‘I realised I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder

Where once people were duped by soft-focus photos and borrowed chat-up lines, now they have to watch out for computer-generated charm. But it’s one thing to use a witty phrase – another thing entirely to build a whole fake persona …

Standing outside the pub, 36-year-old business owner Rachel took a final tug on her vape and steeled herself to meet the man she’d spent the last three weeks opening up to. They’d matched on the dating app Hinge and built a rapport that quickly became something deeper. “From the beginning he was asking very open-ended questions, and that felt refreshing,” says Rachel. One early message from her match read: “I’ve been reading a bit about attachment styles lately, it’s helped me to understand myself better – and the type of partner I should be looking for. Have you ever looked at yours? Do you know your attachment style?” “It was like he was genuinely trying to get to know me on a deeper level. The questions felt a lot more thoughtful than the usual, ‘How’s your day going?’” she says.

Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left her staring at her phone long after she should have been asleep. “They were like things that you read in self-help books – really personal conversations about who we are and what we want for our lives,” she says.

Published: October 12, 2025, 5:00 am

From Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton was the quintessential comedy queen

The late actor won an Oscar for leading a romantic comedy in the 1970s and set the blueprint for many of the women who followed her in the genre

• An ethereally self-aware comedy genius: the loss of Diane Keaton is devastating

• Diane Keaton’s style: she dodged the stamp of the machine

Plenty of great female actors have starred in romantic comedies. Usually if they want to win an Oscar, however, they have to reach for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly this week, followed a reverse trajectory and made it look disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as has ever been made. But that same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. (Keaton originated the role opposite playwright Woody Allen on the stage.) She continued to alternate serious dramas with romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for best actress, changing the genre permanently.

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Allen and Keaton had been in a romantic relationship before making the film, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally to her. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Published: October 12, 2025, 1:07 pm

Democrats are captive to outdated etiquette. It’s endangering democracy | Ryan W Powers

The establishment left’s attachment to rigid rules leaves the party out of touch and failing to meet the moment

In early August, dozens of Democratic lawmakers fled Texas for Illinois, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass new congressional maps projected to give the party as many as five additional seats. Their absence paralyzed the state legislature, turning a walkout into political resistance and drawing national attention.

As the standoff dragged on, Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, offered an unorthodox countermove: a proposal to suspend his state’s independent redistricting commission and draw maps designed to hand Democrats a comparable advantage. He unveiled the plan with spectacle, mimicking Donald Trump’s signature style through all-caps declarations, a mocking nickname for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (“KaroLYIN”) and AI-generated celebrity endorsements.

Ryan W Powers is a legal analyst who writes a weekly newsletter on democracy, dissent and the law

Published: October 12, 2025, 11:00 am

‘How is this possible?’: a new film looks inside the appalling abuses of the Alabama prison system

In the year’s most shocking documentary The Alabama Solution, prisoners share astonishing footage in a plea for help

When film-makers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Alabama’s Easterling prison in 2019, they found a deceptively pleasant scene. Like Alabama’s 13 other prisons, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but allowed the documentarians to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue, a sunny day in which incarcerated men, most of them Black, ate fresh roasts to live music and sermons. On camera, men danced and smiled. But off camera, many more told a different story – horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, unimaginable violence swept under the rug and appalling conditions that “ain’t fit for human society”. Cries for help emerged from inside the sweltering, filthy dorms. When Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official shut down filming, claiming that it was unsafe for him to speak to the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki, whose credits include Capturing the Friedmans and The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, recalled recently. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, because they don’t want you to understand what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.” In the short visit, the crew received the same message over and over: “We don’t have access to the outside world. Please share this.”

Published: October 12, 2025, 12:34 pm

The plastic inside us: how microplastics may be reshaping our bodies and minds

The particles are in our blood, brains and guts – and scientists are only beginning to learn what they do

Microplastics have been found almost everywhere: in blood, placentas, lungs – even the human brain. One study estimated our cerebral organs alone may contain 5g of the stuff, or roughly a teaspoon. If true, plastic isn’t just wrapped around our food or woven into our clothes: it is lodged deep inside us.

Now, researchers suspect these particles may also be meddling with our gut microbes. When Dr Christian Pacher-Deutsch at the University of Graz in Austria exposed gut bacteria from five healthy volunteers to five common microplastics, the bacterial populations shifted – along with the chemicals they produced. Some of these changes mirrored patterns linked to depression and colorectal cancer.

Published: October 12, 2025, 5:00 am

Dining across the divide: ‘He was shocked when I told him that schools weaponise anxiety’

They both dabble in knitting and disagree about the school system, but could they see eye-to-eye on AI?

Patrick, 31, London

Occupation Teacher in a pupil referral unit (PRU)

Published: October 12, 2025, 11:00 am

Gaza ceasefire live: Trump to meet with Israeli hostages after their release by Hamas on Monday, says Vance

US vice-president JD Vance says release could happen ‘any moment’ and that ‘we are on cusp of a sustainable Middle East peace’

Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said that Israel is ready for the “immediate” reception of all Gaza hostages.

“Israel is prepared and ready to immediately receive all of our hostages,” he said in a statement after a meeting with the coordinator for the hostage coordinator Gal Hirsch.

Published: October 12, 2025, 6:21 pm

‘Using us as political pawns’: federal workers reel over threats of firings and withheld back pay

Employees express growing anxiety over their pay – and the future of their jobs – amid the US government shutdown

With no end of the federal government shutdown in sight, an estimated 750,000 workers remain furloughed. Hundreds of thousands more are working without pay. They are being “held hostage by a political dispute”, according to union leaders, as Republicans and Democrats remain deadlocked.

In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Donald Trump suggested that furloughed employees would not necessarily receive back pay – despite a legal guarantee – prompting further unease throughout the federal workforce. “There are some people that don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way,” the US president said.

Published: October 12, 2025, 10:00 am

Meta AI adviser spreads disinformation about shootings, vaccines and trans people

Critics condemn Robby Starbuck, appointed in lawsuit settlement, for ‘peddling lies and pushing extremism’

A prominent anti-DEI campaigner appointed by Meta in August as an adviser on AI bias has spent the weeks since his appointment spreading disinformation about shootings, transgender people, vaccines, crime, and protests.

Robby Starbuck, 36, of Nashville, was appointed in August as an adviser by Meta – owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other tech platforms – in an August lawsuit settlement.

Published: October 12, 2025, 12:00 pm

‘Cavalier and aggressive’: why are border agents flooding into US cities?

Border agents have become a key force in Trump’s migrant crackdown – operating far from their traditional rural range

Border patrol officers have become ubiquitous footsoldiers in Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan, and lawyers and human rights advocates worry that the agency is expanding its aggressive tactics into cities far from its conventional range.

Led by Gregory Bovino, a particularly hardline Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sector chief from southern California, border patrol agents have become a daily presence in several major cities across the US.

Published: October 12, 2025, 2:00 pm

Prince Andrew told Jeffrey Epstein ‘we’re in this together’ in 2011 email

Royal sent email after Virginia Giuffre photo emerged but later claimed he had ceased contact with Epstein in 2010

Prince Andrew told Jeffrey Epstein in an email “we are in this together” after a picture of the British royal with his arm around a teenage Virginia Giuffre was first published in 2011.

The email will pile further pressure on the Duke of York and the royal family because he previously told the BBC he had ceased contact with the convicted child sex offender by that point.

Published: October 12, 2025, 2:29 pm

Trump ‘looking at all options’ amid threats to invoke Insurrection Act, Vance says

Vice-president calls crime ‘out of control’ in US cities as Trump faces legal battles for use of federal forces

The White House is talking about invoking the Insurrection Act that would allow the deployment of military troops on US soil to quell domestic unrest amid legal challenges over the moves, JD Vance confirmed on Sunday.

Vance was asked on NBC News’s Meet the Press whether Donald Trump was seriously considering invoking the emergency power to deploy national guard forces and even the US military in domestic settings.

Published: October 12, 2025, 6:07 pm

South Carolina bar shooting leaves four people dead and 20 injured, officials say

Shooting occurred early Sunday at Willie’s Bar and Grill on idyllic St Helena island

A mass shooting at a crowded bar on an idyllic South Carolina island has left four people dead and at least 20 injured, officials say.

The shooting occurred early Sunday at Willie’s Bar and Grill on St Helena island, officials said. A large crowd was at the scene when sheriff’s deputies arrived and found several people suffering from gunshot wounds.

Published: October 12, 2025, 5:13 pm

New Jersey declares state of emergency as nor’easter approaches

Airports post delays and cancellations in advance of anticipated coastal flooding and strong winds

A nor’easter churned its way up the east coast on Sunday, with New Jersey declaring a state of emergency and some airports posting delays and cancellations in advance of anticipated coastal flooding and strong winds, as another storm system struck farther south with heavy rain and flooding.

“The greatest effects are going to be the coastal flooding potential, especially for areas from north-eastern North Carolina northward to much of the New Jersey coast,” said meteorologist Bob Oravec with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland.

Published: October 12, 2025, 3:32 pm

Doge-ish comes to Florida: a DeSantis loyalist is going after ‘waste’ in Democratic cities

Blaise Ingoglia was handpicked by the Republican Florida governor to lead an assault on municipal spending

The words of Blaise Ingoglia, the Ron DeSantis loyalist handpicked to lead the Republican Florida governor’s Doge-style assault on local government spending, could not have been more prophetic.

“Expect a knock on the door from us,” Ingoglia warned on 1 October as he announced upcoming audits for Democratic-run cities and counties whose “excessively wasteful” pecuniary habits displeased the DeSantis administration.

Published: October 12, 2025, 12:00 pm

Maga figures back Bukele’s call for Trump to crack down on US judges

Experts say El Salvador president’s intervention comes as Trump is employing tactics used by autocrats abroad

Donald Trump is not known for taking advice, especially from foreign leaders who often seek to flatter and compliment the US president.

But El Salvador’s authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele has followed a different tack by calling on the Trump administration to follow his example in impeaching “corrupt judges”.

Published: October 12, 2025, 12:00 pm

European far right follows Trump in calling for antifa to be declared terrorists

Netherlands and Hungary move towards designation as draft resolution reportedly backed by 79 MEPs in 20 countries

Where Donald Trump leads, Europe’s nationalists and far right follow. After a Truth Social post last month, when Trump announced the US would designate antifa, the decentralised anti-fascist movement, “a major terrorist organisation”, his international allies swung into action.

That same day, the Dutch parliament, where the largest party is Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV, passed a resolution, noting the US decision and calling on the government to declare antifa a terrorist organisation in the Netherlands.

Published: October 12, 2025, 5:00 am

Before Trump, ‘Dreamers’ were shielded from deportation. Here’s what’s changed

Until recently, Daca allowed undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children to live and work legally

The Trump administration has once again put Dreamers on a rollercoaster ride.

The federal government is sending mixed signals about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a popular program devised under Barack Obama that had until recently allowed undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children to live and work legally without serious risk of deportation.

Published: October 11, 2025, 4:00 pm

Restitution row: how Nigeria’s new home for the Benin bronzes ended up with clay replicas

The public display of artefacts looted by British colonial forces at the new Museum of West African Art was supposed to be the crowning glory of a decades-long restitution effort. What went wrong?

In a corner of the new Museum of West African Art, visitors can marvel at a sample display of the cultural treasures that adorned the royal palace that once stood in its place: a proud cockerel, a plaque with three mighty warriors, a bust of a king with a glorious beaded collar.

The artefacts, collectively known as the Benin bronzes, were looted by British colonial forces who went on to burn down the palace in a punitive expedition in 1897. In the decades that followed they were scattered across collections in Europe and America.

Published: October 12, 2025, 5:00 am

What is the new EU border system EES, and how will it work?

Digital entry and exit scheme means most travellers will have to register biometric information at the border

• Britons travelling to EU to undergo new biometric checks at border from Sunday

Many travellers to Europe will see changes in border security from Sunday with the launch of the EU’s new digital entry and exit system (EES) after many delays.

The system means most non-EU citizens will have to register their biometric information at the border. Travellers’ faces will have to be photographed and fingerprints scanned before they are allowed into Europe’s Schengen area. The system will eventually replace passports being stamped by border officials.

Published: October 12, 2025, 4:00 am

Saturday Night Live: Amy Poehler is Pam Bondi and Tina Fey is Kristi Noem in standout episode

The former cast members reunite for a historic night, airing 50 years to the day of the first ever episode

Amy Poehler returns to Saturday Night Live for her first hosting gig in 15 years. She’s front and center for the cold open, playing Attorney General Pam Bondi, testifying before the Senate judiciary committee. Bondi is combative from the start: “My name is Pam Bondi, I spell it with an I because I ain’t gonna answer any of your questions.”

She busts out her burn book to hurl personal insults at the senators (“Amy Klobuchar, your ass out here sounding like a Pokémon”) while doing everything she can to avoid answering questions about Trump’s various scandals.

Published: October 12, 2025, 1:53 pm

‘Death to Spotify’: the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the music app

Musicians have long criticized the streaming service’s paltry payouts, but a new wave of boycotts is emerging

This month, indie musicians in San Francisco gathered for a series of talks called Death to Spotify, where attenders explored “what it means to decentralize music discovery, production and listening from capitalist economies”.

The events, held at Bathers library, featured speakers from indie station KEXP, labels Cherub Dream Records and Dandy Boy Records, and DJ collectives No Bias and Amor Digital. What began as a small run of talks quickly sold out and drew international interest. People as far away as Barcelona and Bengaluru emailed the organizers asking how to host similar events.

Published: October 12, 2025, 2:00 pm

Diane Keaton’s style: she dodged the stamp of the machine

A world-class beauty who didn’t lead with her looks, she broke all the rules of celebrity dressing with a sunny smile

• Diane Keaton dies aged 79

• Peter Bradshaw on Diane Keaton

• Diane Keaton interviewed in 2023

• A life in pictures

Personal style is the best kind of style there is, and no one did personal style better than Diane Keaton. Her signature look was shirts and ties, snappy waistcoats and baggy trousers, an idiosyncratic version of menswear that was somehow both elegant and goofy. It was part Beau Brummell and part Charlie Chaplin. “Borrowed from the boys” does not do it justice; she made it entirely her own.

The charm of her wardrobe was that it was exactly her. She was a world-class beauty who didn’t lead with her looks. A quiet subversive who, in the most cookie-cutter of Hollywood eras, dodged the stamp of the machine and chose to live her life her own way. It was never about menswear as power dressing. With a sunny smile, she broke all the rules of celebrity dressing with the disarming sweetness and quiet intelligence that she brought to her screen personas.

Published: October 12, 2025, 8:53 am

The story behind the spy stories: show reveals secrets of John le Carré’s craft

How author researched his plots and letters from Alec Guinness feature in Oxford exhibition

Lamplighters, pavement artists, babysitters – they have taken on whole new meanings thanks to John le Carré. As his fans will know, they are part of tradecraft practised by the spies he wrote about so evocatively. Now, almost five years after his death, an exhibition, with the title Tradecraft, reveals the techniques and motivations of the characters’ real creator, David Cornwell.

As you enter the exhibition in Oxford University’s Bodleian library you are greeted with a large portrait of Cornwell, wearing a black bucket cap, looking straight ahead with piercing eyes, his chin resting on his gently clasped hands. Accompanying the photo are two of his quotes. “I am not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked in the secret world,” one says. The second, after questioning whom, if anyone, we can trust, continues: “What is loyalty – to ourselves, to whom, to what? Whom, if anyone, can we love? And what is the caring individual’s relationship to the institutions he services?”

Published: October 12, 2025, 10:48 am

AI tools churn out ‘workslop’ for many US employees lowering trust | Gene Marks

Studies show widespread errors in AI-generated work, as employers fail to train staff properly

Artificial intelligence sure has been taking a lot of flak lately.

Only 8.5% of the 48,000 people recently surveyed by accounting firm KPMG said that they “always” trust AI search results. Another report from Gartner found that more than half of consumers don’t trust AI searches, with most reporting “significant” mistakes.

Published: October 12, 2025, 2:00 pm

How smoking a bong brought back the trauma of being shot by the Taliban – an exclusive extract from Malala Yousafzai’s memoir

In the activist’s new memoir, she remembers how trying weed at university brought on terrifying flashbacks

• ‘To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op.’ Read an interview with Malala Yousafzai

“Explain how the time inconsistency of optimal monetary policy can lead to a stabilisation bias. How would the introduction of a price path target help to address it?”

After reading the question three times, I still couldn’t make sense of it. I groaned, went back to the textbook, tried to read, made a cup of tea, and tried again. Nothing improved my focus. Then my phone lit up with a message from my friend Anisa: a picture of my name spelled out in Scrabble letters.

Published: October 12, 2025, 12:00 pm

This is how we do it: ‘I worried about his kinks, but I’m learning to relax and be playful’

Marty’s penchant for being demeaned and flogged was new to Viv, who had only slept with two other people when they met …

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

The sex is gentle and affectionate … what I have with Viv is like nothing I’d experienced before

Published: October 12, 2025, 10:00 am

Bari Weiss’s ascent at CBS News was 50 years in the making | David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher

A half-century ago, CBS’s own president was boasting of his support for an antidemocratic political project. Our new book uses never-before-reported documents to tell the story of a scheme to undermine accountability journalism

If you only just started paying attention to the inner workings of the media industry, you might think America’s information environment transformed overnight.

In the past few months, a president extracted settlements from media giants as his apparatchiks vowed state retribution against his opponents – all as they defunded public media at a time when the president’s biggest boosters own the algorithms that decide what information is amplified and suppressed.

Published: October 12, 2025, 1:00 pm

The IMF boss is right to say ‘buckle up’ – the global economy is facing multiple menaces

Trump’s latest tariff tantrum and rising fears of an AI bubble have very quickly borne out Kristalina Georgieva’s claim that ‘uncertainty is the new normal’

• Trump threatens 100% tariffs as Beijing restricts rare-earth exports

Little more than 48 hours passed last week between a warning from the IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, that “uncertainty is the new normal” and Donald Trump’s latest tariff onslaught – this time aimed at China.

Markets plunged on Friday after Trump threatened to levy punitive additional tariffs of 100% on Chinese goods in retaliation for Beijing’s blocks on exports of rare earth minerals.

Published: October 12, 2025, 9:52 am

My foolproof guide to living with a partner – and not falling out about home decor | Polly Hudson

After years of marriage, my husband thinks I’m still trying to find his hideous painting of Bobby Moore ‘the right frame’ so it can go on the wall. It’s these subtle interior design lies that keep a relationship going

Game recognises game. A new, recently engaged friend of mine let slip this week that he has some Lord of the Rings memorabilia in the flat he shares with his fiancee, including a huge map of Middle-earth that is currently not on the wall, because they’re “looking for the right frame.” Well played, that fiancee. Chef’s kiss.

This couple are in their extremely early 30s, so hats off to her even more, for already being so skilled at an essential long-term relationship manoeuvre that not only has she pulled it off perfectly, BUT her future husband is blissfully unaware it’s even happened. The right frame for that map is, clearly, a bin. However, she can’t come right out and tell him that, as there is a delicate language involved in negotiating the interior design … let’s call them “compromises” you are required to make when sharing a home with your significant other.

Published: October 12, 2025, 4:00 am

Parents who film their children crying for clicks should take a good look at themselves | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Toddlers have big feelings. But sharing their tantrums and pain on social media is not a ‘teachable moment’. It’s cruel

There’s a song that’s been in my head all week, and no, it’s not from Taylor Swift’s new album. It’s by a far more sophisticated songwriter than Swift: Ms Rachel. The song is called Big Feelings and it goes: “Big feelings are OK / I’m here to stay with your big feelings.”

Thanks to the trend for gentle parenting, the concept of “big feelings” has become big money online, and for the most part I welcome that (Big Feelings isn’t the only song that reflects this cultural shift; the animation Small Potatoes on CBeebies has a song that goes “Feelings / I’ve got so many feelings”, which my husband likes to sing to me when I’m premenstrual). As a parent, strong emotions are hard to escape: you’re feeling them, the small child in your home is feeling them and, in one of the biggest departures for us as a species, so are myriad other children on your social media feed.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Published: October 12, 2025, 7:00 am

Britain's youth clubs have been quietly decimated. What's most revealing is that few seem to care | John Harris

These vital spaces have been the first targets of cuts in a nation that favours age over youth – despite being the remedy for blights such as social division, polarisation and loneliness

A consensus seems to have recently settled in UK politics: that young British lives are not as they should be, and something must be done. Our teens and twentysomethings, we are told, are lonely, phone-addicted, “overdiagnosed”, and too often jobless, which entails a great blizzard of proposals – from welfare reform to the scaling-back of university education – that seem to have more to do with older voters’ prejudices than the real-life problems of other generations. At the next election, the extension of the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds may do something to correct that, but I wouldn’t count on it. There is, after all, something deep within the British psyche that favours age over youth, and consequently misrepresents and ignores the latter in a way that sometimes looks almost pathological.

If you want a vivid example, consider a drastic loss from millions of young lives that is still bafflingly overlooked. During the first 10 years of the spending cuts that began in 2010, councils’ funding for youth services in England and Wales suffered a real-terms cut of 70%. By 2023, about 1,200 publicly run youth centres had closed, and more than 4,500 youth workers had lost their jobs. Villages, towns and cities still bear the scars: empty buildings that look just as forlorn as any shuttered library or Sure Start centre. But while other aspects of the austerity disaster have at least been acknowledged, this one still seems to be a strange kind of guilty secret, with seemingly no chance of all that lost provision ever being restored.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Published: October 12, 2025, 1:12 pm

Steelers v Browns, Ravens v Rams and more: NFL week six – live

• NFL updates from 1pm EST/6pm BST

• Who will be next first-time MVP? | Mail Graham

Jaguars 0-0 Seahawks 4:20, 1st quarter

Ooh and that’s a bad miss. Trevor Lawrence overthrows a wide open receiver deep downfield but then recovers on 3rd down to move the chains with a strike to Johnny Mundt.

Published: October 12, 2025, 6:17 pm

Former NFL star Mark Sanchez ‘focused on recovery’ after jail appearance over stabbing incident

• Former NFL quarterback facing battery charge

• Fox analyst released from hospital after treatment

Former NFL star Mark Sanchez says he is “focused on my recovery” after being booked and released from jail over an incident last weekend during which he was stabbed and another man was left with significant injuries.

Sanchez was processed at Marion County Jail on Sunday after his release from hospital. A judge ruled Sanchez had to undergo the processing before he is allowed to leave Indiana.

Published: October 12, 2025, 5:18 pm

Hapless Jets manage minus-10 passing yards in London loss to Broncos

• Total is lowest for an NFL team since 1998

• New York sink to 0-6 record for the season

Bo Nix threw an early touchdown pass, Wil Lutz kicked a late go-ahead field goal and the Denver Broncos sacked Justin Fields nine times, with the final one sealing an ugly 13-11 victory over the winless New York Jets on Sunday.

The Broncos (4-2) won their third in a row, but found themselves trailing 11-10 after conceding a safety in the third quarter against a Jets team that managed just 82 total net yards on offense.

Nix, who was 19 of 30 for 174 yards, led Denver on a 12-play, 65-yard drive that ended with Lutz’s 27-yard field with just over five minutes left.

Despite a horrendous offensive display, the Jets (0-6) still had the ball with a chance to drive for a potential winning score. But Fields was sacked by Jonathon Cooper and Justin Strnad on fourth-and-eight from the Denver 44 after Aaron Glenn opted to go for it rather than send out Nick Folk for a long field-goal attempt. Folk had successfully converted all three of his field goals on the day.

Published: October 12, 2025, 5:39 pm

Best goals, biggest gaffes: Premier League fans assess the season so far

The Guardian’s fans’ network on the opening stages of 2025-26: their toughest opponents, biggest setbacks and tips for the next manager sacked

Story so far Top of the table, looking down at our rivals, despite still not really firing on all cylinders … it’s early days, but we’re struggling to keep a lid on the excitement here. Having star turns such as Havertz, Madueke and now Ødegaard succumb to long-term injury is a reminder of the risk of being derailed, but it does feel like we’ve never been better equipped to cope with the slings and arrows. Arteta is still unwrapping his new toys and figuring out the best way to use them – can’t wait to see how the chemistry develops.

Bernard Azulay onlinegooner.com; @GoonerN5

Jonathan Pritchard

Published: October 12, 2025, 7:00 am

Gauff wins all-American clash with Pegula to claim third WTA 1000 title in Wuhan

• World No 3 rallies from 0-3 down in second set

• 21-year-old wins first title since this year’s French Open

Coco Gauff reeled off four straight games to beat Jessica Pegula 6-4, 7-5 and win the Wuhan Open on Sunday in an all-American final.

The 21-year-old Gauff won her second title of the year – her first was the French Open – and she now has 11 career titles.

Published: October 12, 2025, 1:53 pm

Tiger Woods comeback in doubt after seventh back surgery for collapsed disc

• Woods has lumbar disc replaced in New York

• 15-time major winner calls operation successful

• No timetable set for 49-year-old’s golf return

Tiger Woods has announced that he underwent back surgery on Friday to address a collapsed disc in his spine.

The 15-time major winner had lumbar disk replacement surgery after he experienced pain in his lower back and said on social media that the operation was deemed successful, although it is unknown when the 49-year-old will return to golf.

Published: October 12, 2025, 12:21 am

Jaron Ennis dazzles in 154lb debut with one-round destruction of Uisma Lima

• Philly star drops Lima three times in round one

• Showdown with Ortiz Jr looms for early 2026

Jaron Ennis needed less than two minutes to remind boxing why he’s long been considered the sport’s next big thing. The 28-year-old Philadelphian nicknamed Boots flattened Uisma Lima on Saturday night at the Xfinity Mobile Arena, marking an explosive debut at 154lb and setting the stage for the far bigger challenges that await him next year.

Ennis dropped the sturdy but unheralded Lima three times in 118 seconds, igniting the rollicking hometown crowd squarely in his corner. A concussive right uppercut started the unraveling, followed by two blistering flurries that left his Portugal-based Angolan opponent unable to continue. Referee Shawn Clark waved it off at 1:58 of the opening round, giving the unbeaten Ennis his 35th professional win, his 31st inside the distance, and the kind of statement that reverberates through the sport even in a mismatch. “The more I move up, the stronger I get,” Ennis said afterward. “This is my division now. I sent a big message tonight.”

Published: October 12, 2025, 6:05 am

The peerless A’ja Wilson may already be the WNBA’s greatest ever player | Bryan Armen Graham

After a one-of-one season without precedent in NBA or WNBA history, the unstoppable Aces star has made a credible entry into the GOAT discussion before her 30th birthday

A’ja Wilson’s one-of-one season didn’t end merely with confetti so much as a deeper confirmation. When her Las Vegas Aces finished off a four-game sweep of the Phoenix Mercury on Friday night to become only the second team in WNBA history to win three titles in a four-year span, the final horn felt less like a climax than a verdict: the best team of the era led by the best player of the era. When the dust settled the 29-year-old from Columbia, South Carolina, had achieved a quadrafecta no player in the NBA or WNBA had ever managed: winning the scoring title, the Most Valuable Player award, Defensive Player of the Year honors and MVP of the finals in the same year.

Thanks to Wilson, a team who’d looked like the next great American sports dynasty before slipping from their perch a year ago was back at the mountaintop. But anyone who watched the front half of the season knows this was the least expected of Aces’ three banners. For most of the year Las Vegas didn’t give the appearance of a playoff team let alone a champion. They staggered through injuries and misfires, dropped coin-flip games and wore the tightness of a group playing beneath its standard. If dynasties are supposed to hum, this one coughed and sputtered.

Published: October 11, 2025, 5:33 pm

World No 204 Vacherot defeats cousin Rinderknech to seal fairytale Shanghai win

• Qualifier secures 4-6, 6-3, 6-3 victory in final

• ‘It’s unreal what just happened,’ says Monégasque

Valentin Vacherot closed out one of the most stunning big tournament runs in the history of professional tennis, becoming the lowest‑ranked player to win a Masters 1000 title as he roared back from a set down to defeat his cousin, Arthur Rinderknech, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3 and triumph at the Shanghai Masters.

There is little precedent for so many of Vacherot’s achievements over the past two weeks. At No 204, the 26-year-old had only narrowly entered the qualifying draw, where he was the second-lowest ranked direct entrant, following a number of late injury withdrawals. He is the third qualifier to win a Masters 1000 title in the 35-year history of the format and the first Monégasque player to win any ATP title.

Published: October 12, 2025, 11:55 am

Luigi Mangione’s lawyers seek dismissal of federal charges in healthcare CEO killing

Attorneys push to drop death penalty eligibility due to legal threshold and claim Mangione was not read his rights

Lawyers for Luigi Mangione, accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December, asked a federal judge on Saturday to dismiss some criminal charges, including the only count on he could be eligible for the death penalty.

In a court filing, attorneys for Mangione said the death penalty must be dismissed because it does not meet the legal threshold.

Published: October 12, 2025, 4:56 pm

Zelenskyy urges Trump to use Gaza ceasefire momentum to broker peace in Ukraine

Ukrainian leader discussed request for Tomahawk cruise missiles in phone call with US president

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, urged Donald Trump to use the momentum of the Gaza ceasefire to broker peace in Ukraine, as the two leaders spoke by phone on Saturday.

Trump and Zelenskyy discussed Ukraine’s request for the US to allow the delivery of Tomahawk cruise missiles to bolster Kyiv’s ability to conduct long-range strikes inside Russia, among other issues, according to Axios.

Published: October 11, 2025, 3:41 pm

High youth death rates are an ‘emerging crisis’, global health study warns

Alcohol, suicide and injuries driving rises among teenagers and young adults despite overall rates falling, authors say

The world faces “an emerging crisis” of higher death rates among teenagers and young adults, according to a major study on the causes of death and disability worldwide.

The reasons vary from drug and alcohol use, and suicide in North America, to infectious diseases and injuries in sub-Saharan Africa, the researchers said, but warned that their data should serve as “a wake-up call”.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Published: October 12, 2025, 2:00 pm

‘It would be wonderful’: the team hoping to unearth ‘Cornwall’s Stonehenge’

Experts and volunteers working at Castilly Henge have been trying determine if it is the county’s lost great stone circle

It was a grey Cornish autumn day, but Henry Stevens’s tough shift digging in a field next to the A30 was about to get very exciting.

Her eye was caught by something glinting in the soil and she picked up a flake of flint that had lain for thousands of years within what might just turn out to be a Cornish version of Stonehenge.

Published: October 12, 2025, 12:00 pm

Philippines says Chinese ship ‘deliberately rammed’ government boat in South China Sea

Beijing blames Manila for the collision, saying the ship ‘ignored repeated stern warnings from the Chinese side’

A Chinese ship “deliberately rammed” a Philippine government vessel anchored near an island in a disputed part of the South China Sea, Manila’s coast guard said on Sunday.

Confrontations between Philippine and Chinese vessels occur frequently in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims nearly in its entirety despite an international ruling that the claim has no legal basis.

Published: October 12, 2025, 6:12 am

Madagascar’s president says illegal power grab by military is under way

Soldiers from elite Capsat unit have announced they are taking over after weeks of youth-led protests

Madagascar’s president said an “attempt to seize power illegally and by force” was under way, as an elite military unit that joined protesters on the streets on Saturday announced it was taking over the army.

The Capsat unit’s intervention comes after weeks of youth-led protests, which started on 25 September against water and electricity shortages and expanded to calling for the resignation of the president, Andry Rajoelina, an end to corruption and radical overhaul of the political system.

Published: October 12, 2025, 11:43 am

Heavy clashes erupt along Pakistan-Afghanistan border

Escalation comes after Pakistani airstrike in Kabul, with Taliban launching reprisals against military posts

Intense clashes erupted along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on Saturday night, after an attack by the Afghan Taliban on Pakistani military posts led to a heavy exchange of fire and reportedly left dozens of soldiers dead.

According to officials, Afghan troops opened fire on Pakistani army posts along the north-western border with Pakistan on Saturday night and seized several of the posts. The attacks came after the Taliban regime in Afghanistan accused Pakistan of carrying out airstrikes on Afghan territory, including in the capital, Kabul, earlier this week.

Published: October 12, 2025, 12:29 pm

Cameroon’s 92-year-old president set for another term as country goes to polls

Paul Biya, in power since 1982, has brushed off calls to retire but is rarely seen in public

Cameroon goes to the polls on Sunday for a presidential election with Paul Biya, already the world’s oldest head of state at the age of 92, the favourite to win an eighth term in power in the central African country.

A fractured opposition of 11 candidates is standing against Biya, who, despite his advanced age and declining health, has dismissed calls for him to retire.

Published: October 12, 2025, 4:00 am

New Orleans archbishop testifies under oath for first time in church bankruptcy case

Gregory Aymond gives confidential testimony as church closes in on $230m settlement with clergy abuse survivors

As New Orleans’s Roman Catholic archdiocese closes in on a proposed settlement with clergy abuse survivors worth at least $230m, its outgoing archbishop, Gregory Aymond, testified under oath for the first time in the church’s bankruptcy case during a confidential court session on Friday.

Aymond’s sworn testimony was given under a protective order, and those who attended the session were barred from discussing it. But Billy Gibbens, a high-profile criminal defense and civil lawyer, confirmed in an interview with WWL Louisiana that he was there representing the archbishop as his personal attorney.

Published: October 11, 2025, 1:00 pm

Helicopter spins out of control into palm trees at popular California beach

Five people taken to hospital after crash at Huntington Beach in front of beachgoers

A helicopter flying above a popular southern California beach suddenly began spiralling out of control, eventually losing altitude and crashing into a row of palm trees as beachgoers looked on.

Videos posted online show the aircraft starting to spin above Huntington Beach then plunging towards the edge of the beach, where it becomes wedged between palms and a staircase near the Pacific Coast highway.

The Huntington Beach fire department said five people were taken to hospital including two who were in the helicopter and were “safely pulled from the wreckage” after the crash on Saturday.

Published: October 12, 2025, 3:09 am

Six people dead with multiple injured in three shootings at Mississippi homecoming weekends

Four people were killed in an attack in Leland, while two were killed in Heidelberg, amid a third attack in Rolling Fork

Six people were killed and 18 others injured in three separate shootings at high school football homecoming celebrations in Mississippi, according to a number of local officials on Saturday.

The most fatal incident took place around midnight on Friday in Leland, where four people died, John Lee, the mayor of the small city in Washington county, western Mississippi, said on Saturday morning. At least 16 were wounded in that incident, with four in critical condition airlifted to the state capital of Jackson and 12 others treated at local hospitals.

Published: October 11, 2025, 6:09 pm

Chicago TV journalist pushed to ground and arrested during Ice raid, then later released

Witnesses call arrest of video editor Debbie Brockman, a US citizen, by masked federal agents ‘absolutely horrifying’

A video editor and producer for Chicago’s WGN television station was arrested by masked federal agents on Friday morning, and later released, during an Ice raid on the city’s North Side, as shown in videos shared widely on social media.

Videos show Debbie Brockman being violently forced to the ground by two agents before she is handcuffed and put in a van. A local resident filming the incident asks her name while she is face down on the street being handcuffed.

Published: October 11, 2025, 10:52 pm

Urgent calls for debt relief as study shows health and education cuts in developing world

Influential economists want replenishment of funds and new ways to define countries in need before this week’s IMF and World Bank meetings

Top economists are demanding urgent action on debt relief in Washington this week, as analysis from the campaign group Debt Justice shows struggling governments are cutting back on health and education.

As finance ministers and central bankers gather for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank annual meetings, influential experts including the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and leading economists Mariana Mazzucato and Jayati Ghosh, are urging them to “turn debt into hope”.

Published: October 12, 2025, 11:41 am

Soldiers from elite Capsat unit join protests against Madagascar’s president

Demonstrators march alongside regiment, who earlier in the day said they would not fire on the crowds

Madagascar’s prime minister called for calm after an elite group of soldiers joined thousands of protesters against the country’s president on the streets of the capital on Saturday afternoon.

Protesters marched alongside soldiers from the Capsat unit, who drove armoured vehicles, some waving Madagascar flags, from their base in Soanierana in the south of Antananarivo.

Published: October 11, 2025, 5:29 pm

Hackers leak Qantas data containing 5 million customer records after ransom deadline passes

Hacker collective Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters demanded payment in return for preventing the stolen data of nearly 40 companies from being shared

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Hackers say they have leaked the personal records of 5 million Qantas customers on the dark web, after a ransom deadline set by the cybercriminals passed.

The airline is one of more than 40 firms globally caught up in the hack, reported to contain up to 1bn customer records.

Published: October 11, 2025, 5:03 am

Perfume Genius: ‘I really like body hair! I like a bush. I didn’t even notice Jimmy Fallon censored mine’

The singer on looking like Amelia Earhart, the time he set his mother’s house on fire and his beef with the Octopus Teacher guy

Everyone was talking about your pubic hair after it was censored on The Tonight Show. Should we all be showing more or less bush?

More! I really like body hair. I like a bush. I like the whole deal. I’m sure if I didn’t have a bush, they wouldn’t have censored it. Do you know what I mean? The body hair itself, that is too scandalous.

Published: October 11, 2025, 7:00 pm

‘I wanted to write more than I wanted to have children’: author Sarah Perry on rejecting motherhood

When the novelist was faced with the decision of whether to pursue fertility treatment or focus on her career, her literary ambitions kicked in

Fifteen years ago, having said all my life that I never wanted a baby, that I couldn’t fathom why any free woman would do such a thing to her body and her mind, I suddenly and passionately wanted a child. I remember where I was when this feeling, so heretical to me, arrived: it was early morning in London, and having come down Fleet Street on my way to work, I was standing at the till of a newsagents to pay for a Diet Coke, a flapjack and a pack of Silk Cut. There were no children there and no pregnant women; nothing had been said or done to change my mind. It had simply landed on me, and more or less immediately – because I’ve never known how to control an impulse, and because I was 30, which seemed to me then a great age – my husband, Robert, and I set about trying to have a child.

When for some months nothing happened, I turned to the websites where women who’ve never met scrutinise their bodies for signs of pregnancy or fertility or miscarriage, and my vocabulary changed. I became able to communicate in acronyms impenetrable to anyone who hadn’t held a dozen ovulation sticks in a dozen urine streams, and it is all so long ago now that I only remember one: 2WW. At first I took this to be some dry reference to the second world war, since they did seem to be always in battle, these women, or in flight – but in fact it refers to the “two-week wait”, the fearful, hopeful days between sex and ovulation, and the first signs the uterus had succeeded or failed (that these signs can be identical sometimes invokes a kind of madness, to which I also briefly succumbed).

Published: October 12, 2025, 11:00 am

‘Verging on unwatchable’: Guardian writers on their most stressful movies

With the US release of Rose Byrne’s anxiety-inducing motherhood spiral If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, writers relive their most uncomfortable movie watches

The only movie I have literally had to take breaks from in order to give my sympathetic nervous system time to downshift out of flight or flight mode, Scott Mann’s 2022 psychological thriller Fall is brilliant in its simplicity. Thrill-seeking climbing influencer Hunter convinces her bestie Becky to do a little immersion therapy after her husband Dan’s sudden death during a climb leaves her fearful, depressed and suicidal. The goal: to climb a decommissioned TV transmission tower deep in the California desert that’s roughly twice the height of the Eiffel Tower. When the rickety ladder that gets them to a tiny platform at the structure’s top falls to smithereens, the women suddenly discover new meanings of SOL. The film is nothing if not an excuse to gloriously parade a series of show-stopping, sweaty-palm scenes, yet it becomes a deeply psychological, intricate twin character study as Mann gradually peels back the layers of Hunter and Becky’s up-and-down friendship, and the latter’s gradual rediscovery of her courage. With word that Fall is being made into a franchise, I am eagerly awaiting the next opportunity to send my adrenal glands into overdrive. Veronica Esposito

Published: October 11, 2025, 9:01 am

The Freak: script of Charlie Chaplin’s unfinished final film to be published

Exclusive: Fantasy about ‘a beautiful creature with wings’ has been compiled from drafts, storyboards and sketches

He rose from the slums of Victorian London to become arguably cinema’s first great comic artist, with The Great Dictator and Limelight among his masterpieces.

Now the script of Charlie Chaplin’s unfinished final film is to be published, having been pieced together from drafts, storyboards and sketches, on which he had been working before his death in 1977, at the age of 88.

Published: October 11, 2025, 5:00 am

The Intruder review – the daftest thriller of the entire year

The only thing that stops you counting the cliches in this French drama about a sinister au pair is the woefully dim lighting. It’s so obvious that it barely feels worth laughing at its stupidity

You wear a tightly belted beige trenchcoat and you live in a cavernous show-home bedecked with mid-century pine and fashionably inadequate lighting. You are French. You have two uncommonly beautiful teenage children and are preparing to return to your prestigious role at a maison de couture after the recent birth of your uncommonly beautiful baby. But mon Dieu, you are anxious! You fear your glamorous workload will interfere with your ability to care for l’enfant. The solution? You will hire an enigmatic au pair. Alas, you have never watched television and are thus unaware that this will expose faultlines in your marriage and lead to a series of increasingly terrifying events that will threaten the very fabric of your existence. You are Paula (Mélanie Doutey), the protagonist of four-part French thriller The Intruder, and you are, ’ow you say, stuffed.

To France, then, where Paula and Jérôme, her bearded shrug of a husband (Éric Caravaca), are poised to tick off the first point on their “TV Thriller That Begins with the Ill-Advised Hiring of an Enigmatic Au Pair” checklist. To wit: the interviewing of a childminder who appears – and at this point you may wish to ready the nearest defibrillator – almost too good to be true. Enter Tess (Lucie Fagedet), who doesn’t blink but does have the ability to make baby Orso gurgle with glee, so is hired on the spot. But what is this? Within hours of her arrival Tess is tip-toeing around the family’s bewilderingly dark house, staring at Orso’s toys and pawing Jérôme’s shirts.

Published: October 11, 2025, 8:55 pm

Rolling Stones’s Ronnie Wood says he is working on new songs with Rod Stewart

Speaking on Desert Island Discs, guitarist says pair, who were in the Faces in 1960s, have ‘good body of songs going’

Ronnie Wood and Sir Rod Stewart are again working on songs together before a potential Faces reunion, the Rolling Stones guitarist has said.

Wood told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that “absolutely nothing has changed” since the band came together in the late 1960s.

Published: October 11, 2025, 11:01 pm

‘We’re fighting for you!’ Podcaster Ben Meiselas on taking on the Maga media – and winning the ratings battle

His channel, MeidasTouch, puts out 15 videos a day exposing Republican failings – and it is getting bigger audiences than Joe Rogan’s. Is this the champion the American left has been waiting for?

Ben Meiselas is a very busy man. So busy, he has to break off halfway through our interview to conduct an interview of his own, for his next broadcast. It’s 7am Los Angeles time when we meet via video call, and Meiselas is already well into another 18-hour day of podcasting, planning, interviewing, meetings and more besides. His “pro-democracy” channel MeidasTouch, which he runs with his younger brothers Jordan and Brett, puts out 15 or more videos a day, most of them presented by Meiselas himself. “I was doing another video before this,” he says, “and so by now I’ve already released one video I did last night, which was my 4am, and now I just worked on my 7am – it’ll get released any minute now. And then I’ll have an 8.30, a 10, an 11.30 …”

The prolific output is part of the reason The MeidasTouch has become one of the most listened-to podcasts in the US, routinely beating the mighty Joe Rogan in both video and audio, and even overtaking Fox News in YouTube views. Rogan and others in the right-leaning podcast manosphere are thought to have swung the 2024 election in Donald Trump’s favour, prompting much soul-searching on the American left about its media game, and why they need a Joe Rogan of their own; MeidasTouch seems to have stepped in to fill the void.

Published: October 11, 2025, 4:00 am

‘I’m going to write about all of it’: author Chris Kraus on success, drugs and I Love Dick

A decade after her debut became a cult hit, the US author talks about the true crime that inspired her latest novel, #MeToo overreach and being married to an addict

Chris Kraus regards the late success of her first book, I Love Dick, with ambivalence. A work of autofiction, first published in 1997, it chronicles Kraus’s infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed, one-sided love affair that nonetheless pulls Kraus, a depressed, 39-year-old failing film-maker languishing in a sexless marriage, out of her personal and artistic rut. After a slow start, the book became a cult classic and in 2016 it was made into an Amazon Prime Video TV series, with Kraus played by Kathryn Hahn. “To me, success would have been like a long review in the New York Review of Books, not being a character on a sitcom,” Kraus says now. Her commercial success was a financial boon, of course. “But who can stand by a book they wrote 20 years ago? It was massively embarrassing to go out and support the book as if I’d written it last year.”

She had, however, promised herself that if she ever achieved mainstream success she would write about it with the same candour that she brought to her struggles. “I’m going to write about all of it. Not just about youth, but about middle age,” she says. “Middle age is so much harder to write about, because youth is kind of like a trope. We’re very familiar with reading books about the aspirations or disappointed aspirations of youth, but middle age is much crazier ground. It’s not as sexy, it’s not as familiar. So, to write about middle age in the same way takes commitment.”

Published: October 11, 2025, 8:00 am

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says she is terrified her sons will ‘join manosphere’

Nigerian-American author tells Cheltenham literature festival audience having boys made her ‘worry more’

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said she is terrified that her young boys will “join the manosphere”.

Speaking at Cheltenham literature festival on Saturday, the Nigerian-American author of works including Americanah told an audience that having two sons has made her “worry more” about men and boys.

Published: October 11, 2025, 6:14 pm

My cultural awakening: ‘Kate Bush helped me come out as a trans woman’

As a not-yet-out trans teen, The Sensual World – the singer’s rejection of masculine influence – felt like an invocation of everything I was feeling

It wasn’t safe for me to discover The Sensual World, the eponymous track on what Kate Bush described as her “most female album”. The song was intended to be a rejection of the masculine influence that had unwittingly shaped the artist’s previous work, and an ode to something taboo within the female experience. Based on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses – a stream of consciousness in which the character reflects on her experiences of nature, sex and love – Bush wanted to celebrate the experience of life inside a woman’s body, and the ways it gives her spiritual and sexual pleasure. I knew that, for someone like me, who was already being bullied, to openly love a song like this could make me an even more obvious target to those who saw femininity as a sign of weakness. More daunting than that, it might force me to confront my own repressed desires.

By the time I was around 17, I had already spent most of my teenage years in a constant state of survival. I wasn’t yet out as a transgender woman; this was a part of me I could keep secret, unlike my effeminacy. I had a naturally high voice, which I tried and failed to deepen. “You sound like a girl,” was one of the daily taunts aimed at me by pupils at my school, even as I strained my vocal cords. My camp mannerisms and the way I walked were other noticeable crimes to the boys around me, who enjoyed mocking my “sassy” stride. Growing up in an environment such as this meant I never saw my femininity as something to embrace. That I was soft and girlish was a sign of a defective self. Still, it felt safer to be a feminine boy than a boy who wanted to become a woman.

Published: October 11, 2025, 6:00 am

‘Rashes, pain, blisters and bleeding’ … are we glossing over the dangers of manicures?

Gel and acrylic varnishes have been blamed for a host of unpleasant side-effects, stretching far beyond the fingertips. Some ingredients have been banned – but will that be enough to make the process safe?

From French tips to glazed doughnuts, shimmering cat eye to high-shine chrome, getting your nails done is the beauty trend that refuses to fade. Gel polish, dip powder, acrylic overlays … whatever the method, the demand for durable, chip-resistant, manicured nails is so strong that salons now often outnumber high street bank branches in the UK.

But behind the glossy finish lies a more complicated story. Last month, the European Union banned TPO – an ingredient that helps gel polish to harden under UV light – after animal studies suggested it could harm fertility or a developing foetus. The UK is expected to follow next year. It’s not the first safety red flag: Hema, another common ingredient, was restricted in DIY nail kits in 2021 after a surge in cases of allergic contact dermatitis, a painful skin condition marked by redness, blistering and swelling. So how safe is a gel manicure? And what can you do to protect yourself?

Published: October 12, 2025, 1:00 pm

Blind date: ‘After too many tepid, app-based dates, outsourcing my love life to a paper is obviously the way to go’

Hannah, 29, a horticulturist, meets Ioan, 28, a freelance consultant

What were you hoping for?
A fun evening with a stranger … hopefully good chat and not painfully awkward.

Published: October 11, 2025, 5:00 am

The kindness of strangers: a woman paid for my groceries when I couldn’t

I was trying to move money over quickly but the banking app was down. Plus, I had a toddler and a baby with me, and one had started screaming

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At the Aldi checkout I was having trouble paying for my $100 grocery shop. It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford to pay, I’d just forgotten to transfer money into our everyday transaction account. I was trying to move the money over quickly at the checkout but the banking app was down. I had my two little kids with me, a toddler and a baby, one of whom had started screaming.

With a growing queue of other customers behind me, the checkout guy set aside my receipt for the scanned groceries and saved it, then went on to serving other people. Frantically, I called my husband and asked him to come down to the supermarket with his bank card and pay, as it didn’t seem that I was going to be able to. While I was on the phone to him, a lady in the line paid for her groceries – then told the checkout guy, “I’ll pay for hers, too.”

Published: October 12, 2025, 2:00 pm

The moment I knew: he was so open and vulnerable, even as a bloke’s bloke

Ameeta Patel was introduced to a seemingly alpha male called ‘Jungle Jim’. When he talked about his psychologist, she did a double take

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At 40 I was a divorced mother of two. I uprooted myself from New South Wales and headed to Alice Springs to work as a GP. A year later we were all so happy we decided to stay.

Three years later, in 2007, I’d made a great group of friends who were always trying to matchmake me. One suggested I meet an old friend of theirs, the mysterious “Jungle Jim”. He was ex-air force and had four children – which, to be honest, seemed a little daunting – but I was open.

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Published: October 11, 2025, 7:00 pm

Going to the gym was too much effort, until I moved into one

What would happen if you removed the obstacle of having to get to the gym? Brigid Delaney spends a week finding out

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What stops you from going to the gym?

For me, it’s that I can’t be bothered. The gym is too far away, and the effort to get there is just too much. In short, I don’t go because I’m lazy.

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Published: October 11, 2025, 7:00 pm

Baggy, skinny … or neither? Why ‘Goldilocks’ jeans are having a moment

Straight-cut denims are fast becoming the timeless antidote to fashion’s relentless trend cycle

When it comes to fashion power struggles, there is no greater battle than the one between baggy and skinny jeans. But now a new style is emerging, or is it an old one?

Goldilocks jeans – ie straight cut – have made a comeback. Think Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor, rather than Jeremy Clarkson’s bootcut Top Gear era or an indie band’s painted-on pip-squeezers.

Published: October 11, 2025, 7:00 am

I apologise too much, and it annoys everyone around me. How can I stop? | Ask Annalisa Barbieri

Changing such ingrained habits isn’t easy, but when you’re about to apologise try counting to 10 or substituting a different phrase

I’m a woman in my late 30s who, since childhood, has thought it vital to be polite to those around me, including saying sorry when I feel I’ve done something wrong. While I have a happy and fulfilling life, I’ve always had very low self-confidence. This combination of wanting to acknowledge others appropriately and constantly doubting myself has turned me into a person who apologises a great deal. Often, it happens so fast I’m not even conscious of it. It is definitely coming from a place of anxiety and has affected my personal and professional life. It drives my loved ones and colleagues mad, and then it drives me mad that they point it out – only making me more anxious about it.

It is a particular problem when it comes to public speaking or asking questions in front of others. I try to have everything written down so I stay concise and don’t go off on a nervous tangent, but even that doesn’t work most of the time. I am an early-career academic specialising in politics, so speaking confidently is important. I have been trying to fix this by “exposure therapy”, teaching classes and forcing myself to ask any question I can at public events – despite numerous public “humiliations” by established male academics. I have also tried to consider “pausing” before speaking, so I am more aware of when I’m apologising, but that will only work initially before I fall off the wagon again.

Published: October 12, 2025, 5:00 am

Here’s to the birdwatchers! Optimistic, slightly eccentric custodians of wonder and joy and passion and love

At its heart, birdwatching is an act of quiet rebellion, says Natalie Kyriacou. It is the gentle act of noticing – the willingness to see the world around you

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They are the most curious creature of all. Hyper-focused. Single-minded. Intense. Devoted. Often single. They speak in reverent tones and hushed whispers and can walk with preternatural silence across a bed of leaves. They wield binoculars with the nonchalance of a sommelier sampling a Dom Pérignon. They can crouch in shrubbery for endless hours. They speak in code and use hand signals. They have lists and notebooks and write with lead pencils. They dress with military precision: khaki pants, fitted belt, cedar-brown shirt, wide-brimmed hat, waterproof boots. Their social calendars are governed by migration patterns and their conversations are peppered with whispered phrases like “Was that the trill of a reed warbler?”

They are bearers of universal mysteries. Holders of ancient wisdom. They are birdwatchers.

Published: October 11, 2025, 7:00 pm

Actor Eve Myles looks back: ‘Early on, I was told I wasn’t the typical leading lady. Now I realise my idiosyncrasies are what make me authentic’

The Doctor Who and Torchwood star on growing up in a mining village, how Russell T Davies changed her life, and sausage rolls

Born in 1978 in Ystradgynlais, Wales, actor Eve Myles trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama before landing her first major role as Ceri Lewis in the BBC Wales drama Belonging, which ran from 2000 to 2009. She became a mainstream name playing Gwen Cooper in Torchwood, the BBC’s Doctor Who spin-off, from 2006 to 2011, and later won acclaim for her lead performance as Faith Howells in the thriller Keeping Faith/Un Bore Mercher. She lives in Cardiff with her husband, the actor Bradley Freegard, and their three daughters. She stars in ITV’s drama series The Hack this autumn.

This photo, taken at my third birthday party, reveals that I was brought up on pork-based foods. For this special occasion, it was sausage rolls and chipolatas on sticks – very posh, and the marker of any good celebration. My mother had obviously gone to town on that icing to hide the atrocity of the sponge cake that was buried under there. I would have been high as a kite after taking one bite.

Published: October 12, 2025, 1:00 pm

From getting kids to eat veg to curbing screen time: the parenting hacks that actually work

Tots refusing to brush their teeth? Teenagers ignoring your texts? Siblings squabbling – again? Readers and experts share their tried and tested fixes to parenting nightmares

Smart speakers are a great parenting crutch, whether it be for setting a timer (kids seem to be weirdly obedient to them) or asking Alexa for homework help when the kids put you on the spot. But reader Katie Matthews has hacked the parenting matrix. “I used to have to nag repeatedly to get the kids out of the house,” she says. “Now our Google speaker announces a five-minute warning before we need to leave. They know they have to do their last bits of faffing when they hear that warning. Then the speaker announces, ‘Shoes on, let’s go!’ when it’s time to leave. It really has transformed our mornings.”

Published: October 11, 2025, 9:00 am

‘Page one of the authoritarian playbook’: how Trump and allies are exploiting Kirk’s killing

The president and his Maga allies have used the rightwing influencer’s killing to justify attacks on critics, experts say

Donald Trump and Maga allies have capitalized on the killing of rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk to expand attacks on liberal groups, donors, Democrats, and others by tarring many critics as the “enemy within” and “radical left” in a move that legal scholars and historians call authoritarian and anti-democratic.

Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman spurred Trump and top allies to quickly launch conspiratorial charges against a bevy of political foes and an investigation of billionaire liberal donor George Soros. They also threatened legal action against TV network ABC after their late-night star Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension over clumsy comments about Kirk ended.

Published: October 11, 2025, 12:00 pm

A World Cup preying on Fomo: Fifa’s 2026 ticket scheme is a late-capitalist hellscape

Dynamic pricing, crypto detritus and corporate doublespeak have made the task of buying 2026 World Cup tickets a grim case study in the monetization of emotion

When the first tickets for the 2026 World Cup went on sale last week, millions of fans joined online queues only to discover what Gianni Infantino’s assurance that “the world will be welcome” really means. The cheapest face-value seat for next summer’s final, somewhere in the gods of New Jersey’s 82,500-seat MetLife Stadium where the players are specks and the football’s a rumor, comes at a cost of $2,030 (oxygen tank not included). Most upper-deck seats range from $2,790 to $4,210, according to customers who finally glimpsed the prices that had been closely guarded. The much-touted $60 tickets for group-stage games, propped up by Fifa as evidence of affordability, exist only as comically tiny green smudges on the edge of digital seating maps, little more than mirages of inclusivity.

Fifa had kept the costs under wraps until the very moment of sale, replacing the usual published table of price points with a digital lottery that decided who even got the chance to buy. Millions spent hours staring at a queue screen as algorithms determined their place in line. When access finally came for most, the lower-priced sections had already vanished, many presumably hoovered up by bots and bulk-buyers (and that’s before Fifa quietly raised the prices of at least nine matches after only one day of sales). The whole process resembled less a ticket release than a psyop to calibrate how much frustration and scarcity the public will tolerate.

Published: October 11, 2025, 7:00 am

‘To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op’: Malala Yousafzai on growing up, getting cynical – and how getting high nearly broke her

The global icon of women’s education is ready to tell the full story of her turbulent recent life, from arguing with her parents to being ghosted by the statesmen who were once desperate to be seen with her

• How smoking a bong brought back the trauma of the Taliban’s attack – an exclusive extract from Malala Yousafzai’s memoir

I am at the shed where Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai smoked her first bong. No, there’s no punchline – it’s not that kind of anecdote. “My life has changed for ever,” Yousafzai says sadly, as we gaze at the semi-derelict structure. “Everything changed for ever, after that [night].”

The shed is tucked away at the back of Lady Margaret Hall, away from the prying eyes of Oxford’s college life. You have to know how to find it. Yousafzai leads me through quadrangles and out into a hidden garden. Inside are dusty pint glasses and spiderwebs, and board games with the pieces missing.

Published: October 11, 2025, 5:00 am

A regatta, protesters and Palestinians return home: photos of the weekend

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

Published: October 12, 2025, 1:52 pm