​T​he backwards cap, a 90s accessory once dismissed as juvenile​, is emerging as the latest shorthand for laid‑back confidence

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Within the first 20 minutes of Love Story, Ryan Murphy’s new take on the often tumultuous relationship between John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette, the youngest son of the former US president is depicted wearing five different caps. They include a Kangol flat cap as he cycles to a newspaper kiosk in uptown NYC to read the latest headlines about himself, a Yankees cap as he runs topless on a treadmill and a navy baseball cap as he joins his mother, Jacqueline, for dinner, where she promptly reminds him “no hats at the table, please”.

For Kennedy Jr, hounded by the paparazzi and tabloid press who nicknamed him “The Hunk” and more often than not “The Hunk Who Flunked”, you might think this penchant for peaked caps was thanks to the fact that they let him go somewhat incognito. But he preferred to wear his backwards, pulling the cap downwards over his signature flop of lush black hair, and leaving his full face on view.

The best places to seek respite from the wintry UK weather in France, Italy and Germany

• Tell us about a family adventure in Europe – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher

Saint-Jorioz in Haute-Savoie will provide a springtime lift for your spirits. On the shore of Lake Annecy, it’s a short bus ride from the city of Annecy, but less busy and with superior lake and mountain views. Hike to the surrounding peaks, towards the lesser-known Col de l’Arpettaz, or cycle on the excellent greenways. Relax by the cool blue alpine water. Behind you lies the underrated Les Bauges Unesco Geopark. The department only joined France in 1860, and has its own Italian-influenced regional cuisine.
Brian Lowry

It caused a scandal in imperial Russia, then became a staple of popular art in the USSR. But when I spied a copy of Ivan Kramsky’s portrait in the film Sentimental Value, it opened a door to an untold case of life imitating art

Sentimental Value is one of those films you have to watch very closely. In the Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s latest work, which swept the board at the European film awards and is nominated for eight Baftas and nine Oscars, stories are hidden in closeups, half-tones and peripheral objects. Some of these stories are so well hidden, in fact, that they aren’t even apparent to the people who made the film.

In one scene, roughly an hour in, the camera glides down a corridor, and suddenly there she is: a woman’s portrait on the wall. Anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union and later Russia between the 1950s and 2000s, like me, would recognise her instantly. She has been endlessly reproduced: as prints, embroideries, portrait medallions, even on boxes of chocolates. In Britain, people may have encountered her on the covers of various editions of Anna Karenina.

Stranger Things’ Joe Keery is joined by a stellar cast battling an outbreak of virulent brain spores, but the film doesn’t offer much more than endless wisecracks and a splatterhouse grossfest

‘Pay attention! This shit is real!” screams an on-screen warning at the start of this overstuffed horror-comedy-action outing. As much as the deadly fungus it foists on Earth, an outbreak of sardonic attitude runs rampant here. It falls to two bantering storage facility workers, played by Stranger Things’ Joe Keery and Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell, to contain a potential apocalypse event – with intermittent high-grade thespian help from Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave and old faithful Liam Neeson. (Somebody clearly called in a few favours here.)

Things kick off as the Skylab space station falls out of orbit in 1979 – one of its research containers winds up in the Australian outback. Fast-forward to the early 00s and a team of bioterror operatives, including Robert (Neeson) and Trini (Manville), wipe out the virulent fungus that escapes – though not before it turns one of them into a human smoothie. But the Kansas facility where they stow a sample is later decommissioned, and the ground floor converted into storage lockers. Before you can say “heinous government negligence”, night-shifters Teacake (Keery) and Naomi (Campbell) are itching to check out the random alarm sounding somewhere behind the walls.

Leaving behind Cumbria for Oxford in the late 1950s, Bragg navigates class and culture in a world on the brink of change

It’s October 1958, and a nearly 19-year-old Melvyn Bragg is on the platform at Wigton railway station, saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah. He is off to read history at Wadham College, Oxford, one of the youngest in his cohort because national service is being phased out. Another World starts here, picking up the story left off in Back in the Day, Bragg’s previous memoir about his childhood and youth in this small Cumbrian town.

Oxford to Bragg seems “more a theatre than a city, a spectacle rather than a habitation”. After his prelims, the weeding-out exams in his second term, he is left alone until his finals. He discovers Ingmar Bergman and has many earnest pub conversations about whether Pasternak will get the Nobel prize, or jazz is superior to rock’n’roll. He goes on the Aldermaston march and joins the anti-apartheid movement – although in hindsight he sees this as inspired by a residual faith in empire, with South Africa as Britain’s moral responsibility. Even after Suez, he owns a pencil sharpener in the shape of a globe on which the empire is “a continuous governing blur of pink”.

The youth minimum wage is set to rise over this parliament, but it’s putting off employers from hiring people into their first roles

When Keir Starmer was 14 years old, he got a part-time job clearing stones from a local farmer’s field. At 16, Kemi Badenoch was flipping burgers and cleaning toilets in McDonald’s. Me, I waitressed at weekends from the age of 15 in an Essex pub owned by an ex-paratrooper with two formidable rottweilers roaming behind the bar, which was a life lesson all of its own.

But whatever your first job may have been, there’s a reasonable chance it combined the thrill of hard cash with several mortifying mistakes and a crash course in handling stroppy customers, taking criticism more or less gracefully and moaning about it only out of earshot. Though teenage starter jobs have been in decline for decades – for reasons varying from academic pressures on sixth-formers to the rise of side hustles on Vinted that don’t show up in official statistics – everyone still has to start somewhere, even if it’s now more likely at 18 than 14. But getting that start is becoming harder than it was.

Information content manager Rosie Weatherley says harmful inaccuracies are presented as uncontroversial facts

• Mind launches inquiry into AI and mental health after Guardian investigation

A year-long commission has been launched by Mind to examine AI and mental health after a Guardian investigation exposed how Google’s AI Overviews, which are shown to 2 billion people each month, gave people “very dangerous” mental health advice.

Here, Rosie Weatherley, information content manager at the largest mental health charity in England and Wales, describes the risks posed to people by the AI-generated summaries, which appear above search results on the world’s most visited website.

FCAS, which also involves Spain, is imploding at a high-stakes moment for Europe, as threat rises from Russia

France and Germany’s plan to build a fighter jet of the future, planned to come with a swarm of drones and a “combat communications cloud”, is collapsing.

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said this week that the €100bn programme no longer worked for him. He insisted it was “not a political dispute”, but a technical one. France needs a jet that can carry nuclear weapons and launch from aircraft carriers, while Germany does not. However, the problems go back much further.

Exclusive: England and Wales charity to examine safeguards after Guardian exposed ‘very dangerous’ advice on Google AI Overviews

• ‘Very dangerous’: a Mind mental health expert on Google’s AI summaries

Mind is launching a significant inquiry into artificial intelligence and mental health after a Guardian investigation exposed how Google’s AI Overviews gave people “very dangerous” medical advice.

In a year-long commission, the mental health charity, which operates in England and Wales, will examine the risks and safeguards required as AI increasingly influences the lives of millions of people affected by mental health issues worldwide.

A bright, fruity pudding topped with a toasted pebbly crumb

Rhubarb brings its late-winter brightness to this favourite pudding, while ripe, buttery pears soften the edges and add a gentle creaminess. Instead of the traditional rubbing-in method, the crumble is made by pouring warm browned butter straight into the dry ingredients, creating a pebbly topping with a deeper toasted flavour. Leave out the crushed fennel seed, if you prefer, but this small addition, bloomed briefly in the butter, gives the whole thing a subtle aromatic lift.

Can’t wait to ditch that heavy parka? Here are three lighter options for the warmer days ahead

Kraków’s ban on burning solid fuels plus subsidies for cleaner heating has led to clearer air and better health

As a child, Marcel Mazur had to hold his breath in parts of Kraków thick with “so much smoke you could see and smell it”. Now, as an allergy specialist at Jagiellonian University Medical College who treats patients struggling to breathe, he knows all too well the damage those toxic gases do inside the human body.

“It’s not that we have this feeling that nothing can be done. But it’s difficult,” Mazur said.

US president links deal with military strikes against Iran in connection with Tehran’s nuclear ambitions

Donald Trump changed his mind on supporting the Chagos Islands deal because the UK will not permit its airbases to be used for a pre-emptive US strike on Iran, the Guardian has been told.

In his latest change of heart on the deal, the US president said on social media that Keir Starmer was “making a big mistake” by handing sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius in exchange for continued use by the UK and US of their airbase on one of the islands, Diego Garcia.

The actor, comedian and raconteur, who would have turned 100 on Sunday, could play humble or haughty, cheeky or Chekhov – but always stole the show

When standup comic Tom Allen received Attitude magazine’s comedy award last year, he used his acceptance speech to salute the subversive wits who paved the way for freedoms now enjoyed by queer people in Britain. Joining Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward on the list was an actor and raconteur singled out by Allen as “a big hero of mine”, and feted by everyone from Orson Welles to Judy Garland, Maggie Smith to Morrissey.

“I wanted to mention Kenneth Williams because he was so profound,” Allen tells me. “And yet, because he was also funny, that profundity hasn’t been acknowledged. As a child, I connected with his outsiderness. Rather than trying to fit in, he went in the opposite direction. Not only did he not apologise for being different, but he was queer in every sense, truly at odds with the world in which he found himself.”

Joint patrols are being mounted to protect undersea cables from Russian sabotage: localised cooperation is our best hope for now

• Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council thinktank

When European countries in the Baltic Sea region joined Nato for protection against Russia, they were not anticipating their most powerful Nato ally would be the one threatening to seize territory from them. The shock of the Greenland crisis may have faded from the headlines, but Donald Trump’s US has also suggested it may decide not to defend Europe. And Russia continues to be a nuisance in the Baltic Sea.

Luckily, the vulnerable Baltic nations have launched an impressive string of initiatives to keep their mini-ocean safe. As the US sheds responsibility for Europe’s defence, these efforts could provide a model for the future of Nato itself.

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council thinktank. She is the author of Goodbye, Globalization: The Return of a Divided World and The Defender’s Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Gray-Zone Aggression

Israeli police raid compound, arrest staff and curb Muslims’ access as Ramadan begins

A six-decade agreement governing Muslim and Jewish prayer at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site has “collapsed” under pressure from Jewish extremists backed by the Israeli government, experts have warned.

A series of arrests of Muslim caretaker staff, bans on access for hundreds of Muslims, and escalating incursions by radical Jewish groups culminated this week in the arrest of the imam of al-Aqsa mosque and an Israeli police raid during evening prayers on the first night of Ramadan.

Government announces tougher measures to tackle unlicensed sites as ‘prolific waste criminal’ is ordered to pay £1.4m

A new 33-strong drone unit is being deployed to investigate the scourge of illegal waste dumping across England, the government has announced.

The improvements to the investigation of illegal waste dumping – which costs the UK economy £1bn a year – come as the ringleader of a major waste crime gang was ordered to pay £1.4m after being convicted at Birmingham crown court.

I cut small trees around Offa’s Dyke, then shape the wood by hand

I never wanted to be part of an unsustainable society. I’ve always tried to live as peaceful a life as I can, outside the big cities. Now I am the last person left in England making clogs by hand. I spend most days in my studio in Kington, Herefordshire, carving green sycamore wood that I collect myself, hand-dyeing the leather and making sure the soles are as near perfect a match to someone’s foot as possible. I don’t think you can have a more peaceful life than that.

I grew up in Ceredigion, surrounded by sheep. There were no jobs in the area and in 1976 I had to go on benefits. I developed extreme anxiety after breaking up with my first girlfriend. Convent schooling and boys’ boarding schools weren’t the best places to learn to develop relationships and I needed to find something therapeutic to do.

Long-serving socialist former leader Evo Morales has reappeared in his political stronghold after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence

Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared on Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumours he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-president Nicolás Maduro.

The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US president Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.

The president’s announcement came after predecessor Barack Obama went viral last week for saying aliens are ‘real’

Donald Trump has announced he is directing the defense department and other agencies to release whatever files they have on the search for alien life.

In a post on his social media platform, Trump said that he will ask the defense secretary and others “to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”

Avalanche in Sierra Nevada killed at least eight people, including six who frequently went on ski trips together

Six of the eight people who died after a major avalanche swept through the Castle Peak area of the Sierra Nevada this week have been identified, according to multiple reports.

The identified victims – Carrie Atkin, Liz Clabaugh, Danielle Keatley, Kate Morse, Caroline Sekar and Kate Vitt – were part of a close-knit group who frequently went on ski trips together, a spokesperson for the families told the San Francisco Chronicle. The women and their families “cherished time together in the mountains”, the spokesperson said.

Actor who played ‘McSteamy’ died on Thursday, 10 months after he revealed his diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a type of motor neurone disease

Eric Dane, an actor in hit shows Euphoria and Grey’s Anatomy, has died aged 53, less than a year after he publicly revealed he had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

Dane died on Thursday afternoon, his representatives announced in a statement. He first revealed in April that he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a type of motor neurone disease.

Visit was ostensibly to promote economy, but US president focused on repeated, unverified claims of voter fraud

Donald Trump forcefully defended his tariffs on Thursday, claiming “tariffs are my favorite word in the dictionary” and promoting their use to empower American manufacturing at an event in north-west Georgia.

“Without tariffs, this country would be in so much trouble right now,” Trump said during his remarks at Coosa Steel Corporation, a steel-processing and distribution firm in Rome, Georgia.

The court in Innsbruck handed Thomas P a five-month suspended prison sentence and a €9,400 fine over death of woman named as Kerstin G

An Austrian court has found a 37-year-old amateur mountaineer guilty of manslaughter over his girlfriend’s death near Austria’s highest summit, after he left her to fetch help when she could not go on.

The case is unusual because while climbing accidents are common, prosecutions over them are rare.