when a 10-year-old Yoshiko Niiyama entered Hiroshima, two days after it was destroyed by an American atomic bomb.

“I remember that the air was filled with smoke and there were bodies everywhere … and it was so hot,” Niiyama says in an interview at her home in the Hiroshima suburbs. “The faces of the survivors were so badly disfigured that I didn’t want to look at them. But I had to.”

Both major parties want to expel Ward from parliament after he was convicted, but the Kiama MP has engaged lawyers from his prison cell

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New South Wales politicians are facing a potential constitutional showdown with the state’s supreme court over parliament’s attempt to expel local MP and convicted rapist Gareth Ward.

The Minns government was seeking an urgent hearing in the supreme court on Tuesday to lift an ex parte injunction granted the previous day to Ward. It prevented parliament, for now, from moving to expel the member for Kiama.

The young Tahiti surfer will become the WSL’s youngest competitor when she takes on the fearsome break she can see from her family home

When the final leg of the World Surf League (WSL) regular season begins in Tahiti this week, Kelia Mehani Gallina will make history. Just 12 years old, the Tahitian local won the event trials last month to book a spot in the main draw, making her the youngest competitor in WSL history. She will face the current world No 1, Molly Picklum of Australia, and American star Lakey Peterson in the opening round, before celebrating her 13th birthday midway through the event.

The contest site, Teahupo’o, is renowned as being among the heaviest waves in the world. But Gallina is a regular – she speaks to the Guardian by phone with her father, Ryan, from their home in Teahupo’o village. “We can see [the wave] from our bedroom,” says Ryan, who is originally from Hawaii (Kelia’s mother is Tahitian). Such is her local status that Kelia’s Instagram handle is simply @MissTeahupoo.

Government says Patriot parts and missiles included while Nato chief expects announcements from other alliance countries soon. What we know on day 1,259

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I’ve tried to write this for a week now but can’t seem to find the right words. What words could ever be enough?

• Anne Davies: The huge Harbour Bridge march shows people have had a gutful of seeing starving children in Gaza. Politicians need to catch up

“Why can’t I have a pomegranate?”

The little girl’s question sank his heart. How would my colleague, Hatem, explain to his daughter that there are no pomegranates, and barely any flour? How will he explain that real people are doing this to her on purpose? Starving her little stomach as a weapon?

Having lost key players at the back, it appears Bournemouth’s buy-low sell-high model will be tested if they are to again challenge for a European place

Guardian writers’ predicted position: 10th (NB: this is not necessarily Ben Fisher’s prediction but the average of our writers’ tips)

Last season’s position: 9th

US claims judge attempting ‘to silence opposition’ as Bolsonaro accused of breaching ban imposed amid fears he may abscond ahead of trial

In a move immediately condemned by the US, a Brazilian supreme court judge has ordered the house arrest of former president Jair Bolsonaro for breaching “preventative measures” that were imposed ahead of his trial for an alleged coup attempt.

According to the ruling on Monday by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the far-right leader breached a ban on using social media which was imposed last month, when he was also ordered to wear an electronic ankle tag.