Exclusive: Jane and Alan Kelvey reflect on close encounter with Russian warship a few hours into two-month sailing trip

They found themselves at the centre of an international incident, the close encounter between their small sailing boat and a Russian warship making headlines around the world.

A month later, Jane and Alan Kelvey are to be found berthed in a rainy harbour in north-west France, still taken aback by their brush with Vladimir Putin’s forces – but trying to get on with their fun sailing trip.

Former 49-day PM helms a Conservative Political Action Conference that’s a far cry from the glitzy US version

Liz Truss has given us all so much in recent years. A mini-budget. A laugh a minute 49 days in office. A new monarch, after the queen decided enough was enough and died two days after Liz began her Airbnb stay in Downing Street. And now she has given us one thing more. She has imported the US Conservative Political Action Conference to the UK.

And like all things Liz, it’s predictably a bit shit. In the US, CPAC is a full glitz Trump fest where all the champions of the far right go to strut their stuff and sell their merch. In Liz’s hands, it’s an altogether more drab affair with little interest from the audience. A going through the motions by C-list speakers who are well past their sell-by dates and have been saying the same things for years. Everyone would have had more fun and more surprises if the conference had been AI generated. There again, with Liz you can never be too sure.

Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the ancient Greek epic has sparked a new appetite for an old classic. Here are the translations, podcasts and audiobooks that make the Homeric world more approachable

The Odyssey was once all Greek to me. I struggled to keep up with the characters, the mass of heroes and villains, the swarms of sons and daughters. I found the Homeric formula – repeated stock phrases passed down from the oral tradition – confusing and tiring. The prose in my 1946 EV Rieu translation, revised by his son DCH Rieu, felt laboured and laborious. I have put the Odyssey down, several times, in the course of my life. But, like Sirens, difficult books tend to have a hold on us. The recent film adaptation pushed me to once again try reading the Odyssey, so I decided on a new approach. I spoke to classicists and conducted research, aiming to render the inaccessible accessible.

To read the Odyssey, start by avoiding the Odyssey. “Begin with contextualisation” – get to grips with themes and content – Antony Makrinos, associate professor in classics at UCL and director of the Summer School in Homer 2026, told me. He sent me an exhaustive list of recommendations, and I found myself in the British Museum, mid-heatwave, learning about Mycenaean civilisation and ancient Greece. I cooled down that evening with a Simon Armitage documentary, Gods and Monsters: an intriguing assessment of our flawed hero.

Heatwaves, high energy prices, calls for reindustrialisation and North Sea drilling are all high on the to-do list

Wildfires cast a pall of smoke this week over Greater Manchester, whose former mayor Andy Burnham stands on the threshold of No 10. Amid three UK heatwaves so far this year, which have killed thousands of people in England and Wales, damaged harvests and left children crying in classrooms, the new prime minister’s plans for the climate crisis remain as shrouded as his city.

“Burnham has been very quiet about the climate [crisis] so far,” says Chris Venables, an environmental campaigner and fellow at the Green Alliance thinktank. “I don’t think [it] is at the forefront of his mind, but that does not mean he will water down this agenda.”

It was a statistically weird game for Argentina’s talisman against England, full of outliers. It didn’t matter

Thomas Tuchel will have prepared for every eventuality before England’s match with Argentina. He will have considered how his team could prosper in attack while remaining solid in defence. What to change if they scored first or if the opening goal went against them and, like so many managers before him, he will have put plenty of thought into how best to deal with Lionel Messi.

For the first hour he was largely peripheral, with the data showing how England were limiting his involvement in dangerous areas. Messi’s only possession in the centre of the penalty area was snuffed out by an Elliot Anderson tackle shortly after Anthony Gordon had scored. The proportion of the distance he covered that was defined by Fifa as sprinting speed (at least 20km/h) was 4.3%, lower than against Switzerland (4.6%) or Egypt (5.4%) in the previous two rounds.

From blackout masks that block 5am sunshine to silk Bluetooth masks that feel cool on your skin, these eye masks could genuinely improve your sleep

• The most-hyped sleep remedies, tried and tested

The best product I’ve ever reviewed for the Filter cost less than £10 and sent me to sleep. When I tested sleep aids last year in an effort to tackle insomnia, an eye mask helped me nod off faster and stay asleep for longer than numerous purported zzz-enhancers, including magnesium and lavender spray. Between you and me, it also worked better than the melatonin tablets I’d brought back from a trip to the US.

Even so, when I was asked to test a range of eye masks for this article, I didn’t expect the cheap MyHalos blackout mask to retain its pole position. Masks from leading sleep brands Tempur and Manta Sleep, and therapeutic tech specialists such as Therabody, use innovative designs to calm your mind and even sync with your heartbeat. The Lumenate Nova, which deploys soothing LED light therapy, reportedly has Jennifer Aniston among its many fans.

Best budget eye mask and best overall:
MyHalos blackout 3D sleep mask

Best Bluetooth eye mask:
SnoozeBand Pro

Revised plan aims to ‘keep something going’ amid fears Netanyahu may gamble on new all-out offensive before Israeli elections

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

The Gaza recovery plan being pursued by Donald Trump’s Board of Peace (BoP) has shrunk dramatically from an ambitious blueprint for the reconstruction of the whole territory to a small pilot project in the south of the strip.

Even the envisaged pilot scheme – involving a temporary camp for a tiny fraction of Gaza’s 2 million displaced people, with a Palestinian administration, police and a small international security force – is not expected to take shape before the end of the year.

The home secretary, favourite to take over at No 11, has minimal economic credentials and many MPs would prefer Ed Miliband

Andy Burnham last month promised the UK he would bring “good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart” when he is installed as prime minister. Britain’s industry leaders also have a hope in their hearts: that Burnham will install a pro-business chancellor.

The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, was for several weeks seen as the most likely candidate to succeed Rachel Reeves but, after a brutal briefing battle and a backlash from big business, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, appears to have emerged as the frontrunner. Now businesses are scrambling to try to work out how she might run the economy if confirmed in the Treasury on Monday.

Landmark high court ruling calls for fresh inquiry into Jools Sweeney’s death to allow for previously omitted social media evidence

The inquest into the death of a 14-year-old boy, whose mother believes he died after a TikTok challenge gone wrong, is to be reopened in a landmark ruling by the high court.

Jools Sweeney, a schoolboy from Gloucestershire, died in April 2022. His parents, Ellen Roome and Matt Sweeney, believed social media played a role in his death, pointing to the popularity of the “blackout challenge” online at the time.

President says he had to choose ‘one side or the other’ after breakdown of relations between ministry and military leaders

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has defended his decision to dismiss the country’s popular defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, and confirmed reports that relations had broken down between the ministry and the country’s top army leadership.

Speaking at a press conference in Kyiv with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, Zelenskyy said there had been a “challenging dialogue” between Fedorov – widely seen as a reformist and moderniser – and the military’s commander in chief, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi.