Documentary follows the baloeiros, who illegally build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles

An intriguing film set in Brazil, first shown last year at the CPH:DOX documentary festival in Copenhagen, in which expatriate Danish film-maker Sissel Morell Dargis takes a look at a unique grassroots cultural phenomenon: the baloeiros, the ballooners. These are groups of young men, as secretive and loyal to each other as Freemasons, who (illegally) build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles. Why? As kind of graffiti, or a community self-expression, or situationist artform, or just a subversive gesture of pure joie de vivre that does not need or admit of any explanation.

The baloeiros are harassed by the police, on the ostensible grounds that they are part of gang culture, and the authorities encourage local people to inform on those they suspect of building and transporting a balloon. But baloeiros are cheerfully committed to their own kind of public-access artistry. The balloons show colossal images of Sly Stallone and Luciano Pavarotti – aspirational role models and pop culture icons. As Dargis says: “A flying balloon belongs to everyone, even the police.”

British Muslims are too often acceptable only when they bake cakes or win medals. Now the nation has had a true insight into our faith

If anything is going to get me to turn on BBC One early on Eid morning, it’s Eid prayer being televised on a UK terrestrial channel for the first time in British broadcasting history. Held at Bradford Central Mosque, the groundbreaking coverage on Monday followed the entirety of the Eid prayer – starting with Qur’anic recitation, then a sermon in both English and Arabic and the congregational prayer itself, culminating in the customary eid mubarak embraces.

For Muslims like me, these scenes are part and parcel of every Eid. The keffiyeh-draped uncles sporting orange beards dyed with henna, some to emulate the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and some simply to hide their grey hairs; the children using the congregation as an assault course and scouting out the auntie who is handing out the best sweets; fancy clothes, henna-patterned palms and smiling faces; people high on both the spirituality of the just-passed holy month and probably too much sugar. This is the stuff Eid is made of, but watching it unfold on the nation’s main TV channel was a refreshing novelty – and I found it strangely affirming, as well as a little emotional, to witness.

Nadeine Asbali is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain, and a secondary school teacher in London

A New York librarian is discovered unconscious in a park with no memory, in a mystery that challenges consensual reality

We first meet Jane O in the consulting room of Henry Byrd, a New York psychiatrist. Jane, a 38-year-old librarian, is neat, quiet, outwardly unremarkable. She sits without saying anything, then gets up and leaves. Her visit has lasted just 14 minutes and Henry fears he will not see her again. He detects in her “a loneliness of the soul … [like] a pine tree growing alone on a great, wide plain”.

Their next encounter proves even stranger. Jane has been discovered unconscious in a public park with no memory of how she got there. A day of her life has gone missing and she is anxious about the welfare of her young son Caleb, who she failed to collect from nursery during her “blackout”. Terrified about how she might be judged for this memory lapse, she finally gives an account of the inexplicable event that brought her to Henry in the first place.

Owner ByteDance required to find non-Chinese buyer for video app’s American operations by Saturday

Donald Trump is preparing to consider a final proposal to decide the future of TikTok before a deadline for the app to find a non-Chinese buyer or face a US ban.

The US vice-president, JD Vance, the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, will meet in the Oval Office on Wednesday to discuss the issue, Reuters reported.

Liverpool could lose three of their best players this summer. Who should they target in the transfer window?

By WhoScored

Trent Alexander-Arnold is expected to leave for Real Madrid this summer, with Liverpool likely to dip into the market to secure a new right-back. They will need to sign a full-back capable of replicating Alexander-Arnold’s attacking threat, which will prove easier said than done. The 26-year-old has set up six goals and 51 shooting chances for teammates this season, making him one of the most creative defenders in the league.

Plus: a 972 score in Scrabble, the same stadium name across multiple grounds, and 48 league appearances in one season

• Mail us with your questions and answers

“The other day in their Women’s Champions League match against Manchester City, Chelsea fielded a back four of Bronze, Bright, Björn and Baltimore,” emails Asad Butt. “Are there other examples of this in defence, midfield or attack?”

Back in 2017, we answered a question regarding men’s teams fielding three or more players with the same first name, with five Johns starting in an England XI against Switzerland in 1948: John Aston, John Haines, John Hancocks, John (‘Jack’) Rowley and John (‘Jackie’) Milburn all featuring. As mentioned by Asad, Chelsea fielded a back four beginning with the same surname letter against Manchester City earlier this month (plus Aggie Beever-Jones in the first leg). But we can do better than that.

American authors of All Fours and Tell Me Everything are competing for the 30th award alongside four other novels highlighting ‘the importance of human connection’

American writers Miranda July and Elizabeth Strout have been shortlisted for the 30th Women’s prize for fiction alongside four debut authors.

The six titles in contention for the £30,000 prize all draw on “the importance of human connection” in different ways, said writer and judging chair Kit de Waal. “What is surprising and refreshing is to see so much humour, nuance and lightness employed by these novelists to shed light on challenging concepts.”

Two rice dishes from the Gulf: bottom-of-the-pot chicken and rice, AKA fega’ata, and a side or main of tomato, potato and saffron rice

The Gulf countries are known for their elaborate rice dishes, many of them inverted, so the bottom becomes the top and the top the bottom. Some of the best and most traditional ones are cooked over charcoal and palm wood in deep underground fire pits, so the smokiness takes over every grain. That isn’t practical in most homes, but I like to think we can still produce the most wonderful rice dishes with just simple ingredients and a lot of love.

Defence minister Israel Katz says large areas of the territory will be seized and added to the security zones of Israel

Airstrikes continued on Gaza on Wednesday morning after the Israeli defense minister announced that Israel intended to expand its war. In a statement, Israel Katz said the offensive was “expanding to crush and clean the area of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure and capture large areas that will be added to the security zones of the state of Israel.”

The move has been condemned by the Hostages Families Forum, who said it appeared that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government were making the return of 59 hostages still held in Gaza by Hamas “a secondary task” that had been “pushed to the bottom of the priority list.”

I wish success to the IDF soldiers who are fighting bravely and powerfully in Gaza for the return of the kidnapped and the defeat of Hamas. The goal of Operation “Strength and Sword” is first and foremost to increase pressure for the release of all the hostages in the face of Hamas’ refusal.

Expanding the operation this morning will increase the pressure on the Hamas murderers and also on the population in Gaza and advance the achievement of the sacred and important goal for all of us. I call on the residents of Gaza to act now to remove Hamas and return all the hostages. This is the only way to end the war.

The author of The Five, about the Ripper murders, turns her attention to another tragically misunderstood victim

In the canon of British true crime, the case of Dr Crippen routinely gets billed as the first “modern” murder. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly original about the doctor’s motives or methods: in January 1910 he slipped poison into his wife’s bedtime drink so that he could marry his secretary instead. Rather, it was the way that Crippen was caught that turned this run-of-the-mill suburban love triangle into an international cause célèbre.

Realising that it would only be a matter of time before his wife’s dismembered remains were discovered in the cellar of the marital home in north London, Crippen and his secretary Ethel Le Neve fled to Canada in disguise. Such was the media hoopla surrounding the case that the sharp-eyed captain of the SS Montrose quickly spotted the runaway lovers among his passengers. This was despite their unconvincing cover story of being “father and son” (the hand-holding and kissing gave the game away). Using the ship’s brand-new Marconi wireless, Capt Andrew Kendall alerted the British authorities that he had the infamous fugitives in his sight. Within hours, Insp Dew of Scotland Yard had boarded a faster ship from Liverpool with the intention of reaching Newfoundland first, so that he would be ready to arrest Dr Crippen and his companion when they made landfall. To a fascinated public, following the unfolding drama in the newspapers, it was as if time travel were being invented before their very eyes.

One of a series of photographs taken across India in which women, many of them abuse survivors, use traditional needlework to embellish portraits of themselves

This is a portrait of Praween Devi, a woman I met in 2019 through a local organisation while working on my project Nā́rī. I met her alongside other women who gather in their back yards to embroider together, sharing stories over cups of chai.

When I asked to take her photograph, she suggested the main hall of her home, mentioning its lack of decoration and how the walls were bare except for a framed image of flowers and, notably, a photograph of all the men in the house. Before we began, she brought in a rug from another room, subtly curating the space. As I composed the shot, I included the photograph of the men, wondering how she would choose to alter the image through embroidery.

A holiday park on the lesser-known Côte Orientale offers lower prices, activities for all ages, and secluded sandy beaches

I had held out as long as I could, but there was no getting out of it. The catcalls were rising; the baying, cackling audience of under-11s intoxicated by a combination of ice-cream sugar rushes and my obvious, clammy fear. It was day 14 of a two-week summer holiday, and our final afternoon in blissful 30C Corsican sunshine. I just needed one more chapter, lounging with my book, soaking in the last of the bone-warming sun slowly edging down towards the island’s dramatic mountainous spine.

But my calculating offspring had not forgotten ill-fated promises made on a previous evening, probably a little too deep into the second carafe. I was probably caught off-guard at Barny’s, a sensational sushi restaurant in the town of Ghisonaccia, enjoying our best meal of the holiday. They know when my defences are down; when I’m fully relaxed into holiday “yes” mode, and prime for being taken advantage of.

Photographer Sarah Mei Herman was 20 when her half-brother Jonathan was born – she spent the next two decades capturing intimate moments between him and their father

This new identity gave me confidence and the freedom to discover different relationships. It also helped me understand, more broadly, what I really want from life

I’ve never been a good liar. I can trace it back to my early school days, where my excuses for unfinished homework were never convincing, or I’d guiltily double back on even the smallest of fibs. With a knowing look, my mother would say: “Georgina …” She instilled a reverence for the truth, which was bound to the idea of doing the right thing. She wasn’t wrong: building trust is crucial in forming strong bonds in any relationship dynamic.

But, like most teenagers, I gently smudged the boundaries of truth, from concealing my bellybutton piercing, to “borrowing” my brother’s car to meet a boy I fancied. Notably, my untruths were told in the knowledge that they would probably later be discovered (although I hadn’t banked on the flat tyre) and, looking back, they were often linked with an early exploration of my sexual identity.

Wild 5.5 metre swells hammer the eastern NSW coastline, causing damage to key walkways and closing beaches

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Locals in Sydney’s east woke on Wednesday to discover some of the city’s most famous beaches and coastal walkways battered and damaged by huge overnight swells.

Bondi, Bronte, Clovelly and Cronulla beaches were among the areas smashed by 5.5 metre swells.

From Guy Burgess’s briefcase to microdots secreted in talc, an exhibition reveals remarkable items from the agency’s archives – and the extraordinary stories behind them

The agency that would become MI5, originally known as the Secret Service Bureau, employed just 17 staff in 1914; by the end of the first world war, the number working for Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence agency had swelled to 850, including a number of female administrators.

While valuable for managing the card index records, noted Edith Lomax, the controller of women staff in 1918, only women under the age of 30 should be recruited “on account of the very considerable strain that was thrown on [their] brains”.

Kilmer, who has died aged 65, made his name with Top Gun and The Doors – but his exceptional talents were often under-appreciated by the mainstream film industry

• Val Kilmer, star of Top Gun and The Doors, dies aged 65
• A life in pictures

Why do some movie careers take off … and others go a bit sideways? Val Kilmer was a smart actor, a looker, a terrific screen presence and in later years an under-appreciated comic performer. His finest hour as an actor came in Shane Black’s comedy action thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, when he was quite superb as the camp private investigator Gay Perry Shrike: a gloriously sleek, plump performance which was transparently – and outrageously – based on Tom Ford. If only Kilmer could have started his acting life with that bravura performance, and shown the world what he could do. Instead, and at a crucial stage in his career, he was trapped in the body and face of a staggeringly beautiful young man.

He could somehow never quite persuade Hollywood to accept him as a leading man and above-the-title player in the mould of his Top Gun contemporary Tom Cruise, who in 1986 played Pete “Maverick” Mitchell to Val Kilmer’s Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. As the 80s and 90s rolled by, Kilmer never ascended to the league of Cruise, Hanks, Clooney and Pitt. Medication for the illness he latterly suffered can’t have helped, and it is a great sadness that fate never allowed him to mature in the same way as, say, Kurt Russell.

China’s military says drills will continue in the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday and will use live fire

The US has accused China of putting the region’s security at risk after it launched a second day of military drills targeting Taiwan with a rehearsal blockade and attack.

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began the joint drills without notice on Tuesday morning, sending 76 aircraft and more than 20 Navy and Coast Guard ships, including the Shandong carrier group, to positions around Taiwan’s main island.

Bureau of Meteorology predicts flooding could continue for weeks as stock losses already estimated at over 150,000

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Queensland’s premier has declared “day one” of a recovery that will take years as the state prepares to wake to clear skies that should reveal the vast scale of its outback floods.

But despite forecasts the rain will pass for soaked central and south-west Queensland by Thursday, towns and homesteads could be cut off or at risk of flooding for weeks to come, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s senior meteorologist, Dean Narramore.

Democrats have appeared lame and leaderless for 72 days, but then Cory Booker stood up and did something

“Would the senator yield for a question?” asked Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.

Senator Cory Booker, who on a long day’s journey into night had turned himself into the fighter that many Democrats were yearning for, replied with a wry smile: “Chuck Schumer, it’s the only time in my life I can tell you no.”

A 19th-century zoologist found the ‘little salt dweller’, which could be a portal to the past – if only we could locate it again

Last February, with colleagues Gert and Philipp and my daughter Francesca, I made the long journey to an unremarkable city called Río Cuarto, east of the Argentinian Andes. We went in search of a worm of unusual distinction.

Why a worm? As humans, we naturally love the animals that are most familiar. But from a zoologist’s point of view, the vertebrates, from mammals and birds to frogs and fish, can be seen as variations on a single theme. We all have a head at one end (with skull, eyes and jaws); in the middle, a couple of pairs of limbs (a goldfish’s fins, or your arms and legs); and, holding all this together, a backbone ending in a tail.

More than half of Britain’s 59 native species are in long-term decline, UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme finds

Last summer was the fifth worst in nearly half a century for butterflies in Britain, according to the biggest scientific survey of insect populations in the world.

For the first time since scientific recording began in 1976, more than half of Britain’s 59 native species are in long-term decline.

President’s plans have rattled global stock markets and triggered heated rows with US’s largest trading partners

Donald Trump will announce his latest round of tariffs at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, threatening to unleash a global trade war on what he has dubbed “liberation day”.

Trump has rattled global stock markets, alarmed corporate executives and economists, and triggered heated rows with the US’s largest trading partners by announcing and delaying plans to impose tariffs on foreign imports several times since taking office.

After a decade of conflict, loss is constant, as is fear for our children’s future. But we are more than this

A decade of war in Yemen has left us in a place we never could have imagined. Our biggest worries were once exams, work and weddings. Today, we live with the weight of constant fear. You wake to the sound of explosions or the silence of grief, leave your home uncertain if you will return, look at your child and wonder what kind of future awaits.

Yet life goes on. We carry our losses, our broken hearts, our grief, and we continue. Ten years of war, ten years of mourning, of learning to survive with a lump in our hearts.

Carmaker reportedly has yet to announce plan for repairs after telling motorists not to charge their cars

Thousands of drivers have reportedly been left in limbo after warnings that their car could catch fire due to a battery defect.

Ford issued an urgent recall of its Kuga plug-in hybrid car in early March, warning drivers not to charge the battery because of a risk it might short-circuit while on the road. The problem could cause a loss of power or a fire, according to the recall notice. Four weeks later, the manufacturer has yet to announce a timescale for repairs and owners report that it is failing to respond to their requests for an update.

Known for his roles in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Tombstone, the prolific actor’s cause of death was pneumonia

• Remembering Val Kilmer: an ethereally handsome actor who evolved into droll self-awareness
• A life in pictures

Val Kilmer, the actor best known for his roles in Top Gun, Batman Forever and The Doors, has died at the age of 65.

His daughter Mercedes told the New York Times that the cause of death was pneumonia. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered, after treatment with chemotherapy and trachea surgery that had reduced his ability to speak and breathe.

Report finds police mistook girl for missing woman in blunder that has appalled political leaders

An 11-year-old girl was restrained, injected with anti-psychotic drugs and placed on a mental health ward after New Zealand police mistook her for a missing woman, a report found on Wednesday.

Health officials and police have scrambled to explain the mix-up, which has appalled political leaders and stoked outrage across the country.

Anti-Houthi air campaign, details of which were revealed in Signal scandal, has brought further destruction to country

A ramped-up US bombing campaign on Yemen has killed civilians and brought further destruction and uncertainty to the poorest country in the Middle East, compounding an already dire situation after Donald Trump cut aid, according to local people, humanitarian workers and rights groups.

“Now the rampant bombing has started, you never know which way things will go,” said Siddiq Khan, who works as a country director in Yemen for the aid charity Islamic Relief.

Residents of Sake – given 72 hours by M23 rebels to leave camps in Goma – find a ghost town with homes in ruins and no way to make a living

Congolese people forced to return to their home town from displacement camps when the M23 rebel group advanced on the city of Goma earlier this year have described scenes of devastation, with hundreds of homes destroyed by fighting and no opportunity to work or access aid.

As M23 entered Goma, a regional humanitarian hub that hosted hundreds of thousands of people displaced by previous rounds of fighting in the region, more than 100,000 people left camps around the city to return to their homes.

• Gabriel and Timber add to White and Calafiori blows
• Saka’s goal against Fulham was ‘a beautiful moment’

Mikel Arteta enjoyed a “beautiful” goalscoring comeback from Bukayo Saka in Arsenal’s 2-1 victory against ­Fulham in the Premier League but felt the gloss come off the evening as Gabriel Magalhães and Jurriën ­Timber sustained injuries.

Saka scored Arsenal’s second on 73 minutes, having come off the bench in the 66th minute for his first action since he ruptured his hamstring on 21 December. He ran over to the bench to celebrate with one of the club’s performance coaches, Sam Wilson.

• ‘I will not have the time. We have to get it right, fast’
• Manager put Harry Maguire up front as late substitute

Ruben Amorim bemoaned Manchester United’s toothless attack as Nottingham Forest completed a Premier League double over his side and reiterated he is under pressure to ensure his team “get it right fast”.

Forest enhanced their chances of qualifying for the Champions League with a third successive league win, courtesy of an extraordinary counterattack goal by the former United forward Anthony Elanga, while United are 13th and yet to record back-to-back wins in the division this season.

• Manager wants reaction at home in Wednesday’s derby
• Slot says PSG defeat cut deeper than cup final loss

Arne Slot told Liverpool players their work rate in the Carabao Cup final was not acceptable during talks aimed at reinforcing the standards that have underpinned their Premier League title pursuit.

Liverpool resume their title challenge with a Merseyside derby against Everton on Wednesday when Slot and his squad will be seeking to put a ­bruising spell behind them and edge closer to a 20th league champion­ship.

Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, spoke on the Senate floor for more than 25 hours, the longest speech ever given in Senate history. Starting his speech on Monday evening in Washington, vowing to remain on the Senate floor as long as he was 'physically able', Booker spoke in protest at what he called the 'grave and urgent' danger that Donald Trump's presidential administration poses to democracy and the American people. In 1957, Strom Thurmond, a Republican from South Carolina, gave an anti-civil rights speech that lasted 24 hours and 18 minutes

• Senate Republicans consider joining Democrats to oppose Trump over tariffs

Beware the backlash strategies used by Trump and Berlusconi. It is vital that the National Rally leader isn’t able to capitalise on this verdict

The verdict is in: the National Rally (NR) and its leader, Marine Le Pen, have been found to have employed fictitious European parliament assistants between 2004 and 2016. The fraudulent scheme enabled the misappropriation of around €2.9m in European funds, and Le Pen has now been barred from holding public office for five years. Could this mark the end for the National Rally? Highly unlikely – and the reason lies in the party’s strategy.

During the trial, Le Pen deliberately maintained silence in response to the allegations – a tactic some outlets dismissed as evidence of a weak defence, even questioning her credibility. Yet this quiet is far from a sign of weakness; it reflects a long-established approach that consistently shuns conventional manoeuvres in favour of an intentionally unpredictable stance.

Georgios Samaras is assistant professor of public policy at the Policy Institute, King’s College London

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.

I have two degrees, two books to my name and I write for the Guardian. Yet I spent time in care, live at home and struggle for money. Can Karl Marx help me make sense of myself?

I have been obsessed with and confused by social class all my life. Both of my grandparents grew up in Liverpool in the 1930s in traditionally working-class households. They were clever and conscientious and managed to earn scholarships to university, eventually becoming teachers. My parents have university degrees and own property; one of them is now a judge. To most people, all these things place me squarely and categorically in the middle class. But I was in special educational schools from the age of nine, spent part of my childhood in care, left education altogether at 14 and collected the dole until getting my first job in a cotton mill. All these things make me a dyed-in-the-wool prole.

And yet I have two degrees, I have written two books and I freelance for the Guardian – you can’t get more insufferably bourgeois than that. At the same time, I am pushing 40 and living with my mum because I can’t afford to rent anything larger than a broom cupboard, so I feel as though I am in class limbo – fitting in with everyone and no one at the same time.

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2022: In northern Norway, trees are rapidly taking over the tundra and threatening an ancient way of life that depends on snow and ice

By Ben Rawlence. Read by Christien Anholt

Liberal judge says victory is against ‘unprecedented attack on our democracy’ after defeating Brad Schimel in the most expensive judicial election in US history

Susan Crawford won the race for a seat on the Wisconsin supreme court on Tuesday, a major win for Democrats who had framed the race as a referendum on Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s popularity.

Crawford, a liberal judge from Dane county, defeated Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general and conservative judge from Waukesha county, after Musk and groups associated with the tech billionaire spent millions to boost his candidacy in what became the most expensive judicial contest in American history.

Republican defections would amount to rare public rebuke as concerns mount over impact of president’s plans

• US politics live – latest updates

On the eve of Donald Trump’s so-called “liberation day” for tariffs, a handful of Senate Republicans are debating whether to defy the president and join Democrats to stop the US from imposing levies on Canadian imports.

The resolution, offered by the Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, would terminate the emergency order that Trump is using to justify tariffs against Canada, citing the flow of fentanyl across the US’s northern border. The vote is largely symbolic – the House is not expected to take up the measure – but several defections would amount to a rare and notable rebuke of the president by his own party.

A 26-year-old man was rescued from hotel in capital Naypyidaw, long after disaster that has killed thousands

A man was pulled alive from the rubble of a hotel in Myanmar on Wednesday, five days after the country’s worst earthquake in a century flattened entire neighbourhoods and tore through temples, bridges and highways.

The 26-year-old was found alive in the ruins of the building in the capital, Naypyidaw, by a joint team of rescuers from Myanmar and Turkey after midnight, the fire service and the country’s ruling junta said.

The US-Canadian dual citizen speculates he may be ‘barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor’ after his European tour, after years of speaking against Trump

Neil Young has shared his concerns of being barred from the US after his European tour later this year, thanks to his outspoken critiques of Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, on his website Neil Young Archives, the 79-year-old musician – who has dual Canadian-American citizenship – wrote of his fears after the recent spate of people being detained and deported upon entering the US. These incidents have been credited to vague or unspecified visa issues, but have frequently affected individuals who have criticised the Trump administration either publicly or in messages on their phone read by immigration officers.