Once a year, Dutch kids, parents and teachers take part in a walking festival, heading out for four nights in a single week to explore their neighbourhoods, exercise and make friends. It’s a tradition that seems to be genuinely transformative

I shouldn’t have been surprised that the rain didn’t stop the Dutch kids. All day it had been thunderstorming, and the forecast didn’t look so great for the evening. And yet at 5pm, hundreds of kids started arriving – many by bike – with their parents to Amsterdam’s Westerpark, a beloved city park that caters to a more residential area of the capital. Today, it functions as a starting point: volunteers coordinate registration, and groups of children gather, decked out in raincoats and eager to embark on either a 5km or a 10km excursion around the surrounding neighbourhoods.

It’s the second night of Avondvierdaagse (which literally means “four-day evening walk”) , organised by a group of neighbourhood volunteers. It’s not a race, but if children complete every night, they get medals, a bouquet of flowers and, if they’re lucky, a lot of sweets. It’s not just Amsterdam; across villages, towns and cities in the Netherlands, hundreds of thousands of Dutch people are doing the same: every year, kids spend four evenings in early summer exploring their neighbourhoods with their school friends and parents as part of the Week van de Avond4daagse. Some places had celebrated earlier; others were walking the following week. A variation of the tradition has even made its way to Suriname, one of the Dutch former colonies. There are also four-day cycling and swimming events. According to the Royal Dutch Walking Association (KWbN), which helps coordinate the events, half a million people take part every year, in 700 locations across the country, powered by tens of thousands of volunteers.

It’s a decade since the MP for Batley and Spen was killed by a far right extremist. Her sister, Kim Leadbetter, who took over her parliamentary seat, explains what lessons are still to be learnt

Jo Cox was a Labour MP for Batley and Spen, the place she’d grown up and known her whole life. She was firmly pro-Europe, a passionate campaigner for social justice - and the mother of two young children, five and three years old. On the 16th of June 2016, at the height of a toxic Brexit campaign, Jo was murdered by a far right extremist. He shot and stabbed her several times outside Birstall library in West Yorkshire, shouting “This is for Britain”. She was 41 years old.

Her sister Kim Leadbetter and her family set up the Jo Cox foundation in her honour, and took on her former constituency. But a decade later, with far-right ideas increasingly mainstream and far-right violence more common, she tells Nosheen Iqbal what lessons we all can learn from the tragedy

While we need protecting from foreign enemies, slashing benefits in favour of defence will make millions less, not more, safe

As the row over the military budget grows, Keir Starmer has spent much of the past few days insisting he’s spending huge sums of taxpayer money on defence. Every single government department has made cuts to fund next month’s defence investment plan (Dip), the prime minister promised, resulting in “the biggest sustained increase since the cold war”. On Sunday, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told the BBC that cabinet ministers have been asked to look for further reductions to help fund defence.

Now squint and replace the word “defence” with “welfare”. Imagine Starmer – or any prime minister for that matter – boasting they’ve pinched cash from the NHS or schools to boost benefit payments. Indeed, swap “defence” for any sort of progressive cause – think housing, social care or net zero – and you’d be hard-pressed to picture a politician trying to save their career by pledging vast levels of spending, let alone if that spending was lifted from the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist

I’ve met many hardcore, violent fans, but the hostage-negotiating, cocaine-smuggling, Marxist-Leninist Alessandro Casolari still stood out

I had heard the name Alessandro Casolari on and off for years. From 2016 onwards, when I was researching my book on Italy’s ultras – a cross between English football hooligans and Hells Angels – the nickname “Caso” kept coming up. In the late 80s and early 90s, he had led the ultras in Ferrara, whose football club is known as Spal.

A red-brick city in northern Italy between Bologna and Venice, Ferrara has always felt sidelined, languishing in a marshy land of fog and floods. I used to go there quite often, drawn by its festivals and famous writers and film directors. A few years ago, when I started writing another book, about the Po River, I hung out there again, but I never bumped into Caso.

Some titles that once backed the Tories now ‘flirting with Farage’ as they try to gauge where readers stand

It was a Mail on Sunday headline with all the ferocity usually reserved for general elections, directed squarely at a political opponent. But in this case, the traditionally Conservative-supporting title was not targeting Labour.

The party in its crosshairs was Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, the vehemently rightwing outfit that regards Nigel Farage’s Reform UK as too weak on deporting migrants.

He built modern Greece from the ground up, but Ioannis Kapodistrias remains a controversial figure. A new biopic throws light on this overlooked titan of European history

On a hilltop in central Corfu, a marble bust carved in the classical style gazes skyward, lean, fine-featured and composed to the point of austerity. There is no uniform, no decorations, nor symbols of office, just a name cut into the base in Greek capitals: Ι Α ΚΑΠΟΔΙΣΤΡΙΑΣ. The bust stands alone in the gardens of Koukouritsa, once the family home of Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first governor of Greece. The villa is now the only museum in the country dedicated to the man who gave up one of the most powerful diplomatic positions in Europe to return to a country that was barely a country and try to build one.

Without Kapodistrias, there may have been no modern Greek state, and the map of Europe might look very different today. He spent years supplying material and moral support to the Greek revolutionaries; once independence was won from the Ottoman Empire, he negotiated directly with Britain, France and Russia over the new country’s borders and future, then set about building the institutions, its currency, courts, schools and civil service that the modern state still stands on. “He who murdered Kapodistrias murdered his homeland,” Swiss philhellene Jean-Gabriel Eynard wrote on hearing of the statesman’s assassination in 1831 at the hands of rebel leader allies turned enemies.

US president says strait of Hormuz will be open from Friday but questions remain over waterway fees and Israeli breaches of ceasefire in Lebanon

• Tallying the global cost of the US-Israel war against Iran

Donald Trump has declared that the strait of Hormuz will be “completely open” from Friday, as western leaders gathering at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains battled to prevent the fragile US deal with Iran from almost immediately unravelling.

“The deal’s all signed. And the strait ⁠is already partially opened,” Trump said as he arrived at the summit in France, but Israeli breaches of the ceasefire in Lebanon and Iran’s claims about its right to charge fees in the crucial waterway revealed the agreement’s many loose ends.

Labour MP warns of voices fanning hatred on eve of 10th anniversary of the murder of her sister, the MP Jo Cox

Political hatred and division in the UK is probably worse now than during the Brexit referendum, when Jo Cox was murdered, says Kim Leadbeater, Cox’s sister who is now also a Labour MP.

Speaking to the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast Leadbeater, who was elected to the same Yorkshire seat held by Cox in a 2021 byelection, said everyone in public life had a responsibility to try and ease tensions.

No 10 is worried about retaliation from White House over restrictions to under-16s’ internet use

Ministers have embarked on a concerted lobbying operation to prevent a backlash from the Trump administration to the under-16s social media ban announced by Keir Starmer.

Officials said they have spent weeks trying to reassure senior Trump officials and the US president himself that the restrictions were not specifically aimed at US technology companies.

Exclusive: Carns, who quit last week, says he was angered by unwillingness to confront sunk costs of legacy programmes

There is “unbelievable” waste and inefficiency at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the former armed forces minister Al Carns has said, adding that every time he would “turn a stone over” he would get another shock.

Carns said that during his time as a defence minister he had been angered by the unwillingness to confront the sunk costs of legacy programmes – and suggested mismanaged programmes such as tanks investment should be scrapped in favour of new technology.