• The first round matches continue on day two at SW19

• Wimbledon feel more British than usual | Mail Daniel

But back to the immediate future, which are the matches I’ll watch when play gets under way at 11am? I think we’ll go with:

Cocciaretto v Pegula (3)

Public health warnings as heatwave raises concerns about impact of climate change

It’s not only Europe: Japan experienced its hottest June on record, the weather agency said Tuesday, as climate change prompts sweltering heat waves across the globe, AFP reported.

“Japan’s monthly average temperature in June was the highest for the month since statistics began in 1898,” said the Japan Meteorological Agency.

Women, children and elderly people among at least 24 killed by attack that turned beach spot into scene of carnage

Witnesses have described the bloody aftermath of an Israeli strike on a crowded seaside cafe in Gaza, which left at least 24 dead and many more injured on Tuesday.

Al-Baqa cafe, close to the harbour in Gaza City, was almost full in the early afternoon when it was hit by a missile, immediately transforming a scene of relative calm amid the biggest urban centre in Gaza into one of carnage.

Using clever tactics and Messi clickbait, Egyptian creators racked up 14m views with highlights posted before kickoff. YouTube didn’t catch on until it was too late

This story was reported by Indicator, a publication that investigates digital deception, and co-published with the Guardian.

It was Thursday morning in America and something didn’t look right in the highlights of the Club World Cup match between Manchester City and Juventus.

Suzi Ragheb provided research support and translation of one of the videos in Arabic.

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This summer has 28 Days Later, I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Karate Kid franchises coming back to life but what should come next?

The Thin Man series should not be rebooted so much as remixed, shaken a little and strained into crystal coupes. These glamorous 1930s capers starred the debonair duo of William Powell and Myrna Loy as frisky husband-and-wife sleuths Nick and Nora Charles, who solve crimes while cracking wise and necking cocktails, accompanied by their precocious wire fox terrier Asta. There were six films in the original run, starting with 1934’s The Thin Man, an adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name, and ending in 1947. The perfect recipe for a new Thin Man film would comprise two charismatic movie stars with sizzling chemistry, the kind who look stunning in evening dress, but who can also ad lib their own gags, a cavalcade of plot twists and saucy co-stars, a happy ending, and of course a scene-stealing pooch. It’s good, old-fashioned fun, but that’s why it’s so timeless, and a formula that can run and run – until the ice bucket is empty. Pamela Hutchinson

The small city of Minaçu is hoping to challenge China’s dominance in servicing the global appetite for minerals key to the green energy transition

Minaçu, a small city in inland Brazil and home to the only asbestos mine in the Americas, is set to become the first operation outside Asia to produce four rare earths on a commercial scale – a group of minerals key to the energy transition at the centre of the trade dispute between China and the US.

Until now, China has dominated the separation of rare earths, and accounts for 90% of the manufacture of rare-earth magnets, or super magnets, which are made with these elements and used in electric cars, wind turbines and military equipment such as jets.

From streaming services to food-delivery apps, the modern world conspires to keep us home and alone. But I went out looking for a human connection

I am lucky enough to have some wonderful friends. But recently many of them have moved away because they can’t afford, or simply can’t be bothered, to live in a huge city like London any more. And when you’re in your 30s, meaningfully connecting with new people is no mean feat.

I’m not alone in feeling a little lonely: in 2023, the World Health Organization said that social isolation was becoming a “global public health concern”. From the decline of the office to the rise of single-occupancy flats, our social lives are being leached away from us. Meanwhile, streaming services and food-delivery apps discourage us from going out, their ads extolling the safety and convenience of staying home and not seeing or talking to another human. It’s almost as if they want to keep us single and friendless, with nothing to spend our money on but a disappointing chicken burger with a side of Deadpool & Wolverine.

Dracula’s daughter seeks a more peaceful life making plant-based blood substitutes in this Stardew-Valley-inspired, gently creepy farming game

What if you were a tiny, vegan vampire? That’s the question posed by Moonlight Peaks, the gen Z-coded, achingly TikTok-ready supernatural life sim. Inspired by the popularity of “cosy games” such as Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, Moonlight Peaks drapes you in the cape of Dracula’s daughter, who has fled her father’s corpse-ridden home to start a new, peaceful life.

Soon, she settles among werewolves and witches in the supernatural farming town of Moonlight Peaks, where she grows crops and rears animals instead of subsisting on the blood of innocents. Both cosy and creepy, the game has you creating your own plant-based blood substitutes, befriending the town’s residents and fixing a whole host of problems left in daddy Dracula’s wake.

Moonlight Peaks is out on PC in 2026

She has apologised for mentioning a much larger ex – but the comment still haunts me. Should I walk away?

I have been seeing a woman whom I met online for almost a year. Before we met face to face, we had a number of phone calls, during which she became very sexual very quickly. She asked me the size of my penis (which is slightly above average). Then she told me she liked big penises and that an ex-partner’s was 12in (30cm) long. This made me feel very insecure and I told her this. She said: “It’s only a preference.”

Since then, this issue has surfaced again and again. I know it’s hard to believe, but we haven’t had penetrative sex yet. (Initially, I wanted to take things slow. Plus, she is menopausal and hasn’t been feeling sexual much of the time.) We do have other kinds of sex and she says I am the “best” in this respect. But penetrative sex, for me, is very important. She says I’m “big enough” and that she is sure I’ll satisfy her – but the thought that she “prefers bigger” is devastating. She says she doesn’t understand why she made the original remark. She is sorry, but this doesn’t help. I feel I should walk away, but I have strong feelings for her.

Court considers petition by 36 senators calling for dismissal of Shinawatra for dishonesty and breaching ethical standards

Thailand’s constitutional court has suspended the prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, while it investigates alleged ethical violations relating to a leaked phone call.

The court announced on Tuesday that it would consider a petition filed by 36 senators calling for the dismissal of the prime minister, accusing her of dishonesty and breaching ethical standards in violation of the constitution.

Today’s rumours aren’t going out in this weather

Manchester United’s search for a suitable striker continues to occupy the minds of the gossip-mongers, with Ollie Watkins now reported to be firmly on Ruben Amorim’s radar. As United toil to get a deal for Brentford’s Bryan Mbeumo over the line, amid rumours the Cameroon striker may be persuaded to remain in west London, Aston Villa’s Watkins has emerged as a strong target, the Athletic reports. However, a deal may be dependent on Rasmus Højlund being bundled out of the Old Trafford exit door.

United also continue to be dogged by the “How do you solve a problem like Marcus Rashford?” conundrum; the striker faces starting the season at Old Trafford because Aston Villa will not be taking up the £40m option to sign him.

One of the consequences of Israel’s 12-day conflict with Iran was a drop-off in attention paid to the war in Gaza, where a terrible humanitarian situation deteriorated even further. This is a timeline of what happened

In the weeks leading up to Israel’s war with Iran, which it launched on 13 June, there had been little let-up in its offensive in Gaza. A tenuous ceasefire had broken down in March, and a wave of airstrikes followed, as well as an 11-week blockade on all aid. Though some humanitarian assistance was allowed in from late May, military action intensified at the same time.

Growing numbers of desperate Palestinians were being killed as they sought scarce food either from looted aid convoys or from distribution hubs set up by the new, secretive Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by Israel and the US as an alternative to the existing, much more comprehensive UN-led system. Rolling IDF “evacuation orders” covered much of the territory.

• Scotland full-back earmarked for weekend match

• Untested pairing of Gibson-Park and Russell face Reds

To say the last couple of days have been a blur for Blair Kinghorn is putting it mildly. As recently as the early hours of Sunday he was celebrating Toulouse’s Top 14 title success in Paris and doing interviews clad only in a pair of budgie smugglers. Now here he is wearing a British & Irish Lions tracksuit, squinting into the Australian sunshine and trying his hardest to focus on the next onrushing target.

The Scotland full-back, the last originally chosen squad member to arrive, will not be involved in the Lions’ game against the Reds on Wednesday but is earmarked to feature against the Waratahs in Sydney on Saturday. All being well a potential slot in the Test XV could follow but even for a class act like Kinghorn it is going to take a lot of frantic paddling below the surface to get up to speed.

A deeply researched history that examines colonial and post-colonial faultlines, from Aden to Myanmar

Earlier this summer, amid renewed tensions between India and Pakistan following a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, Donald Trump remarked that the two countries had been fighting over Kashmir for “a thousand years”. It was a glib, ahistorical comment, and was widely ridiculed. Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple’s urgent and ambitious debut, offers a more comprehensive rebuttal. Far from being a region riven by ancient hatreds, the lands that comprise modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar – as well as parts of the Gulf – were divided up within living memory from an empire in retreat.

“You can’t actually see the Great Wall of China from space,” Dalrymple begins, “but the border wall dividing India from Pakistan is unmistakable.” Stretching more than 3,000km and flanked by floodlights, thermal vision sensors and landmines, this is more a physical scar left by the hurried dismantling of British India than a traditional geopolitical divide. What might now seem like natural frontiers were shaped by five key events: Burma’s exit from the empire in 1937; the separation of Aden that same year, and of the Gulf protectorates in 1947; the division of India and Pakistan, also in 1947; the absorption of more than 550 princely states; and, in 1971, the secession of East Pakistan. Neither ancient nor inevitable, these lines were hastily drawn in committee rooms, colonial offices and war cabinets.

Renewable energy and critical minerals projects often want to mine on sacred lands but minority groups are fighting back through the courts

Located in Wikieup, Arizona, at the meeting point of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, H’a’Kamwe’ has for centuries had sacred significance for the Hualapai tribe. They regard the hot spring, fed by water naturally stored underground in volcanic rocks, as a place for healing that symbolises their connection to the land.

So when an Australian mining company announced plans to begin exploratory drilling for lithium at 100 locations on Hualapai land, including as close as just 700 metres from H’a’Kamwe’, they regarded it as a potential desecration.

Meg Hillier to vote for government’s legislation on Tuesday though dozens of Labour MPs still expected to oppose it

Downing Street has “listened” and “honoured” the promises it made on changes to the welfare bill, one of the key rebels, Meg Hillier, has said, saying she would vote for the bill on Tuesday.

The Treasury select committee chair, who authored the original amendment that would have killed off the government’s flagship welfare changes, offered her support amid a continued backlash over the bill from dozens of MPs.

In one of the world’s ‘hottest hotspots’ of biodiversity, an all-female team have turned a patch of forest into a haven for orchids, ferns, succulents and carnivorous plants

The previous night’s heavy rainstorm had brought down several large trees in the forest and broken branches were strewn about the ground. Walking through the felled trees, Laly Joseph spotted an orchid clinging to one of the snapped boughs. She gently secured the plant and carefully transplanted it on to a standing tree.

At the Gurukula botanical sanctuary, where Joseph, 56, is head of plant conservation and the most experienced “rainforest gardener”, every plant is considered precious and an all-female team strives to give them the best chance of surviving an increasingly harsh climate.

Laly Joseph, the head of plant conservation at Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, has spent most of her life learning about and caring for plants.

From LeMond’s astonishing comeback to Cavendish’s four victories, the final dash up the great avenue is now part of race folklore

It is impossible now to conceive of the Tour de France without two things: the race leader’s yellow jersey and the finale on the Champs-Élysées, a spectacle that is half a century old this summer. The finish has moved away from the great avenue once in the last 50 years, during the Olympic buildup in 2024, and the Tour cannot really be imagined without that final dash up the great avenue with its high-end shops and cafes, its gardens and plane trees.

The Tour had always finished in Paris, postwar on the velodromes at the Parc des Princes and the Cipale velodrome in the Bois de Vincennes, and it had frequently used the Champs for a ceremonial start; the idea for an “apotheosis” on the great avenue seems to have been inspired by the 1974 Giro d’Italia, which included a circuit race within Milan. The suggestion came from a television presenter, Yves Mourosi, who then had the honour of announcing the venture on his 1pm news show in November 1974.

A compulsive new history suggests the crimes of Ted Bundy et al were – at least partly – down to the air they breathed

In 1974, the year Caroline Fraser turned 13, Ted Bundy committed his first confirmed murders. Bundy was handsome, charming, extremely intelligent and sociopathic – “a sexual virus masquerading as a person”. There is persuasive evidence that he began killing much earlier but never this gluttonously. Almost all of his victims had long brown hair, parted in the middle. Sometimes he broke into the women’s houses while they slept, or snatched them off the street. Sometimes he would put on a sling or plaster cast and lure them into his car to help with some fabricated task. If one refused, he tried another, convinced that he would never be caught because they would never be missed. “I mean, there are so many people,” he reasoned. “It shouldn’t be a problem.” Fraser lived on Mercer Island, Washington, near Bundy’s first hunting grounds. Recalling the moment he was first charged with murder in October 1976, she writes: “Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.”

Bundy was one of at least half a dozen serial killers active in Washington in 1974. Within a few years, the state would produce the similarly prolific Randall Woodfield, known as the I-5 Killer, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Its murder rate rose by more than 30% in 1974 – almost six times the national average. In Tacoma, the city where Bundy grew up, Ridgway lived and Charles Manson was incarcerated for five years before starting his Family, murder was up 62%. It was as if a malevolent cloud had enveloped the region.

Serkan Nihat’s story follows a group of Turkish fugitives, but it bites off rather more than it can chew

The cinematic response to populism and incipient fascism worldwide over the last decade hasn’t fully mobilised – but this broadside on the authoritarian leanings of Erdoğan’s Turkey doesn’t pull its punches. (Unsurprisingly, it’s produced by a UK-based team.) It’s a shame then that, lambasting the effects on education, policing, freedom of expression and the demonisation of minorities, director Serkan Nihat is wedded to a hectoring, didactic method that dulls the audience’s engagement, instead of firing us up.

Nihat opts for the fragmented, multi-character narrative beloved of big-picture global film-makers in the 00s (think 21 Grams or Babel). Academic Hakan (Denis Ostier) becomes a fugitive after his pro-democracy lecture is invaded by regime goons. Hakan is later assaulted by vengeful cop Yilmaz (Murat Zeynilli), his one-time school bully, and then hooks up with another policeman, Mehmet (Umit Ulgen), also on the lam after a crisis of conscience about the politicisation of his work. The pair hole up in a safehouse full of migrants being chivvied to Greece by people-smuggler Sahab (Doga Celik). Meanwhile, Hakan and Mehmet’s wives find themselves targeted by the security forces in a clampdown.

‘No resorts, no tourist traps and no fancy restaurants’ – the friends behind the Kids of the Colony YouTube channel go in search of real connections in their countries of origin

‘Kayum was my friend for years,” recalls Abubakar Finiin. “But when I met his grandad in Bangladesh, it just felt like I understood his whole story. I knew so much more about him as a person.”

This moment of connection captures the essence of Kids of the Colony, a grassroots travel series on YouTube created by three childhood friends from Islington: Abubakar, Kayum Miah and Zakariya Hajjaj, all 23. In a series of chatty vlogs that thrive on their offbeat humour and close friendship, the trio provide a rich travelogue of culture and identity as they explore the countries of their parents’ birth.

The idea came to Abubakar while contemplating his next steps after graduating from Oxford University in 2023. “I just thought about the places that we came from,” he says, reflecting on the layered identity of growing up in London with ties elsewhere. Abubakar is Somali, Kayum is Bengali and Zakariya is of Moroccan and English descent.

An easy midweek meal that’s packed with flavour and texture

Crab deserves to be celebrated, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a super-fancy, laborious meal. Crab midweek? Yes, please, and fried rice is my fallback whenever I am in a dinner pickle. That’s not to belittle its deliciousness, complexity or elegance, though, because this spiced crab version can be as fancy as you like. That said, the speed and ease with which I can create a meal that I know everyone will love is the winning factor. Plus, I often have leftover cooked, chilled rice in the fridge, anyway, which is always the clincher (cooked rice has a better texture for frying once chilled).

Exclusive: Shabana Mahmood told companies she wanted ‘deeper collaboration’ to tackle prisons crisis

• Analysis: Whitehall’s ambition to cut costs using AI is fraught with risk

Tracking devices inserted under offenders’ skin, robots assigned to contain prisoners and driverless vehicles used to transport them were among the measures proposed by technology companies to ministers who are gathering ideas to tackle the crisis in the UK justice system.

The proposals were made at a meeting of more than two dozen tech companies in London last month, chaired by the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, minutes seen by the Guardian show. Amid an acute shortage of prison places and probation officers under severe strain, ministers told the companies they wanted ideas for using wearable technologies, behaviour monitoring and geolocation to create a “prison outside of prison”.

Asset manager Aberdeen’s surprise cut to funding research into inequality has left those that used its grants for good works reeling

The axe fell with shocking suddenness. On Thursday Aberdeen Group plc terminated its Financial Fairness Trust without notice and sacked the CEO, Mubin Haq, the chair and all the trustees, leaving eight staff dangling. The company tells me it plans to move in a different direction. That dreaded phrase marks the end of 16 remarkable years, during which the trust sponsored some of the most influential research into inequality and its financial causes.

Aberdeen is a wealth management and investment company. I admired its willingness to fund research not in its own immediate interest, but for the sake of social improvement, as a sign that decent capitalism was possible. Now that’s over. The mood has changed. Wildfires started by President Trump are engulfing global companies as his administration attempts to bar asset and retirement plan managers from considering environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in investment decisions and targets private sector diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives with executive orders. Companies doing good are at risk. I ask Aberdeen if that’s why it has shut down the trust. It denies it strongly, saying it is just a “natural evolution”.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

In an interview last weekend, Iran’s ambassador to the UN said his country’s nuclear enrichment ‘will never stop’ because it is permitted for ‘peaceful energy’ purposes. It is the latest development in an escalation of tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme, which erupted when Israel targeted the country’s nuclear facilities in June. To understand why enrichment is so important, Madeleine Finlay talks to Robin Grimes, professor of materials physics at Imperial College London. He explains what goes into creating a nuclear weapon, and why getting to the stage of weaponisation is so difficult

Iran’s nuclear enrichment ‘will never stop’, nation’s UN ambassador says

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Tesla CEO also threatened forming an ‘America Party’ if the bill, which would increase US deficit by $3.3tn, is passed

Elon Musk has vowed to unseat lawmakers who support Donald Trump’s sweeping budget bill, which he has criticized because it would increase the country’s deficit by $3.3tn.

“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame! And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth,” he wrote on his social media platform, X.

• Amadou Seini scores in Australia’s basket at U19 World Cup

• Cameroon were six points up with less than a minute left

Australia’s brightest men’s basketball prospects, including the younger brother of an NBA star, survived a double-overtime thriller to record their first victory 101-96 at the Fiba Under-19 World Cup in Switzerland.

But the game will be remembered for the unusual help that triggered the Australians’ late comeback.

Seven inspired wins, David Beckham in the royal box and 10,000 fans at Wimbledon Park meant a memorable start to SW19

It might sound implausible, but this was a day where Wimbledon, that most quintessential of British sporting institutions, felt even more British than usual. The queues were lengthy, the weather hitting record-breaking heights. And over a glorious day of action, the All England Club reverberated to the rare sound of unheralded British players shattering expectations – and ripping up the record books.

By the time Katie Boulter left Centre Court with the cheers still ringing in her ears after defeating the No 9 seed Paula Badosa, there had been a magnificent seven British victories on day one – the most in a single day in the open era.

• Last 16: Manchester City 3-4 Al-Hilal (aet)

• Silva 9, Haaland 55, Foden 104; Leonardo 46 112, Malcom 52, Koulibaly 94

What a last-16 tie, what a triumph for Al-Hilal, what crushing disappointment for Manchester City who, as the contest aged, gradually lost shape and tempo and crumpled in this shock of the Club World Cup.

The killer blow of a breathless extra time featuring three goals was administered by Marcos Leonardo in the 112th minute. Renan Lodi curved a cross in from the left, Sergej Milinkovic-Savic rose and headed, Ederson palmed the ball out and the Brazilian struck his second goal of the contest. Leonardo headed for a corner flag to begin the Al-Hilal party and the camera panned to Phil Foden, who eight minutes before seemed to have saved City.

Photographs of leader with soldiers’ coffins were displayed at a gala concert marking anniversary of military treaty with Russia

Kim Jong-un has paid tribute to North Korean soldiers killed during Russia’s war with Ukraine, resting his hands on their repatriated coffins in a rare public acknowledgment that his armed forces have suffered fatalities in the conflict.

Photographs of the North Korean leader pausing in front of a line of half a dozen coffins draped in the country’s flag were displayed on a screen at a gala performance held on Sunday to mark the first anniversary of a military treaty between the North and Russia.

A biopic of Frantz Fanon and other remarkable new movies are finding success via social media, yet remain invisible at the big film festivals

France’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade was historically among the most significant in Europe. After Britain, France had the second biggest colonial empire. We know that 1.38 million people were deported in at least 4,220 documented French slave trade expeditions. Yet the stories of the lives of those people are almost entirely absent from the French collective imagination.

Growing up in France, the only images of this crime against humanity I ever saw on screen were in US-made films. I learned about it from the 1970s TV series Roots and from Steven Spielberg’s movie Amistad. Today in France, Hollywood films such as 12 Years a Slave or Django Unchained are still the references when it comes to depicting the horrors experienced by enslaved people.

Rokhaya Diallo is a Guardian Europe columnist

Queen members Roger Taylor and Brian May say Geldof told Mercury: ‘Just play the hits – you have 17 minutes’

Freddie Mercury’s performance with Queen at Live Aid in 1985 is often seen as the crowning glory of one of the greatest showmen the world has ever seen.

But he still needed some very clear instructions from Bob Geldof, the festival’s organiser, before going out on stage. “Don’t get clever,” the Boomtown Rats frontman told him, according to fellow Queen members Roger Taylor and Brian May. “Just play the hits – you have 17 minutes.”

Twenty years on, this heart-racing four-part series reconstructs the terror attacks and the vast investigation that followed, without losing sight of the survivors. The detail about the bathtub is astonishing

Netflix is not always known for its restraint in the documentary genre, but with its outstanding recent film Grenfell: Uncovered, and now Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, it appears to be finding a new maturity and seriousness in the field. There have been plenty of recent documentaries on the subject of the attacks and the sprawling investigation that followed – no surprise, given that it is the 20th anniversary this week – but there is still real depth to be found here.

Over four parts, this thorough series unravels the initial attacks on the London transport system, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, then follows that febrile month into the failed bombings of 21 July, and then the police shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, a day later. The first 25 minutes or so simply recount those first attacks, compiling the story using phone pictures, news footage, occasional reconstructions, the infamous photographs of the injured pouring out of tube stations and accounts from survivors and the families of victims. Though it is by now a familiar story, this evokes the fear, confusion and panic of that day in heart-racing detail.

Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers is on Netflix now.

Karin Kneissl made headlines around the world when she invited the Russian president to her wedding in 2018. Five years later, she moved to St Petersburg. The scandal revealed a dark truth about the ties between Vienna and Moscow

The trouble started with a dead cat. For years, the people of Seibersdorf had lived amicably alongside their most famous resident, more or less. True, there had been an incident when a neighbour complained about the smell of her horses. And yes, there had been rumblings about her lack of community spirit, that she was great at giving orders for neighbourhood events but never pitched in to fry a schnitzel or hang bunting. But for the most part, they got along.

Karin Kneissl was a blow-in from Vienna, an hour north. She had lived in Seibersdorf for more than two decades, moving into a rickety old apartment before buying a house near the central square. She had arrived as a junior diplomat, then became a freelance journalist and later began lecturing on international relations at some of Austria’s most prestigious institutions. For a brief period, she also sat on the town’s parish council.

‘You can always find an intersection to Shakespeare’s world in such situations as we have,’ says translator, as Shakespeare productions boom across Ukraine

The Ukrainian Shakespeare festival in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk did not open with a play. Another kind of performance was staged on the steps of the theatre, one that did not deal with sad stories of the death of kings but with tragedy unfolding in real life.

This was theatre in a different sense: a rally involving several hundred people demonstrating on behalf of Ukrainian prisoners of war, thousands of whom are estimated to remain in Russian captivity.

Legal complaints filed by former pupils accuse priests and staff of physical or sexual abuse from 1957 to 2004

When 14-year-old Pascal Gélie saw a brochure for an elite French Catholic boarding school boasting swimming in summer and skiing in winter, he begged his parents to send him. He had just watched the American school drama Dead Poets Society and was expecting “sport and friendship”.

“On the first night, I realised I’d made a terrible mistake,” said Gélie, now a 51-year-old office-worker in Bordeaux. “There were 40 of us in a dormitory with decrepit mattresses. When I whispered to another boy for some toilet paper to take to the bathroom, the supervisor grabbed me by the face and pointed to the stone terrace outside. Someone told me to take my coat because you could be forced to stand outside for hours in the cold and damp. I was made to stand there all night.”

Families report ‘horrific’ conditions in jails and fear executions may be hastened as part of broader crackdown

Life for Reza Khandan has only got worse since Tehran’s Evin prison, where he was an inmate, was hit by an Israeli airstrike on 23 June. The next night, the 60-year-old human rights activist – who was arrested in 2024 for his support of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement – was moved to another jail in the south of the capital, where he has told family conditions are hard to endure.

“My father and others do not have beds and are forced to sleep on the floor. He once found six or seven bedbugs in his blanket when he woke up,” said his daughter Mehraveh Khandan, who described “horrific” sanitary conditions in the prison.

Working remotely from a beach in a far-off land sounds like bliss – and the number of people doing it has soared since 2019. But between bouts of illness, relentless admin and crushing loneliness, many have found comfort in the 9-5 back home

Jason, a 34-year-old American, is stumbling around the pool table, cue in hand. Five Saigon beers later, he will shuffle out, clamber on to a scooter and drive back to his beach hut. I know this because I’ve seen the same routine for the past four nights. Meanwhile, Eloise, 38, a French national, is gyrating on the dancefloor. Earlier, on the beach, she told me about her big bitcoin dreams – although she hasn’t got the funds she needs yet. Then there is Bex, a Briton in her late 50s whose eyes are large and wild because she has just popped a pill. She spends only a month a year in the UK – not because she wants to, she says, just to check in with family who are worried about her.

Here we are together on this paradise island in south-east Asia, laptops closed for the day. This is the digital nomad dream, isn’t it? This is what adventure and freedom looks like, right? We’re happy!

Forever chemicals have polluted the water supply of 60,000 people, threatening human health, wildlife and the wider ecosystem. But activists say this is just the tip of the Pfas iceberg

One quiet Saturday night, Sandra Wiedemann was curled up on the sofa when a story broke on TV news: the water coming from her tap could be poisoning her. The 36-year-old, who is breastfeeding her six-month-old son Côme, lives in the quiet French commune of Buschwiller in Saint-Louis, near the Swiss city of Basel. Perched on a hill not far from the Swiss and German borders, it feels like a safe place to raise a child – spacious houses are surrounded by manicured gardens, framed by the wild Jura mountains.

But as she watched the news, this safety felt threatened: Wiedemann and her family use tap water every day, for drinking, brushing her teeth, showering, cooking and washing vegetables. Now, she learned that chemicals she had never heard of were lurking in her body, on her skin, potentially harming her son. “I find it scary,” she says. “Even if we stop drinking it we will be exposed to it and we can’t really do anything.”