Abstract art like this gives all abstract art a bad name, just meaningless concoctions that avoid proper scrutiny

One thing is obvious about Ed Sheeran the painter: he doesn’t want to ruin his clothes. He paints in a white protective suit, photos reveal, as if paint was radioactive material or sewage. It’s a telling contrast with a real artist like Jenny Saville, who gets completely covered with paint like a naughty three-year-old, let alone Van Gogh, who ate the stuff.

Sheeran isn’t claiming to be one of those artists – is he? He’s in it for fun and charity. And his paintings have more energy than you’d think from the prissy hazmat suit. He must have moved about a bit, flicking and pouring the fizzy greenish blues, hot orange, lime, mixing them as if making cocktails.

The prime minister has repaired broken relations with France, but Britain still looks perilously isolated in a world of shifting alliances

Gilded carriages and royal banquets are not essential tools of modern diplomacy, but nor are they obsolete. In a digital age, when intergovernmental business could easily be conducted online, the analogue grandeur of a state visit feels potent as a bestowal of favour.

This week Emmanuel Macron is the beneficiary. In September it will be Donald Trump. The sequence is not meant to indicate preference. Both relationships are special, say officials. There are enough champagne receptions and sleepovers at Windsor Castle to go around.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

One year of Labour, with Pippa Crerar, Rafael Behr and more
On 9 July, join Pippa Crerar, Raf Behr, Frances O’Grady and Salma Shah as they look back at one year of the Labour government, its current policies and plans for the next four years

Researcher says tech could replace nearly all human labour within 20 years and societies urgently need to prepare

If Adam Dorr is correct, robots and artificial intelligence will dominate the global economy within a generation and put virtually the entire human race out of a job. The social scientist doubles up as a futurist and has a stark vision of the scale, speed and unstoppability of a technological transformation that he says will replace virtually all human labour within 20 years.

Dorr heads a team of researchers who have studied patterns of technological change over millennia and concluded that the current wave will not just convulse but obliterate the labour market by 2045. What cars did to horses and carts, and electricity to gas lamps, and digital cameras to Kodak, are templates for the coming shock, he says. “Technology has a new target in its crosshairs – and that’s us. That’s our labour.”

I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am also an extreme people pleaser. If my living room was filled with judgmental spirits, it felt disrespectful to remain such a mess

About a year after I moved into my apartment in Los Angeles, I was woken up by three loud knocks on my bedroom door at 3am. I thought there might be an intruder – but I got up, opened the door, and there was nobody there. I went to the front door, thinking I had misheard it, but there was nobody there either. I thought I had imagined it. Then it kept happening about once a week.

I thought it must be my upstairs neighbours, perhaps working a night shift, but after I introduced myself to them to ask about the noise, they assured me they wouldn’t be awake at that hour. I asked the man who looks after our 70s-built apartment block if there were problems with the pipes. He said no. At one point, I started putting my dresser in front of the door, because I was so scared. I couldn’t shake the idea that somebody was getting into my apartment, even though there was no evidence of it. I didn’t tell anyone for ages – because if I had, I would have had to recognise how crazy I sounded.

In Britain’s increasingly authoritarian society, any sort of protest can find itself at odds with the law. You might even go to jail

This piece must be carefully written to avoid my being imprisoned for up to 14 years. That’s a curious sentence to say as a newspaper columnist in Britain in 2025. But since the government voted to proscribe the direct action protest group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, any statement seen as expressing support could lead to arrest and prosecution.

You may justifiably respond that Guardian journalists are not above the law. For example, if I penned a column in support of al-Qaida, you might be sympathetic to incarceration: it did, after all, kill nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, as well as perpetrate multiple terrorist atrocities such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings, and the 7 July London bombings two decades ago. Similarly, you may conclude that a polemic in favour of Islamic State should be met with a hefty prison sentence.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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Dull questions, awkward silences, excruciating gaffes: socialising can be a minefield. Here’s how to avoid disaster – and even enjoy yourself

The cliche about small talk is that everybody hates it. The misapprehension is that it has to be small. In fact, conversational interactions are objectively good. “The person who starts the conversation is in a better mood afterwards; they tend to feel more connected – and not just to the person they’re talking to,” says Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex. “We all have a fundamental need to feel connected, valued and seen.” Even if small talk were not socially beneficial, society would demand it nonetheless – we are coming in to wedding season and we are all going to need some moves.

However, we have this perception that there are rules, which haven’t really changed since the 50s: keep things light and relevant, avoid sex, religion and politics, stay on safe territory, such as the weather. But anodyne topics tend to be boring and difficult to segue out of.

Senior judge Sir Brian Leveson unveils radical proposals to clear huge backlog in crown courts in England and Wales

Thousands of defendants in England and Wales could lose the right to a jury trial under plans designed to save the criminal justice system from collapse.

Sir Brian Leveson, a former judge asked by the government to come up with proposals to tackle a record courts backlog, said he had been forced to make recommendations he did not “rejoice in”.

The creation of a new division of the crown court in which a judge and two magistrates hear “either way” offences – those in which the defendant can currently choose to be heard by either a magistrate or a jury in the crown court.

Removing the right to be tried in the crown court for offences that carry a maximum sentence of no more than two years.

Reclassifying some either way offences so they can be tried only in a magistrates court.

Trial by judge alone for serious and complex fraud cases.

The right for all crown court defendants to elect to be tried by a judge alone.

Bectu chief says junior staff in industry feel vulnerable and she is not surprised by further claims about Wallace

Vulnerable freelance workers in television feel “real fear” about coming forward to complain about stars like Gregg Wallace, the head of the broadcasting union has said.

Wallace was fired from MasterChef on Tuesday after fresh allegations to BBC News about his behaviour from a further 50 people.

Mass lobby in Westminster is kicked off with giant image on cliffs of Dover stating ‘89% of people want climate action’

More than 5,000 people from across the UK arrived in Westminster on Wednesday to meet their MPs and demand urgent climate action to protect their communities.

The mass lobby is one of the largest to date. The constituents, including parents and pensioners, doctors, teachers, farmers and youth campaigners, have arranged to lobby at least 500 MPs, about 80% of the total.

UK prime minister to face Kemi Badenoch in the Commons before talks with french president

As Haroon Siddique reports in his story on the Leveson recommendations, the Bar Council and the Law Society are both opposed to restricting access to jury trials. But the Magistrates Association is in favour.

Here is some more reaction to the plans.

Juries are central to our constitutional right to a fair trial. We should think very carefully before altering a system that has served us well for centuries.

But that does not mean the ambit of the jury system can never change. Sir Brian makes a compelling case for radical change and the need for more than extra resources to restore the reputation of the criminal courts.

This review puts a much needed spotlight on the crisis in our courts. Sir Brian Leveson is right to call it unacceptable. The reality is the justice system is at crisis point with many victims waiting years for their case to come to trial. This causes immense suffering – victims’ lives are on hold whilst they are denied access to justice.

We are glad to hear that the government will carefully consider this review and recognise that some recommendations will make uncomfortable reading for victims. Whilst it’s essential that we see an end to long and painful delays this cannot come at any cost. Victims’ views need to be at the centre of all future changes.

[Leveson] can see no limit to the type of case that can be taken out of jury trials. So this is a slippery slope. If you begin to take away jury trials for these cases, the relatively limited number of cases that he’s proposing, where will it end? It could just keep rising and rising and rising. And you see a serious diminution over the years in jury trials. And I think that’s a big, backward step because we should trust the public. We should trust our system that has served us well for generations.