Lucia Osborne-Crowley on what we should learn from Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, journalist and author of The Lasting Harm, explains the grooming tactics of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

“People talk about Jeffrey Epstein as though he’s special or as though he’s mysterious in some way,” Lucia tells Annie Kelly. “That takes away from the truth of it, which is that there are lots of people like him.

The whole ecosystem inside a cave feeds off guano, dead bats, or any dead animals on the ground. It’s not for the faint-hearted

It can be daunting entering a cave. It is an underground world that possibly hasn’t been explored before. The first smell that hits you is guano (or bat poo). Some of these caves host millions of bats – you can hear them chirping above, hanging in the darkness, and occasionally flying around. It always seems like night-time inside a cave because it’s pitch black.

The walls are covered in interesting creatures such as tailless whip scorpions, which look like a cross between a spider and crab (they look dangerous, but are not), as well as millipedes and centipedes. The whole ecosystem feeds off guano, dead bats, or any dead animals on the ground. It’s not for the faint-hearted.

How have the rich and powerful convinced so many voters that the reason they are struggling is the poor and powerless? The American historian talks about the weaponising of divisiveness

‘I think I’ve had at least seven books that have been banned in the United States,” says Ibram X Kendi, in a tone that carries no bitterness but stops just short of pride. It’s proof, he says, that his works on racism, which extend from deep, scholarly histories to a biography of Malcolm X for children, are getting through to the right people – and annoying the right people. According to the writers’ advocacy group PEN America, his books have been banned at least 50 times by multiple US school districts during the tumultuous “anti-woke” backlash of the past five years. He’s not happy about that, but nor was he discouraged. “I understood that the major reason why people were singling me out and demonising me was because they did not want people reading my books,” he says. “And when the character assassinations did not work to the scale that they wanted them to, then they started banning my books, and the books of many others.”

Kendi’s work is divisive almost by design. He has a way of framing his ideas in radically stark terms. In his 2016 breakthrough book Stamped from the Beginning, a history of racist ideas in the US, he argued that racist policies lead to racist ideas, not the other way round. His bestselling follow-up, 2019’s How to Be an Antiracist, introduced an equally contentious proposition: there was no such thing as “not racist”; you were either racist or anti-racist. There was no in-between: inaction or neutrality about racist issues was effectively complicity. By extension, he argued that all racial disparities in outcome for Black people were the result of racist policies – not just some, all.

What was supposed to be a quick win has become a quagmire, so it now must be reduced to a dopamine hit

The war on Iran, even as it spreads and destabilises the Middle East and the global economy, is not real. This is how it is being portrayed by the Trump administration. The war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of dunking. The architects of this war have made a virtue out of stupidity, and have been supported in that by a stupefying information ecosystem. The conflict waged by the US feels like the first of its kind in the modern age: distinctly remote and profoundly ignorant.

A week into the war, the White House uploaded a clip on its social media channels featuring montages of Top Gun, Braveheart and Breaking Bad, with the caption “Justice the American way” – itself a repurposing of a Superman motto. In another, entitled Touchdown, NFL players tackle each other and upon contact, boom, footage of a strike explosion tagged “unclassified”. SpongeBob SquarePants also makes an appearance, asking, “Wanna see me do it again?”, and then, an explosion. In another, Operation Epic Fury is rendered as a Nintendo Wii game.

My generation had great role models, free university and the morning-after pill. We should be running the world. Instead, two-thirds of us are facing mental health problems – and it’s not all about the menopause

Looking at the women in my own immediate friendship group, ranging in age from 50 to 63, we have lived through every flavour of chaos. Apart from the haywire hormones and feelings of invisibility, there are also the life-changing events that happen at this life stage – post-divorce relocation, caring for a parent with dementia, a breast cancer diagnosis, redundancy. Some of my friends are also supporting adult children with mental health problems, who are still living at home. When the singer and memoirist Tracey Thorn referred to this life stage as “sniper’s alley” she wasn’t kidding.

A survey by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) reported recently that almost two-thirds of women over 50 struggle with their mental health. Underlying factors included anxiety, sleep problems and bereavement, as well as the glaringly obvious: menopause. Nine out of 10 of the 2,000 women surveyed had not sought any help.

The Reform UK leader uses the energy of memes to fuel his popularity, but this should not distract us from the seriousness of his purpose

• Guardian investigation into Farage on Cameo

Nigel Farage has spent the past five years upending politics, breaking the two-party hold on parliament, and apparently sending several Cameo videos a day to his paying customers, charging £374,893 overall. But the Reform UK leader’s side hustle isn’t separate from his political work: posting is politics now, which is why Farage loves to brag that he runs laps around other MPs on TikTok.

Cameos are personalised messages, but they are not private – punters get a shareable link so they can post their anniversary wishes and birthday messages on social media. When Farage sent videos to a neo-Nazi group that used the videos for publicity, or described Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in language typically found in Pornhub categories, he was indeed making public statements. The defence from Farage’s team is that he can’t be held responsible for what people do with the messages he sends them, which is perhaps why most politicians don’t send personal endorsements to random people over the internet for money. His spokesperson said that Farage’s Cameo videos “should not be treated as political statements or campaign activity”.

Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

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Fatih Birol says effect on energy markets of Iran bombings and closure of Hormuz strait not initially understood by world leaders

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

The global energy crisis caused by the war in Iran is equivalent to the combined force of the twin oil shocks of the 1970s and the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the head of the International Energy Agency has warned.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said the growing fallout could be seriously compounded through interuptions to the “vital arteries of the global economy”, including petrochemicals, fertilisers, sulfur and helium.

Accusations of intimidation and harassment within UK diaspora including ‘aggressive’ and ‘coercive’ videos online

Iranians living in the UK have expressed safety concerns to authorities amid heightened tensions linked to the conflict with the US and Israel.

Online videos of individuals allegedly being “aggressive” and “coercing” in London, which is home to one of the UK’s largest Iranian communities, have led to some feeling unsafe.

Residents reported headaches, eye and skin irritation and breathing difficulties as Israeli bombings blanketed Tehran with pollutants

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

Satellite images of Tehran show toxic fires caused by Israeli bombings on oil depots were still burning days after the strikes, which have caused fears of serious health complications for millions of residents in the Iranian capital.

Clouds of smoke from bombings on 7 March on multiple facilities blanketed the city with pollutants ranging from soot to oil particles to sulphur dioxide. Hours later, a passing storm showered Tehran with poisonous, oil-filled rain.

Exclusive: Allowing US tech firm to analyse intelligence in name of tackling fraud raises fresh concerns over privacy

• Campaign groups rail against Palantir, but the UK contracts keep coming

Palantir is to be granted access to a trove of highly sensitive UK financial regulation data, in a deal that has prompted fresh concerns about the US AI company’s deepening reach into the British state, the Guardian can reveal.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has awarded Palantir a contract to investigate the watchdog’s internal intelligence data in an effort to help it tackle financial crime, which includes investigating fraud, money laundering and insider trading.