© Aude Bariéty de Lagarde / Le Figaro
Whether in streets draped in anti-drone nets or deep in urban basements, Kherson residents go about their everyday activities with the constant threat of Russian bombing
Galyna Lutsenko, a crisis psychologist, is moving busily among a small group of children seated around a table in a basement in Kherson, unique in being Ukraine’s only leading city almost directly on the frontline with Russian forces – and one where people live with the daily threat of attack.
She dangles a plasticine butterfly on a thread over a playhouse on the table. Her own house in the city, she says, was hit by Russian shelling in 2024, injuring her in the leg and stomach.
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© Photograph: Nina Liashonok/Reuters
© Photograph: Nina Liashonok/Reuters
© Photograph: Nina Liashonok/Reuters
She’s gone from ‘queen of the soaps’ to Loose Woman known for her outspoken opinions and rockstar son Matty Healy. Now sober, she is enjoying another reinvention
Denise Welch doesn’t seem the kind of woman who would turn up with an entourage. But here she is having her hair primped in a makeshift changing room by two people. One tickling her fringe, the other tweaking her tufts. Blimey, I say, have you got two assistants? She grins. “No. There are three.” And now it turns out she’s got a fourth. I offer to make her a cup of coffee. She warns me she’s fussy. “Three teaspoons of Coffee-Mate, please.”
Welch is having a moment. She calls it, with a fabulously camp flourish, her renaissance. The actor and Loose Women regular has hardly been invisible in recent years. But this is on another level. For most of the 2000s, she has been best known for dishing out blithe opinions about anything and everything, and being the mother of the 1975’s frontman, Matty Healy. Now, though, it’s the acting that’s getting the attention. Earlier this month, she returned to the drama series Waterloo Road as the hopeless French teacher Steph Haydock after a 15‑year absence. This time around, she’s a supply teacher and is even more hopeless. Welch has also got parts in the new Russell T Davies drama series Tip Toe, the Josh Pugh sitcom Stepping Up, both on Channel 4, and the adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel Forever Home.
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© Photograph: David Titlow/The Guardian
© Photograph: David Titlow/The Guardian
© Photograph: David Titlow/The Guardian
You’re already doing all the right things for your premenstrual dysphoric disorder, but perhaps it’s time to ask others for more help
I’m 32, and was recently diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), though I suspect I have had it for around five years. It severely affects every area of my life.
For 10 days every month I become irritable and impatient, and have debilitating brain fog. At my worst, I am depressed, with uncontrollable crying and suicidal ideation. I go to weekly therapy sessions, take a variety of supplements, and live a healthy lifestyle – exercise, minimal alcohol, eating well, etc, but all these habits become almost impossible during my luteal phase after ovulation and I feel as though I am completely stuck.
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© Illustration: Alex Mellon/The Guardian
© Illustration: Alex Mellon/The Guardian
© Illustration: Alex Mellon/The Guardian
The Doomsday Clock is ticking ever more loudly as arms-control mechanisms fail and leaders become more reckless. The time to be alarmed is now
Keir Starmer’s tentative pivot to the Dragon Throne has played well in Beijing, though not in Trumpland. That’s partly because, like other needy western leaders, Britain’s prime minister did not dwell on awkward subjects such as human rights abuses, the Jimmy Lai travesty, spying and Taiwan. But in talks with President Xi Jinping, one vital issue was avoided altogether and should not have been: China’s dangerous, unexplained, secretive and rapid buildup of nuclear weapons.
More than the climate crisis, global hunger, Kaiser Trump’s Prussian militarism and the ever prevalent threat of pandemic disease, the uncontrolled proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is the most immediate, existential threat to humanity. Last week, the Doomsday Clock advanced to 85 seconds to midnight – closer to Armageddon than ever before. “Nuclear and other global risks are escalating fast and in unprecedented ways,” warned the clock-watchers, via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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© Photograph: Getty Images
© Photograph: Getty Images
© Photograph: Getty Images
Plaintiffs in case say they were lured from Japan, exploited for labour and cut off from families for generations
It has been more than six decades since Eiko Kawasaki left Japan to begin a new life in North Korea. Then 17, she was among tens of thousands of people with Korean heritage who had been lured to the communist state by the promise of a “paradise on Earth”.
Instead, they encountered something closer to a living hell. They were denied basic human rights and forced to endure extreme hardship. Official promises of free education and healthcare plus guaranteed jobs and housing had been a cruel mirage. And to their horror, they were prevented from travelling to Japan to visit the families they had left behind.
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© Photograph: JIJI Press/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: JIJI Press/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: JIJI Press/AFP/Getty Images
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