Psychologist Leanne ten Brinke has spent decades studying toxic personality traits. What are the red flags to look out for among workmates, politicians and potential partners?

Coming face to face with a probable psychopath was enough to make Dr Leanne ten Brinke rethink her career choices. Early in her 20s, while studying forensic psychology in Halifax, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Ten Brinke was volunteering at a parole office, which would hold weekly group meetings for released sex offenders. “Most of the men showed contrition,” says Ten Brinke. “They really seemed to recognise the damage that they had done.” Except for one. The treatment programme seemed “like a game to him”, she says. One week, in a discussion about the impact their crimes had on victims, this rapist stared at Ten Brinke and, smiling slightly, started to say how much his victim looked like her, “and how I was ‘his type’. Clearly he was trying to scare me, and he did.”

It put her off a career working with convicted criminals, but she remained fascinated with “dark personalities” – psychopathy, mainly, but also narcissism, machiavellianism (manipulating and exploiting others) and sadism. From politics to business to the media, it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of people to study. There were selfish, callous, impulsive and manipulative people everywhere, often presenting as gregarious and charming. “It started to occur to me that these traits aren’t just confined to an underworld. These traits appear in all aspects of our lives,” she says.

The Milk and Good Will Hunting director’s new film is about ‘a little guy’ taking violent revenge against the system. He talks about the parallels between Dead Man’s Wire and the homicide case currently dividing Gen Z and boomers

In February 1977, a middle-aged Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis took hostage an employee at his local mortgage brokers, who he was convinced had cheated him out of the profits of a piece of real estate. The system was weighted against the little guy, Kiritsis decided, and he was going to be the one to make it pay. He attached one end of a wire to the trigger of a shotgun, the other to the hostage’s head, and demanded $5m and an admission of guilt from the brokers’ boss. The final moments of the standoff, which lasted 63 hours, were broadcast live on TV.

It has already been the subject of a 2018 documentary (Dead Man’s Line) and a 2022 thriller podcast (American Hostage) which starred Jon Hamm as the DJ who broadcast an interview with Kiritsis live from the crime scene. Now Gus Van Sant, whose 40-year-plus career incorporates queer landmarks (My Own Private Idaho, Milk), mainstream crowdpleasers (Good Will Hunting) and arthouse award-winners (the Columbine-inspired Elephant), is dramatising the events in Dead Man’s Wire. This wry thriller cuts between the volatile captor (Bill Skarsgård) and the media circus swirling around him, which includes the DJ, played here by Colman Domingo, and a female TV journalist (Myha’la) fed up with being fobbed off. Al Pacino has a cameo as the boss of the mortgage company, sunning himself in Malibu and unconvinced he has anything much to apologise for.

When Trump granted white South Africans refugee status, he was echoing a falsehood about Black people taking revenge for years of brutality. But no one flourishes in a repressive police state

There’s a little town in the scrub in South Africa – a full day’s drive from the country’s big cities – that has become perhaps the most scrutinised place on earth, given its size. It is 9 sq km (3.5 sq miles) of suburban-style houses harbouring about 3,000 people, with a main drag, a municipal swimming pool, one gas station and some pecan farms. Nothing of consequence ever really happens there, a fact the townspeople take as a point of pride. And yet over the past three decades, dozens of English-language news outlets have made a pilgrimage to it, often more than once. The New York Times alone has run four dedicated profiles. The essays have kept pace year after year, quoting the same people over and over, even as nothing of note occurred. There’s been no war, no disaster.

That changelessness is the point. No people of colour are allowed to live in the town, called Orania. The name is a nod to the river that runs nearby – and to the Orange Free State, the apartheid-era designation for the province in which it lies. Orania’s founders established it in 1991, the year after South Africa’s best-known Black liberation leader (and future president), Nelson Mandela, was freed following 27 years in prison.

If anyone can convince politicians and public of the need to pay for a national care service, it’s Louise Casey. With her involved, I now have hope

No government in my lifetime has been dealt a worse hand than Keir Starmer’s. Austerity-broken public services, an empty Treasury, a jittery bond market freaked out by Liz Truss and then stricken by the arrival of Trump 2.0 with his bully-tariffs. Now Britain’s ally is setting the Middle East on fire in a murderous war, exploding oil and gas prices. This needs repeating regularly, lest anyone forgets the obstacles blocking this government’s best intentions for change.

One of those good intentions in the Labour manifesto was the creation of a national care service. Louise Casey, respected troubleshooter, was given a commission to review adult social care and solve its impossible dilemmas. She showed her thinking in a blistering speech last week.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Can Labour come back from the brink? On Thursday 30 April, ahead of May elections, join Gaby Hinsliff, Zoe Williams, Polly Toynbee and Rafael Behr as they discuss the threat to Labour from the Greens and Reform – and whether Keir Starmer can survive as leader. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

Among the many justifications Donald Trump has presented for the US and Israel attacking Iran has been the supposedly imminent threat posed by its nuclear weapons programme. But how close was the country really to developing an atomic weapon? Ian Sample hears from Kelsey Davenport, the director of non-proliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. She sets out why many experts don’t believe the country even had a structured nuclear weapons programme, and explains what she thinks the impact of the war could be on nuclear proliferation around the world.

Attacking Iran’s nuclear programme could drive it towards a bomb, experts warn

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Lady Gaga and David Gest are among those who get ferocious dressings-down in this brutally candid memoir

Liza Minnelli’s father, the film director Vincente Minnelli, used to joke that his daughter’s career in show business was preordained. She was certainly familiar with the dark side of the industry from a young age through her mother Judy Garland, who was on the MGM payroll aged 13, before shooting to fame as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Garland was famously depressive and addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol. When her daughter was six, she shut herself in the bathroom and made the first of many suicide attempts. Minnelli soon learned to monitor her mother and hide her pill bottles when she saw darkness descending. By 13, she was “my mother’s caretaker – a nurse, a doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one … Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood, she robbed me of mine.”

In her memoir, Minnelli – who turns 80 this month – recounts how she broke free from her dysfunctional family at 16 and moved to New York to make it as a singer and actor. Little surprise, given her parentage, that her ascent was swift. “I was the original nepo baby,” she observes, gleefully. But if show business was in her DNA, so was addiction. In her 20s she became hooked on Valium, diet pills, cocaine and alcohol. Later, as her career faltered and her private life imploded, her sister Lorna staged an intervention and got her into the first of many rehab programmes.

US president says war is ‘very complete’ and threatens worse strikes if passage of oil via strait of Hormuz is blocked; IRGC says it will not let out ‘one litre of oil’

• Oil prices drop sharply after Trump moves to reassure markets

• Trump says Iran war is ‘very complete, pretty much’ as economic toll rises

• How have you been affected by the latest Middle East events?

Investor hopes for a swift resolution to the Middle East conflict propelled Australian shares higher today, with the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 finishing the day up 1.1% and recovering about $35bn in value after yesterday’s $90bn plunge.

Oil prices surged to a four-year high early in the week before coming back down below $US90 a barrel after Donald Trump suggested the Iran conflict would end soon, sending global stock markets higher.

After oil prices surged on Monday the US president sought – and failed – to offer a clear vision for when the largest US intervention in the Middle East in years will end

• Middle East crisis – live updates

At one of the most consequential moments of his two terms in office, wartime president Donald Trump on Monday delivered a vague and contradictory forecast for how long the United States will continue to fight in Iran and what the ultimate goal of the US military campaign there will be.

With oil hovering above $100 a barrel for much of Monday and Middle Eastern allies fearing a further tumble into regional conflict, Trump appeared in Doral, Florida with the mission of calming global markets and reassuring skittish allies that he has a clear vision for how to end the largest US intervention in the Middle East since the Iraq war.

As speculation mounts that Kim Jong-un and Trump could meet this month, analysts say Pyongyang will continue to see nuclear weapons as a matter of survival

• Middle East crisis – live updates

North Korea’s launch last week of a missile from a naval destroyer elicited an uncharacteristically prosaic analysis from the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. The launch was proof, he said, that arming ships with nuclear weapons was “making satisfactory progress”.

But the test, and Kim’s mildly upbeat appraisal, were designed to reverberate well beyond the deck of the 5,000-tonne destroyer-class vessel the Choe Hyon – the biggest warship in the North Korean fleet.

Trump has blamed Iran for the mass killing at Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school but geolocation, videos and satellite imagery indicate otherwise

The bombing of a primary school in Minab on 28 February killed scores of people, most of them seven- to 12-year-old girls. The strike is the worst mass killing of the US and Israel’s war on Iran so far – and has been described by Unesco as a “grave violation” of international law.

On Saturday, the US president, Donald Trump, declared that Iran was responsible for the school bombing. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran … they’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”