New £500m town centre welcomes its first tenant this month, but displaced traders say promises that they could return have been broken

Diana Sach once employed more than 30 people and catered for hundreds more every day from her Latin American restaurant and delicatessen, famous for its Peruvian empanadas, in south London’s Elephant and Castle district.

Now, she looks longingly at the shiny tall buildings that have replaced the brightly coloured but shabby shopping centre that was her home from home before being demolished in 2021.

For those who are burned out, perimenopausal, or both, dancing all night can be a panacea. It’s great exercise, lowers stress, boosts energy and provides connection. No wonder so many are doing it

It’s 4am and I’m in a club – the first time I’ve done this in years. I’m 51 and in my sandwich era, meaning I’ve got teenage and elderly loved ones on my mind – a situation that generally calls for early nights. But when you’re responsibilities-maxxing, sometimes you need the opposite. A blowout. A huge, transcendent, resetting release. A rave.

I don’t know what took me so long to get around to it. Misplaced parental guilt? Internalised ageism? Exhaustion? It’s not as though I didn’t know other gen-Xers who have been regularly getting blissfully – ceremonially, even – lost in house, techno or drum’n’bass, and they’re not alone. A 2025 study by the University of Leeds went viral: “Women aged 40-65 are turning to raves for real mental health,” said one of many Instagram posts and press headlines. “Why many women over 40 still go to raves,” read another. But surely the question should be: why the hell wouldn’t they?

From missing scenes and characters to a brand new ending, the director has taken some artistic liberties with Homer’s epic poem

Turning a 12,000-line poem that takes a day to read aloud into a three-hour film was always going to require some pruning. So it has proved with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which dispenses with a number of scenes and characters from Homer’s ancient Greek epic. The director has also changed the emphasis in some of the story’s most famous episodes and made a few of his own additions. Here we run down the most significant alterations.

Elon Musk is trying to own it, competing powers are trying to fight in it and nobody seems to be regulating it. So who does space really belong to?

The last time I saw Laura Grego was in a tent in a baking field on the Welsh borders in May. The conversation on stage ranged from the dangers of space debris to how the law of the sea might pertain to outer space; from our sense of the sacred to our interplanetary futures. At one point Grego, a physicist, said intently, “People have to be aware of what is happening in space. Public knowledge has to catch up.” Three weeks later, SpaceX launched on the stock exchange, temporarily making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

So, I ask her now, what is it that we should all know? Well, she says, the average person’s experience of space is about to change. If, so far, that has been “looking at the stars and being full of wonder, full of connection with the universe”, perhaps noticing the occasional streaking object that was not a shooting star, now “there are plans for tens of thousands more satellites, which would really change your relationship with what you see in the sky”. SpaceX, specifically, has just applied to a federal regulator for permission to launch up to 1m of them.

A report on the Spectator’s coverage of Muslims makes for grim reading. Conservatism is now focused on this minority to the exclusion of everything else

I start this column already resigned to the tune out, to the glaze over, the click away. This is not to say that I do not have faith in you, dear reader, to keep reading and caring. But I am aware, and this is central to the problem, that it is now normal, when it comes to a certain minority in this country, to speak of them as if they were some sort of plague. Islamophobia has become so common as to be mundane in large parts of the British media. Foremost among the offenders is Britain’s oldest political magazine: the Spectator.

A large and comprehensive report from the Centre for Media Monitoring reviewed 3,733 articles published in the Spectator relating to Islam or Muslims. Released last week, it criticised the publication for “a sustained and systemic pattern of biased coverage of Muslims and Islam”, according to the CMM, “with more than half of all relevant articles rated as biased over an eight-year period”. It is grim, grim reading.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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When I gave up washing my hair, the first two weeks were the worst. But I was determined to follow my barber’s advice ...

In 2025 I’d not had a paid-for haircut in about five years, preferring to ask my ex to cut it with kitchen scissors in the bathroom. But now I was in my late 20s and single and I decided that it was time to look more grown up. Not knowing the first thing about looking after my hair, I felt that a trip to an establishment that offered something beyond a short back and sides – a trendy, gentrified place where a trim puts you back a cool £38 – was sorely overdue.

“You need to stop washing your hair,” my barber told me bluntly. As they ruffled through my shapeless, overgrown mop I was warned about using too much shampoo, which can leave your hair dry, lifeless and coarse. I sat in the swivel chair feeling a bit embarrassed. My barber’s words were less a caution and more a diagnosis. I was instructed to drop shampoo immediately for at least two weeks. The dry variety was fine if I got desperate for a clean and I could maybe use a bit of conditioner as a treat. But for the most part, water was my entire regime.

The new PM said he wants to put ‘the right values and the right standards at the heart of government’

• Burnham vows his arrival in power will be ‘circuit breaker’ moment for UK

• Six highlights from Andy Burnham’s first Downing Street speech

Andy Burnham may see banners urging the government not to allow the proposed Rosebank oil field development in the North Sea as he drives to Buckingham Palace and the No 10 today.

Here is a banner on Whitehall.

• Keegan revealed in June 2026 he had stage four cancer

• Starred for Liverpool, Hamburg, Newcastle and England

Kevin Keegan, the former England and Newcastle manager who was twice European football of the year and a stalwart member of Liverpool’s serial First Division and European champions in the 1970s, has died aged 75.

Keegan’s family revealed in January 2026 that he had cancer, and in June he revealed himself that it was stage four, the most advanced stage. “It is with immense sadness that we announce that Kevin Keegan has passed away at the age of 75,” read a family statement. “Kevin had been battling cancer and was surrounded by his wife and daughters in his final moments.

Iran-backed Houthi rebels have announce a maritime embargo as Kuwait army says it is confronting missile and drone attacks from Tehran

• US military identifies two soldiers killed in Iranian attack on Jordan

The price of oil jumped in early Asian trade on Monday after the US carried out its latest wave of strikes on Iran and a vessel caught fire in the strait of Hormuz.

Brent crude for September delivery rose 2.72% to $90.50 a barrel by around 0100 GMT, after briefly crossing $91 – its highest price since June.

CENTCOM assets targeted Iranian military command centers, air defense and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and communications networks to further diminish Iran’s ability to attack commercial vessels and civilian mariners transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. military is holding Iran accountable at the Commander in Chief’s direction.

⚽ Latest World Cup news as tournament comes to close
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Back to the action on the field, or rather slightly adjacent to it. A lacklustre “closing ceremony” in which Tom Cruise was drowned out by the crowd got proceedings under way in New Jersey. A half-time show no one asked for filled the gap in the middle that didn’t need to be plugged. And finally, having kept his physical distance all tournament, US president Donald Trump tried to steal the show just as the curtain was falling.

“I think I heard a match commentator say that the last team that beat Spain was Scotland. Does that mean Scotland have won the World Cup?!” asks Peter Oh.