Royal will join a group of notable figures in his action against the tabloid and its stablemate, the Mail on Sunday, in a trial expected to last nine weeks

On Monday morning, Prince Harry’s legal war with the Daily Mail, one of the British media’s most formidable forces, will finally come to trial in court 76 of the high court in London.

The prince is joined in his action by some of the most recognisable figures in British life: the singer and songwriter Elton John and his husband, David Furnish; actors Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost; Doreen Lawrence, a Labour peer whose son Stephen was murdered in a racist attack; and former politician Simon Hughes, who once ran to lead the Liberal Democrats.

The battle for political domination on the British right still looks and sounds like a battle within traditional conservatism

The Birmingham reggae band UB40 began as a quintessential product of the troubled era when Margaret Thatcher was the UK’s prime minister, archly taking their name from the “attendance card” needed to claim unemployment benefit, and singing songs about life at the sharp end of her rule. Their peak period lasted until the early- to mid-1990s.

In 2008, there came a rupture – due to “management and business disputes” rather than anything musical – which opened the way to the choice that now confronts their remaining fans: whether to go and see a new vehicle for the band’s former lead singer called “UB40 featuring Ali Campbell”, or stick with the outfit that still trades under its original name, and includes his estranged brother Robin. For the time being, there seems to be space for them both.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

These microscopic mites, which burrow under your skin and cause ferocious itching, are incredibly hard to get rid of – and cases in the UK have soared. What is causing the outbreak, and is there anything we can do about it?

Louise (not her real name) is listing the contents of a bin liner she has packed with fresh essentials in case of emergency. Clothes, toothbrushes, hairbrushes, a teddy … “Although it should be two teddies,” she re-evaluates, quickly. I can hear her trying to quell her panic.

A diehard survivalist preparing for catastrophe? Actually, a beleaguered 44-year-old mother recovering from scabies – an itchy rash caused by microscopic mites that burrow under human skin. Far-fetched as it sounds, emergency evacuation is exactly what she, her partner and children (six and four) resorted to in November in a desperate bid to beat the bugs. She is now on tenterhooks in case they return.

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

I am a science-fiction writer, which means that my job is to make up futuristic parables about our current techno-social arrangements to interrogate not just what a gadget does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

What I do not do is predict the future. No one can predict the future, which is a good thing, since if the future were predictable, that would mean we couldn’t change it.

Big tech treats our attention like a resource to be mercilessly extracted. The fightback begins here

In the last 15 years, a linked series of unprecedented technologies have changed the experience of personhood across most of the world. It is estimated that nearly 70% of the human population of the Earth currently possesses a smartphone, and these devices constitute about 95% of internet access-points on the planet. Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.

History teaches that new technologies always make possible new forms of exploitation, and this basic fact has been spectacularly exemplified by the rise of society-scale digital platforms. It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.

Ten years ago, Eugene Teo was obsessed with lifting weights. But, gradually, he realised his extreme mindset was making him unhappy. So he changed his outlook

Eugene Teo, 34, began lifting weights at the age of 13, looking for validation. “I was short, skinny and I thought it would give me confidence,” he says. “Bodybuilding for me was the ultimate expression of that.”

Now living on the Gold Coast in Australia, with his partner and daughter, the fitness coach spent from age 16 to 24 training and competing. At times, he lifted weights for up to four hours a day, aiming to get as muscular and lean as possible. The ideal he was chasing? “If you grab your eyelid and feel that skin,” he says, “that’s the skin thinness you want on your bum and abs.”

The leaders of Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK issue joint statement ahead of EU ambassadors meeting

The United States will also suffer if president Donald Trump implements threats to impose tariffs on European countries opposing his plans to acquire Greenland, a French minister said on Sunday.

“In this escalation of tariffs, he has a lot to lose as well, as do his own farmers and industrialists,” French agriculture minister Annie Genevard told broadcasters Europe 1 and CNews.

Exclusive: No move yet against leader but some say party ‘too academic at times’ and needs coherent national policy

Significant numbers of Liberal Democrat MPs are becoming frustrated by what they view as an overly cautious approach under Ed Davey and the party’s failure to spell out a national message to voters.

Some estimate that as many as half of the Lib Dems’ 72-strong group of MPs feel this way. While there is no move against Davey, who led the party to its best election result in a century in 2024, MPs said this could change if there was no progress.

Emily Thornberry says risk posed to British democracy by bot farms and biased algorithms requires action

Online disinformation campaigns, including Iranian bot farms promoting Scottish nationalism and biased algorithms depicting London as “an overwhelmingly dangerous” city, are seeking to undermine British democracy, a senior Labour MP has warned.

Emily Thornberry, the Labour chair of the foreign affairs select committee, said online disinformation about the UK was being promoted by Donald Trump and other US and UK politicians, and Britain was “constantly suffering from disinformation campaigns from both state and non-state actors”.

Former Tory’s media strategy reportedly calls him ‘biggest defection story Reform has ever had’

Robert Jenrick was described as “the new sheriff in town” and the politician needed by Reform UK to give it experience and political “heft”, according to a leaked media plan for his defection prepared by his aides.

The emergence of the document, which also describes Jenrick as “the most dynamic politician in the Conservative party”, came as Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of policy, hailed the defection, after days of silence from one of Nigel Farage’s key aides.