Conservationists hope that in 15 years species will no longer be at risk of extinction in Mexico – but challenges remain

In 2010, Gerardo Ceballos and a group of other researchers set out to answer a burning question: how many jaguars were there in Mexico? They knew there weren’t many: hunting, loss of habitat, conflict with cattle ranchers and other issues had pushed the population to the brink of extinction.

Ceballos and his team from the National Alliance for Jaguar Conservation (ANCJ) thought there were maybe 1,000 jaguars across the country. They decided to carry out the country’s first census of the animal to find out exactly how many there were. They found 4,100.

Undermining independence of central bank will affect the US and other countries, says Christine Lagarde

• Business live – latest updates

Donald Trump’s attempt to influence the US Federal Reserve could pose a “very serious danger” for the world economy, the head of the European Central Bank has warned.

Christine Lagarde, the president of the ECB, said Trump undermining the independence of the world’s most powerful central bank would have an impact for the US and other countries.

Plane landed safely in Bulgaria but authorities suspect jamming due to ‘blatant interference from Russia’, says European Commission spokesperson

EU transport spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen also offered a bit more detail on the issue of GPS jamming and its impact on operations.

She said:

“Generally, we have been seeing a quite a lot of such jamming and spoofing activities, notably in the eastern flank of Europe.

Europe is the most concerned region in the or most affected region globally, on this.

“We are, of course, aware and used to somehow to the threats and intimidations that are [a] regular component of Russia’s hostile behaviour.

Of course, this will only reinforce even further our unshakable commitment to ramp up defence capabilities and support for Ukraine.”

“This incident actually underlines the urgency of the mission that the President is carrying out in the frontline member states.”

Tina Woods, AKA Tina Technotic, now DJs around the world and has found a new sense of connection. She even believes it’s lowering her biological age

Tina Woods was sitting in a taxi when the dancing bug bit. It was after midnight and she and two friends were heading home from another friend’s 60th birthday party. South-west London rolled past the window. They had had a bit to drink. As they passed Le Fez nightclub, they realised they didn’t want to go home. “We were like: let’s go dancing before we go to bed,” she says.

Woods, then 56, had gone clubbing in her 20s, but on Le Fez’s dancefloor, as her body caught the beat, she had “an epiphany moment”, a shock of pure euphoria: “The joy I felt – the mind, body and soul connection – was like a lightning bolt.” She knew then that “dancing and music were going to be a bigger part of my life than I’d ever thought”.

Emotional toll of constant negative news and unlimited access to ‘doomscrolling’ has led to record-high news avoidance

News has never been more accessible – but for some, that’s exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more and more people around the world are tuning out.

The reasons vary: for some it’s the sheer volume of news, for others the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself. In online forums devoted to mindfulness and mental health, people discuss how to step back, from setting limits to cutting the news out entirely.

• Ferrari driver ‘fine mentally’ despite Dutch GP error

• Hamilton will have five-place grid penalty at Monza

Lewis Hamilton has admitted the pressure is on as he prepares to make his debut as a Ferrari driver at the team’s home race in the Italian Grand Prix this weekend, having unceremoniously crashed out of the Dutch GP on Sunday after an unforced error.

The seven-time world champion suffered an unusual exit at Zandvoort as he went wide on the painted surface outside turn three, made slippery by light rain. He lost the rear and could not hold the car, which slid into the barriers, ending his race.

• Overton cited demands of cricket across 12 months

• Decision means he will not be available for Ashes

Surrey’s Jamie Overton, a member of England’s Test squad throughout this summer’s series against India, has announced that he is taking an indefinite break from first-class cricket, saying it was “no longer possible to commit fully to all formats at every level”.

Overton’s decision means that rather than potentially being part of the squad travelling to Australia for this winter’s Ashes he will be free to honour his contract with Adelaide Strikers in the Big Bash League, with whom he has spent part of the last two winters – he was named the team’s MVP earlier this year after taking 11 wickets and scoring 191 runs at an average of 95.5 in the 2024-25 season, when the Strikers finished bottom of the eight-team league.

Copper Box Arena, London
Dressed like a vicar, Albarn leads his band – joined by a choir, a string quartet, De La Soul and more – in renewing Demon Days’ downbeat drama

Gorillaz are 25. In 2000, this cartoon-fronted project seemed like something fun for Damon Albarn to do between Blur albums, hiding behind Jamie Hewlett’s comic-book animations, but they’ve overtaken Blur almost everywhere but Britain. The number of children in the audience testifies to Gorillaz’s powers of self-rejuvenation – an ever-changing vehicle for Albarn’s ceaseless curiosity.

Gorillaz are marking the occasion with an immersive exhibition, House of Kong, and four era-specific shows. This second night revives 2005’s Demon Days. Co-produced by Danger Mouse, it remains the most satisfying expression of the Gorillaz concept: focused in both its themes (innocence and violence) and personnel (rappers and the rap-adjacent). Dressed like a hip vicar, Albarn serves double duty as a frontman and a conscientious host, although the original cast of vocalists is inevitably depleted. The late MF DOOM and awol Shaun Ryder appear only on screen, while Skye Edwards replaces Martina Topley-Bird on All Alone. Thank goodness for the old-school stalwarts. Bootie Brown enters Dirty Harry like a red-and-white firework before De La Soul boom and cackle through Feel Good Inc.

• Leverkusen took one point from first two league games

• Chief executive: ‘A parting of ways at this stage is painful’

Erik ten Hag has been sacked by Bayer Leverkusen after just three matches in charge. He was appointed as Xabi Alonso’s successor on a two-year contract in May after the Bundesliga-winning coach left for Real Madrid.

The former Manchester United manager was dismissed on Monday morning following Leverkusen’s 3-3 draw with Werder Bremen on Saturday. Leverkusen surrendered two late goals, including a 94th-minute equaliser, despite Niklas Stark’s second-half red card for Bremen.

From deploying the national guard to targeting news channels and schools, the US president’s actions are anything from typical of a democratic leader

Speaking in the Oval Office this week, Donald Trump had something he wanted to clarify.

“I’m not a dictator. I don’t like a dictator,” the president said.

Across the world, women at the heart of their communities are leading the struggle to protect their culture, land and way of life

“We, the daughters of mother earth … have come together to collectively decide what we can do to bring about a world which we would like our children and our children’s children to live in,” so states the Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women.

Adopted in 1995, the document outlined the oppression of women around the world and demanded governments recognise “the social, cultural, economic, and religious rights of the Indigenous peoples in their constitutions and legal systems”.

Albert Serra’s riveting documentary follows star matador Andrés Roca Rey as he confronts the raw force of nature – but it’s a tough watch for animal lovers

For anyone looking for an ethical statement on bullfighting, this is not that film. Composed primarily of a series of corrida at which Peruvian star matador Andrés Roca Rey performs, this is an extremely tough watch for those with any kind of sympathy for animal rights. Director Albert Serra – lauded for his 2022 thriller Pacifiction – is not especially interested in the lives of the bulls, who all die desultory deaths, depicted with horrible intimacy here. What is even more shocking is the abuse and contempt heaped on them by the toreros. “Go join your fucking mother cow,” says one to a convulsing victim.

Rather, Afternoons of Solitude is an unblinking look at bullfighting and the surrounding culture of bravado and machismo, expertly shot and edited with a sense of ritualistic order imbibed directly from the sport. Filming Rey in transit in a people carrier, getting apparelled in his hyper-camp getup, rehearsing his mannerisms in a lift, Serra is fundamentally interested in questions of performance and style. In the arena, he documents the finesse and attitude with which the matador confronts, corrals and quells the raw force of nature. In the ring, Rey has an extraordinary repertoire of gestures: preening head tosses straight from a Whitesnake gig; a glowering demon kill-mask out of kabuki theatre.

I almost admire the confidence it must take to tell people what to do online. But I long for the days when the internet wasn’t just lists of bossy self-optimisation plans

I may have found what will finally wean me off social media. It’s this “things I’ve learned” trend. Take, for example, advice that will supposedly “change your brain chemistry”, courtesy of someone who is definitely not a neuroscientist. Or “my nutrition rules”, from a dewy, gen Alpha sylph who doesn’t realise what they actually have is a teenager’s metabolism. Or “45 things you need to understand” about a place from someone who has spent 45 minutes there. Endless lists of the bleeding obvious: eat intuitively, embrace nature, exercise compassion, remain curious, be childlike, contact friends, put down your phone, put your head in a blender.

OK, not that last one, but it’s how this stuff makes me feel. I don’t know what to call it – expertise overload? Advice pollution? A bottomless pit of wisdom brain rot? – but authoritatively delivered life advice dominates what I see online, from Substack (the online home of cosy, bookish elders) to TikTok (the opposite). It’s not just my algorithm or demographic: men, young people, pregnant people and new parents all get inundated with advice, albeit with different slants.

Bluesky posts referencing scholarly articles ‘find substantially higher levels of interaction’ than on Elon Musk’s platform

Bluesky’s growing status as the social media platform of choice for the world’s scientists has been boosted by analysis suggesting research receives more engagement and original scrutiny than on Elon Musk’s rival platform, X.

A study examining 2.6m Bluesky posts referencing more than 500,000 scholarly articles over the past two and a half years found they demonstrated “substantially higher levels of interaction” – likes, reposts, replies and quotes – and greater “textual originality” than previously reported for X, formerly Twitter.

Heavy rain, lightning and tornadoes lash swaths of continent, with France, Italy and Slovenia among worst hit

Severe storms linked to a deep upper air trough formed from the ex-hurricane Erin lashed parts of western and southern Europe last week.

Italy was hit by severe rainfall on Thursday that caused flooding in the Lombardy region. The commune of Busto Arsizio was badly affected, with more than 100mm of rain and frequent lightning.

If you’ve been affected by the earthquake that struck the Afghanistan province of Kunar late on Sunday, we’d like to hear from you

A least 622 people have been killed and more than 1,500 others injured in the an earthquake in eastern Afghanistan.

The magnitude 6 earthquake struck the province of Kunar at 11.47pm on Sunday and was centred 27km north-east of the city of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province, the US Geological Survey said Jalalabad is about 119km (74 miles) away from the capital city, Kabul. A 4.5 magnitude quake occurred 20 minutes later in the same province.

• City chase Donnarumma | Liverpool agree Isak fee

• Mail John | Transfer interactive | Monday’s Rumour Mill

Here’s a roundup of all the deadline-day transfer chat:

“Was Vinny Samways ‘tough-tackling’? I always remembered him as more a cultured midfielder,” writes Andrew Champney. One deadline day not dominated by Vinny Samways, all I ask. Will never happen. But did you know he spent six years at Las Palmas? Nice work if you can get it.

The Oscar-nominated star of Bend It Like Beckham, Pride and Prejudice and Atonement – and now children’s author – will answer your questions

Keira Knightley’s big break arrived in 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha’s comedy-drama about female footballers, which put her into the premier league. Before that, she’d had smaller parts in the 2002 gritty British drama Pure, about a mother with a heroin addiction, and the 2001 thriller The Hole, set in an eerie abandoned nuclear fallout shelter. Before that, she’d played Natalie Portman’s decoy in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. The reasoning being, well … Portman and Knightley do look a bit similar, don’t they?

Since those days, Knightley has earned two Oscar, two Bafta and four Golden Globe nominations, for Pride and Prejudice, The Imitation Game, Atonement and the TV series Black Doves. She was nearly cast as Bond girl Vesper Lynd in 2006’s Casino Royale (Eva Green was thought to be more age appropriate). She also nearly played Lois Lane in 2006’s Superman Returns instead of Kate Bosworth, and Catwoman in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises instead of Anne Hathaway. In an old episode of The Graham Norton Show (you can tell it’s a while ago – 2014 – because Norton doesn’t have a beard), Knightley tells a story about how Joe Wright, who directed her in 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, 2007’s Atonement and 2012’s Anna Karenina, originally didn’t want to cast her because she was “too pretty”. “But then he met me and said: ‘Oh no, you’re fine,’” she laughs.

Low-budget puzzle game is also about building communities and challenging capitalism – while still looking cute and approachable

One of the most interesting trends in game design is the use of familiar mechanics and genres to explore real-world power systems and how to challenge them. Forthcoming deck-building game, All Will Rise, seeks to interest players in political activism, Compensation Not Guaranteed aims to educate players about south-east Asian politics, while MythMatch is ostensibly a puzzle game set in ancient Greece, but is also about building communities and challenging capitalism – while still looking cute and approachable.

You play as Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, who is having to navigate the institutionalised sexism of Mount Olympus, here represented as a corporation infested with tech bros. In defiance, she decides to help the mortals of Ithaca build a new, more progressive world – and you do this by running around the little environments, merging items and animals to create helpful new beasts and objects. For example, when you’re cast down to Earth you accidentally smash a chariot belonging to Selene, the goddess of the Moon, so you have to match moon shards together to recreate the celestial vehicle. However, one of the shards has fallen into a greenhouse, so you need to solve a puzzle to gain access.

A wounded bird becomes an image for much wider damage to our world

Solitude

Paraphrase on Saint-John Perse, Anabase IV

Most of these little-known but already endangered fish have never been seen alive in their natural habitat, but are under threat from bottom trawling and deep-sea mining

Three years ago I was running a research project from a bottom trawler off Namibia about deep-sea sharks – all of which live under enormous water pressure, close to the seafloor and are rarely seen by humans.

These sharks were being brought up in the trawler’s nets. By the time they were brought to the surface, they had experienced such a dramatic change in pressure that they had undergone barotrauma, so they were internally damaged and unlikely to survive.

I’ve examined how commercial technologies reshape education – often in ways parents instinctively resist, but are told to ignore

• Dr Velislava Hillman is an academic, teacher, writer and consultant on educational technology and policy.

A quiet transformation is unfolding in schools: commercial technology is rapidly reshaping how children learn, often without much public debate or inquiry.

From the near-ubiquity of Google and Microsoft to speculative AI products such as Century Tech, big and ed tech alike promise “personalised learning” while harvesting vast amounts of data and turning education to monetisable widgets and digital badges.

Dr Velislava Hillman is an academic, teacher, writer and consultant on educational technology and policy. She is the author of Taming Edtech

The latest in our series of writers detailing their most rewatched comfort films is a reminder of Anthony Minghella’s starry, sad and sinister 1999 thriller

Sixteen is a great age to see a movie, there on a threshold between wide-eyed wonder and something like maturity. That’s how old I was when I first laid eyes on The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella’s ravishing, exquisitely grim 1999 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s flinty 1955 novel. I’d been a movie fan for years at that point, but something about its elegant menace, its beauty flecked with blood, grabbed ahold of me like little had previously. It is by no means a feelgood film, this story of queer longing and loneliness giving way to murderous deed. But watching it now (as I do perhaps embarrassingly often) still evokes the primal thrill of art cracking open a young mind.

Minghella, who died in 2008, was a master of style, crafting wholly credible visions of the past. His prowess is perhaps best on display in Ripley, which takes the viewer on a grand tour of mid-20th-century Italy, both its sun-splashed coastal languor and its more anxious, cobble-gray city streets. Tom Ripley, a low-birth conman sent to Europe’s blessed boot to retrieve a prodigal shipping scion at his father’s behest, is in awe of the country, as are we in the audience; so much so that we begin to sickly root for Tom’s increasingly sinister campaign to stay there.

Exclusive: Darren Jones appointed to new senior role in charge of day-to-day delivery of PM’s priorities

Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, has been moved to a new senior role in Downing Street as Keir Starmer attempts to get a grip on delivery before what is likely to be a tumultuous autumn for the government, the Guardian understands.

The senior MP, whose new title will be chief secretary to the prime minster, has been put in charge of day-to-day delivery of the prime minister’s priorities after No 10 spent the summer struggling to get on the front foot on issues including the economy and migration, and lags behind Reform UK in the polls.