One line from Ridley Scott’s classic movie was the shove I needed to walk out on my husband after years of his controlling behaviour

It was 1991, I was in my early 40s, living in the south of England and trapped in a marriage that had long since curdled into something quietly suffocating. My husband had become controlling, first with money, then with almost everything else: what I wore, who I saw, what I said. It crept up so slowly that I didn’t quite realise what was happening.

We had met as students in the early 1970s, both from working-class, northern families and feeling slightly out of place at a university full of public school accents. We shared politics, music and a sense of being outsiders together. For years, life felt full of promise. When our first child arrived, I gave up my local government job to stay at home. That’s when the balance between us shifted.

Survey data suggests more and more girls can’t imagine getting married, while their male counterparts are keener. That disparity holds a clue

According to recent data, marriages in England and Wales are down by nearly 9% after a post-pandemic spike, while civil partnerships have risen by almost the same percentage. This downward trend is also reflected in the US. The Vatican has piped up in defence of the institution, releasing a 40-page doctrinal note, Una Caro (One Flesh): In Praise of Monogamy: Doctrinal Note on the Value of Marriage as an Exclusive Union and Mutual Belonging. Sworn celibates would not be my personal first port of call when seeking relationship advice, but to each their own – exclusively and indissolubly, if the Catholic church is to be believed.

Among the younger crowd, gendered expectations about marriage are changing, at least according to a survey by the University of Michigan, which found that only 61% of high-school girls want to be married one day, compared to 74% of the boys. Perhaps this is behind the burgeoning genre of opinion pieces in which a rightwing man complains that women don’t want to date him. Often enough, he is an avowed libertarian, leaving it a mystery why he does not simply accept the workings of the free market.

Naoise Dolan is an Irish writer and the author of Exciting Times and The Happy Couple

​In this week’s newsletter: The turn-of-the-2000s produced a frenzy of cultural crystal-ball gazing​. Two decades on​ those bold forecasts reveal as much about us as they do about the era itself

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I love revisiting articles from around the turn of the millennium, a fascinatingly febrile period when everyone – but journalists especially – briefly lost the run of themselves. It seems strange now to think that the ticking over of a clock from 23:59 to 00:00 would prompt such big feelings, of excitement, terror, of end-of-days abandon, but it really did (I can remember feeling them myself as a teenager, especially the end-of-days-abandon bit.)

Of course, some of that feeling came from the ticking over of the clock itself: the fears over the Y2K bug might seem quite silly today, but its potential ramifications – planes falling out of the sky, power grids failing, entire life savings being deleted in a stroke – would have sent anyone a bit loopy. There’s a very good podcast, Surviving Y2K, about some of the people who responded particularly drastically to the bug’s threat, including a bloke who planned to sit out the apocalypse by farming and eating hamsters.

The PM becomes the first Australian leader to celebrate a wedding while in office with a private ceremony followed by a reception at his official residence, the Lodge

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The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has married his partner, Jodie Haydon, in Canberra, making him the first Australian leader to tie the knot in office.

The ceremony took place on Saturday afternoon at Albanese’s official residence, the Lodge, witnessed by a small group of close family and friends, including Albanese’s son, Nathan, and Haydon’s parents, Bill and Pauline.

Locked away in prison for decades, Marwan Barghouti is a longstanding advocate for a two-state solution

A global campaign is being launched to secure the release of Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian prisoner seen by many as the best hope of leading a future Palestinian state, as negotiations continue in the context of the current Gaza ceasefire.

The campaign, being led by Barghouti’s West Bank-based family with UK civil society support, is seeking to put the 66-year-old’s fate at the centre of the next stage of the ceasefire.

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the past seven days

Sarah, 53, a psychologist, meets Russell, 61, a behaviour officer

What were you hoping for?
A romantic connection. Failing that, getting to know someone I might not otherwise have crossed paths with.

The Daily Mail owner has the Telegraph titles in his sights as part of a long-held ambition to create a dominant stable of rightwing newspapers

Waiting two decades for another chance to snaffle a prized business acquisition is a luxury not afforded to many executives. The Rothermere family, however, takes a more relaxed approach to time.

While most business boards draw up five-year plans, the Rothermeres, having compiled a feared media empire over more than a century, are used to thinking in terms of generations.

Exclusive: UCL scientists find large swathes of southern Europe are drying up, with ‘far-reaching’ implications

Vast swathes of Europe’s water reserves are drying up, a new analysis using two decades of satellite data reveals, with freshwater storage shrinking across southern and central Europe, from Spain and Italy to Poland and parts of the UK.

Scientists at University College London (UCL), working with Watershed Investigations and the Guardian, analysed 2002–24 data from satellites, which track changes in Earth’s gravitational field.

Methanol, a cheap relative of ethanol, is entering the supply chain, causing thousands of deaths around the world

For Bethany Clarke, poison tasted like nothing. There was no bitter aftertaste, no astringent sting at the back of the tongue. If anything, she thought in passing, the free shots she and her friends were drinking at a hostel bar in Laos had probably been watered down – she wasn’t detecting a strong vodka flavour through the veil of Sprite she had mixed it with.

All in all, Clarke remembers drinking about five of those shots, sitting with her best friend, Simone White, and a crowd of others at the hostel’s happy hour. CCTV footage shows the group laughing in the warm air of the open bar in the town of Vang Vieng, green and red lights dancing over their shoulders.

Endometriosis, miscarriage, failed relationships, suicide and gaslighting … they are all laid bare on the singer-writer’s new album. But just as she finished recording it, she got a shock diagnosis. She explains why it’s made her determined to be in the moment

You couldn’t make it up, Jessie J says. There she was preparing for her first album release in eight years, ecstatically in love with her newish partner, and finally the mother of a toddler having struggled to conceive for a decade, on top of the world. Then in March she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

The singer-songwriter, real name Jessica Cornish, is famous for telling it as it is. The album, Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, was supposed to be an open book, dealing with every ounce of devastation she’d experienced since she last recorded music (endometriosis, miscarriage, failed relationships, gaslighting, suicide) with typical candour. The first single, No Secrets, was released in April. But by then there was a mighty secret. The cancer. Then second single, Living My Best Life, came out in May and Cornish was giving interviews about how she was living her best life, while still secretly living with breast cancer. A month later she went public, and in early July she had a mastectomy.

Councils consult on removing former prince’s name as residents report ‘embarrassment’ and ‘smirks’ when giving their addresses

Streets named after Andrew, formerly known as Prince but now plain Mountbatten-Windsor, can be found from Broadstairs to Belfast to Birmingham. Roads, avenues, terraces, lanes, crescents, closes, drives and ways are all afflicted – to the dismay of some residents.

In Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, Prince Andrew Way, celebrating Mountbatten-Windsor’s 1986 marriage to Sarah Ferguson, will be purged after Mid and East Antrim council passed a motion, described by one councillor as “sad but necessary”, to rename. A public consultation is under way.

The online banker sounds concerned, as if he’s trying to keep me on the line until the ambulance arrives

Certain contractual terms oblige my oldest sons to periodically appear at their places of employment. On rare occasions they both go in on the same day. On this particular day, my wife and the dog are also out. I’m alone in the house.

I’m lingering over lunch – because, why not? – when my phone pings in my pocket. It’s a text from my bank.

The supernatural drama inches closer to the end, while Ethan Hawke fully encapsulates Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s Broadway breakup drama. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

A stunning but simple festive vegetarian centrepiece for the whole table to enjoy

Last year I wrote about how I lost my food fandango, got it back, and now simplify matters, especially in the kitchen. This means I no longer do feasts with lots of elements, even at Christmas, but I still adore a showstopper, especially one that the whole table, irrespective of dietary requirements, can enjoy together. This year’s offering is such a centrepiece, an aubergine timbale (timbale means drum) packed to the gunnels with vegetables, rice, nuts, fruit, spices and, should you wish it (you should), one of the finest cheeses to come out of Normandy: Boursin.

The first autopen was patented in the 1800s and has been used by many American presidents

On Friday, Donald Trump claimed that he will reverse everything that Joe Biden has signed with an autopen.

The automated signature machine has been a tool used by presidents at the White House for decades.

Washington’s Putin-appeasing plan for peace in Ukraine has failed, but many heard death knell sounded for European reliance on US protection

Kaja Kallas, the European Union foreign policy chief, asked her officials this week to dig up the number of times Russia had – in its various guises – invaded other states in the 20th and 21st centuries. The answer that came back was 19 states, on 33 occasions. Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister, was not just indulging in some form of historical mathematics. She was seeking to make a point that lies at the heart of the dispute between the US and Europe over Ukraine’s future, a dispute that has again revealed the chasm across the Atlantic about the true nature of the Russian regime.

Kallas reads history books as a leisure activity and – drawing on her own country’s history of Soviet occupation – has long maintained that the Soviet Union fell, but its imperialism never did. “Russia has never truly had to come to terms with its brutal past or bear the consequences of its actions,” she has said, arguing that the nature of the Russian regime means “rewarding aggression will bring more war, not less”: Putin will come back for more.

She made a short, and much-ridiculed, trip to space. She tried to buy a house and fell foul of public opinion. And she’s found love, apparently, with Justin Trudeau. Time to get up to speed before this singer next hits the headlines

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind, wanting to start again? No? Just Katy Perry then. Seven months since her sense-defying jaunt into space, life on planet Earth hasn’t let up for the embattled hitmaker. She’s back in the headlines this week, implied to be raiding the pockets of a “disabled veteran” while facing scrutiny for her somewhat inexplicable new romance with Justin Trudeau. Yes, that Justin Trudeau. Shall we?

1. Perry wins in court, but loses online
By one metric, such as “relative to the rest of 2025”, this might have been a good week for Katy Perry. Since 2020, she has been embroiled in a legal battle against Carl Westcott, who sold her an eight-bedroom, 11-bathroom mansion in Montecito for $15m. Westcott then attempted to renege on the deal, claiming to have been incapacitated by painkillers (prescribed after a back operation) when signing the paperwork. A judge ruled in Perry’s favour in May last year, finding that Westcott was sound of mind when the sale went through. This week, another judge ruled that Perry was owed $1.8m in damages. This sounds like a win, you might think – except Perry had pushed for Westcott to pay $4.7m, and it’s been widely written up as Perry money-grubbing from an “85-year-old disabled veteran”. To give military.com’s headline, from earlier in the dispute in 2023: “Katy Perry Is Fighting a Dying, Elderly Veteran to Force Him to Sell His Home.” It is true that Westcott served in the 101st Airborne Division, is 85 years old and seriously ill with incurable Huntington’s disease. But the insistent framing may say more about Perry’s unenviable position as pop culture’s preferred punching bag.

Starkie has died of leukaemia surrounded by friends and family and ‘listening to Chuck Berry’, his daughter says

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The renowned Australian guitarist Bob “Bongo” Starkie has died at the age of 73, his band Skyhooks has announced.

Starkie died peacefully early on Saturday after a battle with leukaemia, the band’s archivist, Peter Green, said in a post on the Skyhooks Facebook page.

Families are combing hospitals hoping to find their loved ones as about 200 people still listed as missing, and at least 128 killed

An outpouring of grief was set to sweep Hong Kong on Saturday as an official, three-day mourning period began with a moment of silence for the 128 people killed in one of the city’s deadliest fires.

City leader John Lee, along with senior ministers and dozens of top civil servants, stood in silence for three minutes on Saturday morning outside the government headquarters, where the flags of China and Hong Kong were flown at half-mast.

Trump administration says decisions paused until government can ensure ‘every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible’

The Trump administration has announced it is halting all asylum decisions in the wake of the National Guard shooting in Washington DC, according to a senior immigration official.

Joseph Edlow, the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in a post on X on Friday that asylum decisions would be paused “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible”.

• He scored twice in 1988 final against West Germany

• Olympic star was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2019

Imran Sherwani, who starred in the Great Britain hockey team that won Olympic gold in 1988, has died at the age of 63, his family have announced.

Sherwani revealed in 2021 that had he been diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s in 2019, and his family continue to raise awareness of the condition. He represented Great Britain and England 94 times, culminating in scoring two goals in his team’s 3-1 final victory over West Germany in Seoul.

Pacific lawyer Julian Aguon to be honoured with Right Livelihood award for his work that led to ICJ ruling on climate harm

Six years ago, human rights lawyer Julian Aguon received a call from Vanuatu’s foreign affairs minister. The minister had an unusual request – he wanted Aguon to help develop a legal case on behalf of dozens of law students who were seeking climate justice from the world’s highest court.

Aguon, a Chamorro lawyer based in Guam, was excited by the opportunity and believed they could clear up legal ambiguities he says had “long hobbled the ability of the international community to respond effectively to the climate crisis.”