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1 min: Everton win a free kick on the right. They try to send it into the penalty area, but miss.

1 min: Peeeeep! Everton start the game, and Trossard is indeed playing at centre forward.

Israel says soldiers fired on ‘terrorists’ in ‘suspicious vehicles’ but footage shows clearly marked ambulances using flashing emergency lights

Mobile phone footage of the last moments of some of the 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers killed by Israeli forces in an incident in Gaza last month appears to contradict the version of events put forward by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The five-minute video, which the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Saturday was recovered from the phone of one of the men killed, appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle, and shows a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.

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I love that ITV still open up their National day coverage (as the Beeb used to) with the theme music from the 1984 film Champions based on the victory of Bob Champion and Aldaniti in 1981. I still haven’t seen the movie but I found it for a quid last year on DVD.

William Hill Handicap Hurdle (1.20pm) betting

Act Of Authority 4/1

Catch Him Derry 9/2

Billy Joyce 6/1

Timmy Tuesday 7/1

Rushmount 8/1

Park Of Kings 9/1

Double Powerful 12/1

Kamsinas 14/1

Barry Lyndon 20/1

Push The Button 22/1

25/1 BAR – 17 Runners

Full betting at Oddschecker

Pharma firms are developing drugs that avoid the brain’s opioid receptors to minimise the risks of dependence and overdoses, but not all experts are convinced

In January, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first new type of painkiller in more than two decades. The decision roused excitement across the healthcare sector for a key reason: the drug, which is called suzetrigine and sold under the brand name Journavx, is not an opioid.

Opioid painkillers such as oxycodone and morphine are still used to treat severe pain in the UK and US. But they come with an obvious downside: the risk of addiction.

EPA bids to change chemical risk evaluations, which could expose public to higher levels of PFAS and other pollutants

The Trump administration is quietly carrying out a plan that aims to kill hundreds of bans on highly toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” and other dangerous compounds in consumer goods.

The bans, largely at the state level, touch most facets of daily life, prohibiting everything from bisphenol in children’s products to mercury in personal care products to PFAS in food packaging and clothing.

Suit seeking $5m based on study finding controversial herbicide and lead in most cookies across 25 US states

Girl Scout cookies contain lead, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum and mercury at levels that often exceed regulators’ recommended limits, as well as concerning amounts of a toxic herbicide, a new class action lawsuit alleges.

The suit bases its allegations on a December 2024 study commissioned by the GMO Science and Moms Across America nonprofits that tested 25 cookies gathered from across several states, and found all contained at least four out of five of the heavy metals.

The Base, terrorist group founded in 2018, free to export violence abroad as Trump pulls FBI from pursuing far right

A US neo-Nazi terrorist group with a Russia-based leader is calling for targeted assassinations and attacks on the critical infrastructure of Ukraine in an effort to destabilize the country as it carries out ceasefire negotiations with the Kremlin.

The Base, which has a web of cells all over the world, was founded in 2018 and became the subject of a relentless FBI counter-terrorism investigation that led to several arrests and world governments officially designating it as a terrorist organization.

Missile attack on Kryvyi Rih left 61 injured including three-month-old baby and elderly residents

Eighteen people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian missile strike on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, a Ukrainian official said.

A further 61 people were injured in the attack on Kryvyi Rih on Friday, including a three-month-old baby and elderly residents, the regional governor, Serhii Lysak, said. Forty remain in hospital, including two children in critical condition and 17 in a serious condition.

Why is everything computerised, automated or impossible to turn off these days?

I believe, deep in my soul, that car companies’ number one goal in life is to ruin the experience of driving. I don’t have any direct evidence of this conspiracy to rob us of the pleasure of the open road, other than the cacophony of beeps, blips, bloops and blops that greet us in the latest models. Oh, and the screens. Every year, they try to find a new place to glue a touchscreen in a car, like Pizza Hut hunting for more orifices to stuff cheese into one of their pies.

Everything is computerized, automated or impossible to turn off. According to surveys of new-car buyers by the market research firm Strategic Vision, satisfaction with car controls plummeted by 23 percentage points in the last nine years. The whiz-bang gizmos foisted on the North American car buyer have devolved from the glorious, life-saving back-up camera to gesture controls that allow you to turn an invisible knob to crank up the volume on Espresso without touching a single thing in your vehicle.

Turn the volume up: circle your finger in a clockwise direction.

Turn the volume down: circle your finger in a counter-clockwise direction.

Accept a call: point to the BMW iDrive touchscreen.

Select navigation/custom setting: use two fingers to point to the touchscreen.

Change rearview camera angle: draw a circle using your forefinger and thumb.

Regret your life choices: look in the mirror for 10 seconds.

Graphic artist Rebecca Burke was on the trip of a lifetime. But as she tried to leave the US she was stopped, interrogated and branded an illegal alien by ICE. Now back home, she tells others thinking of going to Trump’s America: don’t do it

Just before the graphic artist Rebecca Burke left Seattle to travel to Vancouver, Canada, on 26 February, she posted an image of a rough comic to Instagram. “One part of travelling that I love is seeing glimpses of other lives,” read the bubble in the first panel, above sketches of cosy homes: crossword puzzle books, house plants, a lit candle, a steaming kettle on a gas stove. Burke had seen plenty of glimpses of other lives over the six weeks she had been backpacking in the US. She had been travelling on her own, staying on homestays free of charge in exchange for doing household chores, drawing as she went. For Burke, 28, it was absolute freedom.

Within hours of posting that drawing, Burke got to see a much darker side of life in America, and far more than a glimpse. When she tried to cross into Canada, Canadian border officials told her that her living arrangements meant she should be travelling on a work visa, not a tourist one. They sent her back to the US, where American officials classed her as an illegal alien. She was shackled and transported to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centre, where she was locked up for 19 days – even though she had money to pay for a flight home, and was desperate to leave the US.

Rather than an explosive split that many predicted, Musk instead appears set to keep close ties with Trump and retain influence on US politics

After months of exerting extraordinary power over the US government and becoming a mascot for Donald Trump’s new administration, the first signs that Elon Musk may shift away from his prominent role in the White House began to appear this week.

Both Trump and JD Vance have stated in interviews over the past few days that Musk would eventually leave the administration and the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) that he founded, their most direct statements yet on his tenure. Politico also reported on Wednesday that Trump had told members of his inner circle that the Tesla CEO would be departing in the coming weeks, though Musk called the article “fake news”. Musk is a “special government employee”, a designation that technically carries a 130-day term that, depending on how the administration chooses to log those days, could run out at the end of May. Vance made sure to say that Musk would remain a close “friend and adviser” to the administration even after leaving, further muddying the waters on how to mark Musk’s potential departure.

Centuries later, Jamaican Patwa and US Gullah Creole retain many Africanisms adopted from enslaved people

• Illustrations by Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba

In 2000, I won a writing competition that awakened me to the depth and variety of Caribbean languages. As the Jamaica finalist for the My Caribbean essay competition, I joined more than 20 children from the region to form the youth delegation of the 24th Caribbean Tourism Conference in Bridgetown, Barbados.

I spent days with peers from islands that, until then, I did not know existed, such as the small but brilliant Sint Eustatius and Saba in the Leeward Islands. What I remember most are the simple greetings and phrases the other children and I taught one another in our different Creoles. Every child had an official language they wrote in to win their national competition – English, French, Dutch etc – but as soon as we were comfortable enough, we ditched those and shared as much as we could in our everyday tongues.

US and Europe criticised by head of Norwegian Refugee Council for ‘neglect’ of people living ‘subhuman’ existence

World leaders should be ashamed of their neglect of people whose lives were “hanging by a thread” at a time of surging violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the international charity leader Jan Egeland has said.

In a stinging attack on aid cuts and the “nationalistic winds” blowing across Europe and the US, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s head told the Guardian how people were living out in the open, in overcrowded, unsanitary displacement encampments around the city of Goma, where 1.2 million people have had to flee from their homes as the M23 rebels advanced through the DRC’s North and South Kivu provinces.

Doug and Maggie feel as if they’ve had a relationship reset and are communicating more openly about sex
How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

It was like we’d pressed a reset button on our relationship

The standup comedian and broadcaster on realising he was funny, Parenting Hell and avoiding the spotlight

Born in south London in 1986, Rob Beckett is a comedian and broadcaster. He started on the standup circuit in 2009, performing at the Edinburgh fringe in 2012 with his show Rob Beckett’s Summer Holiday. Television quickly beckoned – after hosting ITV2’s I’m a Celebrity spin-off series, he became a panel-show regular, appearing on programmes including 8 Out of 10 Cats and Taskmaster, as well as the travel series Rob & Romesh vs … . In 2020, he launched the hit podcast Parenting Hell with comedian Josh Widdicombe. He is married and has two daughters. His current tour, Giraffe, continues until April 2026.

That’s my dad in the background but, aside from that, I’ve got no other details. It might have been on holiday, possibly at my dad’s mate’s place in Spain. We always went there – he gave it to us for cheap, but I’m not sure why. You don’t ask questions in my family.

The standup used to joke about not having kids, but then she had IVF and found herself an ‘eroded’ mother of two. Now she’s back with a show about motherhood in her 40s – but don’t expect any cute parenting stories

My favourite Sara Pascoe joke is her imaginary riposte to people asking if she’s going to have kids. They mean well, these prying parents – they just don’t want her to miss out on a life-enhancing experience. The thing is, the comedian has had some life-enhancing experiences of her own. “But I have never, ever said to anybody: ‘Oh, have you been on QI? Ahhh, you should go on QI!’” she insists, settling into her archly patronising pep talk. “No I didn’t think I wanted to be on QI until I was on QI, and then it was like I looked back and my entire life had been leading up to me being on QI. Yes it’s very tiring being on QI, but it’s so worth it. I just wouldn’t want you to leave it too late and they’ll have stopped making it!”

As a skewering of smug, insensitive acquaintances foisting their own ideas of fulfilment on a child-free woman in her 30s, it’s a gratifyingly clever joke. In reality, however, Pascoe wasn’t laughing. During the period she was doing that routine on stage, she was actually “quite sad about not being able to have children”, she says over coffee in a north London cafe near her home. She’d long suspected she had fertility issues after unsuccessfully trying for a baby with an ex-boyfriend.

Uefa’s president could yet do a volte-face and run for office in 2026 as he enjoys success of new-look Champions League

As Uefa’s delegates filed into a long, low-ceilinged room it was tempting to wonder what difference a year makes. Sava Centar in Belgrade places function ahead of form and there was little of the Parisian grandeur that adorned the governing body’s annual congress in 2024. Nor were there as many fireworks on display, although plenty of the issues that will define European football over the second half of this decade flickered persistently around the edges.

Last year’s event turned into the Aleksander Ceferin show, the Uefa president drawing a scandalised reaction by pushing through an extension to the term limits for his role before pulling the rug away by announcing he would step down in 2027 anyway. Uefa had already been rocked by the acrimonious departure of its head of football, Zvonimir Boban, and the sense was that internal posturing risked diverting focus from the real structural and existential concerns the sport continues to face.

Digital technology reveals ‘incredibly modern’ royal who lived 3,500 years ago in kingdom associated with Helen of Troy

She lived 3,500 years ago – but facial reconstruction technology has brought a woman from late bronze age Mycenae back to life.

The woman was in her mid-30s when she was buried in a royal cemetery between the 16th and 17th centuries BC. The site was uncovered in the 1950s on the Greek mainland at Mycenae, the legendary seat of Homer’s King Agamemnon.

Edinburgh University report authors say dietary changes could benefit women living with the disease

Dietary changes could reduce the pain of endometriosis for half of those living with the disease, a new study suggests. The largest international survey ever conducted on diet and endometriosis, involving 2,599 people, found 45% of those who stopped eating gluten and 45% of those who cut out dairy reported experiencing an improvement in their pain.

When women cut down on coffee or other caffeine in their diet, 43% said their pain was reduced, while 53% of women who cut back on alcohol reported the same.

More than 1,000 ‘Hands Off’ protests planned against ‘all-out assault on our government, economy and basic rights’

Left-leaning organizations say that more than 500,000 people are expected to take to the streets to protest in Washington DC, Florida and elsewhere around the country on Saturday to oppose Donald Trump’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda”.

MoveOn, one of the organizations planning the day of protest they’re calling Hands Off along with dozens of labor, environmental and other progressive groups, said that more than 1,000 protests are planned across the US, including at state capitols.

Congressman tells the Guardian Trump is exploiting fight against antisemitism as a ruse to stamp his will on schools

Jerry Nadler, the most senior Jewish member of the House of Representatives, has accused Donald Trump of being a “would-be dictator” who is cynically exploiting the fight against antisemitism as a ruse to stamp his will on top-flight universities.

In an interview with the Guardian, the New York congressman lashed out against the president for using genuine dangers confronting American Jews as a guise to justify his attacks on Columbia, Harvard and other universities. “Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism, this is just an expression of his authoritarianism,” he said.

Paula White, a millionaire televangelist who speaks in tongues, was criticized for an alleged cash-for-blessings scheme

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to “protect religious liberty”, and two weeks after his inauguration he acted: creating a “White House faith office”, which will be led by Paula White, a millionaire televangelist known to speak in tongues who called the Black Lives Matter movement the “Antichrist” and once encouraged people to buy “resurrection seeds” for $1,114.

The move brought renewed focus on White, Trump’s longtime spiritual guru. And for White, not all of it will be welcome.

The US president’s tariffs are vengeful and impetuous – and will have immense costs with no clear goal

With the huge and painful tariffs that Donald Trump announced on Thursday, “Tariff Man” is acting like a paranoid 12-year-old bully who is convinced that everyone has wronged him, and he wants revenge. But the president’s instrument of revenge – massive tariffs – is going to do serious damage to the US and global economies. Stock market investors are convinced that’s the case, with Wall Street and world stock markets losing trillions of dollars in value in recent days as a result of Trump’s obsession.

The president has escalated his risky, vengeful trade war even though the US economy was in strong shape when he took office – the jobless rate was just 4.1%, inflation was below 3% and US economic growth was the strongest in the industrial world, with its stock market at record levels. So it’s unclear whether the US economy needed the shock treatment that Trump is inflicting. The price increases resulting from his tariffs – which are a tax on imports – will cost the average American family $3,800 a year, according to the Budget Lab at Yale.

When Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, lawyer Philippe Sands was part of the prosecution. As his book about the case comes out, he talks to the Colombian novelist about literature and justice

What do law and literature have in common? Do they represent similar impulses towards understanding human motives and behaviour, or are they fundamentally different systems? In his new book, 38 Londres Street, lawyer and writer Philippe Sands revisits the attempts to extradite and prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, beginning in 1998, in which he was involved. He also finds himself on the trail of Walther Rauff, a former SS officer featured in Sands’s award-winning book East West Street, who went on to seek refuge in Chile, later becoming involved in the Pinochet regime’s arrangements for the detention, torture and murder of its opponents. The Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who trained as a lawyer but decided instead to write journalism and fiction, has addressed political violence and its legacy throughout his work, including in his acclaimed novel The Shape of the Ruins. The two friends met to discuss excavating the past, the limits of law and the potential of art.

Philippe Sands: We’ve known each other for quite a few years, and you’re one of those rare people who straddles the worlds that I’ve fallen into: you understand the world of law with your legal qualification, and understand far better than I do the world of literature. But you’re also from the region I’m writing about. Having been to Chile for this book six or seven times, and about to head off again, I’m conscious of being an outsider. It’s a Chilean story, and this Brit has stumbled across it in various ways. It’s a local story for you.

• 35-year-old not offered a new contract
• Forward won 33 trophies at Bavarian club

The Bayern Munich favourite Thomas Müller will leave the German giants at the end of the season after 25 trophy-laden years because he was not offered another contract, he said on Saturday.

In a message on social media, the 35-year-old , who started as a youth player and won a record 12 league crowns with Bayern – the most by any Bundesliga player – said he would have liked to stay on.

Before she became a mother, Samantha Ellis secretly judged other parents who let their children subsist on white bread and pesto-pasta. And when her son was born she couldn’t wait to share the Iraqi Jewish food of her ancestors. Unfortunately, he had other ideas …

My family takes food very seriously. So seriously that when my mother’s family left Iraq in 1971, limited to 20kg of luggage each, they found room for not one but two rolling pins. The truth is that, having used the rolling pins, I think they were right. Born in England, I grew up on my father’s stories, too, of going to a Baghdad street stall to buy hot samoon, Iraqi bread shaped like a teardrop, with a puffy middle and a crunchy crust, with amba (mango pickle) oozing out of it. But he left Baghdad even earlier, in 1951, in a mass airlift along with most of Iraq’s Jews. I grew up in Britain, homesick for a place I’ve never been to, and will probably never see. There are now just three Jews left in Iraq.

Scattered across the world, we didn’t have much from Iraq, but we did have the recipes, which we clung to like a life raft. We didn’t just eat together but often cooked together, too. One of my earliest, happiest memories is of sitting under the Formica table in my grandmother’s kitchen at maybe three or four, and pulling the stalks off parsley so my mother and aunt could make tabbouleh. When, decades later, I was finally about to become a mother myself, I was excited about sharing Iraqi Jewish food with my son. Maybe he’d even want to be my tiny sous chef! Maybe he’d like tabbouleh as much as I did. We make it vivid green with barely any bulgur in it (I was confused when I first saw the pots of beige in the supermarket because they looked nothing like the salad I’d grown up with). Maybe he’d love ingriyi (fried aubergine slices layered with fried lamb or beef and sliced tomato, and simmered with turmeric, lemon juice and date syrup); and tbeet, which just means “overnight” because it was an ingenious dish developed to get around the restrictions on lighting fires or turning on ovens on Shabbat. The flame was kept very low, and chicken and rice were cooked through the night with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, with eggs tucked around the chicken till they went a deep brown. I imagined if I made him kitchri, rice with red lentils, garlic, turmeric, cumin, tomato, melting onions, so much butter and melting slabs of halloumi, and thick yoghurt spooned over the top, he’d say ashteedek (long live your hands) in our language, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, and understand me when I replied awafi (to your health).

Anglers who campaigned for protected area off Oban and Mull are providing key data on critically endangered species

Sea anglers will tell you that catching and landing a large flapper skate is the equivalent of running a four-minute mile. The fish can weigh 100kg and stretch the length of a dinner table.

The first thing anglers will reach for when they land one is their camera or mobile phone, to capture the unique pattern of white spots ranged across each skate’s mottled brown back.

Alarm over ‘the health of the nation’s children’ follows federal workforce cuts by health secretary RFK Jr

Multiple maternal and child health programs have been eliminated or hollowed out as part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) layoffs, prompting alarm and disbelief among advocates working to make Americans healthier.

The fear and anxiety come as a full accounting of the cuts remains elusive. Federal health officials have released only broad descriptions of changes to be made, rather than a detailed accounting of the programs and departments being eviscerated.

The junta’s poor emergency response leaves people fearing prolonged chaos, despite the relentless propaganda

For seven painful days, Hnin has waited for news. Her two daughters, two and seven years old, her husband and their domestic worker, were all inside a six-storey hotel in Mandalay, central Myanmar, when it collapsed.

Delays to search operations have added to her agony. Hnin rushed around the devastated city, where communication lines were barely functioning, to buy head-torches and fuel for poorly equipped teams. A hotel manager refused to allow the use of a digger, fearing the building would collapse. Days passed before Chinese and Russian rescue teams arrived.

A lone vegetable stranded in a world of plastic transformed a trip to the supermarket into a photo opportunity

Ieva Gaile didn’t expect to take a photo on her trip to the supermarket. The lawyer, who lives in Vilnius, Lithuania, was working from home on the day and had popped next door for some lunch. When she spotted the errant cabbage placed atop a towering stack of water-bottle pallets, her reaction was instant.

“Since I began photography I’ve developed a habit of always observing my environment for interesting shots, andI thought it was beautiful visually,” Gaile says of this image, shortlisted in the Object category at the Sony World Photography awards 2025. “I liked the play of colours and repetition of green, and the contrast of textures: the wrinkled and imperfect surface of the cabbage against the synthetic shine of the plastic bottles.”

The actor on how an aside about sex became big news, getting let off for weed, and crying at adverts

Born in Edinburgh, Mark Bonnar, 56, studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. In 2017, he won a best actor Bafta Scotland for his role in Unforgotten, and his other TV work spans Line of Duty, Catastrophe and the Netflix series Department Q, which is released in May. His films include Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Operation Mincemeat and Last Breath, which is out now. He is married to actor Lucy Gaskell, has two children and lives in Hertfordshire.

What is your greatest fear?
That we’re all going to hell in a handcart and Trump is driving.

Malian singer and guitarist, who sold millions of albums with his wife, Mariam Doumbia, had been ill for a while, say family

The guitarist and singer Amadou Bagayoko of the Malian music duo Amadou & Mariam has died aged 70 after an illness, his family said, paying tribute to the Grammy-nominated blind musician.

Amadou and his wife, Mariam Doumbia, formed a group whose blend of traditional Malian music with rock guitars and western blues sold millions of albums across the world.

As Neige Sinno’s critically acclaimed memoir about being sexually abused by her stepfather is published in English, she reveals how writing her story has helped set her free

When it came out in France, Neige Sinno’s heart-stopping Sad Tiger, which pieces together in fragments the lifelong impact of the sexual abuse of a girl in the French Alps by her mountain guide stepfather, blew the literary world apart. Its experimental form of creative nonfiction – a memoir that ditches linear narrative, yet races along like a thriller – was hailed as groundbreaking, the book an instant classic. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, won a swathe of prizes and became one of the most borrowed books in libraries across France when it was published in 2023. The Nobel prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux was so impressed that she made a public appearance in conversation with Sinno, saying: “Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it.”

Now published in English, Sad Tiger – the title is a reference to William Blake’s poem The Tyger – veers between the little girl’s memories of her stepfather blasting French rocker Johnny Hallyday from a cassette player as the hippy family restores a house in an Alpine village, and his attacks on her, during a period when he is scratching a living taking on part-time jobs. Sinno combines the inner world of an abuse survivor with a portrait of life in the French mountains. The book is also a study in society’s denial. The stepfather eventually faces trial, serves a prison sentence, remarries and has four more children after his release.

The Harry Potter and Death of Stalin actor has found fame with a new audience in hit TV show

He has worked in the industry for more than three decades, and appeared in blockbusters, but for a long time Jason Isaacs had managed to eschew the limelight.

Then came The White Lotus, and suddenly the 61-year-old Liverpudlian became an internet sensation. He presented an award at the Brits, and was part of ITV’s Oscars coverage last month, bemusing viewers with his refreshing honesty. “Whoever at ITV decided to get Jason Isaacs as part of their coverage is a genius,” one fan commented.

Replica of world-famous train aimed at reviving glamour of the classic version makes debut journey from Rome

A replica of the world-famous Orient Express made its debut journey from Rome on Friday, transporting well-heeled passengers into the heart of Tuscany’s wine region.

La Dolce Vita Orient Express, the first Italian-made luxury train, is aimed at reviving the glamour of the classic version as well as the romanticised notion of Italy’s dolce vita, or “sweet life”, all the while promoting slow tourism.

Woman who worked with western governments in her home country before fleeing the Taliban told to return

An Afghan woman who risked her life to defend human rights in her home country before fleeing to the UK has been told by the Home Office it is safe for her to return after officials rejected her asylum claim.

Mina (not her real name) worked for western government-backed projects and was involved in training and mentoring women across Afghanistan, which left her in grave danger even before the Taliban took over in 2021.

Our industry must reckon with how we’ve trivialised activism by turning it into comms strategy – only to abandon it

Nobody likes to admit we need marketing, but the discipline has always been necessary to match people with the products and services that fulfil their needs and desires.

It started simply enough, with us focusing primarily on brands’ features and tangible benefits. But as consumer society evolved, we moved on to symbolic benefits: identities, lifestyles. Finally, we began selling values: an ideology that hit its zenith between 2015 and 2022 in the era of “brand purpose”.

Eugene Healey is brand strategy consultant, educator and creator

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.

• Red Bull driver’s ‘great little surprise’ in unpredictable car
• McLaren’s Norris beaten by one hundredth of a second

Max Verstappen delivered a salutary lesson to anyone who might consider his Formula One world championship defence a forlorn hope with one of the best qualifying performances of his career in claiming pole for the Japanese Grand Prix.

In a car that is a handful to drive, at a circuit where precision and total commitment go hand in hand, Verstappen wrestled the beast through what was no less than a champion’s drive.

A tom-yum style bowl bursting with aromatic Thai flavours

This is probably a middle-aged thing, but it only takes something small to make my day. Usually, that’s bumping into a friend on the school run, spotting a cheeky green parakeet in the tree-tops or lighting a few candles at dinner in the evening. When it comes to food and today’s recipe, however, I rather childishly like to say the words “noodle soup” out loud, as if my mouth is pursing in anticipation of the noodles. I love using a whole butternut squash in a dish – that is where a cook’s satisfaction lies. And, for my sins, I adore slurping the noodles out of the bowl.

One clip has been watched 25m times but a Netflix documentary shows him in his childhood bedroom with Wimbledon trophy

There’s a Carlos Alcaraz clip on YouTube that has to date been viewed 25m times. The whole thing is a seven-second loop of him catching a ball on his racket at Wimbledon. Currently it also has well over a thousand comments, engaged in a constantly shifting battle for most-liked, most-approved, most gushingly enthused-over.

You probably shouldn’t click on it because it is also addictive, a perfect moment of perfect Alcaraz, another endlessly replicating needle-prod of pleasure into your overstimulated brain.

Amid club’s scoring struggles we run through the centre-forwards, from Rooney to Zirkzee, since Alex Ferguson’s exit

Centre-forward only statistics: Games 63 Goals 26 Assists 14 Mins 5,196

The recent Bridget Jones sequel, a big hit at the UK box office, celebrates the romance between its middle-aged star and her gen-Z lover, but from Babygirl to The Mother, how do women on screen with younger partners usually fare?

At this admittedly early stage of 2025, with all the noisy blockbusters of summer still ahead of us, the UK’s box-office report tells a nostalgic story. The year’s highest-grossing new release, raking in more than double its nearest rival, Captain America, is Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – a sequel in which its American distributors had so little confidence that they booted it straight to streaming. Brits who missed it in cinemas can finally access it on VOD this week. The film itself is something of a pleasant surprise too: a tender-hearted, flannel-cosy romcom – easily the best in the series since the first, 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary – now suffused with the gentle melancholy of middle age.

Age, of course, is a critical concern of this instalment, which offers Renée Zellweger’s ever-plucky Bridget, now a widowed mother of two, a pair of romantic choices: Chiwetel Ejiofor’s nice, matchingly middle-aged schoolteacher, and Leo Woodall’s flashier gen-Z Lothario. You can probably guess who prevails, though the film seems pleasingly amenable to either option: the possibility of dating across a generation or two isn’t played for shaming comedy. In that respect, this otherwise familiar bit of comfort viewing is relatively fresh.

We forced the government to take some action, but still it closes it eyes to the impending climate collapse. A new method of confrontation is needed

• Indigo Rumbelow is co-founder of Just Stop Oil. She is currently on remand in HMP Styal

After three years, Just Stop Oil is ending its campaign of non-violent civil disruption: we are hanging up the high-vis. But this does not mean the resistance is over. Sitting here in a prison cell in HMP Styal, I am still demanding an end to oil and gas. Every prison key that rattles, every door that is bolted shut, every letter that is read by the prison staff – it all reminds me that 15 Just Stop Oil supporters are currently locked up for refusing to obey governments whose climate inaction is frankly murderous.

There has been some progress. The Labour government was elected last year on a manifesto including the pledge that they will “not issue new licences to explore new [oil and gas] fields”. This is a victory for civil resistance and the climate movement. To everyone who donned an orange high-vis, who leafleted on the streets, who got arrested for their actions, ran a social media page, gave a talk in a community centre, or answered a phone call from someone in custody, I say: you are part of this change.

Indigo Rumbelow is co-founder of Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain. She is currently on remand in HMP Styal having been found guilty of conspiracy to intentionally cause a public nuisance. She is due to be sentenced on 23 May at Minshull Street crown court in Manchester

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.

This exhilarating debut about working-class girls growing up in the hope-starved atmosphere of a small northern English city feels essential

Sometimes you need to leave a place before you can write about it, and Colwill Brown’s Doncaster from the late 90s to 2015 is that place. This lacerating, exhilarating debut novel, written almost entirely in South Yorkshire dialect, spans nearly 20 years in the lives of its protagonists Kel, Shaz and Rach, from the Spice Girls to the drug spice. It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will probably read nothing else like it this year.

“Remember when we thought Donny wut whole world? Before we knew we wa Northern, when we seemed to be central, when we carved countries out ut farmers’ fields, biking through neck-high rapeseed, cutting tracks … ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke, or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” The novel begins as a chorus, musing and retrospective, forcefully acerbic. Each chapter relays a separate, nonlinear, intensely involving incident. Sometimes a rueful, omniscient plural “we” is used; more often second- and first-person narratives spill out from one of the trio. In one chapter the girls’ names are changed to the characters they play in a school production of Romeo and Juliet, without identifying who is who.

Trump’s economic assault on the world stunned economists and sent stock markets into a spiral. Who will pay the price?

• ‘It could’ve been much worse’: how UK avoided a bigger blow from Trump tariffs

Donald Trump’s vast overhaul of US trade policy this week has called time on an era of globalization, alarming people, governments and investors around the world. No one should have been surprised, the US president said.

The announcement of 10% to 50% tariffs on US trading partners tanked stock markets after Trump unveiled a “declaration of economic independence” so drastic it drew comparison with Britain’s exit from the European Union – Brexit.

From billiard, calabash and churchwarden to Wide Sargasso Sea, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Who was the only English monarch to marry a Habsburg?
2 What media company paid $10bn in music royalties in 2024?
3 Which east African country is bottom of the world press freedom rankings?
4 What metal melts at -38.8C?
5 Which artist, according to HG Wells, “invented a whole cat world”?
6 What is the tallest fence on the Aintree Grand National course?
7 What was first won by the Crossworders in 2008?
8 Which restaurant dynasty’s surname was a basic sauce?
What links:
9 A Bend in the River; A Brief History of Seven Killings; To Sir, With Love; Wide Sargasso Sea?
10 Billiard; calabash; churchwarden; cutty; vest pocket?
11 Domenico di Bartolo; Duccio; Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti; Simone Martini?
12 Electromagnetism; gravity; strong nuclear; weak nuclear?
13 Arjan Veurink and Anthony Barry?
14 Deer (wild animals); hedgehog (small animals); lion (safari park); elephant (zoo)?
15 I Love Lucy; Taxi; A Fine Romance; Outnumbered?

We asked camping pros to tell us about their favourite sites, from the highest pitches in Switzerland to a wilderness reserve in Sweden

Pitchup.com lists more than 5,500 campsites in 67 countries. One of the most scenic is the remote Šenkova Domačija farm near Zgornje Jezersko in the Kamnik-Savinja Alps, close to the border with Austria. This heritage farmstead dates to 1517 and is surrounded by pastures and peaks. The farm has 25 pitches (including 10 for tents) in a meadow under old ash trees, plus a communal campfire and kitchen, a shop and restaurant serving breakfast and dinner. Campers can ride horses on short guided hacks or longer treks into the mountains, or tackle the trails on foot.
From £16.93 for a tent and two adults, open 1 April-30 September, pitchup.com

A record number of humanitarian workers were killed last year. My staff’s red uniforms should have protected them. Instead they became their death shrouds

• Jagan Chapagain is secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
• ‘What was their crime?’ Families tell of shock over IDF killing of paramedics

Which was most horrific? The agonising week-long wait – silence after our colleagues went missing, as we suspected the worst but hoped for something different? Or the confirmation, seven days later, that bodies had been found? Or, since, the ghastly details of how they were found, and killed?

Their ambulances were crushed and partly buried. Nearby were their bodies – also buried, en masse, in the sand. Our dead colleagues were still wearing their Red Crescent vests. In life, those uniforms signalled their status as humanitarian workers; they should have protected them. Instead, in death, those red vests became their shrouds.

Jagan Chapagain is secretary general of the IFRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies)

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.

Relatives who waited agonising week before bodies were found speak of passion that drove Red Crescent workers

• Our aid workers were brutally killed and thrown into a mass grave in Gaza. This must never happen again

Gaza is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a civilian now that Israeli forces have resumed their military campaign with even more ferocity, but for the first responders who rush towards the wreckage of bombed buildings, the risks are multiplied many times over.

The 15 paramedics and rescue workers whose bodies were found last weekend in a bulldozed pit outside Rafah knew they were putting their lives in peril to try to save others, but they could not have been prepared for what awaited them in the early hours of 23 March.

This blackly comic, propulsively fun tale of a disgraced hedge fund manager turned crook is all about the one-time Don Draper. He lifts the whole thing

Jon Hamm has one of the great TV faces. Square-jawed and ruggedly suave, it’s the face of a matinee idol with a dangerous edge. The quiff is well-coiffed but grey-flecked. That Marlboro Man chin looks unshaven by lunchtime. Those hooded eyes have a weary, lounge lizard quality. One of his first Hollywood parts was a 1997 episode of Ally McBeal, where he played the aptly named “Gorgeous Guy at Bar”. A decade later, Hamm became the alpha face of a certain prestige drama. Ad Men, was it? Mad Dogs? Something like that.

Your Friends & Neighbors (Apple TV+, 11 April) is a fitting new vehicle for Hamm’s slippery good looks. The launch episode is bookended by shots of his big, mildly befuddled face in screen-filling closeup. This show knows exactly what’s it’s doing. It is blackly comic, frothily fun and highly moreish.

More than 850 men a month are arrested for online child abuse offences in England and Wales. They come from every walk of life: teachers, police officers, doctors, TV presenters. And the numbers are rising every year. How did this happen?

Andy was enjoying a weekend away with his wife when it happened. “My neighbour phoned me and said, ‘The police are in your house. They’re looking for you.’” He didn’t need to wonder why. “You know. You know the reason. I was petrified when I got that call. It wasn’t just the thought of other people knowing what I had done; I also had to face myself, and that is a sick feeling – it is guilt, shame.”

Andy had been watching and sharing images of children being sexually abused for several months before the police appeared at his door. He tried at first to keep it from his wife: “I was afraid she would ask me to leave. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.”

After his dad died at 67, the 12 Years a Slave film-maker knew it was only a matter of time before he would get prostate cancer, too. The disease kills 12,000 men a year in the UK – a disproportionate number of them black. Now, in a bid to save lives, he is speaking out about his own diagnosis, alongside the doctors who successfully treated him

Steve McQueen felt relieved when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He had no symptoms, was perfectly fit, at the peak of his game. Yet the Oscar-winning film-maker and artist believed it was inevitable. After all, his father had died from it, and he is a black man. The statistics speak for ­themselves. They are as overwhelming as they are bleak. One in eight men will get prostate c­ancer. They are two and a half times more likely to get it if their father or brother had it. They’re twice as likely to get it if they’re black – and they’re two and a half times more likely to die from it, too.

McQueen is here today with his urology specialist Prof Suks Minhas and surgeon Ben Challacombe to talk about the nitty-gritty of the disease that is killing so many men. But he believes he might easily not have been. If he had known as little as his father had, he may well be dead. McQueen feels grateful and guilty, and is determined to make people more aware. After all, prostate cancer is eminently treatable. And yet more than 12,000 men die from it in the UK every year – well over one an hour. Simply unacceptable, he says.

England’s ageless right-back proved she has no intention of slowing down soon with a performance which bodes well for the Euros

There was a very summer 2022 feel to this England victory. From the throwback of seeing a confident Beth Mead finding acres of space down the right, to Keira Walsh hitting defence-splitting passes with ease, to a sold-out crowd enjoying the embers of the sunny weather and creating a party atmosphere as they revelled at the entertaining, attacking football being played by the European champions, with a level of cohesion rarely seen since the World Cup. The lineup was reminiscent of that 2022 Euros success too, with seven of this starting side here having been key components of the team that won the European title.

Rolling back the years even further, though, was Lucy Bronze, because there was something very World Cup 2015 about the performance of the best player on the pitch.

‘Baseline’ 10% import levy takes effect at US seaports, airports and customs warehouses on Saturday, with some higher tariffs to begin next week

Donald Trump’s 10% tariff on all imports from many countries, including the UK, has come into force after 48 hours of turmoil.

US customs agents began collecting the unilateral tariff at US seaports, airports and customs warehouses at 12.01am ET (04:01 GMT), with higher levies on goods from 57 larger trading partners due to start next week – including from the EU, which will be hit with a 20% rate.

Monique, 50, who works for the UN, meets Ian, 52, an English teacher

What were you hoping for?
To find a nice connection with someone like-minded and with a romantic touch – it is a date after all!

The privet hedge has been uprooted and the two front gardens have become one – revealing a stark contrast

A tall hedge – a privet – marked the boundary between our front garden and our neighbour Marianne’s. The hedge afforded both a measure of privacy and an illustrative contrast in maintenance regimes: Marianne’s side is always neat and straight; ours shaggy and bulging into the walkway.

A couple of years ago the hedge started to die. At first it was easy to ignore, to hope that the remaining greenery would spread into the bare spots. But it got worse, not better. The time came for a difficult conversation with Marianne.

After three years, thousands of arrests and a state crackdown on protests, the group is ending direct action after a polarising campaign

On the morning of Valentine’s Day 2022, Hannah Hunt stood at the gates of Downing Street to announce the start of a new kind of climate campaign, one that would eschew mere protest and instead move into “civil resistance”.

Last week, three years and thousands of arrests later, in a neat tie-up exemplary of Just Stop Oil’s (JSO) love of media-savvy stunts, Hunt went to the same spot again – this time to announce the group would be “hanging up the hi-vis”.

Organisations that pumped money into overturning Roe v Wade are making inroads in Europe. Women’s rights are truly at risk

With Donald Trump as president, there is now a heavy strain of Christian nationalism driving the US political agenda. From draconian abortion policies to ending birthright citizenship, some of Trump’s first executive orders sound startlingly like something out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian novel turned TV show set in Gilead, a fundamentalist, fascist version of the US where women have no rights. But it is urgent we understand that what is happening in the US could happen here. This road to Atwood’s Gilead is charting a course straight through the UK and Europe, and we may well be sleepwalking on to it.

In November 2024 I debated with the American conservative lawyer Erin Hawley at the Oxford Union. The motion was “This house regrets the overturning of Roe v Wade”, the US supreme court’s landmark decision that once protected the right to have an abortion at the federal level. Hawley is vice-president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, founded by the US Christian right. She is also a high profile lawyer and supported the state of Mississippi on the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned Roe.

Most senior American prelate in Catholic church to face accusations of sexual abuse died in state of Missouri

The first cardinal to be defrocked by the Pope over allegations of sexual abuse has died in the United States, a senior US churchman said on Friday.

Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington and the most senior American prelate in the Catholic church to face claims of abuse, died in the state of Missouri aged 94, the New York Times reported, citing a Vatican statement.

Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with his scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist?

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Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina – set in the troubled 1680s – can almost describe current events, say directors

A Russian political leader sings about war with Ukrainians and the need for a “durable peace”. The fractured political elite argues over whether they should pursue closer ties with Europe or embrace Russian traditions.

The plot of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina was written in the 1870s and is set in the 1680s. But, as the characters lament the fact that their homeland is mired in an endless cycle of violence and unhappiness, the dark and brooding work can feel alarmingly contemporary.

Despite mixed views across France over RN leader since conviction, people are still joining her party in support

Near a roast chicken stand at a rural market, Jocelyn Dessigny was giving out leaflets bearing a photograph of the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen and the words “Save democracy!”

“It is a political attack,” he said of Le Pen’s criminal conviction this week.

From farmers to designers, the entire supply chain will be hit – but it is unclear what duties apply to a finished product

First it was steel producers. Then automobiles. Now the fashion industry has been left reeling from Donald Trump’s announcement on Wednesday that he was imposing tariffs on more than 180 countries including severe levies aimed at some of fashion’s biggest manufacturing regions.

Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs included a 10% duty on all imports to the US but “worst offender” countries – those with whom America has bigger trade deficits – face a higher rate. Several of these are key to fashion’s supply chains. China, where everyone from Prada to Zara outsource production, faces a 54% duty. Vietnam, where more than half of Nike’s footwear was produced last year, will be subject to a 46% tariff. Pakistan, a key manufacturer of denim items, will be hit with a 29% duty. Bangladesh, where garment manufacturing makes up to 80% of its total exports, will be subjected to 37% levy, while the EU, which accounts for at least 70% of the global luxury goods market, will be hit by a 20% tariff.

On social media, the president said, ‘My policies will never change’, before suggesting possible change with Vietnam

Donald Trump doubled down on his decision to launch a global trade war, declaring that he would “never” back off from sweeping tariffs on US trading partners.

The US president’s announced action sent shock waves around the world this week, prompting fierce threats of retaliation and sharp sell-offs in stock markets.

Joanne Sharkey admitted manslaughter after secret birth while she had postnatal depression after first child

A woman who killed her newborn baby 27 years ago while she had severe postnatal depression has been handed a suspended prison sentence, as a judge said the case “calls for compassion”.

Joanne Sharkey, 55, admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility over the death of her days-old son, whose body was found wrapped in bin bags in woodland in 1998.

• Russian star scores two goals in win over Blackhawks
• 39-year-old has chance to beat record on Sunday

Alex Ovechkin tied Wayne Gretzky’s NHL record by scoring the 893rd and 894th goals of his career, the second the game winner, as the Washington Capitals rallied to beat the Chicago Blackhawks 5-3 on Friday night.

Ovechkin scored No 894 on the power play with 13:47 left in regulation to put Washington ahead after Dylan Strome tied it earlier in the third period. The 39-year-old Russian superstar also opened the scoring with his 893rd less than four minutes into game.

Agency that sends volunteers to countries around world expects ‘additional visits’ from Musk cost-cutting team

The Peace Corps is the latest federal agency to be targeted by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”. It appears “Doge” could be eyeing cuts to the agency, which sends US volunteers around the world to work in local communities on health, education and environmental initiatives.

“Staff from the Department of Government Efficiency are currently working at Peace Corps headquarters and the agency is supporting their requests,” the agency said in an email to the Guardian on Friday.

Nine children among the dead in strike on Kryvyi Rih residential area as Kyiv says Moscow’s claim it targeted military gathering is false. What we know on day 1,137

• See all our Russia-Ukraine war coverage

A Russian missile strike killed at least 18 people, including nine children, in a residential area of Ukraine’s central city of Kryvyi Rih on Friday, local officials said – one of Moscow’s deadliest attacks this year in the war. The strike in President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home town damaged residential blocks and sparked fires, the regional governor said on Telegram. More than 30 people, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital, Serhiy Lysak said. At least 50 people were wounded, the emergency services said, adding that the figure was growing. Zelenskyy said rescue efforts were still under way and called on the west to exert greater pressure on Moscow. “All Russian promises end with missiles, drones, bombs or artillery,” he said in his nightly video address. “Diplomacy means nothing to them.”

Russia’s defence ministry said the strike on Kryvyi Rih was targeted at a military gathering, a claim the Ukrainian military denounced as “false information”. “The missile struck a residential area with a playground,” the military’s general staff said on Telegram. The city’s military administrator said after the strike that Russian drones had later attacked private homes there, triggering fires at four sites. Oleksandr Vilkul said an elderly woman had died in her home and five others were injured.

The US secretary of state said Donald Trump was not “going to fall into the trap of endless negotiations” with Russia over Ukraine, adding Washington would know within weeks whether Moscow was serious about pursuing peace. “We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace,” Marco Rubio told journalists in Brussels on Friday after talks with Nato allies. “Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later.” Pjotr Sauer reports that Rubio also appeared to strike a more sympathetic tone towards Kyiv, saying the Ukrainians “have shown a willingness to enter, for example, into a complete ceasefire”.

The Kremlin said on Friday that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump had no plans to talk after a visit to Washington by the Russian president’s investment envoy as wider negotiations over a Ukraine truce appeared stalled. According to NBC News on Thursday, Trump’s inner circle was advising him not to speak to Putin again until the Russian leader commits to a full ceasefire in Ukraine.

Ukraine and Russia accused each other of fresh attacks on energy infrastructure, in breach of a US-brokered moratorium. Zelenskyy said Moscow launched a drone attack on a thermal power plant in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson on Friday, while Russia’s defence ministry accused Kyiv of attacking Russian energy facilities six times in the past 24 hours.

Ukrainian air defences shot down 51 out of 92 drones launched by Russia in overnight attacks on Ukraine on Saturday, the Ukrainian air force said. Damage was recorded in the Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions, it said. Thirty-one other Russian drones were “lost”, usually a reference to them being intercepted or blocked electronically.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that European military planners could be ready within a month with details of a foreign troop contingent in Ukraine seen as critical to ending the war with Russia. Speaking to reporters in Kyiv after meeting British and French military chiefs, the Ukrainian president said many other countries would also contribute to the effort, which envisages foreign troops patrolling Ukrainian land, sea and airspace. “I think the teams need about a month, no longer, and we will be fully ready with an understanding of this infrastructure.”

The Vatican’s foreign minister spoke with his Russian counterpart on Friday to discuss the war in Ukraine and plans to stop the fighting, the Vatican said. Russia’s foreign ministry later said the phone call between Sergey Lavrov and Archbishop Paul Gallagher had been initiated by the Vatican and that they had discussed “ways to resolve the Ukrainian crisis with the obligatory reliable elimination of its root causes”.

Plan to add 90 turbines to Rampion will create 4,000 jobs in construction and could power 1m homes

The government has approved plans to build an offshore windfarm capable of powering about 1m British homes before the end of the decade.

The plan to extend the Rampion offshore windfarm by adding 90 turbines off the Sussex coast is expected to add about 1.2 gigawatts of clean power for British households and businesses.

In outback Queensland, an area four times the size of the UK has been inundated with torrential rain, leaving many cut off or forced to abandon homes

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The extent of flood waters that have engulfed Queensland over the past fortnight is so widespread it has covered an area more than four times the size of the United Kingdom. The inundation is larger than France and Germany combined – and is even bigger than Texas.

The seemingly endless plains of outback Queensland are so vast and remote as to boggle any attempts to visualise the scale of what is being described as one of the most devastating floods in living memory.

Verdict marks end of the first trial of 42 lawsuits filed about 12 years ago, alleging firm’s projects destroyed the regions

Chevron has been ordered to pay more than $744m in damages for destroying parts of south-east Louisiana’s coastal wetlands over the years.

The ruling, which came in the form of a civil jury verdict on Friday, marks the conclusion of the first trial among 42 lawsuits filed about 12 years earlier which alleged that the company’s oil and gas projects have led to the degradation of the region’s wetlands. Among other things, the wetlands play a key role in offering the area a measure of protection from hurricanes.

Traditionalists rail at the ‘Plastic National’ but a third of all adults will have a bet on the world’s most famous race

The numbers are nearly as breathtaking as the sight of 34 horses soaring over Aintree’s famous fences. Before Saturday’s Grand National, a third of adults in Britain will place some sort of bet on the world’s most famous steeplechase. £150m will be wagered in total. And six million will then tune in for the spectacle.

But amid all the noise and fanfare surrounding the 177th running of the “people’s race”, organisers are increasingly engaged in a delicate high-wire act. Because the more they try to ensure the thrills come without horrific spills – and potential deaths – the more they upset traditionalists, who fear that the National has gone too soft.

We have had to be resilient because no one has come to our aid. Myanmar needs tangible support before the humanitarian crisis claims even more lives

Two thoughts entered my head as soon as I saw that Myanmar, my home country, had been hit by an earthquake: “Is everyone OK?”, followed by, “We just can’t catch a break”.

My loved ones thankfully turned out to be badly shaken but physically OK. There were material losses but nothing compared with what so many others are going through.

County’s offer – largest of its kind – would settle lawsuits filed over alleged abuse in juvenile facilities since 1959

Los Angeles county has reached a $4bn agreement to settle nearly 7,000 claims of sexual abuse in juvenile facilities since 1959, officials said Friday.

The agreement, which still needs approval from the Los Angeles county board of supervisors, would be the largest of its kind and have long-lasting financial effects for the county, officials said.

Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, Trump tariffs, the bin strike in Birmingham and the Grand National Meeting at Aintree: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

Appeals court sides with Jefferson Griffin, who lost supreme court election and wants thousands of ballots thrown out

More than 65,000 people in North Carolina who believed they were eligible to vote could have their ballots thrown out nearly five months after election day, flipping the results of a supreme court election, a state appeals court ruled on Friday.

The 2-1 ruling from the North Carolina court of appeals came in response to Republicans’ months-long effort to overturn the results of the state supreme court election in November. The Democrat Allison Riggs, who currently sits on the court, defeated appellate judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, by 734 votes. After the election, Griffin filed a protest seeking to get around 60,000 votes thrown out.

The City midfielder made his teammates look like geniuses and once more he is making just the right move at just the right moment

Not for the first time, Kevin De Bruyne read the situation to perfection. Not for the first time, he spotted the right play just a little earlier than everyone else. And of course this was always his gift: not simply to pick the right option but to do it faster than anyone else, buying him those crucial fractions of a second when everything else was in flux and only he in stillness.

And of course this was not the only respect in which De Bruyne understood the game of football better than most. As a struggling teenager in the Genk academy, he noticed the way the club abruptly stopped paying for a foster family to house him, and then quietly resumed when he started banging in goals for the second team. Cast adrift at Chelsea, he noticed how he was ignored while first-team players were lavished with attention and bespoke coaching.

The white nationalist has been in Trump’s orbit for years, although the White House has tried to sideline her at times

Laura Loomer, a rightwing extremist and political influencer known for her incendiary social media presence, appeared to have been sidelined at points by Donald Trump’s election campaign and then by his new administration.

But she has long had the US president’s ear and may have it again, at least for now.