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Plenty of activity in the 3pm games. Cole Palmer scored four times in the first half, Arsenal needed an injury-time own goal to beat Leicester and Everton came from behind to win their first league game of the season. David Tindall will give you chapter and verse.

“Loath as I am to ever criticise Liverpool,” understates Matt Dony, “I wish they wouldn’t publish the team sheet in numerical order. Diaz at left CB? Robertson and Alexander-Arnold on either side of the front three? It would be entertaining, at least…”

In The Accidental Artist, the comedian combines his quirky sketches with musings on life and, particularly, death

Billy Connolly has faced more than his share of challenges in life, from being abandoned by his mother and abused as a child to being diagnosed with prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease in 2013. But humour, he says, has helped him through his darkest moments.

In advance of the publication of a new book of his drawings, the Scottish comedian told the Observer he dealt with his most despairing thoughts by trying to enjoy them. “Well, just don’t try and analyse them,” he said. “You’re wasting your time. Just watch them as they roll by and you’ll be fine.”

• Champions hold firm to claim 3-2 Serie A win at Udinese
• Davide Frattesi strikes before Argentinian scores two

Lautaro Martínez scored either side of half-time, helping Inter to a 3-2 win at Udinese in Serie A, as the defending champions bounced back from a three-game winless run in all competitions.

Davide Frattesi put Inter in front after 43 seconds from an excellent low cross by Matteo Darmian before the Udinese defender Christian Kabasele levelled in the 35th minute with a header.

This roundup will be updated …

Olympians and amateurs alike swear by legal products such as probiotics and creatine for improving their performance – but does the evidence back them up? We ask the experts about four favourites

In August, Keely Hodgkinson won Great Britain’s only Olympic gold medal on the track. The foundation of the 800m star’s world-beating performance came from a regime that comprises intensity over mileage, cross-training, sand-dune workouts and a £15 supplement that has been around for years but has enjoyed a breakthrough year in 2024. Hodgkinson uses sodium bicarbonate – AKA baking powder – to power up her training and races, specifically Maurten’s “bicarb system” that, according to one leading coach, was used by 80% of endurance athletes in Paris. “I couldn’t recommend it strongly enough,” said Hodgkinson’s coach, Trevor Painter. But why? What is it about sodium bicarbonate and the Maurten system that’s had it labelled “gold dust” by another leading coach? And beyond the bicarb, what other legal supplements are used? The industry is currently valued at $17.61bn (£13.15bn) – that’s an awful lot of pills, powders and potions that purport to improve sporting performance. Here we look at the evidence on four of them.

OpenAI o1, AKA Strawberry, appears to be a significant advance, but its ‘chain of thought’ should be made public knowledge

It’s nearly two years since OpenAI released ChatGPT on an unsuspecting world, and the world, closely followed by the stock market, lost its mind. All over the place, people were wringing their hands wondering: What This Will Mean For [enter occupation, industry, business, institution].

Within academia, for example, humanities professors agonised about how they would henceforth be able to grade essays if students were using ChatGPT or similar technology to help write them. The answer, of course, is to come up with better ways of grading, because students will use these tools for the simple reason that it would be idiotic not to – just as it would be daft to do budgeting without spreadsheets. But universities are slow-moving beasts and even as I write, there are committees in many ivory towers solemnly trying to formulate “policies on AI use”.

Now conspiracy theories are the mainstream’s forte, there’s only one way a magazine on the paranormal can go: rational

I picked up the October issue of the Fortean Times the other day. For half a century, the magazine has been the go-to place for reports of the wildest conspiracy theories, of UFO sightings and poltergeists and frogs falling from the sky. Created by Bob Rickard, a British disciple of Charles Fort, the American investigator of the paranormal, the magazine has always been perfectly pitched somewhere between The X-Files and a parish council newsletter. I enjoyed a subscription for a while, but haven’t read the magazine for a few years.

Returning to it is a curious experience. In the intervening time, the “rational” news world has invaded traditional Fortean territory. Far from being a niche interest, unhinged conspiracy has become something like the political mainstream. Alongside “I was a teenage alien”, the October magazine contains a report into the theories circulating around the two failed assassination attempts against Donald Trump. It is – notably – about as circumspect as any New York Times editorial, warning against the infectious beliefs of the “lone nut fraternity”. Even the far-fetched, it seems, has gone way too far.

Reports of dissenters working for £4 a day on onion plantation owned by Saxony state parliament AfD member Jörg Dornau

Midway through Nikolai’s shift sorting onions alongside other political prisoners in a warehouse in western Belarus, a tall and bald foreigner entered the building.

“He arrived in a car with German license plates. Then he came over and greeted us warmly,” Nikolai*, recalled in an interview with the Observer.

Flooding and landslides strike southern Appalachians after hurricane pummeled the region and caused 44 deaths

At least 44 people are confirmed dead and almost 4 million are without power on Saturday, after strong winds and torrential rain from Hurricane Helene wreaked unprecedented havoc across large swathes of the south-eastern United States.

Historic flooding continued over parts of the southern Appalachians on Saturday, as first responders worked to reach stranded communities in trying conditions while local authorities began to assess the scale of the damage and displacement.

Along the Madeira river basin, in the Amazon, locals blame climate change and human greed for the wildfires

“All of that up there is Paradise,” said Maria Moraes de Souza, gesturing to the string of villages among which she lives along one of the Amazon’s most important waterways.

But lately life in this supposedly Arcadian community has taken a toxic turn, as the River Madeira’s waters have fallen to their lowest level since the 1960s and the skies overhead have filled with smoke from wildfires that are raging across Brazil.

Conservative grandees at the conference in Birmingham fear that none of the candidates can unite the party’s factions

Senior Tories are already predicting that whoever wins the Conservative leadership race is unlikely to survive until the next election, amid criticisms of a “B-list” contest that risks taking the party farther to the right.

Some veteran figures have decided to give this weekend’s conference in Birmingham a miss, fearing the party has learned little from the complete loss of discipline that characterised its final years in government.

Looking through old cutlery was a safe haven for my dad after he became lost in ‘dementia land’

The days are long in Dad’s house in the last year of his life. He is mostly asleep in a hospital bed in the corner of the room, while I sit quietly on the sofa hoping he sleeps a little longer. I sit watching him, worrying he’s stopped breathing, listening to the radio playing pop songs that transform the room into a time machine. “Catch a bright star and place it on your forehead…”, T Rex’s Ride a White Swan transports me back to 1970, watching Top of the Pops in this room, Dad teasing us about Marc Bolan’s shoes or Noddy Holder’s trousers.

When he wakes up, I ask him if he remembers the song. He shakes his head slowly. “I don’t remember anything…” Even trying to remember is too difficult and so, as the song fades away, we fall back into silence until he asks if we can look at spoons.

The trailblazing novelist on the joys of coastal bakeries, writers’ habits and an online boat-tracking map

Born in Devon in 1990, Daisy Johnson studied English literature at Lancaster University and received a master’s degree in creative writing from Oxford. After winning the 2016 Harper’s Bazaar short story prize she published the collection Fen, which took the 2017 Edge Hill short story prize. Her 2018 debut novel, Everything Under, made her the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Booker prize; her second novel, Sisters, came out in 2020. Her new book, The Hotel, a collection of gothic short stories set in the Fens, will be published on 17 October by Jonathan Cape. She lives in Oxford.

A majority of Black residents of key Michigan city don’t cast a ballot, but activists and churches are trying to change that

The largest bloc of registered voters in the city of Saginaw has yet to make a choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and probably never will. A majority of Black residents of the biggest city in the most closely contested county of the battleground state of Michigan simply don’t vote.

To the frustration of civil rights activists and Democratic politicians struggling to secure every ballot in a state that the Harris campaign sees as crucial to victory, more than half of Saginaw city’s population has long been unpersuaded that elections make much of a difference to their lives.

At the final whistle Pep Guardiola and Eddie Howe almost fell into each other’s arms in an unusually protracted and warm embrace.

After the Manchester City manager’s talk of “now we war” with Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta and his Newcastle counterpart’s own only recently ended cold war with the club’s sporting director, Paul Mitchell, it was almost reassuring to see the pair exchanging broad smiles as they whispered in each other’s ears.

Police hunting for suspects in attacks that took place in same neighbourhood in Eastern Cape province

Seventeen people, including 15 women, have been killed in two mass shootings that took place close to each other in a rural town in South Africa, police said.

A search was under way for the suspects, the national police spokesperson, Brig Athlenda Mathe, said in a statement on Saturday. One other person was in critical condition in the hospital, she added.

• Cole Palmer sets record with four goals in the first half
• Live scoreboard | Newcastle 1-1 Man City | Mail David

David Raya is fit enough to play for Arsenal while Leandro Trossard is back from suspension.

Arsenal: Raya, Timber, Saliba, Gabriel, Calafiori, Partey, Rice, Trossard, Saka, Havertz, Martinelli

The group’s secretary general rose from humble beginnings in Beirut to a position of great power. Applicants for his job will need strong nerves

• Hassan Nasrallah killed: latest updates

The killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran leader of Hezbollah, on Friday marks a turning point in the conflict in the Middle East. Both Nasrallah and the organisation he led were hardened by successive decades of conflict within Lebanon, against Israel and, latterly, in Syria. Both were powerful political and social forces with very significant regional and local influence.

Through more than three decades in charge of Hezbollah, Nasrallah built up a fervent personal following, steering the Shia Muslim movement through a number of transitions, balancing the demands of its military role with those of its expansive social welfare systems, building a political wing and negotiating the various crises that broke across the region. He earned adulation from supporters and bitter personal enmity from foes.

Research also reveals that a mixture of arable crops and cattle helps improve the biodiversity of the land

Cows may belch methane into the atmosphere at alarming rates, but new data shows they may play an important role in renewing farm soil.

Research by the Soil Association Exchange shows that farms with a mixture of arable crops and livestock have about a third more carbon stored within their soil than those with only arable crops, thanks to the animals’ manure.

Cosmetic surgery fuels the fallacy that looks bring happiness. But what is it like to live with a striking visible difference? The star of a new film about the subject shares his real-life experiences

Cosmetic surgery is back in the news. After six facelifts, a brow lift, neck lift and a lip lift, the reality star Katie Price has new “butterfly lips”, created with tape and filler that make the lips bigger and curled upwards. Price may have had more aesthetic surgery than most, but she’s not alone in going under the knife. Last year there were 35m such treatments around the world. Facial surgeries – eyelid lifts, rhinoplasties, lip fillers – rose by 20% in 2023. Whatever else is going on – pandemics, economic and political crises, wars, human rights abuses – we cling to the belief that if we fix our looks, we can improve our lives.

It’s an understandable – if solipsistic – belief, given the attention paid to beautiful people; they are the ones who seem to get the jobs, the relationships, the Oscars. We are far more likely to trust, forgive and believe people who are good-looking. And if we can have a piece of that, why would we not, despite knowing some treatments end in tragedy. Last week Alice Webb, a 33-year-old mother of five, died from complications following a non-surgical “Brazilian butt lift”.

(Transgressive/Future classic)
Completed by her brother after her accidental death in 2021, the experimental pop producer’s second album is among the most inventive records of the year

A mischievously distorted “doo doot doo doo” announced the arrival of a singular artist in 2013. The track, Bipp, was not Sophie’s very first release. But this early, abstract banger ushered in a series of formally daring singles, later compiled as 2015’s Product album; warped earworms that were impossible to dislodge.

It was as though Aphex Twin had swallowed a 12-year-old girl’s Spotify account. This was playful, synthetic pop music – songs about love, or just as often, fizzy drinks – pared back to an austere digital minimalism; sounds so crisp and trickly, they sounded like CGI for the ears. And yet for all its foregrounded artifice, Sophie’s work spoke of heartache and yearning; of human connection. “I can make you feel better,” promised Bipp, kindly.

The space scientist, 56, talks about science and diversity, being made a Barbie, dyslexia and why she told Jools Holland we’d encounter aliens by the end of the year

I said we’d find evidence of alien life by the end of 2024. But I said that when I was on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, and my thinking was that if I said something outlandish they’d invite me back – if only to humiliate me. I’m sure alien life does exist. It’s just a numbers game. But we probably won’t get confirmation of it in the next three months.

Science starts out as magic. I’m fascinated by things that seem intangible in the moment, and I like to think of magic as a science that we don’t understand yet. Sometimes beliefs just don’t stand up against the rigorous investigation needed for something to be science, but I think the wonder inherent to magic is needed to get there in the first place. It’s why so much of science fiction becomes science fact – why the telecommunication devices of Star Trek became today’s mobile phones. It’s important for scientists to think beyond

The universe doesn’t scare me. Words do. I’m dyslexic and it takes me ages to start writing books and hit deadlines, because I’m so scared I’m going to get things wrong. I know a lot of people who are terrified by time and space – it makes them feel small and insignificant. And I’ll concede that it can be daunting stuff. I much prefer to see the wonder in being part of it at all. But the terror I feel teetering on the edge of the black hole, trying to start writing? That keeps me awake at night.

Scientists need humility. We need to be able to accept being wrong. If scientists can’t accept that possibility, then the scientific method doesn’t work. Sometimes science that turns out to be wrong was right based on the evidence of the time. Astronomy is a great example.

Guilfoyle has a personal interest in tearing the Democrat down at a time when Trump’s allies have warned him to lay off the attacks – but it isn’t very successful

Donald Trump has hired “tremendous numbers of women” in his time. Tremendous numbers! We know this not from looking at the actual data, which somewhat contradicts these claims, but because he has told us so himself.