Live, rolling coverage of business, economics and financial markets as FTSE 100 oil company pays out $5.7bn to shareholders

Next has reported bumper sales between May and July, as sunnier UK weather and a disruptive hack at rival M&S sent customers flocking to the clothes and homewares retailer.

Full price sales at Next in the thirteen weeks to 26 July surged by 10.5%, which was £49m ahead of its guidance for the period for a 6.5% rise in takings.

In the UK, we believe that the over-performance was largely due to better than expected weather and trading disruption at a major competitor.

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The first episode of this comedy, about a woman who has to rebuild her life after her husband leaves, is bad – really bad. But it gets better, in a brain-melting sort of way …

Leanne Morgan came to standup relatively late. Born and raised in rural Tennessee, she got married at 26 to her college sweetheart and raised three children while the couple built a jewellery business together. It was the door-to-door selling she did and the Tupperware parties she hosted for extra income that first got her a local reputation for being funny and then led to bookings at comedy gigs. But it wasn’t until 2018, when she hired a social media relations team to promote clips of her act online and they went viral, that her comedy career took off and real fame beckoned. Two years ago, when she was 57, Netflix first broadcast her hour-long standup show I’m Every Woman, which she was performing on a 100-city tour. It shows the audience eating out of her hand as she takes them down the highways and byways of marital and menopausal life. Now she is the lead in a new Chuck Lorre-produced sitcom Leanne.

It is best to be upfront about these things and say that the opening episode is bad. Worse than you’ve just assumed when I said “bad.” Gone is the lightness of touch, the consummate ease, the subtly immaculate timing of her stage show; instead, we have a leaden script punctuated by a desperate laughter track, and a one-note performance by Morgan as “Leanne”, a menopausal woman closing in on 60, whose husband, Bill (Ryan Stiles), has just run off with a younger woman after 33 years of what his wife had thought was a perfectly happy marriage.

The writer-director defied expectations to turn the film Fargo into one of the best TV shows of the decade. Now he’s taking on an even bigger franchise. Can lightning strike twice?

When it was first announced in 2013, the thought of Fargo being reimagined as a TV miniseries felt practically sacrilegious. The 1996 neo-noir starring Frances McDormand as a kindly Minnesota police chief was a singular film that had won two Oscars. Surely its distinctive Coen brothers vibe would get shredded in the woodchipper of TV adaptation?

Back then, Noah Hawley, the screenwriter who took on the job, would have agreed. “It seemed like such a terrible idea,” he says via video call from a Long Island holiday bolthole. “Which is sort of why I liked it. The risk/reward was really high.”

Leanne has banned Wes’s hands-free hydrator because it’s a ‘turnoff’. You decide whose argument holds water

Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

It looks like a drip and reminds me of a hospital. If he needs a drink, a cup is more appropriate

I get that it was maybe insensitive to do it during sex, but I didn’t expect her to be so bothered

Exclusive: Survey of officers in England and Wales reveals symptoms so severe that some have had multiple surgeries

Musculoskeletal damage, crushed testicles and lumps in breasts are just some examples of the harm police officers say they experience because of ill-fitting, uncomfortable and low-quality uniforms.

Officers responding to the first national uniform and equipment survey across all 43 forces in England and Wales reported symptoms so severe that some had to have multiple operations.

Critics have described the one-sided deal as an admission of weakness, and a dark day for Europe. They are absolutely right

The Suez crisis in 1956 was a humiliating moment of truth for the UK. Faced with implacable opposition from the US, Anthony Eden’s government was forced to abandon military action in Egypt. Capitulation to American pressure was a recognition of Britain’s diminished status on the world stage.

The trade deal agreed between Washington and Brussels this week lacks the drama of troops being sent in to recapture one of the world’s key waterways, but it is the EU’s Suez moment all the same. What’s more, European politicians know as much.

Larry Elliott is a Guardian columnist

More than 40 years on from its first publication, this exploration of one woman’s thoughts and fantasies is a gem worthy of rediscovery

There’s no getting around it: Dreaming of Dead People is an extremely strange book. Born in 1941, Rosalind Belben was first published in the 1970s; this, her fourth novel, first came out in 1979. Her eighth and most recent, Our Horses in Egypt, won the James Tait Black award in 2007.

Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is the same age as Belben was at the time of writing, and she recalls a similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as “a study of the human figure”, and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is her own.

From Paris to Athens, we pick hidden havens to escape the summer heat and tourist crowds

El Capricho, on the outskirts of Madrid, is one of the city’s lesser-known parks. It was built in 1784 by the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, and visited by 18th-century artists such as Francisco de Goya. Its 17-hectare gardens were designed by Jean Baptiste Mulot, who also worked on the Petit Trianon gardens at the Palace of Versailles. They are in three sections: Italian, French and English landscape. The park also has a small lake, a labyrinth, a bandstand and a mansion. One fascinating feature is an underground bunker, built in 1937 during the Spanish civil war – there are free guided tours at weekends.
Open weekends and public holidays, 9am-9pm, April to September, then 9am-6.30pm, October to March, esmadrid.com

The artists for the 166th edition of the Royal Photographic Society’s international photography exhibition, the world’s longest-running photography exhibition, have been announced. The works will be on display at London’s Saatchi Gallery from 5 August to 18 September 2025

South Korea has experienced a record-breaking streak of ‘tropical nights’, while Japan saw its hottest day on record on Thursday

Authorities in Japan and South Korea have urged people to take precautions to prevent heatstroke, as the region reels from record-breaking temperatures and pressure on hospitals.

On Thursday, South Korea’s meteorological office said the country had experienced a record-breaking streak of “tropical nights” for 22 consecutive days this month.

State’s fish and wildlife department posted a video showing an adult female guarding a nest of eggs

Adult winter-run Chinook salmon have been spotted in northern California’s McCloud River for the first time in nearly a century, according to the California department of fish and wildlife (CDFW).

The salmon were confirmed to be seen near Ash Camp, tucked deep in the mountains of northern California where Hawkins creek flows into the McCloud River. A video posted by CDFW and taken by the Pacific states marine fisheries commission shows a female Chinook salmon guarding her nest of eggs on the river floor.

Newly appointed expedition botanist Matthew Jeffery feels ‘daunted’ but inspired by his unique globetrotting role collecting wild species

It was described as “the best job in the natural world”: an expedition botanist for Cambridge University Botanic Garden who would follow in the footsteps of Charles Darwin and go on plant-collecting adventures around the world.

Within days of the job advertisement going viral, six people had sent it to Matthew Jeffery and suggested he apply.

All Labour leaders live in the shadow of his postwar triumphs. But he wasn’t perfect – and didn’t face the challenges of today

We raised a glass last Saturday evening, the four of us, to toast the 80th anniversary of the 1945 Labour government. None was old enough to remember the event itself, but three of us were born while Clem Attlee was prime minister. In a funny way, I still take a kind of childish pride from that inheritance, as if a piece of that distant era somehow transferred itself by osmosis into my DNA. A photograph of Attlee in old age, taken and given to me by the late Sally Soames, is a treasured possession too.

Our little group was certainly not alone this summer in marking Attlee’s anniversary. There have been TV documentaries and, most substantially, David Runciman’s fascinating Postwar series on BBC Radio 4. All of these start – and Runciman’s series also ends – with the same enduringly astounding fact about Britain in 1945. Weeks after Winston Churchill had led the country to victory in the war in Europe, the voters rejected him by a landslide in favour of Attlee’s Labour.

Crisp Sardinian flatbreads, layered up with tomato and lasagne, make a fine stand-in for pasta

The process of making Sardinian pane carasau is similarly hypnotic to pitta: a disc of durum wheat dough is baked on a hot surface until it puffs up into an almost-ball. The reason for this puffing is the contrast between the rapidly drying surface of the dough and the evaporating water within the dough. The water turns into steam, causing the centre to balloon and the two layers to separate, creating a pocket and making the whole thing look a bit like an inflated whoopee cushion.

In order to make pane carasau, which in Sardinia is a domestic, artisan and industrial art, the puffed-up dough is swiftly separated into two thin discs with a sharp knife, then the discs are returned – possibly folded in half or quarters – to the oven to dry and toast for a second time according to the maker’s taste. Fortunately for us, there are hundreds of makers and the whole point of pane carasau, also known as carta di musica (music paper bread), is that it is brilliantly transportable and enduring: it lasts and lasts, which is why it’s one of my favourite things to have in the cupboard.

Ruling right-wing coalition votes to reverse ban, a move it believes will alleviate energy shortages and high prices

New Zealand’s government has voted to resume oil and gas exploration despite an outcry from the opposition and environmental groups who argue the reversal will lay waste to the country’s climate credentials.

In 2018, the Jacinda Ardern-led Labour government banned the granting of new offshore oil and gas exploration permits as part of its plan to transition toward a carbon-neutral future.

The lawyer and activist who helped lead the Australian civil rights movement ‘changed the lives of Aboriginal people across the nation’

• Warning: This article contains the names and images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died

Aboriginal lawyer and activist Paul Coe, who helped create the first Aboriginal Legal Service and championed the fight for land rights, has died aged 76.

The beloved community figure has been remembered as a giant of the land rights movement who “changed the lives of Aboriginal people across the nation”.

Music superstar announces 2014 courtroom drama This House of Grief as first Australian pick for global monthly book club

Helen Garner has praised Dua Lipa as a “serious and sensitive” interviewer after the British superstar added Garner’s nonfiction book This House of Grief to her monthly book club.

Garner’s 2014 courtroom drama will be the first Australian inclusion on the popular list, taking the Melbourne author’s work to the singer’s growing global audience.

Culture ministry had threatened legal action over planned auction of Piprahwa precious stones

The Indian government has secured the repatriation of ancient gem relics linked to the Buddha’s remains, two months after it halted their auction in Hong Kong.

In a post on X, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, said the return of the Piprahwa gems after 127 years was “a joyous day for our cultural heritage”.

The Victorians called it ‘pernicious vomiting of pregnancy’, but modern medicine has offered no end to the torture of hyperemesis gravidarum – until now

The year my body revolted, I read all 1,296 pages of War and Peace. I did very little else. My body had become stuck in a perpetual rinse cycle, wringing itself out day and night. Becalmed on the sofa, too nauseated to mindlessly scroll, I found an unlikely emergency exit in the bloody Battle of Borodino. In between puking jags, I would prop the book open on my chest, squint at the tiny text, and drift into a Tolstoy-induced torpor. It occurred to me that clouds of saltpetre and the booming of cannon weren’t ideal conditions for a growing baby, but I had to go somewhere.

At 6am my husband left for work and I began another gruelling day on the front; purging viscous pond slime from my empty stomach and keeping up with the Cossacks on their flanking march. In the throes of extreme pregnancy sickness, I found strange comfort in the privations of 19th-century military life; in soaked bandages and musket fire and impromptu field hospital amputations. And even, or especially, in the seeming endlessness of the book itself. For the months that I starved, I lugged my starving Russian comrades with me, from the upholstery-chemical stink of the sofa to the sweet bleach-stink of the bathroom to the seamy oily-skin stink of the bed. Perhaps it was a derangement of dehydration and hormones, but I felt real solidarity with my gangrenous friends on the front – far more than with anyone in a “felt cute” sundress on the What to Expect When You’re Expecting app.

Mick Jagger wanted to play Frank-N-Furter, Susan Sarandon got pneumonia, and the cast were wet and half-naked most of the time. Richard O’Brien, Barry Bostwick, Patricia Quinn and Nell Campbell tell the surprising, seductive story of cinema’s longest-running cult smash

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in cinemas in late 1975 with little fanfare, but the provocative musical, with its campy parody of sci-fi and horror B-movies, fabulous costumes and rollicking songs, dug its glittering heels in and refused to let go for the next 50 years.

The film was an adaptation of the hit musical The Rocky Horror Show, created by Richard O’Brien when he was an unemployed actor. The story of Dr Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), an alien, transvestite scientist, decked out like a bewitching glam rock god and hellbent on seducing everyone around him, galvanised audiences into participating in a way that had never been seen before.

Race against time to study HMS Northumberland as shifting sands expose part of well-preserved wreck off Kent

The British warship HMS Northumberland was built in 1679 as part of a wave of naval modernisation overseen by Samuel Pepys, a decade after he had stopped writing his celebrated diary and gone on to become the Royal Navy’s most senior administrator.

Twenty-four years later, after the ship had taken part in many of the major naval battles of its day, it was at the bottom of the North Sea, a victim of the Great Storm of 1703, one of the deadliest weather disasters in British history.

Tens of thousands have returned from Thailand since border tensions began, but jobs are becoming harder to find as factories cut hours amid order uncertainty

Tens of thousands of Cambodian migrant workers who have fled Thailand since border tensions began were already facing an uncertain future. Now, as they re-enter a precarious job market braced for US tariffs, they are struggling to find work.

A 36% export tax imposed on Cambodia by US President Donald Trump is due to come into effect on 1 August. Trade talks between the US and Cambodia resumed after a ceasefire was agreed with Thailand after five days of border fighting, but on the eve of the deadline for setting rates no new deal had been agreed.

The OSCE hasn’t stopped Putin’s aggression, but it has the potential to help broker a peace in Ukraine when the time is right

Vladimir Putin will probably never give up on his attempts to bring Ukraine into Russia – which is where it belongs, according to his warped view of history. Those who oppose him tend to fall out of windows or suffer other “accidents” or go to prison.

If he agrees to a ceasefire, it will be only to gain time to replenish his forces before trying again. All that would stop him then would be armed peacekeepers of some kind, as is already being discussed. If someone replaces him from his inner circle, there is unlikely to be change.

Kai Hebel is author of Britain, Détente, and the Helsinki CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe); he is assistant professor of international relations at Leiden University. Richard Davy is the author of Defrosting the Cold War and Beyond

The 40cm-long insect, named Acrophylla alta, weighs slightly less than a golf ball and may be the heaviest insect in Australia

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A newly discovered stick insect which weighs slightly less than a golf ball may be the heaviest insect in Australia, scientists say.

The 40cm-long new species, named Acrophylla alta, was found in the high altitudes of the Atherton tablelands in north Queensland – and scientists said the habitat could be part of the reason for its large size.