Last summer, a 14-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by an asylum seeker in Epping and this small community was engulfed in protest. Can it recover?

When Sherzod* moved to Epping in 2025, he was dreaming of a little garden, long dog walks in the forest and more space to breathe. At 20, he had moved from Uzbekistan to the UK to study law, then lived in north London for decades. In his mid-40s, after establishing himself in a media job, he began visiting the forest – 5,900 acres of green lung saved by the Epping Forest Act 1878. The pretty shops of the old south-west Essex town delighted him. “I just liked the high street, I liked the people,” he says. “The people were really friendly.”

Epping was created by the canons of Waltham Abbey in the 13th century as a market town on the road from London to Cambridge. Its high street is still thriving. There is a Gail’s bakery and an M&S Food shop; the four-bed semis in the estate agents’ windows are listed at just shy of £1m.

The beloved BBC sitcom is now a quarter of a century old. Ahead of two TV celebrations, here are 25 things you didn’t know about television’s funniest workplace mockumentary

Fetch the acoustic guitar and twiddle your TM Lewin tie because it’s the 25th anniversary of The Office. Yes, it’s a quarter of a century since we were introduced to Wernham Hogg paper company’s David Brent – a friend first, boss second, probably an entertainer third.

To commemorate the majestic mockumentary’s silver jubilee, actors Martin Freeman and Mackenzie Crook are reuniting to present a BBC documentary looking back at the show. Meanwhile, co-creator Ricky Gervais is releasing a retrospective special on his YouTube channel.

While the Reform leader casts himself as the victim questions about his finances are unlikely to disappear

• Farage quits as an MP amid scrutiny of his finances

For Nigel Farage, a year that was progressing quite nicely started to go wrong when the Guardian revealed he had received an undeclared gift of £5m from a crypto billionaire. Just 10 weeks later, he has been pushed into perhaps one of the biggest gambles of his political career.

That gamble is seemingly not with his role as an MP. Farage took more than 45% of the vote in Clacton in 2024, and the heavily Reform-friendly constituency was always likely to elect him again, even before the bulk of the other parties announced they would stand aside in a byelection they have dismissed as a stunt.

For years, we have sought ways to define and achieve national belonging. Surely the team and our attachment to it makes that possible

When the final whistle blew just before dawn, and England had beaten Mexico in that encounter now hailed as a World Cup classic, glasses were raised and strangers embraced in pubs across England that had been granted special permission to stay open. In living rooms and student flats too, millions of people experienced something increasingly rare in modern Britain: uncomplicated national joy.

For a few hours, the endless arguments over the national budget, the revolving door of British prime ministers and the country’s political malaise fell silent. England’s World Cup victory that night did not erase Britain’s divisions. But watching the team sing their anthem song, Wonderwall, to their cheering supporters reminded us of something every successful democracy depends upon: pride in a shared national story.

Maya Tudor is an associate professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government

As the History of Advertising Trust turns 50, our writer revels in its vast archive, remembering the bread boy on his bike, the suggestive coffee-drinkers and the Hamlet smoker adjusting his comb-over

Hanging over the toilet in the gents’ loos at the History of Advertising Trust’s archive in deepest Norfolk is a photograph of Ian Botham. It’s not just the cricketing great’s mullet that tells you this is 1986, but the fact that Beefy is smoking a cigar. The caption below answers the question that has troubled philosophers since Aristotle: “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.”

If the past is a foreign country, then the history of advertising is a whole alternate universe, one in which excitable metallic martians induced us to buy Cadbury’s powdered potatoes with the slogan: “For mash get Smash.” It’s a place where bowler-hatted chimps dressed as removal men wooed us into buying PG Tips tea, while legions of sports stars energetically advertised carcinogenic smokes.

Some of its amateur matches pull in bigger crowds than European leagues but are more of a spectacle than a pathway to the professional game, say experts

Michael Owen, a man who once quipped he had never drunk tea or coffee, isn’t known for his adventurous palate. Safe to assume, then, that the former England striker was out of his comfort zone sipping Roxburgh rose juice and eating chilli-wrapped rice noodle rolls during his recent visit to south-west China’s Guizhou province.

The 2001 Ballon d’Or winner dusted off his boots for a match in Rongjiang county, the birthplace of viral amateur football league Cun Chao, also known as the Village Super League. Scoring twice in a 4-3 loss for local side Rongjiang Niubi, Owen endeared himself to the thousands in attendance, even if some weren’t familiar with the former Liverpool and Real Madrid player.

Exclusive: Latest Guardian revelation about gift from cryptocurrency tycoon comes as Reform UK leader forces byelection

The £5m gift to Nigel Farage by a cryptocurrency billionaire was reported to the National Crime Agency by bankers who were concerned it may have been laundered money, the Guardian can reveal.

The disclosure will put further pressure on the Reform UK leader, who is awaiting a decision by the standards commissioner over whether his failure to declare the money breached parliamentary rules.

Latest attack in the strait of Hormuz marks ⁠first known US military strikes ​against ​Iran since late last ​month

• Full report: Iran accuses US of violating peace agreement after strikes target sites around strait of Hormuz

The US revoked a temporary sanctions waiver for Iranian oil after three tankers were struck in the strait of Hormuz. The move came before fresh US strikes on Iran today.

The US Treasury on Tuesday cancelled a licence that was announced in June that had allowed Iran to produce, sell and deliver crude oil and related products through 21 August.

Government’s former extremism adviser sounds alarm as idea that diversity is harmful becomes ‘mainstream view’

Two in five Britons believe Muslims cannot integrate into British society and more than half believe the country’s national identity is disappearing due to “diversity”, a report authored by a former government adviser on extremism has found.

Sara Khan, who stood down in 2024 as the UK’s first counter-extremism commissioner, said such views contrasted sharply with accompanying findings that showed 85% of Muslims “favour integration”.

Despite promises of successive governments, gap between richest and poorest areas consistent since 1997

Britain’s deep regional income divide has barely changed in 30 years despite the promises of successive governments to narrow the gap, according to a report showing the challenge for Andy Burnham.

As the prime minister-in-waiting prepares for government, the Resolution Foundation said almost no progress had been made since 1997 to tackle stark divisions in household income, before housing costs are taken into account, between the richest and poorest parts of the country.