Some people spend their lives feeling out of place in groups – but it comes with unique opportunities

‘I can’t explain it. He is a sweetheart. A beautiful boy inside and out, and so brilliant.” This was how a session with N, a longtime patient of mine, began some years ago. Her son, A, was a young teenager, and in spite of coming from a warm, loving family with attentive parents, he had started having social  difficulties.

He wasn’t being bullied or left out at school. He wasn’t depressed, moody or anxious. In fact, he was popular, well liked and constantly being invited to parties, to basketball games, and to hang out with groups of young people. The problem was, he turned all these invitations down, and N couldn’t understand why.

Illegal immigration and the climate crisis were hotly debated by the novelist and the former tram driver. But did they end up on the same track?

Sunyi, 38, Wakefield

Occupation Novelist

The president’s fossil-fuel obsession can’t stop global progress, writes the former Environmental Protection Agency head

Over the past decade, the United States has turned technologies into tools that strengthened our economy, delivered good-paying union jobs, cleaned up our air and water, conserved our precious natural resources, and saved families money all across our country. Yet now the country is choosing to cede that leadership, letting China dominate and control the clean-energy market across the world. It’s no surprise that people are scratching their heads, wondering what happened.

Our president is obsessed with fossil fuels. He wants to resuscitate what everyone knows is a dying coal sector while turning a blind eye to the health, environmental, and economic downsides of the climate crisis. Coupled with inconsistent threats of increased tariffs against virtually all our allies, he has isolated the US and amplified threats to global security.

Gina McCarthy is the managing co-chair of America Is All In, former White House national climate adviser and 13th US EPA administrator

Oliver Twist is one of the author’s best known creations. But for Nicholas Blincoe, the story is much closer to home. He reveals an astonishing family history

For almost my entire life, I’ve known there’s a connection between my family and Oliver Twist. There’s little chance I could forget it. Charles Dickens’s story has exploded into an Oliver multimedia universe, with as many as a hundred screen adaptations, the brilliant Lionel Bart musical, two current TV shows based on the frenmity of Fagin and the Artful Dodger, and an Audible dramatisation starring Brian Cox and Daniel Kaluuya.

I remember one Easter Sunday we were watching Oliver! on TV when my father snapped out of his post-lunch stupor to announce: “Oliver Twist was a Blincoe. He’s my great-great-grandfather.” The original Robert Blincoe was a foundling, abandoned in London’s St Pancras district in around 1792. He spent his early years in the care of the parish, entering the workhouse at four years old. By seven, he was one of 30 “parish apprentices” contracted to work in a Nottinghamshire cotton mill without pay until the age of 21. London’s parish councils shipped thousands of pauper children north between the 1790s and 1830s, but little was known of their lives until Robert’s memoir. His account of brutality, sadism, sexual abuse and starvation became a national sensation, running to five editions between 1828 and 1833.

When war broke out between India and China, the author and her brother were taken by their mother on a chaotic journey from hill station squat to an eccentric household in Kerala. Would they ever find a safe space?

A teacher was what my mother had always wanted to be, what she was qualified to be. During the years she was married and living with our father, who had a job as an assistant manager on a remote tea estate in Assam, the dream of pursuing a career of any kind atrophied and fell away. It was rekindled (as nightmare more than dream) when she realised that her husband, like many young men who worked on lonely tea estates, was hopelessly addicted to alcohol.

When war broke out between India and China in October 1962, women and children were evacuated from border districts. We moved to Calcutta. Once we got there, my mother decided that she would not return to Assam. From Calcutta we travelled across the country, all the way south to Ootacamund – Ooty – a small hill station in the state of Tamil Nadu. My brother, LKC – Lalith Kumar Christopher Roy – was four and a half years old, and I was a month away from my third birthday. We did not see or hear from our father again until we were in our 20s.

• 3rd ODI: Australia, 2-431, bt South Africa, 155, by 276 runs

• Travis Head hits 142, one of three home centurions

Travis Head, Mitchell Marsh and Cameron Green smashed blistering hundreds as Australia steamrollered South Africa by 276 runs in the third and final one-day international of the series in Mackay.

South Africa had already clinched the series, leaving the 50-over world champions to play for pride in the last match. Australia’s opening pair set the tone with a 250-run partnership between player-of-the-match Head (142) and Marsh (100), before an incendiary unbeaten 118 from Green powered Australia to a mammoth 2-431.

Country’s weather agency says 10-day period from 8-17 August was hottest since at least 1950, as fires still rage

A 16-day heatwave Spain suffered this month was “the most intense on record”, the country’s state meteorological agency (AEMET) has said.

Provisional readings for the 3-18 August heatwave exceeded the last record, set in July 2022, and showed an average temperature 4.6C higher than for previous such phenomena, the agency said on X.

National Retail Federation estimates families are budgeting an average of nearly $875 for the year for shopping

Summer is drawing to a close and as parents and children get ready for a new school year, their first lesson will be in economics.

Most of Donald Trump’s tariffs went into effect at the beginning of August. We are still waiting on a deal with China. But with school supplies so dependent on imports, consumers have been anxiously waiting to see how tariffs will affect the prices they see in stores.

Two Ivorian archivists are documenting bygone eras in music and pop culture for younger African generations

Shortly after it was launched in 2020, the Instagram-based project Archives Ivoire received a major boost when the French-Malian superstar Aya Nakamura reshared a meme it had made from the series Nafi, one of Francophone Africa’s most beloved TV shows, to her millions of followers.

In the years since, Archives Ivoire, which documents the female aesthetic in Ivorian pop culture, has amassed 85,000 followers, started hosting cinema club sessions in the Ivorian city of Abidjan and the neighbouring town of Grand-Bassam, and launched a successful sideline in merchandise.

After dating jealous and controlling men, Mabel loves that Finn respects her freedom and celebrates her sexuality

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

The safety I feel with Finn means the sex we have feels safe, too, and we can explore freely

Author Abbott Kahler, who inspired the film starring Jude Law and Sydney Sweeney, tells the stranger-than-fiction tale of mayhem on a remote island

“Was Dr. Ritter, With His Steel Teeth, Poisoned in Paradise? Was ‘Baroness Eloise,’ Known as ‘Crazy Panties,’ Who Ruled the Island With a Gun and Love, Murdered by One of Her Love Slaves After She Had Driven the Other to His Death? And Why is Frau Ritter Going Back to What She Once Called ‘Hell’s Volcano?’ – the Mystery of the Galapagos Island Which Germany Covets, to Be Solved At Last?”

This florid passage from a tabloid newspaper caught the eye of the author Abbott Kahler decades after it was published in 1941. “Basically it was the equivalent of a record scratch,” she recalls. “I was thinking: what the hell is the story?”

• Latest news before the afternoon kick-offs

• Today’s live matches | Mail Matchday live

David Moyes likened moving into the Hill Dickinson Stadium to a “new romance” for Everton and the aesthetics are certainly nice when it comes to the architecture and engineering. Will supporters fall head over heels in love like they did, over the decades, with Goodison Park?

A long marriage has a lot to do with how the team is and what team we put on the pitch over the years to come. Can we make that marriage last with the supporters and everybody at the club? I think that’s the next bit.

The IPC’s findings that a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza are starving should mark an urgent turning point in this war

The declaration on Friday of widespread famine in Gaza by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) should mark a turning point in the war. The IPC, which represents a fastidious survey of available data, is regarded as the international gold standard in nutritional crises.

Long-criticised by humanitarians in other emergencies for its overabundance of caution, the IPC’s declaration of Level 5 – “catastrophic” hunger – in Gaza is a significant moment. Famine, under the IPC’s exacting criteria, requires three critical thresholds to be passed: extreme food deprivation, acute malnutrition and starvation-related deaths, all of which are now visible in Gaza.

When Putin blamed the 2020 US election result on mail-in voting he bolstered a Trump obsession – just one example of the blurring of international goals and domestic grievances

It was a language he could understand. Donald Trump had lost the 2020 US presidential election, Russia’s Vladimir Putin told him last Friday, because it was rigged through mail-in voting.

Three days later, the president announced that lawyers were drafting an executive order to eliminate mail-in balloting, a method used by nearly a third of Americans that has not been credibly linked to election fraud.

With her retro blend of jazz-pop, the Icelandic artist seems an unlikely superstar. She discusses her surprising path to fame – and how much of her personal life she is willing to put into her music

One mark of whether someone has the boldness to be a good pop star is how they respond to overhearing someone slagging them off. A few weeks ago, the Icelandic-Chinese jazz-pop phenomenon Laufey was at a coffee shop close to her Los Angeles home when her ears pricked up at the mention of her name (it’s pronounced “Lay-vay”, by the way). “I used to love her,” a young woman told her friends. “I’ve met her and she’s so sweet, but her music is unlistenable now.”

In that split-second, Laufey realised that she could do the Normal Person Thing (slink away unnoticed and furiously text her group chat), or do the Pop Star Thing. She spun around to face the group. “I’m so sorry,” Laufey said, her voice dripping with honeyed sarcasm. “I try my best.”

• Lammens to miss Pro League game against Mechelen

• Belgian goalkeeper expected to join United for £17m

Senne Lammens is set to miss Royal Antwerp’s match against Mechelen on Sunday due to his €20m (£17m) proposed transfer to Manchester United.

The current plan is that the 23-year-old goalkeeper has been stood down from the Pro League fixture, which kicks off at 12.30pm, with United expecting his move to become official imminently.

The folk-pop star would try Fleetwood Mac at karaoke and is scarred by her parents’ sex music. But which musical theatre ballad does she secretly like?

The song that changed my life
My mom was Kate McGarrigle, who formed folk duo Kate and Anna McGarrigle with my aunt. My dad is the folk singer Loudon Wainwright III. They were only married for five years, but wrote songs about each other and about my older brother Rufus and I. My dad wrote Five Years Old about missing my fifth birthday. That changed my life. Sometimes it’s easier to apologise in music than in person.

The song I can no longer listen to
Recently, I’m upset that I can’t listen to Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, because the Luke Combs country version has ruined it for me.

• Decision intended to improve relations with Europe

• Tournament could expand to include playoff games

Fifa has told the continental confederations that the next Club World Cup will take place in the summer of 2029 in a move that would appear to kill off a proposed bid from Qatar to host the tournament. In another significant development, Fifa has informed the confederations that the next edition is likely to feature more than the 32 clubs that competed in the United States this summer.

The Guardian revealed in June that Fifa was under pressure from leading clubs to expand the Club World Cup to 48 teams, with the lobbying intensifying since last month’s tournament, which resulted in the winners, Chelsea, receiving £85m from the £750m prize and participation fund. While Fifa is understood to have indicated that some expansion is likely for 2029, an immediate leap to the 48-team model that will be used for the first time for the men’s World Cup next year is not guaranteed.

British team had a ‘nightmare’ in the Czech Republic, but the solidarity among competing nations shone through

Anne Soltow’s glider was leading the field all day. Now it is in an actual field and a kilometre short of the finish. The single-seater sailplane looks like a giant alien bug: long slender fuselage, a canopy encasing the cockpit like a single eye, epic wings, 15 metres tip to tip. They were all that was keeping Soltow’s engineless aircraft in the sky – until 10 minutes ago.

The pilot is furious with herself. She had been in the air for nearly four hours and in first place before running out of altitude on the final run back to the airfield. “Landing out” is common in gliding, where testing courses are spread across hundreds of kilometres (think orienteering in the sky). You stay airborne by climbing naturally occurring, upward-spiralling cylinders of warm air known as thermals. Fail to find these and the ground comes to meet you a lot earlier than you would like.

• Williams surprises Sharapova at induction

• 23-time major winner hails fierce rivalry

• Bryan brothers, Sharapova join 2025 class

Serena Williams made a a surprise – and early – appearance at the International Tennis Hall of Fame, emerging from behind the stage to introduce “former rival, former fan and forever friend” Maria Sharapova for her induction on Saturday night.

Williams, a 23-time grand slam champion who will be eligible for her own enshrinement in 2027, drew gasps and shrieks from the crowd at the Newport shrine.

• Over-by-over updates from final match of series

• Australia hit 431-2 at Great Barrier Reef Arena

• Any thoughts? Get in touch with an email

5th over: Australia 45-0 (Head 22, Marsh 21) Maharaj gets the ball to spin off the straight, Marsh lofts for two into the leg side and collects a couple more past mid on. Maharaj slows things down though, just four off his first

4th over: Australia 41-0 (Head 22, Marsh 17) Marsh takes a couple of steps out of his ground and larrups Mulder for SIX over mid off! Maharaj is being summoned already as the Proteas look to get some control in this match. Australia will look to smash him out of the attack.

The seven-times major champion is making her 25th appearance, facing Karolina Muchova in the stadium she helped christen in 1997

Venus Williams will take the court on Monday night for her record-extending 25th US Open singles appearance, the Here We Go Again meme brought to life, quite literally as enduring a part of the Flushing Meadows iconography as Arthur Ashe Stadium itself. At 45, two years removed from her last grand slam match and ranked No 610 in the world, she will face Karolína Muchová, the Czech 11th seed and 2023 French Open runner-up who has twice reached the semi-finals in New York.

If the scale of the task before her is formidable, so too is the symbolism of her presence. Williams is the oldest singles competitor at America’s national championships since Renée Richards 44 years ago. She made her debut here as a 17-year-old in 1997 – the same year Ashe was completed and replaced Armstrong as the tournament’s main stadium – becoming the first unseeded player in the Open era to reach the final before losing to Martina Hingis. Twenty-eight years later, she returns with her place in history long since assured but her taste for the fight undiminished.

Politicians are scrabbling to raise birthrates, but when the older generation is the only childcare safety net, that’s a problem

‘Enslaved grandparent syndrome” – sounds extreme, doesn’t it? But that’s what some psychologists in Spain are calling the childcare burden faced by older people in that country, where 35% of people over the age of 65 take care of their grandchildren several days a week. In my London neighbourhood, the sight of a grandparent pushing a baby in a buggy, or a toddler in a swing, is fairly common, but in Madrid, even more so. The latest Europe-wide survey, in 2016, found the proportion of over 65s undertaking childcare at least several days a week in southern European countries – Spain especially, but also in Italy and Greece – is much higher than in France (13%) and Germany (15%) or the UK (18%).

This is the result of historical cultural norms of shared care between generations, but now some Spanish grandparents are fighting back. After working all their lives, and years spent raising their own children, they hadn’t bargained for spending their retirements engaged in unpaid childcare, and they are not alone in that.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

I spent decades being ashamed of the way I look. Then a visit to the Natural History Museum changed everything

I still remember the moment my body image issues began as if it were yesterday. The shaming came before the bingeing: I was 18 and my mum told me I needed to start being careful with my eating, because I was “getting fat”.

She would say: “You’d be so pretty if you’d just lose weight!” I wasn’t overweight at the time, and I felt so angry. But young women aren’t allowed to be angry – so, with nowhere to put those feelings, I channelled them into food, spiralling into binge-eating as an act of revenge. Then came remorse and shame: a cycle of bingeing and restriction.