After IceBlock’s launch in April, Kristi Noem attacked developer Joshua Aaron and his wife was fired from the DoJ. The attention has only led to more raids being reported

For many undocumented immigrants living in the US, the constant threat of Ice raids has turned their homes into prisons. Leaving the house to go to work, school, buy groceries or the doctor’s office all carry unthinkable risks.

It’s a problem that Joshua Aaron wanted to tackle. A former indie musician (he played bass in 2000s buzz band The Rosenbergs and later fronted his own group Stealing Heather) turned app entrepreneur, he set about making an app that could spot Ice and alert people, the same way drivers let other drivers know about traffic stops on Waze.

Young people are drawn in by the promise of a ‘no-distractions’ zone, rereleases of old classics and music documentaries by global artists

A new generation of film lovers is helping to drive an increase in cinema attendance across the UK. As the industry slowly recovers from the decline of audiences during the pandemic – there were 126.5m admissions in 2024 compared with 176.1m in 2019, the rise in younger people returning to cinema may be due to a newfound love for film developed during the lockdown years. Although figures are yet to be restored to pre-pandemic levels, admission rates are continuing to increase, and it is younger audiences in particular who are showing significant enthusiasm, with figures from the Cinema Advertising Association suggesting that under-35s make up 50% of cinemagoers across the board.

This is a proportion, which includes all cinemas including mainstream multiplexes, has held steady over the last few years but the effect appears particularly marked on the independent cinema circuit. Curzon, which operates 16 venues across the UK, reports there has been a clear shift over the past six years in young people overtaking older audiences. In 2019, the biggest age demographic of Curzon attendees was 65+, followed by 55-64. In 2025, however, the dominant age group is 25-34 – rising from 16% in 2019 to 31% in 2025 – followed by 18-25 (growing from 17% to 24% over the same period).

Hashem Abedi charged over incident in which four prison officers were injured at a maximum security prison in April

The Manchester Arena plotter Hashem Abedi has been charged with three counts of attempted murder after four prison officers were injured at a maximum security prison.

Abedi, 28, is also charged with one count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and one count of unauthorised possession of a knife or offensive weapon after an incident at HMP Frankland in Durham on 12 April.

In the run-up to this week’s deadly attacks, stories linking Palestinian reporters to Hamas gained currency. What followed seemed inevitable

What is the role of journalism when Palestinian reporters are treated as criminals and left to die? Last October, I spoke with the journalist Hossam Shabat. He described families packing what little they had left in northern Gaza as Israel began implementing its “generals’ plan”. Six months later, Shabat was dead – killed by Israel, accused of being a Hamas operative.

Israel does not try to hide these killings. Instead, it often smears its victims in advance – branding journalists as “terrorists”, accusations that are rarely substantiated. These labels serve a clear cause: to strip reporters of their civilian status and make their killing appear morally acceptable. Journalists are not legitimate targets. Killing them is a war crime.

Hanno Hauenstein is a Berlin-based journalist and author. He worked as a senior editor in Berliner Zeitung’s culture department, specialising in contemporary art and politics

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.

• Williams to play first slam singles since 2023

• Oldest US Open singles entrant since 1981

• Seven-time major champ won in 2000 and 2001

Venus Williams will make her return to Grand Slam singles at the US Open after a two-year absence, having received a wildcard invitation on Wednesday to compete at Flushing Meadows at age 45.

Williams will be the oldest singles entrant at the tournament since Renee Richards played there at 47 in 1981, according to the International Tennis Federation.

Authorities could face bill of up to 23m krone for wrongful charges over seven-year period to mostly foreign couples

Authorities in Copenhagen could face a bill of tens of millions of krone after it emerged that the city had illegally charged wedding fees to about 12,000 couples over seven years.

Most of those who were charged during the period are understood to have been from outside Denmark and did not have permanent residence in the country.

State of emergency declared around Chattanooga as child and two adults killed and heavy rain closes roads

Flash flooding and torrential rain has cost at least three lives in Tennessee on Wednesday and caused havoc on the roads around Chattanooga, as the county mayor declared a state of emergency.

A tree uprooted from saturated ground and fell on a family in their car early on Wednesday morning, in East Ridge, on the outskirts of Chattanooga, killing a child and two adults, according to authorities in the area.

Melbourne pastry chef Charlie Duffy microplanes nuts into thin, leaf-like shavings for his crisp mini cakes. Brown the butter well for an extra-sweet nutty aroma

These moreish little cakes were inspired by a friend’s pecan farm in northern New South Wales. They’re salty, sweet, rich and nutty, with a crisp exterior that gives way to a soft centre. Their toasty aroma comes from browning the butter until it turns a deep brown.

I used panela sugar, which lends a lovely caramel flavour to the mix, but if it’s not available you can replace it with more brown sugar.

Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif was on air until Sunday, when the 28-year-old correspondent was killed along with five other journalists in a targeted strike carried out by Israel.

Al Jazeera’s managing editor Mohamed Moawad tells Nour Haydar why al-Sharif refused to leave Gaza, even though ‘he knew this day would come’

Read more:

Almost all of the ‘sex discordant’ birds were genetically female but had male reproductive organs, study finds

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

About 5% of common Australian wild birds including kookaburras and lorikeets could have undergone a “sex reversal” where their genetic sex does not match their reproductive organs, according to a new study.

The study is thought to be the first to find widespread sex reversal across multiple wild bird species, but the cause of the phenomenon is not yet known.

Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now!

When Football Daily were a lad and everything about football was much better, top-flight referees were able to go about their business unencumbered by nothing more hi-tech and new-fangled than a wrist-watch, a coin, a whistle, red and yellow cards, and a stubby little pencil they could’ve half-inched from the betting shop. Fast forward several decades and while the standard of officiating remains much the same, advances in the fields of both technology and vanishing foam dictate that Premier League refs are now forced to include spray cans, headsets and now body cameras on the list of items to be ticked off their pre-match checklists before they can lead teams out on to the pitch.

As an Atlético member of 13 years standing, can I throw a few more comments into the mix of La Liga’s anti-fan policies (yesterday’s Football Daily)? Want to book flights and accommodation to Spain to catch a game? Oh wait, you won’t know the date or even the time the nominal Sunday game will be played until a fortnight beforehand: Saturday, Sunday or even Friday or Monday (unless Barça or Real Madrid, natch). Fancy a midweek game then? Always Tuesday or Wednesday? Oh sorry, Barça have the Copa del Rey coming up so let’s switch other fixtures around to suit TV. Let’s go for Thursday with minimum notice. To hell with fans who’ve spent hundreds on flights, hotels and match tickets. And while we’re at it, let’s kick off at 9.30pm. Bitter? Moi?” – Rob Ford.

Big Website worlds collide! Yesterday’s Football Daily had an excellent photo of Vice-era Tubbs wearing a stunning teal/turquoise suit. And the kit review linked to this Wolves away kit” – Mike Wilner.

Late-night hosts discuss Trump bragging about his intellect again as he prepares for a summit with Putin in Alaska

Late-night hosts talked about Donald Trump’s rambling Truth Social posts and Taylor Swift’s new album announcement.

Thousands of the viral toys are poorly made while genuine dolls ‘are almost impossible to find’, CTSI says

Growing numbers of counterfeit Labubu dolls being sold in the UK are poorly made and pose a choking hazard to young children, a trading standards body has warned.

The toothy, fluffy monster doll figures, made exclusively by the Chinese toymaker Pop Mart, have surged in popularity among children and adults after going viral on social media. Celebrity fans include Rihanna and Lisa from the K-pop group Blackpink, while many owners like to attach the dolls to handbags or backpacks.

As the Downton Abbey finale hits the big screen, the actor looks back on the pitfalls of scoring huge success so young – and the liberation she later found singing in a band and writing a play about Ava Gardner

For the maudlin among us, the final Downton Abbey film should perhaps come with a warning. Everything in it is tinged with wistfulness – a goodbye to cherished characters and a farewell to a stately home that was a sturdy presence in a transient world. When the ITV series started in 2010, wasn’t life … better? Did Elizabeth McGovern feel this too, the sense of time passing? After all, her character, Cora, is now ageing out of custodianship of Downton along with her husband, Lord Grantham, in favour of a younger generation and a changing era as the 1930s dawn.

“No!” says McGovern, snapping me out of my melancholy. “I feel very excited that I’m going into a gratifying new phase in my career.” As well as reviving Cora, there is the play she has written, Ava: The Secret Conversations. Starring McGovern as Hollywood actor Ava Gardner, it will run in New York, Chicago and Toronto, having made its debut in London in 2022. There is also a new album of her folk-inspired music. “I feel like I’m just beginning,” she declares as we meet at her publicist’s London office. At first glance, McGovern, fine-boned and composed, seems delicate – but if you only go on first impressions, you’ll miss her rebellious spirit.

Confrontations are playing out nationwide as lawmakers conduct checks of facilities where thousands are being held

The Arizona representative Yassamin Ansari toured a detention facility in May where immigrants rounded up as part of the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportation were being housed. She described what she saw inside as “sickening” and “worse than prison” – immigrant detainees were held in overcrowded, moldy cells and many reported that they did not have reliable access to food, water or medical care.

Two months later, Ansari returned to the remote desert complex to conduct another congressional oversight visit. This time, she was denied entry.

Mendenhall Glacier outburst threatens homes, with scientists warning events are intensifying

Alaska’s capital city of Juneau is urging many residents to evacuate, bracing for the arrival of what could be record floodwaters flowing downstream from a basin dammed by the area’s Mendenhall Glacier, with the event being driven by climate change amid glacial retreat, according to a federal agency.

Summer glacial flooding, known as a glacial lake outburst flood, or GLOF, threatens parts of the city due to a combination of rainwater and snowmelt.

Who has the time to help underprivileged children when you have a pickleball court and a president to attend to?

If you put it in a novel – a ham-fisted satire of tech overlord hypocrisy, say – it would look too contrived to fly. But here we are, absorbing a story from the New York Times this week in which Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are discovered to have been running a private school out of their compound in Palo Alto, California, in violation of city zoning laws. More pertinently, the school of 14 kids, which includes two of the couple’s three daughters, is less than a mile from the school for low-income families that the couple founded in 2016. Guess which school the world’s second-richest man and his wife are shutting down?

Say the word “zoning infraction” to a certain stripe of American and the effect is equal to using “queue jumper” on a Briton, but of course the broader point here isn’t one about permits. (A spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan told the newspaper that the family was unaware about the zoning laws and that the private school, or “pod of home schoolers” as they put it, is now moving to another location.) It is, rather, about Zuckerberg’s perceived retreat from progressive social causes, starting with the shuttering of the school and ending with the announcement in May this year that the pair’s charitable foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), will be pulling funding from almost all the affordable housing and homeless charities it supports in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as slashing diversity programmes.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

‘My daughter and her friends are part of the smartphone generation. The more time I spent with them, the more I learned about the darker side of their mobiles’

This started as a project with my daughter and her friends, who are all part of the smartphone generation. They were 14 years old at the time and I wanted to learn more about the relationship they had with their mobile phones. In 2022, a study by Ofcom showed that nine out of 10 children owned one by the time they reached the age of 11, and that 91% of them used video platforms, messaging apps and social media by the age of 12. I spoke to my daughter and her friends about how they use their phones and the negative reputation that surrounds teenagers and their screens. They told me the positives as well as the negatives, such as how social media can raise confidence as well as knock it down.

I asked if I could photograph them. There was very little direction from me and – rather than photographing them in a controlled portraiture style, as I would usually have done – I simply observed them doing their thing. The energy was high: they moved so fast, dancing to short music reels, filming each other, laughing, scrolling, chatting, taking selfies, and back to making TikTok dances again. It was so hectic, I struggled to keep up. This image, called TikTok, came out of that session. I found this composition and asked Lucy to quickly look up at me. I had about two seconds before the moment was broken and they moved on to the next thing. As a portrait photographer, you get a feeling about certain shots, and I knew this was the one.

UN refugee agency says more people could still be missing at sea, with between 70 and 80 believed to have survived

At least 20 people have died after a boat capsized off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, a United Nations agency and local media reported on Wednesday.

Rescuers have recovered 20 bodies so far and operations were continuing, according to initial reports by Ansa news agency. Between 70 and 80 people were believed to have survived.

Trump says ‘we’re going to be asking for extensions’ on 30-day limit to takeover of DC police as he announces himself as the host Kennedy Center Honors

We can expect to hear from Donald Trump at least a few times today. According to the president’s daily schedule, he’ll make an appearance at the Kennedy Center at 11am ET, and make an announcement.

He’ll then head back to the White House and sign executive orders at 4pm ET. For now this will be closed press, but could very well open up.

Will be speaking to European Leaders in a short while. They are great people who want to see a deal done.

Very unfair media is at work on my meeting with Putin. Constantly quoting fired losers and really dumb people like John Bolton, who just said that, even though the meeting is on American soil, “Putin has already won.” What’s that all about? We are winning on EVERYTHING. The Fake News is working overtime (No tax on overtime!).

If I got Moscow and Leningrad free, as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal! But now they’ve been caught. Look at all of the real news that’s coming out about their CORRUPTION. They are sick and dishonest people, who probably hate our Country. But it doesn’t matter because we are winning on everything!!! MAGA

In a world overwhelmed by noise and with more players looking for solace, it’s time the triple-A developers pay attention

I am 85 hours into Death Stranding 2, an apocalyptic nightmare about Earth becoming infected with death monsters, and I’ve realised that I’m playing it as a cosy game. For hours at a time, I trundle along the photorealistic landscapes in my pick-up truck, delivering parcels to isolated communities and building new roads. The only reason I complete the main story missions is to open new areas of the map so that I can meet new people and build more roads. I find it blissfully enjoyable.

Of course, I am far from alone in playing video games this way. “Cosy games” have become a thriving cottage industry over the past five years, led by crossover successes such as Minecraft, Stardew Valley and Untitled Goose Game, but also housing hundreds of smaller titles that appeal to highly engaged communities. On Steam this month you’ll discover Catto’s Post Office, a delightful game about a feline postal worker, Fruitbus, a cute food truck management sim, MakeRoom, an interior design challenge, and Tiny Bookshop, which is about running … a tiny bookshop. Most of these games are united by the same elements: small teams, often young, often working remotely; short play spans; low-stakes challenges; and highly stylised visuals, as an aesthetic choice and an economic necessity.

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

Foreign secretary reports ‘oversight’ to Environment Agency after failing to acquire necessary rod licence

David Lammy has referred himself to the environment watchdog after going fishing with JD Vance without the required licence during the US vice-president’s trip to the UK.

The foreign secretary hosted Vance and his family at Chevening House in Kent last week, where the pair fished from the property’s private lake. Anglers aged 13 and over must hold a rod licence to fish for freshwater species such as carp in England and Wales. Lammy failed to land a catch, but “all of my kids did”, Vance said.

Four teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of committing burglaries at the homes of several prominent residents, according to LA police

Los Angeles police have formally linked a break-in at Brad Pitt’s home in the city in June to a string of other burglaries at properties belonging to celebrities.

Los Angeles police chief Jim McDonnell announced the arrest of four suspects, saying they were a a crew that were committing burglaries at the homes of “various high-profile residents” throughout the city, adding that “some of the burglaries included homes of actors and professional athletes”.