As a young teenager, Javid and his brother were caught stealing from slot machines, arrested and held in a cell. His future hung in the balance. How did he get from there to the top of UK politics?

In 2019, when Sajid Javid was home secretary, he spoke about growing up on “the most dangerous street in Britain” and said how easy it would have been to fall into a life of crime. Fortunately, he said, he managed to avoid trouble. But it turns out that Javid was being a little economical with the truth. He did get into trouble. Serious trouble.

Now 56, he has just published his childhood memoir, The Colour of Home. It’s crammed with incident – arranged marriages, savage beatings and boys behaving badly. I think there’s one key moment in your story, I tell him. “What, just one?” he hoots. Javid is not lacking for confidence.

The mysterious Cornish electronic music pioneer has gained an extraordinary second life in the TikTok era. Writers and musicians explain why his glitchy slipperiness is so in tune with life today

QKThr, an obscure cut from Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs, sounds like an ambient experiment recorded on a historic pirate ship. Shaky fingers caress the keys of an accordion to create an uncanny tone; clustered chords cry out, subdued but mighty, before scuttling back into dreamy nothingness.

This 88-second elegy has always been overshadowed by another song on Drukqs, the Disklavier instrumental Avril 14th, which alongside Windowlicker is the Cornish producer’s best-known track. But QKThr has become a weird breakaway success, featuring on nearly 8m TikTok posts, adorning everything from cute panda videos to lightly memed US presidential debates, and a fail video trend dubbed “subtle foreshadowing”.

Innocent people are being frozen out of basic banking services – and it all traces back to reforms rushed through after 9/11

Hamish Wilson lives a few miles away from me, in a cosy farmhouse in the damp hills of mid Wales. He makes good coffee, tells great stories and is an excellent host. Every summer, dozens of Somali guests visit Wilson’s farm as part of a wonderfully wholesome project set up to celebrate their nation’s culture, and to honour his father’s second world war service with a Somali comrade-in-arms.

Inadvertently, however, the project has revealed something else: a deep unfairness in today’s global financial system that not only threatens to ruin the Somalis’ holidays, but also excludes marginalised communities from global banking services on a huge scale.

T​his fantastically enjoyable romp about the boy band covers the highs, the oiled thighs and the chainmail codpieces. But why does Gary Barlow twiddle his bandmates’ earlobes so much?

‘I don’t like cauliflower cheese,” says Howard Donald (57), prodding at a hillock of cheddar-festooned florets as he tackles an otherwise inoffensive backstage repast during Take That’s 2024 stadium tour. Gary Barlow OBE (55) is aghast. “You don’t like cauliflower cheese?” he splutters between mouthfuls of pie. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Cheesy,” mumbles his carefully bearded bandmate. “It’s too cheesy.”

The prime minister may have seen off the challenge for the moment – but what will be the cost to his leadership? Peter Walker reports

Ever since Andy Burnham abandoned Westminster to become Greater Manchester’s first ever mayor in 2017, he has been dogged with questions about returning to parliament for the top job. He never hid his ambition to become prime minister one day – he couldn’t, really, given that he tried and failed twice to become Labour party leader. But he insisted time and again that he was perfectly happy back in his beloved north, and had no plans to get back to London.

Then on Saturday night, he finally cracked. He wrote to Labour’s ruling body to ask for permission to stand in Gorton and Denton, promising a “hopeful and unifying campaign”, in what he admitted was a risky move. Winning the byelection was not a given and he would have to give up being the mayor if he succeeded. But instead he was blocked by the committee, including Keir Starmer, from standing at all.

Testimony from medics, morgue and graveyard staff reveals huge state effort to conceal systematic killing of protesters

On Thursday 8 January, in a midsize Iranian town, Dr Ahmadi’s* phone began to buzz. His colleagues in local emergency wards were getting worried.

All week, people had taken to the streets and had been met by police with batons and pellet guns. With treatment, their injuries should not have been too serious. But emergency room staff believed many wounded young people were avoiding hospitals, terrified that registering as trauma patients would lead to their identification and arrest.

Statement, since withdrawn, followed ex-minister becoming third Conservative MP to join Farage’s party in just over a week

The Conservatives are facing a backlash after claiming that Suella Braverman defected to Reform UK after “mental health” issues, as the former home secretary finally joined Nigel Farage’s party after months of denials.

Braverman, who was sacked from the cabinet by both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, became the third sitting Conservative MP to defect in little over a week. She immediately went on the attack against her former party.

Federal agents set to scale back presence in Minneapolis as president and allies strike more conciliatory tone

Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy militarized immigration agents in US cities may finally be reaching a reckoning as he faces widespread opposition across the US, dissenting lawmakers in his own party, and impending court rulings after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal officers in Minneapolis.

While there was no sign the aggressive tactics used by immigration enforcement are coming to an end, the mayor of Minneapolis said the administration would begin to scale back the number of federal agents in Minneapolis starting on Tuesday, as the president and his team soften their harsh rhetoric regarding Pretti’s killing.

Greater Manchester mayor’s hopes of imminent return as MP appear remote as relationship with Starmer at low ebb

Andy Burnham has not given up hopes of returning to Westminster and will try again, allies say, but would need to be convinced that Keir Starmer would not try to block him again before running.

The Greater Manchester mayor’s hopes of an imminent return to parliament appeared remote, however, as No 10 sources suggested that relations between the two men were at a low ebb and played down chances of a rapprochement.

Exclusive: Parents said their children had become withdrawn or hypervigilant because of uncertainty, unsafe environments and removal of support

Neurodivergent children living in temporary accommodation (TA) in England are subjected to conditions that amount to “torture”, and the harm it causes them is “psychologically excruciating” and a form of “child cruelty”, a report has found.

The report by King’s College London through the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) for households in temporary accommodation, found that while living in TA was damaging for any child, it had a particularly severe impact on neurodivergent children and those with special education needs and disabilities (Send).