PC, PS5, Xbox; Don’t Nod
Friends gather in 2022 to relive a haunting 1995 summer in the woods in Don’t Nod’s fascinating two-parter with excellent period details

Ten years ago, Parisian studio Don’t Nod effectively crafted a new sub-genre of narrative adventure with its teen mystery Life Is Strange. Part thriller, part relationship drama, it used music, art and relatable characters to create a touching paean to unshakeable friendship. After a series of sequels, Don’t Nod’s Montreal studio has crafted a new tale about teenage relationships, split into two episodes, or Tapes, the first of which will doubtless have fans on tenterhooks for the concluding part.

It’s 1995 and introverted teen Swann is facing a final quiet summer alone in the rural town of Velvet Cove, Michigan, before her family moves to Vancouver. But in the parking lot of the local video store, she meets fellow 16-year-olds Nora, Autumn and Kat, and the four girls bond over their boredom and frustration with small-town life. Soon, they are inseparable, spending their days hiking in the nearby forests, making camp fires, confessing their secrets – until they discover a spooky shack hidden out among the trees and decide to make it their base. Here, they form riot grrrl band Bloom & Rage, channelling their dreams, desires and fears into fantasies of fame and revenge on shitty boys and repressive parents. But when their swirling emotions seem to awaken a supernatural presence in the woods, something terrible happens and the girls swear each other to a lifelong secret.

Young people have ditched capitalisation in favour of a writing style that reflects their values and attitudes to tradition. Will this change our language for ever?

When Maelle Kouman, 24, turned off auto-capitalisation on her phone as a teenager, she didn’t realise it would become a lifelong habit. “Lowercase feels like an ongoing conversational tone without a start or end,” she says. “It removes the serious tone certain texts can exude, even without trying.”

Ruweyda Hilowle, 24, has also turned her back on capitals. “I text in lowercase because it feels more relaxed,” she says. “When I start using proper capitalisation, it feels as if I’m trying to make a point stronger than it needs to be.”

Ditching DEI initiatives will curry favour in the Oval Office. It will also alienate the workforces bosses rely on

The mask has slipped and the gloves are off. A company which in 2022 boasted that it had exceeded its target, “spending $1.26 billion with US certified diverse suppliers”, is now ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

That company is Meta (formerly known as Facebook), whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced DEI dismantling shortly before he had a prominent seat at Donald Trump’s recent inauguration. Perhaps from that privileged spot he was able to imbibe some of the “masculine energy” he says he wants to see at work.

Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre. His latest book is Fair or Foul: the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition

Emma Hayes’ latest US squad lacks some of the biggest names from last summer’s Olympic triumph, but there are still plenty of intriguing selections

The Olympic gold medalists are back to competitive soccer, though the United States women’s national team might look a bit different than you remember them if the last match you saw was the final in Paris.

All three of the famed Triple Espresso frontline – Trinity Rodman, Mallory Swanson and Sophia Wilson (née Smith) – are sitting out this competition. The first woman to cost a $1m transfer fee, Naomi Girma, is also taking a break, as is Rose Lavelle. Goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher has retired from international competition, with Jane Campbell and Mandy McGlynn getting the opportunity to compete for the No 1 shirt.

Amazon’s hugely successful extreme competition series is the latest attempt to lure younger online viewers to TV

Beast Games, Amazon Prime Video’s reality competition series hosted by the YouTuber known as MrBeast, is not a well-made show. It is certainly an expensive show, something Mr Beast, the alter ego for 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson of Greenville, North Carolina, likes to frequently remind viewers. The series is a feat of scale shocking to audiences outside the realm of YouTube, and especially Donaldson’s fiefdom: 1,000 contestants, filmed by a system of 1,107 cameras, battling each other for a $5m cash prize – the largest in entertainment history, according to Donaldson. For the competition, Donaldson and his posse designed a warehouse war zone modeled on the Netflix dystopian series Squid Game, constructed a bespoke city and purchased a private island (also to be given away, along with a Lamborghini and other lavish prizes). Contestants eliminated in the first episode are dropped through trap doors to unseen depths; there is a pirate ship with cannons.

Yet for all the ostentatious displays of wealth, the show still looks terrible – garishly lit, frenetically edited, poorly structured, annoyingly loud and tackily designed. Many have pointed out that the show’s central conceit – broke Americans duking it out and playing psychological warfare for luxury prizes, many in the name of paying their bills – is as dystopian as the Netflix series it’s based on, a depressing spectacle of aggro-capitalism for our neo-Gilded Age times, with Donaldson as a self-styled Willy Wonka figure.

The scorned woman thriller deftly reimagined, preposterously gripping murders at an ice skating training camp - and a frantic search for a missing daughter

The protagonist of Chris Bridges’s Sick to Death (Avon) is not your run-of-the-mill thriller heroine. Emma is sick with a neurological condition that leaves her crushed by fatigue, prone to blackouts, unable to work. Hers is a disease “without concrete evidence, without affirmative scans or validated cause”, and she is constantly having to justify herself to her family – her mother, cruel stepfather Peter, stepsister and daughter – with whom she shares a tiny council house. “Everyone has their limits of what they can tolerate. It turns out that they couldn’t take me being ill. I can’t stand their lack of care. Why wouldn’t I become angry?” says Emma. When she falls for her handsome neighbour Adam, a doctor, her vague plans to get rid of Peter start to take shape – particularly when she learns more about Adam’s wife, Celeste, and the trouble Adam is in. “My illness doesn’t mean that I have to be relegated to a supporting role, the background character who dies at the end or fades away. I can even be the villain if I want to.” Bridges, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2020, writes in an author note that he had had enough of the “tired tropes” around sickness in fiction, from the “sickly sweet ill woman”, to the unwell person who is shown to be a fraud. Sick to Death turns these tropes on their head: Emma is a force to be reckoned with, and although the plot does become increasingly tangled, this is deliciously dark and twisted, and a lot of fun.

Fun is also at the heart of CL Pattison’s First to Fall (Headline) – if you’re prepared to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy this tale of murderous figure skaters. We open with a newspaper report about deaths “at the home of legendary German figure skater, Lukas Wolff” during an extreme blizzard. Wolff, we’re told, is famous “for a spectacular sequence of skating moves called ‘the Grim Reaper’”. Our heroine is Libby, a promising but poor young skater who jumps at the chance to go to Wolff’s training camp in the Bavarian forest. Wolff puts Libby and her fellow trainees through their paces, a harsh but brilliant taskmaster, until the blizzard descends, the mobile reception goes, and Libby’s fellow skaters start dying. Pattison is a great writer, Libby a brave and brilliant character, and it turns out that reading about tricky skating moves is more fun than I’d anticipated. Throw in a corker of an escape down an icy river and you’ve got yourself a winner.

I’m campaigning for legal protection for cleaner fish, because no one has done a proper assessment of the impact of removing them from Scottish reefs

I was in my 50s when I first became aware that cleaner fish existed, when I met a fisher who sold them to Scottish salmon farms. Each year, around the world, such farms use more than 60 million cleaner fish to eat – or “clean” – parasites off other fish. But the natural habitat of the cleaner fish is the reef.

On a reef, each cleaner fish has clients that visit them to have their parasites removed – sometimes much bigger fish or predators such as sharks and rays. I was intrigued to discover the cleaner fish would gently massage these clients with their fins and make sure they were comfortable.

Given a boost by Jordan Peele, this hyped ‘lost’ movie from Eugenio Mira about freaky goings-on at a hotel finally gets a proper release

This amusingly overwrought mystery-horror-thriller is both a new release and a reissue all at once. Originally made in 2004, and shown at a few genre-specific film festivals, it never secured distribution. Still, it found a way to get seen on alternative platforms like YouTube and homemade DVDs. Frustrated with the lack of appreciation for his work, director Eugenio Mira started sending copies of the film to directors he admired like Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo del Toro among others, exactly the right kind of guys who like to champion neglected cult classics. Meanwhile, lead actor Corey Feldman (once a child star in the likes of Stand By Me and The Goonies back in the 1980s) was conducting his own under-the-radar campaign on the film’s behalf. After it ended up getting shown via a scratchy master print at a screening hosted by director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Nope) and praised to the heavens, funds suddenly became available for a 4K restoration and a limited worldwide release. Now we can all see what the fuss is about.

Was it worth the wait? Yes and no. The Birthday takes its sweet time getting going as we meet Feldman’s nebbishy protagonist Norman Forrester in a hotel room, all gussied up in a prom-king tuxedo while he bickers with his bossy girlfriend Alison (Erica Prior). (The whole movie, by the way, takes place in this old-fashioned hotel, the action unfurling in real time, an adherence to Aristotelian notions of classical unity that used to be quite popular in indie and arthouse films but you don’t see so often any more). Nervous about meeting Alison’s posh family for the first time at a birthday party being held in the function room downstairs, pizza-parlour employee Norman must navigate between various awkward social interactions – not just with his partner’s family but at another do on another floor being thrown by a friend from high school (Dale Douma) attended by some beefy pharmaceutical bros. Meanwhile, there’s definitely something weird going on with the hotel employees with their deadpan expressions, toiling away in the background.

A new book looks back in history to see how presidents including Reagan and Eisenhower were affected by war

In his new book, Presidents at War, Steven M Gillon considers how the second world war shaped a generation of presidents, a span that takes in eight men – but not all of them served in uniform between 1941 and 1945.

Gillon likes to “ask people, ‘There are seven men who served in uniform in world war two and who went on to be president: who are they?’ And most people think Jimmy Carter did, and they forget Ronald Reagan.”

The Barcelona manager Hansi Flick defended the use of the video assistant referees (VAR) after Rayo Vallecano were left fuming over a number of controversial decisions during Monday’s match in La Liga.

The Barcelona striker Robert Lewandowski scored the winner from the penalty spot in the first-half following a long VAR review over a foul inside the box that the referee did not catch on first sight. Rayo also complained after they were denied a penalty and were further angered when they were denied an equaliser as they thought Jorge de Frutos’ strike was harshly ruled out in the 42nd minute.

Israeli forces remain in five points in Lebanon for what the IDF says is security purposes but Lebanese presidency says truce deal demands a full withdrawal

Back to some news coming out of Lebanon. The country’s new government will negotiate with the International Monetary Fund for a new programme and will work to deal with the country’s financial default and public debt, according a policy statement – seen by Reuters – that has been approved by the cabinet. It also said the government would work towards an economic recovery achieved primarily through the reform of the banking sector.

Lebanon is still grappling with a crippling economic crisis, now in its sixth year, which destroyed its state electricity sector and left many in poverty unable to access their savings. The local currency lost much of its value and commercial banks severely restricted foreign currency withdrawals.

European officials not part of discussions as Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns his country will not recognise peace deals made without Ukrainian participation

• See all our Ukraine war coverage

Back when Europe was still looking to America with hope, and not despair and confusion, a US musical perfectly captured the nature of the conversations we are going to see today:

No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens
But no one else is in the room where it happens

When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game
But you don’t get a win unless you play in the game
Oh, you get love for it
You get hate for it
But you get nothing if you
Wait for it

I wanna be (Where it happens)
I’ve got to be, I’ve got to be (I wanna be in the room where it happens)
In that room (The room where it happens)
In that big ol’ room (The room where it happens)

The chemical compounds that block UV rays may lead to bleaching of coral and a decrease in fish fertility

Urgent investigation is needed into the potential impact sunscreen is having on marine environments, according to a new report.

Sunscreens contain chemical compounds, known as pseudo persistent pollutants, which block the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays and can lead to bleaching and deformity in coral or a decrease in fish fertility.

It could be wildfires, a pandemic or a financial crisis. The super-rich will flee to their bunkers – the rest of us will have to fend for ourselves

Though we might find it hard to imagine, we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure.

There are several possible mechanisms. Let’s start with an obvious one: their assault on financial regulation. Trump’s appointee to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Russell Vought, has suspended all the agency’s activity, slashed its budget and could be pursuing Musk’s ambition to “delete” the bureau. The CFPB was established by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, to protect people from the predatory activity that helped trigger the crash. The signal to the financial sector could not be clearer: “Fill your boots, boys.” A financial crisis in the US would immediately become a global crisis.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Charred cabbage and crisp chorizo add depth of flavour to this creamy Spanish bean soup

Cabbage is often an afterthought, but here it takes centre stage by celebrating its natural sweetness and earthy flavour. When charred, cabbage develops a smoky depth that makes this soup wonderfully rich and comforting. In Spain, cabbage and chorizo have long been a winning combination found in all manner of hearty stews and rustic dishes. The addition of white beans not only makes this soup more satisfying and filling, but also gives it a gorgeous, creamy texture that helps to balance all the smoky notes going on. This is a simple and honest dish that’s full of warmth and great flavours.

• Attack Energy say complaint not taken seriously by FA
• Abu Muslim Farah beat them to title on goal difference

A club that missed out on winning Afghanistan’s top division on goal difference has disbanded in protest at what it says is the national federation’s failure to properly investigate allegations of match-fixing.

Attack Energy were dissolved after Abu Muslim Farah were crowned champions for the first time in a competition set up in 2021 when the Taliban regained power.

As immigration has increased, GDP has surged and unemployment has fallen to lowest level since 2008

From Madrid to Barcelona, restaurants and bars are brimming with people, and reservations have become essential for everything from fine dining to high-end hotels.

It’s a glimpse of how Spain has become Europe’s buzziest economy – named the world’s best by the Economist in 2024 – fuelled in part by what analysts have described as the government’s strikingly different approach to migration.

The latest issue of Eyeshot magazine celebrates the serendipity of everyday life – where construction site sunbathers and hovering cemetery angels defy logic

O’Donnell brings the spare intensity of her award-winning short stories to her first novel, a compulsive tale of one woman’s escape intensified by Dublin’s housing crisis

When it comes to escaping an abusive relationship, it’s said that leaving is the simple part; the real challenge is not returning. For Ciara Fay, pregnant and with her two small girls in tow, the difficulty is magnified by Dublin’s housing crisis, still one of the worst in Europe. Having finally bundled the kids into the car, along with a few impulsively grabbed necessities and the little cash she’s been able to save, hidden in a nappy, she’s faced with a stark question: where are they to go?

Nesting, Roisín O’Donnell’s compulsive debut novel, makes of Ciara’s bid for safety and freedom a minutely observed, heart-juddering drama. To the casual onlooker, husband Ryan is a well-dressed, mass-attending civil servant, but over the course of their five-year marriage he has subjected Ciara to relentless emotional abuse and more, isolating her from friends, preventing her from working, controlling their finances. “Things happen at night,” Ciara imagines saying out loud. “My body doesn’t feel like my own.”

The vice-president’s attack on European values signalled a historic realignment. Should the continent seek rapprochement or go its own way?

Forty women joined the first ‘Hostel Hoolie’ – an exhilarating programme of hillwalking, climbing, running and socialising in Scotland’s Caingorms

‘Do you run in the dark?” “How do you stop chafing?” “Does menopause affect your flexibility?” “What snacks do you take on the hill?” It’s the first night of the inaugural “Hostel Hoolie” – a women’s outdoor adventure weekend in Braemer in the Cairngorms – and in a living room packed with 40 guests, the conversation is flowing thick and fast.

Outside it’s wild and windy; there have been snow-closed roads and rural diversions, but the long journeys are quickly forgotten. Most women have come alone, though you wouldn’t know it.

This weekend is a collaboration between two outdoor adventure companies: women’s trail running and hillwalking specialist Girls on Hills, and The Adventure Syndicate, a trio of epic cyclists who put on madcap events on two wheels throughout the year. Both organisations frequently partner with Hostelling Scotland, and we’re staying at the newly reopened Braemar Youth Hostel. Adding to the fun is yoga teacher Lindsay Warrack, and a hired sauna from Stravaig Saunas set up in the woods outside the hostel.

How anti-immigration politics across the EU clashes with demographic reality

The rise of the far-right could speed up the population decline of Europe, projections show, creating economic shocks including slower growth and soaring costs from pensions and elderly care.

Anti-immigration politics is on the rise across the EU, as shown by the gains made by far-right parties in the 2024 elections. Meanwhile, the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is polling second in the run-up to the German federal election this month.

Three school friends discover their adult selves in this fast and flashy adventure debut from director Li Yang

“When you grow up, your heart dies,” is a famous line of dialogue from The Breakfast Club. In this barmy coming-of-age sci-fi a trio of teenagers find out that adulthood really does suck after sneezing themselves 20 years into the future. The movie is a directed by young Chinese film-maker Li Yang on a maximalist scale; it’s noisy and flashy, like a John Hughes movie made for TikTok – every scene sped up or slowed down, stylised with a comic-book animation or pinging with gamer special effects.

The year is 1999 on a planet that looks a lot like Earth (although days are only 12 hours long, so time really does move fast). Three 18-year-old school friends acquire the power to travel forward 20 years in time after falling into a lake polluted by toxic chemicals. High-school heartthrob Chengyong (Yang Song) is appalled to discover as an adult he has become a nasty thug involved in an organ trafficking racket. Zha (Ruoyun Zhang) grows up to be an investigative journalist hopelessly and miserably in love with a colleague who’s so badass she puts on ear plugs to fight: “I hate the sound of men screaming.” Only overweight bullied Pao Pao (Chenhao Li) is pleased with the future. His 38-year-old self is gym-sculpted and living with the most popular girl from high school – which is not without complications.

Lobbyists argued it was unfair for their industry to be treated the same as others as end product – oil and gas – inevitably produced emissions

Experts have accused the fossil fuel industry of seeking special treatment after lobbyists argued greenhouse gas emissions from oilfields should be treated differently to those from other industries.

The government is embroiled in a row over whether to allow a massive new oilfield, Rosebank, to go ahead, with some cabinet members arguing it could boost growth and others concerned it could make the goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 impossible to reach. Labour made a manifesto commitment to halt new North Sea licensing, but Rosebank and some other projects had already been licensed and were awaiting final approval when the party won the general election.

European headlines reflect the response to the diplomatic shockwaves sent by the US and splits among leaders on defence spending and how the war in Ukraine should end

• See all our Ukraine war coverage

Headlines in European newspapers were on Tuesday dominated by the emergency meeting of leaders in Paris after a week in which the US sidelined Europe and Ukraine from ceasefire negotiations and made it plain the US should not be relied upon for the region’s security.

Monday’s meeting came a day before diplomats from the US and Russia were due to meet in Saudi Arabia to discuss ending the war in Ukraine, but ended with little unity on crucial points, including the idea of sending a European peacekeeping force to the country.

Exclusive: More than 200 civil society groups say governments have failed to prevent planes from being used to violate international law

More than 200 organisations worldwide have called on nations involved in producing F-35 fighter jets to “immediately halt all arms transfers to Israel” amid fears they have failed to prevent the planes from being used to violate international law.

The letter, signed by 232 civil society organisations, was sent on Monday to government ministers in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the US and the UK as the war in Gaza reached 500 days.

Trump’s orders will cause hardship but it could allow small nations to face up to their dependence on a coercive oligarchy

For generations, many in the Caribbean grew up believing that the United States was the world’s great benefactor – a beacon of freedom, prosperity and boundless opportunity. Carefully cultivated through cinema, television, magazines, newspapers and radio, this perception reinforced the idea that the US was a land where hard work could secure a better life.

It was the dream destination for countless Caribbean migrants seeking to escape economic hardship and limited opportunities. But that illusion has crumbled, as historical distortions have become clear.

Exclusive: Property developer making trademark challenge claims the spy franchise is in mortal danger

“James Bond will not die on our watch,” the businessman challenging the ownership of the rights to 007’s name has said, claiming he is motivated by concerns about the future of the multibillion-pound global spy franchise.

The Guardian revealed on Friday that Josef Kleindienst, the Austrian property developer who is building a $5bn luxury resort complex called the Heart of Europe on six artificial islands off Dubai, is challenging the trademark ownership of the James Bond name in the UK and the European Union.

The Reform leader and Kemi Badenoch have struck the wrong alliances at the wrong time. Ukrainian sovereignty is a cause close to rightwing hearts

Timing is everything in politics. So when the leader of the opposition realised she was due to be making a speech heaping praise on Donald Trump, just as the president plunged her own country into a national security crisis, you might think even she would have hesitated.

But seemingly nothing can keep Kemi Badenoch from a culture war, not even the threat of an actual war. So, at a rightwing conference in London on Monday morning, she duly ripped into corporate diversity policies, climate activism, Keir Starmer taking the knee four and a half years ago, and various other imagined threats to western civilisation that are not forcing Britain to consider deploying troops against them, before concluding triumphantly that when people ask her what difference a change of leader makes, her answer is, “Take a look at President Trump.”

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Amid Elon Musk’s meddling on behalf of the AfD, the Linke is gaining strong support from women and young voters

As the world’s richest person meddles at will on behalf of the far right in the German election campaign, a leftist party calling for taxing billionaires out of existence has risen from the ashes in the race’s final stretch.

The far-left Linke, successor to the East German communists who built the Berlin Wall and just months ago on life support after an internal schism, has had a surprise resurgence before the 23 February poll.

One headteacher says diet, exercise and lack of water are factors in rise of cases

• Primary-age child constipation rates up 60% in England and Wales

Laxatives in the school medical cabinet, nappies in case of accidents, and hospital admissions for the most severe cases are being reported by teachers in England, suggesting that constipation is an increasing problem for their pupils.

While constipation is known to be a common problem in children, teachers say they are being asked to administer more laxatives like Movicol which have been prescribed by GPs to their pupils. In the most concerning cases it can lead to surgery, while in others school avoidance, because of embarrassment and discomfort.

There were landmark gay kisses, characters who returned from the dead and the biggest earrings ever seen on screen. As the soap turns 40, we round-up Walford’s weirdest, wildest and most heartbreaking scenes

‘Cor, stinks in here, dunnit?” At 7pm on 19 February 1985, we heard Simon May’s now-familiar theme tune and watched those wriggly River Thames titles for the first time – followed by that aromatic opening line of dialogue.

The BBC’s new soap opera was its attempt to make a mass-market, twice-weekly rival to ITV’s Coronation Street. Co-created by the producer Julia Smith and the writer Tony Holland, the gritty saga was set in a Victorian square in the fictional east London borough of Walford. Working titles for the show included Square Dance, Round the Houses and London Pride. They settled on EastEnders.

Songwriter, musician and actor, best known as a heartthrob in one of the biggest bands of the 1980s, Gary Kemp joins Grace for a brand new helping of Comfort Eating. Longtime Spandau Ballet fan Grace hears about the good old days: how Gary poured a tin of golden syrup over baby brother Martin Kemp’s head; how there were eels for dinner kept alive in his nan’s sink; and how hot fish and chips in their wrapper warped his first beloved T Rex record. Gary opens up about how he defiantly started eating meat again after his very public split from actor Sadie Frost, how his film career took him to Hollywood to act alongside Whitney Houston, who worked the catering tent nicely, and unwanted perishable gifts from affectionate fans at the height of Spandau Ballet fame

New episodes of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent will be released every Tuesday

When China stopped receiving the world’s waste, Turkey became Europe’s recycling hotspot. The problem is, most plastics can’t be recycled. And what remains are toxic heaps of trash

On a chilly evening in late 2016, a few miles from the Turkish city of Adana, a Kurdish farmer named İzzettin Akman was sitting on the second-floor balcony of his concrete ranch house when a construction truck backed up to the edge of his citrus groves, paused, then dumped a great load of rubbish along the roadside. Before he pulled away, the truck’s driver set a paper bag on fire and tossed it on top of the garbage, triggering an outpouring of flames blacker than the night sky into which they ascended. Akman leapt up, put on his sandals and sprinted out along his dirt driveway toward the crackling trash pile.

The trash, by the time Akman got to it, was a hissing mass of fire. Plastic is less flammable than wood or paper, though it emits more heat as it burns. It is at least as capable as either of getting swept up in a gust of wind and, in Akman’s case, setting alight about 50 acres of orange and lemon trees. “Son of a bitch!” Akman wheeled around, ran back home, located a bucket, then rushed back to the conflagration, which he began dousing with water lifted out of a stream by the edge of the road.

The Scottish first minister, John Swinney, was recently forced to deny plans to ban cats after a report from independent experts said the species was a threat to Scotland’s wildlife. In the UK, it is estimated that cats kill or bring home 57 million mammals and 27 million birds every year. Ian Sample hears from cat-owner Madeleine Finlay and the ecologist Prof Robbie McDonald about the best ways to reduce our feline companions’ impact on wildlife without affecting welfare

Clips: Good Morning Britain, Channel 5 News

Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod

Divers have documented evidence of what conservationists say is widespread coral bleaching at the Ningaloo Reef off Western Australia’s north-west coast. Waters off WA have been affected by a prolonged marine heatwave since September, with ocean temperatures 1.5C higher than average over a five-month period

• Large areas of WA’s Ningaloo corals could die in ‘weeks ahead’ after widespread bleaching documented

• Ellie Carpenter backs Kerr after ‘very challenging time for her’
• Star striker again absent from squad for She Believes Cup in US

Matildas vice-captain Ellie Carpenter has thrown her support behind Sam Kerr as the star forward turns her focus to recovering from a serious knee injury after a high-profile trial in the UK ended last week.

Kerr is nearing a return to playing with Chelsea after rupturing an anterior cruciate ligament more than a year ago but will miss the Matildas’ SheBelieves Cup campaign in the US this month.

• Melbourne-born player says ‘it’d be great’ to represent Boomers
• Dallas Mavericks guard must prove exceptional circumstances

His basketball skills have embarrassed the world’s best defences, but Dallas Mavericks guard Kyrie Irving faces imposing regulation, resistance and red tape before he will be allowed to represent Australia in international competition.

The former USA point guard revealed at the NBA All-Star Weekend in San Francisco over the weekend he is exploring how to switch allegiances to the country of his birth.

EU and Ukraine have been excluded from high-stakes negotiations between top Russian and US officials

• Europe live – latest updates

Volodymyr Zelenskyy reiterated that Ukraine would not recognise any peace agreements made without its participation, as top Russian and US officials prepare to meet in Saudi Arabia for high-stakes talks on the war in Ukraine.

“Ukraine regards any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognise … any agreements about us without us,” Zelenskyy said on Monday. His comments came as Russian and American officials travelled to Riyadh before Tuesday’s talks aimed at ending Moscow’s nearly three-year war in Ukraine, with Kyiv and Europe excluded from the negotiations.

The Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, Shaun Walker, talks through a seismic week, as the president sidelined Kyiv and other European capitals from negotiations on the ending the war and then called into question the future of US support for Europe’s security altogether

Last Monday, the Guardian’s central and eastern European correspondent, Shaun Walker, sat down in Kyiv to interview the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The conversation, Walker explains, was dominated by what Zelenskyy hoped to achieve in any upcoming talks on a ceasefire deal in Ukraine. The president outlined his red lines, too: that the US would have to be involved in some way in securing Ukrainian security once the fighting stopped; and that any negotiations over its future would have to involve Ukraine itself.