In a hugely successful TV and film career, her waitresses, neighbours, moms and daughters ranged from comedy to drama to David Lynch films, always with compelling authenticity

• Diane Ladd, Oscar-nominated star of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, dies aged 89

Diane Ladd was part of a Hollywood aristocracy of character actors who from the golden period of the American New Wave onwards lent star quality to supporting roles. She brought an authentic, undiluted American screen-acting flavour to everything she was in, and ran hugely successful movie and TV careers in parallel for decades, playing waitresses, neighbours, moms, sirens and daughters, and ranging from comedy to drama.

She was famously the mother of screen actor Laura Dern and wife of Bruce Dern, and repeatedly acted with Laura in a remarkable mother-daughter partnership in which the two women’s closeness always shone through. You might compare it to Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, or Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher — although Diane Ladd and Laura Dern were far more trouble-free and without that kind of angst. They were Oscar-nominated together for their joint appearance in Martha Coolidge’s Depression drama Rambling Rose from 1991. And they also both appeared in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Inland Empire, Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth, and in Mike White’s HBO drama Enlightened – and in three of these they played, naturally, a mother and daughter. In Joel Hershman’s 1992 comedy Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Ladd acted alongside her own mother, the stage actor Mary Lanier.

Defence argued police engaged in ‘fishing expedition’ when they stopped far-right activist in Folkestone in July 2024

Tommy Robinson has been cleared of a terror-related offence after being accused over a refusal to give police access to his phone during a border stop.

Robinson, 42, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was driving a silver Bentley Bentayga SUV and was on his way to the Spanish tourist hotspot of Benidorm when he was stopped by officers at the Channel tunnel in Folkestone on 28 July 2024, Westminster magistrates court previously heard.

• Balco boss revealed Marion Jones used growth hormones

• Conte served four months in prison over involvement

Victor Conte, the architect of a scheme to provide undetectable performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones decades ago, has died. He was 75.

The federal government’s investigation into another company Conte founded, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco), yielded the convictions of Jones, elite sprint cyclist Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield along with coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.

Kaja Kallas to issue update this afternoon on progress countries are making towards becoming union member

Meanwhile over in the Netherlands, the coalition forming process is about to start this afternoon as leaders of the main parties meet to discuss next steps and appoint a “scout” to see what’s possible.

The meeting is scheduled for 4pm local time today, and will be hosted by the parliament speaker, Martin Bosma.

In The White House Effect, now available on Netflix, archival footage is used to show how the US right moved from believing to disputing the climate crisis

In 1988, the United States entered into its worst drought since the Dust Bowl. Crops withered in fields nationwide, part of an estimated $60bn in damage ($160bn in 2025). Dust storms swept the midwest and northern Great Plains. Cities instituted water restrictions. That summer, unrelentingly hot temperatures killed between 5,000 and 10,000 people, and Yellowstone national park suffered the worst wildfire in its history.

Amid the disaster, George HW Bush, then Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, met with farmers in Michigan reeling from crop losses. Bush, the Republican candidate for president, consoled them: if elected, he would be the environmental president. He acknowledged the reality of intensifying heatwaves – the “greenhouse effect”, to use the scientific parlance of the day – with blunt clarity: the burning of fossil fuels contributed excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, leading to global warming. But though the scale of the problem could seem “impossible”, he assured the farmers that “those who think we’re powerless to do anything about this greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House Effect” – the impact of sound environmental policy for the leading consumer of fossil fuels. Curbing emissions, he said, was “the common agenda of the future.”

With polls showing signs of recovery after a popularity slump, Tuesday’s results will test whether the party can rebuild

One year after Donald Trump won his way back into the White House, voters are going back to the ballot box in a test of the president’s popularity and whether Democrats are able to rebound from their catastrophic losses of 2024.

With governor’s mansions, mayoral offices, statehouses and mid-cycle redistricting on the line in closely watched contests from Trenton, New Jersey and Richmond, Virginia to New York City and beyond, the party is pinning its hopes on locally rooted campaigns aiming to blunt a national conservative message that has surged in recent years.

While Labour is desperately trying to mimic Reform’s line on the cash economy, the blame lies solidly with ordinary people feeling the pinch

According to politicians across all parties, something called the “hidden economy” – the shadowy nethers of the labour market, in which work goes unregulated and undeclared to the authorities – is a “menace”, full of migrants whose illegal working “undercuts British workers”, and even a threat to our national security. MPs have been so worried about asylum seekers delivering their Friday night pizza that they’ve spent parliamentary time discussing Deliveroo et al’s business models. In response, the government has repeatedly reassured us, in the somewhat Mills & Boon-style phrasing of Yvette Cooper, when she was home secretary, that it’s “surging enforcement” to tackle the problem.

Solutions suggested include Keir Starmer’s digital ID cards, requirements for increased “right to work” checks, and new data-sharing agreements in which the Home Office gives delivery companies the addresses of asylum hotels to try to stop asylum seekers working. All of these measures are intended to stop migrants earning money if they lack the legal right to work, which suggests that the government thinks those migrants are the main problem in the hidden economy.

Emily Kenway is a writer and former policy adviser

Having won her third British shot put title in four seasons in the summer, Adele Nicoll also has a Winter Olympic dream – and admits she’s ‘terrible for wanting to do everything’

Walking through the University of Bath’s vast sports complex to Britain’s only bobsleigh push-start track, a momentary silence is broken by the thwack of a ball and hearty cheers from excited adolescent spectators.

It is the first Wednesday afternoon – when inter-university sport takes centre stage – of the academic year, and Adele Nicoll is reflecting on how her own undergraduate days inadvertently led her to this point. Nicoll, then a sport and exercise science student at Cardiff University, had an eye on making it as an international shot putter, but not to the detriment of enjoying all aspects of university life; she played as hard as she worked.

In an extract from his new book on the rise of Canadian basketball, Oren Weisfeld examines the pressures of being a teenage star in the modern game

Andrew Wiggins was among the first superstar prospects of the social media era. Born in Thornhill, Ontario just north of Toronto, Wiggins was known internationally by the time he was 13. It wasn’t always easy for the shy, small-town kid to embrace the spotlight.

After just one full season at Vaughan, Wiggins needed better competition than Canada could provide and moved on to Huntington Prep in Huntington, West Virginia — a relatively new prep school set in a small, blue-collar, sports-oriented college town near Kansas.

This is an edited extract from The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse by Oren Weisfeld. It’s published by ECW Press for $19.95 (USD) wherever you get your books.

If the fronds have turned brown and crispy, all is not lost – this nifty, cost-free trick is surprisingly effective

The problem
Few plants test a person’s patience like ferns. One day they’re full of life; the next they look like tumbleweed left on a radiator. Fern fronds crisp up at the first hint of dry air, and once they turn brown, most think it’s game over.

The hack
Put the plant inside a clear plastic bag – but don’t seal it as it still needs some airflow – and place it in bright but indirect light.

Wielding fantasy weapons and splashing fake blood, the New Yorkers have even learned how to make chainmail outfits – and they’re already aiming to conquer stadiums

While many a rocker has cribbed from high fantasy, few have truly walked the walk. Sure, they might bedeck their album sleeves with ghouls, goblins, manacled maidens and brawny barbarians, but did a member of Cirith Ungol ever have to retrieve a missing unicorn horn from a snowy field in the depths of winter? Has Yngwie Malmsteen spent time squinting in the back of a tour bus, repairing his own chainmail?

Formed in 2019, Brooklyn’s Castle Rat have had to face both these scenarios and more as they live out their epic fantasies. From heraldic, earworm-heavy anthems to eye-popping live shows, costume design, videos and album art, they’re not so much a metal band as a full immersive experience.

Beating the dangerous influence of private interests on governments requires independent judges, journalists and a courageous civil society

A global youth revolt is shaking the foundations of political power. In just a few months, millions of young people have taken to the streets across continents – from Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, Kenya, Tanzania, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru and Paraguay – to denounce corruption and collapsing public systems. The spark is familiar: governments accused of looting public wealth while ordinary citizens face unemployment, rising costs, poverty and failing services. These digitally connected protest movements – leaderless, borderless and fast-moving – have toppled governments in Nepal, Peru and Madagascar. The anger is not abstract. It is directed squarely at political and economic elites who have turned public office into private estates. What they are confronting, often without naming it, is state capture – a form of corruption so deeply embedded that it shapes the rules of democracy itself.

Most people think corruption is about a politician taking bribes, or a public official pocketing cash for a favour. That’s the low-hanging fruit: petty or grand corruption, both corrosive but familiar. But there is a deeper, more dangerous form of rot – state capture. Not simply corruption of the system. It is corruption as the system.

Our cartoonist on how even a comic-book hero could become a greedy narcissist if the game continues to eat itself

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A quarter of a century from his starring role in a 4-3 win over Liverpool, the Australian reminisces on playing in Croatia during civil war and opening a coffee shop after retirement

It started how it finished: with a delicate chip. Twenty‑five years ago, Mark Viduka scored all four goals in Leeds’s 4-3 victory against Liverpool at Elland Road. While those around furiously pedalled, Viduka remained Buddha‑esque, bookending his efforts with deft wedges over Sander Westerveld.

“I had to learn it over time,” Viduka says when asked whether his serenity was a superpower. “I played a lot of games where I was very nervous. When I was younger, I might just have belted it and hoped for the best.”

Towering above Delhi’s skyline, emitting an inescapable stench of rotting flesh, are giant mountains of rubbish. Several miles wide and more than 200ft (60 metres) high, they are visible from across the city and stand as symbols of Delhi’s inability to deal with its trash.

Hannah Ellis-Petersen visited communities living in the shadow of Bhalswa’s overfilled landfill heaps, to see how they have become reliant on the mountain that is simultaneously poisoning them

Carmaker’s seventh biggest single investor will vote against package at annual shareholder meeting

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Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has said it will vote against a $1tn (£765bn) pay package for the Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk.

The fund, which is the biggest national wealth fund in the world, said that while it appreciated the “the significant value created under Mr Musk’s visionary role” it would vote against his performance award.

Spy chief Mike Burgess says it’s possible the unnamed regimes ‘would try to hide their involvement’ in any killings

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Foreign agents from at least three countries are “willing and capable” of assassinating perceived political dissidents on Australian soil, Australia’s spy chief Mike Burgess has claimed.

While not naming the three countries on Tuesday evening, Burgess, the director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, warned of the risk of a politically motivated assassination in Australia and said: “This threat is real.”

After mass killings in El Fasher and four years on from a coup, UAE now admits its Sudan policy has gone wrong

The United Arab Emirates’ diplomatic machine is for the first time admitting to mistakes in its Sudan policy after suffering reputational damage over its support for the Rapid Support Forces, the Sudanese paramilitary group that has carried out mass killings in El Fasher since it captured the city late last month.

Speaking in Bahrain on Sunday, Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s senior diplomatic envoy, said the UAE and others had been wrong not to impose sanctions on the instigators of the 2021 coup – jointly led by the RSF and the army – that overthrew Sudan’s transitional civilian government.

Top lawyers call for change in rhetoric that has left minority ethnic Britons fearful as politicians target migrants

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Leading British lawyers have warned of a political “race to the bottom”, after a Conservative MP tipped as future party leader said large numbers of legally settled families must be deported.

Katie Lam, a shadow Home Office minister and a Tory whip, said people with legal status in the UK should have their right to stay revoked, to ensure the UK is mostly “culturally coherent”. The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, rowed back on Lam’s statement last Thursday, weeks later.

A new law will restrict protests outside the homes of public office holders. The right to demonstrate is a given, but to menace private homes is just not right

Every day, I hear appalling stories of the abuse suffered by people who step forward to represent their communities and serve our country. It is shocking to see the level of harassment and intimidation faced by those in our parliament, our town halls and elsewhere in public service. Every story I hear only increases my determination to stop it happening and keep those who serve safe.

The horrific murders of my friends Jo Cox and David Amess were not isolated tragedies. They sent shockwaves through parliament and our democracy. Their loss left behind grief and a fear that shapes our politics.

Dan Jarvis is security minister and Labour MP for Barnsley North

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Randall Alberto Gamboa Esquivel’s family alleges negligence and inhumane treatment

The recent death of a Costa Rican man who was jailed by US immigration authorities in February before being deported in a vegetative state in September has prompted his family and supporters to speak out with allegations of negligence and inhumane treatment.

Nonetheless, a spokesperson for Donald Trump’s administration – which has aimed to deport as many people as possible from the US since his second presidency started in January – maintained in a statement that the medical treatment Randall Alberto Gamboa Esquivel received before his death is better than many immigrants “have received in their entire lives”.

Emily Mkrtichian’s feature debut was shot in the now defunct republic of Artsakh, a tender, intimate meditation on the impermanence of life

With a title taken from the traditional opening phrase of Armenian fairytales, Emily Mkrtichian’s feature debut hints at the impermanence of life itself. Shot in the now defunct republic of Artsakh, the film follows four extraordinary women who find their hopes and ambitions cruelly derailed by war. The breakaway state was formed in 1991, after decades of political discrimination under the Soviet Union and military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. For the predominantly Armenian population here, their peace has always been under threat.

The personal journeys of Mkrtichian’s subjects feel even more remarkable in the face of these uncertainties. A judo champion, Sose aspires to represent her country at the Olympics; Siranush campaigns to be on the city council; and Gayane runs a support group for women. For those living in Artsakh, memories of the last war are more than a spectre; working in bomb disposal, Sveta defuses mines that are still lodged in the verdant landscape. Though their professions vary, they are all committed to bettering the community, a testament to the strong cultural bonds that exist here.

Exclusive: Pregnancy experts warn of inadequate medical advice and lack of safe and reliable care

Women must be given clearer warnings on the potentially fatal dangers of giving birth at home and should only be aided by experienced midwives, experts have said.

Maternity services worldwide are dealing with an increase in the number of women with more complex pregnancies. Many are choosing to have their baby in a familiar environment, in the comfort and privacy of their own home. Some choose a home birth because having their first baby in hospital was “deeply traumatic” and they are reluctant to repeat the experience.

Chancellor says she is focused on priorities for British people in pre-budget speech laying ground for expected tax rises

• Business live: Pound lowest since April as investors anticipate budget tax rises

Reeves says welfare needs to be reformed.

There is nothing progressive about refusing to reform a system that is leaving one in eight young people out of education, or employment.

I put our public finances back on a firm footing, provided an urgent cash injection into a faltering public services and began rebuilding our economy.

But since that budget, the world has thrown even more challenges our way.