‘Any strategy based on either phasing out fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail,’ says former PM

Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.

Keir Starmer is not expected to campaign in the Hamilton byelection, a critical contest for Scottish Labour which takes place in early June, Anas Sarwar has confirmed.

I wouldn’t expect Keir to be campaigning in the byelection. That’s not to say he won’t, but I’m not expecting Kier to campaign in the byelection.

I’ll be on the stump campaigning for a Labour win. I’m the candidate for first minister next year. I’m the one that wants to remove the SNP from government.

Next year, we’ve got to demonstrate to people that for all Nigel Farage might want to come here with his easy answers and create a bit of a circus, the reality is a vote for Reform only helps the SNP. If you want to get rid of the SNP, only Scottish Labour can beat them.

Actor makes major dramatic bid as UFC fighter Mark Kerr in biopic also starring his Jungle Cruise co-star Emily Blunt

Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt aim for awards glory with the first trailer for fact-based sports drama The Smashing Machine.

The wrestler-turned-actor plays the MMA fighter Mark Kerr in the film inspired by the 2002 documentary with the same name. Kerr won multiple awards and medals in his career and also struggled with substance abuse.

Faye Carruthers is joined by Sophie Downey, Ameé Ruszkai and Marva Kreel to discuss Arsenal’s win, Chelsea’s loss and latest action across the WSL and the Championship

On this week’s Guardian Women’s Football Weekly, Faye is joined by Sophie Downey, Ameé Ruszkai and Marva Kreel. The panel discuss Arsenal’s 4-1 second-leg victory over Lyon, the north London side knocking out the eight-time European champions and securing their place in the final. However, it won’t be a full English affair after Chelsea’s dreams were dashed by a rampant Barcelona.

The panel review the latest action across the Women’s Super League and the Championship as the season nears its conclusion and relegation spots are confirmed.

Donmar Warehouse, London
Patrick Marber’s debut play about a group of poker players brims with banter, but this pallid 30th-anniversary revival exposes its weaknesses

In 1995, two British playwrights made their debuts with all-male, six-character chamber-pieces strongly influenced by Pinter and Mamet, and set over one long, tense night in London. Jez Butterworth’s Mojo and Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice proved to be superficially dazzling calling cards rather than enduring classics. Now a pallid 30th-anniversary revival of the latter reveals its weaknesses.

Set in a restaurant where the manager Stephen (the Paul Bettany-esque Daniel Lapaine) and his employees Frankie (Alfie Allen), Sweeney (Theo Barklem-Biggs) and Mugsy (Hammed Animashaun) are gearing up for a late-night card game, the play brims with bants.

At Donmar Warehouse, London, until 7 June

Joshua Bonnetta spent 8,760 hours recording a pine – then honed it down into a four-hour album full of creatures, cracking branches and quite possibly the sound of leaves growing

What does a landscape sound like when it’s not being listened to? This philosophical question was a catalyst for film-maker and artist Joshua Bonnetta, who has distilled a year of recordings from a single tree in upstate New York – that’s 8,760 hours – into a four-hour album, The Pines. As Robert Macfarlane writes in his accompanying essay, The Pines is a reminder of the natural world’s “sheer, miraculous busyness”, its “froth of signals and noise”. It is rich with poetic meaning, and resonant amid the climate emergency.

“It started as a personal thing,” Bonnetta explains from his studio in Munich, where he relocated from the US in 2022. For over 20 years he has made sonic records of places as private mementos, but recent experiments with long-form field recording led him to push himself “to document this place in the deepest way I could”. On a residency in the Outer Hebrides between 2017 and 2019, Bonnetta made the sound installation Brackish, a month-long continuous radio broadcast from a weather-resistant hydrophone – an underwater mic – by a loch. “I started to leave the recorder for a day or two, then it just got longer,” he says. “Amazing things happen when you’re not there to interfere … This allows you a different, very privileged window into the space.”

Federal funding was critical to Tesla’s survival, yet the Doge boss now derides subsidies as government overreach

• Nottingham Panthers player died in 2023 match
• Matt Petgrave of Sheffield Steelers on bail for 18 months

No criminal charges will be brought against an ice hockey player arrested on suspicion of manslaughter after the death of Adam Johnson with the crown prosecution service deciding there was no realistic chance of a conviction.

The Nottingham Panthers player died of a neck injury from a skate after a collision with Sheffield Steelers’ Matt Petgrave in a match in October 2023. The Panthers described the incident at the time as a “freak accident”. CPR was administered on the ice at the Sheffield Arena, but Johnson died from his injuries.

SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, California

The singer delivers a rousing, seven-act spectacle as she performs many of her country songs on stage for the first time while also harking back to her previous dance-leaning era

Beyoncé doesn’t just take the stage – she takes the narrative back. On opening night of her Cowboy Carter world tour at the four-year-old SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, she brings forth a sweeping, theatrical spectacle that reclaims country music, reframes American identity and reminds everyone who’s still driving pop’s evolution after all these years. Her nearly three-hour, seven-act performance draws heavily from Cowboy Carter – her Grammy-winning country epic – and threads in nods to Renaissance, the ballroom-infused predecessor that lit up stadiums barely two years ago. Rather than stake a claim in country, Beyoncé goes deeper: celebrating the Black roots of the genre and exploding its boundaries with precision, power and polish.

Outside SoFi, vendors hawk more cowboy hats than you’d see at a Los Tigres del Norte show. Inside, anticipation sizzles. Projected across the massive stage-length screen: CHITLIN’ CIRCUIT – a nod to the historic Black music venues where blues, country and rock took shape. The show begins with American Requiem – the Sign o’ the Times-drizzled opener from Cowboy Carter – followed by a haunting Blackbiird. Then comes a defining moment: a Hendrix-inspired Star-Spangled Banner, laced with the thunder of Freedom, flashing red, white and blue. The screen reads: “Never ask permission for something that already belongs to you.”

He has a more typically masculine body, is older, more experienced and skilled in bed, and I am finding it increasingly difficult to perform

I am a gay man and have been married to my husband for 12 years. I sometimes lose my erection during sex, leading me to avoid it for long periods. My problem is my sexual script, which intellectually I don’t believe, but still cannot seem to set down. My husband has a larger penis, a more typically masculine and societally attractive body and is older, more experienced and more skilled a lover than I am. I know none of this matters and that sex should be about mutual pleasure and connection, but I cannot help but feel inadequate, leading to performance anxiety. My husband is kind and reassuring, but this has been going on for our whole relationship and I feel stuck and frustrated.

Being distracted during sex , whether it is due to any kind of anxiety, lack of confidence in your body, fear of losing your erection, fear of disease, germ phobia, stress about external life situations – or any one of many possible thought intrusions – will easily arrest your enjoyment of a sexual process, and often lead to sexual dysfunction. Rather than allowing negative thoughts and fears to intrude during erotic experiences, it is important to focus simply on the purpose of eroticism – pleasure. This is not easy for people who have become invested in achieving excellence of performance, or even just being able to maintain an erection. Switch your approach to sex, ask for your partner’s support and cooperation in being able to stop and relax whenever negativity intrudes and refocus on just giving and receiving pleasure. If your anxiety is generalised (it occurs in many other situations) it is important to seek formal treatment or proven methods to calm you.

Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.

Crew members jump out of Super Hornet before jet and towing tractor fall into the Red Sea

US sailors had to leap for their lives when a fighter jet fell off a navy aircraft carrier that was reportedly making evasive maneuvers to avoid Houthi militant fire in the Red Sea on Monday.

The F/A-18 fighter Super Hornet jet, along with the vehicle towing it into place on the deck of the USS Harry S Truman, rolled right out of the hangar and into the water, the navy said.

Spanish PM says ‘no hypothesis being ruled out’, after energy providers concluded cyber-attack was not to blame

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has vowed to “get to the bottom” of the unprecedented power cut that hit the Iberian peninsula on Monday, as energy operators in Spain and Portugal ruled out the possibility of a cyber-attack.

Speaking on Tuesday morning after the power supply had been restored to both countries, Sánchez said that while it was still too early to know exactly what had happened, lessons would be learned to prevent any further large-scale blackouts.

The prime minister is apparently pursuing ways to land the 2028 Open for the president. With friends like that, POTUS surely won’t be carrying his own clubs

At what point does realpolitik tip over into nakedly facilitating conflict of interest/corruption? I only ask in the strictest hypothetical terms after reading that Keir Starmer’s government has been exploring whether golf bosses could host the 2028 Open championship at Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort in Ayrshire. Sorry, but no. It’s almost as if the prime minister is compiling material for a seminal 2025 business manual. Call it The Art of the Kneel. Perhaps Starmer could ask the Treasury to “explore” buying a load of Trump meme coins.

According to reports, Donald Trump has frequently mentioned in his phone calls with the prime minister that he’d prefer it if the Open returned to Turnberry. As so often with this particular caller, the reply to this should simply be, “And I’d prefer to be talking to Mickey Mouse, but we’re all making compromises.” Failing that, just go with: “God, you always want MORE, don’t you? Scotland invented the great game of golf. Have you said thank you ONCE?” Unfortunately, the actual reply seems to have been: “Capital idea, Mr President! How can we make that happen?”

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Indus treaty, which had survived 65 years and three wars between countries, has been paused after Kashmir attack

In July 2023, Ali Haider Dogar was one of tens of thousands of farmers in central-eastern Pakistan whose crops were submerged after India released water from the Sutlej River into Pakistan in an attempt to mitigate flash floods in its own northern regions.

Dogar, whose family’s losses in 2023 ran to tens of thousands of pounds, said every farmer in his village in Punjab was fearing the worst in the comings months after India suspended the Indus waters treaty, following a deadly attack on tourists in India-administered Kashmir that India has pinned on Pakistan.

Trump administration has been cracking down on people who leak information to the media since January

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said on Monday it has started using polygraph tests to aid investigations aimed at identifying the source of leaks emanating from within the law enforcement agency.

“We can confirm the FBI has begun administering polygraph tests to identify the source of information leaks within the bureau,” the bureau’s public affairs office told Reuters in a statement.

Team news and the form guide as Barcelona host Inter and Arsenal welcome PSG to the Emirates

By WhoScored

​Arsenal had a rest at the weekend. They will have been disappointed to watch Liverpool secure the Premier League title on Sunday, but that missed opportunity should focus minds on the Champions League​, their only hope of silverware this season. ​They are unbeaten in their last 12 matches but have won only six times in that run, and have drawn their last two home games, against Brentford and Crystal Palace.

Activist jailed in Egypt receives medical treatment and family worry his mother Laila Soueif is ‘dying in slow motion’

The family of the imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah say they fear for his health along with that of his mother, Laila Soueif, as both continued their hunger strikes to demand his freedom.

Relatives of Soueif said they were worried she was “dying in slow motion” after eight months on full or partial hunger strike. “What are we supposed to do, just sit around and wait to die?” said Soueif.

Leader of Liberals, who appear to have made a remarkable turnaround, has said old relationship with the US is over

• Canada election live – latest updates

At the beginning of the year, Canada’s Conservatives had a 25-point lead over the Liberal government, and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, looked certain to be the country’s next prime minister. But as the votes cast in Monday’s election have been counted, the story of the campaign has been confirmed: victory for the Liberals and their new leader, Mark Carney, who have extended their decade of rule by as much as another five years.

With almost all polls counted, it appears likely that the Liberals will fall just short of a majority, and instead be the leading party in a minority government, as in the last two elections. Regardless, it represents a remarkable turnaround, and vindication for Carney’s efforts to present himself as the prime ministerial candidate who would most effectively stand up to Donald Trump. As for Poilievre: the CBC projects he has lost his seat.

People queued calmly for torches and shared radios, but our vulnerability in an internet-reliant world was badly exposed

At the entrance to a healthcare centre on Trafalgar Street, in my densely populated, central Madrid neighbourhood, somebody had stuck a sign: “We ask for patience and common sense.” The door was half open as doctors and nurses calmly tended to emergencies inside.

Patience and common sense is a very good way to describe what I witnessed in Madrid throughout the big blackout. We had no light, no power, no phone signal, not even water in some apartment buildings.

If your evening meals are getting a bit samey, our roster of cooks has a bounty of saucy ideas that might just help transform your dinners for good

What sauces and dressings can I make to rejuvenate weekday meals?
Sauces and dressings give dinner life, making even the simplest meals taste better. The formula, says Gurdeep Loyal, author of Flavour Heroes (published in June), goes something like this: “You need two things: a really good fat and a really good sour.” Sure, that fat could be oil, but it doesn’t have to be. “It could be an egg yolk, it could be avocado, but if it’s oil, go for a flavoured one,” Loyal says, and in place of the usual acid suspects (vinegar or citrus), try the likes of gherkins, capers or preserved lemons instead. “My go-tos are preserved lemon whizzed up with a bit of their brine, some garlic-infused olive oil and maple syrup. Or avocado blitzed with gherkins, gherkin brine, a bit of sugar, if you want, and perhaps herbs such as chives or tarragon. Or chilli-infused olive oil blitzed with a teaspoon of tamarind.” These powerhouses are a dream on pretty much anything, he says, from a roast kale salad with chickpeas to baked butter beans or even as a dip for pizza crusts.

For William Gleave, chef-patron of Sargasso in Margate, meanwhile, “Something with anchovies is always nice, because it goes with so many things”. For him, a “classic stolen/borrowed from the River Cafe” comes out tops: “It’s essentially a dressing with lots of chopped anchovy, grated garlic, red-wine vinegar, lemon juice, oil, black pepper and chilli flakes,” which is to say it’s bright, umami-rich and versatile. “Spoon that over everything from grilled fish to lamb or pork to crunchy veg, and it will feel as if you’ve put in a load of effort, even though it’s super-simple.”

Got a culinary dilemma? Email feast@theguardian.com

The acclaimed writer of His Dark Materials says the third volume in The Book of Dust series will portray a ‘dangerous, breathtaking quest’

Philip Pullman has revealed he will tell the final part of Lyra Silvertongue’s story in The Rose Field, which will come out this autumn.

It has been six years since a book about Lyra has been published – and 30 since readers first encountered her in Northern Lights, the first in Pullman’s His Dark Materials children’s fantasy trilogy. The bestselling novels, which have since been adapted into a TV series by the BBC, take place across a multiverse and feature “dæmons” – physical manifestations of a person’s soul that take the form of animals.

From gourmet home-cooked meals to vegan and insect alternatives, the options are endless. Here’s everything you need to know about how to keep your dog well fed – without breaking the bank

Dog food products labelled “complete” are legally defined as providing all the nutrients your pets need, in the right proportions. Whereas a product labelled “complementary” should not be a dog’s only source of nutrition, says Lauren Bennett, RSPCA scientific and policy officer, as these “do not contain all of the required nutrients, may lead to poor nutrition and can cause dietary deficiencies and associated disease, such as metabolic bone disease”.

Climate experts say warming atmosphere from climate change could fuel severe freezing rain and ice storms like the one that hit the upper midwest last month

Winter has been slow to release its icy grip from the upper midwest this year, and in northern Michigan, its effects will be keenly felt for months, perhaps years.

A devastating ice storm that hit late last month has left an estimated 3m acres of trees snapped in half or damaged from the weight of up to an inch-and-a-half of ice across the northern part of lower Michigan.

Young players are impressing across the country following the American league’s very un-American move

For the first time in its history, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) commenced a regular season this spring with no draft. A quintessentially American event, defined by hopes and dreams being on public display while teams trade players into the professional leagues without their explicit input, was scrapped by a collective bargaining agreement negotiated between the NWSL and the NWSL Players Association in August.

In so doing, a league unafraid of reinvention became the first major professional sports league in the United States to forgo the draft. That’s a seismic shift by any measure, and while the move puts the NWSL in line with global football standards the long-term implications will take much longer to assess. After all, the draft was not simply an entertaining way to distribute talent while introducing them to the public on a celebratory stage; it was also a useful means of ensuring parity in a league proud of its competitiveness. In the words of the NWSL’s commissioner, Jessica Berman: “There actually is nothing to point to as a case study of how to make this transition, because there is no league that has gone from a world of a draft and having years of service, to being able to earn free agency and just having that melt away overnight.”

This is an extract from our free weekly email, Moving the Goalposts. To get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions. Moving the Goalposts is back in to its twice-weekly format, delivered to your inboxes every Tuesday and Thursday.

The American actor told Bill Maher’s podcast that he had asked Quincy Jones about the singer’s sexuality and felt he couldn’t ‘play that character 100%’

The actor Terrence Howard has said that he declined the role of Marvin Gaye in a film, because he didn’t want to kiss another man.

Speaking to Bill Maher on his Club Random podcast, the actor said the “biggest mistake” of his career was turning down the leading role in a separate biopic of the singer Smokey Robinson – which Robinson had personally asked him to play.

Owen Lawrence, 38, believed to have shot two women with crossbow on Saturday before turning weapon on himself

A man suspected of attacking two women in the Headingley area of Leeds on Saturday afternoon has died overnight, counter-terrorism police have confirmed.

Owen Lawrence, 38, is believed to have shot the women, aged 19 and 31, with a crossbow before turning the weapon on himself on Otley Road, a popular pub crawl route.

Rock star co-founded cancer charity that helped sign up 250,000 people as stem cell donors

Mike Peters, frontman of the Welsh band The Alarm, has died from blood cancer aged 66.

The rock star, who was forced to cancel a US tour last year after being diagnosed with fast-growing lymphoma, had been undergoing treatment at the Christie NHS foundation trust in Manchester.

Long-awaited ruling means cash-for-citizenship programme that allowed people to live and work in bloc must be scrapped

• Europe live – latest updates

The European court of justice has ruled that Malta’s “golden passport” scheme is illegal, meaning its cash-for-citizenship programme must be scrapped.

In a long-awaited ruling on Tuesday, the EU’s top court concluded that Malta’s investor citizenship scheme was contrary to EU law. Judges said the scheme represented a “commercialisation of the grant of the nationality of a member state” and by extension EU citizenship, which was at odds with European law. Malta had jeopardised the mutual trust between EU member states necessary to create an area without internal borders, the court argued.

US president expected to hail his policies as administration moves to less impact of auto tariffs

• 100 days of Trump: interactive look at second term so far

Trump has posted on Truth Social about the first 100 days of his second term, calling them “100 very special days”.

100 VERY SPECIAL DAYS. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!Danielle Alvarez of the RNC, and Paul Perez of Border Patrol, were GREAT on Fox & Friends (First). Thank you both! DJT

Edward Berger will helm the Ridley Scott-produced screen version of the 1994 novel by Tim Winton, which has been in development in various incarnations for 25 years

Edward Berger, whose papal thriller Conclave won best film at the Baftas and was nominated for eight Oscars, has signed on to direct Brad Pitt in a big-screen version of Tim Winton’s novel The Riders.

The film will be financed by US studio A24, produced by Ridley Scott and written by David Kajganich, a frequent collaborator of Luca Guadagnino.

• Caja Mágica power restored at 8am on Tuesday morning
• Widespread outage emerged in Spain and Portugal

The Madrid Open resumed on Tuesday afternoon after a massive power outage left Spain and Portugal without electricity on Monday and forced the tournament to suspend all matches after 90 minutes of play. After about 10 hours without electricity and mobile internet for most people in Madrid, power to homes and phones returned late on Monday night, prompting widespread cheers in the streets. However, the Caja Mágica, which is situated in the southern neighbourhood of San Fermín, remained without power overnight.

At 7am, the Madrid Open announced that the opening of the gates had been delayed. An hour later, power was finally restored. Although play normally begins at 11am, it started at noon on Tuesday.

The Ballon d’Or winner has set his sights on helping the club grow, offering his expertise and pulling power

It was the transfer nobody saw coming: Luka Modric to Swansea City, not joining as a player but a minority stakeholder. The most decorated player in Real Madrid’s history, a six-time Champions League winner and one of the greatest midfielders of his generation pitching up as a co-owner at a mid-table Championship club was certainly an unforeseen end-of-season development. A Ballon d’Or winner and Bernabéu star walking into the Swansea boardroom or exploring the Mumbles?

The sight of Modric cradling a Swansea-branded football in the accompanying press release prompted a few double-takes and sent a jolt across the game. “Hi Swansea fans, I’m Luka Modric and I’m excited to be part of the journey,” came his message. The 39-year-old Croatia captain may be in the twilight of his career but Swansea hope those words mark just the start of his involvement. “My goal is to support the club’s growth in a positive way and to help to build an exciting future.”

Jury shown phone footage with sound of chainsaw and toppling tree, in trial of pair who deny criminal damage

Two men filmed themselves using a chainsaw to fell the famous Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall in an act of “mindless criminal damage”, a court has heard.

Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, embarked on a “moronic mission” to cut down in minutes a tree that had stood for more than 100 years, the prosecutor Richard Wright KC told Newcastle crown court.

Former coach’s conduct is said to be the tip of the iceberg and Fifa continues to investigate matters related to abuse

It was at a press conference to announce Gabon’s squad for an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier against Burundi in August 2018 that Pierre-Alain Mounguengui admitted Gabonese football had a problem. After shocking revelations made by Shiva “Star” Nzigou – a former striker who played for the French club Nantes and won 24 caps – that a network of paedophiles had been operating in the country for more than two decades, the president of the Gabon football association (Fegafoot) since 2014 felt obliged to comment.

“Before Shiva Star Nzigou’s statements, we knew that in Gabon there were similar signs and other indications,” Mounguengui said. “In the past, without naming names, we had people in certain clubs and sports venues who were hired to coach young people, but the education of a child begins at the grassroots. If they are deformed at the root, it is sometimes difficult to straighten them out. If we can have adults [coaches] of good moral character, I think it’s possible to stem this phenomenon.”

Spanish director compared the US president to Franco and said he wondered whether it was appropriate to visit country while he is in power

The veteran Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has launched a broadside against the US president, Donald Trump, while accepting an award in New York.

Speaking on stage at the Lincoln Center on Monday evening, he said he had been in two minds as to whether to travel to the US to pick up his Chaplin award.

She started singing in her family’s yurt before a Goethe-Institut residency led her to jazz and life in Munich. The distance from home is ‘bittersweet’ – but both styles, she says, are about trusting your instinct

Growing up in the icy Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, singing was as natural as speech for Enkhjargal Erkhembayar. “Every day after my parents came home from working in the local power factory, they would gather with a group of friends in our yurt to unwind and someone would always begin to sing,” she says. “Soon, we would all join in, singing old folk songs to keep warm and to express ourselves long into the night.”

As Enji, 33-year-old Erkhembayar is now taking this music into international concert halls, having forged a beguiling hybrid of Mongolian folk music with acoustic jazz improvisation. She anchors her performances in the circular-breathing vocal style of Mongolian long song – a folk tradition where syllables are elongated through freeform vocalisations – her delivery tender and delicate, full of yearning emotion.

The Guardian, working with media partners, has tracked down first-hand accounts to reconstruct Viktoriia Roshchyna’s final months

The exchange took place on a lonely forest road in February. Moving along a line of refrigerated lorries, the teams in hazmat suits went about their grim work: preparing the remains of 757 Ukrainian military casualties handed over by Russia for the journey back to Kyiv.

Clipboards in hand, intermediaries from the Red Cross checked their lists. For each body shrouded in white plastic, the Russians had provided a number, a name, a location, sometimes a cause of death. And then, at the very bottom of the last page, a mystery entry: “NM SPAS 757.” The letters were abbreviations, taken to mean “unidentified man” and “extensive damage to the coronary arteries”.

Charity shops won’t take them. Councils incinerate them. Retailers dump them on the global south. We’re running out of ideas on how to deal with our used clothes – and the rag mountain just keeps growing

In February, a threadbare polycotton bedsheet landed on the desk of Simon Roberts, CEO of Sainsbury’s. A “protest by post”, it had been sent by the Sheffield-based designer, maker and eco activist Wendy Ward. “I purchased this from Sainsbury’s at least 10 years ago,” she wrote in the accompanying letter. “It has served me well. However, I have no sustainable options available for what I should do with it.” Beyond repair, it was too damaged to donate to a charity shop, she explained. She couldn’t compost it as it had been blended with polyester, and she couldn’t repurpose it as cleaning cloths, as, being polycotton, it wasn’t absorbent. And, she added, “I don’t want to put it into a textile recycling collection as the likelihood is that it will be shipped overseas or incinerated and not recycled.” Ward qualified her assertions with links to respected sources – as a sustainable fashion PhD student, she is well informed on such matters.

“The only action I can personally take,” she continued, “is to put it into my general waste bin. I don’t want to do this, as in Sheffield all general waste is incinerated as ‘energy recovery’. This isn’t a sustainable option as such processes have been shown to be as damaging to local air pollution as burning coal.” So, she concluded, “as Sainsbury’s is responsible for designing and manufacturing this product, making decisions to use polycotton with no consideration for what could be done once it reaches the end of its life, I have decided to return it to you. I would really love to hear what you decide to do with it.”

In his first 100 days, the president has taken a sledgehammer to institutions and the constitution. We can only guess what’s next

In nearly 100 days on the job, Donald Trump has outlasted Liz Truss and a fabled head of lettuce. That’s a fact, not an achievement. Like the hapless British prime minister, the 47th president blazes a trail of wreckage. Chaos is his calling card. If, when and how the carnage ends is anyone’s guess.

The US simultaneously wages economic war on its allies and China. Tariffs soar. It’s as if Trump forgot the words “Smoot-Hawley” and “Great Depression”. The president risks higher inflation and a recession for an idealized yesteryear that never quite was. Back on Earth, markets signal potential capital flight and stagflation.

Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992

Amid the debate about trans people on hospital wards we have lost sight of dignity, respect and the horrifying reality of a health service in meltdown

Another morning, another absolutely bananas conversation about transgender people, without any trans people involved, following the supreme court ruling that permits the exclusion from single-sex spaces of anyone not born into that sex. On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Emma Barnett was asking care minister Stephen Kinnock about wards in hospitals, and came out with the immortal line: “Do you think it’s right for trans people to be segregated from other patients, as an interim measure, or for the future?”

Great save, that “for the future” – because if you’re going to interpret this ruling as a requirement to exclude trans people, what does that mean in practice? Trans women on men’s wards, trans men on women’s wards? This delivers dignity and respect to precisely no one; so, sure, “segregate” away, and it would have to be for ever, because it would otherwise be an interim measure on the way to what? The relentless demonisation of trans people has led us straight to a place where every choice is impossible, using words that recall, or should recall, the darkest days of prejudice and hatred.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.