The actor, who has died aged 78, recently answered Guardian readers’ questions about missing out on James Bond, the true terrors of Jurassic Park and why he called his prize cow Helena Bonham Carter

• Peter Bradshaw on Sam Neill

• A life in pictures

• ‘A true gentleman’: actors, directors and leaders pay tribute to Sam Neill

• Obituary

• Neill interviewed in 2023, 2024 and 2026

Did you consult a canine expert about how best to regress into a dog in Dean Spanley? WomanofWolfville
There was no consultation. I’ve studied dogs – wittingly or unwittingly – over the years, so the portrayal came from that.

I’ve had dogs all my life. I understand them better than I do people. I had a Staffy for 15 years. They are the most expressive of dogs – every flicker of guilt or pleasure is written all over their faces. If I had to leave, my dog wouldn’t take it well. I’d pack in secret – if she saw a suitcase, she’d plunge into despair. When I returned, she’d walk right past me and shun me as punishment. I’d think: “Are you ever going to forgive me?”

Prime-minister-in-waiting has been a key figure in overhauls behind the scenes of the game, as well as helping to create the Hillsborough Independent Panel

Picking up the country when it is in a slump of self-doubt is perhaps within Andy Burnham’s reach. And football, close to his heart, may provide the template. There have been several occasions in the past 20 years when English football has been in a state of anguish, but a nadir came in 2007 – when Burnham made one of his most significant interventions to the national game. If England win the World Cup, expect the prime-minister-in-waiting to take at least a slice of the credit.

England had just lost 3-2 against Croatia at Wembley and failed to qualify for Euro 2008, the game where Steve McClaren was dubbed “the wally with the brolly”, the pouring rain adding to the sense of despair. At Wembley that night Burnham was with James Purnell, now poised to become his chief of staff at No 10, as guests of the Premier League’s then chief executive Richard Scudamore. Burnham was the minister for culture, media and sport, having succeeded Purnell, who had been moved to the Department for Work and Pensions, this being the early days of Gordon Brown’s Labour premiership.

Tate Modern, London
This exhibition makes nothing of the Cuban-American artist’s controversial death – instead it focuses on the astounding way she left an imprint of herself on the earth using blood, feathers and gunpowder

A huge colour photo of a ruined ancient site greets you outside Ana Mendieta’s engrossing exhibition and it immediately tells you this is going to be different. It’s the kind of thing that seems to belong more to a British Museum show about a lost pre-Columbian civilisation than in the concrete citadel of Tate Modern’s Blavatnik wing. Yet in her imagination, that’s where Mendieta belonged, too. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, she was sent to the US when she was 12 to flee the revolution. She felt like an outsider among white Americans. Home, for her, was the past, and she would excavate the very origins of art and mythology.

Mendieta made art from blood, feathers, flowers and sand and in such fresh ways you’d think these primeval substances were new inventions. She literally played with fire, drawing a human figure with gunpowder on the ground or on the trunk of a tree, then setting it alight. The flames leave behind a scorched shadow of a person, like the victims of a nuclear bomb or the dead of Pompeii entombed in ash. Confronted by a row of these burnt ghosts emerging from real tree trunks you almost expect them to speak to you like the shades of the dead.

Five years after the ultra-conservative Islamists retook Afghanistan, students describe male pupils being beaten for minor rule breaches and inexperienced teachers struggling to deliver lessons

Before he leaves for Kabul University each morning, Hashmat* checks his face for the beard he has been ordered to grow. Male students are required to grow their facial hair and wear traditional Afghan clothes and those who fall short are punished. Hashmat says he recently saw a classmate beaten for wearing trousers.

“They look at you before they listen to you. If your appearance is wrong, you are already in trouble before the class begins,” he says.

He beat brain cancer. Now your favourite DJ’s favourite DJ is on a UK tour, armed with experimental techno, Beastie Boys and Taylor Swift

Ten years ago this month, Japanese DJ Yousuke Yukimatsu had an epileptic seizure. When he didn’t show up for a festival booking, organisers got in touch with his friends in Osaka, who found him collapsed at home. He was taken to hospital where doctors diagnosed a brain tumour. “If no one had contacted me, I might have died,” he posted on a crowdfunding platform several months later.

In the black-and-white photograph accompanying the crowdfunder to support his work, Yukimatsu leans his head towards the camera, his buzz cut growing out around a thick ragged scar that curves from his left ear to the top of his hairline: he’d been through two craniotomies, plus extensive chemo and radiation therapy. The illness also left him with a realisation that he needed to make DJing his full-time job; to dedicate himself to his craft and make the world a better place. “If we can keep living [for] tomorrow, if I can encourage people … that’s what I’m always trying to do,” he says now. “The world is getting much worse than the time when techno was born [in the mid 1980s]. Weapons are being developed; it’s getting easier to commit a massacre. In Japan, if a musician speaks about politics, they can be hugely criticised. But I think it’s really important to speak up.”

She has built an unlikely career in mould, maggots and excrement, cleaning for those who most need it. It can take months building trust with a stranger, before she and her boyfriend go in and transform everything

‘There might be a dead bird in the box room. We think it has been there for a couple of years,” says Bea Elton, raising her voice to be heard through her respirator. It is particularly robust, as she has a dust and cat hair allergy. “Not ideal,” in her line of work, the 28-year-old concedes.

Knowing it would be difficult to talk on the job, we spoke before we arrived, struggling into hazmat suits, shoe covers, gloves and masks in the overgrown garden outside the front door. “I refer to myself as a cleaner. I would never refer to myself as a cleanfluencer,” says Elton. The slick videos on her platform, CleanWithBea, which record her transforming homes fallen into extreme dirt, decay and dilapidation, tell a different story. She has more than six million followers across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, who have crowned her a celebrity of this genre, her audience keen to watch the imperfect made perfect in a world that feels increasingly out of control. Yet no matter how many of her polished videos you watch, nothing can prepare you for entering one of the homes she cleans in person.

Officers say decision made after ‘new information and evidence has come to light’ over death of former British minister

Counter-terrorism police are now leading the investigation into the death of the former MP and Reform spokesperson Ann Widdecombe in light of “new information and evidence”.

Widdecombe’s body was found with serious injuries by the ambulance service at her home in Haytor, Devon, at 11.40am on Thursday, Devon and Cornwall police said.

Exclusive: Three men killed in incidents over past year allegedly involving G4S guards, who replaced in-house team after previous deaths

Bereaved families and politicians have raised alarm about continued killings on Del Monte’s pineapple farm in Kenya despite the company hiring G4S to replace its in-house security team after previous deaths were exposed by the Guardian.

Del Monte appointed G4S to guard the farm, which is estimated to cover at least 40 sq km, the area of a small city, after the Guardian detailed allegations of brutal assaults and killings of people suspected of trespassing on its land. Kenyan police have been working with G4S to guard the site.

US president says strait will remain open ‘with or without’ Iran and there will be a 20% rate charged on all cargo shipped

• US launches new attack wave on Iran as Tehran says diplomacy has proven ‘futile’

Bahrain’s military has accused Iran of targeting civilians with its latest attacks on the country, after Tehran said it had struck US military facilities and infrastructure there earlier.

“Iran continues its systematic hostile approach through its heinous attacks with missiles and drones that target civilians in the Kingdom of Bahrain,” the general command of Bahrain’s military said, adding that air defences “intercepted and destroyed a number of Iranian aerial attacks” this morning.

Major incidents declared in north Wales and Derbyshire, with firefighters also called out to two large fires in London

People have been evacuated from their homes after a wildfire swept across a mountainside in north Wales, prompting firefighters to declare a major incident.

Residents described hearing the crackling fire advancing down Conwy Mountain towards homes as ash fell from a sky turned dark by thick smoke.