How do you cope when your sacred land becomes Times Square? The art of the first Native New Yorkers

A new exhibit of Lenape paintings, traditional dress and music proves their modern-day culture is vibrant and alive

During the 19th century, the US government funded more than 500 “Indian boarding schools” aimed at forcibly assimilating Native American children into western culture. Students were taken from their families, frequently by force, and forced to cut their hair. They were stripped of their original names, and taught to feel shame regarding their heritage and customs. Run like military academies, these institutions required children to wear uniforms and subjected them to severe physical punishment, such as solitary confinement and flogging. Richard Henry Pratt, who established the first of these schools, declared that their explicit purpose was to “kill the Indian, save the man”.

These assimilation practices persisted for decades, during which numerous children endured physical and sexual abuse. At least 1,000 children lost their lives, though the actual casualty count is believed to be significantly higher. The US government issued no formal apology for these atrocities until 2024, when former president Joe Biden described the boarding school system as “one of the most horrific chapters in American history”.

Published: September 30, 2026, 6:00 am

Ken Paxton’s Christian identity politics obscure a history of scandal | Sidney Blumenthal

The Texas Senate candidate rose to power as a culture warrior. His record is a marriage of hypocrisy and cynicism

Ken Paxton’s political career, more than that of any other Republican candidate campaigning in this cycle, charts the arc of the religious right. The most influential of its activists and donors engineered his rise as a culture warrior at each of its phases from his creation through every disgrace. His race for the Senate, the culmination of his ambition, has become not only his last stand, but also the Alamo for Christian nationalists in Texas.

Paxton’s rap sheet explains his Christian identity politics as a shield to distract from the liability of his own record of financial and sexual scandals scrolling back decades. The 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton, adopted by the Republican-controlled Texas house of representatives in May 2023, were double the Ten Commandments that Paxton insists should be displayed in every Texas classroom.

Published: September 30, 2026, 3:00 am

So long PSL, hello apple-flavored everything – seven snacks we're eyeing this fall

Pumpkin spice is a perennial fall favorite – but apple is the new flavor coming for its crown

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Every fall, brands add pumpkin spice to everything, from cereals and sodas to … toilet paper. Fall seems to come earlier every year too. By the end of summer, Starbucks has typically already released its infamous pumpkin spice latte, or PSL, a drink that has become a hallmark of the season.

And the flavor continues to be profitable. In 2025, pumpkin spiced foods garnered an estimated $1.25bn in revenue, according to Future Market Insights.

Published: September 30, 2026, 7:15 am

Jameis Winston is now the New York Giants’ starter. He’s far from a goofball hero though

The quarterback is widely adored on and off the field. Whether he deserves the public spotlight is another question

Throughout the NFL’s history, we’ve had our fair share of clown princes. Not too long ago, Rob Gronkowski was the league’s court jester. That history extends back, through Pat McAfee and Chad Ochocinco, past Jared Allen and John Randle to Jim McMahon, Steve McMichael, John Riggins, Alex Karras and Billy “White Shoes” Johnson.

There’s probably something deeply insightful to say about the need for goofballs in a sport characterized by militarized order and a seriousness that borders on self-parody, but what’s important now is how we reflect on these chosen merrymakers.

Published: September 30, 2026, 2:00 am

A fake image of a Georgia mayor kissing a person went viral. Can US voters trust everything they see?

Deepfakes and misinformation driven by artificial intelligence have become a point of deep concern for legislators, advocates and the public

An image of Bianca Motley Broom, the mayor of College Park, Georgia, kissing a man – who was not her husband – in a bar spread far and wide on Facebook. The fact that it’s fake is spreading faster, now, but only after it had been seen by thousands of people.

“I think this is a sad commentary about where we are in our democracy, and where we are in our political discourse,” Motley Broom said. “It also seeks to reinforce really tired stereotypes about women in leadership.”

Published: September 30, 2026, 3:00 am

Bill Gates predicts AI will kill a billion people – but saying he’s been wrong before is quite the understatement | Arwa Mahdawi

He knows a thing or two about tech, but what to make of the views of a man who met Jeffrey Epstein 30 times and couldn’t see what a monster he was?

The Bill Gates rehabilitation tour is in full swing. After having his carefully cultivated image tarnished by the revelation of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, Gates lay low for a while. Now, however, the Microsoft co-founder is once again thrusting himself into the public consciousness, this time with a dire warning about AI. If left unchecked, AI could cause “a billion deaths”, Gates declared in an interview with NBC on Sunday.

Perhaps I should be terrified by this announcement from a man who, for all his sins, knows a thing or two about technology. But I’m sick of hearing about the hypothetical dangers of AI when the technology is being used to kill people today. Gates may not be directly involved in Microsoft any more, but, rather than making prophecies about the future, I’d love to hear what he thinks about the company’s role in the AI-enabled destruction of Gaza.

Published: September 30, 2026, 3:00 am

Pilot who stabbed co-pilot on Israel-bound plane may have tried to crash it, says Netanyahu

Accused pilot being questioned in Saudi Arabia as Israeli officials investigate if incident was attempted terror attack

One of the pilots of a plane flying from the United Arab Emirates to Israel stabbed his co-pilot and appeared to try to crash the aircraft, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said, as Israeli officials said they were investigating whether the incident was an attempted terror attack on Israelis.

Eyewitnesses reported chaos onboard as the attacker tried to barricade himself and the wounded co-pilot in the cockpit, and then attempted to disable the controls, forcing the plane to descend 17,000 feet in just two minutes.

Published: September 30, 2026, 11:26 am

Trump ally urges administration to ‘step back’ and rethink immigration agenda

Republican senator Jim Justice of West Virginia criticizes immigration crackdown as ranchers’ associations condemn ICE activity

A close political ally of Donald Trump has broken from the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda and recommended it “step back” to evaluate what it could do better.

“To get better, the first thing you got to do is admit you’re doing something wrong,” Jim Justice, a Republican senator of West Virginia, told Politico. “And in this situation, with all that’s going on and all the stuff, we probably got to step back from it and say: ‘Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,’ and then adjust to that.”

Published: September 30, 2026, 7:52 am

‘No beardos, no weirdos, no wimps’: Hegseth says he will cut number of US generals by 20% in anti-diversity speech – live

Defense secretary summons military leaders for speech railing against diversity policies

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Rachel Leingang and Riley Messer

Some of the biggest food and agriculture corporations in the US are funding a campaign that pays social media influencers to combat elements of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again platform, according to an investigation by the Guardian and Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project.

Published: September 30, 2026, 2:12 pm

California rushes to prepare for massive ‘Kelvin’ wave and predicted sea level rise

Wave nearing southern California expected to reach San Francisco Bay Area by October as it crawls toward Alaska

Communities across California are rushing to prepare for the imminent arrival of the so-called “Kelvin wave”, a massive underwater band of warm water threatening to inundate swaths of the vast North American shoreline.

The wave is nearing southern California and expected to reach the San Francisco Bay Area by early October, as it crawls toward Alaska. Waters could rise by a foot along the California coast, according to scientists, who have warned that this could dramatically double the 8-12in rise in sea levels already caused by climate change over the last century.

Published: September 30, 2026, 4:00 am

Catholic clergy sexually abused nearly 1,000 Massachusetts children over decades, report finds

No new indictments from eight-year investigation as state attorney general says church knew about abuse

More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over several decades, according to a report released by the state’s attorney general’s office on Wednesday.

The eight-year-long investigation did not result in new indictments, the office said, claiming that some conduct identified was not a crime under Massachusetts law at the time it occurred, and that in other cases the applicable statute of limitations had expired.

In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453 or visit their website for more resources and to report child abuse or DM for help. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available at ascasupport.org. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International

Published: September 30, 2026, 12:53 pm

In-laws charged with murder of New York Times games engineer in California

Shili Chen and Shouyong Zhang, both 77, charged days before Jonathan McKinsey and wife were set for hearing in divorce case

A California couple have been charged with murder after authorities say they shot their son-in-law to death on Saturday in a public park, days before he and the couple’s daughter were set for a hearing in a bitter divorce case.

Shili Chen and Shouyong Zhang, both 77, were due in court on Wednesday for an arraignment on the charges. The Associated Press was not able to reach an attorney for the couple before the court appearance. Their daughter, Candice Jang, could not be reached, though she appeared virtually at Wednesday’s hearing.

Published: September 30, 2026, 1:31 pm

Pennsylvania reports fifth measles-related death of the year amid outbreak

Measles outbreak in the state has now reached 39 counties, with 943 confirmed cases and 176 hospitalizations

Pennsylvania has reported its fifth measles-associated death of 2026 as the state’s ongoing outbreak climbs to 943 confirmed cases across 39 counties.

The Pennsylvania department of health said on Wednesday that an unvaccinated Lancaster county resident who tested positive for measles had died. Health officials did not release further information about the individual, citing privacy protections.

Published: September 30, 2026, 1:28 pm

Tennessee halts plan to execute woman for first time in 200 years

State governor and supreme court earlier refused calls for clemency for Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder

Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in 200 years was halted by a court on Wednesday morning an hour before it was set to take place.

The state governor and the supreme court had earlier refused calls for clemency in the case of Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder 30 years ago.

Published: September 30, 2026, 11:05 am

Parents of toddler who had loaded pistol in bag at Detroit daycare to face charges

No one was injured at Children’s World Early Learning Center and parents will appear in court, police said

The parents of a Detroit-area toddler who pulled a loaded pistol out of his backpack at a daycare will face charges in the case, police said on Wednesday.

In a statement, police in Canton Township said the parents would make an initial court appearance on Thursday. The Wayne county prosecutor’s office declined to offer details or additional comment, saying it would wait until a judge signs off on the charges.

Published: September 30, 2026, 1:45 pm

Senate blocks Republican bill restricting stock trades by US Congress members

Democrats block measure they say didn’t go far enough – and was bundled with ‘poison pill’ voter ID rules

The US Senate on Wednesday blocked a Republican bill restricting stock trading by members of Congress, after Democrats refused to advance a measure they said would let lawmakers keep their portfolios and was bundled with voter ID rules they called a “poison pill”.

The 53-47 vote fell seven short of the 60 needed to open debate on the Stop Insider Trading Act, which the Republican-controlled House passed in July. Every Democrat and independent voted no, and the failure comes five weeks before the 3 November midterms.

Published: September 30, 2026, 1:36 pm

Senate Democrats block datacenter energy bill, saying ‘toothless’ legislation ‘misses the mark’

Republicans supported legislation although Democrats said it wouldn’t effectively address energy consumption

Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked legislation intended to offset the impact of datacenters on consumer electricity bills, calling it a “toothless” attempt to address a top voter concern ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The Ratepayer Protection Act failed by a 57-to-43 vote, falling just shy of the 60 votes necessary to advance through the Republican-controlled chamber. Four Democrats – Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and both Georgia senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock – joined Republicans in support of the measure.

Published: September 30, 2026, 10:48 am

Federal Reserve watchdog finds no criminal violations for building renovation cost overruns

Trump criticized $2.4bn rehab amid attempts to pressure then Fed chair Jerome Powell into lowering interest rates

An internal watchdog said the Federal Reserve mismanaged costs associated with a $2.4bn renovation of its Washington DC headquarters, but noted that no criminal violations occurred, according to a report released on Wednesday.

For over a year, Donald Trump has centered his attacks against the Fed and former chair Jerome Powell around the renovations, including a months-long Department of Justice criminal investigation that was dropped in April.

Published: September 30, 2026, 10:49 am

Good news in US inflation report boosts chances Fed won’t hike rates

Traders see about a 35% chance of an October rate hike, down from ​about 45% following White House pressure

Good economic news boosted Wall Street’s main indexes on Wednesday, as a softer-than-anticipated inflation reading buoyed up hopes that the Federal Reserve might not hike rates as soon ⁠as next month.

A commerce department report ⁠showed the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) ​price index stood at 3.4% on an annual basis in August against estimates of 3.7%, per economists polled by Reuters.

Published: September 30, 2026, 8:34 am

From mass raids to quiet crackdown: a timeline of Trump’s strategic ICE pivot

After switching tactics, federal agents are detaining and deporting record numbers of people from the US

• Gone in 90 seconds: an ‘invisibilized’ ICE is arresting more people than ever

• Three deaths, three states, 24 hours: one day in ICE’s quiet but ‘gruesome’ surge

When federal agents fatally shot the US citizen protesters Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January during the nation’s largest immigration-enforcement operation ever, it marked a turning point for the second Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

Donald Trump in his second term had sparked outrage and huge protests with federal immigration officers descending en masse on one Democratic-run city after another in what some leaders called militarized “invasions”. Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, then Minneapolis saw lines of masked and armored officers swaggering into town to conduct street arrests, ambushes of day workers waiting in Home Depot car parks for hire, and neighborhood sweeps. Adults and kids were whisked off to detention and protests met with aggressive deployment of chemical spray, teargas, fists and batons. The killings in Minneapolis were the culmination of what appeared to many to be a federal shock force increasingly out of control while being defended by federal leaders – and public opinion broadly turned against this violence.

Published: September 30, 2026, 3:00 am

‘Of course I’m the underdog’: the British former spin doctor trying to turn California red

Steve Hilton’s long-shot campaign for governor is courting Golden state voters with unapologetically populist message

Steve Hilton stands almost no chance of becoming California’s next governor, but that isn’t stopping him from campaigning as though he was just one step away from pulling off the impossible.

The former Downing Street political adviser and Fox News host refuses to be daunted by the rancid political environment for Republican candidates this year, or by opinion polls that tell him he is lagging 20 percentage points or more behind his Democratic rival, Xavier Becerra.

Published: September 30, 2026, 7:00 am

Trump’s AI chatbot turns on its master

The famously fact-averse president rolled out a new AI tool – but its answers don’t conform to his version of reality

Donald Trump, in a development that could almost be from a Greek tragedy, appears to have invented something that is willing to do what no one in his orbit will: tell him the truth.

The president launched America.gov on Tuesday, an AI platform which the White House says will make it easier for Americans to interact with the federal government and eventually complete services like renewing passports and enrolling in Medicare.

Published: September 30, 2026, 12:12 pm

How Trump is meddling in Brazil's election – explainer

Brazil will head to the polls on 4 October for the first vote in its presidential race. The incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is neck-and-neck with Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is in prison for plotting a military coup. There are fears and accusations that the US is interfering in the election, and these follow similar allegations in a string of elections across Latin America won by Donald Trump-backed candidates in what is being called 'the orange wave'.

The Guardian's Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, explains the tactics Trump and his administration have been using in recent months and what impact another Bolsonaro government could have on the region, and the world

Published: September 30, 2026, 6:24 am

Judge ends federal oversight of Oakland police department after 23 years

Group of officers known as ‘riders’ in 2000s prompted longest arrangement of its kind in US history

After 23 years, a district judge has released the Oakland police department (OPD) from federal oversight, marking the end of the longest arrangement of this kind in US history.

In the early 2000s, a group of police officers known as the “riders” were exposed for offenses like planting evidence, falsifying reports and using excessive force against primarily young Black men. These actions led victims to file more than 100 civil lawsuits against the department. In 2003, as a part of the settlement of these cases, the OPD was put on a federal court-ordered reform program.

Published: September 29, 2026, 7:02 pm

‘He’s unbearable’: bear that went viral for living under LA home is back

‘Yellow 2120’ has been driven out of other Altadena neighborhood crawlspaces, but he just keeps coming back

He’s back: the 550lb bear made famous after he took up residence under an Altadena home in November 2025 is wandering the Los Angeles neighborhood again after he moved in and out of the crawlspace of another home.

“Yellow 2120”, as the black bear has been tagged, was spotted in the crawlspace of a home on Minoru Drive on Monday.

Published: September 29, 2026, 4:43 pm

Six Flags permanently shuts down X2 rollercoaster after claims of brain injuries

More than 100 people have said they were injured by the ride in California, which reached speeds up to 76mph

Six Flags has permanently shut down its embattled X2 rollercoaster in Valencia, California, the company announced on Tuesday, as numerous past riders have come forward with allegations of serious injuries.

X2, a Magic Mountain park favorite, which reaches up to 76mph (about 122km/h) and has seats that can rotate 360 degrees, had been closed since mid-July.

Published: September 29, 2026, 1:16 pm

California bans officers’ use of electric-shock gloves after ICE reveals plan to equip agents

State passes law banning local, state and federal officers from using gloves that deliver painful electric shocks

California has passed a law Tuesday banning local, state and federal law enforcement officers from using gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks to people.

The ban on shock gloves will take effect next year and remain in place until 2030. It comes weeks after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) moved to equip its officers with the gloves, which are designed to gain compliance from combative individuals. Last month, the agency awarded a nearly $17m contract to buy 6,000 pairs.

Published: September 29, 2026, 12:59 pm

‘The Savage Skulls were the most dangerous gang in the Bronx’: Jean-Pierre Laffont’s best photograph

‘I’d read stories about gangs killing drug-pushers who targeted young people. Police would find their bodies at the bottom of five-storey buildings. I didn’t want to go looking for them alone’

The late 1960s and most of the 1970s were a difficult time for New York. I’d moved there from France in 1965 with a reporter friend and a plan to start a little agency, but soon found myself working alone. It could be a dangerous city, especially at night, but I enjoyed taking pictures of everyday life around me. In 1969, I became the first foreign correspondent for the Paris-based Gamma Agency, but always insisted on working on personal projects rather than assignments.

Reading the New York Times in 1972, I would see stories about gangs in the Bronx that were killing drug-pushers who targeted young people in the area. The police would find their bodies on the kerb at the bottom of five-storey buildings they’d been thrown off. The gangs included the Savage Nomads and the Dirty Dozen, but the one I was most interested in was the most dangerous: the Savage Skulls.

Published: September 30, 2026, 7:41 am

I looked through thousands of Prime Day deals. Here are the best early sales

From Ugg and Ninja to KitchenAid and Shark – these are best sales to get your hands on before Prime Day kicks off on 6 October

• A buckwheat pillow and a 10lb blanket: what you loved most in September

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Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, live on 6 and 7 October, is the Super Bowl of online shopping. While the e-commerce behemoth just hosted another Prime Day in June, consumerism never sleeps and there are still genuinely good deals to be found, although some are exclusive to Amazon Prime members. But if parsing through thousands of deals isn’t your jam, fear not, because it’s ours.

As veteran consumer journalists, we’ve taken the time to find out what’s really worth the spend, from expert-vetted tech gadgets to make every day a little easier to rigorously tested kitchen scores that help put dinner on the table quickly. Here are the top Prime Deals to shop from brands you know and love such as KitchenAid, Ninja, Bissell, Ugg and more.

Published: September 30, 2026, 10:27 am

The Swan contestants on the ‘sadistic’ pageant reality show: ‘Ultimately, we were just a job’

In a new documentary, film-maker Erin Lee Carr lifts the lid on the 2000s TV series that shocked America

It was in 2003, while listening to country radio, that Kelly first heard the casting call: “Have you dreamed about plastic surgery but never thought you could afford it?” She immediately turned up the volume. The pitch sounded too good to be true: free cosmetic procedures, a nutritionist, self-esteem work – one “life-changing opportunity” that “could transform everything”. Kristy, Cindy, Tawnya and Beth heard the call, too: the chance to overhaul oneself from the outside in, fulfilling the implicit but omnipresent promise that if you just lost a little weight and just tweaked your face a bit, your whole life would open up. You, too, could be an ugly duckling transfigured into a swan.

The catch? It would all be filmed for television, of course, for a short-lived show that some have called one of the most sadistic of all time: The Swan. The Fox reality program, which ran for two seasons in 2004, brought the spectacle of intensive plastic surgery – the endurance of extreme pain and humiliation in pursuit of a narrow beauty ideal – to US living rooms with shocking bluntness: bandages and bruises, surgical cannulas pounding into flesh, curt assessments of lumps and bumps and “masculine” teeth that must be corrected in pursuit of a better you. Even among similarly thin-obsessed programs from the infamously ruthless wild west of early reality television – America’s Next Top Model and The Biggest Loser, to name a few – The Swan stands out as especially cruel, at once hopelessly bought into punitive beauty standards on-screen and shamelessly manipulative off it.

Published: September 30, 2026, 2:00 am

Verity review – Dakota Johnson leaves teethmarks as she goes back to Fifty Shades erotic thriller territory

Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett co-star in this unconvincing mystery about a struggling writer who is asked to ghostwrite for a bestselling author

The nation is crying out for a really enjoyable erotic mystery-thriller, a taste potentially at least as strong as the cosy-crime fetish currently dominating our every waking moment. The success of Paul Feig’s naughty-but-not-nice movie The Housemaid proves it. We are thirsting for a sexy encounter with a dishy yet maybe problematic nice-guy husband; we are pining for a damaged and dangerous beautiful wife; we are longing to identify with a vulnerable yet gutsy young person who finds herself in the middle of their creepy scenario and we are yearning to spend some time in a secluded luxury lakeside villa of gigantic modernist proportions down whose night-time corridors we can tremblingly tiptoe. So here is a drama, adapted by screenwriter Nick Antosca from the novel by Colleen Hoover, in which someone has such excitingly transgressive sex that they leave teeth marks on the headboard. During this film, audiences may be leaving teeth marks in the seatback in front of them. Or the back of someone’s head. But not in a good way.

Dakota Johnson goes back into “Fifty Shades” ingenue-cute territory as Lowen, a struggling writer mysteriously approached by a legal team working for Verity Crawford, played by Anne Hathaway, a mega-bestselling author whose recent indisposition means that she is unable to finish her hugely lucrative novel series. Crawford’s people ask Lowen if she might be willing, in exchange for several shedloads of money, secretly to ghostwrite the rest of Crawford’s darkly saucy page-turners. Lowen agrees, largely because she is strangely drawn to Verity’s handsome, sensitive husband Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett. She has to go and stay in their gorgeous Vermont home where she is upset to find that Verity is now immobile, using a wheelchair, and cannot speak. And she is even more upset to discover a certain manuscript by Verity which hints at a terrifying situation of which the world has no clue.

Published: September 30, 2026, 6:00 am

Heavy metal is about uplifting the downtrodden. So why is alleged abuse by Marilyn Manson so easily forgotten?

Slipknot sharing their stage with a man accused of wrongdoing by more than a dozen women is the antithesis of everything the genre should stand for, even if he denies it

Published: September 30, 2026, 5:53 am

I heard one thing loud and clear in Andy Burnham’s landmark speech: the left has won the arguments | Owen Jones

The PM’s stated trajectory is a rebuke to past Tory and Labour governments. The challenge now is to make his project progressive in word and deed

As Andy Burnham delivered his conference speech to the Labour faithful yesterday, it was hard not to recall Jeremy Corbyn’s words after the party’s shattering 2019 election defeat. “I am proud that on austerity, on corporate power, on inequality and the climate emergency,” he wrote for this publication, “we have won the arguments and rewritten the terms of political debate.” Given Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority, widespread mockery ensued.

But when it comes to rhetoric, who can now deny that the left has won the argument? A Labour prime minister has declared that “Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time”, listing five villains: “Deindustrialisation, deregulation, privatisation, austerity, Brexit.” His speech was infused with class politics, as he condemned a society “run for vested interests, not in the public interest, with power held in too few hands”.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist. His latest book, The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It, is published on 1 October. Order your copy at the Guardian bookshop

Published: September 30, 2026, 12:00 am

It shouldn’t take the eviction of an 87-year-old to get Spain’s housing crisis fixed | María Ramírez

Pédro Sanchez is an admirer of Zohran Mamdani. It’s time Spanish politicians emulated the New York mayor’s relentless focus on affordable homes

Maricarmen Abascal is a determined woman who uses a wheelchair to get around. She has needed her determination over the years she has spent fighting the real estate company that forced her out of her Madrid apartment last week. She had lived in the flat for more than 70 of her 87 years.

Police forced their way into her apartment after a judge approved Abascal’s eviction. By then, protesters had gathered around the building, including the actor Carlos Bardem, Javier’s brother. Teargas was used against them. Abascal was taken to a Madrid hospital, suffering from anxiety and extreme exhaustion, while her supporters chanted: “You are not alone.”

María Ramírez is a journalist and deputy managing editor of elDiario.es, a news outlet in Spain

Published: September 29, 2026, 9:00 pm

How Senate Democrats can stop Trump from stealing the midterms | David Walbert

Republicans could lean on congressional procedure to defy the will of voters. But if they try that, the Senate has a clear way to fight back

Having lost his mail-in ballot case, Donald Trump will probably resort to ever more extreme ways to try to hold a Republican Congress in November’s elections.

His last-ditch effort to count Joe Biden out in 2020 was for Republicans to “investigate” states Biden narrowly won; proclaim fabricated allegations of “stolen elections” to be true; and then reassign those states’ electoral votes to Trump. I have previously described how that same playbook could be used to try to steal the midterms if a Democratic margin of victory in the House is relatively narrow.

Published: September 29, 2026, 3:00 am

Stop shaming people for using AI. Start organizing to prevent our obsolescence | Garrison Lovely

The industry is engaged in a perverse quest to replace humans. We cannot cede the best tools available to the other side

I don’t need to tell you that people hate AI. The list of grievances is long: slop, cheating, bias, enfeeblement, electricity bills, environmental destruction, exploitation, theft, cybercrime, doom. But resistance to the technology has often taken the form of shaming people for personally using it, with precious little organizing against the companies building the machines. This is perplexing, given that those companies are attempting to render us obsolete.

The executives may contest this framing, offering some bromides about how AI will augment human work or how we’ll simply find new jobs to do. But their clear goals are to create systems that so clearly surpass our abilities that we will have little hope of competing.

Published: September 29, 2026, 5:00 am

The Guardian view on Lula v the Bolsonaros: the decision of Brazilian voters will affect us all | Editorial

Sunday’s general election is too close to call, with the incumbent president facing the son of the man who attempted a coup against him

Sunday’s election in Brazil could hardly be a clearer-cut choice – nor a closer call. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, is neck and neck in the polls with Flávio Bolsonaro, the son and champion of the jailed far-right former president Jair. Mr Bolsonaro senior is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup to “annihilate” democracy after losing the last election.

Brazil is Latin America’s largest democracy, but military dictatorship is in its recent past. Mr Bolsonaro wants to free his father and those who rioted in his support in 2023. The senator has campaigned as a less crass and temperamental version of his father, but he is no less extreme. For many on both sides, this is a vote against a man they detest more than an endorsement of their own candidate. Most voters disapprove of both men.

Published: September 30, 2026, 10:37 am

Arizona State hockey coach on leave after practice that left player fighting for life

• Greg Powers taken off duties during investigation

• Matthew Mayich unlikely to recover, says lawyer

Arizona State have placed hockey coach Greg Powers on administrative leave as the school investigates the collapse of a player during an outdoor workout.

Arizona State’s Matthew Mayich collapsed during an outdoor workout in August. He suffered from external heat stroke that reduced flow of oxygen to his brain and is unlikely to recover, according to family attorney Rob Carey. Carey said the 21-year-old Mayich had shown signs of distress before his collapse at the workout, which took place in 89F heat. Carey also said there was no cold water tub available, which is often used to treat overheating. The Green Beret in charge of the practice, Tim Ziesel, did not have a contract with the university.

Published: September 30, 2026, 11:50 am

Rival clubs feel relegating Manchester City to Championship would not be enough

• Premier League executives pushing for severe punishment

• City maintain they are ‘innocent of the accusations’

The Premier League will face pressure from Manchester City’s rivals to push for a sanction that will result in a prolonged absence from the top flight after the club were found guilty of more than 100 charges of financial rule-breaking.

Executives at a number of Premier League clubs have told the Guardian that a points deduction that would relegate City to the Championship for a single season would be insufficient given the scale of what an independent commission described as the club’s “disguised funding scheme” and “sham commercial deals”, which enabled them to artificially inflate their income by £900m between 2009 and 2018.

Published: September 30, 2026, 11:55 am

Cristiano Ronaldo walks out on Portugal after being dropped from starting lineup

• Jorge Jesus earlier said captain would again be a sub

• The 41-year-old has trained alone in gym since weekend

The Portugal captain, Cristiano Ronaldo, announced on Wednesday that he had left the team’s training camp in Denmark after head coach Jorge Jesus told reporters that the iconic striker would not start their next match.

Ronaldo had been due to train with his teammates at the Parken Stadium in Copenhagen on Wednesday but left abruptly after Jesus’s press conference. The veteran coach had said that Ronaldo, who spent the entire match on the bench against Norway on Sunday, would not start Thursday’s Nations League clash away to Denmark either.

Published: September 30, 2026, 12:55 pm

‘We don’t need boos’: Astros players frustrated as own fans turn on them in playoffs

• Houston announce crowd of 34,011 for playoff opener

• Players criticize boos during 6-3 defeat by White Sox

• Astros are first division winner with .500 or worse mark

The crowd at Daikin Park was surprisingly sparse as the Houston Astros – baseball’s first division winner with a .500 or worse record – opened their AL wildcard series with a 6-3 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday.

Large swaths of seats, especially in the upper deck, sat empty while right-hander AJ Blumbaugh delivered the game’s first pitch at 4.10pm. The bottom two levels were much fuller than the upper deck, but many seats in the lower two decks were also empty.

Published: September 30, 2026, 9:46 am

Quips, slights and a surprise twist: Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury come face to face

• Joshua reveals he is speaking to Peter Fury on training

• Fury vows to ‘blast him out’ at London press conference

Anthony Joshua has revealed that he is in contact with Tyson Fury’s uncle Peter, in a surprise twist to the buildup between the two former world champion heavyweights who will finally meet in the ring in Cardiff in December.

Peter Fury trained Tyson when he shocked Wladimir Klitschko to win his first world heavyweight title, in 2015. The uncle and nephew fell out soon afterwards, apparently over a financial dispute, and have not spoken in many years.

Published: September 30, 2026, 12:15 pm

WNBA playoffs: Caitlin Clark shines in Fever win as A’ja Wilson confronts fan after Cunningham foul

• Clark has 27 points and 15 assists in Indiana win

• Wilson assessed technical foul after confrontation

All Caitlin Clark wanted was one more chance to play this season. She delivered a masterpiece. The All-Star guard scored 27 points, had 15 assists, reached another milestone and provided the energy on both ends of the court to help keep the sixth-seeded Indiana Fever’s postseason alive with a 99-89 victory over the defending WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces. Kelsey Mitchell added 26 points as the crowd chanted “M-V-P” throughout the game.

Indiana evened the best-of-three series at 1-1. Game 3 will be played Thursday at Las Vegas.

Published: September 29, 2026, 7:44 pm

USMNT youth shines again in contentious 4-2 win over Chile

• Sebastian Berhalter scores and assists on winner

• Two scuffles between teams erupt as match ends

• Julian Hall, Mathis Albert set records for youngest scorers

Riding goals from Sebastian Berhalter, Julian Hall, Chris Richards and 17-year-old newcomer Mathis Albert, the US men’s national team beat Chile in St Louis on Tuesday night 4-2. The US were shaky at times but used a blend of regulars and newcomers to get the job done, with Albert becoming the youngest-ever goalscorer for the US men with his insurance goal in stoppage time, and Hall becoming the youngest US men’s player to score in each of his first two games.

The game ended with an example of the collective identity a young US group has managed to forge in their first World Cup window, minus major figures like Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, and Folarin Balogun. When goalkeeper Brian Schwake fell on the ball as stoppage time ticked over, Chile forward Leandro Hernández left a kick in on the Nashville SC goalkeeper. Richards took exception, confronting Hernández, setting off a group confrontation that cleared both benches and saw US manager Mauricio Pochettino jump in to the middle of the fray to try and calm things down.

Published: September 29, 2026, 7:18 pm

WNBA playoffs: No 8 Liberty spring historic upset to take down No 1 seed Lynx

• New York are first No 8 seed to beat first seed

• Liberty ease to 2-0 series victory over Minnesota

Jonquel Jones had 21 points and 13 rebounds and the No 8 seed New York Liberty beat the top-seeded Minnesota Lynx 87-71 in Game 2 of their WNBA playoff series on Tuesday night to advance to the semi-finals.

Breanna Stewart added 21 points and Sabrina Ionescu had 18 to help the Liberty become the first No 8 seed to eliminate a No 1 seed in the league’s 30-year history. The WNBA has undergone a number of different playoff formats, and in many of them, it wasn’t possible for those seeds to match up. However, in 2022 the league changed to the current iteration in which the top-eight teams play in the quarter-finals.

Published: September 29, 2026, 7:55 pm

A ‘freaked out’ US food industry is hitting back at Maha – with social media influencers

Cross-partisan support in Washington on issues like pesticides and food additives pose a threat to the industry’s bottom line

Some of the biggest food and agriculture corporations in the US are funding a campaign that pays social media influencers to combat elements of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again platform, according to an investigation by the Guardian and Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project.

The ascension of RFK Jr to secretary of health and human services has boosted his putative campaign to end chronic illness in the US, which he believes is primarily caused by processed foods and dyes, exposure to certain chemicals, and poor farming practices, along with an overuse of what he falsely claims are dangerous vaccines. The “Maha” movement blends long-running mainstream concerns about food and farm safety with conspiracy theories about everything from medicine to milk. A Maha “summit” in Washington this week will feature JD Vance and several members of Trump’s cabinet.

Published: September 30, 2026, 3:00 am

‘So much uncertainty’: Michigan’s Arab American businesses navigate Trump’s Canada trade war

Arab communities on both sides of the border grapple with ongoing tensions as US-Canada relations continue to sour

In Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest community of Arab Americans in the US, one industry has risen above all others in recent years: Yemeni cafes.

At the forefront is Qahwah House, a powerhouse in the burgeoning Yemeni cafe world with 32 branches open across the country. Three of those are here in Dearborn, with more on the way, and they attract people from near and far.

Published: September 30, 2026, 5:00 am

US trade regulator opens investigation into AI giants including Anthropic and OpenAI

FTC move is first official US enforcement ⁠action on rogue AI agents, following surge in incidents first reported in July

The US’s main trade regulator is conducting an industry-wide investigation ⁠into Anthropic, OpenAI and other ⁠AI labs ​to uncover the potential dangers their technology poses to consumers.

The investigation by the Federal Trade Commission is the first official US enforcement ⁠action that delves into rogue AI agents, following a surge in incidents first reported in July that have stoked fears among the public that uncontrolled AI could one day ⁠harm humans.

Published: September 30, 2026, 11:35 am

‘Strong indications’ that Iran played role in RAF Fairford incident, says Burnham

PM also defends decision to release suspects on bail and expresses ‘complete confidence’ in security services

There are “strong indications” that Iran played a role in events in which five men were arrested near RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire as part of a terror investigation, Andy Burnham has said.

Speaking to the media at the end of the Labour party conference in Liverpool, Burnham said he could not give any more details amid a police investigation, but that Iran was believed to be involved.

Published: September 30, 2026, 9:00 am

Israeli forces overwhelmed by violent settlers in ‘terrorist attack’ on Palestinian family

Settler violence in West Bank makes everyday life ‘untenable’ for Palestinians, says ICRC after assault on family trying to return home in Jalud

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said Israeli settler violence in the West Bank has made everyday life for Palestinians “untenable”, as a mob attack on Palestinians trying to return home prompted one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s main rivals to warn of a campaign of settler terror.

More than 100 militant settlers overwhelmed Israeli security forces early on Tuesday to attack a Palestinian family as they attempted to reclaim their homes which had been seized by settlers in the West Bank village of Jalud. Three Israeli security officials were injured and houses were set on fire.

Published: September 30, 2026, 12:01 pm

Hedge fund CEO gives $3bn to Carnegie Mellon University in historic donation

Unprecedented university donation from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin will go toward building a new Miami campus

Carnegie Mellon University will receive an unprecedented $3bn donation from the billionaire investor Ken Griffin, making it the largest single donation in the history of US education.

Griffin, 57, is the founder and CEO of Citadel, described as the most profitable hedge fund in history. The money is going toward a new Miami campus as well as big investments at the university’s longtime home in Pittsburgh.

Published: September 30, 2026, 8:13 am

BBC removes article linking bare nails trend to ‘white supremacist standards of beauty’

Corporation says story did not meet editorial standards after it attracts criticism from US and UK media

A BBC article that included a claim that a trend for bare nails was linked to “white supremacist standards of beauty” has been permanently removed from its website, after editors concluded it did not meet the corporation’s editorial standards.

The article, which first ran on the BBC’s website on 27 September, examined an apparent “viral craze” for bare rather than decorated nails. It said the trend had been flooding social media and fashion catwalks.

Published: September 30, 2026, 7:38 am

Gaza documentary NAZA beats Avengers Endgame: Encore to top Italian box office

Award-winning, Guardian-produced film focused on Israel’s mass killing of civilians extends run after sold-out screenings

NAZA, the award-winning documentary about Israel’s systemic mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, has opened at No 1 at the Italian box office, beating rival titles including Avengers Endgame: Encore, which came in at No 2.

The 80-minute film was booked for a three-day run in Italy, but after sold-out auditoriums and positive audience reaction, its release window will be extended. On its opening day on Monday, the documentary took a total of €451,872, with a per site average of €1,153.

Published: September 30, 2026, 10:11 am

‘We want justice’: series of rapes trigger mass protests at Indian universities

Women say nothing has changed since Delhi’s infamous Nirbhaya bus rape case 14 years ago

The posters, just like the women holding them, were taking no prisoners. “Girls don’t need curfews, rapists need consequences,” read one. “Lock your dicks rather than your women at home,” read another.

As hundreds of women walked from the gates of their university campus into the streets of Delhi – where sexual harassment, assault, catcalling and molestation are a constant, daily threat – they shouted together in a chorus of rage and defiance: “We want justice.”

Published: September 30, 2026, 8:56 am

All of a flutter: how butterflies avoid being a predator’s lunch

Their whirring wings and bright patterns help keep them safe from birds, British study finds

Naturalists have long wondered how brightly coloured butterflies manage to evade the attention of birds that make a meal of other insects.

New research from British ecologists suggests it is not simply a matter of good luck but instead a visual illusion created by their fluttering wings.

Published: September 30, 2026, 8:00 am

Insects play critical role in ecosystems beyond just providing food, new research shows

Insects provide protection, sanitation and even shelter to vertebrates, making them a priority for conservation efforts

For many vertebrates, insects are more than a food source. As “little things that run the world”, insects provide critical functions such as protection, sanitation and shelter across ecosystems, according to a new study.

The study, published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity on Wednesday, sheds light on the various ways insects support vertebrates, ranging from birds and bats to reptiles, amphibians and mammals.

Published: September 30, 2026, 3:00 am

‘Beyond priceless’: how a halt to dredging saved the seas of Scotland’s Summer Isles

Fish and shellfish populations were falling rapidly as scallop dredgers devastated the seabed, but local activists and small-scale fishers battled hard to protect their coastline

Inside a bothy overlooking the Summer Isles, in the north-west of Scotland, the lilting tones of a traditional Gaelic duo fill a room full of musicians, storytellers, artists, local people and revellers, hung with fish-shaped lanterns and “Happy Birthday” signs.

It’s no ordinary birthday. The people in the small cabin have come together, on a windy night in Achiltibuie, a string of coastal hamlets and villages north of Ullapool, to celebrate an important milestone in the community’s history: a hard-won battle to protect their waters from the ravages of scallop dredging.

Published: September 30, 2026, 3:00 am

Tokyo succumbs to ‘rain fatigue’ after a record 35 consecutive days of showers

The record rainfall has been blamed on a combination of climate change and El Niño, which has created a prolonged high pressure front in the Pacific

Residents of Tokyo awoke to a familiar sound on Wednesday: raindrops splashing against windows and balcony floors.

The Japanese capital has seen a record 35 consecutive days of rain that experts blame on a combination of climate change and El Niño, which has created a prolonged front of high pressure in the Pacific Ocean.

Published: September 29, 2026, 9:23 pm

Trump administration withdraws US from Greco anti-corruption monitoring body

‘The era of writing blank checks to international bureaucracies is over,’ state department spokesperson says

The Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption monitoring body, arguing that paying to belong to the multilateral group no longer serves US interests.

The US formally notified the Strasbourg-based organization on Monday that it was leaving the Group of States against Corruption, known as Greco – the latest step in a broader effort by the administration to pull back from international bodies it regards as inefficient, overreaching or out of step with its priorities.

Published: September 30, 2026, 6:54 am

Trump campaign ads paid with public money violate federal law, critics say

White House has labeled ads ‘public service announcements’ and has responded defiantly to criticism

Federal regulators have been urged to stop the broadcast of White House advertisements promoting Donald Trump that critics say amount to government propaganda and violate laws against using public money to promote partisan causes.

Public Citizen, an advocacy group, called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to intervene and block further airing of three ads it said were “designed to boost the image and character of Donald Trump” as part of the Republicans’ campaign for November’s midterm elections.

Published: September 30, 2026, 3:00 am

New Orleans judge files police complaint against CBS affiliate over reporting

Kimya Holmes’s police report over a news segment on a real-estate transaction invokes law that no longer exists

A New Orleans state court judge filed a police complaint against a local CBS affiliate after it aired a segment scrutinizing a real-estate transaction in which she was involved, with the jurist invoking a section of law that no longer carries criminal penalties, according to the journalist who reported the story.

The situation centering on New Orleans criminal court judge Kimya Holmes and investigative reporter David Hammer was only the latest in a series of high-profile matters pitting Louisiana journalists against members of the state’s court system.

Published: September 30, 2026, 2:00 am

Texts about alleged Cornell gang-rape released after investigation reopened

Texts, including unnamed male defendant appearing to apologize, reportedly sent days after alleged 2024 assault

Excerpts of text messages reportedly exchanged by a defendant in the Cornell University gang-rape case and the woman who claims she was assaulted were published by CBS News on Tuesday, a day after New York prosecutors said they were reopening a criminal investigation.

The texts were reportedly sent within days of the alleged October 2024 assault at a campus fraternity house in which a female student said she was drugged and repeatedly raped over the course of seven hours by multiple men who were alerted to her presence on the social media platform Snapchat.

Published: September 29, 2026, 12:01 pm

Macron says ‘welcome back’ to Burnham suggestion UK could rejoin EU

French president, speaking alongside Spanish counterpart Pedro Sánchez, says EU bid would be good news for UK and Europeans

• UK politics live – latest updates

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has reacted warmly to Andy Burnham’s suggestion that the UK could rejoin the EU.

“Welcome back,” the French leader said in English with a smile at a news conference in Madrid on Wednesday. Macron continued in French: “If the British want to come back and if the prime minister is moving in that direction, I think that is very good news, both for his country and for the Europeans.”

Published: September 30, 2026, 9:40 am

Iranian singer’s 74 lashes for performing without a hijab ‘a form of torture’, say rights groups

Iranian court upholds sentence against 29-year-old star Parastoo Ahmadi and other musicians in crackdown on women flouting hijab law

An Iranian court’s decision to uphold a sentence of 74 lashes against the popular singer Parastoo Ahmadi for performing without a hijab has sparked outrage among rights groups, who described it as “a form of torture”.

In June, Ahmadi, 29, and eight members of her production team, including musicians, were sentenced by a court in the city of Qom over a concert that was streamed online in 2024, which went viral and racked up millions of views. The court said the group had violated the country’s “legal and cultural norms” and called the performance “obscene and vulgar”.

Published: September 30, 2026, 4:09 am

South African leader urges men to speak up on gender-based violence after series of killings

President announces measures amid anger at authorities over recent murders of women

South Africa’s president has called on men to take more responsibility for violence against women as he announced measures to tackle the problem, amid anger at authorities over a recent wave of murders.

Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged that not enough had been done to protect women. He said police would be reviewing unsolved murders, attempted murders and serious sexual offences against women and children, as well as producing a funded plan to reduce the forensic backlog for such cases, both within 60 days.

Published: September 30, 2026, 7:16 am

‘We’re afraid of dying’: Brazilian news site will not cover upcoming elections after threats

Co-founder of independent website Tapajós de Fato said decision was made to protect journalists and their families

Four years ago, during Brazil’s last presidential election, the tyres were slashed on the pickup truck used for reporting by Tapajós de Fato, an independent journalism website in the Brazilian Amazon.

Days later, a cat’s severed head was left next to the car park, alongside a note bearing the name of one of the site’s founders, Marcos Wesley Pedroso, and a warning that he would be next.

Published: September 30, 2026, 1:00 am

The secret lives of men who read romance books: ‘My life is full of love, so I’m drawn to them’

It’s often assumed straight men are not interested in romantic fiction – but many are sharing their passion in forums online

After a tiring day as a school maintenance worker, 28-year-old Paul loves nothing more than unwinding with a good romance novel – ideally one with a fantasy or horror element to it. He reads five or six a month – most recently Love Bytes, about an 8ft-tall werewolf woman who runs an extremely successful AI company and falls in love with a handsome ballroom instructor.

Paul got into romance fiction via what he calls its “more traditional” side – such as the Regency romance series Bridgerton. He is partially sighted, so he mostly reads on his Kindle, where he can adjust the font size. In the first Bridgerton novel, “Simon, the main character, has a speech impediment that he has to work through,” says Paul. “I’m more attached to that one. Typically, I don’t come across disabled protagonists that much.”

Published: September 30, 2026, 2:00 am

‘They’ll never bring us dowwwwwwwn!’ Wicked’s stars pick their favourite songs from the smash hit

The musical powerhouse has spawned huge hits, but which do its troupers love to belt out – even for the 1,700th time? From Broadway legend Idina Menzel to composer Stephen Schwartz, they reveal all

Idina Menzel originated the role of Elphaba, the witch of the west who turns out not to be so wicked (but still very green). She won a Tony on Broadway, starred in the West End run and made a cheeky cameo in the recent film version

Published: September 29, 2026, 9:00 pm

Digger review – Tom Cruise’s loudmouth oil tycoon goes hard in Alejandro G Iñárritu’s eco-satire

One man’s irresponsible drilling causes a global crisis in Iñárritu’s exasperatingly laborious, self-congratulatory film

A new movie from the Oscar-winning Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu is always an event. So it’s disconcerting to discover that the event in question is the most disappointing film of the year: an exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory satire with a trick up its sleeve, featuring very good actors giving not very good performances. There are moments to enjoy in Tom Cruise’s boisterous leading turn, yes, but the film’s value resides chiefly in some dreamlike and disturbing images, distorted and bulging from the screen, conjured by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Dennis Gassner.

An ageing, paunchy Texan oil tycoon called “Digger” Rockwell is seen fretfully getting up in the morning, cooing over his horrible old incontinent cat, taking urgent messages from underlings about a certain situation developing in his drilling station in the frozen Arctic. He is played by Tom Cruise with a wispy baldingness and various other prostheses, together with a good-ol’-boy twang and a Stetson borrowed from Slim Pickens’s bomb-riding army major in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. His prized possession is the battered old shovel his granddaddy used a century before, digging for black gold as a penniless young man in the lone star state. Digger likes to brandish this to make a point.

Published: September 29, 2026, 9:00 am

It was a ghost town of three people. So how did Luckenbach rival Nashville as the heartland of country music?

In 1971, self-appointed mayor Hondo Crouch turned the Texan town into a rural respite for country stars. Soon it was immortalised in chart-topping songs – and became a symbol of a simpler American life

In the summer of 1973, the US country singer Jerry Jeff Walker was in the middle of nowhere, recording his soon-to-be-classic album ¡Viva Terlingua!. A crowd was packed to the rafters in an old dancehall 70 miles west of Austin, in Luckenbach, Texas. An extension lead ran from the hall to a recording truck outside. After everyone had gone home that night, Walker stood in the street and said to Hondo Crouch, Luckenbach’s self-appointed mayor: “I wonder what we just did.”

When Crouch had bought the town two years prior, its population was just three people – and according to the most recent census in 2021, it’s back at the same number. But in the 1970s, this ramshackle town thrived as Walker and his peers headed there, and Luckenbach became one of the most improbable yet important centres for country music.

Published: September 29, 2026, 6:30 am

On the Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli review – a physicist’s guide to life, the universe and everything

Near-mystical musings from a scientist who believes we are on the brink of a revolution in understanding ourselves

Under the letter “B” in the index at the back of Carlo Rovelli’s latest book you will find Francis Bacon, bats, behaviourism, Henri Bergson, and the big bang. This intriguing little miscellany reflects the sweeping ambition of what is perhaps Rovelli’s most overtly philosophical work to date.

Rovelli, who directs a quantum gravity research group in Marseille, has written several books on physics for the general reader, including the global bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. His latest is an attempt to integrate principles and theories from the discipline into a broader Weltanschauung: one of the essential unity of all things, and the profoundly relational and perspectival nature of the universe. “Electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgments and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another,” he writes. “They are notions that illuminate each other.”

Published: September 29, 2026, 11:00 pm

Dèy by Edwidge Danticat review – motherhood and trauma in Miami

The first novel in over a decade from the acclaimed Haitian-American author lacks the power of earlier works

Dèy, Edwidge Danticat’s first novel in over a decade, begins with a bang. Magnolia, the daughter of Haitian parents now shopping for a birthday present for her own daughter, hears gunfire, maybe bombs, in a Miami mall. A killer is on the loose – a young man high on hate, the author of online screeds about how “our country is under attack”, obsessed by cane toads who’ve been coming in from the Amazon basin. As she scrambles to the floor of a restaurant called Oasis, surrounded by dozens of diners playing dead, a man asks, “Is this a mass grave?”

Things have always been tough for Magnolia. Her mother chases pigeons by day, sleepwalks at night, is on and off lithium. Her father worked for many years as a bus driver in Brooklyn, saving every cent so he could buy a nice retirement home back in Haiti. She was brought up by an “aunt” whose family had been killed by goons employed by Haiti’s dictator-in-chief Papa Doc Duvalier. Later she gets to college, where “school was my refuge”.

Published: September 30, 2026, 1:00 am

The Fall of the West by Owen Jones review – a bracing history of the changing world order

A journalist charts a quarter century of geopolitical hubris and economic overreach

Like many Britons born in the 1980s, the journalist and Guardian columnist Owen Jones came of age with Tony Blair’s platitudes ringing in his ears. Politics at the turn of the millennium was a story of temporary dispensations mistaken for eternal truths: the definitive triumph of free market ideology; US military supremacy; a rules-based global order. As Jones recounts in his new book, these certainties would come crashing down over the next quarter of a century amid a succession of economic failures, foreign policy disasters and political crises.

Indeed, “the west” itself – as a shorthand for the US plus the wealthier western European nations – feels almost quaint today, given the increasing unilateralism of the administration in Washington. But in the 2000s it was part of the lexicon, as if the hemisphere were a political actor in its own right. Revisiting the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are reminded not just of their horrific death tolls (totalling half a million, by conservative estimates) but also their total strategic failure; the 2021 evacuation of Kabul airport, Jones writes, was “among the starkest images of American decline yet broadcast to the world”.

Published: September 29, 2026, 1:00 am

How Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil stands out from all other game adaptations

There’s no Leon, Claire or Ada Wong in Cregger’s adaptation. Instead, it re-creates something more fundamental – the strange, terrifying experience of actually playing the game

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I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. “It’s not a real Resident Evil movie,” they’ve claimed. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.

On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!

Published: September 30, 2026, 7:00 am

Seth Meyers on Trump canceling $1bn in federal funds: ‘Is he adding a waterslide to the reflecting pool?’

Late-night hosts weighed in on Trump’s relationship with tech leaders and the White House’s new AI-powered site

On Tuesday night, late-night hosts discussed a Maha summit in Washington DC, the White House’s new AI-powered website and Donald Trump once again falling asleep on live TV.

Published: September 30, 2026, 8:46 am

Start spreading the news… New York’s opera giveaway shows UK politicians how to be brave

New York’s mayor Mamdani is putting his political capital behind one of our greatest art forms with his pledge of Opera for All – and 70,000 free tickets to prove it

Opera for All. It’s the credo of every opera house in the world, and each has its own ways and means of attracting new – and, crucially, younger – audiences. But it’s rare that one gives away thousands of tickets to anyone who applies. In New York last week, mayor Mamdani took to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera to tell his city that previously opera-shy citizens should apply for one of the 70,000 free tickets that he and the opera house are giving away this and every season. That means a staggering 10,000 free tickets a month. Not just for the under-25s, not just for the productions that they can’t shift tickets for on Mondays and matinees. New Yorkers simply enter the lottery the day before and if successful, will get a pair of tickets to the next day’s show.

Mamdani’s announcement coincides with the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, going on a fundraising drive hoping for $1.5bn to secure the opera house’s future. Generous as the offer seems, the Met can surely spare the tickets, given how few of their shows actually sell out the 4,000-seat hall – the Met averaged only 72% capacity the last season.

Published: September 30, 2026, 4:27 am

Van Gogh goes on display before sale of ‘almost mythical’ private collection

Châtaigniers en fleurs, valued at $180m, to be auctioned along with 11 other works by likes of Cézanne and Monet

For more than 50 years it was held in a private art collection with an “almost mythical status” that was likened to a miniature version of Paris’s Musée d’Orsay.

But on Wednesday a painting by Vincent van Gogh created during the last two months of his life has gone on display before it is put up for auction with a value of $180m (£136m).

Published: September 30, 2026, 3:11 am

Radioactive trees to fighting fish: the best of Photoworks festival 2026 – in pictures

There are origami cats, Ecuadorian midwives and painful images from the Ukraine war at this year’s event, all under the theme ‘Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams’

Published: September 29, 2026, 11:00 pm

A moment that changed me: My mother fell off a mountain – and my life began again

A bad breakup had made me afraid I would be mired in anger for ever. But on that family hike, in our fear and horror as we awaited the air ambulance, my old hurts took on a different hue

To steal a well-known line, 2023 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. My annus horribilis began when a long-term relationship broke up in January, only six months after we had bought our first home together. I was about to turn 38 and the future I thought was mine – marriage, children – all fell apart. What followed was blow after blow: my sister announced her engagement, I was told by a fertility doctor that I was “not a suitable candidate” for egg freezing, and I soon began having multiple panic attacks a day.

Ordinarily, my work would have been my solace; when I wrote, it was as if time was suspended. But now, my words abandoned me. They would not come, no matter how much I tried. So, in April, I decided to take the rest of the year off to recover. As I was self-employed, this was not a choice I made lightly – but my heart was broken and so too, it seemed, was my brain.

Published: September 29, 2026, 10:45 pm

‘Online sex workers literally have to bare it all’: why Patricia Nilsson is exposing the world’s biggest porn bosses

As a business journalist, Nilsson began rigorously reporting on the power players of the adult industry, who prefer to remain in the shadows. Along the way, she uncovered how porn has shaped the internet – and our lives as a whole

There was a time, a few decades ago, when the men who owned the world’s biggest pornography businesses were happy to be famous. They paraded a lifestyle they hoped looked glamorous, appearing in public dressed in silk pyjamas or with a woman in swimwear on each arm. Porn moguls like Hustler’s Larry Flynt or Playboy’s Hugh Hefner were household names.

“Say what you want about these old perverts, who once set the tone of our sexual culture, but at least you knew who they were and what they were selling,” Patricia Nilsson writes in her new book, Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else. “These days, the men calling the shots are nowhere to be seen.”

Published: September 29, 2026, 2:01 am

Inside Seoul’s K-beauty ‘mecca’: I hunted for the best skincare at the world’s biggest Korean beauty store

What’s actually worth buying at Olive Young? A dispatch from the epicenter of Korean beauty, including the best skincare, face masks and hair care

• Five of the best Korean skincare brands you can actually find in the US

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God does not exist in Olive Young’s flagship Seongsu location in Seoul. Inside the five-story, 4,628 sq meters temple to Korean beauty, chaos reigns. The first floor has been converted into a beach-themed installation for the season, complete with “wellness” smoothie and gelato bars, and bewilderingly, in the center of the room, a man sitting atop a giant lifeguard chair, booming greetings to shoppers through a megaphone. On the upper levels, I am greeted by a wall of face masks, a beauty station with mirrors and sinks and a health grocery store. Every floor is overrun by hordes of skincare-obsessed tourists like me, stuffing our bags with everything we can’t find back home. According to reports, a purchase is made every 0.9 seconds in the store.

If flying all the way to Seoul into the eye of the storm for some face masks sounds like overkill, I have good news for the skincare lover reading this. More and more Americans are getting access to Korea’s largest health and beauty retailer, which opened its first US store in Pasadena earlier this year with a line that stretched a quarter-mile long. Last month, it made a buzzy debut in Sephora, where shoppers can buy 19 curated Korean brands in hundreds of locations nationwide. It’s been a relief for K-beauty fans in the US who have been stuck with the frustrating reality that the best stuff isn’t FDA-approved for sale here, or they can only find marked-up or counterfeit options on Amazon.

Published: September 29, 2026, 7:15 am

Exposed bras and unitards: why are people wearing underwear on the outside?

From crystal balconettes on the catwalk to mankinis on the parkrun, showing off your undies seems to be all the rage

Name: Underwear.

Age: The first loincloths date from about 7,000 years ago.

Published: September 30, 2026, 10:15 am

Stella McCartney makes waves with ‘sea life, not sea food’ theme in zero-wool Paris show

Designer showcases wool alternatives and ocean-inspired clothes and says ‘kindness requires real work’

Stella McCartney has been talking about animal rights at fashion week for 30 years. She is usually a lone voice, but the issue is back in the headlines this season. Outcry over the physical restraining of a Peta protester at a catwalk show by Steven Kolb, the president of New York fashion week’s governing body, has put cruelty in wool production – previously considered niche compared to the hot button topic of fur – on the news agenda.

“There is no wool on the runway this season, and I’m proud of that,” McCartney said after her show. She has been working on wool alternatives, including Brewed Protein, a fermented alternative to cashmere and wool developed in collaboration with the Japanese biotech firm Spiber, which was first used in her collections a year ago.

Published: September 30, 2026, 11:47 am

Jonathan Anderson mixes Austen romance with chic streetware in Dior’s Paris show

Designer’s latest work takes bold steps away from the fashion house’s brand, creating a show that felt like an event

“I want to land on a vibe.” This was how Dior designer Jonathan Anderson, one year into what is arguably the biggest job in fashion, summed up his assignment before his latest show. Expounding on chiffon and buttons with the intensity of a barrister delivering a closing speech in the high court, ruffling his hair as if his mind might at any moment explode with ideas, Anderson brings more brainpower to the pursuit of the vibe than the superficial phrasing suggests.

The vibe is coming in to land. This Dior show felt like an event, which is the bar Christian Dior set for his successors back in 1947, when his New Look silhouette made front pages all over the world. Overnight, trees had emerged out of the circular pond in the Tuileries Garden in Paris, and – thanks to the deep pockets of owners LVMH – a magical mist conjured to swirl around them, lending a cinematic grandeur to the slender catwalk spanning the water. (The trees will be replanted elsewhere in the gardens, after the show.)

Published: September 29, 2026, 8:56 am

Who’s your Uber driver on the phone to? Welcome to the long, long diaspora phone call

For those employed in arduous solitary work such as cab driving, a marathon phone call is the perfect place to navigate the dislocations of immigrant life

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The question of the week is: “who are Uber drivers always talking to on the phone?” It’s one that regularly surfaces on Reddit threads and social media and even, on a couple of occasions, in the office. It’s not my question (I know who they are talking to), but I think the fact that many people are so baffled by it tells us a lot about the separate worlds we occupy.

When you get a cab on a ride-hailing app, the chances that your driver will be on the phone is high. The conversation is almost always quiet, containing pauses so long that it often seems they are actually no longer on a call. But then comes a rejoinder, a laugh, an interjection, and the marathon continues.

Published: September 30, 2026, 6:19 am

On the rocks? Scotch distilleries pause production as unsold ‘whisky loch’ grows

Demand for Scotland’s most famous export has slumped, with industry facing job cuts and closures

Obscured by the Scottish countryside on the outskirts of Kirkcaldy, Cluny bond is, in effect, a small town built to store whisky. By the time the latest set of warehouses are finished on the former opencast coal mine, Diageo’s 220-hectare (544-acre) maturation campus will be able to store almost 3m casks of Scotch. The drinks multinational needs the space.

After a 15-year boom turbocharged by the Covid-19 pandemic, demand for Scotch whisky has slumped around the world. Distilleries have paused production across Scotland to avoid adding to the glut of supply, known as a “whisky loch” – the equivalent of a “wine lake”.

Published: September 29, 2026, 2:01 am

‘I do not know if the doctor survived’: young mothers recall ‘living hell’ of Nepal’s floods

Kalpana Nepali was seven months pregnant when the flash floods hit last month, while Pooja Pariyal spent three days on a hospital roof waiting to be rescued. Now, they are living precariously in temporary shelters

For three days, Pooja Pariyal waited on the roof of Trishuli hospital with her three-month-old daughter, Ridhika. On the ground below and around the building, most of her town had been destroyed and churned into a sea of mud in the catastrophic flash floods that surged through the Himayalan border region of Nepal and Tibet in August.

“Those three days were living hell for me, with no food, no working toilet and no one to help with the baby,” she says. “I had nothing to clean my baby’s soiled clothes. My milk supply had reduced because I was hungry and this poor little thing would cry her lungs out.

Published: September 29, 2026, 9:00 pm

The night sky is getting 10% brighter every year. We’re forgetting what darkness feels like

If more cities start regulating outdoor lighting, we humans could make the environment better for all living creatures

Every night, I can turn off the lights in my room – but I can’t do anything about the outdoor lights in the walkway or parking lot that leak through the curtains. Living in Portland, where the night is still illuminated by street lights, porch lights and parking lot glare, I forgot what it actually feels like to sleep in darkness.

I was excited when I realized my travels to a residency in south-east Oregon would show me a sky I hadn’t experienced in decades. In the Oregon outback, part of the International Dark Sky Places network, I would be surrounded by 2.5m acres of unpolluted night in every direction.

Published: September 29, 2026, 5:00 am

‘It takes a lot of work’: Deb Haaland puts addiction struggles at center of New Mexico governor bid

First Native American woman to serve as US cabinet secretary candid about history with alcohol as she seeks to tackle billowing public health crisis

“It clouds your mind,” recalls Deb Haaland, the trailblazing US cabinet secretary now running to be New Mexico’s next governor. “They say that, after the first drink, you lose your judgment.”

Haaland developed a drinking problem after leaving high school and was twice arrested for driving under the influence. But in her 20s she decided to get sober, a battle that required personal commitment and critical external support. She went on to become a member of Congress, one of the first two Native American women ever elected to the House, and then to become the first Native American to serve as a US cabinet secretary.

Published: September 29, 2026, 5:00 am

Send us your questions about how the Iran war will affect US voters in the midterms

Our politics and foreign policy reporters will answer your questions live in a Q&A on Tuesday 6 October

The war with Iran has had major implications for Americans’ wallets, government spending and US foreign policy. It’s also been key in reshaping the political landscape as it enters its seventh month before the 2026 US midterms.

We’ll be hosting a live midterm election Q&A on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at 12pm EDT on the Guardian US site, with a panel of our politics and foreign policy reporters to help readers understand the costs of the war and political consequences for Trump and candidates running in November.

The makeup of the Democratic party, plus key races to watch

Who are the groups financially backing the candidates in the midterms?

Published: September 30, 2026, 12:23 pm

Has direct experience of a recent climate event changed your mind about the climate crisis?

Perhaps you lost your home or possessions in a wildfire, or your mountain business has been affected by glacial retreat and snow scarcity

Has direct experience of a global climate event where you live changed how you now view the climate crisis?

Perhaps you were sceptical or even denied the climate crisis before the impact of recent global climactic events.

Published: September 30, 2026, 7:07 am

Maradona mural poses and a piglet race: photos of the day – Wednesday

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

• Warning: gallery contains sensitive images

Published: September 30, 2026, 5:36 am