Playwright was an unusual mix of originality and authority and in high demand as a cultural critic

Bonnie Greer, who has died at the age of 77, moved to the UK from New York in 1986. She grew up in Chicago six siblings. Her father worked in a factory and her mother “kept house”, she said once – in a tone so elegantly ominous, she conjured an image of a woman holding up a full dwelling with seven children in it, with her bare hands. Greer was ambitious and, academically, a high flyer, but abandoned her law degree, facing baked-in sexism from professors. Yet, since she started writing plays aged nine, arguably she was just hastening a creative career that was inevitable.

The Actors Studio was what drew her to the West Village in Manhattan in the late 70s, and she was there at the height of the Aids crisis, a brutal time of mass bereavements and poisonous prejudice. She lost about 35 of her friends, and later told the Sunday Times: “I owe those people my life. If I hadn’t met my gay friends I would be a suburban SUV-driving granny. They taught me the value of insurrection and fun. Nearly 30 years on, I’m still that 25-year-old, on top of some bar, in one of those vintage dresses, dancing with those guys.” But when she arrived, touring, at the Edinburgh festival, it felt like a release, from the “shadow of death”, and a New York theatre scene bereft of its heart. She stayed in the UK permanently.

By standing behind support act Macklemore, who was removed from the tour for his vocal support of Palestine, these artists are demonstrating the self-sacrifice necessary to stand against those crushing free speech

In a statement about Macklemore being dropped from his US stadium tour for making pro-Palestinian comments, Ed Sheeran defended his own publicly apolitical stance: “If we only ever focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will ever change. There are different approaches to being an advocate for change.”

Every other musician involved with the tour – support acts Finneas (Billie Eilish’s brother), Danish band Lukas Graham and Irish songwriter Aaron Rowe, plus Sheeran’s Irish backing band, Beoga – has made their approach to advocating for change clear, pulling out of the remaining dates to protest against the censorship of Macklemore and to express support for the Palestinian people.

A new map of the world rescales the size of Africa and calls into question our perception of land, power and influence

This month, the UN passed a resolution, brought to the assembly by Togo, to phase out the traditional Mercator map of the globe and replace it with another that shows the real scale of territories. That’s right – when it comes to size, the map of the world we have all grown up with is not accurate. The main loser of land on the Mercator map is Africa, and the new “Equal Earth” map reflects its true proportions. I spoke to our west Africa correspondent Eromo Egbejule about his extensive reporting on the map changes, and why people feel so strongly about it.

Seeing the new map transposed over the old might make you feel oddly disoriented. Logically, there is absolutely no immediate tangible impact on one’s life that comes out of knowing that the entire top part of the northern hemisphere is so much smaller than you were led to believe. And yet, there is still something agitating about it, like you’ve been the subject of a lifelong trick, or at least a breach of trust.

A new report highlights the dangers experienced by those who seek to serve the public. People are being deterred and your democracy is suffering

There is a rising tide of abuse in our politics and I feel it every day. This week, the Electoral Commission warned that harassment and intimidation are changing how candidates campaign, what they feel able to do and whether they stand again. This is a threat to our democracy – and we cannot ignore it.

The figures are stark. Commission research into the May 2026 local and mayoral elections in England found that 55% of candidates said harassment or intimidation was a problem, up from 47% in 2025. Women, ethnic minority candidates and those with disabilities were most likely to encounter abuse. The experience was so unpleasant that a third considered not standing again.

Dawn Butler is Labour MP for Brent East

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US student Linus Chen-Plotkin has analysed music by four canonical composers looking for patterns. Turns out Mozart’s music moves in the least predictable way

It’s a question that has taxed musical thinkers for centuries: just what is it about one composer’s music that makes it more distinctive than anyone else’s? Entire disciplines of academic thought, of music analysis and historical musicology, as well as the formation of classical music’s canon of “great” composers, have been given over to this single idea: can it be proved that Mozart, say, was measurably “better” than other composers?

Our instinctive feeling about the sensual magic of Mozart’s music is part of the equation, but accounting for precisely how his pieces can sustain a lifetime of listening, why their pleasures never seem to pall and are still capable of seeming to surprise us even when we know them inside out: that’s the million-dollar musicological question.

With tear gas, grenades and a new law, French authorities are targeting unlicensed music gatherings. Those in the rave scene explore the parallels with the UK in the 90s

When Spiral Tribe fled England in 1992, they left behind an indelible mark on rave history. The itinerant sound system collective are best known for their involvement with Castlemorton Common festival, an unlicensed free party drawing more than 30,000 people and lasting nearly a week. After a drawn-out and notoriously expensive trial for public order offences, Spiral Tribe were acquitted of all charges. They decided to drive their repurposed military caravans out of the UK and never look back.

Their documented history often stops there. But little known is the fact that they then kicked off “the biggest illegal underground movement that Europe had ever seen”, says Spiral Tribe associate Sebastian Vaughan, AKA electronic musician 69db.

Body found in pond in Suffolk village of Brantham, where Noah was last seen on Tuesday afternoon

Police searching for a three-year-old boy who went missing from a playground on the Suffolk-Essex border have found a body.

Noah Woods was last seen at 3pm on Tuesday in Merriam Close, Brantham, near Manningtree, before becoming separated from a relative.

Government sources say legislation aimed at China poses a risk to British businesses and must be addressed

The UK government’s EU reset summit could be delayed again unless the EU agrees to include “Made in Europe” legislation – that could lock British business out of parts of EU industry – on the agenda, government sources have said.

The “Made in Europe” legislation – formally known as the Industrial Accelerator Act – is designed to curb China’s increasing presence in European industry, but was not on the reset plan agreed by the former prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, in London in May 2025.

Exclusive: Ten category C prisons in England and Wales asked to add second beds, in breach of safe occupancy limits

The Prison Service has drawn up plans to “double up” hundreds of prisoners in temporary prefabricated cells built for one person, at the request of the Ministry of Justice, leaked documents show.

Amid an ongoing overcrowding crisis in England and Wales, governors of 10 category C prisons have been asked to sign off the installation of second beds in “rapid deployment cells [RDCs]”.

Israeli prime minister to pursue new laws as directors of Guardian-produced film face threats from far-right officials and activists

• ‘They know the house they are bombing is full of children’: NAZA’s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he would seek new laws allowing Israel to strip citizenship from people who “smear” Israeli soldiers, escalating the campaign against the Oscar-winning film-makers behind the Gaza documentary NAZA, who have faced threats from senior government and military officials and groups of far-right Israelis gathering outside their families’ homes.

NAZA, which was produced by the Guardian, concerns the country’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza and is named for an acronym used euphemistically by Israel’s intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike. The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian from 2023 to 2025.