A compulsive new history suggests the crimes of Ted Bundy et al were – at least partly – down to the air they breathed

In 1974, the year Caroline Fraser turned 13, Ted Bundy committed his first confirmed murders. Bundy was handsome, charming, extremely intelligent and sociopathic – “a sexual virus masquerading as a person”. There is persuasive evidence that he began killing much earlier but never this gluttonously. Almost all of his victims had long brown hair, parted in the middle. Sometimes he broke into the women’s houses while they slept, or snatched them off the street. Sometimes he would put on a sling or plaster cast and lure them into his car to help with some fabricated task. If one refused, he tried another, convinced that he would never be caught because they would never be missed. “I mean, there are so many people,” he reasoned. “It shouldn’t be a problem.” Fraser lived on Mercer Island, Washington, near Bundy’s first hunting grounds. Recalling the moment he was first charged with murder in October 1976, she writes: “Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.”

Bundy was one of at least half a dozen serial killers active in Washington in 1974. Within a few years, the state would produce the similarly prolific Randall Woodfield, known as the I-5 Killer, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Its murder rate rose by more than 30% in 1974 – almost six times the national average. In Tacoma, the city where Bundy grew up, Ridgway lived and Charles Manson was incarcerated for five years before starting his Family, murder was up 62%. It was as if a malevolent cloud had enveloped the region.

Serkan Nihat’s story follows a group of Turkish fugitives, but it bites off rather more than it can chew

The cinematic response to populism and incipient fascism worldwide over the last decade hasn’t fully mobilised – but this broadside on the authoritarian leanings of Erdoğan’s Turkey doesn’t pull its punches. (Unsurprisingly, it’s produced by a UK-based team.) It’s a shame then that, lambasting the effects on education, policing, freedom of expression and the demonisation of minorities, director Serkan Nihat is wedded to a hectoring, didactic method that dulls the audience’s engagement, instead of firing us up.

Nihat opts for the fragmented, multi-character narrative beloved of big-picture global film-makers in the 00s (think 21 Grams or Babel). Academic Hakan (Denis Ostier) becomes a fugitive after his pro-democracy lecture is invaded by regime goons. Hakan is later assaulted by vengeful cop Yilmaz (Murat Zeynilli), his one-time school bully, and then hooks up with another policeman, Mehmet (Umit Ulgen), also on the lam after a crisis of conscience about the politicisation of his work. The pair hole up in a safehouse full of migrants being chivvied to Greece by people-smuggler Sahab (Doga Celik). Meanwhile, Hakan and Mehmet’s wives find themselves targeted by the security forces in a clampdown.

‘No resorts, no tourist traps and no fancy restaurants’ – the friends behind the Kids of the Colony YouTube channel go in search of real connections in their countries of origin

‘Kayum was my friend for years,” recalls Abubakar Finiin. “But when I met his grandad in Bangladesh, it just felt like I understood his whole story. I knew so much more about him as a person.”

This moment of connection captures the essence of Kids of the Colony, a grassroots travel series on YouTube created by three childhood friends from Islington: Abubakar, Kayum Miah and Zakariya Hajjaj, all 23. In a series of chatty vlogs that thrive on their offbeat humour and close friendship, the trio provide a rich travelogue of culture and identity as they explore the countries of their parents’ birth.

The idea came to Abubakar while contemplating his next steps after graduating from Oxford University in 2023. “I just thought about the places that we came from,” he says, reflecting on the layered identity of growing up in London with ties elsewhere. Abubakar is Somali, Kayum is Bengali and Zakariya is of Moroccan and English descent.

An easy midweek meal that’s packed with flavour and texture

Crab deserves to be celebrated, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a super-fancy, laborious meal. Crab midweek? Yes, please, and fried rice is my fallback whenever I am in a dinner pickle. That’s not to belittle its deliciousness, complexity or elegance, though, because this spiced crab version can be as fancy as you like. That said, the speed and ease with which I can create a meal that I know everyone will love is the winning factor. Plus, I often have leftover cooked, chilled rice in the fridge, anyway, which is always the clincher (cooked rice has a better texture for frying once chilled).

Exclusive: Shabana Mahmood told companies she wanted ‘deeper collaboration’ to tackle prisons crisis

• Analysis: Whitehall’s ambition to cut costs using AI is fraught with risk

Tracking devices inserted under offenders’ skin, robots assigned to contain prisoners and driverless vehicles used to transport them were among the measures proposed by technology companies to ministers who are gathering ideas to tackle the crisis in the UK justice system.

The proposals were made at a meeting of more than two dozen tech companies in London last month, chaired by the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, minutes seen by the Guardian show. Amid an acute shortage of prison places and probation officers under severe strain, ministers told the companies they wanted ideas for using wearable technologies, behaviour monitoring and geolocation to create a “prison outside of prison”.

Asset manager Aberdeen’s surprise cut to funding research into inequality has left those that used its grants for good works reeling

The axe fell with shocking suddenness. On Thursday Aberdeen Group plc terminated its Financial Fairness Trust without notice and sacked the CEO, Mubin Haq, the chair and all the trustees, leaving eight staff dangling. The company tells me it plans to move in a different direction. That dreaded phrase marks the end of 16 remarkable years, during which the trust sponsored some of the most influential research into inequality and its financial causes.

Aberdeen is a wealth management and investment company. I admired its willingness to fund research not in its own immediate interest, but for the sake of social improvement, as a sign that decent capitalism was possible. Now that’s over. The mood has changed. Wildfires started by President Trump are engulfing global companies as his administration attempts to bar asset and retirement plan managers from considering environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in investment decisions and targets private sector diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives with executive orders. Companies doing good are at risk. I ask Aberdeen if that’s why it has shut down the trust. It denies it strongly, saying it is just a “natural evolution”.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

• Last 16: Manchester City 3-4 Al-Hilal (aet)

• Leonardo goal sets up quarter-final against Fluminense

What a last-16 tie, what a triumph for Al-Hilal, what crushing disappointment for Manchester City who, as the contest aged, gradually lost shape and tempo and crumpled in this shock of the Club World Cup.

The killer blow of a breathless extra-time featuring three goals was administered by Marcos Leonardo in the 112th minute. Along the left, Renan Lodi curved a cross in, Sergej Milinković-Savić rose and headed, Ederson palmed out, and the Brazilian struck his second of the contest. Leonardo headed for a corner flag to begin the Al-Hilal party and the camera panned to Phil Foden who eight minutes before seemed to have saved City.

Fellow Queen members Roger Taylor and Brian May say Geldoff told Mercury: ‘Just play the hits – you have 17 minutes’

Freddie Mercury’s performance with Queen at Live Aid in 1985 is often seen as the crowning glory of one of the greatest showmen the world has ever seen.

But he still needed some very clear instructions from Bob Geldof, the festival’s organiser, before going out on stage. “Don’t get clever,” the Boomtown Rats frontman told him, according to fellow Queen members Roger Taylor and Brian May. “Just play the hits – you have 17 minutes.”

In an interview last weekend, Iran’s ambassador to the UN said his country’s nuclear enrichment ‘will never stop’ because it is permitted for ‘peaceful energy’ purposes. It is the latest development in an escalation of tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme, which erupted when Israel targeted the country’s nuclear facilities in June. To understand why enrichment is so important, Madeleine Finlay talks to Robin Grimes, professor of materials physics at Imperial College London. He explains what goes into creating a nuclear weapon, and why getting to the stage of weaponisation is so difficult

Iran’s nuclear enrichment ‘will never stop’, nation’s UN ambassador says

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Twenty years on, this heart-racing four-part series reconstructs the terror attacks and the vast investigation that followed, without losing sight of the survivors. The detail about the bathtub is astonishing

Netflix is not always known for its restraint in the documentary genre, but with its outstanding recent film Grenfell: Uncovered, and now Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, it appears to be finding a new maturity and seriousness in the field. There have been plenty of recent documentaries on the subject of the attacks and the sprawling investigation that followed – no surprise, given that it is the 20th anniversary this week – but there is still real depth to be found here.

Over four parts, this thorough series unravels the initial attacks on the London transport system, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, then follows that febrile month into the failed bombings of 21 July, and then the police shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, a day later. The first 25 minutes or so simply recount those first attacks, compiling the story using phone pictures, news footage, occasional reconstructions, the infamous photographs of the injured pouring out of tube stations and accounts from survivors and the families of victims. Though it is by now a familiar story, this evokes the fear, confusion and panic of that day in heart-racing detail.

Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers is on Netflix now.

Tesla CEO also threatened forming an ‘America Party’ if the bill, which would increase US deficit by $3.3tn, is passed

Elon Musk has vowed to unseat lawmakers who support Donald Trump’s sweeping budget bill, which he has criticized because it would increase the country’s deficit by $3.3tn.

“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame! And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth,” he wrote on his social media platform, X.

Photographs of leader with soldiers’ coffins were displayed at a gala concert marking anniversary of military treaty with Russia

Kim Jong-un has paid tribute to North Korean soldiers killed during Russia’s war with Ukraine, resting his hands on their repatriated coffins in a rare public acknowledgment that his armed forces have suffered fatalities in the conflict.

Photographs of the North Korean leader pausing in front of a line of half a dozen coffins draped in the country’s flag were displayed on a screen at a gala performance held on Sunday to mark the first anniversary of a military treaty between the North and Russia.

A biopic of Frantz Fanon and other remarkable new movies are finding success via social media, yet remain invisible at the big film festivals

France’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade was historically among the most significant in Europe. After Britain, France had the second biggest colonial empire. We know that 1.38 million people were deported in at least 4,220 documented French slave trade expeditions. Yet the stories of the lives of those people are almost entirely absent from the French collective imagination.

Growing up in France, the only images of this crime against humanity I ever saw on screen were in US-made films. I learned about it from the 1970s TV series Roots and from Steven Spielberg’s movie Amistad. Today in France, Hollywood films such as 12 Years a Slave or Django Unchained are still the references when it comes to depicting the horrors experienced by enslaved people.

Rokhaya Diallo is a Guardian Europe columnist

Karin Kneissl made headlines around the world when she invited the Russian president to her wedding in 2018. Five years later, she moved to St Petersburg. The scandal revealed a dark truth about the ties between Vienna and Moscow

The trouble started with a dead cat. For years, the people of Seibersdorf had lived amicably alongside their most famous resident, more or less. True, there had been an incident when a neighbour complained about the smell of her horses. And yes, there had been rumblings about her lack of community spirit, that she was great at giving orders for neighbourhood events but never pitched in to fry a schnitzel or hang bunting. But for the most part, they got along.

Karin Kneissl was a blow-in from Vienna, an hour north. She had lived in Seibersdorf for more than two decades, moving into a rickety old apartment before buying a house near the central square. She had arrived as a junior diplomat, then became a freelance journalist and later began lecturing on international relations at some of Austria’s most prestigious institutions. For a brief period, she also sat on the town’s parish council.

‘There is a big need for theatre to work with existential problems,’ says translator, as Shakespeare productions boom across Ukraine

The Ukrainian Shakespeare festival in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk did not open with a play. Another kind of performance was staged on the steps of the theatre, one that did not deal with sad stories of the death of kings but with tragedy unfolding in real life.

This was theatre in a different sense: a rally involving several hundred people demonstrating on behalf of Ukrainian prisoners of war, thousands of whom are estimated to remain in Russian captivity.

Legal complaints filed by former pupils accuse priests and staff of physical or sexual abuse from 1957 to 2004

When 14-year-old Pascal Gélie saw a brochure for an elite French Catholic boarding school boasting swimming in summer and skiing in winter, he begged his parents to send him. He had just watched the American school drama Dead Poets Society and was expecting “sport and friendship”.

“On the first night, I realised I’d made a terrible mistake,” said Gélie, now a 51-year-old office-worker in Bordeaux. “There were 40 of us in a dormitory with decrepit mattresses. When I whispered to another boy for some toilet paper to take to the bathroom, the supervisor grabbed me by the face and pointed to the stone terrace outside. Someone told me to take my coat because you could be forced to stand outside for hours in the cold and damp. I was made to stand there all night.”

Families report ‘horrific’ conditions in jails and fear executions may be hastened as part of broader crackdown

Life for Reza Khandan has only got worse since Tehran’s Evin prison, where he was an inmate, was hit by an Israeli airstrike on 23 June. The next night, the 60-year-old human rights activist – who was arrested in 2024 for his support of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement – was moved to another jail in the south of the capital, where he has told family conditions are hard to endure.

“My father and others do not have beds and are forced to sleep on the floor. He once found six or seven bedbugs in his blanket when he woke up,” said his daughter Mehraveh Khandan, who described “horrific” sanitary conditions in the prison.

Working remotely from a beach in a far-off land sounds like bliss – and the number of people doing it has soared since 2019. But between bouts of illness, relentless admin and crushing loneliness, many have found comfort in the 9-5 back home

Jason, a 34-year-old American, is stumbling around the pool table, cue in hand. Five Saigon beers later, he will shuffle out, clamber on to a scooter and drive back to his beach hut. I know this because I’ve seen the same routine for the past four nights. Meanwhile, Eloise, 38, a French national, is gyrating on the dancefloor. Earlier, on the beach, she told me about her big bitcoin dreams – although she hasn’t got the funds she needs yet. Then there is Bex, a Briton in her late 50s whose eyes are large and wild because she has just popped a pill. She spends only a month a year in the UK – not because she wants to, she says, just to check in with family who are worried about her.

Here we are together on this paradise island in south-east Asia, laptops closed for the day. This is the digital nomad dream, isn’t it? This is what adventure and freedom looks like, right? We’re happy!

Forever chemicals have polluted the water supply of 60,000 people, threatening human health, wildlife and the wider ecosystem. But activists say this is just the tip of the Pfas iceberg

One quiet Saturday night, Sandra Wiedemann was curled up on the sofa when a story broke on TV news: the water coming from her tap could be poisoning her. The 36-year-old, who is breastfeeding her six-month-old son Côme, lives in the quiet French commune of Buschwiller in Saint-Louis, near the Swiss city of Basel. Perched on a hill not far from the Swiss and German borders, it feels like a safe place to raise a child – spacious houses are surrounded by manicured gardens, framed by the wild Jura mountains.

But as she watched the news, this safety felt threatened: Wiedemann and her family use tap water every day, for drinking, brushing her teeth, showering, cooking and washing vegetables. Now, she learned that chemicals she had never heard of were lurking in her body, on her skin, potentially harming her son. “I find it scary,” she says. “Even if we stop drinking it we will be exposed to it and we can’t really do anything.”

In today’s culture, responsiveness is a proxy for care. But being in constant rotation, always logging into another version of myself? I’m tired

A friend messaged me the other day. I saw it. I didn’t reply. A week later, I finally responded with the classic: Sorry for the late reply, just got to this.

She called me out. You didn’t just get to this, she said. I saw the double ticks.

Turkey police face demonstrators after prosecutor orders arrests at LeMan magazine, whose editor-in-chief denies allegation and says image has been deliberately misinterpreted

Clashes erupted in Istanbul with police firing rubber bullets and teargas to disperse a mob on Monday after allegations that a satirical magazine had published a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.

The clashes occurred after Istanbul’s chief prosecutor ordered the arrest of the editors at LeMan magazine on grounds it had published a cartoon that “publicly insulted religious values”.

League of Social Democrats disbands amid ‘the omnipresence of red lines and the draconian suppression of dissent’, days before anniversary of Beijing’s imposition of NSL

In a cramped, dark office, in front of a wall adorned by some misshapen shelves, faded photographs, and a single fan battling against the summer heat, Hong Kong’s last active pro-democracy party admitted defeat.

Behind them, a sticky-taped banner declared: “We’d rather be ashes than dust.”

Two iconoclasts of contemporary fashion will show side by side in the first major Australian exhibition since the London designer’s death two years ago

Two era-defining avant garde fashion designers, Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, will be brought together in a blockbuster summer exhibition announced on Tuesday by the National Gallery of Victoria.

It has been more than 20 years since Westwood’s work has been exhibited extensively in Australia, and the NGV show will be the first since the designer’s death in December 2023.

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Offshore wind power boom helps push profit from land and property to more than double what it was two years ago

King Charles is set to receive official annual income of £132m next year, after his portfolio of land and property made more than £1bn in profits thanks to a boom in the offshore wind sector.

Profits at the crown estate – which partly funds the monarchy – were flat at £1.1bn in its financial year to the end of March but more than double their level two years ago, at £442.6m.

Victoria police allege Point Cook man Joshua Brown sexually assaulted infants and children in his care at a western suburbs childcare centre

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Victorian health authorities are recommending that 1,200 children are tested for infectious diseases after a Melbourne childcare worker was charged with allegedly sexually abusing infants and children in his care.

Police on Tuesday confirmed that a Point Cook resident, Joshua Brown, 26, had been charged in May with more than 70 offences relating to eight alleged victims aged between five months and two years old.

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Growing popularity of mysticism can also be connected to increasing sense of cultural confidence as Chinese brands and products go global

Pass my exams. Meet Mr Right. Get rich. Pinned to a board by the entrance of a dimly lit fortune telling bar in Fengtai, an urban district in the south of Beijing, handwritten notes reveal the inner worries of customers coming for cocktails with a side of spiritual salvation.

One As All is one of several fortune telling bars to have opened in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities in recent years. Hidden on the 12th floor of a commercial building, the bar serves a wide range of drinks starting at an auspicious 88 yuan (£9) (eight is considered to be lucky number in China). As well as enjoying a sundowner with a view over Beijing’s skyline, customers can consult the in-house fortune teller who specialises in qiuqian, known in English as Chinese lottery sticks, an ancient style of divination often found in Taoist temples. From a private side-room, the smell of incense burning in front of a genuine Taoist shrine wafts into the bar.

Bryan Kohberger to be spared death penalty but will be given four consecutive life sentences, ABC News reports

Bryan Kohberger, the man accused of killing four Idaho college students in 2022, has agreed to plead guilty to all counts, a move that would spare him from the death penalty, ABC News reported on Monday, citing a letter sent to victims’ family members.

Kohberger, who previously pleaded not guilty on charges of murder in the fatal stabbings, will be sentenced to four consecutive life sentences and waives all right to appeal, according to ABC News.

Club captain on coming back from injury, the importance of his family and Trent Alexander-Arnold fitting in well

Dani Carvajal misses his family. The good news is that in return he’s about to become reacquainted with something he has missed as much. For some players, this is a competition too far, played on poor pitches in half-empty stadiums and suffocating heat, something they could do without, but it has been good for Real Madrid’s captain, something to aim at.

Now, 270 days later and 4,400 miles away, just as the Club World Cup gets real, he is back to face Juventus in the last 16 in Miami. “And I know what I’m like: if they let me loose, there’ll be no fear,” he says.

Dealing with very serious blazes means fire and rescue service has limited ability to respond to other emergencies

Firefighters battled wildfires in the Scottish Highlands for a third day on Monday in a situation the first minister has called “extremely serious”.

The Scottish Gamekeepers Association (SGA), which has helped tackle the blazes, warned the fires are “becoming a danger to human life” that are leaving “stretched” firefighters unable to attend other incidents.

Advocates say the move could turn the tide for other British overseas territories battling for LGBTQ+ rights

A court in London has upheld a Cayman Islands law legalising same-sex civil partnerships, in a move that campaigners say could turn the tide for other British overseas territories battling for LGBTQ+ rights.

On Monday, the privy council, the final court of appeal for the British overseas territory, rejected an appeal that had argued the Caribbean island’s governor had no right to enact the bill, after lawmakers had rejected similar legislation.

In this astonishing and gross series, we stand witness as teams battle to clean up blood, guts and body fluids. Viewer discretion is very much advised – there will be maggots

It has been a while since we had a good, honest point-and-boke documentary, is it not? “Boke”, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, means to be sick. I use it here because the onomatopoeia gives a better sense of the fight that precedes the act, especially if – say – a programme is unspooling in front of you that keeps the nausea building until you are past the point of no return. Viewer discretion – and a plastic bowl – is advised.

So, then, to Crime Scene Cleaners, a 10-part documentary – yes, 10! – that does exactly what it says on the tin. It follows teams from British and American companies as they move in after bodies have been removed and evidence bagged and tagged by police to clean up anything left behind. “Anything” can mean blood – spattered, accumulated in the bottom of a bath tub, trailed along a floor, soaked into a carpet, stained into grouting, arterially sprayed along skirting boards. Hepatitis B, we are informed via a dramatic voiceover, can survive for up to seven days in dried blood, hepatitis C for up to six weeks on hard surfaces. Clever pathogens.

Club have history of promoting from within and remain pragmatic about potential departure of Bryan Mbeumo

Phil Giles had already given the update on Christian Nørgaard. “It’s more likely than not,” the Brentford director of football said, suggesting that the club captain was close to sealing a £10m move to Arsenal, which is expected to feature £5m in add-ons. Then it was time for Giles to do likewise with Bryan Mbeumo, who is the subject of a bid from Manchester United. Brentford value their 20-goal top scorer from last season at about £65m. United are nearly there with it.

“We’ve made our point clear,” Giles said. “If Bryan earned a massive move now and it was right for us financially, we’d be open to it. But if he ended up here with us next season, I wouldn’t be massively surprised. We’d be delighted. And it would save me a massive headache, frankly.” With that, Giles glanced at the man to his left – the new Brentford head coach, Keith Andrews, presumably the source of said headache if Mbeumo were to leave.

• Reigning champion wins 7-5, 6-7 (5), 7-5, 2-6, 6-1

• Spaniard: ‘I was really nervous at the beginning’

Carlos Alcaraz said he was proud to have squeezed into the second round after struggling with his nerves and the heat on Centre Court during his dramatic five-set win against Fabio Fognini on Monday.

In searing temperatures, Alcaraz started his pursuit of a third consecutive Wimbledon title by outlasting the veteran Italian 7-5, 6-7 (1), 7-5, 2-6, 6-1 after 4hr 37min on-court.

Grisly finding comes at end of worst month in war between Sinaloa factions as government tries to stop killings

Mexican authorities have found 20 bodies in the state of Sinaloa, a region gripped by a war between factions of the Sinaloa drug cartel that is reaching new heights of violence.

The state prosecutor’s office said on Monday that four of the victims had been decapitated and their bodies had been found hanging from a bridge on a main road near Culiacán, the state capital.

MPs including select committee chairs express doubts that concessions agreed last week go far enough

Downing Street’s plans to see off a major Labour welfare rebellion were in chaos on Monday night, amid continued brinkmanship between MPs and the government over the scale of the concessions.

There was significant division between government departments over how to respond to rebels’ demands – with seemingly little idea how to quell continuing anger ahead of the knife-edge vote on Tuesday.

We pick half a dozen contenders to lead the scoring charts in Switzerland, from the WSL Golden Boot winner to France’s formidable finisher

Russo is coming into this tournament in the form of her career. Her 12 goals in the Women’s Super League played an integral role in the Gunners’ second-place finish and earned her a share of the Golden Boot, alongside Manchester City’s Khadija Shaw. She was also Arsenal’s top scorer in their run to securing the Champions League. Her productivity in front of goal has been the biggest improvement to her game.

• Union says 20-minute pause could be ‘significant’

• Temperatures at tournament have exceeded 40C

Half-time breaks should be extended to 20 minutes in extreme heat, the global players’ union has said. Fifpro is calling for extra measures to protect footballers after what it describes as the “wake-up call” of the Club World Cup, which has been plagued by extreme temperatures over the past two weeks.

Fifa protocols allow for a cooling break lasting for three minutes in each half if temperature thresholds are exceeded. According to Fifpro’s medical director, Dr Vincent Gouttebarge, an extended half-time break would provide a necessary additional tool in helping to keep players’ core temperatures within their normal range.

Scores of Palestinians reported killed as senior Netanyahu adviser due to arrive in Washington for ceasefire talks

Israel ramped up its offensive in Gaza on Monday, with new displacement orders sending tens of thousands of people fleeing the north of the devastated territory and waves of airstrikes killing about 60 Palestinians, according to local officials and medical staff.

The violence in Gaza came as a senior adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was due to arrive in Washington for talks on a new ceasefire, a day after Donald Trump called in a social media post for a deal to end the 20-month war and free 50 hostages held by Hamas.

At the Phoenix Arts Museum, a new exhibition displays different approaches to comedy within photography

Humor stands in a strange relationship to the art world. Often ranked as a lesser aspiration for the work of a true artist, when humor does find its way into the graphic arts, it’s as more of a condiment than the main dish.

How refreshing then to see the Phoenix Art Museum’s substantial new exhibition, Funny Business, which boldly and decisively leaps into the realm of comedic photography. Showcasing humor from a wealth of angles, including slapstick, whimsical, acid, surreal, ironic, parody and so many more, the show offers ample opportunity to consider just what purpose laughter serves – and to enjoy a hearty laugh or two on a summer’s day.

• India yet to decide if fast bowler will play at Edgbaston

• Moeen Ali joins England backroom staff for the match

One of the many delights of leafy south Birmingham is when an international cricket team is in town and residents stumble across them training on the Colts Ground at Edgbaston. Folks could be heading for a stroll in Cannon Hill Park, or their weekly shop at Aldi, only to suddenly find themselves watching Jasprit Bumrah let fly.

Sadly, the fences were covered with tarpaulins after some hecklers over the weekend. There was a decent subplot playing out inside as India trained, too, over whether Bumrah will play the sold-out second Test that starts . Having bowled these past few days, the man himself offered a passing “hopefully”.