‘Brash, disingenuous, lethal’: that’s how the 67-year-old actor describes his younger self. He lied to his partners, disrespected his audiences, betrayed his friends. Has this indiscreet, unreliable heartbreaker finally grown up and settled down?

Rupert Everett is struggling with the heatwave. It reminds him of the summer of 1976, when he was 17, basking in the sun, serene as a sloth, his future spread out ahead of him. It’s so different now. “When you were young, hot weather was nice. But when you’re chubby like me now, it’s not so nice,” he says.

“You’re not chubby,” says his publicist, with reassuring brio.

Exclusive: 25 years after race riots in north of England, Arooj Shah says extremist groups and lies about grooming scandal are poisoning Oldham

“Identity politics is tearing communities apart”, the former leader of Oldham council has warned, in the week marking the 25th anniversary of race riots across the north of England.

Arooj Shah quit as leader of the Greater Manchester borough earlier in May, after the local elections left the council with no group in overall control.

For ease and speed, we are degrading our ability to connect and to organise our societies. We must assert our trust in humans over machines

Here is a nightmare scenario for you. You are writing a book about how AI reshapes reality. You start using it as a research partner, confident that you are applying the right hygiene by not letting it actually write a sentence of the book. You think you’ll be careful, you will double check everything. And then your book comes out and it appears that it includes more than a half dozen misattributed or fake quotes. Steven Rosenbaum, the unfortunate writer, acknowledged that sometimes the output of AI was “staggeringly wrong”, but still, errors crept in.

There are others. A Commonwealth prize-winning short story became engulfed in claims that it carried the hallmarks of AI. And every time I see a story of a journalist caught out by fake AI quotes during research, I cross myself – there but for the grace of God go I. But to make sure it is not left up to grace alone, I never touch the thing. When AI results pop up as the default in a search engine, I reject them, rebuke them, as if they contained a dark sorcery that would through mere engagement creep into my synapses and take control.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Horrified by the recent murder of Kawthar al-Husayjawi, one of her female relatives describes what happened – and her fears for other women and girls forced into early marriage in Iraq

The men of my tribe [extended family] threw my relative Kawthar Bashar al-Husayjawi, 15, into a pit and put a little dirt over her body. They had killed her hours earlier with 10 bullets, and split her small head with an axe. My family then joined others in coming on to the streets to dance and celebrate her death.

Kawthar lived in al-Nahrawan, a district in the south-east of Baghdad. She had been taken out of school and at age 13 forced to marry an alcoholic years older than her.

Set in the aftermath of the famine, the Hamnet author’s family saga folds in myth and folklore

‘His father was ever a man of few words,” begins Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, a lengthy and ambitious story set in the aftermath of the Irish famine. Land opens in 1865 on a rainswept Irish peninsula and takes us to Dublin, Rome, Quebec and Kerala as it tells the story of two generations and gestures backwards and forwards at two more. The opening line came to O’Farrell on a train journey from Belfast to Dublin, and became the way in to a story based in part on that of her great-great-grandfather, who worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland not long after the great hunger. “What, I wondered, would it have been like to be revising the maps at that time,” she writes in a short introductory note; “to be recording and setting down the devastation that had occurred?”

In bitter weather, Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam are mapping a peninsula – perhaps Dunmore Head in County Kerry, though O’Farrell doesn’t specify – using surveying poles and measuring chains. Tomás is in the pay of the English, who need him not only for his surveying ability and draughtsmanship, but for his language skills: they cannot easily find out from Irish speakers the names of places, or determine who owns what. It is Tomás’s job to untangle complex local legends and obscure toponyms to create a usable map, and he wants to ensure that the marks left by the famine – the empty houses and graveyards – are recorded on it, though the “redcoats” sign their names to his work. A famine survivor himself, scarred by unspeakable trauma, he tolerates this: as we later discover, assisting the surveyors and learning their trade was his route out of the workhouse. He might not have survived otherwise.

Endless swiping has left a generation of singles burned out. But get real: dating assistants and AI-aided chats will never recreate the friction of real romance

After years of shrinking usage and tumbling stock prices, the dating app Bumble is teasing a major change to its product. But in solving one problem, it might be walking right into another. The company told Axios this month that it’s getting rid of a dating app mainstay: the swipe. The feature made it easy for people to carelessly flick through photos, said CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, leading to a user experience with too many dead-end conversations. Going forward, Bumble will focus on features that make for deeper, more meaningful connections, she said. Namely, an AI assistant named “Bee”.

While it’s still unclear exactly what Bee will do, its responsibilities will include punching up users’ profiles by suggesting better options for their photos and personal blurbs. Bumble says it will also use AI to chat with people about their dating preferences and help them find others with similar “values”.

Tatum Hunter is a technology journalist based in Brooklyn. She writes on Substack at Bytatumhunter

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Sources predict ‘toe-curling’ revelations as more than 1,000 pages of documents relating to his appointment as US ambassador to be published

• Mandelson files show no mitigation of security concerns

The Times has published polling today from JL Partners saying that trade union members are as likely to support Reform UK as Labour.

Around 1,000 trade union members were polled, and Reform UK and Labour both attracted 28% support. In 2024 Labour was on 24% with union members.

Labour is no longer the party of the patriotic working class. That mantle now belongs to Reform.

Labour has abandoned the working class, and the working class have abandoned Labour.

Being prepared to cut the winter fuel allowance, slash benefits for the disabled and aid and abet a jobless transition for oil and gas workers at the same time workers and their families are struggling with a baked-in cost of living crisis is not the change people voted for.

Reform are no friends of workers. They want to cancel hugely important union rights and are targeting the pensions of the low paid.

But Labour has to show working-class people it can be on their side — as it did with last week’s essential help for our ceramics industry.

Thousands leave homes after Israeli military instructed to strike ‘terrorist targets’ in largest escalation of war since ceasefire

• Middle East crisis – live updates

Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed the Israeli military to bomb the southern suburbs of Beirut, the most serious escalation of Israel’s war in Lebanon since a supposed ceasefire was announced on 17 April.

The Israeli prime minister and his defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Monday they had given instructions to strike “terrorist targets” in the southern suburbs for what they called “repeated and ongoing violations of the ceasefire by Hezbollah”.

Annette Bramley says Holly’s Law would stop perpetrators acquiring pets and raise awareness of domestic abuse link

Annette Bramley fondly remembers her daughter Holly as being family-oriented and a lover of animals. “She adored anything small and furry, or even not. I mean, she thought orangutans were beautiful,” she said.

When Holly ended up in a controlling and abusive relationship, her husband, Nicholas Metson, was quick to use this passion against her. He bought Holly a puppy and then tried to kill it by putting it in a washing machine at their home in Lincoln. After it was rescued by Holly, he drowned it in a bath.

Home Office says presence of Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker in UK ‘may not be conducive to the public good’

Two prominent US political commentators who were due to speak at events in the UK this week have been banned from entering the country by the Home Office.

Cenk Uygur, the host of the Young Turks online political talkshow, and Hasan Piker, who runs his own hours-long stream each day, have been stopped from appearing at SXSW London, while the former said he had also been due to speak at an event run by University of Oxford students.