The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Malian singer-songwrier and guitarist who had international success in a duo with his wife Mariam

One of the most extraordinary success stories in the history of African music began in 1978 in the south of the Malian capital, Bamako, in the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles, a school for young blind people. It was there that Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia began to make music together. Over two decades later, by now married and known as Amadou & Mariam, “the blind duo of Mali” (as they were once billed) became an award-winning commercial triumph, headlining at festivals and concerts around the world.

Amadou, who has died aged 70, played the electric guitar, sang with Mariam, and wrote or co-wrote many of their songs. They had enjoyed a lengthy, sometimes difficult career together when their lives were transformed by a collaboration with the French-Spanish globally-influenced pop star Manu Chao. He heard one of their songs on the car radio while driving through Paris, and offered not just to produce their next album but to co-write and sing on some of the tracks, adding his slinky, rhythmic style to the duo’s rousing blend of African R&B. The result, Dimanche à Bamako (2004) introduced the duo to a new global audience, selling half a million copies worldwide and reaching No 2 in France.

Alberto Lovo Rojas fled violence in his home country. Now, he fears Trump-backed deportation

It finally happened while he was waiting to get his hair cut.

Alberto Lovo Rojas, an asylum seeker from Nicaragua, had been feeling uneasy for weeks, worried that immigration officials would arrest him any moment. But he had pushed the worry aside as irrational – after all, he had a permit to legally work in the US, and he had been using an app to check in monthly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).

A wildlife crossing across the 101 freeway will connect two parts of the Santa Monica mountains for animals

Above the whirring of 300,000 cars each day on Los Angeles’s 101 freeway, an ambitious project is taking shape. The Wallis Annenberg wildlife crossing is the largest wildlife bridge in the world at 210ft long and 174ft wide, and this week it’s had help taking shape: soil.

“This is the soul of the project,” says Beth Pratt, regional executive director, California, at the National Wildlife Federation, who has worked on making the crossing become a reality over the last 13 years. She says she’s seen many milestones, like the 26m pounds of concrete poured to create the structure, but this one is special.

Even if he’s convicted, a jury might decide on a lesser punishment for Luigi Mangione in the trial’s penalty phase

It was a decision that everyone expected to come. But it still had all the drama of a made-for-television legal show: would the government seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering a top health insurance executive on a Manhattan street?

The answer came last week: yes.

According to a new survey, over half of millennials work more than one job. It’s what they have to do in today’s economy

Americans are barely staying ahead of inflation. So how are they dealing with this issue? By working more.

That’s one of the biggest takeaways from a new study by Academized, an outsourcing platform that connects writers and students. According to the report, more than half of millennials – who make up the largest percentage of workers in this country – are working more than one job to make extra money. What’s even more eye-raising is that nearly a quarter (24%) of those workers have three jobs and a third (33%) have four or more income-earning opportunities outside their full-time work.

US health and human services department confirmed death but insisted the exact cause is under investigation

A second child with measles has reportedly died in Texas amid a steadily growing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people in that state alone.

The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the eight-year-old girl had died from “measles pulmonary failure” early Thursday at a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, citing records obtained by the outlet.

Internal investigation cleared the national security adviser Mike Waltz, but the mistake was months in the making

Donald Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz included a journalist in the Signal group chat about plans for US strikes in Yemen after he mistakenly saved his number months before under the contact of someone else he intended to add, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The mistake was one of several missteps that came to light in the White House’s internal investigation, which showed a series of compounding slips that started during the 2024 campaign and went unnoticed until Waltz created the group chat last month.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

Why do sunglasses make you look cool? Allen Bollands, by email

Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday.

The older you are, the more likely it is that a fall, a knock or just gravity will break bones that have been weakened by osteoporosis. But there are ways to protect yourself – and the earlier you start, the better

I’ve broken just one bone in my 61 years – my fibula, the smaller of the two that connect your knee to your ankle. I was skiing, I caught my left foot on some ice and the rest of my body just rotated around it until something snapped. Yeah, ouch. I made a full recovery, but I’d rather not break anything else. I definitely don’t want to become so frail that just sneezing or coughing might fracture a rib, or gravity alone could crack my spine.

Like broken hips and wrists, these are all possibilities with the bone disease osteoporosis. In Britain alone, an estimated 3.5 million people live with porous and fragile bones – and one in two women and one in five men over 50 will have a fracture as a result, according to the Royal Osteoporosis Society (ROS). The older you are, the more likely you are to be affected.

As his attackers are jailed for eight years, Kashti speaks about resilience, recovery after being targeted in attack

As he lay on the floor of a remote Welsh cottage, having been battered by a gang of masked kidnappers and handcuffed to a radiator pipe, musician and record producer Itay Kashti was heartbroken to imagine he would never see his family again.

“I thought: ‘This is it. I’m going to die and this is the end of my story.’ I felt it was the final scene from a movie. I was thinking about my children.”

For many of us, the United States means music, progress, hope. Whatever their president does, plenty of Americans continue to believe in those too

It seems as inevitable as the economic chaos let loose by Donald Trump’s mad avalanche of tariffs: a precipitous drop in the number of tourists visiting the US, which is now forecast to be even worse than initially feared. In February, overseas travel to the country was down by 5% compared with the previous year – and, now, reputable forecasters are predicting a drop of nearly twice that size.

We all know why. Trump’s hostile words about Canada and Mexico have hit the US’s top two markets for tourism. Finnish, German and Danish transgender and non-binary people have been advised by their governments to contact a US diplomatic mission before travelling there. Note also a trickle of reports about outsiders falling foul of the cruel stringency apparently now gripping the American authorities: a 28-year-old woman from north Wales held for 19 days in a detention centre and escorted on to her plane home in chains; the French scientist who was summarily denied entry into the US after his phone was found to contain messages criticising the president. Those stories intensify the Trump administration’s general air of brutality and belligerence, which also brings familiar fears to the surface: of guns, politicised thuggery and a country in a frighteningly volatile state. The result is the sudden understanding of the US as somewhere that may be best unvisited – which, for millions of people, brings on a very painful pang of loss.

The blue-and-purple hoop is supposedly there to answer questions that arise in chats, but it’s a slippery slope from providing bus times to annihilating the human race

There are five stages of grief, but only two stages of discovering the little Meta AI circle on your WhatsApp screen. Fear, then fury.

When I first saw the small blue-and-purple hoop last week, I was terrified that it meant I was now livestreaming my life to the entire metaverse, something I presumed I had agreed to when accepting but (of course) not reading the terms and conditions. As the saying goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

Book highlights performer’s wartime contribution and how she used her fame to provide cover and promote equal rights

She was, according to US wartime counter-intelligence officer Lt Paul Jensen, “our No 1 contact in French Morocco”, supporting the allied mission “at great risk to her own life – and I mean that literally. We would have been quite helpless without her.”

The British intelligence agent Donald Darling had her down as an especially “cherished agent of [Charles] de Gaulle’s government”. Well aware of her importance, the UK foreign intelligence service MI6 called her “the pet lady agent” of the Free French.

Considering everyone is a protagonist in their own narrative brought clarity for Will Storr

For nearly 20 years, I’ve been researching and writing about the human brain as a storyteller. My work has unalterably changed the way I see the human world in general, and myself in particular. It has helped me understand everything from political hatred and religions to cults to the nature of identity and suicidal thought. It has even made sense of my own lifelong struggle with making friends.

Our evolution into Homo narrans, the storytelling animal, is the secret of our success. Like other animals, humans exist in a realm of survival in which we seek sustenance, safety and procreation. But, uniquely, we also live in a second realm, a story world that’s made out of the collective imagination. The human brain has evolved to remix reality and turn it into a narrative. We are made to feel like the underdog heroes of our own lives, surrounded by allies and enemies, pursuing meaningful goals and striving towards imagined happy endings. We have a voice in our head that authors a constantly unfolding autobiography of who we are and what we’re doing. We experience, and remember, the events of our lives in three-act episodes of crisis, struggle, resolution. We think in stories, we talk in stories, we believe in stories, we are stories.

Book details how Biden’s circle was reluctant to step down, Harris’s handling of a listing ship and a lack of faith in both

In their book Fight, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes offer an account of the “Wildest Battle for the White House” – and a scathing indictment of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the losers of that battle.

By 2023, a year before the campaign, Biden’s age and fitness to be president were the topic of conversation among senior aides. He had difficulty stringing together a coherent sentence yet, there was no serious discussion of his exiting the ticket until it was way, way too late. Harris, meanwhile, was isolated in her party and terrified of facing the press. She took the wheel of a badly listing ship. It sank.

Fight is published in the US by HarperCollins

• Tszyu wins IBO superwelterweight title following two shock losses
• Sydney fighter calls out American Keith Thurman for next bout

Tim Tszyu has restored his reputation and reignited his international career with a brutal beatdown of American Joey Spencer in Newcastle.

The referee stopped the fight two minutes and 18 seconds into the fourth round after Australia’s former WBO world champion battered Spencer with a stunning blitz to the head and body.

• Minute-by-minute updates on the 2pm BST kick-off
• Owen wrong to claim winning title not enough, says Slot
• Live scoreboard | Read Football Daily | Mail Daniel

Also going on: it’s summer!

We’re all Brann now.

Pontiff makes first public appearance in the Vatican since his release from hospital two weeks ago

Pope Francis has made a surprise appearance in St Peter’s Square during a special jubilee mass for the sick and health workers, marking his first public appearance at the Vatican since his discharge from hospital two weeks ago.

The pontiff waved at the crowd that stood and applauded as he was appeared unannounced, assisted in a wheelchair to the front of the altar in the square.

• Court of arbitration for sport decides against Uefa
• Result of freedom of expression case is ‘important’ ruling

The Norwegian club Brann have won a landmark freedom of expression case with the court of arbitration for sport (Cas) ruling that Uefa should not have punished them for fans singing “Uefa mafia” or displaying banners with the same message at Women’s Champions League games.

The European footballing body fined Brann on two separate occasions in 2024 with a third case pending. Uefa argued that the incidents were a breach of its regulations, which make clubs responsible for “offensive statements of a provocative nature” from the stands.

Garment workers in countries such as Cambodia among those who fear they will lose pay cheques if companies move production elsewhere

“This is very messed up. If Trump wants Cambodia to import more American goods: look, we are just a very small country!”

Khun Tharo works to promote human rights in the Cambodian garment sector, which employs about 1 million people – many of them women.

As the third season of the social satire draws to its finale, the costumes featured in the series are selling out fast

The third season of The White Lotus finishes on Monday, marking the end of group chats and column inches devoted to the Thai hotel and its super-rich guests.

While some of this chatter has been dedicated to theories of who kills who in the finale, or the alleged fallout between creator Mike White and composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, a lot is focused on something else – the fashion.

Alon, Oren and Tal Alexander used their money and influence to build a sex-trafficking network, prosecutors say

The Alexanders are the ultimate Miami crime story: three brothers from one of Florida’s wealthiest families, opulent real estate, luxury yachts and fast cars; there are drugs, fashion models and A-list celebrities. And, ultimately, a trio who flew too close to the sun, only to crash back down to Earth.

The downfall of the Alexander twins Alon and Oren, and their elder sibling Tal, is reflected in their current residence, a federal jail in New York ahead of their trial next year. They face charges including rape, sexual assault and the sexual trafficking of dozens of victims.

The craft is gaining popularity among those in search of a way to slow down, switch off and improve mental health

Woodcarving is gaining in popularity among those who want to whittle away their anxieties and carve out time for themselves amid life’s hurly-burly.

Samuel Alexander’s peaceful carving reels on Instagram now have more than 56,000 followers, and his meditative YouTube videos regularly generate more than 60,000 views.

We are not victims, there is no genocide. This rhetoric shows that the US administration doesn’t understand my thriving country

I am a blue-blood Afrikaner, at least in terms of ancestry: both my grandfathers were young Boer soldiers in the Anglo-Boer war and I am directly related to the president of the old Transvaal Republic, Paul Kruger. I am a descendant of Dutch, French and German settlers who were brought to the southern tip of Africa in the 17th century. Unlike other colonial societies in Africa, my ancestors never left.

They occupied the whole country, displacing and oppressing the Indigenous inhabitants. Eventually, their concept of white supremacy developed into a formal state policy, apartheid. The UN classified this as a crime against humanity. Miraculously, my country has been a thriving democracy and open society ever since the formal end of apartheid in 1994.

Max du Preez was the founding editor of Vrye Weekblad, an anti-apartheid, Afrikaans weekly newspaper

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The latest book from artist Lee Shulman, who has created the world’s largest private collection of amateur colour transparencies, has an often startling sartorial focus

It started with an impulsive eBay purchase. When Lee Shulman received the box of vintage slides he had bought from an anonymous seller, the British visual artist and film-maker could not believe the treasure he had accidentally uncovered. Beyond the impeccable quality of each image, taken in the 1950s by unnamed photographers, these were glimpses at everyday moments from everyday lives long since lost. Birthdays, family gatherings, holidays, parties, graduations – once cherished memories lovingly captured but now forgotten.

Bought in 2017, that box was the catalyst for what Shulman refers to as a “complete obsession”. More than 1m slides, 14 publications and a dozen international exhibitions later, The Anonymous Project has grown into a global endeavour and the 51-year-old’s life’s work. This ever-expanding archive of Kodachrome – a once groundbreaking but now defunct colour film released by Kodak in the mid-1930s – now represents the world’s largest private collection of amateur colour slides.

After the murder of George Floyd, many companies turned to toothless diversity initiatives that they abandoned in the wake of Trump 2.0. A conservative agenda dating back to the 50s explains why

At Ford Motor Company, the moral stock-taking began with a letter.

“This is an extraordinary moment in our history,” Bill Ford, the company’s executive chair, and Jim Hackett, its CEO, wrote to employees on 1 June 2020. It had been three months of upheaval since the coronavirus pandemic began and the company first suspended production at its manufacturing sites. By mid-May, more than 87,000 people in the United States had died from the virus. Then, on 25 May, the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, ultimately killing him, was seared into Americans’ consciousness.

Darren Jones says age of ‘fast-fashion or cheap TVs’ is over and people should be prepared for tougher times to come amid market turmoil

Starmer orders economic reset amid Trump’s tariff mayhem

Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy which faces a 32% tariff rate, said it will not retaliate against the levies and would instead pursue diplomacy and negotiations to find mutually beneficial solutions. Jakarta has said it would send a high-level delegation to the US for direct negotiations with the government.

Cambodia asked the US government on Friday to postpone the 49% tariff rate on its products, the highest rate in Asia and second-highest globally.

Vietnam’s leader To Lam and Donald Trump agreed on Friday to discuss a deal to remove tariffs (Vietnam will be subject to a 46% tariff).

Brazil, which faces a 10% levy on its exports to the US, has said its “government is evaluating all possible actions to ensure reciprocity in bilateral trade, including resorting to the World Trade Organization, in defense of legitimate national interests”.

Taiwan’s top financial regulator said this morning it will impose temporary curbs on short-selling of shares to help deal with potential market turmoil brought resulting from the new import tariffs. Taiwan’s government said on Thursday that the new 32% tariff rate levied on the island were unreasonable and it would discuss them with Washington.

China has hit back hard against Trump’s imposition of 34% tariffs on Chinese goods, which were already subject to a 20% levy, taking the total levy to 54%. Beijing in turn announced a slew of countermeasures, including extra levies of 34% on all US goods and export curbs on some rare earth minerals.

Canada announced a limited set of counter measures against the latest US tariffs. The new Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said the government will copy the US approach by imposing a 25% tariff on all vehicles imported from the US that are not compliant with the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal (Canada and Mexico were exempt from Trump’s latest duties because they are still subject to a 25% tariff related to the US fentanyl crisis for goods that do not comply with the US-Mexico-Canada rules of origin). Carney says Canada will retaliate against “unjustified, unwarranted” tariffs.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is set to travel to Washington to meet with his close ally, US president Donald Trump.

The president has been testing the waters by suggesting he could run again, a familiar playbook of the Maga movement – and a distraction tactic

It is noon on 20 January 2029. In the biting cold of Washington, thousands of people are gathered on the National Mall to witness the swearing in of a new US president or, more accurately, an old US president: Donald Trump, aged 82, starting his third term in office.

The scene is the realm of fantasy or, for millions of Americans, the stuff of nightmares. But in Trump’s own mind it is apparently not so far-fetched at all. Last weekend he told an interviewer that he is “not joking” about another run and there are “methods” to circumvent the constitution, which limits presidents to two terms.

Understaffed agency sent into ‘death spiral’ as employees warn Musk-led cuts will lead to structural collapse

Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration (SSA) have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency.

The SSA operates the largest government program in the US, administering social insurance programs, including retirement, disability and survivor benefits.

I get why wedding DJs are increasingly discerning. Our job is to spread joy on the dancefloor – not upset and division

I have DJed at some impressively esoteric weddings in my time. I started playing clubs in 1999, but in the mid-2000s I started advertising myself as a wedding DJ on the era-defining digital noticeboard Gumtree. One heroic couple only wanted the music of abrasive Manchester geniuses the Fall for the entirety of their nuptials. Another sweet couple wanted to evoke the night they met at 5am at the London gay club Fire – so hired me to bang out punishing hard house from 5pm in a hotel function room.

From experience, people who hire wedding DJs are usually fairly clear about what they like. They may provide a short list of songs they love, usually across a few genres, and trust a DJ to fill in the gaps. It’s rarer that people are clear what they explicitly don’t like.

The boss’s bonus is an annual debating point at Britain’s biggest company. But that’s not the only issue this year

AstraZeneca is used to facing protests over pay at its annual general meetings, given the position of its chief executive, Pascal Soriot, as the best-paid FTSE 100 chief executive for most of the past five years. But pay is not the only issue overshadowing this year’s virtual gathering on Friday.

Britain’s biggest listed company, valued at about £170bn, faces investigations in China over import and data breaches, while it ran into controversy when it ditched the planned £450m expansion of its vaccine site in Speke, near Liverpool, in late January, after failing to hammer out a state support package with the UK government.

British-born painter Sarah A Boardman disputes US president’s claim that she ‘purposefully distorted’ his image

The British artist called “truly the worst” by the US president, Donald Trump, after he derided a portrait she created of him, has said the criticism called her “integrity into question” and is threatening her career.

Sarah A Boardman painted Trump’s official portrait for the Colorado state capitol building in Denver, where it hung for six years from 2019.

Substantial dishes for when spring afternoons get colder

It has been a week of bright, sunny days that suddenly turn into chilly evenings. The sort of weather that can wreak havoc with dinner plans. Twice this week I have had to make last-minute changes when the temperature dropped.

What started out as a light supper of stuffed aubergine ended up being rethought as a more substantial offering, the aubergines layered with haricot beans and chilli-spiked tomatoes under a thyme and breadcrumb crust.

The film, combined with The Little Mermaid, created more carbon emissions than some major airports do in a year

At a screening of the new Snow White movie in London last month, influencers walked through an artificial fairytale forest, complete with a full-size thatched cottage filled with models of furry animals. In the US, Disney paraded an actual bunny in a brown knitted jumper down the red carpet at the film’s Hollywood premiere.

But the film’s theme of being at one with nature seems not to have extended to the real-life environment, with company documents showing the making of Snow White generated more greenhouse gas emissions in the UK than the latest Fast & Furious film, despite the latter’s reliance on an array of gas-guzzling cars.

Arklow’s sleek new wastewater treatment plant is a collaborative triumph between engineers, contractors and architects Clancy Moore. And it’s amazingly unsmelly…

“Who’d want to live next to a sewage treatment plant?” asks the architect Andrew Clancy, who with his business partner Colm Moore runs the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore. Who indeed, yet they have had to find a way to overcome precisely this difficulty. In the coastal town of Arklow, 40 miles south of the Irish capital, they have designed a wastewater facility that seeks to act as a landmark for the town, an agent of its renewal and growth, and a good neighbour to the homes and shops and places of work that it is hoped will be built alongside. The plant consists of two calm oblongs of mysterious scale, their long horizontals echoing the line where the sea meets the sky, plus a third more domestic structure alongside, all in a marine blue-green colour you could call pale teal.

The project is in illustrious company. The tradition of making dirty functional structures into objects of pride and beauty gave the world such things as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the noble, deco-ish ventilation towers of the Mersey Tunnel in Liverpool and the Wirral. When Joseph Bazalgette installed London’s sewage system in the 1860s and 70s, he created parks and gardens and well-appointed public spaces on the river embankments that contain giant sewers, and ornate structures such as the neo-Byzantine pumping station in Abbey Mills, east London. The Arklow project, argues Clancy, is an opportunity to make visible the billions that are usually spent unseen on the public good of clean water.

Peter Reynolds, 79, detained with his wife, Barbie, since February, says prison is ‘nearest thing to hell I can imagine’

A Briton held captive by the Taliban for more than nine weeks has said he is living in dire conditions in a prison in Kabul, describing it as “the nearest thing to hell I can imagine”.

In a recording of a phone call from Pul-e-Charkhi prison, Peter Reynolds, 79, also spoke of his fears for the safety of his wife, Barbie, who is being held in the women’s section of the the maximum-security jail.

The Israeli PM will have to call on his talent for self-preservation in the face of questions about how a foreign power viewed as an enemy was able to infiltrate the highest levels of his government

Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is no stranger to scandal. Over three decades in politics, the 75-year-old has been accused of everything from spending excessive public money on ice-cream and striking deals with media outlets for favourable coverage to undermining trust in public institutions and the rule of law. In November, the international criminal court announced it was seeking his arrest for alleged war crimes in the conflict in Gaza.

To date, the prime minister has always managed to find a way to cling on to power – and public support. But even for “King Bibi”, as he is known to both supporters and detractors, this has been a difficult week, as a new scandal known as Qatargate gains momentum.

The US vice-president’s avid concern for Livia Tossici-Bolt’s conviction is plain sinister

You know the feeling: you’re feeling sociable, why wouldn’t you make a sign saying “Here to talk, if you want to”, and head for a spot outside the nearest abortion clinic? And why wouldn’t some of its arriving patients want to pause before their appointments and satisfy your entirely innocent interest in their reproductive intentions?

This, give or take, amounted to the case by the prominent anti-abortion campaigner, Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was on Friday found guilty of twice breaching a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO). Her sign-holding outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic was, she had argued, not covered by a council-imposed safe zone, being “a mere invitation to speak”. And thus an invitation she could have happily extended to strangers just a little further from the clinic. But that did not suit Tossici-Bolt’s purpose. Nor does anything prevent her from staging anti-abortion rallies, distributing literature, or expressing her views on abortion anywhere except right in abortion patients’ faces outside clinics. These details, although similar regulations exist in parts of the US, routinely fail to surface in accounts by her prominent US supporters, with whose help Tossici-Bolt has been misrepresenting the illegal undermining of UK women’s reproductive rights as a noble quest for free speech.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

As the clay season hits full swing, the bigger names – and a few outsiders – are building towards the next grand slam