A mass politics of anti-austerity, identity and climate is emerging from the left’s margins. Keir Starmer cannot afford to ignore it

Zack Polanski’s landslide election as leader of the Green party marks a turning point for Britain’s fractured left. Young, rhetorically fluent and unafraid to cloak climate arguments in those about class, Mr Polanski is nothing if not ambitious. He sees his party not as a parliamentary pressure group but as a replacement for Labour itself.

His ascent might have seemed fanciful last July when Labour had just won a thumping majority. Yet Labour languishes in the polls. Sir Keir Starmer’s personal ratings have collapsed. On the extreme right Reform UK now boasts 237,000 members, 870 councillors, and 10 councils under its control. The Greens have more MPs than ever before. And the uneasy leadership team of Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana is preparing to launch a new party to Labour’s left. This is no longer political noise at the margins. This is about the structural failure of leadership at the centre.

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Gaps in access to dentists mirror other health inequalities. And ‘golden hellos’ won’t solve the problem on their own

Disadvantaged primary school pupils at the government’s first wave of new breakfast clubs can expect to be trained in toothbrushing, as well as fed. Data showing that a fifth of all five-year-olds in England have experienced tooth decay persuaded ministers to make improved oral health part of the early years and reception class curriculum. But the prevalence of decay is not evenly spread across the country. And research showing how much worse the situation is for children in deprived areas is in line with other findings about widening health inequalities.

New analysis from the Local Government Association highlights the differing availability of dental care across council areas – a situation sometimes described as a dental divide. It found no specific correlation between the numbers of NHS dentists and young children with tooth decay. But it adds to a body of research showing that people in poorer areas are generally less well provided for. In Middlesbrough, for example, there are just 10 NHS dental practices per 100,000 people, while in wealthy Richmond upon Thames there are 28.

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Daughter of former Nazi official and her husband to be questioned after raid on home failed to find masterpiece

A federal court in Argentina has ordered house arrest for the daughter of a former Nazi official and her husband after a raid failed to locate a painting stolen from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam.

Authorities raided a home in the coastal city of Mar del Plata last week after a Dutch newspaper identified a painting seen in a real estate photo as an Italian masterpiece registered on a database of lost wartime art.

After the controversy over Amy Sherald’s portrait of a trans Statue of Liberty, trans artists speak about why their work speaks to an important moment

Part of the magic of portraiture is how it renders so much of the human experience accessible to us, things we might never see otherwise. This has been very much on Black artist Amy Sherald’s mind. When I spoke to her in advance of the debut of her exhibition American Sublime, she told me that Black representation was foundational to her practice: “I developed this idea that, when I look at art history, for the most part I don’t see portraits of people that look like me. So it started there.”

That exhibition’s curator, Sarah Roberts, also spoke about Sherald’s passion for representing the LGBTQ+ community: “Amy has thought a lot about her role as an artist and the need for representation, and she has long been a champion of LGBTQ+ rights. This work is thinking about who gets depicted as being American.”

• £125m striker thanks former teammates and staff

• ‘It has been an honour … Thank you, Newcastle’

Alexander Isak has made a belated attempt to rebuild bridges at Newcastle by thanking his former teammates, St James’ Park staff and the club’s fans for their support during his three years on Tyneside.

When Isak joined Liverpool for £125m on Monday evening the Sweden striker departed a squad and a city thoroughly disillusioned by his decision not to train with or play for Eddie Howe’s team for the majority of this summer. Ultimately that tactic succeeded in forcing the move to Anfield he had long craved but, along the way, a player who scored 27 times for Newcastle last season shredded his reputation there.

Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Tracy Letts star in this immaculately constructed nightmare procedural that ticks down the minutes from an atomic bomb’s launch to its detonation

Kathryn Bigelow has reopened the subject that we all tacitly agree not to discuss or imagine, in the movies or anywhere else: the subject of an actual nuclear strike. It’s the subject which tests narrative forms and thinkability levels.

Maybe this is why we prefer to see it as something for absurdism and satire – a way of not staring into the sun – to remember Kubrick’s (brilliant) black comedy Dr Strangelove, with no fighting in the war room etc, rather than Lumet’s deadly serious Fail Safe.

Bigelow, with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, broaches one of the most frightening thoughts of all: that a nuclear war could or rather will start with no one knowing who started it or who ended it. I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.

The drama is recounted in one 18-minute segment, repeated from various standpoints and various locations: 18 minutes being the time estimated to elapse between military observers reporting the out-of-the-blue launch of a nuke from the Pacific and its projected arrival in Chicago.

The action plays out in a series of situation rooms and command-and-control suites with acronyms like PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) featuring military and civilian personnel in banks of desks, generally in a shallow horseshoe shape facing a very big screen flashing up the threat level from Defcon 2 to Defcon 1 and also showing a large map displaying the missile’s current position, which is occasionally replaced with what amounts to a Zoom mosaic of tense faces belonging to high-ranking officials with no idea what to do, dialling in chaotically from their smartphones.

Rebecca Ferguson plays intelligence analyst Capt Olivia Walker, Tracy Letts is the gung ho military chief Gen Anthony Brady – this drama’s equivalent of the cold war’s Gen Curtis LeMay – who advocates an immediate pre-emptive counterstrike before the incoming missile arrives, Jared Harris is the defense secretary Reid Baker who realises that his estranged daughter is in Chicago, Gabriel Basso plays the brilliant and flustered young NSA adviser Jake Baerington who, if this was an Aaron Sorkin script, could be relied on to save the day.

Author quipped she wrote ‘suitable’ piece after Alberta school ban included her novel The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood has released a new short story critiquing elected officials for a wide-ranging book ban in the Canadian province of Alberta. The controversial decision to remove books purportedly containing “explicit sexual content” has seen numerous works of literature swept up in the dragnet, including Atwood’s, dystopian work The Handmaid‘s Tale.

In a social media post, Atwood wrote that since her famed work was no longer permissible in Alberta schools, she had written a “suitable” short work for teens, adding the work was necessary because the province’s minister of education thought students were “stupid babies”.

• England 131; South Africa 137-3; SA win by seven wickets

• Sonny Baker endures nightmare debut with ball

They say that if you fail to prepare you should prepare to fail, and it turns out that is what England were doing across the two understaffed days of training with which they launched themselves into this series. They proceeded to get bowled out for 131 in 24.3 overs, losing their last seven wickets for just 29 runs, before Aiden Markram humbled their bowlers in propelling South Africa towards victory by seven wickets, sealed with 175 balls to spare.

A week ahead of this match Temba Bavuma’s team were in the middle of a convoluted, lengthy journey from Queensland to Yorkshire via Sydney, Singapore and London. But it was England who looked jetlagged by the less long-distance but more recent whiplash turnaround from the Hundred, in which several squad members, if only two of those selected for this series opener, were engaged 48 hours earlier. In their absence the team’s first training session on Sunday was attended by just a handful of players, their second on Monday had less than two-thirds of the squad present, and the outcome was a powder-puff display against match-honed and whip-smart opponents.

• American won three golds at Paris 2024

• 28-year-old has been dealing with achilles injury

Olympic champion Gabby Thomas will miss this month’s World Athletics Championships with an achilles tendon injury she’s been dealing with since May.

Thomas, who won the 200m in Paris and was on the 4x100m and 4x400m gold-medal relay teams, said she exacerbated the injury in July.

“I understand that it will be disappointing for some track fans to hear this news, but I’ve finally come to the realization that it’s OK to be human and take care of myself,” Thomas said in a press release on Tuesday. “As an athlete you always want to keep grinding, but sometimes you simply can’t outwork an injury. Sometimes it’s about patience and making the right decision for the long term. All the best to my Team USA teammates fighting for medals in Tokyo.”

Soldiers express doubts about serving in Gaza but few will refuse to fight

Tens of thousands of reservists in Israel will return to active service in the coming weeks amid an intense debate in their ranks over the war in Gaza, which reflects wider divisions in the country.

Some will be forced to make their decision within days. The Israel Defense Forces began mobilising tens of thousands of reservists on Tuesday after calling up 60,000 for an expanded offensive in Gaza City, one of the few places in the devastated territory outside its control. More will be ordered to report to military bases if the fighting continues for many months, as analysts expect.

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Strasbourg, official seat of the European parliament, the jewel of the Alsace region on the west bank of the Rhine. Important historically, geographically and politically. One of the city’s most famous sons, Arsène Wenger, as a boy, was so embedded that his first language was Low Alemannic German, not French. To use a word Wenger brought to the English football vernacular – footballistically – Strasbourg was never too much of a hub. The club reformed after liquidation as recently as 2011, having won just one French title back in 1979 when Wenger was a fringe player already embedded in coaching. In defence was the future France coach Raymond Domenech, the keen astrologist in charge when a very Gallic bust-up ravaged Les Bleus at the 2010 World Cup.

We’re all captivated by the journey of Wrexham. It’s been amazing for Welsh football and hopefully now in a number of years we’ll see young players coming through … There isn’t similarities to how I play to how Wrexham play. It’s different ways, no right or wrong way for this” – Craig Bellamy, the Wales manager, praises Wrexham’s rise under the co-ownership of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. Despite his newfound diplomacy, let’s assume the former Cardiff forward isn’t entirely sold on a style of play focused on 6ft 5in striker Kieffer Moore.

In the first two episodes of a six-part series, the stardom of 80s primetime host Enzo Tortora is cleverly crosscut with the scramble of a mob secretary who implicates him – and his parrot – in drug trafficking

Marco Bellocchio, the tireless warhorse of Italian cinema, kicks up a swirling dust cloud of corruption with this fabulous, stranger-than-fiction account of an 80s TV star convicted of conspiring with the Camorra. Shot for the streaming service HBO Max, it is the director’s second historical miniseries after 2022’s Exterior Night, about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and features the same lead player in Fabrizio Gifuni, an actor who has surely cornered the market in playing glossy public figures whose lives are about to take a hellish turn. Bellocchio’s dramas typically inhabit this kind of shonky, venal moral universe. The ground is liable to drop away pretty much at any moment.

Gifuni stars as Enzo Tortora, a primetime TV presenter in the twinkling Terry Wogan mould who hosts a Friday night entertainment show on a soundstage made up to resemble an old-style small-town market. Portobello features dances and phone-ins and stars a parrot called Ramon, who point-blank refuses to speak. The show pulls in a peak audience of about 28 million, which means it’s watched by everyone, in all social classes, from the sisters at the convent to the cons inside Naples’ Poggioreale prison. One of these prisoners is such a fan of Portobello, in fact, that he posts Tortora a set of knitted lace doilies to be auctioned at his market. Naturally the inmate wants a namecheck on the show – or failing that, a letter of thanks. So he writes to Tortora again, and this time he’s more peeved.

Latest attack comes as Israel’s military urges people to leave Gaza City with 60,000 more reservists to be called up

At least nine people, including five children, have been killed in an Israeli strike while fetching water in al-Mawasi, an area of southern Gaza which Israel has designated as a safe zone, health officials said.

A doctor from al-Nasser hospital shared a picture of the children’s bodies in the hospital, as well as a picture of water jugs left in a pool of blood at the site of the attack on Tuesday.

• ‘More personality creates more stars,’ says rugby chief

• Sell outs expected at four weekend World Cup games

The head of World Rugby has urged the men’s game to learn lessons from how players at the Women’s Rugby World Cup have shown off their personalities and interacted more with fans.

Alan Gilpin also suggested that World Rugby would be preparing a dossier of “great facts and stats” to show teams at the men’s World Cup in 2027 that engaging more with supporters would not take the edge off their performances.

• Jessica Pegula defeats Barbora Krejcikova 6-3, 6-3

• Sinner routs Bublik to reach quarters | Email Daniel

Pegula 3-1 Krejcikova* A little better from Krejcikova, who makes 30-15 when Pegula slices into the net and, in comms, Martina bemoans the lack of classic matches so far this tournament. I really enjoyed Muchova v Kostyuk yesterday, for what that’s worth; meantime, Pegula opens the court with another forehand, then hits a backhand into the space she created for 40-30, quickly making deuce thereafter. She’s started like she means it, but when she fails to convert on advantage, Krejcikova closes out, a backhand winner – her first of the match – sealing the deal.

*Pegula 3-0 Krejcikova Krejcikova had to save eight match points to beat Townsend in round four and perhaps that’s still in her legs, or her mind; she’s not got going here at all. But she does get to 40-30 only to allow a weak second serve to escape unpunished; another forehand winner secures the consolidation.

As the war gets livestreamed to our phones, it is easy to be overwhelmed and feel helpless. But even small acts of activism add up

I don’t know if Frankenstein star Christoph Waltz is normally a man of few words but he didn’t have much to say at a recent Venice film festival press conference. Waltz uttered only six words, with “CGI is for losers” constituting four of them. The remaining two were “I don’t”, in response to a question about how he stays hopeful in today’s “monstrous times”.

Waltz is certainly not alone in despairing of a world which seems to elevate liars, cheats, and adjudicated sexual predators. It’s hard to feel hope when a genocide has been livestreamed to our phones for almost two years and there is no justice in sight; just a systematic slaughter of the journalists who serve as messengers. No peace prospects on the horizon; just well-paid consultants putting together ethnic cleansing prospectuses so a “Gaza Riviera” can be built. (Oh, sorry, we’re supposed to say “voluntary relocation”, aren’t we?)

Some claim eating steak and whole sticks of butter has improved their skin, cleared brain fog and even eliminated farting. Experts say an all-animal diet carries risks

• Read more in the Antiviral series

Ex-vegan turned carnivore Isabella Ma, better known to her nearly half a million followers on Instagram as @steakandbuttergal, has glowing skin and a flat stomach. She looks directly at the camera as she chomps down on an entire stick of butter. It’s part of her “high fat carnivore diet” to which she attributes a whole host of health benefits, not least of which is the claim she “literally never fart[s] any more” and has a single “scentless” bowel movement a week.

A lot of gym bros also back the diet touted for helping people lose weight and build muscle, such as Antonio Angotti, who says the fat in red meat “includes almost every nutrient humans need to thrive” and invokes religion as part of his dietary choices, saying he eats “just foods God will actually bless”. It’s also been platformed by Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.

Natasha May is Guardian Australia’s health reporter

Antiviral is a fortnightly column that interrogates the evidence behind the health headlines and factchecks popular wellness claims

A weekend off has given the eight remaining teams time to work on their strengths and weaknesses – and us an opportunity to assess their chances

The AFL finals race went down to the wire with early pacesetters limping to the line and other sides flying home, before Gold Coast booked the last spot for this year and their first in club history with a win in the game that finished the home-and-away season.

An evenly-matched finals series is now on the cards; only three wins separate minor premiers Adelaide from Hawthorn in eighth place – just the second time the gap has been so narrow since the top eight was introduced 31 years ago.

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Democratic governor Gavin Newsom takes shot at Trump after ‘the courts agree’ that deployment of national guard during LA immigration protests was illegal

• Trump illegally deployed national guard during LA Ice protests, judge rules

Donald Trump’s “exciting announcement” expected at 2pm ET will be “related to the Department of Defense”, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna plan to hold a news conference tomorrow with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse as the political fallout from the saga continues to engage Congress on several fronts.

Russian president says relations at ‘unprecedentedly high level’ as dozens of leaders gather for Victory Day events

Vladimir Putin has hailed Russia’s “unprecedentedly” high level of ties with China, as dozens of leaders including the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, arrived in Beijing on the eve of a massive military parade intended to showcase a Chinese-led global order.

Putin called China’s leader, Xi Jinping, a “dear friend” after the two held talks at the Great Hall of the People and then at Xi’s personal residence. “Our close communication reflects the strategic nature of Russia-China relations, which are at an unprecedentedly high level,” Putin told Xi, according to a video on the Kremlin’s Telegram channel. “We were always together then, and we remain together now.”

From designing enormous postwar housing projects to escaping from prison using a rope, Pouillon’s life had high drama. A new documentary charts the extraordinary rise, fall – and rise again – of France’s ‘most wanted’ creative

Variously described as an “architect, painter, novelist, communist and convicted fraudster”, Fernand Pouillon’s life was punctuated by abrupt reversals of fortune that might have sprung from the pages of Dickens or Dumas. Throughout an eventful career, he ricocheted from intoxicating success, to financial scandal, prison, exile and eventual rehabilitation.

In 1985, when Pouillon was in his early 70s, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by President François Mitterrand. Yet just over 20 years earlier, Pouillon found himself in custody awaiting trial on charges of corruption. As a prolific architect-developer who had designed gargantuan housing schemes in France and Algeria, he was accused of funding irregularities and violating laws contrived to keep the processes of design and construction separate.

A new survey has found that more than a quarter of adults under 35 commit the sin of dilution to keep their pint cool. Is this alarming new trend here to stay?

Name: Icy beer.

Age: Niche for a while, now horribly mainstream.

• Oliver Glasner intervened over centre-back’s £35m switch

• Guéhi considering giving up Palace captaincy in protest

Marc Guéhi is extremely unhappy with Crystal Palace’s decision to pull the plug on his £35m transfer to Liverpool, which came after Oliver Glasner stepped in to prevent the move by threatening to resign if he was sold, the Guardian understands.

The Palace chairman, Steve Parish, reluctantly accepted Liverpool’s offer for the England defender a few hours before Monday’s deadline despite Glasner having insisted the 25-year-old must not be sold because there was no time to find an adequate replacement.